Lipstick Traces: Une histoire secrète du vingtième siècle - Softcover

A coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out.--Terry Eagleton "New York Times Book Review "

"Lipstick Traces" has the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status.--Ben Brantley "New York Times "

For anybody who wants to go deeper into the ontology of an idea that animates a kind of music, or is illuminated by that music, read Greil Marcus's "Lipstick Traces", just reissued in an expanded edition for the book's twentieth anniversary. I often say that "Traces" is the best book ever written about music, even though it's not actually about music: it is about the life of an idea.--Sasha Frere-Jones"New Yorker online" (10/21/2009)

That Marcus can kick off and end his exhaustive, but always clear-headed, cross-epochal trek with the Sex Pistols--and make it all cohere--is but one indication of how fully he meshes the academy and the gutter.--Katherine Dieckmann "Voice Literary Supplement "

In 1989, Harvard University Press published "Lipstick Traces", the second book by the American writer and critic Greil Marcus. It was a dazzling creation, mapping out an untold "secret history" which connected the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, the Parisian evenements of 1968, that legendary subversive clique the Situationist International and an Anabaptist revolt in 16th-century Germany, led by a notorious libertine named John of Leyden. Among the book's most ardent fans, it sparked real epiphanies...It stands as a singularly idiosyncratic product of a genre-cum-tradition rooted in the business of writing about musicians and the whirl of ideas that once surrounded them...[Marcus] manages some of the finest music writing ever to make it on to the page...My 20-year-old copy of "Lipstick Traces" is the one book I would save from my proverbial burning house.--John Harris"The Guardian" (06/27/2009)

Il y a une figure qui apparaît et réapparaît tout au long de ce livre. Ses instincts sont fondamentalement cruels ; sa manière est intransigeante. Il propage l'hystérie, mais il est immunisé contre elle. Il est au-delà de la tentation, parce que, malgré sa rhétorique utopiste, la satisfaction est le cadet de ses soucis. Il est d'une séduction indicible, semant derrière lui des camarades amers comme Hansel ses miettes de pain, seul chemin pour rentrer chez soi à travers un fourré d'excuses qu'il ne fera jamais. C'est un moraliste et un rationaliste, mais il se présente lui-même comme un sociopathe ; il abandonne derrière lui des documents non pas édifiants mais paradoxaux. Quelle que soit la violence de la marque qu'il laissera sur l'histoire, il est condamné à l'obscurité, qu'il cultive comme un signe de profondeur. Johnny Rotten/John Lydon en est une version ; Guy Debord une autre. Saint-Just était un ancêtre, mais dans mon histoire, Richard Huelsenbeck en est le prototype.