(b. 1945) Former editor
at Rolling Stone
and Creem whose 1975 tome Mystery
Train re-defined the parameters of rock
music criticism. The book places rock 'n'
roll within the context of American cultural
archetypes from Moby Dick to Jay Gatsby
to Staggerlee. Marcus's "recognition of the
unities in the American imagination that
already exist" unleashed, for better or for
worse, the fevered fancies of numberless
rock scribes. His next book was equally
ambitious: Lipstick Traces: A Secret
History of the 20th Century (1989,
developed from an earlier essay) stretched
his trademark riffing across a millennium of
Western civilization. Positing punk rock as
a transhistorical cultural phenomenon,
Marcus illuminated hidden connections
between entities as diverse as the Sex
Pistols, the Dadaists, and medieval heretics.
Dead Elvis, a 1991 collection of writings
about Presley, 1993's Ranters and Crowd
Pleasers, an examination of post-punk political pop could not
but seem earthbound in
comparison. Using old Dylan bootlegs as a typically obscure
starting point, Marcus
delved once more into the American subconscious with 1997's
obsessive Invisible
Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. This "bespectacled
Zeitgeist surfer" (the
Boston Globe) continues to hang ten in the pages of Artforum.
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