THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL IN TEN SONGS - Greil Marcus
- "Rock 'n' roll may be most of all a language that, it declares, can say anything: divine all truths, reveal all mysteries, and escape all restritions. (...) As a seemingly newly discovered form of speech, rock 'n' roll proclaimed its novelty in the way in which it became instantly self-referential, a world that, even as it was being built, was complete in itself, a Tower of Babel where whatever was said, however unlikely, no matter how close it was to speaking in tongues, regardless of whether it was babble and meant to be, it was instantly understood." (pág. 10).
- "You invent yourself to the point of stupidity, you give yourself a ridiculous new name, you appear in public in absurd clothes, you sing songs based in nursery rhymes or jokes or catchphrases or advertising slogans, and you do it for the money, renown, to lift yourself up, to escape the life you were born to, to escape the poverty, racism, the killing strictures of a life that you were raised to accept as fate, to make yourself a new person not only in the eyes of the world, but finally in your own eyes too." (pág 18).
- "Curlicuing around the note allows a singer to mimic the sense of event in soul music, the sense that something is happening which has not happened before and cannot be repeated, by mimicking the apprehension of soul, those moments when singers dramatize their struggle to bring out of themselves what lies buried in them, inaccessible, until this moment, even to themselves. As worrying is mimicked into melisma, it is also, behind the curtain of the effect, in a lie no one who tells it will ever admit to, satirized. (...) It goes back to gospel, both the technique and the soul. As the singer must convince you that as he or she sings, he or she has, by a commitment God can recognize, called down a visitation, then the tradition in which Beyoncé works is not merely bad music, but a form of blasphemy." (pág. 84).
