This is Greil Marcus’ Brain on “Shuffle”

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Author and critic’s critic Greil Marcus takes a scholarly approach to writing about pop music. He’s covered all the greats of rock ‘n’ roll for a variety of publications over the years, including Rolling Stone, where he was the magazine’s first reviews editor. Among the 18 or so books he’s written or edited is 1975’s acclaimed Mystery Train, in which he hones in on a handful of musicians in his quest to cement rock ‘n’ roll within a larger American cultural context. Marcus has paid special attention to the likes of Elvis Presley, Van Morrison—the subject of a book earlier this year—and particularly Bob Dylan. His new collection, out this month, is called Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010. I reached out to Marcus with a few questions on his current and all-time music faves, new surprises, and, of course, His Royal Bobness.

Mother Jones: What’s your favorite new release this year within your usual realm?

Greil Marcus: Carolina Chocolate Drops, Genuine Negro Jig (Nonesuch). Very educated people who somehow get inside the blackface minstrel music of 150 years ago, and come out the other side.

MJ: What about something totally outside your genre?

GM: I like to think there’s no outside; that I can hear whatever has a claim to make, but if you’d asked me if I were interested in poetry set to music, I’d probably say no. When I heard Ellen Maybe’s “City Streets” on KALX in Berkeley I had no idea what it was, just that I was transfixed. I called up the DJ, went to Amoeba Records, couldn’t find it, wrote away—and after listening to Maybe’s album Rodeo for the Sheepish (Hen House) half a dozen times, I had no idea who the people behind it were—a poet, and a musician/singer who sounds like many of himself, or for that matter her-himself. But there’s a pathos cut with self-lacerating humor that makes this the most surprising and painful music I’ve come across.

MJ: Shuffle your iPod and name the first five songs that pop up.

GM: Don’t have an iPod…
1.     Jan and Dean, “Dead Man’s Curve”
2.     Robert Johnson, “Come on in My Kitchen”
3.     Kim Carnes, “You Keep Me Hanging On”
4.     Supremes, “Stop! In the Name of Love”
5.     Cyndi Lauper, “Money Changes Everything”

MJ: If you don’t have an iPod, what was it that you just shuffled?

GM: My head.

MJ: What’s the latest song, good or bad, that super-glued itself in your brain?

GM: Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”

MJ: Three records or singles you never get sick of listening to?

GM: Cream, “Crossroads”
Crickets, “Looking for Someone to Love”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “American Girl”

MJ: Name a guilty pleasure—something you like to listen to but don’t like to admit it.

GM: Short of reading or listening about mass murder, torture, and child rape and pornography for pleasure, I don’t buy the concept.

MJ: Favorite holiday-related song or album?

GM: From Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You: Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” now and forever—though it’d be hard to top what she did with it on David Letterman last year.

MJ: Favorite politically themed song or album?

GM: Barry McGuire, “Eve of Destruction”

MJ: Do you have any new favorite bands that we might not have heard of?

GM: Jockey, Yellow Fever, Woods, DeSoto Rust

MJ: Your new book out this month contains four decades of your writings on Bob Dylan. Can you think of any rising young musicians who embody the Dylan spirit without being derivative?

GM: Dylan when, where, how, why? The Handsome Family, Be Good Tanyas, Crooked Still, New Model Army.

MJ: Let’s say an alien came down and wanted to hear the Dylan album that best demonstrates what he’s about, which one would you hand the creature?

GM: Another Side of Bob Dylan. Confuse the thing. No reason to give away all our secrets just like that.

MJ: Can you still listen to Dylan for pleasure?

GM: Reminds me of what John Lennon said when asked who the new Chuck Berrys and Jerry Lee Lewises were: “Are they dead?” Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term “still” seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure.

MJ: As a longtime critic, can you listen to a song purely emotionally, without thinking about context and structure and history and all of that?

GM: Almost always, that’s how I listen. I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow.

Click here for more Music Monday features from Mother Jones.

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate