MORE REAL LIFE ROCK

The doyen of rock journalists serves up a book of lists of favorite moments in pop culture over the last seven years.

The author’s lists, written for publications such as Rolling Stone, the Barnes & Noble Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, take in movies, books, news reports, and other sources of material. The author of the indispensable Invisible Republic, which examines the centuries-old roots of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes, Marcus remains a Dylan fanatic. That much is evident from his frequent mentions of Dylan performances, official releases, bootlegs, interviews, and other ephemera. Not all are good: The author calls Dylan’s “nadir” the period from 1978 to the early 1990s, “when Dylan reinvented himself onstage as a lead guitar player and went back to the ballads and blues of his first discovery of folk music with Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong.” Marcus is fascinated by Dylan’s dirgelike 2020 song “Murder Most Foul,” which he rightly pegs as “a seventeen-minute fever dream of the first Kennedy assassination.” The author also devotes much attention to Seattle punk trio Sleater-Kinney, whose founder, Carrie Brownstein, is a multiple threat—musician, actor, author, and screenwriter. Marcus isn’t overly political, but neither is he shy of excoriating Donald Trump, often in the words of others, as when he cites Taylor Swift’s nicely direct comment, “We will vote you out in November.” While Marcus is largely in recommendation mode, it’s not all positive. For example, he calls Marianne Faithfull’s Negative Capability, a “poor, forced album,” like “Lana Del Rey before she was born and after she’s outlived a lot of the people who bought her records.” Still, the author’s enthusiasms win out, whether for a Don DeLillo novel or a Henry Rollins live show. He closes with a provocation: Why aren't the Shangri-Las in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

A smart set of suggestions for further reading, viewing, and listening by a most trustworthy guide.