From the author of The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs comes his “Basement Tapes”: the complete “Real Life Rock Top 10” columns

For nearly thirty years, Greil Marcus has written a remarkable column called “Real Life Rock Top Ten.” It has been a laboratory where he has fearlessly explored and wittily dissected an enormous variety of cultural artifacts, from songs to books to movies to advertisements. Taken together, his musings, reflections, and sallies amount to a subtle and implicit theory of how cultural objects fall through time and circumstance and often deliver unintended consequences, both in the present and in the future.

Real Life Rock reveals the critic in full: direct, erudite, funny, fierce, vivid, uninhibited, and possessing an unerring instinct for art and fraud. The result is an indispensable volume packed with startling arguments and casual brilliance.

Greil Marcus's books include Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, and The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs. He teaches at Berkeley and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.