Greil Marcus Archives - Hey Dullblog, the Beatles fan blog

Book Review: “Beatles vs. Stones”

By Devin McKinney|2014-02-03T05:09:15-08:00November 11, 2013|1968, Beatles vs. Stones, biography, books|

Beatles vs. Stones by John McMillian 288 pp. Simon & Schuster, 2013 Reviewed by Devin McKinney Note: This review was first posted, precipitately, on July 22nd, after review copies of John McMillian's book were sent out; it was difficult for the reviewer to resist reading and responding to it immediately. Now that the book is publicly available, we repost the review, without any changes. A character in Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude claims that every small-group dynamic found in fiction or in life is comprehensible via the Beatles model of organizational relationships: “The Beatles thing is an archetype, it’s like [...]

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Book Review: “Beatles vs. Stones”

By Devin McKinney|2016-12-01T17:40:34-08:00July 22, 2013|1968, Beatles vs. Stones, biography, books|

Beatles vs. Stones by John McMillian 288 pp. Simon & Schuster, 2013 Reviewed by Devin McKinney A character in Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude claims that every small-group dynamic found in fiction or in life is comprehensible via the Beatles model of organizational relationships: “The Beatles thing is an archetype, it’s like the basic human formation. Everything naturally forms into a Beatles, people can’t help it.” He illustrates this theory by applying it, convincingly, to Star Wars and The Tonight Show. (For the record, the archetypal roles—or “four sides of the circle,” as the title of a Beatles bootleg once [...]

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Greil Marcus: “You won’t outgrow this”

By Devin McKinney|2013-08-13T22:50:12-07:00May 7, 2012|Beatles tributes|

Greil Marcus, not outgrowing it. Simon Reynolds: . . . [I]t just struck me how rock 'n' roll early on was teenage music, and even when it got arty and a little bit more grown-up, it was still caught in that sixties live-for-now mindset. Like Jim Morrison counseling "learn to forget." Rock 'n' roll in the beginning was very much "don't know much about history," but then all of sudden you've got the Band doing "King Harvest" about the plight of farmers in the late 19th century, and a little bit later Randy Newman singing songs about slavery. Greil Marcus: [...]

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All that time

By Ed Park|2015-09-19T00:06:38-07:00May 7, 2012|1970, Reviews, Rolling Stone|

Greil Marcus "When I became record reviews editor, I made it clear to him after a few months — nobody had done the job before me — that the record review section was an independent republic within the country of Rolling Stone. That meant that nobody else could tell me what to review or what a writer could say. They could argue with me, but ultimately it was my decision. And that worked well. There was one incident where Paul McCartney makes his first solo record and people thought it was wonderful: this rough, homemade one-man-band album. It was accompanied by [...]

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