Real Life Rock

by Greil Marcus · 2015

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The Washington Posthails Greil Marcus as "our greatest cultural critic." Writing in the London Review of Books, D. D. Guttenplan calls him "probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson." For nearly thirty years, he has written a remarkable column that has migrated from the Village Voiceto Artforum, Salon, City Pages, Interview, and The Believerand currently appears in the Barnes & Noble Review. It has been a laboratory where Marcus has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements, teasing out from the welter of everyday objects what amounts to a de facto theory of cultural transmission.

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Published to complement the paperback edition of The History of Rock & Roll in Ten Songs, Real Life Rockreveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, astute, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.

Subject
literary criticismliterary criticismMore like thisLess of this
Themes
musicmusicMore like thisLess of this
Setting
20th century20th centuryMore like thisLess of thisUSAUSAMore like thisLess of this
Audience
adult
Length
epic · 600 pages
Form
essaysessaysMore like thisLess of this

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