Simon Reynolds, “Greil Marcus: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian Saturday 18 February 2012 (Guardian Review p. 12)

At once epic and fragmentary, the book [Lipstick Traces] argues for the Sex Pistols as the culmination of ‘an unheard, invisible tradition’ of apocalyptic protest-poetry stretching back via Situationism and Dada all the way to medieval millenarian sects like the Brethren of the Free Spirit. ‘Johnny Rotten is speaking for himself but all those other voices are in there speaking with him too. All kind of demands on society, on life, on ontology, on epistemology are present in the noise of punk and in that vocal sound, boiled down on to a little 7-inch piece of plastic’.