Toby Manning’s history of popular music in its historical context is a rich and rewarding exploration of the politics of music, finds Charles Marriott

‘We are on a road to nowhere, Come on inside’

Popular history of the post-war period is history written by the winners, ‘where all roads lead to neoliberalism’ (p.9). This history, in the words of Francois Hartog, is ‘an invitation for collective amnesia’ (p.11). By stripping out the idea of struggle, and the potential for change, we end up with a sanitised history with music as pure commodity and the masses as the mere temple slaves to the market. In this deep, richly textured book, Manning wants to challenge the history of the winners and the ideas that music is imposed from above and is ‘consumer capitalism writ too large’ (p.5). In its place, we are asked to see music and popular culture as dialectical; a struggle between ‘dominant ideology and popular imaginary, consent and refusal’ (p.5). Music is a form that in Marxist terms is in ‘fluid movement’ (p.5) and offers us a ‘resource of hope for the present, to inspire and incite us to push into the future’ (p.13).

One of the highlights of the book is the periodisation of the chapters; instead of sticking to decades, or longer time periods, each chapter is designed naturally around musical and historical breaks. We have 1953 to 1958, the era of the nuclear family, the nuclear threat and rock’n’roll’s revolt followed by the morbid symptoms of long-1950s cuteness from 1958 to 1964 through to punk, disco and authoritarian pop of 1977 to 1981. These short periods reflect the fluidity of popular culture and history from counterculture to reaction, from revolt to commodification, from utopian to dystopian and from hope to resignation.

This periodisation enables the reader to enjoy the longer perspective of the whole work and dip back into time periods, and musical styles from punk to glam to disco, from rave to rap to grunge. Each period is a rich diet of songs, song lyrics of chart music from the USA and UK that to some may be an overindulgence, but to others will feel like a banquet. Whatever your tastes, your historical, theoretical and musical horizons will be challenged, and your mind will be thinking of lyrics, songs, artists and movements that you would have included. This is a neat trick that will have me returning again and again to this book.

‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom’

In popular history, and the eyes of right-wing politicians and commentators from the late 1970s onwards, the 1950s was the period of lost innocence. It is a period sterilised and stylised in Happy Days and American Graffiti. This collective amnesia is reflected in what happens if you look up Elvis on your streaming service. What you get as the most popular song is the from the waist up, balladeering, ‘sophisticated lethargy’ (p.45) of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ rather than the adversarial, exciting, inciting and inspiring ‘Hound Dog’. The 1950s of this history fetishes ‘order, religion and property’ (p.15) with wholesome images of dad as the suited, bread-winning, company man with mom baking apple pie, which even led Harold MacMillan in 1957 to declare ‘we’ve never had it so good’ (p.15).

As the author argues ‘if everything was so peachy perfect, why did rock’n’roll happen?’ (p.16). Here is a story of the working class of non-professional musicians, across colour line, on independent labels, storming into history to challenge the conformity of segregation and social apartheid, patriarchy and the cult of domesticity and the heavy-handed patrolling of sexuality. The author invites us to think of the unfettered freedom of ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’ of Little Richard, and the ‘all disorientation, all excitement, all sex’ (p.2) of ‘Hound Dog’. The author also invites to think of Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’, where the song’s car culture stands as a mirror to a society where African American car ownership was more utopia than reality, as seen in the 1955 Bus Boycott. Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ sees the singer satirising conservative commentators’ hollow claims that the USA was a level playing field whatever the colour of your skin or your class, whilst ‘School Days’ concludes with the utopian couplet ‘Hail, hail rock and roll/ Deliver me from days of old’ (p.25).

It was not just the music; it was the fashion. No longer buttoned down, smoothed down and suited, the youth were greased up, rolled up and dressed in blue-collar and rustic fabrics like denim and plaid (p.35). The youth presented themselves as objects of envy and desire, challenging the dominant ideology and rejecting class hierarchy (p.39). However, capitalism quickly ‘exploited and then contained rock’n’roll’s anarchic energy’ (p.40) with major labels reasserting entertainment over excitement. Mad Men reflects this era of the late 1950 and early 1960s dramatizing how ‘advertising co-opted 50s discontent into consumerism and, as Thomas Frank argues, “made of alienation a motor for fashion”’ (p.47).

The right’s desire to turn its gaze back to the 1950s as an age of responsibility and order is built on sand. This was also a period of challenge to the right’s certainties on race, gender, class and sexuality. It is there in its music which reminds of the possibilities for the future whilst being an echo of the past. Eddie Cochrane’s ‘Summertime Blues’ still raises a fist to the alienation of work (p.458) by raising a fuss ‘about workin’ all summer just to try to an’ earn a dollar’ and raises a holler about the fact that ‘Everytime I call my baby, to try to get a date, my boss says, no dice, son, you gotta work late’.

‘It’s a competitive world’

The 1980s of Thatcher and Reagan is in popular history the natural endpoint of the failure of social democracy and reveals a collective amnesia about the fact that, according to New Economics Foundation research, 1976 was the peak year of British national happiness, whilst the riches’ share of UK wealth was at its lowest between 1974 and 1976 (pp.202-3). This popularised history sees the 80s as a rejection of socialism, social democracy and the social. In its place, was the individual, privatisation, the corporate and the Yuppie. Think Pretty in Pink, Dynasty and Miami Vice and the privatisation of listening with the Walkman (p.241, p.262).

The same was seen in music; an over the top, enthusiastic sense of positivity and individualism that coerced you to be free. Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ insists we are ‘rising up, straight to the top’ whilst Spandau Ballet monetised everything by commanding us to remember ‘Always believe that you are gold’ (p.241). The protestant work ethic was back and was sexy, with Madonna’s ‘Holiday’ just ‘one day out of life’ as life is work and work is life. Principles were out; as Culture Club sang ‘I am man without conviction’, conformity was in, whilst Belinda Carlisle reminded us that ‘Heaven is a place on Earth’.

Yet within this golden edifice, music and culture were growing in the cracks of the structure. Film saw Blade Runner, Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome and 1984, offering a very different view. Music saw the Jam presenting us with the choice ‘to either cut down on beer or the kid’s new gear’ in ‘A Town Called Malice’ (p.248); The Pogues in their rambling ‘Rum, Sodomy and Lash’ gave us songs of the disposed; Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel gave us ‘The Message’: ‘You’ll grow in the ghetto, living second rate/ And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate’ (p.249). Alienation is clearly expressed in the cold, hard musical landscape of ‘Underpass’ on the dystopian ‘Metamatic’ by John Foxx, which offers a ‘satire of a clinical business environment’ (p.231).

In the USA, Bruce Springsteen gave us the pared back anger of ‘Nebraska’ and the terrible sense of loss of a better world and anger against the treatment of veterans on ‘Born in the USA’. This yearning for a collective, socialised past gives the lie to the shiny, individualised world of the 1980s. Whilst Depeche Mode’s industrial sounds on ‘Everything Counts’ capture alienation and lament the ‘collective loss in individualism’ (p.256) with the chorus of ‘The grabbing hands/ Grab all they can/ All for themselves, after all’.

Whilst the right-wing politicians of the 1980s looked to their golden past of the 1950s, the right wing of today looks to the 1980s. They want to write that history as a history of economic success and individual freedom. Yet beneath this gilded veneer, lies a music and politics of protest from the miners’ strike to Billy Bragg’s ‘Between the Wars’ and Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up that Hill’ (recently brought back to the charts via Stranger Things). Defeats may have been experienced during these eras, but they were also times of possibilities, of change, and of potential. Music has the ‘power to evoke and to inspire desire – feelings, dreams, hopes and that is power’ (p.465). History does not have to repeat itself.

‘Fight the Power’

We are lost in music. It comes at us from everywhere and we don’t listen to it chronologically. It surrounds us, ‘whether in a shop or a hipster café, coming from a phone on a bus or a muscle car on the street, heard in a film soundtrack or on a TikTok’ (p.456). However, the author argues that music does not ‘transcend its historical period’, rather it ‘testifies to its historical period’ (p.457). It offers us collective memory, and a collective memory of hope and the potential of change. Watch and listen to Public Enemy’s equal parts ‘rally, party, and revolution’ (p.462) or the Beloved’s ‘Sweet Harmony’ utopian pledge to ‘come together, right now, oh yeah, in sweet harmony’ or Stormzy’s pledge ‘to find a way/ To another day’ on ‘Blinded by Your Grace, Pt.2’.

This history is a history worth telling and a history worth reading. It gives a detailed voice to dissent and challenges the monochrome history of culture told by neoliberal apologists. Perhaps it needed a greater analysis of rave’s potential as a music and mass movement that threatened individualism, private property and the ‘Hip to be Square’ world view of the 1980s. Perhaps the language should have been more open and less technical, however these are minor quibbles in a great book. You and I might not agree with all the musical choices, or all the analysis, but it will challenge your view and I welcome its voice.