From Publishers Weekly
Marcus ( Mystery Train ) believes that rock songs of groups like the Sex Pistols filter into mass consciousness and subtly influence everyday speech and thought. His underlying premise is that pop culture, like radical protest, is capable of altering history. He traces a common thread presumed to link the rebelliousness of punk rockers, medieval religious heretics, the Dada antics of Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball, the films of the anarchist group Situationist International and the anti-bourgeois ravings and graffiti of the lettrist movement in post-war Paris. Marcus contrasts what he sees as the spurious pop revolt of Michael Jackson with Elvis Presley and the Beatles, "who raised the possibility of living in a new way." This deliberately meandering tour of countercultural high and low roads is illustrated with rock posters and handbills, news clippings, photographs, protest art. In this version of history, Little Richard's glossolalia has direct ties to the pre-Christian Essenes. Rock critic Marcus is consistently entertaining even if he doesn't prove his thesis.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Acclaimed rock reviewer/author Marcus ( Mystery Train , LJ 4/1/75) offers up a fascinating thesis: that modern consciousness is to a great extent shaped by events or documents "insignificant" of themselves but collectively very important indeed, perhaps even definitive. While spending much of its time on the impact of the Sex Pistols, this is not purely a "rock-music" book--along the way one encounters various ranters, Dadaists, nihilists, whatever--even Theodore Dreiser. If it lacks the rigor demanded of academic historiography, Marcus's book is still great popular culture, and academic historians would do well to be interested. Meanwhile, the cross-referential treatment gives a seeming (at least) validity that sheer facts wouldn't to the idea of a "secret history" that permeates unobtrusively and yields more meaning than many would like to believe.
- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
