More Real Life Rock
The Wilderness Years, 2014–2021
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A funny, fierce, and uninhibited musical chronicle of the convulsive past six years from one of our finest cultural critics
"A one-of-a-kind guide to rock music’s resonance in every aspect of our lives.”—David Kirby, Wall Street Journal
“A smart set of suggestions for further reading, viewing, and listening by a most trustworthy guide.”—Kirkus Reviews
For the past thirty-five years, celebrated author Greil Marcus has applied his unmatched critical apparatus to everything from music, television, radio, and politics to overheard comments, advertisements, and happenstance street encounters—an eclectic collection of what he calls “everyday culture and found objects.”
This book collects hundreds of items from the crisscrossing spectrum of culture and politics throughout the tumultuous past six years of American life, an essential travel guide to the scorched landscape of recent history. Tracking the evolution of national identity during the Trump administration, Marcus spotlights the most whip-smart cultural artifacts to compose a mosaic portrait of American society, replete with unexpected heroes and villains, absurdity and its consequences, humor and despair, terror and defiance—as seen through media, music, and more.
Bursting with Marcus’s effortless, no-nonsense, unapologetic verve, this book features seventy-three columns from 2014 through February 2021.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Critic Marcus (Mystery Train) picks up where he left off in Real Life Rock with this spirited if uneven collection of 73 columns written for Barnes & Noble Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pitchfork, rollingstone.com, and the Village Voice. Marcus pulls no punches: in a one-sentence takedown of the album Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, he sharply asks, "Where does talent go when it goes away?" Meanwhile, Barney Hoskyns's Small Town Talk is "the most depressing music book I've ever read," and jazz saxophonist Charles Lloyd plays "riffs that wouldn't disturb a car commercial." In a vibrant appraisal of Erik Jensen's one-man play about music critic Lester Bangs, however, Marcus writes that "the play is about Bangs's struggle to believe that music can not so much save his soul as allow him, through signal moments of music, to construct a soul in which he might want to live... Jensen gets it all." Marcus's most thoughtful review discusses the origins and best years of Fleetwood Mac and the "long shadow" cast by founder Peter Green. The pieces suffer a bit from repetition when read straight through, but even so there's always fun to be found in Marcus's curmudgeonly musings and razor-sharp wit. Play this one on random and enjoy the ride.