Greil Marcus

Jan 14, 2025 | greilmarcus.substack.com | Greil Marcus

Over the past months I found myself returning to the slow, hazy tunes on a pre-release copy of Nina Nastasia's Run to Ruin (Touch and Go). I'd get lost in its oddness: the way it felt as if it came less from anywhere in Nastasia's Hollywood hometown or current life in New York than from some drugged, after-hours Central European café in the '30s—the way the album seemed to emanate less from anything happening in the world of pop music than from a fantasy that the world of pop music didn't exist.

Jan 13, 2025 | greilmarcus.substack.com | Greil Marcus

What I found most compelling in James Mangold’s movie about Bob Dylan’s first years in New York, from his arrival in the folk world in Greenwich Village in 1961 (“a reality of a more brilliant dimension,” as he described it in his Chronicles in 2004) to his escape into rock ’n’ roll on the stage of the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 (“I didn’t know what was going to happen, but they certainly booed, I’ll tell you that,” Dylan said at a San Francisco press conference months later), is that (1)...

Jan 8, 2025 | greilmarcus.substack.com | Greil Marcus

I’m sure you will share your thoughts on the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. I admired how the actors could sing and play so much like their famous real-life characters, but the movie itself falls short for me as most of these musical biopics tend to do. Perhaps it would have made a better mini-series?

Jan 7, 2025 | greilmarcus.substack.com | Greil Marcus

Lora Logic isn't an obvious collect-and-reissue candidate. As part of the experimental post-punk London scene from 1978 to 1982, her one-woman, four-man combo, Essential Logic, never had the profile of Gang of Four, the Raincoats, or the Mekons. She never made the cover of NME. And yet in 1977, as the 16-year-old saxophonist in Poly Styrene's X-Ray Spex, Lora Logic had been where Gang of Four and their like had not: on punk's first stages.

Jan 2, 2025 | greilmarcus.substack.com | Greil Marcus

In You Are Free (Matador), as in most of the music that travels under the name of Cat Power, you can feel the world come to a complete stop. It might be the room you're sitting in, the neighborhood outside, the country surrounding any place you might find yourself, or anywhere the singer, 31-year-old Georgia native Chan Marshall, might be. You're listening to someone who has come to terms with dead ends.