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‘Rock and pop music were the unexpected consequences of the working-class entering history’
BRETT GREGORY speaks with TOBY MANNING, author of Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music
Little Richard, 1984

WRITING in the Morning Star, Alistair Findley recommended this 565 page tome which “achieves the seemingly impossible by grounding high-level intellectual scholarship and theory within the popular culture of the day.”

So what initially inspired Manning to put pen to paper? 

“I wrote the book after researching Marxist theory,” he says, “and I started to realise how much we skim over the surface of everything in the news and in our understanding of the world”.

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