Synopses & Reviews
Greil Marcus, author of
Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out ofa fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. "I am an antichrist!" shouted singer JohnnyRotten-where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.
This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands--demands on society, art, and all the governing structuresof everyday life--seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the FreeSpirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dameto proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris--based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps themost provocative social criticism of the 1950s and '60s; the rioting students and workers of May '68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage "Anarchy in theU.K." and "God Save the Queen."
Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick Tracesis not a book about music; it is about acommon voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic textsfrom Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitaryrefusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Tracestells a story as disruptive andcompelling as the century itself.
Review
A book about the twilight zone of art and revolution...[that] displays an intellectual confidence, or nerve, that more than convinces the reader to follow its unmarked trails.
Review
A cultural history of society's anarchic fringe.
Review
Lipstick Traceshas the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status.
Review
Greil Marcus's absorbing new study...dips in and out of the history of the Great Refusal, all the way from the medieval Lollards and Brethren of the Free Spirit to the Dadaists, the French Situationists, theChildren of the May 1968 uprising in France and British punk rockers. Lipstick Traces, however, is no sedate academic record of libertarian revolt but a bold blending of anecdote, personal confessionand cultural analysis, cutting backward and forward from Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols to the Surrealists, from Alexander Trocchi of the 1950's avant-garde group know as Lettrist International to George Grosz, from the Anabaptists inthe 16th century to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Danny the Red of the French student rebellion...[Marcus's] book is impressively adept at bringing alive some of the dramatic moments of the history it charts...A coruscatingly original piece ofwork, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out.
About the Author
Greil Marcuswrites for many publications, including Esquire, Interview, and The ThreepennyReview. He is the author of Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History(both by Harvard), and Invisible Republic.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Version One: The Last Sex Pistols Concert
Version Two: A Secret History Of A Time ThatPassed
Faces
Legends of Freedom
The Art of Yesterday's Crash
The Crash of Yesterday's Art
The Assault on Notre-Dame
The Attack on Charlie Chaplin
Lipstick Traces (on aCigarette)
Epilogue
Works Cited
Sources and Credits
Acknowledgments
Index