Music Critics # 6 Greil Marcus

I haven't included Marcus here because I like everything about him or all of his writing. I don't. He's undoubtedly a very important figure when you talk about Rock Criticism, something I'm very interested in. Since the death of Lester Bangs, he's probably become the default Don in this respect as far as American music journalism is concerned.

A lot of his stuff tends towards the abstruse and intellectual. Some would say academic, and there's little doubt that Rock music has long since entered the realms of academia. You could probably easily choose a Post Graduate degree writing about the early albums of R.E.M or even the value of Music Journalism. Or pretty much anything related you might choose to. Whether this is a good thing or not is another question entirely. But it has happened.

Marcus was undoubtedly one of the first journalists to see this coming. Some of his stuff I find almost unreadable. I haven't the slightest desire to read his book about the Sex Pistols, Lipstick Traces, where he draws parallels between the band and the Diggers and the Ranters. Just because there are parallels to be drawn, it doesn't mean that writing a book about it is a particularly good idea.

He's here because I really like one particular book of his. In The Fascist Bathroom, a collection of articles he wrote for American magazines and newspapers between 1977 and 1992 all focused to a greater or lesser degree on the impact of Punk on Western Culture.

I think this is Marcus at his best. He's more immediate here than he generally is elsewhere. His prose is punchy and urgent and also entertaining ,which you certainly can't say for everything he's written. It's also focused on things and people that he really cares about and who are interesting to read about; Gang of Four, Elvis Costello, Delta 5, Au Pairs, The Clash, Springsteen.

He also casts his net wider, writing about Reagan and Thatcher, politics and society, the way that culture is eroding with time and how this threatens us all. Like the best Rock journalists of the period; Bangs, Nick Kent, Jon Savage and Charles Shaar Murray, he writes about this stuff as if it matters. He's right. It does.