Lipstick Traces  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989) is a cultural history book by American writer Greil Marcus. It examines popular music and art as a social critique of Western culture.

The book covers 20th century avant-garde art movements like Dadaism, Lettrist International and Situationist International and their influence on late 20th century countercultures, The Sex Pistols and the punk movement in general. Another part of the work is the tracing of the philosophical roots of the 20th century avant-garde in the medieval "heresies" of the Cathars and the anabaptists.

A "soundtrack" to Lipstick Traces, compiling many of the songs referenced in the book, was released by Rough Trade Records in 1993.

Citations

"Pop culture - the folk culture of the modern market, the culture of the instant, at once subsuming past and future and refusing to acknowledge the reality of either - began about 1948, in the United States and Great Britain." --p. 257.

From the back cover

Greil Marcus, from the back cover:

This book is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called "Anarchy in the U.K." was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. Made by a four-man rock 'n' roll band called the Sex Pistols, and written by singer Johnny Rotten, the song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris-based intellectuals. First organized in 1952 as the Lettrist International, and refounded in 1957 at a conference of European avant-garde artists as the Situationist International, the group gained its greatest notoriety during the French revolt of May 1968, when the premises of its critique were distilled into crudely poetic slogans and spray-painted across the walls of Paris, after which the critique was given up to history and the group disappeared. The group looked back to the surrealists of the 1920s, the dadaists who made their names during and just after the First World War, the young Karl Marx, Saint-Just, various medieval heretics, and the Knights of the Round Table.

My conviction is that such circumstances are primarily odd. For a gnomic, gnostic critique dreamed up by a handful of Left Bank cafe prophets to reappear a quarter-century later, to make the charts, and then to come to life as a whole new set of demands on culture—this is almost transcendently odd.

Table of Contents

• Prologue
• Version One: The Last Sex Pistols Concert
• Version Two: A Secret History Of A Time That Passed
  • Faces
  • Legends of Freedom
  • The Art of Yesterday's Crash
  • The Crash of Yesterday's Art
  • The Assault on Notre-Dame
  • The Attack on Charlie Chaplin
  • Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette)
  • Epilogue
  • Works Cited
  • Sources and Credits
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index

See also

• Peter Schneider (writer)
• 20th century
• Secret history
• Notre-Dame Affair
• Ray Lowry
• Ocean of Sound by David Toop, a similar work in its wide-ranging scope
• May 1968 events in France
• Simon Goddard
• Bascom Lamar Lunsford
• The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower
• Out of Time (The Rolling Stones song)
• Recuperation (politics)
• Roadrunner (Jonathan Richman song)
• Matthew Earnest
• I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground
• Dennis Morris (photographer)
• On the Poverty of Student Life