Greil Marcus

Music journalist and cultural critic, notable for work that places rock 'n' roll music in a broad framework of culture and politics. He was the first reviews editor for Rolling Stone magazine in 1969, andI  has written for Artforum, the Village Voice, The Believer,  and many other publications. His first book Mystery Train (1975) is considered a landmark for having placed rock and roll within the context of American culture. His next book, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), was a study of the many hidden voices of counterculture, from Zurich and Berlin in the early 20th century to Paris in the 1950s to London in the 1970s. It saw punk rock as a transhistorical cultural movement, which Marcus linked philosophically to such diverse phenomena as medieval heretics, Dada, and the Situationists.