Madonna: Sex (1992)

One of the most controversial books of the 1990s, now long out of print. Wikipedia has an extensive article about its production, reception and legacy. See also a recent, critical comment on the book by Isabella Rossellini.

Photographed by Steven Meisel
Art directed by Fabien Baron
Edited by Glenn O’Brien
Produced by Callaway
Publisher Warner Books, New York, October 1992
ISBN 0446517321
128 pages

WorldCat

PDF (10 MB)

Néstor García Canclini: Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (1990–) [ES, EN]

“When it was originally published, Hybrid Cultures was foundational to Latin American cultural studies. This now-classic work features a new introduction in which Néstor García Canclini calls for a cultural politics to contain the damaging effects of globalization and responds to theoretical developments over the past decade.

García Canclini questions whether Latin America can compete in a global marketplace without losing its cultural identity. He moves with ease from the ideas of Gramsci and Foucault to economic analysis, from appraisals of the exchanges between Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges to Chicano film and graffiti. Hybrid Cultures at once clarifies the development of democratic institutions in Latin America and reveals that the most destructive ideological trends are still going strong.”

Publisher Grijalbo, México, 1990
ISBN 9700505626
391 pages

English edition
Foreword by Renato Rosaldo
Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez
University of Minnesota Press, 1995
New edition, with a New Introduction, 2005
ISBN 9780816646685
293 pages

Reviews: Jesús Martín‐Barbero (Travesia, 1992, EN)
Arnaldo Valero (Actual, 1994, ES), Ileana Rodríguez (Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 1997, EN), Jesús Martín Barbero (Dominical, 2001, ES), Ivanilton Jose de Oliveira (Redalyc, 2007, ES).
Commentary: Anderson Moebus Retondar (Sociológica, 2008, ES), Luis Pulido Ritter (Cuadernos Inter.c.a.mbio, 2011, ES).
Wikipedia (ES)

Author (ES)
Publisher (EN)
Worldcat (ES)
Worldcat (EN)

Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Spanish, 1990, 19 MB)
Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (English, new ed., 1995/2005, 19 MB, updated on 2022-9-22)

Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989–) [EN, ES, TR]

“Greil Marcus began work on this book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. “I am an antichrist!” shouted singer Johnny Rotten—where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.

This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands—demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life—seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris—based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and ’60s; the rioting students and workers of May ’68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “God Save the Queen.”

Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick Traces is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.”

Publisher The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge/MA, 1989
Twentieth Anniversary Edition, 2009
ISBN 0674034805, 9780674034808
496 pages
via missionsamurai

Radio interview with author (30 min, KCRW, 1989)
Interview with author (Simon Reynolds, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2012)

Reviews: Simon Reynolds (Melody Maker, 1989), Jerome McGann (London Review of Books, 1989), Jon Erickson (Discourse, 1989-1990), Steve Redhead (Popular Music, 1990), Libero Andreotti (J Architectural Education, 1996).

Wikipedia
Publisher
WorldCat

Lipstick Traces (English, 1989/2009, EPUB, 5 MB)
Rastros de carmín. Una historia secreta del siglo XX (Spanish, trans. Damián Alou, 1993, 13 MB)
Ruj Lekesi: Yirminci Yüzyılın Gizli Tarihi (Turkish, trans. Gürol Koca, 1999, 29 MB)