What’s the Connection?



Holy Greil: Marcus does his famous impression of Buck Henry and Lou Reed.

Greil Marcus puts pop culture pieces together. Sometimes they fit. Sometimes they don’t.

by Sam Adams

There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, about the great critic Pauline Kael. It goes something like this: Sometime near the end of her tenure at the New Yorker, Kael was asked why, after all the controversy and commendation she’d attracted as a critic, Kael didn’t cap off her career by writing an autobiography. Her response, in the story, is simple: "I already have."

Though he’s decades younger, Greil Marcus’ career began around the same time and place as Kael’s: the Berkeley of the late ’60s. The two are colleagues and friends, and though Marcus’ writing is as professorial as Kael’s is populist, there’s an undeniable similarity between their work. Casting off the strictures of the decade that lay behind them, both forged an aesthetic in which criticism was, first and foremost, personal. It was no longer criticism’s place to evaluate whether or not a work met some predetermined standard, but whether it provoked a response, whether it connected in some trivial or profound way with the world outside its boundaries — whether or not it worked. You didn’t have to be an expert to write about movies or rock ’n’ roll; you just had to feel, and pay attention.

But while other rock scribes made themselves the explicit focus of their work — Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Nick Tosches and hundreds of other far less talented folk — Marcus always resisted navel-gazing. Read the seven books he’s released in the last quarter century, and you’ll know less about Marcus than you do after reading a single Lester Bangs review.

Despite several passages in Lipstick Traces which, Marcus says, are "so nakedly autobiographical and self-revealing" that he was "shocked" when he read them in the published book, Marcus mostly disputes the idea of criticism as autobiography. Taking a tone appropriate to the seminar he’s teaching at Princeton, he explains in a phone interview, "Any good critic writes as a kind of accidental or self-chosen representative of the audience at large, or the potential audience, for any critical artifact." He paints the revelatory passages in Lipstick Traces as almost accidental: "I didn’t know they were [revealing] when I wrote them. And if I had known, I wouldn’t have put them in."

But Marcus’ writing is autobiographical in a way that’s as profound and perhaps even more provocative than Bangs’ wild rants. In a passage from his latest book, Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (Henry Holt & Co., 248 p., $25), Marcus compares his style to that of longtime friend and Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick:

Last fall in Nashville, Guralnick and I shared a literary forum. I’ve known Guralnick for thirty years, and I felt he sold himself short when he stated his credo: "My approach to writing is the same as my approach to coaching baseball. I tell the kids, ‘Don’t speculate. Stay inside the game.’" My approach is the opposite — speculate; get outside the game — and I think that to find a person who so completely entered the souls of others as Elvis Presley did, you have to do that.

Most dramatically in Lipstick Traces, Marcus reaches across genres and through history to link seemingly unrelated events; he expands upon and sometimes invents links between punk rock, Dadaists and Situationism, as well as random bits of pop-cultural detritus which find their way into Marcus’ narrative. What unites them, for Lipstick Traces’ purposes, is the fact that they evoke similar feelings — a similar excitement, a similar sense of possibility — in Marcus himself. Either you feel that connection or you don’t. (Personally, I don’t find Richard Huelsenbeck anywhere near as thrilling as Gang of Four.)

Double Trouble starts out on more well-trod ground. As Marcus points out, the comparison of Clinton to Elvis started early in his Presidential run and eventually became so established that Clinton himself accepted and even exploited it. But, with his books Mystery Train and Dead Elvis, Marcus has been tracking manifestations of Elvis’ image since before the King was dead, and it’s no surprise that for him, the similarities between the two go beyond white-trash roots and a fondness for food.

"I’m fascinated by the way the way that Elvis Presley continues to worm his way through the culture, and finds enough sustenance in familiars or doppelgangers to keep himself alive," Marcus explains. "The book follows the connections that get made — intentionally or not — in the cultural arena. I look at the kind of cartoons and jokes that are all over the 1992 campaign as almost Freudian slips."

As much as the obvious manifestations of the Clinton-Elvis connection — Clinton blowing "Heartbreak Hotel" on the Arsenio Hall show — Marcus is after more ephemeral ways of understanding the Clinton era, like the "hint of fascism in a Taco Bell commercial" that gives the book the "no alternatives" part of its subtitle. Overtly, the essay in which the reference appears has nothing to do with Clinton, which is true of around half the book’s collected works. But Marcus makes the case that he’s mapping the terrain carved out by Clinton’s presidency.

"To me, that’s where these arguments take place," he says of the commercial, which hawks an alternative music sampler with the slogan, "There is no alternative." "You would never hear a politician say something so horrible. Can you imagine? ‘There is no alternative to my plan.’" The connection between that and Clinton, to say nothing of Elvis, is elusive, but Marcus explains, "A lot of these essays are about my attempt to find an extreme voice, which in a way I miss in Clinton’s presidency until the impeachment." In other words, in the absence of real dissent, Taco Bell is free to assert its dominance, and Bill Clinton is forced to repress his inner Elvis.

It’s on such vertically integrated conspiracy theories that Marcus is most persuasive, the idea being that consumer culture sneaks ideas in under our nose when we’re least expecting it, while the true visionaries toil in obscurity. Or as Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, a favorite subject of Marcus’, puts it: "Culture happens in secret."

I remember my own Greil Marcus Moment. Perhaps two years ago, I was leafing through the Inquirer when I came across an ad which was pitching hotel rooms to Philadelphia residents, the idea being that even overworked city dwellers who don’t have the means to leave town can still relax for a weekend. What dropped my jaw was the ad’s headline: "Feel Like a Tourist in Your Own Home." To find the title of Gang of Four’s shattering Marxist-alienation anthem "At Home He’s a Tourist" so blatantly recontextualized as huckster promo copy made my skin crawl.

It’s that kind of constructive recontextualization that makes Marcus seem like both a visionary and a solipsist, and perhaps why his arguments are most successful when made subliminally. Ranters and Crowd Pleasers — recently republished under Marcus’ preferred title, In the Fascist Bathroom — collects scattered essays on punk from a dozen different sources, but because it doesn’t force them into a box as small as presidential politics ("punk" being, in Marcus’ hands, an extremely flexible term), the threads which link the pieces — the connections between connections, if you will — remain dynamic, open to interpretation. Like a great song, you can take from it what you need. Double Trouble, on the other hand, might be the critical equivalent of prog rock: Impressive, intelligent, but airless and uninviting.