Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best
book ever written about America as seen through its music, began
work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols:
that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and
dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture
called punk. "I am an antichrist!" shouted singer Johnny
Rotten-where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking
for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey,
Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of
blasphemy, adventure, and surprise. This is no mere search for
cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is
that various kinds of angry, absolute demands-demands on society,
art, and all the governing structures of everyday life-seem to be
coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but
inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us
hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren
of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in
seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and
Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one
Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to
proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the
Situationist International, small groups of Paris-based artists and
writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films,
prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social
criticism of the 1950s and '60s; the rioting students and workers
of May '68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing
France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage
"Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen." Although the Sex
Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick
Traces is not a book about music; it is about a common voice,
discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of
previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and
filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs,
collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus
takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a
hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for
the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias,
solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained
disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an
insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Traces tells a
story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.
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