Top 35 Greil Marcus Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.”

— Greil Marcus

2. “Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.”

— Greil Marcus

3. “Art doesn’t explain itself.”

— Greil Marcus

4. “It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.”

— Greil Marcus

5. “I never could understand – it was impossible for me to get my head around – what the furor was, what the sense of betrayal and anger and rage was about Bob Dylan’s beginning to perform with a band, to play rock-and-roll, to get on the radio.”

— Greil Marcus

6. “We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.”

— Greil Marcus

7. “Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.”

— Greil Marcus

8. “Berkeley was a lookout and a hideout.”

— Greil Marcus

9. “I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.”

— Greil Marcus

10. “It was the invention in the music that was so striking – the will to create what had never been heard before, through vocal tricks, rhythmic shifts, pieces of sound that didn’t logically follow one from the other, that didn’t make musical or even emotional sense when looked at as pieces, but as a whole spoke a new language.”

— Greil Marcus

11. “At a deeper level it is a fantasy of no-limits for a people who live within a labyrinth of limits every day of their lives, and who can transgress them only among themselves.”

— Greil Marcus

12. “It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.”

— Greil Marcus

13. “Think about how rare it is for anyone to encounter a teacher who can open you up to the notion that there is an infinite amount of meaning and possibility and inspiration in the smallest thing before you.”

— Greil Marcus

14. “Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.”

— Greil Marcus

15. “I learned that when something just has to be said to move the discussion along, or broaden it or deepen it, if I can just keep my mouth shut for five minutes a student will say it. So for me a lot of teaching is about keeping my mouth shut.”

— Greil Marcus

16. “Curlicuing around the note allows a singer to mimic the sense of event in soul music, the sense that something is happening which has not happened before and cannot be repeated, by mimicking the apprehension of soul, those moments when singers dramatize their struggle to bring out of themselves what lies buried in them, inaccessible, until this moment, even to themselves.”

— Greil Marcus

17. “No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes.”

— Greil Marcus

18. “Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.”

— Greil Marcus

19. “Rock ‘n’ Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation.”

— Greil Marcus

20. “There is always a social explanation for what we see in art,” Albert Camus said in 1947. “Only it doesn’t explain anything important.”

— Greil Marcus

21. “One thing that old blues records teach you, is that even people with very limited skills can play very personal, distinctive, and appealing music that has nothing to do with the extent of their technique. It was their artistry. It was their feeling.”

— Greil Marcus

22. “I want another idea, another project, but you can’t make them up. They show up.”

— Greil Marcus

23. “Some forms of music spark the freedom of singers to say, in words or how words are sung, in pace, hesitation, timbre, shouts, or silences, what they most deeply and desperately want to say; other forms take it away.”

— Greil Marcus

24. “I am a critic who is pulled toward history. But Bob Dylan himself is a great historian. He is an historian who acts out history. So it always has a personal stamp. It always has a particular timbre. It always has a particular howl, or a moan, in that voice.”

— Greil Marcus

25. “D. H. Lawrence’s “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale” is always right.”

— Greil Marcus

26. “Yet “nothing” is not quite Faulkner’s last word, only the next to the last. In the end, the negativist is no nihilist, for he affirms the void.”

— Greil Marcus

27. “Bob Dylan continues to release odd and unsettling records, and to do odd and unsettling things on stage. So the term ‘still’ seems meaningless to me. But the real answer is simple: I listen to Bob Dylan for pleasure more than I listen to anyone else for pleasure.”

— Greil Marcus

28. “Blues grew out of the need to live in the brutal world that stood ready in ambush the moment one walked out of the church.”

— Greil Marcus

29. “Wonder made the old chicka-chicka-boom beat so potent it sounded like a syncopated version of Judgment Day.”

— Greil Marcus

30. “You’re going to react to a painting in a way that the painting demands you react.”

— Greil Marcus

31. “For thirty years you couldn’t possibly make it unless you were white, sleek, nicely spoken, and phony to your toenails – suddenly now you could be black, purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased, or almost anything on earth, and you could still clean up.”

— Greil Marcus

32. “Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.”

— Greil Marcus

33. “For every new art form there’s someone to come along and pronounce it dead, but rarely has an art form been born dead – as is the case with rock video, and its major outlet, MTV.”

— Greil Marcus

34. “Listening is like running down a mountain on a switchback trail, the sound of surprise generating its own momentum. There’s a punk glee inside the bluegrass craft–and a punk vehemence inside the bluegrass smile.”

— Greil Marcus

35. “Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don’t mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber’s film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.”

— Greil Marcus

36. “If Bob Dylan really is an historian in and of himself in his work, in his performances, he is also an historian with a unique sense of humor. There’s always been a bit of a stand-up comic in him.”

— Greil Marcus

37. “I never find myself even catching lyrics until something in the sound has taken me captive. Thinking about anything else is just the pleasurable byproduct of wow.”

— Greil Marcus

38. “It was the only free country left in the world,” he once said, not talking about America but about rock’n’roll in America, or anywhere else. “No boundaries, no passports. There wasn’t even a government.”

— Greil Marcus

39. “The official, standard history of rock ‘n’ roll is true, but it’s not the whole truth. It’s not the truth at all. It’s a constructed story that has been disseminated so comprehensively that people believe it, but it’s not true to their experience, and it may even deform or suppress their experience.”

— Greil Marcus