But that’s not the most eyebrow-raising comparison therein. Marcus dissects each song to see what each artist has brought to it - sometimes slaughtering sacred cows in the process, as in a chapter on “All I Could Do Was Cry” that compares Etta James and Beyoncé, an unfair battle if ever there was one. He runs through Phil Spector and the Beatles and Etta James and Robert Johnson and Buddy Holly and more, but this is not a complete rock history, and it’s not a “10 most important songs in rock” history treatise. In this way, Marcus looks at various versions of “Money (That’s What I Want),” “This Magic Moment” and “In the Still of the Night” to see what each iteration says about the song, the singer and society at large. “With the slightly acrid scratch that sometimes crept into her harder songs dissolved in a creamy vortex, the feeling was scary, and delicious in those three seconds, then moving on through the first lines with hesitations between words and syllables so rich with the specter of someone facing the Spector tombstone and reading the words off of it out loud, TO KNOW HIM WAS TO LOVE HIM, each word as she sang it demanding the right to be the last word, or merely wishing for it, the song expanded as if, all those years it had been waiting for this particular singer to be born, and was only now letting out its breath.” It was music far behind rock ’n’ roll, music for weddings without dancing, too square for proms.” But in 2006, Amy Winehouse picked it up and something magical happened. 1 hit for the Teddy Bears in 1958 even though it “stood simpering, dripping treacle, almost crossing the line from sentimental homily to prayer, a dirge at its most lifelike. He takes us through Phil Spector’s “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” a No. Greil Marcus gets to the heart of these questions in “The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs,” which explores songs that have been interpreted multiple times by artists in different generations. But is a great, enduring rock song powered most by the song or the performance? Are we swooning because the song is so perfectly written that we can’t help singing along? Or is it the rendition that etches it into our minds? Or is it both - and more - since every song is a Proustian madeleine that evokes all our memories of the song and of the people we celebrated it with? A molecule of our shared experience containing not just an incredible performance but also a shared desire for something - love, money, sex, peace, rebellion, power, freedom - some intensely held desire. Every great, enduring rock song is like a cell in our cultural memory.
0 kommentar(er)
