The Holy Greil

I read an interview with Thomas in The Wire a year or two ago and he was essentially full of crap, his approach seemed to be be only american people can understand rock music and British people shouldn't listen to it and should only play records of cockney music hall.

haha he lives in brighton!!

He may have just been fucking with the Wire - it is an English mag.

yeah everyone knows British people won't udnerstand irony.

Jeez

But it seems according to Thomas here, that British people should be able to take on any musical genre they want, including Memphis blues or whatever, as long as their VOICE feels the music and can communicate the feeling to the audience. That's what I thought was interesting about this, ie it no longer matters that the Rolling Stones weren't *working class*--the question beomes how well can Mick Jagger express/interpret the music. Of course, the world would be a better place if more people (British and American) played cockney music hall records... Tony Newley to thread...

I have finished Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic. It's the first of his books I have read in full.

It is impressive, a bout of lyrical historical imagination. He can spin a line, and he has done his homework, he has his factual-looking bedrock and 50pp of notes. He seems a major pop writer.

Yet I was not wholly satisfied. I think my doubts might be condensed thus:

1) Vagueness - of prose, and thus of thought. A little vagueness is OK; I like haze as he does. Yet he sprinkles it too readily. Many sentences read like: 'And as he sings, he may be facing down life, or death, or both, and maybe there's not much difference'. In fact, that sentence is les vague than some of those actually in the book.

2) American exceptionalism. This still seems the phrase that nails a problem, yet I cannot seem to push it further, explain what the problem is and how it pans out. Something about everything's uniqueness being American, and America being unique - and it leads him into what feel like some dubious maneouvres, with politics, constitutional debates, founding texts. The aesthetic and the political are perhaps too readily collapsed.

A major writer, yes, on a major singer and a large hinterland. Yet his own talent maybe leads him astray.

Is it ironic that you complain of his vagueness or abstuseness or are you trying to capture it in your own posting style?

I think the only line of mine above that is vague is the one about American exceptionalism, which I acknowledge is vague: I have trouble getting to the nub of this problem.

I don't think that what I say above is vague in a GM way. But perhaps I ought to be glad if it were. He may be a great writer.

i suppose i was also thinking about your latest post on the Nicholson Baker thread which either seems like a pretty way of saying nothing or an attempt to give people a hint of an idea in order to confuse them more. Re.G.M. I can't see why you would try and give an example of someone's vagueness by posting a sentence thats not even in the book, that's all.

No, it's not in the book. I don't think Bob Dylan ever lived in Kill Devil Hills, neither.

this was a very difficult book for me to read. it sometimes took days to wind my way to the end of a sentence then I'd have to trek back to the start of the paragraph again to gain its sense. knotty boy.