The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs Quotes

“D. H. Lawrence’s “Never trust the teller. Trust the tale” is always right.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“And because soul music is the limitless affirmation of the individual despite his or her past sins and all obstacles in his or her way,”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“critic Robert Ray once said, “What’s interesting about rock & roll is that the truly radical aspect occurs at the level of sound. ‘Tutti Frutti’ is far more radical than Lennon’s ‘Woman Is the Nigger of the World,’ and the sound of Bob Dylan’s voice changed more people’s ideas about the world than his political message did.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Art doesn’t explain itself.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“One thing that old blues records teach you, is that even people with very limited skills can play very personal, distinctive, and appealing music that has nothing to do with the extent of their technique. It was their artistry. It was their feeling.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Someone was going to want to say, I’m fucked.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Punk was just a single, venomous one-syllable, two-syllable phrase of anger—which was necessary to reignite rock & roll. But sooner or later, someone was going to want to say more than fuck you.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep-Mountain High,” his most ambitious record, with the biggest, most implacable sound and an arrangement that made it feel as if the record lasted a lifetime, not three and a half minutes (“That,” the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia said, “sounds like God hit the world and the world hit back”), failed to come anywhere near the radio; Spector closed his studio and began lecturing at colleges.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“The official, standard history of rock 'n' roll is true, but it's not the whole truth. It's not the truth at all. It's a constructed story that has been disseminated so comprehensively that people believe it, but it's not true to their experience, and it may even deform or suppress their experience.”
― Greil Marcus, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“It was the only free country left in the world," he once said, not talking about America but about rock'n'roll in America, or anywhere else. "No boundaries, no passports. There wasn't even a government.”
― Greil Marcus, The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Curlicuing around the note allows a singer to mimic the sense of event in soul music, the sense that something is happening which has not happened before and cannot be repeated, by mimicking the apprehension of soul, those moments when singers dramatize their struggle to bring out of themselves what lies buried in them, inaccessible, until this moment, even to themselves.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“For thirty years you couldn’t possibly make it unless you were white, sleek, nicely spoken, and phony to your toenails—suddenly now you could be black, purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased, or almost anything on earth, and you could still clean up.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“It goes back to gospel, both the technique and the soul. As the singer must convince you that as he or she sings, he or she has, by a commitment God can recognize, called down a visitation,”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Some forms of music spark the freedom of singers to say, in words or how words are sung, in pace, hesitation, timbre, shouts, or silences, what they most deeply and desperately want to say; other forms take it away.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“There is always a social explanation for what we see in art,” Albert Camus said in 1947. “Only it doesn’t explain anything important.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“Yet “nothing” is not quite Faulkner’s last word, only the next to the last. In the end, the negativist is no nihilist, for he affirms the void.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“The only thing that rock & roll did not get from country and blues was a sense of consequences,” the writer Bill Flanagan said to Neil Young in 1986.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“It was the invention in the music that was so striking —the will to create what had never been heard before, through vocal tricks, rhythmic shifts, pieces of sound that didn’t logically follow one from the other, that didn’t make musical or even emotional sense when looked at as pieces, but as a whole spoke a new language.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“But it is the moment when something appears as if out of nowhere, when a work of art carries within itself the thrill of invention, of discovery, that is worth listening for. It’s that moment when a song or a performance is its own manifesto, issuing its own demands on life in its own, new language—which, though the charge of novelty is its essence, is immediately grasped by any number of people who will swear they never heard anything like it before—that speaks. In rock ’n’ roll, this is a moment that, in historical time, is repeated again and again, until, as culture, it defines the art itself.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“What it is, coming out of and entering into all of those people in a swirl of transubstantiation, is soul music, here taking a shape so stark that it makes the style, in the deepest sense of the word, turn around the record as if that seven-inch disc were the sun, with the first, struggling attempts in the 1950s to discover the music—Ray Charles’s “What Would I Do Without You,” the Chantels’ “If You Try,” the Five Keys’ “Dream On”—and the deep-soul records of the mid-’60s that can seem to take the style, now a form, as far as it could go—Irma Thomas’s “Wish Someone Would Care,” Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” Lonnie Mack’s “Why,” most of all Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna come”—the planets that circle it. And because soul music is the limitless affirmation of the individual despite his or her past sins and all obstacles in his or her way, an affirmation that remains even in the moment before suicide, as it can seem to be in “Wish Someone Would Care” and “Why,” each of these records can, in the moment in which you hear them, be the sun, and all the rest, “This Magic Moment” spinning with them, again mere planets, maybe even, someday, should they ever fade, and their lies speak more loudly than whatever truths they tell, written out of the book and taken down from the sky, like Pluto—except that once a song has gone into the ether, it never disappears.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs

“What’s so striking in Johnson’s originals is the way, in the choruses, Johnson drops the bottom out of the tunes, suddenly replacing all that was optimistic and energetic—the fabulous Chicago grin of “I’m booked, and I gotta go!”—with fatigue and doubt. No matter how carefully fashioned, the music is never completely stable.”
― Greil Marcus, History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs