Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop

By Nick Brownlee

Has the global phenomenon that is Pop Idol completely ruined pop music, or is it just the natural revolution of a genre of music that has always been manufactured? From Tin Pan Alley via The Monkees... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1860745121
• ISBN13: 9781860745126
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Sanctuary Publishing
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.91 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Svengalis all

I've been reading up on bubble-gum music and I found this to be one of the better books. It follows a chronological pattern and covers "prefab" music from the 1950s (not really Tin Pan Alley) through about 2002, treating it by decades. Especially interesting was the focus on managers who, realizing they had the formula down, would reinvent it in the next wave of music with a new band in a new style. The author also admits the fuzziness between "well-packaged" and "plastic," including a discussion of Beatles vs. Stones as nice boys/bad boys. The vignettes about individual stars and groups were useful to read in counterpoint to the narrative, but the layout meant every 4 paragraphs I was interrupting my train of thought to read about another band. The book is British (read "gigging" for "jobbing"), and as such is probably more balanced across the Atlantic than some American books on the subject, but it also means they make a few mistakes about American phenomena like understanding Toni Basil only in terms of the song "Micky" and omitting Davy Jones' pre-Monkees Broadway stint as the Artful Dodger in Oliver. The typos are pretty minimal for this sort of book, and the photos are great. The author's tone is generally pretty matter-of-fact about his subject in a "that's show-biz" sort of way: he only occasionally scoffs at a group or fawns over another one. Occasionally he is quite witty.