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Why I Write: Finding a life's work

2023; Wiley; Volume: 111; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tyr.2023.a914439

1467-9736

Greil Marcus,

Music History and Culture

Why I WriteFinding a life's work Greil Marcus (bio) I write criticism. When I started in 1968, with a record review in Rolling Stone, I don't think I even knew the word, at least insofar as it referred to a kind of writing, or thinking. It seemed pompous and pretentious. I didn't want that. I was a fan, writing out of fandom, out of love and betrayal: You have to hear this! This is a fraud! You have to hear this even more! Then, one day in late 1969, I set out to write about the forthcoming Rolling Stones album, Let It Bleed. I heard it, I read it, as much more than another Rolling Stones record, though in those days, every Rolling Stones album was an event, a summing up, a document of where the world its listeners lived in was at that moment. But Let It Bleed was more. It had a longer look back and a longer gaze forward. It was about—or it was an attempt to enact—the close of a chapter in history, the end of the idea, already being sold as a brand, of "The Sixties." [End Page 8] From its first song, "Gimme Shelter," to its last, "You Can't Always Get What You Want," the music said that a thrilling time when anything seemed possible was about to turn to stone and open into a future of dread and terror, into a realm where to speak falsely, or even carelessly, could be fatal to body and soul. And I found that to get that down, to get at what was going on with Mick Jagger's voice and Keith Richards's guitar, I had to broaden the context of the music as far as I could. I had to write about photography and movies and fiction and every form of cultural speech that was feeding into the album and bleeding out of it. Writing that piece was when I got an idea of what criticism was and what it could be. It was an analysis of one's own response to something out there in the world, in this case a $3.98 LP. Why am I reacting to this so intensely? Why does this make me smile and scare me at the same time? Does it matter if he's saying "death" or "bed," or does the real power in the word lie in the way it slides away as it's sung? To ask these questions was a claim of cultural citizenship: not only do I have the right to say in public what I think this is and why that matters, I have an obligation to do so. Listen to me; I'll listen to you. That was the beginning of what I have done with my life since. I realized I had a choice as a writer: make the world bigger and more interesting and live in that world, and find a life's work, or shrink everything down to your own crabbed and paltry self, hang on for years conning editors and publishers and yourself, and find your life's a lie. ________ there are other critical events that have shaped my own sense of what writing can be and where it can go, confrontations with something outside of yourself, experiences that cause the world to suddenly look different, and you have to come to grips with that, you have to think about that, and a germ is planted and sooner or later you will have to write about it. Maybe there are hundreds, thousands. But only a few really stand out. Reading Moby-Dick for the third or fourth time, and finding myself overwhelmed at the way a single line early in the book can [End Page 9] bring the next two hundred pages rushing back as if I'd lived them myself—which, since this is a book, and you're supposed to read it, along with all the generations since 1851, I had. Listening over and over to the Firesign Theatre's 1969 album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at...