Rock And Roll In Ten Songs By Greil Marcus: Song Analysis
662 Words3 Pages
Recently, we read and studied the book “The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll In Ten Songs” which is wrote by Greil Marcus. In his book, he wrote in a very special way and found greatness in seemingly trivial songs by comparing the early version and modern version of each song, then interpret them as well.
The chapter I chose is the song “To Know Him is to Love Him.” In 1958, the Teddy Bears released “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” a number 1 hit written by Teddy Bear Phil Spector. And in 2006, Amy Winehouse sang it again. If you search and listen two versions on Youtube, you will find that the same song was interpreted in two very different ways. For Teddy Bears’ version, they performed it sincerely, nervously and a little bit immature of their voice and…show more content… So this obviously is a song full of sadness, But Greil Marcus wrote that “the record of Teddy Bears(or Phil Spector) was weak-it all but worshiped weakness, advertised it as a way of life.” It made too much sense, which pissed audience off so that they pushed him into a men’s room stall and pissed all over him after his performance. I hear the music the same way Greil Marcus does. I think that his song is weak as Marcus think and he never show the true meaning of his song which is sadness because weak is not the necessary part of sadness. We can easily see in the book contexts that he only took advantage of sadness as a tool for performance and he made his music stand simpering, dripping treacle, almost crossing the line from sentimental homily to prayer, a dirge at its most lifelike. He advertised sadness as a way of life, which made his music far behind rock ‘n’ roll likes an unchained melody because he made everything in a unnecessary weak form and still tried to preach it as a rock ‘n’ roll song which should be shamed