Ask Greil (current) Greil. Marcus. net. In which readers ask Greil Marcus questions and he answers them.

To submit your own question, email admin@greilmarcus. Ask Greil.” (Alternatively, you can use the submission form at the bottom of this page.)See also the 2. Ask Greil. 1. 0/3. I noticed your anticipation of Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War back in August.

I’ve watched the complete series now, and found it more compelling and rewarding than any other Burns documentary that I have seen. Not only were many vagaries of the war made clearer to me, but I found myself regularly trying to solve Vietnam in my head. For example, what if Ike had strong- armed the French in the fifties, and struck a deal with Ho Chi Minh that would give the country to his movement, but not under the communist brand?

As thought- provoking as the series is, I was disappointed at the way the music of the period was selected and used. The soundtrack choices are almost unerringly cliché, from The Animals to Procol Harum to Simon and Garfunkel, to “Gimme Shelter.” You could feel each one of them coming around the corner, and I thought scenes were sometimes stretched just to accommodate another verse or chorus. And all of it at the expense of the instrumental music contributed by Trent Reznor and Yo- Yo Ma, which appeared most often as brief, soft padding. After a while, I felt I was being hustled, and could imagine a voiceover reminding me I could receive the 2- CD soundtrack “at the $1. To be fair, that soundtrack does include some unusual choices, like Otis Redding’s version of “Tell The Truth.” But those were either crowded out in the series or I can’t recall hearing them at all. Would this story have suffered for lack of rock and roll music?

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Does any account of that era really need to be decorated by “Get Together” and “For What It’s Worth”? And if the story has to have “’Nam songs” to make its impact, can you think of any that would be more striking to the ear if they were included?– Glenn Burris. I haven’t seen it. Your account is as pointed a review as I’ve read. I wonder—does he use the Doors, who were so present in Vietnam that one GI said years later he had to force himself to stop listening to the band, because their music was the only thing that made what he’d seen and done real, but he had to finally put it behind him—and never listen again. Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”? Some years ago Bear Family put out a nearly insane 1.

CD box called …Next Stop is Vietnam, a collection of Vietnam songs—super- patriotic, weirdly erotic, absurdist—that, as no sneer at Ken Burns, had exactly what he’d never touch. A lot of it is unlistenable, musically and morally. But it’s not a cliché. Recently one of your correspondents, Randy, wrote that your “insight” into the Ramones “changed the way I heard them, and I think you’re right: they really do sound like a bunch of twits.”Now, I talk shit to people all the time about their tastes in music, but I’d be pretty bummed if my opinion actually turned someone off an artist that he or she liked. Are you okay with it?– Steve O’Neill. I never want to encourage anyone not to like what they like, or be ashamed of it. Except maybe for Journey.

Note: G. M.’s original reference to Irving Wallace has been corrected and changed to Harold Robbins; thanks to D. Schilling for the catch.]Bob Dylan has always had angry songs. Like A Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street” and “Idiot Wind” are some of the best. But in the past 2 decades I notice some over the top proclamations that just appear in the middle of songs. Just a few examples: — “I’ll drag ‘em all down to hell and I’ll stand ‘em at the wall, I’ll sell ‘em to their enemies” (“Workingman’s Blues #2”)— “I’m preaching the word of God, I’m putting out your eyes” (“High Water”)— “Yes, I’m leaving in the morning just as soon as the dark clouds lift, gonna break the roof in—set fire to the place as a parting gift” (“Summer Days”)— “My enemy crashed into the dust, got pinned down. He lost his lust. Bled to death against a tree.

I didn’t notice it ‘til later, that he had wounded me” (“Long And Wasted Years”)And then there is “Pay In Blood” from Tempest, which is nasty the whole way through. I acknowledge that this kind of thing is not new with Bob.

From “Idiot Wind”: — “You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies/One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes/Blood on your saddle…”But that line seems alive and honest and it still moves me. These new outbursts mostly seem forced and artless to me. What do you think?

I wonder why Bob is still so angry, who all these enemies are, and is it really necessary to pay them back in such a way?– Bob Ryan. The songs you mention from the past have never sounded angry to me. I hear empathy, regret. Dylan described “Like a Rolling Stone” as an attempt to warn someone of the danger she was facing: you can hear that. The sense of weariness, tiredness, fatigue at the very concept of hate and envy directed toward him by the Llewyn Davises of his world is what I hear in that song, not anger. What you’re hearing in the songs you mention from Love and Theft on down doesn’t sound angry to me either, or as you say forced and artless, even though a lot of the lines are borrowed from Ovid and elsewhere.

They sound nihilistic, sadistic, funny, playful—don’t ever hear these words outside of their music, outside of what the band is doing and the way Dylan is singing, which tells you what he feels about what he’s singing if not what he means. And they sound real. It’s not unusual for someone, as he or she gets older, to contemplate the hell one’s enemies, which can simply mean, or mostly mean, people who irritate you, deserve: their brutal, dismembering, death- by- a- thousand- cuts deaths, their Harold Robbins fantasies of, as with Nevada Smith, slitting someone’s eyelids so they can’t close and then putting anthills on the villain’s face so the ants will eat his eyes while he bakes in the sun staked down to the ground—you get the idea. That’s all over “Ain’t Talkin’.” I don’t doubt him for a moment. Watch Hana Kimi Online Episode 12.

I also think—I hear—that conjuring up scenarios of revenge is a form of energy, the energy behind such great songs as “Highwater,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” and so much of Tempest. But “Highwater” is also hilarious all the way through, and “Summer Days, Summer Nights”—I mean, what better way to end that party than burning down that roadhouse and moving on to the next one? Warehouse 13 Season 1 Episode 4 Watch Online on this page. What is your assessment of John Mellencamp’s career? I am particularly interested in which songs have resonated with you and best represent what he seems to be about.– Bradley Fackler. It’s a good question and a good response would be a 5. But—Breaking free from the conceptual art/traditional UK rock manager’s slave camp and reclaiming his own uncommon, funny- sounding name—after David Bowie’s maestro Tony De. Vries scooped up the young cutie pie and renamed him Johnny Cougar in the manner of such first- wave British Elvis (and Pat Boone!) imitators as Johnny Eager and Billy Fury—was a great accomplishment.

It must have been a struggle, and a scary thing to do, and I’ve never read anything about it. He—the Johnny Cougar him—was a hit almost from the start—the promotional push even before his launch was sophisticated and relentless, with very classy seeming scams meant to compromise critics into taking him seriously. But even the perfectly decent early hits like “Jack & Diane” and “Pink Houses” self- destructed with the oversold drawl. You heard calculation before anything else. Rod Stewart combed his hair in a thousand ways, but then he walked out of his room and into the world. What you heard here was a guy trapped in front of the mirror. There’s such a huge leap from the ducks- in- a- row of “Two American kids growin’ up in the heartland” from “Jack and Diane”—a song including its own ad, its own franchising campaign—and the loose and rambling “Another boring romantic, that’s me” in “Small Town” from Scarecrow.