Lipstick Traces

This is a secret history of modern times, told by way of what conventional history tries to exclude. Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.

Greil Marcus is the author of The Doors, Mystery Train, and other books.

A coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out. -- Terry Eagleton New York Times Book Review 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 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 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 20090627 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 20091021