Griel Marcus Interview

Powell's Books has an interesting interview with long-time chronicler of rock music and pop culture, Griel Marcus. I used to write a music column for an alternative newspaper, and Marcus was the icon I looked up to. The interview begins:

Describe your latest project.
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice: Through the moral and political rhetoric of John Winthrop, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, America explained itself to itself as a field of promises so vast they could only be betrayed. The attempt to keep the promises — of community, liberty, justice, and equality, for all, because once let loose the genie could never be put back in the bottle — in the face of their betrayal became the engine of American history and the template for our national story.

Once this was the stuff of political speech; today, the real story is pursued in art: as I tell my part of the story, in the work of Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, David Lynch, in the faces and gestures of the actors Bill Pullman and Sheryl Lee, in the music of Corin Tucker's band Heavens to Betsy and of David Thomas, for more than thirty years the face of the band Pere Ubu. It's not a story where anyone ends up where he or she started out.