Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Greil Marcus's absorbing new study...dips in and out of the history of the Great Refusal, all the way from the medieval Lollards and Brethren of the Free Spirit to the Dadaists, the French Situationists, the Children of the May 1968 uprising in France and British punk rockers. Lipstick Traces, however, is no sedate academic record of libertarian revolt but a bold blending of anecdote, personal confession and cultural analysis, cutting backward and forward from Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols to the Surrealists, from Alexander Trocchi of the 1950's avant-garde group know as Lettrist International to George Grosz, from the Anabaptists in the 16th century to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Danny the Red of the French student rebellion...[Marcus's] book is impressively adept at bringing alive some of the dramatic moments of the history it charts...A coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out.
--Terry Eagleton (New York Times Book Review 20010511)

Lipstick Traces has the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status.
--Ben Brantley (New York Times )

A book about the twilight zone of art and revolution...[that] displays an intellectual confidence, or nerve, that more than convinces the reader to follow its unmarked trails.
--Gail Caldwell (Boston Globe )

A cultural history of society's anarchic fringe. (New York Times )

Lipstick Traces...is a highly subjective account of rebellious gestures that recur from decade to decade, often in remarkably similar incarnations. Marcus doesn't belabor the division between high and low--he just ignores it, fluidly shifting from (sometimes obscure) source to source. Dada leads to punk leads to Police Academy, and Elvis movies prompt analyses of the Left Bank. Natch! That Marcus can kick off and end his exhaustive, but always clear-headed, cross-epochal trek with the Sex Pistols--and make it all cohere--is but one indication of how fully he meshes the academy and the gutter.
--Katherine Dieckmann (Voice Literary Supplement )

Product Description

This is a secret history of modern times, told by way of what conventional history tries to exclude. Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself. "Hip, metaphorical and allusive..."--Gail Caldwell, Boston Sunday Globe. Full-color illustrations and halftones.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (September 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674535812
• ISBN-13: 978-0674535817
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #169,195 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #44 in

  Books > Entertainment > Music > Musical Genres > Punk

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tremendous catalyst for intellectual growth, August 10, 1999

By	Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

LIPSTICK TRACES is a tremendous brain expander. We talk sometimes of "expanding one's consciousness," and of no book is that more appropriate than this one. Marcus is not merely brilliant in what he writes; he is brilliant in the artists and writers and works of art he points you towards. You will find yourself scurrying off to buy copies of THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, bootleg CDs of the Sex Pistols, and hard-to-find copies of movies like 20 MILLION YEARS TO EARTH, and will find yourself enriched by the process.

But the main reason to get this book is that it is a lot of fun. Maybe I am weird, but I had none of the sense that some of the other readers had: that it is hard, that it bogs down, that it is a slow read. Maybe its all the Wittgenstein, Hegel, and Kierkegaard I read in grad school, but I found this book to be an absolute page turner. I give it my highest recommendation.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars 99 Molotov Cocktails on the Wall, February 19, 2002

By	Matthew H Camp (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews

Think non-linear. Think connective. This book isn't exactly art history or criticism, it isn't a manual on how to start an artistic revolution, it isn't sociological theory - but it touches on all these.

Marcus traces currents of thought and action in musical and artistic "movements" in an illuminating and inspiring way that swings from such 20th century horrors as Nazi death camps to Michael Jacksons' "Thriller", although he gets bogged down in the second half with the "lettristes" who really, from his description, don't sound exciting enough to spend so much time on. Okay, letter poetry, sounds stupid, what next?

The person this book would be perfect for is the edgy artist who needs some instigation (the person who recommended it to me), intellectual "punk rock" fan (I might qualify), or the anarchist with a taste for literature (who I am mailing my copy to).

If you are unfamiliar with the situationists, the sex pistols, the dadaists, European revolutions, etc. then this book is a good starting point. (I'd never heard of Guy Debord but the extensive quotes from "Society of the Spectacle" convinced me to rush out and read that, too.)

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, engaging take on a much-covered subject, July 9, 2005

By	J. Dillingham (Tucson, Arizona United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ludicrously dismissed by punks and academics alike (revealing something that links them: a profound lack of imagination), Lipstick Traces is the most audacious and brilliant book ever written about popular music, one that barely mentions its purported subject (punk rock). In his absurd attack on Marcus, Richard Meltzer quotes some critic's dismissal of LT as a failed version of his (Meltzer's) own The Aesthetics of Rock; in truth, that book itself is more like a failed version of itself, in which brilliant ideas are let down by virtually unreadable prose. What Marcus does is easy to miss at first, but it becomes obvious over the course of the book: he's not just trying to show us the Guy Debord in Johnny Rotten, but the Johnny Rotten in Guy Debord. And so a book devoted almost entirely to obscure artists, barely given a footnote in any "real" history of art or rock or whatever (the Pistols and the Clash aside, none of the punk bands Marcus admires - the Buzzcocks, the Slits, X-Ray Spex, Essential Logic, the Adverts, even Public Image Ltd. - will ever get much time on VH1) becomes unbelievably exciting and visceral.

Marcus doesn't bother writing much about the Sex Pistols themselves, though his descriptions of their records are almost more amazing than the records themselves. The first half of the book is a rambling screed, taking in subjects as unlikely as Adorno and Michael Jackson's Victory Tour. Marcus doesn't dumb down anything he takes on, and he shuttles back and forth between seemingly unrelated topics so often that some readers may be frustrated. Persevere, and you'll find that Marcus's writing, imposing at first, is ultimately vibrant, witty and illuminating. The second half is a much more straightforward account of the "heroes" of Marcus's vision - Tristan Tzara, Michel Mourre, Debord - though he still has room for a lovely meditation on the Orioles' 1948 "It's Too Soon to Know," which he considers the first rock'n'roll record. What's fascinating about this section is that Marcus either digs up information on people you'd never hear of otherwise (Mourre, a deadbeat sometime-surrealist who made headlines around the world by marching into Notre Dame Church dressed as a monk to proclaim the death of God, may be the most intriguing character here) or writes about them in an engaging manner that you wouldn't find in a more traditionally scholarly book. Finally, in the epilogue, Marcus brings it all home, revealing for the first time why he decided to write a book about revolutions that never happened.

There is little historical connection between any of these figures, but that's the point - all these would-be revolutionaries really shared was a certain tone, and Marcus takes on something of that tone himself. It's the voice of Charlie Chaplin's tramp at the end of "The Great Dictator": someone willing, even for a moment, to address the entire world, to refuse to censor oneself, and to accept whatever consequences may follow.