Mixing Pop and Politics

“A much-needed reckoning with the way pop music has soundtracked social change, political conflict and utopian dreaming over the past 70 years. Refusing the conventional opposition between emotional or aesthetic readings of pop and ‘political’ readings, Manning brilliantly illuminates how all three mix together.”
“A monumental analysis of the politics of pop music. Manning brings to his writing a profound knowledge of pop music history and a clear-eyed commitment to the radical possibilities of pop culture. The story he tells is tangled, but ultimately hopeful; pop music always retains the ability to claw its way back to utopia.”
“This excellent, alternative history of pop and rock lucidly and convincingly asserts that politics in music extends beyond the usual suspects - Billy Bragg, The Clash and so on. Mixing Pop And Politics surveys pop history not out of nostalgia for the dead past but as a resource to dare hope for, and achieve, a better future.”
‘This is a landmark work that brings a complex analytical framework to bear on the entire past 70 years of Anglophone pop music history …. it will be a key reference point for politically and sociologically informed cultural criticism for years to come.’
“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 and Oliver Anthony.”

Toby Manning is the author of The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd (2006) and John le Carre and the Cold War (2018). His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, Sight and Sound, Arena, The Face, NME, Select, Q and The Word. He has taught at the University of Birmingham, Brunel and Queen Mary universities, and City Lit College, London. Having grown up in North Wales and lived all over the UK, he now lives in London.

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