The Stylist - by Greil Marcus (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Bryan Ferry, Greil Marcus, hands across the water--one singer, one critic, a music comes to new life.

What is a song? Is it a fact, or is it a question? Over more than fifty years in a story that is still going on, for Bryan Ferry, either with Roxy Music or as a solo artist, any song is an open question, something he interrogates as surely as it interrogates him. Who are you? Ferry asks Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" or Roxy Music's own "More Than This." What do you have to give me that no one has found before? The song answers. In Greil Marcus's dazzling new book, it's a drama that writes a new chapter every time Ferry takes a new stage. Except in Bryan Ferry's own hands, his music has never taken on as full a life as it does in these pages.

The Stylist avoids a conventional biographical approach, instead listening to what the artist's music tells us about the sort of person it would take to have made it, moving forward and backward in time, focusing on key moments--live performances, television appearances, studio recordings, and songs as they played in movies or novels, as they moved through and enter broader musical and social histories, film noir, Richard Hamilton's reinvention of modern art, the dandy as secret sharer. No one reading this book will not be surprised at what they find.

About the Author

Greil Marcus is the author of many books, including Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces, and The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs. With Werner Sollors, he is the editor of A New Literary History of America. Marcus has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, the New School, and the Graduate Center in New York. In 2013 he delivered the Massey Lectures on the History of American Civilization at Harvard and in 2023 delivered the Windham-Campbell "Why I Write" Lecture at Yale. In 2000 he was named Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République Française and in 2017 was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was born in San Francisco in 1945 and lives across the Bay in Oakland.