WORDS & MUSIC

John Self enjoys the bookish thrill of recognising the literary references of the pop artists he loves

MUSIC, WE KNOW, IS ALL ABOUT PASSION: and I don’t mean Handel’s Messiah. I’m talking about the contemporary currency of passion. I’m talking about the last half-dozen decades of popular music: rock, pop and dance, where a four-to-the-floor beat drives the body and frees the mind so that — as Funkadelic so memorably put it half a century ago — your ass will follow. It is, in short, a visceral thing. (Viscera: the bodily organs, the pumping heart, the squirming guts.) It is instinctive and intuitive — babies can respond to music in the womb — not cerebral or rational. It is the driver of involuntary toe-tapping, head-nodding and booty-twerking. What more is there to say, or think, about pop music than the immortal words of Janice Nicholls on Thank…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2023

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