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.

Not far in I checked if it was indeed dedicated to Stuart Hall, for it ought to be, and I think he would have been delighted to read it. It is well over four decades since I encountered Hall’s BSCS texts (Birmingham School of Cultural Studies 1964-2002) which inspired “thick description” studies of popular culture — in the form of working-class youth cultures, black and ethnic subcultures, moral panics, resistance through rituals, hooligans et al, that I read as a young welfare professional and budding Marxist activist via John Clarke, Dick Hebridge, Geoff Pearson (my tutor), and Hall — all beautifully written, rich, nuanced, analytical, closely observed studies in 3D. 

All were anti-Thatcher in spirit but dedicated to understanding her as an authoritarian right populist figure, not the right bloody eejit that too many on the political left dismissed her as, just as many now view Sir Keir Starmer. 

“Thick description” is a term the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined to describe human social behaviour that includes the cultural context and subjective meanings of those involved in them. “Thin description” offers a factual account without interpretation. Any attempt to “explain” thick descriptive texts ends up reducing them to thin descriptive ones.

Here’s a sample from the first chapter entitled “Rock’N’Roll, Doo-Wop And The 50s”: “Rock’n’roll represented a breach in the managed conformity of mass society — what Williams calls an “emergent culture” — and was one of the unexpected consequences of the working-class entering history (cites Marx’s Economic Manuscripts). 

“Rewriting the Fordist rules, publicly educated, non-professional musicians recorded songs in small studios and released singles on independent labels (cites Jameson’s Archaeologies), disdaining polite balladry and light jazz for a souped-up take on rural country and roustabout rhythme’n’blues. Sometimes they even sang their own rough-hewn songs, rather than those tailored by Tin Pan Alley. Where balladeers performed at a remove from their musicians, rock’n’rollers recorded and performed as a group — whatever the billing — expressing a collective sensibility, be that of youth, class or both. 

“Although rock’n’roll appeared to be unsophisticated, un-Fordist, Fordism was integral to the form’s sound — defined by Fender Stratocaster tremolo and analogue slap-back echo — even as rock’n’roll’s rural/urban, acoustic/electric, black/white dialectic pulled at Fordism’s parameters. Sonically alone then, rock’n’roll was a form of protest: even Duane Eddy’s 1958 instrumental Rebel-Rouser (which rose to 19 in UK charts and 6 in US charts) articulates a defiance that was like nothing heard previously in popular music.”

This book achieves the seemingly impossible by grounding high-level intellectual scholarship and theory within the popular culture of the day, viewed over several generations of technological, artistic, financial, industrial, social, political and cultural change without missing a beat.

It does not talk down to people as deluded “subjects” or “fashion” or “style” “victims,” the mindless “products” of “mass consumerism,” as though “we,” individually and collectively, were not aware of it. Rather, we took what we wanted from it and chucked the rest away when it felt right, as Thatcher found out, and as will Sir Keir if he isn’t careful. 

This book serves to entertain and historicise and materialise popular culture and it does so by drawing on primarily Marxist or Marxisant perspectives, and there are not nearly enough of those around now.