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THE HISTORY OF ROCK 'N' ROLL IN TEN SONGS
By: Greil Marcus
Yale University Press
September 2014
On Sale: September 2, 2014
320 pages
ISBN: 0300187378
EAN: 9780300187373
Kindle: B00MNFCUVW
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
Unlike all previous versions of rock โnโ roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points that everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008, then proceeds to dramatize how each embodies rock โnโ roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts outโa new language, something new under the sun. โTransmissionโ by Joy Division. โAll I Could Do Was Cryโ by Etta James and then Beyoncรฉ. โTo Know Him Is to Love Him,โ first by the Teddy Bears and almost half a century later by Amy Winehouse. In Marcusโs hands these and other songs tell the story of the music, which is, at bottom, the story of the desire for freedom in all its unruly and liberating glory. Slipping the constraints of chronology, Marcus braids together past and present, holding up to the light the ways that these striking songs fall through time and circumstance, gaining momentum and meaning, astonishing us by upending our presumptions and prejudices. This book, by a founder of contemporary rock criticismโand its most gifted and incisive practitionerโis destined to become an enduring classic.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - August 30, 2014
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