“Visions and Versions of America”: Greil Marcus’s Rock Journalism as Cultural Criticism

Abstract

This article seeks to elucidate to what degree Greil Marcus’s rock journalism can be considered an American cultural criticism. Is it legitimate to advance the idea that his rock journalism is more than rock writing? And what role does America play in this context? When both early American rock journalism and the field of American studies try to answer the question “What is America?” it becomes obvious that the latter would profit from analyzing rock writing. This promising dialogue, however, exists only in rudimentary form. By discussing Marcus’s texts (especially Mystery Train and his writings on punk rock), this article offers one possibility of establishing this dialogue.