The Stylist

Bryan Ferry, Greil Marcus—one singer, one critic, a music comes to new life.

What is a song? Is it a fact, or is it a question? Over more than fifty years in a story that is still going on, for Bryan Ferry, either with Roxy Music or as a solo artist, any song is an open question, something he interrogates as surely as it interrogates him. Who are you? Ferry asks Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” or Roxy Music’s own “More Than This.” What do you have to give me that no one has found before? the song answers. In Greil Marcus’s dazzling new book The Stylist, it’s a drama that writes a new chapter every time Ferry takes a new stage. Except in Bryan Ferry’s own hands, his music has never taken on as full a life as it does in these pages.

The Stylist avoids a conventional biographical approach, instead listening to what the artist’s music tells us about the sort of person it would take to have made it, moving forward and backward in time, focusing on key moments—live performances, television appearances, studio recordings, and songs as they played in movies or novels, as they moved through and enter broader musical and social histories, film noir, Richard Hamilton’s reinvention of modern art, the dandy as secret sharer. No one reading this book will not be surprised at what they find.