Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The Twentieth Century (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
A fabulous history of the cultural trends that became punk, tracing the underground cultures of 20th century Europe (and with a great soundtrack, if you can find it). Marcus has presented us with a significant contribution to cultural history at two levels - he has traced the 20th century history of a set of disruptive cultural movements from Dada through Surrealism, Lettrism, and Situationism to Punk. His grasp of the movements and of their political and philosophical foundations is monumental and the case he makes for the links betwen these art and political movements (although that may be too strong a term for things such as Lettrism) is compelling and although others such as Stuart Home (with his discussion of the genealogy of groups such as Class War) or Hakim Bey (with his philosophy of Immediatism) have drawn on similar sets of ideas, this remains the most comprehensive and impressively analysis of the politics of 20th century cultural disruption which also has the advantage of avoiding modernist and elitist notions of those as avant-garde movements.At a second level his is a challenge to many of the ways we do history, especially cultural history which so often deals with elites, with high culture and the like. There is no doubt that the groups he is exploring here are elites, are unorthodox, are well outside the mainstream - but crucially they are not groups that are validated or valued by those with power, and indeed in some cases such as the Situationists found themselves actively fighting those in and with power, while others such as the Lettrists were so obscure and abstract that few if any knew they existed let alone what they were on about. But the point is that these undergrounds do, from time to time, surface - as we saw with the four key 'movements' here, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and Punk - while they may and often do have a much more profound general impact (which I realise it taking me close to some of the truisms of analyses of the avant-garde). The point is not the extent to which these movements were well known or had an impact though, but that they existed, that they mounted philosophical and political challenges and debates, that they in some ways articulate a zeitgeist/i> and for those reasons tell us much about their times, while Marcus's sensitivity to how the various protagonists told their own stories further draws out their cultural politics, their archaeologies, and their forms of self-creation and the control of memory.Of course, it is not a 'perfect' case – they don't exist – and I could challenge the book’s tendency to reify and almost deify Punk. That said, it challenges our understandings of 20th century art, politics, culture in ways that demand we revisit what so often seems the ephemerality of the popular, the everyday, and seemingly trivial, obscure, inane, and frankly ‘weird’ and explore their links, growth and significance. Most obviously, it demands that we think anew about what makes up the sphere we think if as politics and the relevance of both pleasure and the absurd – after all, it was the Situationists who told us in what seemed and absurdity, sous les pavés, la plage. Read it!
At the time of writing the Country is getting ready to celebrate the impending Olympics and 60th Jubilee. Union Jacks are everywhere and everyone is getting ready for a public holiday. For some of us it will be an escape from the boredom and austerity measures of the current government. In 1977 another Jubilee was being celebrated and a song came out that encapsulated the feelings of all of those people who felt alienated from the patriotism and nostalgia for a Britain that no longer existed. This book is a history of The Sex Pistols and the various Punk movement that originated at that time but it is also a secret history of the art movements that preceded the Punk explosion of the late 20th Century,Greil Marcus focuses on the rage of the young Johnny Rotten singing 'I am the antichrist'. He is fascinated on how a band like the Sex Pistols could create such anti-music in a pop song. He follows the history of the Sex Pistols and the emerging punk movement to the decline of the Sex Pistols in their infamous US Tour. There is a tenuous link to a young girl who is enraged at not getting tickets for a Michael Jackson concert to try and explain where this alienation came from. How could a pop song be influenced by the anti-establishment religious movements like the Brethren of The Free Spirit of medieval England, the Dutch religious reformer John Of Leiden and the Seventeenth Century Ranters? Why did Punk and the Sex Pistols have so much in common with the failed Spartacist uprising in 1919 and the German Dada movement and anti-art in the Cabaret Voltaire? How could the works of Isidore Isou and the Lettrist International and Guy Debord and the slogans of the Situationist s have been revived in a pop song in the late 1970's? The revised edition includes a foreword by Nicky Wire from Manic Street Preachers. This book was a huge influence on Richie Edwards who wrote about the 'boredom, alienation and despair' that had been included in the writings of the SI many years earlier. The Situationist s tried to build a Marxist and Avant-garde alternative to Capitalism in what Debord called the 'Society of The Spectacle'. People would create situations as an alternative to the capitalist system. They were influential in the General Strike and student protests in May 1968 and their writings are as Marcus argues a huge influence on Malcolm MacLaren and Jamie Reid who had both been in the radical group King Mob. Marcus features the bands that came out of the Punk era like The Raincoats, Gang Of Four, Mekons, Wire, X-Ray Spex and many others who shared a similar outlook. This was an enjoyable and informative book but sometimes Marcus tends to ramble in his narrative.
What do You think about Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The Twentieth Century (2001)?
Lipstick Traces is the first book since my required text at college which I didn't read so much as looked at each word briefly before it vaporized behind my eyes. It's an experience like following a trail of ashes; I could track it from beginning to end, but I couldn't distinguish any single section from another.I could've given up on it, I guess, but something made me want to find out where Greil Marcus was going with all of this. Were all 447 pages really going to be about drawing a line to punk from a rightfully forgotten and deeply shit-dipepd French social-theory movement? Does Marcus not realize that we can't understand most of what he's trying to communicate? Or does he simply not care, because he knows how devoid of importance it all really is?To be fair, the other reason I held on is that Marcus's first 100 pages, in which he talks about punk in general and the Sex Pistols in particular, are so fantastically good that I expected he had the potential to climb out of the hole he'd dug for himself. He never does, but the first section of Lipstick Traces is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the unique power of British punk for those who love it.
—Seth Madej
***Greil Marcus is coming to Skylight Books in May to do a reading for his new book. Time finally to read all of Lipstick Traces?Details:http://www.skylightbooks.com/event/gr...Friday May 7, 2010GREIL MARCUS discusses and signs "WHEN THAT ROUGH GOD GOES RIDING"Start: 7:30 pmEnd: 9:30 pmWhen That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (PublicAffairs)We're thrilled to announce that Greil Marcus, music and culture critic, Believer columnist, and author or editor of many Skylight staff and customer favorites (Lipstick Traces, A New Literary History of America, and others) will be here to discuss and sign his new book of criticism on another Skylight favorite person: Van Morrison.Greil Marcus is the author of The Shape of Things to Come, Like a Rolling Stone, and The Old Weird America; a twentieth anniversary edition of his book Lipstick Traces was published in 2009. With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published last year by Harvard University Press. Since 2000 he has taught atPrinceton, Berkeley, Minnesota, and the New School in New York; his column “Real Life Rock Top 10” appears regularly in The Believer. He lives in Berkeley.
—Betsy
Could have been a lot shorter and just as interesting. Was a great review of a lot of the 20th century and did a good job of linking dada to the beginnings of the Situationist International. The connections Greil Marcus makes between Medieval heretic movements, dada, the SI and punk are hyperbolic and I think more poetically correlated than anything else. This book was the best when it presented biographical and geographical details. I took particular interest in the story of Isidore Isou and the beginnings of the Lettrist International - including the mind boggling story of the Notre Dame Affair and it's symbolic foreshadowing of May '68. When the facts are being presented they are riveting and highly entertaining. The book becomes troublesome when Marcus gets carried away and rapturously makes connections where connections do not need to be made. He could have made all of the same networks without pounding it down with WHAT IT ALL MEANS. Sometimes a coincidence is just as magical as a direct cause and effect. Especially, when one is talking about punk, it might do well to be careful of meaning making. His definition of punk is very narrow, and doesn't take into account the still real, measurable, and positive aspects of what that word means.
—Danica
