Watkins Media, Sachbücher, Mixing Pop and Politics (Englisch, Toby Manning, 2024)

&ldquo 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 &lsquo political&rsquo readings, brilliantly illuminating how all three are in the mix with one another.&rdquo &mdash 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." &mdash 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&rsquo 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.&rdquo &mdash 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&rsquo 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." &mdash Jeremy Gilbert, author of Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World and Twenty-First Century Socialism.