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 critics, was the first to name this as the moment that turned Clinton's campaign around -- and to make sense of why.


In Double Trouble Greil Marcus draws on articles he published from 1992 to 2000 to explore the remarkable and illuminating kinship between Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley. In a cultural landscape where ideals and choices are increasingly compromised, the constantly mutating representations of Clinton and Elvis embody the American struggle over purity and corruption, fear and desire. In the public imagination each remains a signal figure in a B-movie about the country's unresolved notions of what it means to be good, true, and beautiful -- and evil, false, and ugly.


Focusing as well on Hillary Clinton, Nirvana, Sinead O'Connor, Andy Warhol, and especially Bob Dylan, Marcus pursues the question of how culture is made and how, through culture, people remake themselves. The result is a unique and essential book about the final decade of the twentieth century.