Greil Marcus: Writing About Rock Music for People Who Care About Rock Music

Ranters and Crowd Pleasers

Greil Marcus is rightly regarded as one of the pre-eminent writers about rock music of all time. His writings in Rolling Stone magazine were among the best reasons to buy that chronicle of all things rock and roll throughout the 70s and 80s, before he lost a subject to write about with the death of rock and roll in the 90s. Most of his must-have articles from Rolling Stone were collected in a volume titled Ranters and Crowd Pleasers. Reading this book is like reading a history of the greatest music in the world from the late 70s to the early 90s, especially music with a punk sensibility, but not exclusively so.

An introduction gets the engine revving with a review of the classic Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed. Greil Marcus takes this seminal Stones album and uses it to build the foundation upon which most of the rest of Ranters and Crowd Pleasers is built. The real meat of the this beginning of the book, however, focuses on the sadly little known novel The Ice Age as a comparison piece for the final Sex Pistols concert and disintegration in San Francisco. Greil Marcus takes these seemingly disparate and unconnected cultural events and uses them to create a theme for what would otherwise just a standard collection of essays.

Throughout Ranters and Crowd Pleasers, Greil Marcus focuses on some of the true heavyweight rock acts of the period between 1977 and 1992. At the same time, he does one of the things he always did best when writing for Rolling Stone. He introduces the music lover to little known and even obscure acts. It was Greil Marcus who first turned me on to Gang of Four; they remain one of my favorite bands. This piece is included in this book and it not only introduced Gang of Four to many lovers of rock music, but a litany of bands and artists coming to the fore at the same time in England: The Raincoats and Essential Logic among them.