Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music

by Toby Manning

Overview

From rock’n’roll to contemporary pop, Mixing Pop and Politics is a provocative and entertaining mash-up of music and Marxist theory.

A radical history of the political and social upheavals of the last 70 years, told through the period's most popular music.

Mixing Pop and Politics is not a history of political music, but a political history of popular music. Spanning the early 50s to the present, it shows how, from doo-wop to hip-hop, punk to crunk and grunge to grime, music has both reflected and resisted the political events of its era.

Mixing Pop and Politics explores the connections between popular music and political ideology, whether that’s the liberation of rock’n’roll or the containment of girl groups, the refusal of glam or the resignation of soft rock, the solidarity of disco or the individualism of 80s pop.

At a time when reactionary forces are waging political war in the realm of culture, and we’re being told to keep politics out of music, Mixing Pop and Politics is a timely, original and joyful exploration of popular music’s role in our society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913462673
Publisher:	Watkins Media
Publication date:	05/14/2024
Pages:	477
Sales rank:	1,110,519
Product dimensions:	6.05(w) x 9.18(h) x 1.56(d)

About the Author

Toby Manning is the author of The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd (2006) and John le Carré 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.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“An ambitious and much-needed reckoning with the way pop music has soundtracked social change, political conflict and utopian dreaming over the past seven decades. What stands out is the way Manning refuses the conventional opposition between emotional or aesthetic readings of pop and ‘political’ readings, brilliantly illuminating how all three are in the mix with one another.” 
— Dr David Wilkinson, Senior Lecturer in English, Manchester Metropolitan University and author of Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain

"A monumental, committed analysis of the politics of popular music. Manning brings to his writing a profound knowledge of popular music history and a clear-eyed commitment to the radical possibilities of popular culture. The story he tells is tangled, but ultimately hopeful; even in the worst of times, popular music always retains the ability to claw its way back to utopia."
—  Dr David Pattie, Senior Lecturer, University of Birmingham, co-editor of Talking Heads (Bloomsbury, 2025), The Velvet Underground: What Goes On (Bloomsbury, 2022)

"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. Manning shows how, from Elvis to hip-hop, pop’s inherent desire for better things is supremely political. 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.”
— David Stubbs, author of 1996 and the End of History and Mars by 1980

"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 seems extraordinary that nobody has tried to tell the whole story of modern pop while deploying the Western Marxist conceptual toolkit (Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Williams, etc): but they haven’t, until now. The result is well worth the wait, and will be a key reference point for politically and sociologically informed cultural criticism for years to come."
— Jeremy Gilbert, author of Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World and Twenty-First Century Socialism