Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

June 1, 2014

Stanley (Match Day), a member of indie pop band Saint Etienne, traces the development of popular music in Great Britain and the United States from 1952 through 2012, with extended riffs on major solo artists and groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, ABBA, and Michael Jackson, and shorter discussions about everyone from one-hit wonders in obscure English mining towns to long-popular singers such as Elton John and Aretha Franklin. He casts a wide net, encompassing pop, rock, folk, soul, R & B, country, punk, metal, grunge, and rap, examining the cultural context surrounding the music and delving into the lyrics, the harmonies/chord structures of songs, and use of instruments. All of this helps distinguish his work from others that explore these genres and gives the whole more depth. Some may quibble with Stanley's opinions or emphases, but his chatty style will engage the reader and his extensive research is displayed to excellent effect. VERDICT This eminently readable tome should appeal to all who lived through this period or who have an interest in the various musics. Despite some Britishisms and only a glancing reference to key players such as the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, and Frank Zappa, Stanley presents a solid story.--Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 21, 2014
For anyone who’s unfamiliar with the terrain of pop music, critic Stanley’s survey offers a solid introduction to many facets of popular music. While fans of musicians mentioned will not find much new, the author nevertheless provides an intriguing view of the shifting ground of pop music. Of the Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, for example, he writes: Buckingham’s guitar “felt like a continuation of the Macs that had gone before... they still felt like a walk beside a seashore on a windy day, collar pulled up against the spray.” Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “noise was the most commercially successful variant of garage punk.” Stanley covers every musical style that makes up pop music, including country and western, new wave, hip hop, and grunge, and he devotes individual chapters to groups and individuals—the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna—that changed the shape of pop music. In the end, he observes, that “pop music doesn’t have the desirability it once had; it’s not as wantable.”

Starred review from June 1, 2014
Numerous albums and songs have used the word as their title, so it seems somehow appropriate that music journalist Stanley has chosen yeah to sum up the history of popular music, offering an immensely entertaining pop-music survey course. He is engagingly opinionated and often very, very funny. (He describes, for example, the members of the Turtles as looking like three Pillsbury Doughboys, one in a bushy black fright wig, while Simon & Garfunkel looked like as much fun as their undertaker name suggested. ) His book traces a thread that connects pop music along a twentieth- and twenty-first-century continuum as he describes the musical contributions of, among others, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, ABBA, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna. For Stanley, pop is an eclectic and messy mix that includes rock, doo-wop, R&B, Motown, soul, glam, New Wave, disco, punk, grunge, hip-hop, house, techno, metal, and country. The assemblage of irresistible, bite-size histories of top-of-the-charts stars is joyful, smart, and addictive, just like the best pop songs, and a must for music fans everywhere.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2014
Exhaustive, exhausting history of pop music. Like so many popular histories that aim for comprehensiveness, this plodding assemblage staggers under its own weight. Even though he claims that "this book is not meant to be an encyclopedia," in trying to tell the story of pop, music journalist, DJ and Saint Etienne founding keyboard player Stanley gets so swamped in name-checking every band and song title that he loses the plot and characters. Instead of focusing at some intelligent length on key figures, genres, trends or shifts in tastes, he is more concerned with touching on everything than doing justice to anything. He's all about connecting the dots, usually patching them together with well-worn anecdotes or conventional wisdom. The book's real juice is in Stanley's scattered opinions, which range from the unusual to the obnoxious. His Brit-skewed viewpoint offers less-than-reverential takes on the Clash and Elvis Costello and stirring defenses of The Monkees, Sex Pistols and Abba, and he delivers a cogent and interesting history of the Bee Gees. Among his many questionable judgments: that "New Morning" (1970) is possibly Bob Dylan's best album or that Bob Marley's music was as "musically simplified as the Bay City Rollers." Stanley, however, does score the occasional apt phrase: Joy Division was "modern pop viewed through night vision goggles-grimy and murky." Abba's hits "sound like a music box carved from ice." The author also writes of the Smiths' "bedsit bookishness" and Belle and Sebastian's "librarian chic," and he correctly notes that "indie" has now "stretched out to become a meaningless catchall term." Unfortunately, all these scattered perceptions fly by in a hazy, numbing blur as Stanley hits the pedal on this breakneck trip through the past 60 years, and his tone becomes increasingly grating. Like the print version of an endless, time-filling BBC series-even the most interested readers will likely do a lot of fast-forwarding.

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