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Monday, September 10, 2007
IF THE BRAKEMAN TURNS MY WAY
Bright Eyes
Cassadaga
Saddle Creek : 2007
[Buy it]
THIS AMERICAN LIFE
Marnie Stern
In Advance of the Broken Arm
KRC : 2007
[Buy it]
THE FUTURE CRUMBLES
The Nein
Luxury
Sonic Unyon : 2007
[Buy it]
Some Scattered Notes on The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, by Greil Marcus, Taken This Morning After Reading the First Fifty Pages While Drinking Lots of Coffee
Greil Marcus's latest attempt to reconcile America's modern and historical idols into an unbroken continuum of American-ness is a high-stakes game of cultural billiards, each shot followed by a smooth perspectival shift through each chaotic carom. With every shot Marcus nearly clears the table, then picks up the game with the ball that glanced off of the pocket, carrying it forward in unpredictable directions.
He writes like Didion, if less laser-precise and more flailing, less the gourmand than the voracious buffet-sacker, more interested in American gravitas than American kitsch. He draws eagled-eyed lines between pop cultural motifs and the grander stuff of historical memory, for instance comparing famous orations by Lincoln and King to songs by Sleater-Kinney and Nirvana: "The straight, well-built verse, the chorus in flames, the song blowing up in your face."
Always this passion and intensity for Marcus, tempered by a God's-eye view of our teeming continent and its faintly glowing, cross-temporal web of ley lines. Beyond the book's potent amalgamation of superficially unrelated cultural material, it's a lesson in seeing. Nothing slides into cliche for Marcus. Constructs metaphorically outsized and nostalgically flattened, from the television drama 24 to King's "I Have a Dream" speech, de-ossify in his gaze, like Medusa in reverse, and fill up with nuance, feeling, and life.
Like Christgau, Marcus has been known to lament the passing of pop monoculture. It's easy for younger dudes like me to chalk this up to fuddy-duddy-ism, an obstinate denial of an evident truth: that just as technological capabilities and corporate practices gave us the monoculture, so have new technologies and the new corporate strategies they mandate given us, ineluctably, our fragmented polyculture. But this book hints at a deeper impetus for Marcus's elegiac stance than nostalgia. The monoculture is a collection of individuals singing its story to itself, in threnody, reaffirming its ideals. From this monoculture, prophetic voices, from Lincoln to King to Kurt Cobain, periodically rise to remind the collective body of the gap between the promises on which it was founded and the realities by which it operates, and to remind it of the dangers of betraying a convenant, ostensibly made with God, that America actually made with itself. As the popular discourse splinters and compartmentalizes, the prophetic voice, speaking to America's future by speaking about its past, embodying the collective will, is diffused. And maybe this will turn out to be his point - like I said, I'm just on page fifty. I'm excited to find out.
posted by Brian
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