Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. “I am an antichrist!” shouted singer Johnny Rotten—where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise. Gardner, P., Bertino, M. F., Weimer, R. (2010). Differentiation between lip cosmetics using Raman spectroscopy. JASTEE, 6(42), pp. 42-57. As in other moments on the same stage on the same night, as in so many moments on the singles the Sex Pistols put out over the previous year, he seemed not to know what he was saying. He seemed not to be himself, whoever that was, once more he was less singing a song than being sung by it." I believe recent times reflect that pattern in an oddly popular manner. Its been assimilated somehow via capitalism or something commercial. Now it seems as though the people who in past times might have been subversive, critical, are now our brand name hipsters whose goals includes the habits of an Imelda Marcos. Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. "I am an antichrist!" shouted singer Johnny Rotten--where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.

When I first read this I was so excited someone had managed to reasonably accumulate so much of this particular variety of comparative history. I recall being impressed by ideas moving through history, time and again there being such movements toward liberty of self expression.

Not surprisingly, much of the spirit and intellectual heft of such moments, to the degree anything of that kind adheres to them, emerges from the French avant garde. This book intrigued me to read ‘The Society of Spectacle’ by one of the key predecessors to the punk movement, Guy Dubord, which looks at how consumer capitalism gets intertwined with culture even when it appears not to. The device used to link these diverse individuals and movements is the metaphor of the medium; Johnny Rotten is a passive creator whose body is taken over by what Marcus describes as 'the voice,' but which we might just as well call the muse, or God – because it's a higher authority. In his description of the last Sex Pistols concert, Marcus portrays Johnny Rotten as a puppet whose actions are controlled by an occult force: Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" (traditional; famously recorded by Paul Robeson; from " Let Robeson Sing") Crucifix Kiss (live at Club Citta, Kawasaki, Japan)" (from Gold Against the Soul (Japanese version)) Marcus quotes the musician Paul Westerberg as saying that he became enthralled with the Sex Pistols because “It was obvious that they didn’t know what they were doing and they didn’t care.” That statement is the core belief of all the movements that Marcus explores. He artfully shows that this is not a declaration of nihilism but a striving for liberation from what the Situationists called “The Spectacle.”

Kanazawa University Research: Researchers Define a Nanopipette Fabrication Protocol for High Resolution Cell ImagingThis is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands—demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life—seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris—based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and ’60s; the rioting students and workers of May ’68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen.” And indeed, he asks, “why is it that both Mehring and Costello find themselves talking about train platforms and blood pressure? The happenstance of specific words in common is an accident, but it might suggest a real affinity. The two men are talking about the same thing, looking for words to make disruption precious; that may not be an accident at all. If the language they are speaking, the impulse they are voicing has its own history, might it not tell a very different story from the one we’ve been hearing all our lives?” (4). Marcus surveys a catalog of artifacts and ephemera to offer that there is something interesting about patterns of revolutionary symbols and gestures that appear in disparate parts of history. He does not suggest that they are mere coincidence; nor does he posit that they form some sort of intentional or even conscious continuum. These reoccurring phenomena simply provoke us to imagine alternative histories to the one we are accustomed to hearing, and to ask questions of that established history. It’s a remarkable similarity. Marcus muses of history as “spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language” (4). The compilation also charted within the Top 40 in Finland and Ireland and in Japan the album only managed to peak at number 243.

I saw Greil Marcus when I was at Berkeley in the late seventies. I’m not sure whether it was a lecture or just a walk by but ever since, his writing connects me to that place and those years. With the concept of 'the voice,' a hidden authority which (dis)organises the world, Marcus abandons any need for a rational explanation of the events he describes. Such a mode of discourse has more in common with the simple faith of a priest, than the considered reflections of a critic or historian; it is a creed which, with its refusal of difference, does a gross disservice both to the post-war avant-garde and the PUNK music Marcus claims to love. AllMusic rated the album with a 3 out of 5, saying that: "Some of the Manics' peers did deliver consistently on their B-sides -- Suede and Oasis have B-sides collections every bit as good as their proper albums -- but they themselves didn't. And that's fine -- this collection was put out for the sake of completeness, and for completists, it's a good buy. But less dedicated fans can pass it by." Pitchfork also reviewed the album with a 6.3/10, and said that: "Manic Street Preachers never conquered the world like they wanted to, but it's been a good enough ride that I don't begrudge them for trying, and this compilation, flawed though it is, is sure to please those who'd always hoped they would succeed." [1] From fans [ edit ] In Marcus’ words: “Unfulfilled desires transmit themselves across the years in unfathomable ways, and all that remain on the surface are bits of symbolic discourse, deaf to their sources and blind to their objects—but those fragments of language, hidden in the oaths and blasphemies of songs like ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ or ‘God Save the Queen’… are a last link to notions that have gone under the ground, into a cultural unconscious. All that remain are wishes without language: all that remains in unmade history, which is to say the possibility of poetry. As the poetry is made, language recovers and finds its target: the history that has been made” (308).I've been considering re-reading it because I have 2 sons entering into the pre-adolescent period of serious and deliberate consideration over their identity and the means of self expression available to them, either immediate or by proxy. They are artistic and they are kind. They don't like what they see happening around them but they enjoy taking advantage of it. DADAyama is / to be reached from railroad stations…” and “DADAyama makes / the blood boil like it / enrages the crowd” (4).

This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands--demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life--seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris--based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and '60s; the rioting students and workers of May '68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen." The role of temperature has also played a part in the analysis, where the switch from a low temperature of 200ºc to a high 500ºc shows peak shifts and different intensities. Gladysz, et al. have analyzed their results through the chemometric techniques, Cluster analysis, and Principal component analysis. Manic Street Preachers - Official Single Charts". Official Charts Company. Archived from the original on 28 September 2013 . Retrieved 1 September 2013. Slash N' Burn (live at Club Citta, Kawasaki, Japan)" (from Gold Against the Soul (Japanese version)) For example, as part of Marcus’ survey of Secret History, he discusses the text of 1400s mystic Pico della Mirandola (“‘If by charity we, with His devouring fire, burn for the Workman [God] alone, we shall suddenly burst into flame in the likeness of a seraph.’”) and 1970s Village Voice contributor James Wolcott’s review of the Sex Pistols’ LP: “I want to see [Johnny Rotten] burst into flames” (307).He looks at all the cultural impulses that figured in that late seventies moment and made it resonate so loudly. Marcus makes the point that this isn’t necessarily the start of a coherent movement though movements often come out of these kinds of moments. And from here Marcus embarks for his big dig. Soon after he places side-by-side the Pistols’ safety pin through the queen’s mouth in ’77 perfectly mirroring the Atelier populaire poster of May 1968 of a bandaged head with a safety pin through the mouth (33-34). In 1999, the book was adapted into a stage production by Rude Mechanicals (a.k.a. Rude Mechs) of Austin, TX. The play has been performed all across the United States- including a stint Off-Broadway in 2001- and in Salzburg, Austria. In 2005, the play was invited to join the New York Public Library's Dramatic Literature Archive.