E-raamat: Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs

The most interesting writer on Dylan over the years has been the cultural critic Greil Marcus. . . . No one alive knows the music that fueled Dylans imagination better. Marcus just published Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs. Its [ an] ingenious book of close listening.David Remnick, New Yorker

A poignant reminder of everything Trumpism had tried to destroy. His dissections of these songs . . . are thorough and well-referenced. Paul Genders, Times Literary Supplement

A book filled with genuine insights. . . . Blowin in the Wind, the anthem that transformed a little-known folk singer into the conscience of a nation, is exhibit A for Mr. Marcuss theory of empathy. . . . Mr. Marcus is at his best in exploring this rootedness.The Economist

Marcus . . . has written more and better about Dylan than just about anyone, most recently in Folk Music.Carl Wilson, Slate

Marcus keeps chasing Americas greatest songwriter down the highway. Its cultural criticism as a long-running detective storyand a musical love story.Rob Sheffield, Rolling Stone, Best Music Books of 2022

The books openness restores a sense of existential unity, of a whole in which everything has a place and plays a part.Devin McKinney, Critics at Large

A perfect storm of things to love: American history, music history, Dylans music and beautiful writing. The style is colloquial, but not informal; informative but not didactic, and downright seductive to follow. . . . His in-depth analysis of the songs themselves is unmatched.Anne Margaret Daniel, Spectator

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Marcus tends to a hyperbolic style, producing a slightly febrile mood, appropriate to the events being related. He also uncovers, or produces, hidden connections between apparently disparate things.David McCooey, New Daily

Marcus profound expertise in the American cultural landscape blasts open new fissures in our understanding of this most mythologised of singer-songwriters. . . . The reader comes away marvelling at what Bob Dylan has done with such a violent cultural inheritance, and also at how enmeshed the beauty of the songs are with the brutality in life.Gregory Day, Sydney Morning Herald

In elaborating Dylans musical journey Marcus puts on display a vast knowledge of Americas popular culture and a sardonic recognition of the flaws in our national characterflaws such as racial injustice and wealth inequality that folk music tries to address. The book is fast-paced, like a song, and hip. . . . [ Marcus] closes on an elegiac note punctuated with love. What will go out of the world with him?Arthur Hoyle, New York Journal of Books

The biography, Marcus seems to reason, must emerge prismatically, if at all, through Dylans core achievement: the songs themselves. . . . It might be his most resonant tribute to His Bobness: a primer in how seriously to take major art and how to live alongside it in real time, delivered with an idiosyncrasy and crooked grace worthy of its subject.Martin Herbert, Art Review

This is an absorbing overall read and Greil Marcus is arguably the best rock culture writer around.Tony Jasper, Methodist Recorder

[ A] joyously circumlocutory voyage around the Bard of Hibbing.Danny Eccleson, MOJO

Greil Marcus tells this great artists story through seven of his most transformative songsa selection that will inevitably cause much debate amongst Dylanophiles.Choice

In Folk Musics interpretative brilliance, boundless energy and moral rage, Marcus honours his source. The discursive Dylanologist par excellence, the freewheelin Greil Marcus.Joseph Marlow, The Critic

This is the good stuff: the stuff you cant usually get in books. Greil Marcus is already the most important chronicler of Dylan. But here he outdoes himself. This book is rich with deep understanding, with caustically funny commentary, and a psychoanalysis, much needed, of Bob Dylan and of America.Rachel Kushner

Decade after decade, Greil Marcus has proven himself to be not only a brilliant cultural critic about the music, lives, and stories that have helped shape contemporary American consciousness; he has also done much to articulate why our music has always stood at the axis of sound and politics. This book is not only a valuable addition to the canon, it further elevates Marcus to what he has always been: a supreme artist-critic.Hilton Als

Here is Greil Marcus at his most brilliantly insightful, eloquent, persuasive, brimming with information about Bob Dylan and his music, unique in his ability to combine the most candid sort of memoirist prose with truly inspired commentary. As Dylan sees himself in his subjects, so Greil Marcus sees himself in Dylan, the most original musical genius of our time, the perfect subject for the most original music critic of our time.Joyce Carol Oates

Greil Marcuss writing on Dylan constitutes one of the great living bodies of work by one mold-breaking creative mind interpreting the art and meaning of another. Dylans multitudes nd their champion in Marcuss critical exuberance.Todd Haynes

Marcus is unsurpassed in showing how Dylan reflected the cultural moment even as he changed it. This moving, personal, compelling book traces Dylans complex relationship to American culture through some of Dylans most iconic songs, enabling us to understand these songs in fresh ways while also giving us a profound history of how we understand ourselves.Dana Spiotta   Greil Marcuss writing on Bob Dylan is as essential as Dylan himself. Through the prism of Dylans visionary genius, Marcus unveils a fascinating history of the soul of modern America.Olivier Assayas