No Weak Men in the Books at Home


Tom Ewing
, August 8, 2008

No Weak Men in the Books at Home

I was into history before I was into pop. I remember music from when I was five, but no single act of listening to it. On the other hand, I can vividly picture crouching under a table during a thunderstorm, blocking out the fear by burrowing into the jingoistic pages of Our Island Story. Written in 1905, and given to my grandmother when she was a tot, this thick storybook history of Britain presented the past as a sequence of ripping yarns and heroic tales. Two millennia of gumption and pluck, leading to a sunlit Imperial present.

Even as a well-off kid, the Britain at the end of Our Island Story-- righteous, bold, and dominant-- was clearly radically different to the shabbily comfortable, municipal, and motorised country I was growing up in. This probably insulated my child-mind from the book's more chauvinistic intent-- the old world it described might as well be Narnia. But it had changed into my own Britain nonetheless.

At school I got to fill in some of the gaps in the story, and this summer I've been reading Andrew Marr's A History of Modern Britain to plug a few more. Marr's is a grown-up book, with far fewer great deeds than Our Island Story, but the populist principle is the same. History is an act of selection, a mixtape or a Greatest Hits album: presenting its topic in a particular, tricky light, cutting away irrelevance, leaving fans to quarrel about what got left out.

For instance-- let's look at how Marr's book covers pop music in Britain. You get skiffle, the Beatles and Kinks, a nod to the art school tradition, and then punk (politically juvenile, Marr reckons, and the Who did it all better, but at least it tried). And then nothing, pop subsumed into a more general celebrity culture about which he enjoys little and says less.

Now if you want a one-sentence summary of the post-war history of British pop, "It was about entertainment, then about art, then about celebrity" isn't totally inadequate. I don't agree with it, but it's a story, and my own version would probably be too vague: "It's always been about entertainment, but it's interesting how this particular form of entertainment seems such a great medium for other stuff-- art, politics, celebrity, social mobility, drug culture-- to bubble through." Not quite as catchy! Anyway. It's Marr's story to tell, his mixtape to compile, even if on this topic his version of history doesn't feel like the one I lived.

Reading that book brought me back to thinking about the history of pop, or rather the lack of one. If someone was to ask me to recommend a one-volume history of pop music-- let's make it easier, pop music since 1955-- where would I point them? Most of what's available either stops once the author loses interest or devolves into listmaking-- "1001 albums you must hear" is a cool book idea, but it's not a history any more than a tracklist is an album review.

Of course there are magnificent books about aspects of pop or rock history, often huge aspects. Lloyd Bradley's Bass Culture, a doorstop of a book about reggae, is remarkably rich, packed with detail, and reading it you still keep wanting to stop Bradley and say, no, wait, tell me more about that. This is the terrible problem of writing a history of pop-- we don't experience music in a grand omniscient sweep, we feel it a track at a time, and we all have scenes or songs without which "pop history" seems incomplete. Marr's brief overview, for instance, comes over as simply wrong to me because he leaves out acid house. I could produce excellent historical justifications of that, but the truth is I'm unsatisfied because he doesn't validate my own memories of what mattered.

Pop love is driven by selfish experience, which makes pop as a historical subject terribly vulnerable to broader historiographical pitfalls: The temptation to write histories of progress or decline, selecting your facts to fit the grand hypothesis. But history is messy; things tend to hang around. Take warhorses: A key instrument in 19th century wars, but swiftly superseded by the tank in the 20th. Right? Except the war in which most horses were actually used-- and killed-- was World War II. Similarly, it's nice to write about how the Beatles transformed 60s pop by revolutionising the album format, but the biggest-selling albums of the mid-60s in their homeland were soundtracks to South Pacific and The Sound of Music.

Of course that doesn't negate the Beatles story, only qualifies it, but most pop histories wind up written by critics, who often distrust qualifications. Better to disregard sales figures entirely? Maybe, but they're one of our few bits of concrete primary data. Without data, you're left with telling a version of history that will feel right to you but leave someone else's experience out in the cold. That's exactly what a book like James Miller's boomer-centric rock history, Flowers in the Dustbin, is aiming for: This mattered, that didn't, and by the way, that means we mattered and you didn't. But given how personal the pop experience is, how can this dead end possibly be avoided?

Maybe a better history of pop would leave out the music entirely! There's still a hell of a lot to think about. For a start, rather than criticise, you could write about criticism-- since the rock press has been crucial in determining the contours of a music-centric 'rock history'. In the 60s, there was an alignment between "what's worth writing about" and "what's big", which broke down during the following decades. When did the masses whose frenzied reaction to Sinatra or Elvis or the Stones drove musical change become the masses whose supine consumption of-- oh, you decide-- is the easiest target in town? How come, in other words, The Sound of Music became the story not the qualifier?

So that might lead our ideal pop history into the history of marketing. The story, for instance, of the music industry's colossal good fortune that its most profitable format-- the long-playing record-- was also the vehicle some musicians used to stretch themselves and grab creative autonomy (and, more importantly, publishing money). Suddenly the 'album' stopped being an odds-and-sods cash grab and became the axle of artistic progress. Like the MP3 revolution, this was a bottom-up change in attitudes to music-- unlike it, the business took advantage, adapted, and enthusiastically sold on the idea that pop had artistic worth. The story of how is fascinating and largely untold.

That tale leads us in two more fruitful directions-- the cultural demographics of pop, how successive generations aged and what it did to their tastes and ideas; and the history of music technology. These intersect in 1983, with the invention of the CD and the realisation that back catalogues were a major revenue stream. The business decisions taken then-- about what constituted a fair price for music, for instance-- have obvious impact today.

There are already books covering some of this ground-- Fred Goodman's The Mansion on the Hill, for example, examines the intersection of rock and commerce in the 60s and 70s, but by focusing on specific artists he seals his story inside a decline narrative. So our idealised pop history should also turn away from the industry and the critics and be a history of listening-- the social consequences of the move away from performance to reproduction, spanning jukeboxes in diners to MP3 blogs and kids on the bus playing music out loud on their mobiles. You might be able to persuade those kids they're the consequence of tragic artistic decline-- or you might not.

The history of listening would segue into the history of fandom-- of the conversations and connections music has enabled and the divisions it's created. Which would lead us neatly round to criticism, and pop music's present day: endlessly discussed, barely bought. Though once again, the data can act as a corrective-- even today's rapidly contracting global record industry is far vaster than it has been for most of its life.

I've now written an outline of a book that doesn't exist (or if it does, please let me know!). It's a history of pop without the music criticism-- a bloodless waste of time, you might scoff, and perhaps you'd be right. But it seems to me that rock and pop history is still mostly at the Our Island Story stage-- bright pictures, derring-do, brave and bloody deeds, a happy or sad ending. That book is still in print, and I bet it's still entertaining, too. But we're all surely old enough to want something more.

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