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‘ROCK AND POP MUSIC WERE THE UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES OF THE
WORKING-CLASS ENTERING HISTORY’  
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Brett Gregory
March 27, 2025
Morning Star
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_ The Morning Star's Brett Gregory speaks with Toby Manning, author
of Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music.
Manning asserts that “Rock and pop music were the unexpected
consequences of the working-class entering history.” _

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WRITING in the Morning Star
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Findley recommended this 565 page tome which “achieves the seemingly
impossible by grounding high-level intellectual scholarship and theory
within the popular culture of the day.”

So what initially inspired Manning to put pen to paper?

“I wrote the book after researching Marxist theory,” he says,
“and I started to realise how much we skim over the surface of
everything in the news and in our understanding of the world”.

Interestingly, Manning asserts that: “Rock and pop music were the
unexpected consequences of the working-class entering history.

“In the US all of its practitioners were either poor whites or
African-Americans from the disadvantaged South, so rock and roll
sounded like a crude assault on the mores of established society.

“Thus, we have Sixteen Tons sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford about a
coal miner rejecting the authority of his bosses in 1956; Eddie
Cochran turning his back on the Protestant work ethic in 1958’s
Summertime Blues; and in 1957 we have Little Richard telling his fans
to ‘Rip It Up’
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playbook and just live for the weekend.”

And how did the Establishment react to this newfangled thing called
rock and roll?

“Genteel post-war balladry by the likes of Patti Page and Doris Day
dominated the airwaves at the time, so law enforcers just simply tried
to ban it,” Manning continues. “Radio stations refused to play it,
and record labels got white middle-of-the-road crooners to record
cover versions in an attempt to tame it.

“When these strategies failed the authorities moved in and finally
got their way via accusations of payola.”

Payola is the dubious practice of bribing radio stations and/or DJs to
play certain songs on the radio in an attempt to turn them into
profitable hits.

“But this was the only way these small independent labels could get
their records heard in a market stitched up by the big labels and
publishing houses,” Manning contends. “The subsequent court
hearings resulted in people losing their jobs, and all sorts of
convictions, the most famous being the indictment of the DJ Alan
Freed.”

And what about racial segregation in the music industry during the
1950s?

“There were clear lines. Whether they were railway tracks, coloured
bars, lines down the middle of the auditoriums, drinking fountains,
and all the rest of it. And there was a separate black music chart
too, but it had cross-overs.”

Cross-overs?

“So when Little Richard started getting traction in the black charts
with, say, Tutti Frutti or Long Tall Sally, he was immediately
sabotaged by Pat Boone and a whiter than white Christian cover version
which the label pushed in order to sell more copies.

“And although Chuck Berry had disgraced himself personally, I
don’t think that’s the real reason why he’s been written out of
rock and roll history. I mean, he wrote all of his own songs, invented
his own guitar style, and created a whole genre of riffs which classic
heavy rock still uses today.

“But then you have movies like George Lucas’s American Graffiti in
1973 and Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future in 1985 which removed
all the aggression and rebelliousness out of black rock and roll,
turning it into a white suburban phenomenon.

“So, yeah, I would say that all this occurred because of
institutional racism.”

The book covers a huge amount of much ground, and the first two
chapters scrutinise the 1950s through the critical lens of Fordism.

“Fordism is the mechanism of mass production and consumption which
defined the first two-thirds of the 20th century,” Manning explains.
“It’s a factory model which a record label like, say, Motown is
built around.

“What’s often overlooked, however, is that Henry Ford introduced a
corporate welfare system in his automobile plants where he reduced
working hours and increased wages in the wake of the Russian
Revolution in 1917.”

And, musically, how did the 1950s end, and how did the 1960s begin?

“Repressed due to a reassertion of conservatism and patriarchy.
Mournful, yearning songs like The Everley Brothers’ All I Have To Do
Is Dream from 1958 and Roy Orbison’s In Dreams
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mood of melancholia, alienation and restlessness.

“We must remember, however, that dreams also informed the political
utopianism of the black civil rights movement at that time, and a
track like Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come
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inspired by Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in
1963.”

Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music is
published by Repeater Books
The full interview with Toby Manning is available on Spotify
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_Brett Gregory is a film-maker based in Greater Manchester who also
interviews film/media academics and authors for his podcast, Serious
Feather Arts_

_The Morning Star [[link removed]] is a
left-wing British newspaper and the only English-language socialist
daily newspaper in the world, published six days a week. Subscribe to
the Morning Star. [[link removed]]_

 

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