Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
A coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out. (Terry EagletonNew York Times Book Review)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 DieckmannVillage Voice Literary Supplement)Lipstick Traceshas 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 BrantleyNew York Times)In 1989, Harvard University Press publishedLipstick Traces, the second book by the American writer and critic Greil Marcus. It was a dazzling creation, mapping out an untold 'secret history' which connected the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, the Parisian événements of 1968, that legendary subversive clique the Situationist International and an Anabaptist revolt in 16th-century Germany, led by a notorious libertine named John of Leyden. Among the book's most ardent fans, it sparked real epiphanies… It stands as a singularly idiosyncratic product of a genre-cum-tradition rooted in the business of writing about musicians and the whirl of ideas that once surrounded them… [Marcus] manages some of the finest music writing ever to make it on to the page… My 20-year-old copy ofLipstick Tracesis the one book I would save from my proverbial burning house. (John HarrisThe Guardian2009-06-27)For anybody who wants to go deeper into the ontology of an idea that animates a kind of music, or is illuminated by that music, read Greil Marcus'sLipstick Traces, just reissued in an expanded edition for the book's twentieth anniversary. I often say thatTracesis the best book ever written about music, even though it's not actually about music: it is about the life of an idea. (Sasha Frere-JonesNew Yorker online2009-10-21)I first read Lipstick Traces as a penniless traveler, hiding in the bathroom of a late-night express train from Cologne to Berlin. My paranoia was considerably eased as I delved into the lives of various misfits and aesthetic revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century. As dawn broke and the train pulled into the station, I disembarked,  feeling not shell-shocked from the conductor's repeated passes to my stall, but decidedly refreshed. (J. Scott BurgesonEast Bay Express1998-01-01)The 'secret' of Marcus's history is its poetry…widely separated persons and events call out to each other and 'connect' precisely because so many of ordinary history's causal and syntactic arrangements have been positively negated. (Jerome McGannLondon Review of Books1989-01-01)Greil Marcus has developed an ability to discern an art movement, or an entire country, lurking inside a song. (New Yorker2004-01-01)Probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson. (D. D. GuttenplanLondon Review of Books2007-01-01)