Q&A
ROCKHOUND GREIL MARCUS
BY ZACH DUNDAS
zdundas@wweek.com

Greil Marcus calls David Thomas, singer for the old Cleveland art-punk band Pere Ubu, a crank prophet.

Who is David Thomas, who is Pere Ubu, and what is a crank prophet? Funny you should ask.

Marcus revels in setting up and then unraveling such bafflers. The acclaimed rock critic and Salon.com columnist plans to devote his Arts & Lectures speaking slot next Wednesday to the Thomas/Ubu/prophet question.

"A crank prophet is someone who speaks as a visionary from the fringes," Marcus explains. "It's a characteristic American figure. I'm going to trace the line of descent that Dave Thomas is a part of."

Marcus' books-dense metahistories more constructed around pop music than about pop music itself-are thick with such startling connections and arcane allusions. Lipstick Traces, for example, linked the Sex Pistols to obscure French theorists of the '50s and medieval heretics. Double Trouble corralled Bill Clinton, Elvis and Kurt Cobain into the same semiotic feeding pen.

Some believe this hyper-intellectual approach merely gives America's most vibrant native idiom its due. Others find it ridiculously pretentious. Some ask why 'Boomer writers like Marcus (and '60s-schooled cohorts like Robert Christgau and David Marsh) still dominate the field of pop writing. Does it make sense to obsess over the Pistols, Elvis and Dylan's Basement Tapes-three Marcus touchstones-in a Total Request Live world?

A fair question, certainly. However, because big rock mags like Spin and Rolling Stone have largely abandoned serious analysis, there is no younger generation of megawatt pop writers on the horizon. Critics be damned, Marcus is one of the only provocative voices willing to discuss pop music in national forums.

WW interviewed Marcus via telephone from his home in California.

Willamette Week: Your writing makes connections, leaps and intuitions that likely wouldn't occur to most people. Was this what you set out to do, or is this a technique that developed as you wrote?

Greil Marcus: I didn't set out with the plan of defining myself against other people. When I wrote my first book, about 27 years ago now, I had begun to think about rock and roll-which was really my staff of life, the thing I cared the most about-as a part of American culture rather than as this oddity that had to be evaluated as an aberration that had nothing to do with anything else.

I try to enrich the context, the whole milieu in which one might listen to a record. At first, it was really just a matter of writing about music the way I was listening to it anyway. If I heard something that reminded me of Abraham Lincoln or Edgar Allen Poe, I just decided not to censor myself. I decided I wasn't going to keep my mouth shut about it.

One thing that's irked me the most is when people have written about my work, usually meaning to be complimentary, that I've tried to make rock respectable. That was the last thing that would have ever occurred to me.

You wrote a book about Bill Clinton. Could you write one about George W. Bush?

Not if you held a gun to my head. I was fascinated by Bill Clinton. There was a lot I liked about him and a lot I didn't like about him, but he wasn't this alien figure to me. He made sense in a way George Bush does not. Some people can write very well about people they despise or find contemptible-Molly Ivins writes very well about George Bush, for example. I don't think I have that talent, or the willingness to devote the time and energy to it.

At the same time, Mystery Train was very much a Watergate book, informed by the feelings and events of that time. And Lipstick Traces was absolutely my Ronald Reagan book, in that when Reagan was president, I couldn't bear to think about America. I went as far away as I could, into these bizarre European traditions I didn't understand.

Lipstick Traces has a lot to do with punk rock, but it was written at the end of the '80s, when punk was still an underground culture. How would that book be different if you wrote it now, when punk's style gestures and rhetoric are mainstream?

There's two ways to answer that. One is to say that once you've written a book, it is what it is. It has a life of its own, and to go back and change it after the fact is dishonest in some fundamental way. The other way to answer it, to answer it directly, is to say I still wouldn't change it in view of what happened.

At the same time, the last book had almost as much in about Nirvana as it did about Bill Clinton. Nirvana was really a band that took the punk story and added a dimension. Kurt Cobain's death was deeply tragic in a way that, say, Sid Vicious' wasn't.

How so?

Maybe Sid Vicious was a tortured individual, but Kurt Cobain was tortured about matters of substance. To have someone who made such a positive difference in so many people's lives decide that life isn't worth living is an extraordinarily grim prospect.

The other thing about Lipstick Traces is that you have to consider the time in which it was written. It took as long to write as Reagan was president. I felt driven away from American culture. It wasn't until Bill Clinton became president that I really felt comfortable writing about America again.

And what about now that we have this fake president?

Well, Bush may be a fake president or he may not be. The people around him are not fake. They're very serious, and this is not something you can kid around about. With Reagan, I'd already lived through eight years of him as governor. As a Californian, I knew something about him, and I knew that the worst thing anyone could do would be to underestimate him. When he was governor here, he wasn't this pleasant, avuncular guy who could do bad things and make you like them. He was a mean, bloodthirsty son of a bitch. He spoke with rancor and contempt. He put on a mask when he became president, and all the people back East underestimated him. They played right into his hands. With Reagan, I was frightened of him. I'm not frightened by George Bush, but it really remains to be seen what's going to happen.

At the same time, there seem to be things happening in American music that interest you. You've written a lot about Sleater-Kinney, and you've written some things about Eminem that cut against the politically correct grain.

For a long time now, the most interesting music in America has come from the fringes. In hip-hop, people have gotten to the center, where the money is, very rapidly. And people have been used up and disappeared very rapidly. That could happen with Eminem, who is so extraordinarily talented. Snoop Dogg, for example, was very talented but never did anything with it.

Starting about 1990, the music on the Olympia labels really began to interest me. When I first heard Corrin Tucker's voice-it was on a compilation, when she was singing in Heavens to Betsy-it caught my attention immediately. This is a band that figured out very early that they could self-destruct very easily if they stepped out of the realm in which they had control.

I had written about them for a long time before I interviewed them, which I did last year. In that interview, they talked a lot about autonomy and how to preserve it, not as an end in itself but as a way to do good work. A lot of us can say, 'Oh, I can take this money and this fame without selling out.' And maybe some of us can. It takes a stronger person, though, to realize how dangerous officially defined success can be.

Sleater-Kinney is interesting because, to a certain extent, the band has been able to achieve a measure of officially defined success, as you put it, without fully playing the industry's game.

A few years ago-about the time Kurt Cobain died, in fact-I wrote about something I called the "folk virus." The folk virus is this notion is that if you say something that a lot of people like, that resonates with masses of people, it can't possibly have any content.

Kurt Cobain was tormented by this notion-the more records he sold, the more worthless he felt. If he'd made a record that the critics all hated and no one bought, I think he'd have thought, 'Ah, at last I've really said something.'

When you come up through a very strict and severe punk community-and the Olympia punk community certainly was that, at least back then-and come out without that commitment to purity is, I think, a very healthy thing. A woman I sat on a panel with last year, a professor who had been in a Toronto punk band and who is very familiar with that whole scene, said that in any kind of subcultural milieu there is always a Stalinist component. I'd never heard it put that way, but it's really quite true.

You mentioned hip-hop earlier. The other form of pop music that's really emerged as a force in the last 10 years is electronic music. How does someone who, in your own words, thinks of rock and roll as his staff of life look at the whole world of genres and subgenres that has exploded out of electronic, DJ-based music?

So much of it seems really formal to me. It often sounds like variations on a very narrow theme. Two electronic artists I've liked are Moby and Oval.

Moby's records, when I listen to them, leave me cold. But when I hear his songs on the radio, I never know what they are when they come on and they always blow me away. It's to the point where I often drive home and have to call the radio station and demand to know what I've just heard. And often, it's a Moby track I've listened to six times before. As a friend of mine put it, when I hear it on the radio my resistance is down.

With Oval, I always thought their music was very funny. A group called Hooverphonic I liked because they had this very spooky feeling, this early Godard feeling of small-time characters living in desperation. When I've been in Europe, where techno is all you hear, I've felt that I really have very little to say about it.

My ability to hear things is limited. I don't have wide-open ears like, say, Robert Christgau. Even though I've been doing this for a long time, I'm just now learning to really get inside the music I really like and care about. I'll put it this way-hip-hop and techno definitely do not need whatever pathetic things I could say about them. I'm concentrating on those areas where I think I can make a difference and say something of value.