A new book by Toby Manning argues that the best music of the past 60 years has often reflected, foreshadowed or even embraced the turmoil and radicalism of its time.
Toby Manning mounts arguably the landmark first attempt to present an accessible and characterful Marxist overview of popular music.
TRIBUNE
Since at least as far back as Theodor Adorno famously denounced the ‘mechanical soullessness’ of interwar jazz, the relationship between Marxism and pop music has been rather vexed. While plenty of card-carrying Marxists have dabbled in music writing over the last few decades (see especially Perry Anderson’s exquisitely over-written Sixties critiques of the Beatles and Stones under his ‘Richard Merton’ alias), fully crossing the Rubicon into the ambiguous world of ‘cultural studies’ has often been seen as something Really Serious Marxists shouldn’t do.
Toby Manning’s Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music is a nice corrective to this strain of leftist elitism-purism. An accessible, characterful popular history rather than a dry definitional textbook, Manning’s study is surely the first really cogent attempt to present a birdseye-view Marxist chronology of pop music from the time of Lonnie Donegan to our present tense of Olivia Rodrigo, Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony. In Manning’s telling, pop music’s ‘dialectic of repression and refusal charts and channels the political struggles of the last three-quarters of a century’ — and it is this fundamental binary his book seeks to explore and elucidate.
What emerges from this premise is an epic story of musical innovation set against a backdrop of political turbulence. Central to the narrative is the familiar but enduringly ambiguous notion of counterculture, a term popularised by Theodor Roszak’s seminal 1969 study The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. For Manning, counterculture is the means by which pop music pulled away from its origins in the consumeristic, Fordist 1950s to become — from the Sixties on — a radical, utopian, often downright revolutionary mode that was at bottom ‘expressive of Fordism’s discontents’.
A useful counterblast to the revisionist ‘hippyphobic’ tendency which views the Sixties paroxysm as an ineffectual boomer decadence, Manning’s history rightly asserts that the counterculture was in fact a nexus for almost the most politically vital developments of the period (and indeed the ensuing decades). As he skillfully shows, counterculture was the glue which held together tendencies as disparate as Black Power, second-wave feminism, the burgeoning gay rights movement and anti-Vietnam protestors. For all that it has been bowdlerised and packaged as nostalgia in recent years, Manning suggests, the Sixties counterculture is ultimately the point of origin for much of the anti-capitalist radicalism of the last half-century (if not necessarily Marxist thinking and activism proper), up to and including the recent activities of what has been termed Generation Left.
The million-dollar question in all of this — and one Manning keeps returning to — is how pop music relates to the overtly political side of the so-called New Left and its offshoots. Rather than an aloof theoretical analysis of post-Fifties pop, much of Mixing Pop and Politics is an impassioned defence of the idea that the best music of the last half-century has both foreshadowed and embodied the culture (in the broadest sense) of political radicalism it developed in tandem with. Thus, psychedelia is ‘the musical manifestation of what Marcuse heralded as “a world that could be free”’, glam rock ‘the cultural logic of the era’s industrial militancy’ and Billy Bragg’s 1985 hit ‘Between the Wars’ ‘a secular hymn to the social contract between citizen and state which was concurrently being crushed in the coalfields.’
If such statements seem to see a world in a grain of sand, they do so in the best possible sense. A salient problem for anyone trying to read pop music politically is how to derive sustained analysis from the relatively fleeting glimpses of historical content we find in the radically sensuous, often consciously ephemeral form that is the three- or four-minute pop song. But throughout Mixing Pop and Politics Manning is always subtle in the claims he makes for the interplay between music and history.
Rather than falling back on the overused, mostly rather specious notion of the ‘protest song’ (as certain clumsy centrist commentators have done this century), his approach is more nuanced in showing how wider historical movements have shaped the cultural life of pop songwriters and performers — and, occasionally and momentously, found expression in their sighing lyric asides and more pointed political declarations.
Whether he is detecting the ‘utopian’ assertions of the arrangement of ELO’s ‘Livin Thing’ or finding echoes of disaster capitalism in Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’, Manning is unfailingly meticulous and imaginative in showing how pop and politics have — and have not — interacted over the last 70 years. But over and above such finer points, he is also very good on how we should and should not look back on the ‘Fordist’ period of pop from a twenty-first-century present which often struggles to free itself from apolitical nostalgia for this apparent musical golden age.
As he puts it at one point, ‘we can immerse ourselves in the past as a site of escape — as a comforter or pacifier — or we can return to the past as a resource of hope, grounded in its vision of the future. In choosing between an enervated or an energised hauntology, therefore, we can either embrace the imposition of politicised limits, or we can reject them.’ Leftists following in the trail set by this powerful, pioneering text would do well to heed this vital message.
Since at least as far back as Theodor Adorno famously denounced the ‘mechanical soullessness’ of interwar jazz, the relationship between Marxism and pop music has been rather vexed. While plenty of card-carrying Marxists have dabbled in music writing over the last few decades (see especially Perry Anderson’s exquisitely over-written Sixties critiques of the Beatles and Stones under his ‘Richard Merton’ alias), fully crossing the Rubicon into the ambiguous world of ‘cultural studies’ has often been seen as something Really Serious Marxists shouldn’t do.
Toby Manning’s Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music is a nice corrective to this strain of leftist elitism-purism. An accessible, characterful popular history rather than a dry definitional textbook, Manning’s study is surely the first really cogent attempt to present a birdseye-view Marxist chronology of pop music from the time of Lonnie Donegan to our present tense of Olivia Rodrigo, Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony. In Manning’s telling, pop music’s ‘dialectic of repression and refusal charts and channels the political struggles of the last three-quarters of a century’ — and it is this fundamental binary his book seeks to explore and elucidate.
What emerges from this premise is an epic story of musical innovation set against a backdrop of political turbulence. Central to the narrative is the familiar but enduringly ambiguous notion of counterculture, a term popularised by Theodor Roszak’s seminal 1969 study The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. For Manning, counterculture is the means by which pop music pulled away from its origins in the consumeristic, Fordist 1950s to become — from the Sixties on — a radical, utopian, often downright revolutionary mode that was at bottom ‘expressive of Fordism’s discontents’.
A useful counterblast to the revisionist ‘hippyphobic’ tendency which views the Sixties paroxysm as an ineffectual boomer decadence, Manning’s history rightly asserts that the counterculture was in fact a nexus for almost the most politically vital developments of the period (and indeed the ensuing decades). As he skillfully shows, counterculture was the glue which held together tendencies as disparate as Black Power, second-wave feminism, the burgeoning gay rights movement and anti-Vietnam protestors. For all that it has been bowdlerised and packaged as nostalgia in recent years, Manning suggests, the Sixties counterculture is ultimately the point of origin for much of the anti-capitalist radicalism of the last half-century (if not necessarily Marxist thinking and activism proper), up to and including the recent activities of what has been termed Generation Left.
The million-dollar question in all of this — and one Manning keeps returning to — is how pop music relates to the overtly political side of the so-called New Left and its offshoots. Rather than an aloof theoretical analysis of post-Fifties pop, much of Mixing Pop and Politics is an impassioned defence of the idea that the best music of the last half-century has both foreshadowed and embodied the culture (in the broadest sense) of political radicalism it developed in tandem with. Thus, psychedelia is ‘the musical manifestation of what Marcuse heralded as “a world that could be free”’, glam rock ‘the cultural logic of the era’s industrial militancy’ and Billy Bragg’s 1985 hit ‘Between the Wars’ ‘a secular hymn to the social contract between citizen and state which was concurrently being crushed in the coalfields.’
If such statements seem to see a world in a grain of sand, they do so in the best possible sense. A salient problem for anyone trying to read pop music politically is how to derive sustained analysis from the relatively fleeting glimpses of historical content we find in the radically sensuous, often consciously ephemeral form that is the three- or four-minute pop song. But throughout Mixing Pop and Politics Manning is always subtle in the claims he makes for the interplay between music and history.
Rather than falling back on the overused, mostly rather specious notion of the ‘protest song’ (as certain clumsy centrist commentators have done this century), his approach is more nuanced in showing how wider historical movements have shaped the cultural life of pop songwriters and performers — and, occasionally and momentously, found expression in their sighing lyric asides and more pointed political declarations.
Whether he is detecting the ‘utopian’ assertions of the arrangement of ELO’s ‘Livin Thing’ or finding echoes of disaster capitalism in Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’, Manning is unfailingly meticulous and imaginative in showing how pop and politics have — and have not — interacted over the last 70 years. But over and above such finer points, he is also very good on how we should and should not look back on the ‘Fordist’ period of pop from a twenty-first-century present which often struggles to free itself from apolitical nostalgia for this apparent musical golden age.
As he puts it at one point, ‘we can immerse ourselves in the past as a site of escape — as a comforter or pacifier — or we can return to the past as a resource of hope, grounded in its vision of the future. In choosing between an enervated or an energised hauntology, therefore, we can either embrace the imposition of politicised limits, or we can reject them.’ Leftists following in the trail set by this powerful, pioneering text would do well to heed this vital message.
About the Author
Alex Niven is a writer, editor, and lecturer in English at Newcastle University. His books include Folk Opposition, Definitely Maybe 33 1/3, and New Model Island.
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