Customer Reviews

Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop

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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.

Although ambitious in scope, this is carelessly (though sometimes cleverly) written. The author seems to have relied on his memory for various information, with the result that new, "What the...?" bits of disinformation are added to the unsurprising appearance of long-held popular falsehoods. Worth $1.25, but don't believe everything in here.