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Music is a time machine, transporting us back to the past’s hopes and dreams, a hauntology that doesn’t simply offer escape from a grim present but inspiration for the future. If this is one way that music is political, this collective listening seminar, drawing on Toby Manning’s Mixing Pop and Politics, offers another. Because music is a social activity, from production to dissemination to reception: “Everybody in the Place!” as ravers The Prodigy urged.
The session will range across history’s affective archive, from rock’n’roll’s demands for freedom amid 50s social control, to beat’s working-class aspiration in the optimistic 60s; from glam rock flaunting sexual difference in the militant 70s, to 80s pop’s assurance that the free market would free us all. Coming uptodate, from post-punk to hyperpop, whether music’s politics are radical, reactionary or absent, it will always convey what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling’, the temperature of its times.
Toby Manning is a journalist and author who contributes regularly to The Quietus, Tribune, Jacobin and New Socialist and whose books include Mixing Pop Politics: a Marxist History of Popular Music.
