Marcus wove the ephemeral threads together with such skill that his book gave these rebellions a permanence and a strength that the rush of time had never allowed them. It captured and conveyed not just a fleeting subculture but a genealogical tree of fleeting subcultures.

In fact, the book was an elegantly written narrative history of twentieth-century artistic rebellion, from the art movements of post-World War I Germany and the Situationist collectives of 1960s France to the yowling Sex Pistols. It was ostensibly a book about Punk music. Then Greil Marcus gave us Lipstick Traces. Aspects of our disaffection were fatuous, but at core it was genuine. We saw consumerism and pop culture as twin monsters. We trolled shabby, independent bookstores-when such places still were common-searching for cheap copies of Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, or booklets by Peter Lamborn Wilson. We were suburban refugees raised on Punk and post-Punk rock we had spent years listening to The Clash and the Gang of Four. This was in the time before laptops and cellphones, and we sat in squalid apartments or Alphabet City bars discussing politics and music. That twenty-something could have been me.

The book’s cover featured a stylized photograph of a bug-eyed Johnny Rotten. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Greil Marcusįor a time in the early 1990s it was hard to walk around Lower Manhattan without running into someone, usually a scrawny twenty-something, gripping a chunky yellow and orange paperback titled Lipstick Traces.

Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus