What exactly is pop music? What creates great pop? In a new edition of this richly textured 776-page musical history, Bob Stanley, founding member of Saint Etienne, thrillingly spans five decades from 1952, in a style both absorbingly analytical and anecdotal, exploring everything from music industry infrastructures to song structures to the intimate inner world of creativity.
Stanley tells the story chronologically, from a time when Britain was “a musical backwater” to the undercurrents and shifting sands that gave birth to the charts in the 1950s, tracing the development of pop’s digital switchover at the turn of this century, from CDs to downloads, and the demise of Top of the Pops.
“We have to know where music has come from in order to understand where it’s at and where it could be heading,” explains Stanley who skilfully unpicks webs of connection and influence; how Alanis Morissette, whose Jagged Little Pill album sold 33m copies, “could play godmother to the riot-grrrl scene”; why names such as Prince and Madonna “couldn’t have existed at the dawn of modern pop”; how influence came from place as well as people.
“I love the flash and glory of pop’s superstars,” Stanley explains, but “I love the underdog equally” – and so this compelling cacophony of sound is packed with classic hits but also shores up long-lost gems. Stanley is liberal with footnotes containing fascinating nuggets, and one of the greatest pleasures is in exploring the forgotten margins of modern musical history.
Stanley beautifully captures how powerful a three-minute song can be. Yet Yeah Yeah Yeah also has its engrossing moments of no no no, particularly when looking at how icons with “egos the size of mansions” dealt with failure. Some dug themselves into holes, others resurfaced.
As this passionately told story of modern pop chronicles the hits and flops, the story of societies also unfolds, for we see how music has by turns reflected and created zeitgeists. Given their ubiquity, love or loathe them, certain songs have soundtracked our lives at some point; as music conjures memories, this story of modern pop becomes powerfully interwoven with the story of our own lives.
Ultimately, this superlative book tempts us to listen more closely to the music itself, with greater understanding of factors from the economic to the emotional that shaped it. We gain insight into those moments that made music, and those moments when music made us.
Yeah Yeah Yeah is published by Faber (£20). Click here to order it for £15
