Book Review: Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music by Toby Manning

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion

I’m a simple person. I see Marxist and I see music and straight away I’m interested, as a socialist who is obsessed with classic rock. I’ve written blog posts about the topic before, musing about anti-war songs and protest songs and 60s and 70s music with socialist themes, and writing deep dive blog posts about socialist classic rock musicians of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Alongside my LGBT themed posts, these are among my most popular blog posts. So you know when I saw that there was an opportunity to review a book that combines these two interesting topics, I had to jump on it and share my thoughts.

About the author:

Toby Manning is a writer who has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the Open University, so as you can expect, this book is going to be an academic one, so that means it won’t be easy-breezy and it might feel dry at times. He is based in London and has written for music magazines such as Q, Mojo, and NME since the 90s. He has also written The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd.

About the book:

The book takes its name from a lyric from the Billy Bragg song “Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards”. Billy Bragg is a folk punk musician and an outspoken socialist and many of his songs have socialist themes, so with that, those songs aren’t going to be commercially successful thanks to the media being owned by billionaires and socialist ideas going against their interests as well as the interests of advertisers. Rather than this being a book about leftist musicians (that would be an incredibly short book because who would be in there? Not a lot of musicians.

Mixing Pop and Politics is an overview of popular music from a Marxist perspective. It’s not a book limited to classic rock, but there are chapters about the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. For our purposes here, I’m only going to talk about those sections because anything after classic rock isn’t really relevant to the blog. When Toby Manning says popular music, he’s talking about music that charted. If it didn’t chart, it’s not going to be talked about and I think it’s a real shame because there are so many great songs to talk about that didn’t chart or weren’t released as singles, but I get why he chose to write the book this way. This is about looking at popular songs from the 50s to today through a leftist lens.

My take:

I don’t consider myself a Marxist, even though I have many points of agreement with Marxists. I consider myself a mix of socialist, libertarian, and populist. The YouTubers I’d say I’m most similar to politically would probably be The Amazing Atheist and Shoe0nHead. I’m absolutely not a communist, so there were definitely points where I’d disagree with the book, but overall I nodded my head a lot and agreed a lot with the text, although I’m not sure if I agree with the author calling JFK right wing.

I appreciate that this book isn’t Americanocentric, the author is British so it’s going to be very British focussed, but it’s not like American music is ignored, it’s discussed a lot in this book. I love how there are a lot of song lyrics in the book to contextualise the points he’s talking about.

Overall, it’s a well-organised book. I like that the chapters are divided by eras and I love how they take their titles from song lyrics. And within each chapter, songs are discussed together based on the sound or the theme. Lots of connections are made between songs and I love how the organisation of the book gets me thinking of these songs in a new way. The chapters are thankfully not divided into decades, because that would be way too long.Instead, they’re divided into chunks of about five years give or take a couple of years: 1953-58 (early rock and roll), 1958-64 (golden oldies and long 50s), 1964-68 (the beat music boom, folk rock, soul music, and psychedelic rock), 1968-1971 (psychedelic soul, hippies, protest music), 1971-74 (glam rock), 1974-77 (disco, soft rock), 1977-81 (punk rock and disco), 1982-87 (new wave), 1988-92 (hip hop and grunge), 1993-2001 (Britpop, boy bands, hip hop), 2001-07 (pop music?), 2008-15 (music from the recession), 2015-2020 (recent years). If you liked how Questlove’s Hip-Hop Is History book is organised, you’ll like how this book is organised. Overall I think the information in the book is pretty comprehensive and I don’t think there’s too many gaps. The author is clearly knowledgeable and passionate about music and politics.

Admittedly, I don’t know much about newer music, like from the 21st century, but I can say that all of the political commentary about that time, a time I’ve grown up in and currently live in, it’s too close to home. I’m not sure though if I would say that there’s much political about most 2000s pop music. Sometimes art is just art and that’s it. Not everything has a message.

This book definitely isn’t for a general audience, but rather more for music loving leftist politics nerds who are all like “read theory” and university students looking for scholarly sources on their music and politics essays. If you’re not familiar with leftist terminology and academic vocabulary, this will be a hard read for you. If you’re conservative, liberal, or centrist, I don’t think you will like this book because it is really political. I wouldn’t say this is essential reading for all classic rock fans, but I’d say it’s a good read for academics who like classic rock and I think it will help a lot of students with essays and school projects on leftist politics and messages in music. It’s thought-provoking, dense, and very long at over 500 pages – this could have easily been broken up into multiple books. It’s like bang, bang, bang: song, how it’s Marxist, rinse and repeat. It’s an excellent book idea. I only wish that the book were more approachable for a general audience, but Marxism isn’t really associated with general audiences, but it could be!

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