The climax of What Nails It, the music critic Greil Marcus’s new book, is a letdown. As Marcus recounts it, on his last day of high school, he went to the movie theater to see The Pirates of Blood River, which promised thrills but turned out to be a piece of forgettable dreck. “The Park Theatre in Menlo Park was jammed with students,” Marcus writes,
most of them graduating and a lot of them drunk. The air was thick with the tension oozing out of a thousand bodies; up on screen, evil pirates, noble Huguenots, and a lot of piranha gave chase to a progressively incomprehensible storyline. The movie was not delivering: four years of high school for a reward like this?
What seems like a trivial teenage experience turns out to be an object lesson not in the disappointments of art but in the power of criticism. “Suddenly, with bullets shooting off in all directions and nobody caring,” Marcus tells us, “a tall kid stood up in one of the front rows, turned to face the crowd,” and shouted: “I NOMINATE THIS MOVIE SHIT-FUCK OF THE YEAR, 1962!”
We don’t learn how the rest of the audience reacted — just that “the release everyone had come seeking was granted.” This over-the-top performance of dissatisfaction was one of the young Marcus’s earliest encounters with criticism. And not just criticism as scorekeeping — as measurement of a work’s worthiness of a consumer’s time — but as an instrument for breaching an artwork’s artificial protective bubble and returning it to the world at large, taking the necessary risk of upstaging it in doing so. Criticism, that is, as an event in and of itself.
That is the kind of criticism Marcus has spent his career producing. Though he was an early presence at Rolling Stone and has taught at Berkeley and Harvard, his main business is not music journalism or music scholarship but music writing. His aspirations have always been literary. He has written ambitious books that get at topics from Bob Dylan to presidential politics to The Great Gatsby from every angle at once, on every scale: historical, aesthetic, memoiristic, mythological. One of his books, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century — which discovers connections between late-70s British punk, the interwar Dada movement, and the Dutch Anabaptists of the 16th century — has even been adapted for the stage.
What Nails It is something of a craft book. An expanded version of a lecture Marcus gave at Yale, it combines autobiographical capsules with some loose reflections on how good culture writing works. According to What Nails It, it often works by surprising its own author: “I write,” Marcus tells us, “to discover what I want to say and how to say it.” You could understand this as an endorsement of something like automatic writing, a skim off the top of the unconscious: “That feeling of no, I didn’t think that, I didn’t write that, where did that come from?” But it is also the product of a forceful conviction that style produces knowledge.
You can almost always tell when a writer is drawing on style for knowledge. The writing often has a kicking-out-over-open-air quality that can be exhilarating or tiresome, or a bit of both. Part of the struggle of the earliest rock criticism in the 1960s and 1970s was finding a style both adequate to the music itself and persuasive to a broad swath of readers outside the vanguard of American youth culture. Critics rose to the challenge by channeling voices. For Lester Bangs, ventriloquism was a way to infuse rock criticism with a sense of historical consciousness — as in his early essay “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung,” where a fictional conversation with a then-unthinkable character, a rock-and-roll grandpa, tracks the whole trajectory of rock music from naïve garage bashing to ponderous arena bloat. Bangs’s breakneck, ranting style also allowed him to perform contortive feats of taste, starting out disdainful of 1970s schlock-rockers like Black Oak Arkansas but seeming to convince himself over the course of a review that in some perverse way they were actually great. Ellen Willis, the other great rock-critic stylist of those years, was also a great documenter of her own challenged and changed stances, but she never let her sentences get away from her: They were always in service of a reasoned argument, often a political one.
“I write,” Marcus tells us, “to discover what I want to say and how to say it.”
Marcus let style carry him somewhere different. For a while in the late 1960s, he was writing and editing album reviews for Rolling Stone and Creem while working toward a graduate degree in American Studies at Berkeley. A few years later, despairing at his lack of patience as a teacher, he dropped out to write full time. But even outside the academy, he still felt its rhythms of thought. There had to be a way, he started to think, to use his academic training to tell a big new story about rock and roll, situating it in the broader ambit of American culture, American myth.
With Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music, his first book, Marcus made a name for himself writing about rock and roll in a voice much closer to that of a belletristic English professor than of the average teenage fan. The book’s opening pages invoke the authority of the literary critic Leslie Fiedler; soon after, an account of a forgotten singer is interrupted by an excursus on Moby-Dick. Marcus’s subjects — from Sly Stone and the Band to Delta bluesman Robert Johnson — are wrenched from the arena of mass entertainment and thrust into the damp open air of archetype and myth. Stone becomes an avatar of the legendary murderer Stagger Lee; Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson are transposed into rugged settler woodsmen bushwhacking through the frontier. Marcus clearly admires these artists’ music, but evaluation takes a back seat to contextualizing and mythologizing.
Above all, Mystery Train is an adventure in style. In What Nails It Marcus recounts how, in an effort to imagine the life of Stagger Lee — a character who, while suggested by a real person living in St. Louis in the late 19th century, is mostly a creature of folk songs — he “started with a declarative sentence. After that, some uncanny cadence took over the words. As if in a trance, the words were making their own rhythm.” These are the words that came out:
Stagger Lee is a free man, because he takes chances and scoffs at the consequences. Others gather to fawn over him, until he shatters in a grimy celebration of needles, juice, and noise. Finally he is alone in a slow bacchanal, where his buddies, in a parody of friendship, devote themselves to a study of the precise moment of betrayal.
As with much trance-writing, there is more rhythm than immediate sense in this passage. There is a story here, but it is so compressed and abstracted that it would only make sense if you already knew it. Mystery Train can be a frustrating book because it feels like it was written entirely in this kind of private trance-language, less an act of public critical speech than Marcus’s attempt to make sense of the crush and blur of rock and roll to himself. Still, the gnomic density of Marcus’s prose is alluring. It makes you want to tunnel further in and figure out what, exactly, is going on. It is also exciting as a document in the history of criticism: Where the prose departs from strict sense, you can feel Marcus out on a cliff, trying to bring his academic training to bear on something still too new and culturally denigrated to attract many interpreters within the academy.
There had to be a way, Marcus thought, to use his academic training to tell a big new story about rock and roll, situating it in the broader ambit of American culture, American myth.
When Marcus dropped out of grad school to write rock criticism in the 70s, he must have seemed like an apostate to his professors. Today, though, academic and journalistic criticism are harder to separate. At mainstream culture magazines like The New Yorker and The New Republic in recent years, half the bylines in the back of the book seem to be Ph.D.s, or working toward one. Institutions have taken notice. Humanities departments now regularly offer workshops on public-facing writing for their graduate students. The old advice to keep such writing off one’s academic CV — at least until one has secured tenure — has reversed polarity. Today’s Ph.D. candidates feel pressured to crank out “public scholarship,” alongside peer-reviewed articles, to make themselves more competitive on the academic job market. The public voice that Marcus figured out as he went is becoming an all but mandatory requirement of graduate education in the humanities.
And yet, in most of its contemporary iterations, the institutional idea of “public scholarship” could not be more different from the vision of criticism Marcus lays out in What Nails It. A recent academic self-help volume captures this attitude succinctly: “What matters about writing for mainstream publications is the ability to translate work for a nonspecialist audience in a way that is compelling.” Administrative authorities and dispensers of career advice sound this note over and over: Writing for a general audience is at bottom an act of translation where the expert makes specialized knowledge intelligible to the masses. The scholar already has the knowledge; the writing is just a tool for packaging and transmitting it. Writing produced under this framework may be socially useful, as with policy briefs or pieces that contextualize current events. But it is not likely to prompt the question Marcus asks about his mentor, the great film critic Pauline Kael: “What would it feel like to write like that — to care that much?”
Maybe this is the key to understanding the difference between public scholarship and criticism. Public scholarship claims authority through credentials: a gesture which the dreaded words “Historian here!” — portents of incoming truth bombs — reduce to its barest form. Criticism, by contrast, claims authority through style. The unnamed teenager who interrupted The Pirates of Blood River was just some kid, and yet through his bombastic performance, he claimed the right to pronounce judgment and “nominate” the movie for its ignominious prize. Stylish criticism, like good art, gives sensible form to feelings we didn’t think or realize we had. Or, as Marcus says of an overwhelming encounter with Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin, which temporarily short-circuited his belief that popular culture contains expressions of the human condition equally significant to those in classical high culture: “What art does, maybe what it does most completely, is to tell us, make us feel, that what we think we know we don’t.” Criticism gives us concepts for understanding these alien feelings, their sources, their consequences.
Public scholarship claims authority through credentials. Criticism, by contrast, claims authority through style.
Whether he knows it or not, Marcus’s celebration of the power of the critic has a valedictory quality. It is well-known that criticism today, both in and out of the academy, is a hollowed-out profession: a cobwebby smattering of gigs where a vocation should be. For most of us, no amount of “nailing it” will lead to a career as long and storied as Marcus’s, let alone pay the bills.
And yet paradoxically, as criticism is further deskilled and deprofessionalized, the performance of stylistic charisma becomes more important than ever. In the world of music criticism, lean times have often produced explosions of stylish writing, from the riot grrrl zines of the 90s to the scene blogs and shaggy Bangsian Pitchfork reviews of the post-dot-com-crash 2000s to the more recent profusion of critical newsletters. (Marcus and many of his peers, including Robert Christgau, now publish regularly on Substack.) Ryan Ruby has recently argued that literary criticism is experiencing a similar period of flourishing amid economic scarcity. Academics have played a significant role in this boom. A fair share of this newer criticism, especially the work published in little magazines, is stylistically adventurous, using prose in the way Marcus models: as a device for thinking, for giving a determinate conceptual form to faint and diffuse sensations. We might as well write this way; there is not much to lose.
We don’t always nail it. Sometimes the writing overstretches, sometimes it manhandles its objects or produces a phantom version of them virtually unrecognizable to anyone who doesn’t have our specific brain. These are necessary risks. At his best, Marcus gives us coordinates for a kind of writing that does not know it all in advance, that refuses the flatness of the research summary and the bland superiority of the generic-midcentury-New York Review of Books-contributor voice many of us find ourselves falling into, perhaps betraying our wish to turn back the clock to a time when critics could claim authority by fiat and shore it up with a pose of lordly disdain. “It comes down,” as he writes, “to the falsity of knowing, as a critic… what’s best for people, to know that some people are of the best and some are worthless, the urge to separate the good from the bad and praise oneself, to decide what books people ought to read, what songs people ought to be moved by, what art they ought to make.” As scholars, we know plenty of things — but not those. We need to write to figure them out.
