Greil Marcus Interview
(New York, April 7 2011)*

Text&Interview: Rokko

Greil Marcus (*1945, San Francisco) is one of the most important cultural critics and authors, dealing with literally anything that affects him. I had a chat with him, basically on his book “Lipstick Traces. A Secret History of the Twentieth Century“ (1989), which is really fascinating and uncovers the traces between Dadaism, Lettrism, Situationism and the English Punk. He’d been working on “Lipstick Traces” for nine years and feared he might get pissed or bored on that subject during the long time of researching and writing – but it didn’t happen. He liked it until the end. So do I.

 

Rokko: A lot of the things I want to talk about are based on „Lipstick Traces. A Secret History of the Twentieth Century“. I read that with the exception of Pere Ubu you didn’t find the US-punk all that interesting. So the first question: Would it have been possible to write „Lipstick Traces“ based on the US-American punk?

Greil Marcus: No, not for me. Maybe somebody else could have. But for me, that wasn’t what moved me, that wasn’t what excited me or got me fascinated. You know, I was not listening to that with the exception of Pere Ubu and The Avengers which is a San Francisco punk band from ‘77, ‘78 – I wasn’t hearing that same cry that I heard in the Sex Pistols and in many other groups whether it was The Adverts or Lora Logic, all sorts of people. Well you know, that being in a foreign place, in a foreign tradition, opened up into this whole world of European avantgarde what Heidegger called “European Nihilism”. That was a strange and difficult world for me to fathom – which was part of why I was so fascinated by it.

R: You wrote – also in „Lipstick Traces“ – that the English punk was a fake culture. Was there a moment when it turned real?

GM: Well, I think I say it was fake culture but it turned into real culture. People put on costumes, they imitated each others gestures, they did what seemed cool or uncool – which was the coolest thing of all in some ways. And by performing all these inauthentic imitations they were not real expression what any given indiviudal wanted or desired or was afraid of. They were able to discover and give voice to their own desires and fears and in that sense, fake culture leads to real culture.

R: Could the English punk emancipate from Malcolm McLaren?

GM: Well, it’s not like he controlled anything. He couldn’t even control his own band. I don’t think there is any question of emancipation. Certainly all the groups that formed in the Sex Pistols’ wake... you know, there’s that famous, legendary night in Manchester in 1976 when the Sex Pisotols performed there. In the audience are the people who would become members of Joy Division, people who would become the Buzzcocks and so many others who were so shocked and so thrilled at this sense of liberation in the destruction of all values, of all norms of behaviour. You didn’t have to emancipate from Malcolm McLaren, you simply had to emancipate yourself from yourself, from your own conditioning, from your own expectations, from the limits on your own life that you would come to accept.

R: When I read Lester Bangs, I had the impression that he was looking for the traces of avantgardism in US-American punk, namely in The Stooges.

GM: Well sure, everybody writes about what moves them, what intrigues them. And The Stooges always meant far more to Lester than they ever did to me. You know that wonderful piece in “Psychotic Reactions” “Of Pop and Pies and Fun” (“A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, or, Who's the Fool?”) which is for this time an unbelievably long... you could even say tedious – it wasn’t tedious for me, but I’m sure some people found it that way – three part essay with very academic subtitles on The Stooges at a time when people either thought that they were a really fun fucked up band or a bunch of morons. And here Lester is writing an essay about the whole shape of culture based on a Stooges-show.
But I couldn’t have done that. Because I didn’t hear in their music what he heard and I wasn’t moved by the way he was moved.

R: Did you have discussions back then about The Stooges?

GM: We had discussions about everything! And they all started with: “What have you heard lately? What have you seen lately? Oh, you must be kidding! I can’t believe you!” – those sorts of discussions.

R: In “Psychotic Reactions” he writes about the performance of The Stooges, especially about Iggy, of course. He points one thing out that is very avantgarde: that Iggy fools himself, he makes himself ridiculous about the whole rock’n’roll-industry and the myth and the aura, kind of deconstructs the whole rock’n’roll myth sold to the youth. He made it possible for the audience to see that this was just a show.

GM: Yeah.

R: In “Lipstick Traces” you wrote about the Sex Pistols’ performance, that they spit in the audience, denounced their ancestors,...

GM: With avantgarde-performance, you have so many different shapes and forms and so many different periods. What is always there, what is always kind of the starting point and ideally the ending point, is when you do something that makes people upset, that gets them angry or scared and they began to react in predictable ways. And in the mist of their reactions some people are gonna say: “Hey wait a minute!” As they (the artists) are shouting: “You asshole, you fucker, shut the fuck up!” – as they’re shouting they (the audience) say: “Hey wait a minute! I like this!”
Any avantgarade-performance with its whole attempt to shock, to demolish the audience’s expectations, leaves them with nothing so often, when people are trying to do that – nothing happens. People sit there bored: “I’ve seen this before. When does the real show start?”
And the events where something does happen are so rare that they become legendary and the people never stop talking about it, about that night.

R: John Lurie once said that the only thing you have to do is give the audience what it doesn’t expect.

GM: Yeah, that’s right! And I think I say almost the same thing in “Lipstick Traces”, you know, that there’s nothing easier than provoking a crowd to riot. You just do something they aren’t expecting. It doesn’t even have to be outrageous. The first time Public Image Limited performed in New York, they performed behind a screen so that you couldn’t see them – which is an old Dada-trick. And  nothing happened: “Oh god, come on.” There was no reaction.

R: Do you think the Sex Pistols were innovative in terms of performance?

GM: It was new to them. My point in “Lipstick Traces” is, going back into the past, where there was the Lettrist- and Situaniost-past and the Dada-past – it was not to say: “Oh look, it’s all been done before!” It was to say that these opportunities for negation are rediscovered again and again. And in that sense, well, someone else might say: “Oh, this is so old hat. A-B-C-D.” What I’m saying is that they’re new every time to the people involved. The people involved normally don’t have that sense of history, they’re not scholars, they’re not copying anybody in an intentional way. They are rediscovering a certain pulse, a certain instinct that’s part of modern life. So not only is it new to them – it makes them new.

R: Do you know what the Sex Pistols and Malcolm McLaren thought about "Lipstick Traces"?

GM: Malcolm McLaren loved the book, as he often said in interviews, and in the notes to his album “Paris”.  John Lydon often put the book down in interviews, but in one, he summed up the book's entire argument in a paragraph, and then, when the interviewer said, “But don't you think he's completely wrong?” replied, “No, he's not wrong.”

R: What do you think: have Dadaism, Situationism and the English punk continuations until the present? Or: how would the secret history of the 20th century continue?

GM: Well, you know, that’s a story for somebody else to tell. My argument is that this moment of negation is always rediscovered and it will be rediscovered in forms that at least I could never predict or wouldn’t expect. I might not even recognize it if I saw it. So to me, I’m always asked about that book: where are the similar manifestations now? I either give a facetious answer or say: „I don’t know. That’s a story for someone else to tell.” I ended the book by saying that when the next moment comes then the thrill that you hear in the best punk records – this thrill of discovery, this thrill of breakig through, this thrill of an empty battlefield where you can go in any direction and the only thing left is to build, is to create – I say when that next moment comes, the best punk-records will no longer sound as fantastic, as revolutionary, as autonomous as they do. And that moment hasn’t come for me. In other words: When I listen to those records they still sound as impossible and as unlikely and as wonderful as they ever did. But for somebody else that moment may have come and gone.

R: Have you had this moment also with newer music? That you were kind of positively shocked?

GM: Yeah, but not that often. The one person, both on record, but especially in one show I saw, where that happened, where I came face to face with my own... it’s like: whatever I knew – I knew nothing, and I had no idea of what was happening, and it was scary, and it was bottomless, and it was thrilling, and I just didn’t even know where I was. That was with PJ Harvey, a show in San Francisco I saw a number of years ago. But over and over on her records: she has that voice, fearlessness. Other people find it in Pattie Smith, say, I don’t. But I do in her. She has now been performing close to 20 years and I think it was there in the beginning and it is still there now. She’s a one-woman-movement, you know, just like the Sex Pistols said: “We’re a one-band-movement!”

R: That’s the greatest thing that can happen, that you are surprised by anything.

GM: Sure, that’s right.

R: I’m always looking for that too and about once a year, I get it.
Now I have three questions put into one: What do you think about the reunions of the Sex Pistols, The Stooges and Gang of Four?

GM: Well, most of the punk-reunions I’ve seen were really, really great – not the Sex Pistols. The DVD that just came out with the show they did just a few years ago, that was pretty good. But what I found, when I went to see The Avengers close to 20 years after they broke up, I saw the Gang of Four just a few weeks ago in Minneapolis. One of the things you find is people can play better than they used to. But they don’t play better in any virtuoso-manner. They are able just to get more punch out of the small simple things they were always doing maybe than they did before. This has happened with Wire, with the Gang of Four, The Avengers and a few other bands, that the songs bring them to life again. They are not singing at the songs – the songs still have that power of that moment when they discovered their own power to speak, their own desire to speak and the absolute thrill of having other people respond to them, hear what they’re saying. Those songs, even if they started singing at them, what has now become a reified object: the song out there, the record out there, what we did then – which I’m now alienated from, which is no longer me. They started singing at that reified object and they discovered that this object is still within them and it’s not reified at all. It’s not finished, they don’t know what the song really is about, they don’t know the limits of what it can say or how it can be played and so there’s no sense of anything being rehearsed or repeated.
One of the things I found most shocking in the same manner: If you look at the movie “Sid & Nancy” and there are sequences in that movie where the actors who are playing the Sex Pistols – play. The actors played their own instruments and they did their own singing. The implication was this stuff was so primitve, this stuff was so not-music, that anybody could do it – which of course was the point all long. And I read interviews with these various actors and they said things like: “Well, I was never into Sex Pistols, that was a long time ago.” Or: “I never thought they were any good. I don’t like these songs but you know, this is what I have to do for the role.” And yet, if you watch those sequences when the actors are playing the Sex Pistols play in the movie – God, it’s great! It’s powerful! It’s shocking! And you realize that they could not control what those songs released in them. But afterwards they’re saying: “Oh, nothing had happened.”

R: Of course, they are professionals!

GM: Yeah, yeah.

R: But do you think the reunion of the Sex Pistols destroyed some of their impact, their original power? Because that’s something a punk band usually doesn’t do.

GM: No, I mean, you know, my attitude was these people did so much to make the world a more interesting place, that I don’t care if they go on every five years for the money: they deserve it. They can’t be repaid for what they did – that’s how I feel about it. At that London-reunion-concert, John Lydon says at one point: “You lucky fuckers! This is the best band in the world!” And you could tell at that moment he means it. Nobody could do what they can do – and he loves it. And anyway, if they’d all become bankers, or arms merchants or mercenaries in Iraq or something like that – those records would still be there and they would still be things in themselves. And the creators could not hurt them.

 

*my stay in New York was made possible by the “Forschungsstipendium Universität Wien” and their money. Thank you for trusting me!