LITM Extra - Toby Manning on Mixing Pop and Politics
Love is the Message: Dance, Music and CountercultureShow Notes
This is am excerpt from a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing along with dozen more, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod and sign up for as little as £3 a month.
In this patrons-only episode we welcome writer Toby Manning to the show to discuss his recent book Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music. Toby's book offers a political reading of popular music, taking as its methodological starting point the songs found in the charts from the 1950s to the present day, to explore how the music people listen to reflects and resists the politics of their time in fascinating ways.
In this show Jeremy, Tim and Toby discuss the charts themselves, how we think of 'popular music', and discuss lyrics as a tool for analysis. This being LITM, we of course spend some time on the hits of the 1970s, but we hear also about '80s synth pop and yacht rock, Annie Lennox, MJ, and contemporary artists like FKA Twigs and Little Sims. Also found inside: the GLC, the High Sixties and Kneecap.
Thanks to Toby for coming on the show. If you'd like to order his book, you can do so from Repeater Books: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/mixing-pop-and-politics-a-marxist-history-of-popular-music/. Enter the code 'popdiscount' for some money off.
More from Love is the Message: Dance, Music and Counterculture
In this episode we conclude our survey of 1970s spiritual jazz with some lesser known cuts from the canon. Several of the tunes here were once hard-to-find collectors items, but the renewed interest in this body of work has led to reissues and an enlarged audience for these awesome pieces. Tim and Jeremy discuss the various religious sources on the practitioners of spiritual jazz, from Buddhism and Hinduism to African and Gospel influences. They unpack the problems with the term ‘spiritual’, consider this music’s utopian horizons and conduct a little reception history of how this sound lost and found an audience.
This is an excerpt of a patrons-only episode. To hear the full thing, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod.
Today we’re taking it back to the early 70s as we begin a mini-series on spiritual jazz. Psychedelic, cosmic, astral: all words associated with a set of releases somewhat maligned at the time but now firm favourites on our turntables and across the globe. Tim and Jeremy cue up Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, Lonnie Liston Smith and of course the great Alice Coltrane for a journey down the streams of consciousness. They examine the genealogy of the term spiritual jazz and the pre-history of some of its early progenitors, dig into the the various belief systems of universal love and peace, examine the Indian influences on both the music and the metaphysics, and give some time to the looming figure of Miles Davis in all this. Plus: an unexpected visit from Louis Armstrong. Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod Loveisthemessagepod.co.uk Produced by Matt Huxley
This is an excerpt from a patrons-only show. To hear the full thing, plus dozens more like it, visit Patreon.com/LoveMessagePod to sign up.
Love is the Message returns from our summer break just in time for the Bank Holiday Weekend, which in London means one thing: Carnival. In this episode Jeremy and Tim cover the history of Notting Hill Carnival, the largest such event in Europe. They discuss patterns of Caribbean migration to the UK, traditions of carnival from Ancient Greece to Trinidad and Rio, and the particular story of Notting Hill, with its steel bands, dub sound systems, parade and party. They return to Lovers Rock, consider legendary stages like Aba Shanti, Good Times and Saxon, and interrogate how Bakhtinian and Deleuzian ideas can be applied to this unique expression of Black British culture. Plus: David Mancuso in Trinidad, and a young Jeremy tries to buy Pass the Dutchie.