Tag Archive: Greil Marcus


Illuminating the Lynchian universe

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April 13, 2026

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, PART 8.  Movies Minute By Minute  – Jeff Wood (Bloomsbury Time/Codes Series, 2025)

“Twin Peaks as The Return is the epic and serial momento mori of 20th century Americana passing through the violent taxidermy of its own hallucinatory euphoria and into the perpetually reanimating nightmare of itself, looping and glitching as violently unreal.”

The fact that the above quote is taken from the endnotes section gives a flavour of the mind-blowing quality of the text contained in the main body of this short (120 pages) but immense book. 

Jeff Wood embarks on a deep dive into the Twin Peaks universe taking the risk of drowning in the vast ocean of David Lynch’s visionary genius. The Ohio born author swims freely in the ambiguities, weirdness and complexities he discovers.

Twin Peaks’ original run in 1990 comprised two seasons and 30 episodes. Quite simply it redefined what television series could achieve in a way that modern streamers now take for granted . Season 3, promoted as a ‘A Limited Event Series” subsequently landed in 2017. Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost were given carte blanche in ‘the return’ to go with the flow, a degree of self-control that could have proved disastrous but actually resulted in 18 episodes that brilliantly expanded and enriched the narrative universe of Twin Peaks.

At its epicenter is ‘Part 8 Gotta Light? which has rightly been heralded not only as the pinnacle of the ‘show’ but on a par with the greatest of Lynch’s cinematic achievements. It’s hard to think of any of the greatest series –like, say, ‘The Wire’ or ‘Breaking Bad’ – that could be so satisfactorily encapsulated in a standalone episode lasting just 58 minutes.

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Take a walk on the weird side

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December 2, 2019

The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane (Penguin Books, 2013)
The Old Weird Albion by Justin Hopper (Penned In The Margins,2017)

Screen shot 2019-12-02 at 21.59.29If Robert MacFarlane were to say “I’m just poppng out for a walk”, chances are you wouldn’t see him again for days, weeks, even months. Not for him a gentle stroll in the park. We’re talking serious trekking here. He tells us nothing about the equipment or supplies he takes with him, but it’s plain that he sets off prepared to sleep rough and scavenge for food if necessary.

Being fully immersed in the natural world is what drives him and gives him sustenance. In ‘The Old Ways’ the writer wanders around England and Scotland and also roams abroad (Palestine,Spain and Tibet). Some of these adventures border on the reckless as he challenges himself against the elements or strikes out onto what he knows full well to be inhospitable terrain. MacFarlane regards “walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape”. In other words, it’s a serious business and not just a gentle recreational pursuit. Continue reading →

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GREIL MARCUS GATHERS MOSS

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September 27, 2015

LIKE A ROLLING STONE – BOB DYLAN AT THE CROSSROADS by Greil Marcus (Faber & Faber, 2006)

Greil Marcus is a man of many words. His verbosity is not to everyone’s taste. Many readers have, with just cause, accused him of being deliberately obtuse and willfully pretentious.

At the same time, his scholarly writings on music and cultural history are well worth the effort since they are frequently illuminating and consistently insightful.

Bob Dylan, the man and his music, is a subject he comes back to time and time again; taking fresh aims at a moving target he knows will never be fully defined.

It is the very elusiveness of Dylan that makes him so intriguing.

In this book, Marcus tells the story of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, charting the song’s origins and impact. He rightly identifies this as being more than just another rock song but, rather, a unique work of art more akin to an event. It may not have changed the world but it certainly set a new benchmark for what could be achieved in popular music. Continue reading →

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BACKTRACKING # 30 : THE SEX PISTOLS – ANARCHY ON EMI

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August 6, 2011

Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)

THE SEX PISTOLS – Anarchy In The UK b/w I Wanna Be Me (EMI, 1976)

“It happens. you feel alien. You are other. Nothing in your culture, in your experience gets near what you feel. You want to be elsewhere. If you can’t be elsewhere, you want to see everything brought down. These thoughts explode in your head. You can’t sleep, you grind your teeth. You get migraines. You shake.
Then you walk into a room. You see or hear four people making a noise, playing the limits of electricity and the room’s ambient space: like a switch tripping, your life is changed forever. Out of nowhere, the terrain is cleared and the possibilities stretch before you.
This will happen only once, with that certainty”.

These lines are part of the sleeve notes by Jon Savage to Lipstick Traces, a compilation CD designed to be played alongside the book of the same name by Greil Marcus.

The four people in the room making the racket almost certain refers to The Sex Pistols. No other band, not even The Clash, had that effect

Without the single Anarchy In The UK, Marcus’ secret history of the 20th century would not have been written.

Without this record, and Johnny Rotten in particular, countless bands would have remained unformed and postwar popular culture might have continued on a downward spiral.

I might still be listening to albums like Tales From Topographic Oceans or Brain Salad Surgery.

It is hard to imagine, and as the years pass, it gets harder and harder to convince other people what an impact this record had.

Marcus notes Rotten’s demonic laugh and insolent way he not so much sang as hurled the lines into the world and writes of “a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible”. Continue reading →

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RETROMANIA : THE FUTURE IS NOT WHAT IT WAS

Filed under: Books, Music — 1 Comment
August 2, 2011

Retromania (Pop Culture’s Addiction To Its Own Past) by Simon Reynolds  is a brilliant and perceptive study which the author describes as “an investigation – not just of the hows and whys of retro as a culture and an industry but also of the larger issues to do with living in, living off and living with the past”.

While he writes about wider cultural trends, he is at his most passionate (and knowledgeable) when writing about music. This book confirms him as the most perceptive and articulate rock critic since Greil Marcus.

At one point he muses: “Maybe we need to forget. Maybe forgetting is as essential for a culture as it is existentially and emotionally necessary for individuals” but in his heart of hearts he knows full well that this never likely to happen.

The impulse to revisit high points in your life is hard to resist and the means to do so have never been easier. If you get nostalgic for a kids TV show theme, for instance, you can find it after a few minutes surfing. Not only that, but you can often find complete episodes of shows you had all but forgotten about.

The fact that we have such resources at our disposal online largely accounts for why our obsession with the immediate past has never been greater.

Added to this is a general insecurity about the present and uncertainties/fears about what the future might hold. As Reynolds writes: “in a destabilised world, ideas of durable tradition and folk memory start to appeal as a counterweight and a drag in the face of capitalism’s reckless and wrecking radicalism”.

Reynolds is a self-confessed record-geek and book-nerd (particularly Sci-Fi). He was born in 1963 and his adolescence coincided with the advent of Post-Punk. Later, he became a huge fan of the Rave Scene. He has covered these topics extensively in his previous books.

Simon Reynolds

Retromania is a more personal and wide-ranging book peppered with autobiographical asides about growing up, moving to America (he now lives in LA) and becoming a Dad. It documents his insatiable hunger for new cultural experience, something that  means that the book is not just the work of someone harking back to a golden age.

He certainly doesn’t look down on ‘retromaniacs’ and even admits to being one himself. There is, for example, a nostalgia for his time as an avid record collector back when music was a more tangible ‘thing’ than it is now. These days, particularly for the ‘connected’ generation, music is often treated more as information than something to have and hold.

His current favourite music mostly falls into the category of Hypnagogic Pop and Hauntology (e.g. Ariel Pink, Ghost Box, Flying Lotus, Gonjasufi) but while he praises these sounds he recognises that none of it feels truly new.

Past decades threw up many new genres : beat-pop, psychedelia, ska, folk-rock in the 60s; glam, heavy metal, punk, funk and reggae in the 70s; synth-pop, Goth, house music in the 80s; rave and grunge in the 90s. The noughties and beyond is defined more by rapid changes in technology and social networking than any true musical innovation.

Reynolds has not lost the knack of inventing smart terms to summarise trends. This, after all, is the man credited with coining the genre term ‘Post-Rock’. In Retromania he talks of  “ecstatic regression” offered by You Tube.  Gang Gang Dance’s latest album Glass Jar opens with the spoken words : “I can hear everything – it’s everything time” ; with You Tube (and elsewhere), its easy to believe that we can hear AND see everything.

An even better label is “hyper-stasis” which sums up what he feels is the fundamental problem of retro-ism.  The massive and seemingly limitless vaults of information being available at the click of the mouse means that the vibrant forward-looking nature of culture has stagnated. This leads to what Cyberpunk author William Gibson calls “future fatigue” with the consequence that there seems to be a general loss of cultural appetite. The state we’re in is summed up succinctly in the closing chapter:

“In the analogue era, everyday life moved slowly (you had to wait for news, and for new releases) but the culture as a whole felt like it was surging forward. In the digital present, everyday life consists of hyper-acceleration and near-instantaneity (downloading, web pages constantly being refreshed, the impatient skimming of text on screens), but on the macro-cultural level things feel static and stalled. We have the paradoxical combination of speed and standstill”.

Retromania is a timely and important book which is a ‘must-read’ for culture vultures past, present and, maybe, future.

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