RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
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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
pop politics
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
New releases from The Tenementals, Nik Bartsch’s Ronin, and Kuunatic
SCOTT ALSWORTH hears the call to burn down and rebuild the video game industry from the bottom up
The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
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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