Can Music Change the World?
Toby Manning, Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music
Repeater, 568pp, £25.00, ISBN 9781913462673
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Can music change the world? Is it possible to recover elements of a liberated consciousness, one that might lead to emancipatory social praxis, from a cultural repository as deeply enmeshed in capitalism as the pop industry? These are questions that haunted much of leftist aesthetics in the postwar era. Refusing the mainstream procedures of classical harmony, as the Second Vienna School did, had done nothing to inspire a revolutionary awakening in the era of the Great War, but where music was genuinely part of the everyday sensory context of the people, could there be unsuspected potentials lurking within it that might unlock radical collective action?
Toby Manning's hefty survey of pop from 1953 to 2023 squares up to these debates with impressive energy, displaying conversant familiarity with multiform genres from rockabilly, doo-wop and ska to grime, trap, crunk, and many another trend you might find yourself Googling. The approach is chronological, through eras of roughly a half-decade each, framed by sociopolitical epochs as much as stylistic tides in pop. Manning's concern is to illuminate the ways music was eloquent of its times, but also how its own polemical currents, overtly or implicitly, helped produce or sustain the collective consciousness on which a truly radical politics would depend.
The Introduction engages head-on with the predictable objections to an undertaking like this. Manning acknowledges the force of the Frankfurt School critique of the culture industry, refusing the usual dismissal of it as shallow elitism, but insisting correctly that, just because pop is an exemplary capitalist product, it is not entirely bereft of the critical apparatus by which it might energise its consumers, even as they contribute to its global profits. It is undialectical to regard popular culture as being entirely imposed from above, even if much of it is.
A more neuralgic issue altogether, though, arises from the bedrock of Marxist theory. Rehearsing the various flurries that pop phenomena have created over the years — suggestive gyrations, disrespect for elders, noise, obscenity, long hair, drugs, raves in the countryside, F-words, N-words, C-words, and back to gyrations — it is all very well to be reminded of how incendiary it all seemed at the time, but that's just historicism. What matters is historical materialism, the intangible force-fields that make yesterday's apoplexies the nostalgic pabulum of Friday nights on BBC4. Looking to the past, Manning argues, is not necessarily a matter of conservative retrenchment, but can be a way of recovering hope from the dynamism of earlier eras. This is true enough, but it isn't the way this book is structured. From 'Hound Dog' (1956) to the 'aggressively competitive individualism' of Drake's 'Slime You Out' (2023), the focus is always on how songs were received at the time. The reverberations of explosive events die away, which does not preclude their having different resonances among successive generations, but Manning is concerned to set everything in its primary context.
To a truly dialectical approach, the pastness of the past is the least interesting thing about it. What is more productive is how the past itself can be changed in light of subsequent events, not so as to arouse another liberal Orwellian threnody about rewriting history, but because history itself has altered its meaning while preserving it. Manning is too agile a thinker not to acknowledge the impress of this, but there are lapses into more static temporal thinking here nonetheless. While considering the 1960s counterculture, he insists that the later parallax view of the era, in which it has been extensively devalued, is unfair to how it felt at the time. But there is no stopping the remorseless verdicts of historical convulsion. The fact that it took until the 1980s, as Manning points out, before John Lennon was recognised as a raging hypocrite doesn't mean that he wasn't already one when he wrote 'Imagine' (1971).
Despite these theoretical lapses, this book is teeming with smart, provocative and daring analyses of the hundreds of songs that drift by, some in a paragraph, many in half a sentence. Captured in the snatches of lyric that are all that copyright restrictions permit, but with acidulating textual gloss, stinging wit and impressive technical acuity, Manning raps out insights on every page. The strange morbid era in song that intervened between the end of rock-and-roll and the onset of folk and psychedelia, which produced celebrations of the death drive in such hits as 'Johnny Remember Me', 'Blue Velvet' and 'Leader of the Pack', is reinterpreted here as 'passive protest, an existential refusal of what is‘. On a more upbeat note, the triumphant 'Ha!' in Nancy Sinatra's 'These Boots Are Made for Walking' is 'one of the peak moments in the history of pop', a pendant thought to Walter Benjamin's 'The eternal is far more the ruffle on a dress than the history of an idea'. Their roots in heavy rock made Queen in the 1970s a symptom of vile authoritarianism ('No time for losers. . .’ Fuck you right back, Fred.) Eminem is the musical equivalent of South Park. 'Every Breath You Take' is a 'stalker soliloquy that's become a wedding song'.
Manning does not shy away from the risk of ridicule in finding subversive grit in the most inauspicious or whimsical or hopeless places: 'Downtown', 'Eve of Destruction', 'Lola', 'Metal Guru', Bastille's 'Pompeii', Rihanna's 'We Found Love'. Sometimes the detailed discernment of a negative judgment seems lacking. The tired slur on Joy Division's 'flirtation' with fascism is compounded by wrongly evoking German Expressionism as something to do with the Nazis. To hear 'more shame than liberation' in the Pet Shop Boys' ‘It's A Sin’ is to have struck on the tin ear in reaching for the real one. The James hit 'Sit Down' is derogated for celebrating the passivity that takes over when you can no longer stand up, overlooking the radical strategic force of sit-ins, sit-down protests, Benjamin's image of revolution as slamming on the historical brakes. On that last point, there is a perceptive section on the intoxicated mood that accompanied the post-crash austerity era of 2007-15. Drink and drugs not just as desperation, or even as witless hedonism, but as flaming defiance again. 'Go out and smash it,' advise Black Eyed Peas on 'I Gotta Feeling'. 'We can do this until we pass out,' adds Tinie Tempah.
Throughout the book, Manning emphasises the collectivity to which pop has consistently appealed ever since it turned tribal in the early 1950s. This leads him into occasional misperceptions such as the familiar denigration of Leonard Cohen as a bedsit tragedian, as though songs from a room could only ever be solipsistic, but does afford sustained considerations on the way pop has tried to dissolve the social boundaries that have cheapened and bracketed the lives of women, Black people and sexual minorities. It's surprising to keep seeing the epithet 'homoerotic' in discussing the dance moves of Elvis, or the explosion of formation dancing in 1980s videos (nothing has ever been identified as 'heteroerotic'), but the impulse to emancipation is anyway seen as unifying rather than divisive. Togetherness itself may not be entirely the virtue that one hopes to find – it fuelled the March on Rome, for example – but in any case, the injunction that we should all love each other, which Manning identifies as the pearl in the oyster of the Woodstock era, is only just as radical as when it was articulated by Christianity two thousand years earlier.
There is a liberal scattering of factual errors, which it would be uncomradely to enumerate, and some conversations we might productively have under 'Any Other Business'. 'Love Hangover' is not 'the sexiest she [Diana Ross] would ever get'. Let me play you her recording of 'Muscles', written for her by Michael Jackson. It doesn't matter whether the video to 'Two Tribes', in portraying Chernenko as equally culpable to Reagan, is unfair to the USSR; it was a violent refusal of the sclerosis of the Cold War. There are only three lions on my shirt, not four. At the close, though, Manning invites us to look (again) at the moment in 'Lovers Rock', one of Steve McQueen's suite of films about the lives of London Black communities, Small Axe (2020). At a house party in Notting Hill in 1980, the DJ plays the Janet Kay hit, 'Silly Games'. Eventually, he turns it off, and everybody takes up the singing of the tune themselves, making the point that even when we don't hear it in the present moment, music can precipitate solidarity between us in the face of social coldness, and against the political denigration to which our social identities expose us.
The title of Manning's study is derived from a song on Billy Bragg's 1988 album, Workers Playtime. 'Waiting for the Great Leap Forward' is an elegy for the permanently exploded hopes of the radical left, the doomed initiatives and flaccid simulacra of political subversion that too often seem, in their belated impotence, better than nothing. 'Mixing pop and politics, he asks me what the use is / I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses.' There is no use, we are almost tempted to conclude. But in the very belittlement of the failed endeavour, the punk fanzines and the urban-guerrilla forage caps at Glasto, quite as much as the flat pamphlet and the boring meeting, lies the insistence — and you don't want to put it this way, because it sounds like comfort calling late, disintegrating into its crumbs — that something about it refuses to be passed over. It Is What It Is, 'the mantra of contemporary politics,' as Manning observes, is not enough. What it is is a nightmare. It ought to be other. Now pop a cap, and dance with me.
Toby Manning's hefty survey of pop from 1953 to 2023 squares up to these debates with impressive energy, displaying conversant familiarity with multiform genres from rockabilly, doo-wop and ska to grime, trap, crunk, and many another trend you might find yourself Googling. The approach is chronological, through eras of roughly a half-decade each, framed by sociopolitical epochs as much as stylistic tides in pop. Manning's concern is to illuminate the ways music was eloquent of its times, but also how its own polemical currents, overtly or implicitly, helped produce or sustain the collective consciousness on which a truly radical politics would depend.
The Introduction engages head-on with the predictable objections to an undertaking like this. Manning acknowledges the force of the Frankfurt School critique of the culture industry, refusing the usual dismissal of it as shallow elitism, but insisting correctly that, just because pop is an exemplary capitalist product, it is not entirely bereft of the critical apparatus by which it might energise its consumers, even as they contribute to its global profits. It is undialectical to regard popular culture as being entirely imposed from above, even if much of it is.
A more neuralgic issue altogether, though, arises from the bedrock of Marxist theory. Rehearsing the various flurries that pop phenomena have created over the years — suggestive gyrations, disrespect for elders, noise, obscenity, long hair, drugs, raves in the countryside, F-words, N-words, C-words, and back to gyrations — it is all very well to be reminded of how incendiary it all seemed at the time, but that's just historicism. What matters is historical materialism, the intangible force-fields that make yesterday's apoplexies the nostalgic pabulum of Friday nights on BBC4. Looking to the past, Manning argues, is not necessarily a matter of conservative retrenchment, but can be a way of recovering hope from the dynamism of earlier eras. This is true enough, but it isn't the way this book is structured. From 'Hound Dog' (1956) to the 'aggressively competitive individualism' of Drake's 'Slime You Out' (2023), the focus is always on how songs were received at the time. The reverberations of explosive events die away, which does not preclude their having different resonances among successive generations, but Manning is concerned to set everything in its primary context.
To a truly dialectical approach, the pastness of the past is the least interesting thing about it. What is more productive is how the past itself can be changed in light of subsequent events, not so as to arouse another liberal Orwellian threnody about rewriting history, but because history itself has altered its meaning while preserving it. Manning is too agile a thinker not to acknowledge the impress of this, but there are lapses into more static temporal thinking here nonetheless. While considering the 1960s counterculture, he insists that the later parallax view of the era, in which it has been extensively devalued, is unfair to how it felt at the time. But there is no stopping the remorseless verdicts of historical convulsion. The fact that it took until the 1980s, as Manning points out, before John Lennon was recognised as a raging hypocrite doesn't mean that he wasn't already one when he wrote 'Imagine' (1971).
Despite these theoretical lapses, this book is teeming with smart, provocative and daring analyses of the hundreds of songs that drift by, some in a paragraph, many in half a sentence. Captured in the snatches of lyric that are all that copyright restrictions permit, but with acidulating textual gloss, stinging wit and impressive technical acuity, Manning raps out insights on every page. The strange morbid era in song that intervened between the end of rock-and-roll and the onset of folk and psychedelia, which produced celebrations of the death drive in such hits as 'Johnny Remember Me', 'Blue Velvet' and 'Leader of the Pack', is reinterpreted here as 'passive protest, an existential refusal of what is‘. On a more upbeat note, the triumphant 'Ha!' in Nancy Sinatra's 'These Boots Are Made for Walking' is 'one of the peak moments in the history of pop', a pendant thought to Walter Benjamin's 'The eternal is far more the ruffle on a dress than the history of an idea'. Their roots in heavy rock made Queen in the 1970s a symptom of vile authoritarianism ('No time for losers. . .’ Fuck you right back, Fred.) Eminem is the musical equivalent of South Park. 'Every Breath You Take' is a 'stalker soliloquy that's become a wedding song'.
Manning does not shy away from the risk of ridicule in finding subversive grit in the most inauspicious or whimsical or hopeless places: 'Downtown', 'Eve of Destruction', 'Lola', 'Metal Guru', Bastille's 'Pompeii', Rihanna's 'We Found Love'. Sometimes the detailed discernment of a negative judgment seems lacking. The tired slur on Joy Division's 'flirtation' with fascism is compounded by wrongly evoking German Expressionism as something to do with the Nazis. To hear 'more shame than liberation' in the Pet Shop Boys' ‘It's A Sin’ is to have struck on the tin ear in reaching for the real one. The James hit 'Sit Down' is derogated for celebrating the passivity that takes over when you can no longer stand up, overlooking the radical strategic force of sit-ins, sit-down protests, Benjamin's image of revolution as slamming on the historical brakes. On that last point, there is a perceptive section on the intoxicated mood that accompanied the post-crash austerity era of 2007-15. Drink and drugs not just as desperation, or even as witless hedonism, but as flaming defiance again. 'Go out and smash it,' advise Black Eyed Peas on 'I Gotta Feeling'. 'We can do this until we pass out,' adds Tinie Tempah.
Throughout the book, Manning emphasises the collectivity to which pop has consistently appealed ever since it turned tribal in the early 1950s. This leads him into occasional misperceptions such as the familiar denigration of Leonard Cohen as a bedsit tragedian, as though songs from a room could only ever be solipsistic, but does afford sustained considerations on the way pop has tried to dissolve the social boundaries that have cheapened and bracketed the lives of women, Black people and sexual minorities. It's surprising to keep seeing the epithet 'homoerotic' in discussing the dance moves of Elvis, or the explosion of formation dancing in 1980s videos (nothing has ever been identified as 'heteroerotic'), but the impulse to emancipation is anyway seen as unifying rather than divisive. Togetherness itself may not be entirely the virtue that one hopes to find – it fuelled the March on Rome, for example – but in any case, the injunction that we should all love each other, which Manning identifies as the pearl in the oyster of the Woodstock era, is only just as radical as when it was articulated by Christianity two thousand years earlier.
There is a liberal scattering of factual errors, which it would be uncomradely to enumerate, and some conversations we might productively have under 'Any Other Business'. 'Love Hangover' is not 'the sexiest she [Diana Ross] would ever get'. Let me play you her recording of 'Muscles', written for her by Michael Jackson. It doesn't matter whether the video to 'Two Tribes', in portraying Chernenko as equally culpable to Reagan, is unfair to the USSR; it was a violent refusal of the sclerosis of the Cold War. There are only three lions on my shirt, not four. At the close, though, Manning invites us to look (again) at the moment in 'Lovers Rock', one of Steve McQueen's suite of films about the lives of London Black communities, Small Axe (2020). At a house party in Notting Hill in 1980, the DJ plays the Janet Kay hit, 'Silly Games'. Eventually, he turns it off, and everybody takes up the singing of the tune themselves, making the point that even when we don't hear it in the present moment, music can precipitate solidarity between us in the face of social coldness, and against the political denigration to which our social identities expose us.
The title of Manning's study is derived from a song on Billy Bragg's 1988 album, Workers Playtime. 'Waiting for the Great Leap Forward' is an elegy for the permanently exploded hopes of the radical left, the doomed initiatives and flaccid simulacra of political subversion that too often seem, in their belated impotence, better than nothing. 'Mixing pop and politics, he asks me what the use is / I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses.' There is no use, we are almost tempted to conclude. But in the very belittlement of the failed endeavour, the punk fanzines and the urban-guerrilla forage caps at Glasto, quite as much as the flat pamphlet and the boring meeting, lies the insistence — and you don't want to put it this way, because it sounds like comfort calling late, disintegrating into its crumbs — that something about it refuses to be passed over. It Is What It Is, 'the mantra of contemporary politics,' as Manning observes, is not enough. What it is is a nightmare. It ought to be other. Now pop a cap, and dance with me.