lipstick traces a secret history of the twentieth century

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. “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.This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. The index betrays the breadth of the author's preoccupations: 'Trocchi, Alexander' rubs shoulders with 'Trotsky, Leon' 'The Oils' with 'Dionysus The Areopagite' 'Nazis And Nazism' with Bruce Springsteen's 1982 song 'Nebraska' and 'Le Corbusier' with 'Led Zeppelin'.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.

Lipstick Traces begins and ends with a Ray Lowry cartoon satirising Johnny Rotten, Malcolm MacLaren and the in famous Kings Road SEX boutique, but this is only fractionally more than a framing device for the book's real agenda by the time the MarcusTours round-trip is complete we have explored the furthest fringes of European avant-gardism via 16th-century heresy, the Paris Commune, the Cathars and The Slits.

As the poet and lyricist Pete Brown once put it: 'Things may come and things may go, but the art school dance goes on forever.' The particular variation of the art school dance into which Greil Marcus stumbled while pursuing his fascination with the Sex Pistols has turned into a frisky old fandango indeed keeping his research under control must have been a task akin to hanging on to an enthusiastic rottweiler which has suddenly decided to go walkies.

Lipstick traces a secret history of the twentieth century