Customer Reviews

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.)

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.

Sigh. Okay, okay... I never actually finished reading this one... but I had a lot of fun trying! Pop culture critic Marcus weaves the history of the Sex Pistols -- and their disasterous final tour to America -- in with sideways social analyses and neo-surrealist "Situationism". A heady, stream-of-consciousness, Lester Bangs-ian nouveaux rock book that'll give you plenty to think about. You'll get dizzy being pointed in so many directions at once. A classic.

I'm still wondering what it is about 'Lipstick Traces' that has so polarised Amazon's readers. I don't consider it a great bit of writing/journalism, and I agree, with the benefit of 20/20 rear vision, that the author who wrote this tract in the early 80s might well reconsider the emphasis he'd placed on Johnny Rotten as a perveyor of Dadaist angsty pranks.In the epilogue, he makes clear that the story was very much a personalised view,(stemming from his student days at Berkley in the early 60s) rather than a serious rewrite of history, which gives him some leeway about the provisionality of his own opinion. I enjoyed the stuff on Huelsenbeck, on Debord, on Hugo Ball. I liked the graphic layout and the photos of main suspects & reproductions of 50s & 60s Situationist texts. I feel a more judicious editorial hand might have produced a less repetitive text, though the side alleys were fantastic, nevertheless. Marcus has written tighter, tougher stuff than this & his breathy, blow by blow accounts of Dylan and his sources are wonderful.For more on art visi>rodmoss.com

It does it! It traces the exact path I took in 1976, when 16, upon going from the Beats (Kero and Burro) into Dada... then on to Kent Ohio where the insane punk scene swept me up, cemented my sensibilities and threw me for a loop.

Everything comes together in this book, although Marcus almost ignores what was happening in US at the time, he traces the roots of punk. His thesis is that the Sex Pistols' Anarchy for the UK/etc trace back to earlier ideas such as Dada, the SI, etc. He does a good job in dissecting what punk was without selling it out. Recommended for 30-something former punks AND for anyone currently 13-24.

Sean Wolf Hill

Trying to read some of these other customer reviews forced me into quickly typing this. BE WARNED that Lipstick Traces is not some sub-High School history of Punk Rock just because Mr. Rotten is on the front cover! This is probably one of my favorite all-time books since it opened my eyes to a (secret) history of things that really MUST become common knowledge to all who consider themselves somewhat intelligent & knowledgeable and/or leaning towards what used to be referred to as the "counter-culture" (now "alternative" or "hipster" or any other tag for those that gag on what spectacular society spoon feeds them with a shovel). Greil Marcus takes the Sex Pistols 1st 45 "Anarchy in the UK" as the starting point & free-association hopscotches across centuries of the hidden & forgotten for what informed the raw scream of that first listen. And though it may seem a tough go on your first dig into its pages (especially in today's A.D.D. world), "Lipstick Traces" rewards you around each corner since you never know where the author will take you next. Starting with the first UK Punks back to the Situationists who took equal inspiration from the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire AND the heretics of the European Middle Ages, most notably the Movement of the Free Spirit - this is often a heavy read that never fails to F#@k with your preconceptions, leaving you sometimes thinking that everything you already know is WRONG! Very few books I've read left me with a similar effect and after rereading it several times (there is so much here that a quick run through just doesn't do it - be forewarned), I've dug deeper into the books of Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle & (especially) Raoul Vaneigem The Revolution of Everyday Life as well as Dada, the Free Spirit The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Galaxy Books), etc, etc and I'm still digging. This book may change you too if you are the right person who has a deep curiousity for the underside of what stands against "culture"..."alternative" & otherwise! If youth today still reads books, they must read this. As I remember that famous scene in "The Matrix": which pill will YOU take?

I'm not kidding. Well, maybe it would be better placed in a collection of gnomic tracts... the point is that this book, mad, spectacular artifact that it is, has done more for my previously-thought-lost senses of glee and invention than any number of wholly Marxist offerings. It's a tilt-a-whirl, a labor of love that turns into a stalking then turns into a far more colorful prom than ever is dreamed of in the philosophies of the otherwise educated. Yes, I'm ranting, and you will too. Anabaptists were never this much fun back in high school...

In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus explores the Twentieth Century in an interesting and unconventional way by viewing popular music and art as a social critique of Western culture. Marcus asks the question, "Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured...or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language?" (page 4). He uses movements such as Dada, Surrealists, Situationalist, Letterist, and most importantly, the punk movement as his evidence. For Marcus, the connections between the movements are clear, and through his exploration he finds that although there is not an undeviating chronological lineage between the movements, the spirit and strategies employed by the respective revolutionists are eerily similar.

The author explains that these movements brought about a new kind of social dialogue, a new language so to speak. This language is left behind in traces through the existence of popular art and music that was influenced by the movements. Marcus acknowledges this connection between the movements and popular culture saying, "All the demands that dada made on art, that Michel Mourre made on God, that the LI and SI made on their time, came to life as demands on the symbolic milieu of pop music" (page 441). He explains that the spirit of these movements all amounted to a conscious desire to create history and denounce the path laid out for humans as individuals.

Though it seems somewhat obscure, the strength of the author's argument in Lipstick Traces lies within his detailed discussion of each of the movements. Marcus spends most of his book explaining the key facets of the movements, and by doing this his connections seem to make themselves. Each of the groups attempted to alter reality though rebellion or through an expansive conversation of negotiation, and as the conversation grew, historical and institutional power dissolved (page 444). Through the examination of Dada, Surrealism, Situationalism, Letterism, and Punk, Marcus uncovers the radical demands made on the reality of Western culture during the respective times. While none of the revolutions ever came to any triumphant ends, each of the movements made their mark on reality by pushing the limits of ordinary life and are therefore undeniably connected through the traces that they left behind: the expanded borders of reality.

"Everything connected to a totality, and the totality was how you wanted to live: as a subject of an object of history" (page 444). This is the reason that Marcus relies so heavily on the music of the Sex Pistols and other punk bands of the Seventies. These bands conveyed the idea that anyone could reject their reality and embrace the idea of "no future" to the extent that they experience freedom from reality or from the conventions of history. Anyone could be an anarchist, reject order, and embrace rebellion simply by entering into a new social dialogue. Collective destiny was no longer the only option; now an individual destiny existed as well. The desire to change the world continues to manifest itself within social movements and popular culture, what makes Lipstick Traces so important is the fact that it points out that it doesn't matter whether these movements succeeded in their mission to change the world, because by simply existing, they changed history though influencing popular art and music.

Is it just me, or does it just go a bit too far? I admit, I never did get to finish the book, and probably didn't get to see the whole "point" of it all... Engaging and eclectic, but I kinda lose track when he gets just a bit too far from rock and roll itself. (I don't wanna compare, but "Psychotic Reactions..." by Lester Bangs [w/c marcus edited] is more "unputdownable" and didn't require me to brush up on my 20th century avant-garde theory) The CD of this book is just as strange. (did they ever release it as CD/book combination?) Check out that sound poetry!! Marie Osmond too! And the last song, "Lipstick Traces" is just WONDERFUL.