Double Trouble by Greil Marcus

Double Trouble by Greil Marcus

In June of 1992, when all the polls showed that Bill Clinton didn't have a chance, he took his saxophone onto the Arsenio Hall show, put on dark glasses, and blew Heartbreak Hotel. Greil Marcus, one of America's most imaginative and insightful popular culture critics, was the first to name this as the moment that turned Clinton's campaign around--and to make sense of why. Double Trouble draws on articles Marcus published from 1992 to 2000 to explore the remarkable and illuminating kinship between Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley--and, moreover, to explore how culture is made and shared in today's America and how, through culture, people remake themselves.

Double Trouble is a unique and essential book about the final years of the twentieth century. This edition also includes a new essay Marcus wrote just before the 2000 presidential election: an eerily prescient piece that looks forward to two very different futures for ex-President Bill Clinton.

With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published last year by Harvard University Press. Since 2000 he has taught at Princeton, Berkeley, Minnesota, and the New School in New York; his column Real Life Rock Top 10 appears regularly in The Believer. He has lectured at U Cal, Berkeley, The Whitney Museum of Art, and Princeton University. He lives in Berkeley.