Greil Marcus - Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

I loved that book. It was a crazy, wild, at times almost inarticulate attempt to do something nobody else had done before.

Malcolm McLaren, Select, 1995

John Lydon: Its so mad, its so daft, its so off the wallits thoroughly enjoyable...

Interviewer: But you dont think hes completely wrong?

John Lydon: No, hes not wrong.

Tension, 1991

We are living in hell, and this book makes me proud to be alive in hellto be a good citizen of hell.

Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre, KRCW, Los Angeles, 1989

I first read Lipstick Traces as a penniless traveler, hiding in the bathroom of a late-night express train from Cologne to Berlin. My paranoia was considerably eased as I delved into the lives of various misfits and aesthetic revolutionaries throughout the twentieth century. As dawn broke and the train pulled into the station, I disembarked, feeling not shell-shocked from the conductors repeated passes to my stall, but decidedly refreshed.

J. Scott Burgeson, East Bay Express, 1998

C. C. Club/Address 2600 S Lyndale Ave., Minneapolis, 55408Here come the regulars indeedthe C. C. Club is the Minneapolis landmark that inspired the famous Replacements song, which should make it a must-see on any rock fans itinerary. Once youve perused the famously interesting jukebox, and played the famously good pinball selection, settle into a booth for some not at all famous but still very satisfying grill grub. The BLT comes stuffed with fat planks of good bacon, the patty melts have the gloss of a grill well used for years and years. Not a place to bring your niece or boss, but when you want to be alone with your hangover, your racing form, or your copy of Lipstick Traces, theres none better.

Dish Dining Guide, City Pages, 2008

The secret of Marcuss history is its poetry... widely separated persons and events call out to each other and connect precisely because so many of ordinary historys causal and syntactic arrangements have been positively negated.

Jerome McGann, London Review of Books, 1989

Lipstick Traces has the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status.

Ben Brantley, New York Times, 2001

Greil Marcus has developed an ability to discern an art movement, or an entire country, lurking inside a song.

New Yorker, 2004

Probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson.

D. D. Guttenplan, London Review of Books, 2007

LIPSTICK TRACES

LIPSTICK TRACES

A SECRET HISTORY
of the TWENTIETH CENTURY

GREIL MARCUS

THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Copyright 1989 by Greil Marcus

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1990

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Pace Trust, David Orr, Administrator.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marcus, Greil.

Lipstick traces: a secret history of the twentieth century / Greil Marcus,

p. cm.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-674-03480-8 (paper)

1. Popular cultureHistory20th century. 2. Avant-garde (Aesthetics). 3. Art and societyHistory20th century. 4. Sex Pistols (Musical group). 5. Punk rock musicHistory and criticism. I. Title

CB428.M356 1989

Designed by Heather Shaff Beaver

To John Rockwell, who got me started.

To the Firesign Theatre and Monty Pythons Flying Circus, who got me through it.

Since this book was first published twenty years ago, a number of the actors and voices who appear in its pages have died. It is humbling to mark their passage: the political critic and patriot Walter Karp, 19341989; the photographer Ed van der Elsken, 19251990; the political philosopher Henri Lefebvre, 19011991; the filmmaker and founding member of the Lettrist International and of the Situationist International Guy Debord, 19301994; the sound poet, collagist, and founding member of the Lettrist International Gil Wolman, 19291995; the orator and teacher Mario Savio, 19421996; the visionary and Lettrist International member Ivan Chtcheglov, 19331998; the singer and founding member of the Clash Joe Strummer, 19522002; the Lettrist International member Jean-Michel Mension, 19342006; the founder of lettrism Isidore Isou, 19252007; the historian Norman Cohn, 19152007; the editor and member of the Situationist International Christopher Gray, 19422009; and the singer Michael Jackson, 19582009.

Over the same period of time, an enormous amount of material drawn on for this bookobscure, fugitive, untranslated, or long-unavailable books, journals, flyers, films, paintings, collages, and sound recordings, from the nineteen-teens onhas found its way into the light, and Ive tried to keep pace in the section now called Works Cited and Sighted. Except for the correction of errors, the main text of the book remains as it was.

From inside a London tea room, two well-dressed women look with mild disdain at a figure in the rain outside. Its that shabby old man with the tin whistle! says one. A battered fedora pulled down over his eyes, the man is trying to make himself heard: I yam a antichrist! It is, reads the caption to this number of Ray Lowrys comic-strip chronicle of the adventures of has-been, would-be pop savior Monty Smith, seventeen long years since Monty was spotted in the gutter outside Malcolm MacGregors Sex n Drugs shop...

Years long enough: but as I write, Johnny Rottens first moments in Anarchy in the U.K.a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets

I AM AN ANTICHRIST

remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record todaylistening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sangmy back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat. When you listen to the Sex Pistols, to Anarchy in the U.K. and Bodies and tracks like that, Pete Townshend of the Who once said, what immediately strikes you is that this is actually happening. This is a bloke, with a brain on his shoulders, who is actually saying something he sincerely believes is happening in the world, saying it with real venom, and real passion. It touches you, and it scares youit makes you feel uncomfortable. Its like somebody saying, The Germans are coming! And theres no way were gonna stop em!

It is just a pop song, a would-be, has-been hit record, a cheap commodity, and Johnny Rotten is nobody, an anonymous delinquent whose greatest achievement, before that day in 1975 when he was spotted in Malcolm McLarens Sex boutique on Kings Road in London, had been to occasionally irritate those he passed on the street. It is a jokeand yet the voice that carries it remains something new in rock n roll, which is to say something new in postwar popular culture: a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible.

It remains new because rock n roll has not caught up with it. Nothing like it had been heard in rock n roll before, and nothing like it has been heard sincethough, for a time, once heard, that voice seemed available to anyone with the nerve to use it. For a time, as if by magicthe pop magic in which the connection of certain social facts with certain sounds creates irresistible symbols of the transformation of social realitythat voice worked as a new kind of free speech. In countless new throats it said countless new things. You couldnt turn on the radio without being surprised; you could hardly turn around.