Toby Manning, "Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music" (Repeater, 2024)
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Welcome to another episode of the New Books Network. I am your host, LaToya Johnson, and I am here with author Toby Manning to discuss his recently published book, Mixing Pop and Politics, A Marxist History of Popular Music. Thank you for being here with me, Toby. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, so Mixing Pop and Politics explores the role in 20th century popular music, specifically U.S. and U.K.-based pop music, and how it shapes our social fabric. How did the work come about, and what inspired you to frame the history of popular music through a Marxist lens? Okay, um...

I think it was just that, you know, I've been a huge music fan all my life. I've been a music critic. You know, I've sat in Jay-Z's limo. You know, I've hung out with Amy Winehouse. It's just, you know, that's like, so I had that all in my veins. But I'd only ever really thought about it sort of aesthetically and sort of biographically.

you know, just like, what's this sound like? Who are the people that make this thing? Like, you know,

And it was just only as I became increasingly involved in activism and started to think more, to stand back from the world. I was also teaching literature and I was teaching a lot of theory. So, you know, I was in universities. I was constantly standing back and kind of looking at what's going on with a sort of sharper eye. And I thought, you know what? I've never done this to music. Why? You know, it's like, what would happen? What would happen if? You know, so that's what it was really.

And so in the book, you described rock and roll as this emergent culture that was disrupted by Fordist conformity. Can you talk a bit about Fordism, what it what it meant then and what it means now and its relationship with pop music? Yeah, well, it's sort of it's sort of bipartite in a way in the sense.

Fordism as most commonly used is like a factory system. So it's an assembly line production for mass produced for a mass public. And that is pretty much what popular music became. It was a process, but by the 50s, that was in full effect.

Now, I extend that to be Fordism to cover what is sometimes also referred to as social democracy or welfare capitalism or more likely in America, maybe even the New Deal.

So just the system whereby the sort of the negative effects of capitalism, which obviously America experienced, particularly, you know, graphically in the Great Depression, where the negative effects of capitalism are kind of offset by the by sort of by government control. Yeah.

So I was seeing that coming into full effect again by the 1950s, that system of governance and industry working side by side, and music is produced both according to those criteria, but that also reflects that system as well that variously might...

discuss or uh i don't know sometimes promote or uh you know rebel against or talk back to that system somewhere i very much see rock and roll rock and roll is full of songs complaining about how exhausted people are from work and how much they're looking forward to the weekend how this sort of system is sort of grinding them down you know that you know i've got some money in my jeans i'm sure gonna spend it right that's eddie cochran you know and

Speaking of capitalism, the book does mention how pop music is a product of capitalism. And so I would like to know, what tensions do you see now and then, also then, between music as a commodity and a medium of rebellion? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

My argument, broadly speaking, is that music pretty much always arises up from the streets, right? Normally from some or other politically and socially marginalized community, whether that is black people, working class people, queers, sometimes women, etc. People who do not have the major stake in the dominant society.

And therefore, that music will necessarily always carry some kind of implicit or explicit controlling message to what is conventionally regarded as sort of the societal norm.

And that is normally expressed in some sort of a new form. So, I mean, the one we've been talking about is rock and roll. Later on, it would be the beat explosion, which you call the British invasion. Later on, you could cite, I don't know, disco is a brilliant example of a form that was not created or even wanted by the record companies or by the capitalist industry that came up through queer, black and Puerto Rican clubs and communities.

So, and then the dynamic of capitalism will be that it will eventually, I mean, you know, it got quicker at this after rock and roll. Rock and roll, it was very, very slow to respond to the sort of potential and capacity for sort of capital extraction. You know, this is the nature of capitalism. It's like, here's something new that's going to appeal to a particular demographic, you know, in 50s, teenagers, whatever, you know, let's capitalize it, you know, and

And that process produces a struggle, right? And what I find fascinating is

is that that struggle produces the most incredible music. You know, that as the sort of jaws of the machine close upon these kind of upstarts, there's like, that is actually where the exciting stuff takes place. Eventually, capitalism wins, right? The corporations will normally crush the life out of these things, right? And it will become sanded down and homogenized and, you know, tamed in some way. But here's the hopeful part.

Every time that happens, something new springs up because ordinary people are incredible. It doesn't matter how repressed, oppressed they are. Back they come, springing up again with some new thing, which is not what the elites were looking for, weren't they? Was there a surprising revelation about the intersection of music and politics that you uncovered during your research and writing process?

I mean, I don't think I had, for instance, realized the extent to which disco was, you know, very much a sort of street art phenomenon. You know, the way that the record companies, again, were actually very slow because they weren't interested in music that they considered gay or black or Puerto Rican. Again, you know, and it was only like the popularity of these things within clubs that sort of forced their hand.

So I guess that was one thing. I mean, the other revelation to me was more negative, which, you know, and maybe I should have been more aware. But I hadn't fully thought through the ramifications of the whole and the disco backlash. That, you know, where you get that, you know, disco demolition derby in Comerston Park in Chicago, the whole disco sucks movement.

And I hadn't connected that up. So almost immediately, almost overnight, disco kind of, you know, obviously it doesn't happen immediately to us, but there is a sort of recession and a withdrawal for disco. So people like Sheik are essentially out of work. Niall Rodgers has to go off looking for workers to produce it for rock acts, you know. What I hadn't connected that up to was MTV's initial refusal to play black artists' music or black artists' videos.

You know, and to me, that is a kind of long form effect of what was essentially, you know, a racist and a homophobic kind of backlash. You know, I think probably prompted by things like the recession. So people were casting around for who to blame. It's just kind of what happens.

And I also think that had an effect on the emergence of hip hop. I mean, it certainly had an effect on what happened to what I call sort of ghetto funk. That kind of got killed off. You know, R&B as a whole took some time to kind of regroup.

And early hip-hop, all of the hip-hop classics from the sort of golden age, there were hits over here, but you look in the American charts, they didn't figure beyond a specific demographic chart, but they didn't feature in the mainstream billboard of 100s.

So that to me, again, is, you know, I suspect there's some sort of, there's some machinations going on there as well. But it also strikes me as a sort of facet of that kind of repression of black music that was occurring at that time.

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While reading the book, Toby, I was overwhelmed by the wide historical scope of it. There is so much there. And also while reading it, I was watching the Yacht Rock documentary. And I was just wondering, have you seen it yet? And I really, I want to get your perspective on what you thought about it. But were there any chapters or errors that you found particularly challenging to explore?

Again, you know, outside of, you know, the disco and, you know, MTV's history with how they lack the lack of portrayal of black artists outside of Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson took his time to work through as well. But yeah, he was hand-painted eventually. So, yeah.

Okay, so yeah, the period I found the hardest to write about is the, okay, so my experience is that most, because you know, you say this book has this sort of huge scope. Some people would say it's overwhelming, right? Because it's like a massive book and it covers a lot and it's full of detail.

And I think what most people do is they, and I like this, they go straight for a particular chapter or two, which covers normally their kind of, probably their kind of teens and maybe their early 20s. But I go, if I do that with my own book, I find myself in the 90s, right?

And the 90s, so therefore, it should have been like my star chapter. It should have been, here I am in my kind of comfortable space, you know? But it wasn't at all. I really, really struggled with that. And I, why? Why? Because, maybe because I knew it too well, so it was like, what do I leave out? What do I put in? But also just because I was reminded by how much, how many aspects of the 90s I actually really disliked it.

And, you know, so from the sort of revival of, I mean, here we called it the new lad. So it was like this sort of revival of, it was a sort of, there was a sort of anti what was then called political correctness, which was like the first go round for anti-wokeness, right? So there was a sort of backlash to 80s political correctness.

that produced things like sort of lad culture, where kind of like, you know, cheeky, supposedly innocent and harmless sort of sexism became fine, you know, became socially acceptable. And a sort of borderline racism became socially acceptable. There were magazines called things like Asian Babes in that era, you know, and they were mainstream titles kept in high street music. Not bad at all.

And, you know, speaking of faves, I really did gravitate towards the 77 to 82 era with the soft rock where you mentioned the soft rock. And then I was watching the yacht rock documentary at the time.

And at the beginning of the documentary, I think it was a member of Steely Dan who said that they were just writing lyrics, not really connecting any meaning to the lyrics. But then it made me think, what would Toby say about that, considering that pop music has such a political foundation? Do you think that artists really...

There were artists who were just really making music for the pleasure of it, or were they really, was there really an underlying political stance, a socio-political stance under the music, specifically with Salsa Rock?

Yeah, I can answer that because artists will always say that. And that is how they feel and that is how they need to operate. I don't think very many artists think, I'm going to write a political song. And if they do, we can narrow it down to a canon of specific kind of protest songs from, I don't know, the times they are changing to something by Billy Bragg or R.E.M.'s Orange Crush or something. There'll be like Welcome to the Occupation. There'll be something.

There are specific protest songs where somebody obviously said, right, we're going to write a protest song about now. What I think happens more often is that we are all products of our place and time. And we just unconsciously reproduce ideas or are in dialogue with the sort of ideas and social currents of our particular era.

But I have to say, when it comes to someone as thoughtful, satirical, and spiky as Steely Dan, I do not think that they are, like, not aware. They were not aware of the things that they were saying, commenting. I think they deliberately...

that made it abstract and difficult to pin down precisely because that was the way they rolled that they had fun with that. You had a lot of fun with that, but you know, whether they're depicting like, you know, sort of self-made tycoons in, in, in kids Charlemagne or like, uh, I talk a lot about Haitian divorce, which, you know, has this little sort of subtle kind of, um,

you know, underpinning about sort of American imperialism going all the way through it. I would say, you know, it's always there. You know, I think Silly Dan were very aware. So I'm not sure if they necessarily sat down with a particular agenda, but they kind of, you know, they were definitely, you know, watching the news and the culture and the world around them with a very, very sharp eye.

What message would you like readers to take from Mixing Pop in politics? Like once we're done reading it, what do you hope that stays with us?

Optimism, I would say. Hope and optimism. Because that thing that I said near the beginning of it's the business of capitalism and I'd say it's the business of the capitalist system to kind of keep people or musicians or genres down essentially, to keep them under control.

But the hopeful thing is that they keep escaping that control and reasserting their own voices and their own vision. So I think that I tried to, sometimes it was very challenging to hold on to that hope, but I worked quite hard at kind of always trying to find something relatively hopeful, positive, say even in the dark days of say 80s, the dark days after the financial crash in 2007 and so on.

Now, I don't like to ask authors if we know what they're working on next, because I know writing books, it's hard. But I was wondering if there's an idea that you have percolating at the moment, some musical idea we can look forward to in the future. I do, actually. And it's funny, it's very close to what you were talking about. We could have explored the soft rock and yacht rock thing more, but it's in that

area because the the the the era that keeps sort of returning to me is as you say that sort of 77 i i it's what i call the long 80s which i believe starts in 1977 and ends in about two right so yeah and i just think that is the period that shaped the world that we live in today music that we hear now if you listen to something like flowers by uh miley cyrus

That just sounds, you know, even though it rips, I mean, actually it rips off a song from that era, which is, you know, I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor, but it's also filtered through a sort of very 80s pop production as well. And there's so much of that stuff. That's the sound of mainstream pop, you know, and, you know, the weekends hits and stuff also. And even, you know, Ed Sheeran ended up sounding very 80s.

But, you know, we also live in a political system that was essentially kind of institutionalized and became the dominant and the norm in the 80s and hasn't actually ever been shaken or changed since. So that strikes me as a very, you know, potentially rich and profitable period to return to, to find out what happened, you know, why and how.

Well, Mixing Pop and Politics, A Marxist History of Popular Music is out now. Again, Toby, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Latoya. I really enjoyed talking to you.