Real Life Rock by Greil Marcus

Relatively speaking, rock criticism is still new. Pitchfork’s been around for less than two decades; Rolling Stone is nearing 50. And most of the first wave of rock critics have either moved on to other fields or just moved on, period: Patti Smith, Lester Bangs, Robert Palmer.  

However, Greil Marcus has hung on and hung around, listening to almost everything and writing hundreds of columns, essays and books over the last five decades. One of them, 1975’s Mystery Train, has become one of the cornerstones of any music library. He started at Rolling Stone back in the 60s and next month, he’ll start appearing at Pitchfork. On top of all that writing, Marcus has written a column almost without interruption since the early 80s: Real Life Top Ten. 

First appearing in the pages of New West, his column started as ten-thoughts-on-music. Over the years it’s enlarged in scope, including art, books, television shows and even street performers. It’s also moved around quite a bit: magazines as diverse as Salon, Interview and The Believer have all hosted the column; soon, it’ll start running at Pitchfork. For anyone but the hardcore music criticism junkie (is there such a thing?), getting a complete archive of the column would be nearly impossible. Until now, anyway.

Late last year, Yale University Press issued Real Life Rock, collecting all of Marcus’ columns from 1986 to 2014. On the surface, it looks like a strange beast: a big, thick compendium of short little thoughts. But it’s more than just that: it’s a shadow history of rock music, popular culture and where they’ve intersected over the past decades.

There are popular heroes and villains in the hundreds of columns here. Both The Mekons and Sleater-Kinney pop up as heroes; Lucinda Williams and Patti Smith are occasional punching bags (“the Madame Defarge of rock ’n’ roll,” he writes). Some of his references haven’t aged well – hands up if you remember Dramarama – while others show how now-legendary musicians were seen at the time: Nirvana, Michael Jackson and Eminem, among others. 

While you can read this front-to-back, part of the joy of a book like this is picking through it slowly, almost at random. Jump around through time and see what was current, what was worth talking about and, most interestingly, what one of the sharpest minds in music criticism had to say about it. 

For example, jump to page 657 and there’s a review of a Paul McCartney DVD, In Red Square. “You see a cool-looking guy in the audience, looking straight at the camera, with a deep, knowing smile. The song was supposed to be a joke, as in who’d want to go back to the USSR?, and today the USSR doesn’t even exist.” Or to page 126, a 1990 column with a brief look at a Babes in Toyland record, Spanking Machine: “Three women who take up the challenge The Slits laid down in 1977. As if no more than a minute has passed, they shout back…”

Of course, we have the privilege of looking back at these columns with hindsight. We know, for example, Babes in Toyland are enormously influential. And although Marcus gives them less space than a Lucinda Williams dig, it also shines a light on how mainstream music journalists viewed them at the time: loud, abrasive and an instant comparison to a long-disbanded band from the other side of the Atlantic. This kind of context is interesting to music junkies – or at least to me, anyway.

Obviously, there’s a lot more here than just “context.” And this collection is packed full of the charm, wit and smarts that distinguish Marcus’ writings from his peers: in these pages, it’s not uncommon for him to make casual references to Dada artists, French writers like Guy Debord or bluesman Robert Johnson. But not only is Marcus well read and clever, he’s able to mix his smarts with a clever wit. Take his piece on a bizarre Neil Young ad: “The implication seems to be that Geffen, which sued Young to force him to produce salable music, is Chamberlain, and that Young is—Hitler? Who paid for this ad? What does it mean?” (pg 30)

And honestly, half the charm comes from the sheer range of stuff Marcus writes about. For example: “It was so smooth it was like drinking a sunset. I reached for the bottle and it was empty,” he writes of a limited edition Robert Johnson-themed beer. How many other music writers would’ve been able to sneak a beer review into their columns? And come up with as great a closer as that? 

Obviously, a book like this isn’t for everyone. But I’d recommend it for two kinds of people. The first is the hard-core music fan with a sense of humour: flip open the book and you can see what critics thought of something at the time. It doesn’t always reflect what we think now, but it’s always interesting and if you can keep from getting fed up by his judgments, there’s a lot to enjoy here. 

The other would be a young music writer: read this, front to back, and see how it could and should be done. Marcus obviously wields a big stick with his opinions and isn’t always right,  but generally approaches music with a mind both open and wide enough to look at anything critically and place it in it’s context. In a time when anyone can write up their thoughts on a record, it’s useful to have someone as critically sharp at Marcus around. Keep this on the shelf between copies of The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic and Mystery Train.