GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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Lay it on thick
ALISTAIR FINDLAY recommends a prime example of a Marxist history of popular music that entertains and inspires
A FORM OF PROTEST: The Cribs performing live in 2018
[Bruce Baker/CC]
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an accessible - and optimistic - take on our relationship to new technology
JOHN GREEN suggests that a new, biased, and highly readable re-hash of the story of the Cambridge Five be taken with a large pinch of salt
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a timely reminder of the long history of protests and the outdoor spaces in which they takes place
Mixing Pop and Politics
Toby Manning, Repeater Books, £25
THIS is a refreshing and inspiring book written by a music industry insider, author of The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd (2006) who has written for Q, NME, New Statesman, Guardian and similar media, and is now manager and producer of a band called The Idle Lovers.
He says of it himself: “This is a Marxist history of popular music, not a history of Marxist popular music — that would be a very short book.” Indeed.
In fact it is a fascinating but very large book, 565 crammed pages, a hundred of which comprise the index and notes and thus a treasure trove waiting for aspiring Phd/masters students to plunder for quotes, insights and critiques, mostly from the Stuart Hall stable of cultural studies intellectuals — Marx, Gramsci, Marcuse, Althusser, Foucault, Raymond Williams and the more recent Frederic Jameson etc.
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