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Listening To Van Morrison (2012)

by Greil Marcus(Favorite Author)

3.26 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0571254462 (ISBN13: 9780571254460)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Faber and Faber Limited

review 1: Yes, 5 stars. I very much enjoy the author's style and bought this book confident that, almost regardless of the subject, the tangential journeys would keep me interested. And they did. I know enough of VM's music to have enjoyed this enormously. My "enough" is the generally well known '60s and 70's albums and some of the recent stuff too, including one or two duffers. Don't be put off by Goodreads grumps.
review 2: Like all Marcus collections, it contains examples of him at his insightful, thought-provoking best and at his blustery, bullshitting worst, at times in the same long, rambling sentence. For some reason, every subject he writes about has to somehow be made into an exemplar of the American democratic experiment or an artist testing the boundaries of f... morereedom or expression. The smallest throwaway moment in a song can be the launching point for pages and pages of ruminations on God and/or the blues. When he's on to something this can be amazing, but the more he writes like this the more he risks turning into a parody of himself. Every note is not a life or death matter, even for a singer as weird and gifted as Van Morrison. The high points are easily worth the lows, though, and not enough people have written in depth about Morrison, a guy overdue for some serious critical study. Biggest disappointment with this book: only two mentions of "Veedon Fleece," his greatest album after "Astral Weeks." It's a minefield of literary and Celtic mythological references that I thought would surely attract Marcus. less

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