MIXING POP WITH POLITICS - TOBY MANNING with JEREMY GILBERT

Rock 'n' Roll Book Club

Spanning the early 50s to the present, Toby Manning's radical history  is a  joyful exploration of popular music’s role in our society.

Mother's Ruin Gin Palace

March at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Book Club

Bowie’s PR Guru, provocative pop polemics and connecting through song make up our March author events

From rock’n’roll to UK drill, funk to punk, folk-rock to prog rock and hip hop to heavy metal, Toby Manning’s rollercoaster ride through music history reveals how pop is political in ways that range from the radical to the reactionary, the pulse-quickeningly direct to the intricately subtle. Fellow music lover and politico Jeremy Gilbert will put Manning through his pop paces in a sparky discussion that will upend conventional critical assessments and recast familiar songs in a startlingly new light. Mixing Pop and Politics is a history of modern Britain and America, told through music and relayed with equal parts passion and provocation. As egalitarian in its love of all forms of popular music as in its politics, the book explores how 1950s rock’n’roll rejected social conformity, how the 60s’ counterculture reshaped both music and society and how the 70s saw glam, funk, and punk reject a reemerging conservatism.With the 1980s marking a conservative shift in both pop and politics, the ensuing rebellions of rave, hip-hop and grunge were quickly crushed or coopted by the corporations. By the 90s, Britpop and gangsta rap, like politics, were projecting a perkily pessimistic ‘realism’, while in a 2000s defined by war and economic collapse, pop became increasingly insular and individualist. If the revival of rap and grime in the 2010s paralleled the period’s resurgence of radical politics, the escapist pop and protest post-punk of the 2020s reflects our current, less hopeful historical moment. Nevertheless, Manning argues that despite constant co-optation, music will always reinvent itself from the ground up, and that this ever-recurring renewal provides a powerful analogy for political change which, hence, offers hope for the future."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.”Alex Niven, Tribune.Toby Manning has written for The Quietus, Q, NME, Select, The Word, New Statesman and The Guardian. His previous books include The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd (Penguin, 2006) and chapters in Sean Albiez and David Pattie’s Velvet Underground (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Talking Heads (Bloomsbury, 2025)Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London, the co-host of the Love is the Message podcast and co-author of Hegemony Now! (Verso, 2022)