Introduction: The Top 10

1. The Power of Popular Music

Erupting into suburban living rooms from valve radios and brand new television sets in summer 1956, Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” announced a new reality, expressed through a new form: rock’n’roll. “Hound Dog” and its performer were unalienated, uninhibited, free: a freedom of being, not having; an expression of pure feeling when feelings were suspect – disorderly, effeminate, probably dirty – delivered with a directness that disdained conformist convention. “Hound Dog” demonstrated what popular music could do; what ordinary people could do. For rock’n’roll’s origins lay in the music of the disenfranchised and disempowered – country and blues – in non-professional nobodies plugging into the electrical currents of modernity. Disreputable, ecstatic and defiant, rock’n’roll’s expression of a liberated world was an offence to arbiters of taste, morality and control.

“Hound Dog” (UK 2; US 1) is a meta-song, a synecdoche both for rock’n’roll itself and for a popular music that’s of, rather than for, the people. “Hound Dog” wasn’t the first rock’n’roll smash – that honour goes to Bill Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock” (UK 1; US 1) the previous year – it wasn’t even Presley’s first, but it was the first to sound adversarial. Rock’n’roll was the real starting point of post-war popular culture – youthful, multi-racial, unofficial – of music as a medium of rebellion, and thus the first looming of the counterculture, of a different kind of society. For all the intervening decades of co-option and self-incorporation, of buyout and sellout, “Hound Dog” – played loud – still carries much of its original charge, its ability to excite, incite and inspire.

“You ain’t nothin’ but…” That opening acapella holler stops you in your tracks. What Elvis captured was not the timbre but the abandon of African American singers: most obviously Little Richard, but also bluesman Arthur Crudup and rhythm’n’blues shouter Big Mama Thornton, who cut the original version of “Hound Dog”. Just as it’s a vector of its precursors, “Hound Dog” isn’t just a vehicle for Elvis Presley but the sum of its social parts. In contrast to formally dressed balladeers, backed by a distant or invisible orchestra, scruffily attired groups were key to rock’n’roll’s visceral visual and aural impact. After that opening shout, the sheer ferocity of DJ Fontana’s drumming slaps you in the face, gives you a few seconds to come to your senses… then does it again. Peppered with overexcited handclaps, the arrangement’s stop-start approach is designed to mess with you – all disorientation, all excitement, all sex. Inspired by both Chuck Berry and jazz’s improvisational freedom, Scotty Moore’s first electric guitar solo (from 0:49–1:05) is channelled anarchy, his second – hitting discords and noteless reverb (1:20–1:37) – mere anarchy. The most conventional, ballad-like element of the track is The Jordanaires’ unruffled backing vocals – the calm in the sonic storm, the orchestra playing on the Titanic, serving only to highlight the devastation that surrounds it.

The doggerel of “Hound Dog” is defiantly beyond common sense, outside conventional thinking. It’s also beyond authorised notions of authorship – an uncredited rewrite of a rewrite of a Leiber and Stoller Tin Pan Alley tune. Likewise, “Hound Dog” pulls and pushes its mode of production, being louder, rawer and more aggressive than anything that preceded it in the pop charts. Yet the world that “Hound Dog” announced would only have a year before the corporations would get the fix in, pull the orchestra out of the deeps and give it the kiss of life; before they’d pull a veil over Elvis’s pelvis, push him into bland ballads and mawkish movies and reassert ‘entertainment’ as sedating rather than seducing.

The repressed would return (as the repressed does): each time music’s adversarial energy has been contained or co-opted, something new emerges. Popular music’s dialectic of repression and refusal charts and channels the political struggles of the last three-quarters of a century, and it’s this relationship to which this book is dedicated.

2. Music Is Political

This book is a Marxist history of popular music, not a history of Marxist popular music – that would be a very short book, encompassing The Clash, The Jam, our titular hero, Billy Bragg, Public Enemy, Rage Against The Machine… and not much else. Or not much else that was popular, this book’s focus being the chart music of Britain and America from 1953–2023, which has moved largely in lockstep. Beyond those putatively Marxist outfits, there is one act named after Karl Marx – 1993’s one hit wonder, Marxman (“All About Eve”, UK 28) – 80s balladeer Richard Marx is no relation – and three hit songs that cite Marx, only one of which might be termed ‘Marxist’. In the aftermath of the 60s, Don McLean’s 1971 “American Pie” (UK 2; US 1) implicates Marxism in pop’s politicised loss of ‘innocence.’ In the aftermath of punk’s political refusal, The Clash’s 1981 “The Magnificent Seven” (Sandinista! UK 19; US 24) captures Marx’s concept of ‘alienation’, while giving the philosopher and his collaborator, Engels, surreal cameos at a 7/11. Amidst the depoliticised cynicism of the high 80s, Bros’s 1987 “When Will I Be Famous” (UK 2) posits Marxism as a prop for the ‘past it’ and po-faced. Beyond that, there is one (loose) quotation from Marx in popular music, in ABBA’s 1974 Eurovision winner, “Waterloo” (UK 1; US 6), which theorises “The history book on the shelf/Is always repeating itself.”

Pop and politics are part of the tragedy and farce – the fabric – of our lives and yet are rarely held to mix. Despite its Marxist terminology, Madonna’s turn of the millennium claim that “music mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel”, puts “Music” beyond politics (UK 1; US 1). In our culture popular music is understood either aesthetically or affectively, critical approaches that, in Marxist terms, are ‘idealist’ (not rooted in the material). The aesthetic approach focuses on genre and ‘influence’ and thus mainly understands music in relation to other music. The affective approach reinserts the human factor, understanding music as the self-expression of the artist – thus the profusion of music biographies and autobiographies – while connecting ‘universally’ (and somewhat vaguely) to the emotions of its audience.

Of those who regard music more sociologically, Mark Fisher doesn’t always mix his pop and his politics (Acid Communism being the major exception), Simon Reynolds is prone to exempting genres from the political (rave; grime), while Stuart Maconie dismisses Marx’s “dialectical materialism” as antipathetic to music. John Street asserts that political music is a minority report, echoed by David Hesmondhalgh, who argues that such “protest music” isn’t a politically effective medium, while Tom Ewing extends this to protest itself. These analyses rest upon a narrow concept of the ‘political’ in popular music – as progressive, as public-orientated, and as protest-based – and one which is essentially pessimistic, even passive. For, if politics is a matter of governments and parties, it has little to do not only with music but with people’s everyday lives, and can be left to politicians. However, just as politics encompasses the reactionary as well as the radical, so does pop, whose politics inform the private as much as the public sphere (the personal is political), while being expressed through more varied, subtle and unconscious means than protest (love songs, even instrumentals, can be political).

This book reads music in relation to the social and economic conditions of its production and reception, as an expression of the mood of its era, of what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling.” In comprehending the political as being felt as much as thought, this approach encompasses affect (that of music’s creators and its listeners), while, in positing musicians’ choice of a particular word or phrase, sound or style as expressive of a wider, social structure of feeling, it folds in the formal. By historicising music in this way, this book offers a materialist rather than an idealist analysis of cultural production, which, rather than closing music down didactically, as Maconie suggests, opens it up, providing new perspectives on old songs and radical reassessments of conventional assumptions. This approach doesn’t merely illuminate music, but history itself, recounting the political events of the last three-quarters of a century through the living, democratic medium of popular music, rather than the dead medium of sequestered archives. The aim is not just to bring the past “back again, like a long-lost friend”, as The Carpenters put it on 1973’s “Yesterday Once More” (UK 2; US 2) but also as an everyday adversary – and to capture the struggle between these impulses.

Mixing Pop And Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music is published by Repeater. Read Lucy Thraves's review of the book in The Wire 487. Wire subscribers can also read the review online via the digital magazine library.