Greil Marcus’ “Lipstick Traces” is a text that bears musical elements of the early 1970s. The “Sex Pistol” is among the first parts that the text which comprises of a music group that rose in United Kingdom. The songs and the music groups seems to protest against religion and the music suggests a time of religious and political upheavals. When the narrator is giving an outline of the songs that characters such as Johnny Rotten were singing, he says that the lines made the tears run down. The contrast methodology used by Marcus suggests that the songs were sorrowful and he presents a phenomenon which contrasts the social and political songs which were sang during the revolution and wars.
In the prologue of Greil Marcus’ “Lipstick Traces” there is a depiction of cultural conspiracy between the roc music sang during the revolution. The prologue says, “…launched to change the music business and make money off the change-but Johnny Rotten sang to change the world” (p. 2), which means that the art entailed the “ideological constructs perceived and experienced as natural fact” (p.3).
The text also depicts the political situation of the nations, that is, United Kingdom and Germany. There is developing nihilism and anarchy in the UK as “Sex Pistols”
manager Malcolm says that, “It is a question of nihilism-and "Anarchy in the U.K” (p.8) to depict what the text will be responding to.
Hitherto, the prologue claims the divine mysteries and contrasts them with the beliefs of antichrist which are portrayed by the rock and roll music stories. The prologue also attests that, “real mysteries cannot be solved but can be turned into better mysteries” (p.22), probably, the mysteries that even the rock and roll music would not reveal.
Work Cited
Marcus, Greil. Lipstick traces. Prologue, p.1-22.
