Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century
 
Revolutionary
Socialism in the
21st Century

Review | Mixing Pop and Politics

Grace Healy

Grace Healy reviews Mixing Pop and Politics by Toby Manning, a Marxist history of popular music that analyses the relationship between society’s economic base and its cultural superstructure.

Music is, in Marxist terms, dialectical, a push and pull between product and affect, dominant ideology and popular imaginary, consent and refusal.

Toby Manning’s Mixing Pop and Politics is an original, rigorously-researched, dense yet accessible Marxist history of the chart music of Britain and the United States from 1953-2023. It is a refreshing counter-narrative to the proliferation of ‘idealist’ approaches to popular music history currently found in cultural studies and the social sciences. 

In rejecting an aesthetic and affective approach to music analysis, Manning reveals music’s dialectical relationship to rebellion and repression, documenting the myriad ways in which its ‘adversarial energy’ continues to emerge, despite capitalism’s unrelenting attempts at containment. This materialist approach focuses on music’s relationship to the social and economic base from which it emerges, examining the ways in which the victories and defeats of the alienated within each decade play out. It rejects the all-encompassing postmodern narrative that capitalism swallows all of  music’s ‘refusal’, while acknowledging the real and often successful attempts at co-option by the music industry. He expertly weaves together a multitude of Marxist thinkers – Mark Fisher’s ‘hauntology’, Raymond Williams’ ‘structures of feeling’, Stuart Hall’s notion of popular music as the site of class struggle, Herbert Marcuse’s advocation of ‘fantasy’, amongst others – offering hope, ‘to inspire and incite us to push our way into the future’. Manning demonstrates that just because something is a product of capitalism, it doesn’t mean it can’t be directly in opposition to the dominant culture, and it almost always tells us something about dominant neoliberal capitalist ideology.

Beginning in the 1950s, setting the scene with an overview of Fordism, Manning reveals the contradictions within the era that gave rise to rock ‘n’ roll: the 1950s is a decade looked back on nostalgically by conservatives as one of order, tradition, and morality, yet the stability enjoyed by many during this time was founded on a socialist system. The emergence of rock ‘n’ roll is proof in itself that the reality of the 50s is far from the peaceful image now etched into popular imagination. Despite its socialist foundations, the New Left critiqued the Fordist era for  its suppression of human meaning, desire, and agency. For Manning, this makes rock ‘n’ roll not simply a product of, but a protest against  this stifling ideology. The association of youth, rebellion and the ‘return of the repressed’ (a concept drawn from Freud which recurs throughout the book) begins here. Conservatives were alarmed and threatened by those desires captured by rock ‘n’ roll which couldn’t be contained in the wider, dominant culture: overt sexuality, the refusal of work, the gradual dissolution of racial segregation, and collective working-class consciousness.

Manning guides us through the 1960s, when cultural reverberations were originally a celebration of Fordism’s success, but slowly morphed into an expression of its contradictions and broken promises. The dominant culture in the 1960s was one of utilitarianism, liberalism and reformism, and the most exciting music at the time embodied their opposites: utopianism, radicalism and revolution. Drawing on Stuart Hall, Manning argues that it is from within the political polarisations of this decade that neoliberalism began to emerge. The Right took the notion of ‘individual liberation’ espoused by the Left and perverted its meaning, grounding it instead in economic terms. Manning’s summary of this decade is worth quoting in full here:

Universal love, in our cynical world, is the facet of the 60s most prone to mockery, the concept of ‘kinship’ having become biological rather than moral, with duty performed in the name of the father rather than the name of all. Yet the counterculture’s veneration of love, its collectivity and solidarity are still tangible in the 60s’ sounds and visions, in its forms and fabrics, which represent the enduring remnants of the era’s attempt to attain utopia in the here and now.

The 1970s begin with nostalgia for the 1950s, wiping the 1960s from collective consciousness. But for Manning, all hope is not lost, and this decade’s ‘industrial unrest, feminist militancy, and racial refusal is symbiotic with its musical efflorescence – an era bursting with ideas and initiatives from alternative technology to collective squats, workers’ occupations to concept albums’. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, he rescues glam-rock from its depoliticisation by writers such as Simon Reynolds, and conceptualises it instead as not a ‘retreat from the present’ but an ‘aggressive repossession’ of it. Neoliberal economic reforms lay the foundations for ‘high-80s positivity’, and whilst much of the chart music during this time can be read as a product of the individualism endorsed by Thatcher and Reagan, for Manning, ‘there is […] a vein of 80s songs that venerate the counterculture, and that, rather than evincing the enervated stasis we’ve been seeing convey a recurring sense of motion in their melancholia, and thus hope’.

The contradictions of capitalism continue to simmer beneath the surface of the 1990s: Blair and Clinton were ‘supposed to resolve neoliberalism’s contradictions, to combine social liberalism with economic liberalism, and realise personal freedom through the free market’. For Manning, this union, whilst more inclusive, ‘normalised the notion of human society as a competitive and thus hostile environment’. The music produced throughout this decade is reflective of this tension, both fun (Spice Girls) and serious (Radiohead).

This review barely scratches the surface of the complex relations between the economic base and cultural superstructure that Manning captures throughout Mixing Pop and Politics. He has undertaken an impressive amount of research into both the chart music itself and the Marxist thinkers from which he draws his argument, providing a detailed and insightful overview of the history of popular music from 1953-2023. Whilst at times the writing is difficult to follow due to the formatting (bracketed dates and chart positions are included in every other line, occasionally disrupting the flow of the text) Manning’s command of Marxist theory and palpable love for popular music are interlaced skilfully to produce a truly original history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music is published by Repeater Books.

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