"We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail"
About this Quote
Marcus is talking about culture as a contact sport with time: you don’t invent meaning from scratch, you wrestle it out of inherited plots. The line lands because it treats “stories” less as entertainment than as operating systems. When you “succeed,” you don’t escape the canon or the myth-bank; you refresh it. You take the hero’s journey, the redemption arc, the outlaw ballad, the comeback narrative and make it feel like it was written for right now. Success, in this view, is a kind of cultural rerelease: same chassis, new engine, suddenly the old forms explain the present better than the present explains itself.
Failure flips that agency. “Trapped” is the key verb: the stories aren’t just there, they’re closing in. When the attempt doesn’t work, you don’t get to claim innovation or revision; you get sorted into familiar cautionary tales. The starving artist, the washed-up genius, the sellout, the one-hit wonder. That’s Marcus at his sharpest: pointing out that culture judges outcomes before it judges intentions, and then retrofits a narrative that feels inevitable.
The subtext is also a critique of originality fetishism. Marcus, a critic steeped in rock, folk, and American myth, has spent a career showing how supposedly new movements are haunted by older voices - blues phrases, gospel cadences, Dylan’s rewrites, punk’s borrowed sneer. What matters isn’t whether you’re derivative; it’s whether you can make the borrowing sound like prophecy. Success turns repetition into tradition. Failure turns repetition into a prison cell.
Failure flips that agency. “Trapped” is the key verb: the stories aren’t just there, they’re closing in. When the attempt doesn’t work, you don’t get to claim innovation or revision; you get sorted into familiar cautionary tales. The starving artist, the washed-up genius, the sellout, the one-hit wonder. That’s Marcus at his sharpest: pointing out that culture judges outcomes before it judges intentions, and then retrofits a narrative that feels inevitable.
The subtext is also a critique of originality fetishism. Marcus, a critic steeped in rock, folk, and American myth, has spent a career showing how supposedly new movements are haunted by older voices - blues phrases, gospel cadences, Dylan’s rewrites, punk’s borrowed sneer. What matters isn’t whether you’re derivative; it’s whether you can make the borrowing sound like prophecy. Success turns repetition into tradition. Failure turns repetition into a prison cell.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
|---|
More Quotes by Greil
Add to List
