Susan Sontag, Greil Marcus, and the Art of Writing About Music
There’s the famous phrase that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, meaning it’s beautiful but pointless, a doomed translation between two incompatible languages. I can personally speak to this difficulty.
Some writers, however, have been able to make language listen. They make prose hum with rhythm and insight, turning analysis into art. Among them, two stand apart: Susan Sontag and Greil Marcus.
Sontag believed that criticism should sharpen perception, that to write about art was to pay attention until seeing itself became revelation. Marcus, on the other hand, wrote as if songs were alive, haunted by history and myth. One pursued clarity; the other chased chaos. Between them lies the full spectrum of what writing about music can be.
Susan Sontag and the Sensual Intelligence of Listening
Susan Sontag was not, strictly speaking, a music critic. But she wrote about all art as though sound were pulsing underneath every sentence. When she published Against Interpretation in 1966, she was taking a stand against the intellectual trends of her time. Critics, she argued, were smothering art beneath layers of theory and politics.
Her solution was radical: stop interpreting and start feeling.
“In place of a hermeneutics,” she wrote, “we need an erotics of art.”
For Sontag, to write about music (or anything) was to experience it fully. The timbre, the texture, the atmosphere. She wanted readers to sense the art before they understood it, to treat listening as a kind of touch.
This was criticism as attention, not analysis. She believed that to pay attention — really pay attention — was a moral act, a way of honoring both the art and the moment. When you read Sontag, you hear that focus: clean, sharp sentences that seem to breathe in time.
Her essays on photography, style, and modern sensibility were less about objects than about ways of seeing. Apply that same idea to sound, and you get a new model for music writing that’s not about decoding meaning, but tracing the shape of emotion.
If Greil Marcus writes like an improvising musician, Sontag writes like a composer, with every phrase deliberate and every silence intentional. Her kind of criticism teaches us that writing about music can be as disciplined, and as sensual, as music itself.
Greil Marcus and the Mythic Imagination of Rock ’n’ Roll
Where Sontag polished language into precision, Greil Marcus lets it sprawl. His sentences have the sometimes chaotic, always charged feeling of electric guitar solos.
Emerging from the 1970s rock-critic scene, Marcus quickly made himself impossible to categorize. His landmark book Mystery Train (1975) treated Elvis Presley, The Band, and Robert Johnson not as pop figures but as symbols of the American imagination. Through their music, he traced a lineage of rebellion, restlessness, and myth that told the story of America in rhythm and distortion.
Marcus listens to songs the way a historian studies ruins, by looking for the stories that survived the collapse. In Lipstick Traces (1989), he linked punk rock to the Dada art movement, arguing that every cultural explosion leaves echoes centuries apart. In his essays, Bob Dylan becomes a prophet, the Sex Pistols become a revolution, and even silence hums with memory.
If Sontag’s essays feel like sculpture, Marcus’s feel like collage. He layers references — political speeches, movie dialogue — until a larger picture emerges. His writing is musical in the literal sense, being full of rhythm.
Two Critics, Two Frequencies: Clarity and Chaos
On the surface, Sontag and Marcus occupy opposite ends of the critical spectrum. Sontag writes for the intellect; Marcus writes for the bloodstream. She values control, while he celebrates collision.
But their work intersects at the belief that listening is an act of meaning-making.
- For Sontag, listening is attention — stripping away noise until art reveals its form.
- For Marcus, listening is immersion — letting the noise swallow you until meaning rises out of the chaos.
Both approaches resist the cynical idea that music writing is secondary to music. They argue that criticism can participate in the art itself. That the writer, too, can perform.
Each, in their own way, writes to the rhythm of what they love.
Music Criticism as Art in Itself
Today, when algorithms predict our playlists and music journalism too often collapses into listicles, Sontag and Marcus’ writings still stand out. They remind us that the act of writing about music can be artful and not just informative.
Together, they form a kind of duet: clarity and chaos, philosophy and fever. Both insist that the critic’s job is not to explain music, but to translate its energy into another form.
If Sontag gives us the discipline of listening, Marcus gives us the ecstasy of understanding. The best music writing needs both.
Why Their Work Still Resonates
Half a century later, their influence remains everywhere, from Zadie Smith’s rhythmic essays to Hanif Abdurraqib’s soulful reflections on music and memory. You can feel Sontag’s precision in the way modern critics describe texture and tone, and you can hear Marcus’s collage-like urgency in how writers mix personal narrative with cultural commentary.
More importantly, they both treat music as more than entertainment. For Sontag, art refines consciousness. For Marcus, it shapes history. Both saw the critic as someone who listens on behalf of others.
Their work is so enduring partly because it respects the mystery. They never claim to solve what music means. They only try to trace what it does to us.
Conclusion: The Sound of Language Listening Back
The art of writing about music isn’t about explanation but response. Sontag’s precision and Marcus’s passion represent two sides of that same response. One analytical, one emotional, both utterly devoted to the act of listening.
Maybe words can’t reproduce a sound. But they can echo its effect, the recognition that something alive has entered the room.
Sontag reminds us that clarity can be erotic. Marcus reminds us that confusion can be holy. Together, they make the page sing.
Five Essential Essays on Music and Art
By Susan Sontag:
- Against Interpretation (1964) — A manifesto for feeling over decoding.
- One Culture and the New Sensibility (1965) — Modernism, pop culture, and new forms of perception.
By Greil Marcus:
- Mystery Train (1975) — Rock ’n’ roll as the story of America itself.
- Lipstick Traces (1989) — Punk as the rebirth of artistic rebellion.
- The Old, Weird America (1997) — Bob Dylan and the ghosts of American folk music.
