Protest with room to seethe

by Greil Marcus

Faber and Faber, 256pp, 12.99

POP CULTURE IS THE FINAL frontier of grown-up criticism. It's not that the territory is unpopulated, but between the over-excited ingnues, snake-oil salesmen and dimwit professors infesting the colourful landscape there's precious little room for penetrating analysis. Today's intellectuals barely seem to know what pop music is - never mind how or why it works.

This was the scene Greil Marcus burst on to 30 years ago with Mystery Train, a book which established - and continues to sustain - his reputation as our foremost pop critic. Berkeley-educated in American literature and politics, Marcus's reference points were as much Leslie Fiedler and Alexis de Tocqueville as Robert Johnson and Little Richard, and his 1975 collection of essays is distinguished by its wit, passion and subtle reflection. What made it an important book, though, is that it began to define the critical principles which could underpin a mature analysis of rock 'n' roll.

Broadly, Marcus is interested in the dialogue between pop and identity. In Mystery Train he started to dismantle and scrutinise the parts of the process: the audience as a community, the mythologies and values expressed in music and the cultural influences that shape them.

American-ness is central to the study (America being a place where, because of a diverse immigrant population, the creation of identity is a pressing and even conscious issue), which does present some problems for the non-American reader. This new study of Bob Dylan's 1965 anthem rarely ventures beyond the Unites States, even if one of its most illuminating quotations is from an English school teacher who identifies the song's "vituperative elation" as the quality which raises a communal reaction round a Durham jukebox during the 1984 miners' strike.

But the Durham story is typical of Marcus's magpie eye for detail. Anybody who is interested in music or culture will not want to miss him on Al Kooper's keyboard contribution (derived from Alan Price's work on the Animals' House of the Rising Sun), the Pet Shop Boys, Robert Burns, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", the Italian cover Come una Pietra Scalciata, the fragile, talented and ultimately doomed figure of guitarist Mike Bloomfield, 30 songs which begin with a lone drumbeat, and Stairway to Heaven: "a daydream of Druidic forests while riding the escalator up to the lingerie floor of Harrod's".

There are meditations on Dylan's elusive stage personality ("Again and again he has refused to give an audience what it paid for"), the devastation wreaked by the Dylan-led 1960s singer-songwriters on the traditional hit-makers of Tin Pan Alley, and the folkies' sense of betrayal when Dylan went electric (many people at the time understandably saw pop as industrialised childishness, while roots music connected to traditions of integrity and even radicalism).

Dylan's strangely textured six-minute song was undoubtedly an accident, a freak one-off take among many failures in the recording studio, and a curio the Band subsequently struggled for years to reconstruct on stage. But for all Marcus's theorising about something he calls "total sound", the strangeness of the thing is surely down to its modified time signature: by stretching out the original three-time (imagine the familiar chorus as a waltz), the singer's diatribe gives itself room to seethe, with an extra beat of unanswered accusatory space in each bar.

Well, this is exactly the sort of debate Greil Marcus provokes. Infatuated, imaginative and expert, he writes in breathless, runaway prose, often with an elliptical style which is more like incantation than debate. He is didactic and sometimes infuriating, searching and demanding (demanding, for example, as much of an audience as of a performer). And if I disagree wholly with his vision of Dylan's song as a manifesto for possession-free liberation - to me "How does it feel/To be on your own" sounds more like the gloating misogyny that often fuelled Dylan's brilliance - it is still a pleasure to be provoked.

This is a writer who reads the lines carefully, and between the lines, and the web of links between the lines and culture, and turns up a huge amount of rich material. And if it sometimes seems as if he may be coming up with more than is actually there, this is a small corrective to the knuckleheaded convention of seeing less than nothing. It's sadly revealing that so little has been built on the critical foundations Marcus laid down 30 years ago - but we must be grateful we can still hear his distinctive voice above the slap and tickle of everyday music journalism.