Peter Doggett’s ambitious history of pop opens with the author having a terrible time in the “air-conditioned limbo” of a 2003 Merseyside shopping mall: 30 years on from a youthful epiphany brought on by an infamous Bob Dylan bootleg, he reacts with horror when the self-same holy music floats out among the unholy simulacra of Next, Starbucks and Vodafone. Doggett must be aware he is drawing what amounts to a self-caricature: the grumpy old duffer who is nostalgic for a lost world of coupons cut out of crinkly music papers, the Queen’s head on envelopes, bootlegs inside brown paper packages tied up with string. He yearns for solid things, authentic things, and a time when buying pop music was somehow a rebelliously anti-consumerist gesture.
Such a glum episode may strike some readers as an odd way to kick off a celebration of the joyful fizz of pop music. “Here we go again,” they may well sigh: “another pale, middle-aged, record-collector bloke bleating about the Good Old Days.” But Doggett’s negative epiphany introduces his basic thesis: how uproariously fast things change in pop, not just the music itself but the whole manner in which it is delivered and consumed. He takes us all the way back to the end of the 19th century, to so-called “coon songs” and ragtime fever, to waltzes and vaudeville; to a pre-jazz era when even those with a decent income were more likely to have a piano in their parlour than a “phonograph or gramophone”.
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