Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

by Greil Marcus

Book Overview

This is a secret history of modern times, told by way of what conventional history tries to exclude. Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself. Hip, metaphorical and allusive...--Gail Caldwell, Boston Sunday Globe. Full-color illustrations and halftones.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674535812
• ISBN13: 9780674535817
• Release Date: September 1990
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 508 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

An intro to what you SHOULD know

Trying to read some of these other customer reviews forced me into quickly typing this. BE WARNED that Lipstick Traces is not some sub-High School history of Punk Rock just because Mr. Rotten is on the front cover! This is probably one of my favorite all-time books since it opened my eyes to a (secret) history of things that really MUST become common knowledge to all who consider themselves somewhat intelligent & knowledgeable and/or leaning towards what used to be referred to as the "counter-culture" (now "alternative" or "hipster" or any other tag for those that gag on what spectacular society spoon feeds them with a shovel). Greil Marcus takes the Sex Pistols 1st 45 "Anarchy in the UK" as the starting point & free-association hopscotches across centuries of the hidden & forgotten for what informed the raw scream of that first listen. And though it may seem a tough go on your first dig into its pages (especially in today's A.D.D. world), "Lipstick Traces" rewards you around each corner since you never know where the author will take you next. Starting with the first UK Punks back to the Situationists who took equal inspiration from the Dadaists of the Cabaret Voltaire AND the heretics of the European Middle Ages, most notably the Movement of the Free Spirit - this is often a heavy read that never fails to F#@k with your preconceptions, leaving you sometimes thinking that everything you already know is WRONG! Very few books I've read left me with a similar effect and after rereading it several times (there is so much here that a quick run through just doesn't do it - be forewarned), I've dug deeper into the books of Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle & (especially) Raoul Vaneigem The Revolution of Everyday Life as well as Dada, the Free Spirit The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Galaxy Books), etc, etc and I'm still digging. This book may change you too if you are the right person who has a deep curiousity for the underside of what stands against "culture"..."alternative" & otherwise! If youth today still reads books, they must read this. As I remember that famous scene in "The Matrix": which pill will YOU take?

Brilliant, engaging take on a much-covered subject

Ludicrously dismissed by punks and academics alike (revealing something that links them: a profound lack of imagination), Lipstick Traces is the most audacious and brilliant book ever written about popular music, one that barely mentions its purported subject (punk rock). In his absurd attack on Marcus, Richard Meltzer quotes some critic's dismissal of LT as a failed version of his (Meltzer's) own The Aesthetics of Rock; in truth, that book itself is more like a failed version of itself, in which brilliant ideas are let down by virtually unreadable prose. What Marcus does is easy to miss at first, but it becomes obvious over the course of the book: he's not just trying to show us the Guy Debord in Johnny Rotten, but the Johnny Rotten in Guy Debord. And so a book devoted almost entirely to obscure artists, barely given a footnote in any "real" history of art or rock or whatever (the Pistols and the Clash aside, none of the punk bands Marcus admires - the Buzzcocks, the Slits, X-Ray Spex, Essential Logic, the Adverts, even Public Image Ltd. - will ever get much time on VH1) becomes unbelievably exciting and visceral. Marcus doesn't bother writing much about the Sex Pistols themselves, though his descriptions of their records are almost more amazing than the records themselves. The first half of the book is a rambling screed, taking in subjects as unlikely as Adorno and Michael Jackson's Victory Tour. Marcus doesn't dumb down anything he takes on, and he shuttles back and forth between seemingly unrelated topics so often that some readers may be frustrated. Persevere, and you'll find that Marcus's writing, imposing at first, is ultimately vibrant, witty and illuminating. The second half is a much more straightforward account of the "heroes" of Marcus's vision - Tristan Tzara, Michel Mourre, Debord - though he still has room for a lovely meditation on the Orioles' 1948 "It's Too Soon to Know," which he considers the first rock'n'roll record. What's fascinating about this section is that Marcus either digs up information on people you'd never hear of otherwise (Mourre, a deadbeat sometime-surrealist who made headlines around the world by marching into Notre Dame Church dressed as a monk to proclaim the death of God, may be the most intriguing character here) or writes about them in an engaging manner that you wouldn't find in a more traditionally scholarly book. Finally, in the epilogue, Marcus brings it all home, revealing for the first time why he decided to write a book about revolutions that never happened. There is little historical connection between any of these figures, but that's the point - all these would-be revolutionaries really shared was a certain tone, and Marcus takes on something of that tone himself. It's the voice of Charlie Chaplin's tramp at the end of "The Great Dictator": someone willing, even for a moment, to address the entire world, to refuse to censor oneself, and to accept whatever consequences may follow.

can I make a horrible confession?

Sigh. Okay, okay... I never actually finished reading this one... but I had a lot of fun trying! Pop culture critic Marcus weaves the history of the Sex Pistols -- and their disasterous final tour to America -- in with sideways social analyses and neo-surrealist "Situationism". A heady, stream-of-consciousness, Lester Bangs-ian nouveaux rock book that'll give you plenty to think about. You'll get dizzy being pointed in so many directions at once. A classic.

A tremendous catalyst for intellectual growth

LIPSTICK TRACES is a tremendous brain expander. We talk sometimes of "expanding one's consciousness," and of no book is that more appropriate than this one. Marcus is not merely brilliant in what he writes; he is brilliant in the artists and writers and works of art he points you towards. You will find yourself scurrying off to buy copies of THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, bootleg CDs of the Sex Pistols, and hard-to-find copies of movies like 20 MILLION YEARS TO EARTH, and will find yourself enriched by the process.But the main reason to get this book is that it is a lot of fun. Maybe I am weird, but I had none of the sense that some of the other readers had: that it is hard, that it bogs down, that it is a slow read. Maybe its all the Wittgenstein, Hegel, and Kierkegaard I read in grad school, but I found this book to be an absolute page turner. I give it my highest recommendation.

Add this to that list of monotheistic texts...

I'm not kidding. Well, maybe it would be better placed in a collection of gnomic tracts... the point is that this book, mad, spectacular artifact that it is, has done more for my previously-thought-lost senses of glee and invention than any number of wholly Marxist offerings. It's a tilt-a-whirl, a labor of love that turns into a stalking then turns into a far more colorful prom than ever is dreamed of in the philosophies of the otherwise educated. Yes, I'm ranting, and you will too. Anabaptists were never this much fun back in high school...