FROM WONDERFULLY VAGUE BUT EVOCATIVE TO MUMBLING AND MUDDLED

Greil Marcus has a gift for crafting poetic, wide-ranging essays that explore rock and pop music, popular culture, and the unexpected intersections between songs and the historical forces that shape our lives. At his best, Marcus opens our eyes—urging us to listen more closely, to dig into the motivations of artists, and to sharpen our senses in a quixotic hope of nudging humanity toward some kind of upgrade.  His finest work remains Lipstick Traces, a 1989 doorstop of a book that ambitiously surveys what its subtitle calls the “Secret History” of the 20th century. Marcus argues—though never too directly—that the century’s art movements formed scattered, often chaotic pockets of resistance to the numbing status quo. These movements, whether intentional or accidental, pushed back against a system designed to keep industrial populations distracted and docile while the powerful consolidated wealth.  For Marcus, it’s all connected: surrealism, cubism, Russian cinema, Cabaret Voltaire, blues, bebop, Coltrane, Elvis, the Sex Pistols, Bob Dylan. Lipstick Traces is a whirlwind of baroque poetics and intellectual hyperbole. It doesn’t offer firm conclusions so much as it suggests, hints, and gestures toward meaning. Like Ken Burns with a sharper edge, Marcus assembles a dazzling collage of names, dates, and trends, then lets the implications hang in the air, unresolved. He writes as though perched outside of history, watching the ambitions and failures of brilliant men and women unfold. The result is part prose poem, part critical impressionism—a book that invites readers to construct their own narrative from the fragments he presents.Years later, Folk Music  arrives in the same style: a Burnsian drift through five essential Bob Dylan songs, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Murder Most Foul.” But this time, the magic falters. Without a clear thesis or guiding argument, the book feels like a compressed mashup of dates, names, songs, controversies, and half-remembered cultural moments. The connective tissue is thin, and the absence of a coherent line of inquiry robs the book of momentum or purpose.Marcus has written five other books on Dylan—many of them insightful, often beautifully written. But Folk Music reads like a retread, as if he’s run out of fresh things to say about the former Mr. Zimmerman. It’s hasty, clumsily structured, riddled with awkward transitions. At times, it resembles the ramblings of a once-brilliant mind hoping that if it keeps talking long enough, something profound might emerge. This time, it doesn’t.

Jazz Forward!

A book I'm currently reading, "Playing Changes" by Nate Chinen, is a fascinating argument that we are currently in an age of amazing new jazz artists and an equal amount of amazing innovation and new ways for jazz composers and soloists to further this resilient art of musical improvisation. The premise is not one I'd bicker with--ours is a time when the "jazz is dead" club needs to just be silent for a very long time and listen to the creativity that abounds. But, as the review points out, author Chinen, a critic with a forward-thinking preference for new and temperamentally sounds, writes in a such a way that he makes you think of the guy who must have been the least interesting student in a seminar on post-modernism. He does not, as the reviewer suggests, at times sound like Derrida; rather, he seems more like a person who thinks he sounds like Derrida. Which is a shame, because although Chinen writes about important artists and at times makes crucial distinctions in what is happening in the ever-evolving jazz timeline, it seems that the premise of the book is that the music exists only to be co-opted and made to dance between inscrutable phrases and descriptions that don't really intrigue a reader to actually go out and purchase some of this fine new music. Tellingly, Nate Chinen chides the older critical establishment, those who would have jazz become a formalized canon, set in place, with boundaries and inflexible boundaries, yet he seems to be working to construct his own fiefdom of critical imperative. Meet the new boss...In any case, all this begs the question to be asked, which is why can't there be a working idea of jazz that doesn't require anyone going to war against other schools of thoughts on the music, or specific ways of playing. A jazz fan can enjoy both and not be betraying whatever "true spirit" of jazz the critical camps think. Seriously, one occasionally feels that some critics, whether Leonard Feather , Amiri Baraka or Nate Chinen, despite his protest to the contrary, wish they could be in the studio, instructing the musicians in what their note selections and points of creating tension and release should be.

Slaves to do These Things: Amy King

Slaves to do These Things
poems by Amy King

Amy King's writing is at once brainy yet coursing with a perceptible sensuality, are among the best of the post-modernist, post-Language, post-confessional style where we have. She is a writer who has surmounted the collective, generationally situated surprise that our native tongue is, in essence, slippery when it comes to addressing our experience and who has gotten on with an interrogation of both the templates one has absorbed from birth and the ones accrued through living long enough to modify one's narrative.

There is no defeatism here, no smallish voice sighing over disappointments, no staccato -cadenced anger replaying old wounds. Amy King comes through these poems, not as a survivor nor someone inclined to obscure the bare facts of her life and the reading she brought with her, but rather a poet with a firm grip on the co-agitations of joy and subtler anguish.

The wonder is that there not a place one senses that they've come across someone who thinks it's time to address themselves in a disguised past tense; these are the wonderings, inspections, musings of someone too enthralled with the discussion underway to worry what the final word will be. What hasn't been said yet is nothing to worry about, but to anticipate as a hard-verbed, sexily ironic entree to what one doesn't already know.

King's verse is sharp, witty, moving in ways that are made powerful by the emotional nuance her line breaks contain; there is the sense that everything one knew is wrong, after all, and yet it stands as a reasonably reliable filter through which one may continue their negotiation with the metaphysically inclined whispers--the ghostly reminders objects, places, faces can awake and send a chill down your spine. There is an analytical rigor here, but not cerebralization of one's history. One witnesses the sort of appreciation of personal multi-valence; the meaning of King's life has changed due to the texts she's absorbed, and her experience, in turn, has changed the meanings of the books she has been given.

Choice and recommended.