What Nails It (Why I Write)

by Greil Marcus

Yale University Press 2024

Pioneering rock music critic Greil Marcus has been writing tirelessly for almost as long as the name "rock music" has existed. His new book attempts to explain just why he’s done so.

The latest in Yale University Press' Why I Write series, What Nails It is an expanded version of his contribution to Yale's annual Windham-Campbell lecture. Previous people in the series include Patti Smith and Karl Ove Knausgård.

The beginning is the only part of the book that reads like a talk, with Marcus giving it to us right away: "I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it--and the nerve to say it". A cliché: writing is a process of self-discovery, as we've all been told. However the nutritious following pages more than compensate for the opening.

We read that writing is rooted in memory, and our author's early memories, or lack thereof, are big ones. Serving aboard the USS Hull in 1944, Greil Herstley died along with most of the crew when the captain ordered them to sail into a typhoon. Marcus was in the womb when this happened and his mother's unwillingness to talk about his father while he was growing up --she didn't even tell him his name-- left him with a hazy, fragmented sense of self. This developed his urge to learn and reconstruct history, to read. A supply of cultural memories to complement and make up for the lack of lived experience.

Marcus' second reason to write is a vast improvement on the first: he read Pauline Kael. The late longtime film critic for The New Yorker, some will know her well but for those who won't, Marcus adorns his discussion with plenty of brilliant extensive quotes. The middle part of the book is entirely devoted to her and it works as one of the best appreciations of that writer there is. Admittedly, it is the only one I've read, but it will be hard to beat. Through his portrait of Kael's work we are presented to his own view of what criticism can be. “I was shocked by it,” he writes, “by the total engagement of a writer with her subject, which might first take the form of a movie and then expand to take in, or maybe create, the whole social world that movie would have to address, surrender to, or defy.”

"I learned,” he writes more generally, “that there were no limits to what a movie or a novel or a song could say, and no limits on what you could say about it."

This expansive view of criticism applied to popular music, the attempt to connect one's material with everything else, is what has distinguished Marcus' work for all those years, most notably in his acclaimed book Mystery Train. Still, searching though it is, his criticism always returns to the same, often neglected, subject: the audience.

The audience, connection with, is the subject of the third and last part of the book, wherein Marcus recounts his strongest personal reactions to pieces of art, reactions of a kind and magnitude that compel one to share them, write about them. Jackson Pollock and The Rolling Stones qualify as art here, because this is the all-important point for Marcus: the division between high (good) and low (bad) art is false.

The recounting of these events culminates in his first time witnessing Titian's Assumption of the Virgin, whose scale and beauty manage to temporarily turn our critic into a taste fascist. For a man who literally almost died when first hearing Gimme Shelter to become a taste fascist is a hell of transformation, anyone would have to admit. Marcus believes that to try to communicate such revelatory experiences is the duty of the writer. "Most explanations of art," he writes, "are meant to exclude a lot of people, and raise up the people who are doing the explaining." It'd be high presumption to believe that it's for him to raise up others with his criticism, if he didn't advocate that it's also everyone's obligation to do the same. "Listen to me; I'll listen to you."

In 1975 Marcus wrote this about Randy Newman:

He does want the mass audience, both because he thinks his work is good enough to deserve it, and because he thinks the mass audience is good enough to deserve his work. But he pretends he doesn’t want that audience, and that his fans aren’t part of it. [...] Newman, then, is trying to perform a populist act—to write songs that make us care about people we would ordinarily laugh at or dismiss, and to expand his audience by touring for months in all parts of the country—while placing himself and his audience under an elitist umbrella.

In What Nails It, as in most of his work, Greil Marcus is performing a populist act without the umbrella.

Nikolas Mavreas is a reader living in Athens, Greece