The People's Music

Just finished Ian MacDonald’s book The People’s Music, a series of articles/essays/chapters? on popular music – focussing on that of the sixties and seventies, largely through discrete discussions of individual artists and groups. This focus and discretion, however, is really a launch pad for a wider commentary on popular music in general and by extension popular culture in general and the contemporary mindset.

Sadly I wasn’t paying enough attention to MacDonald’s writing before his death in 2003 to have picked up on his name as one to follow in the music press. And this despite having read and greatly enjoyed his earlier book Revolution in the Head; The Beatles Records and the Sixties. This book then has done a great service in compiling some of his best work from magazines such as Arena, Mojo and Uncut and giving it more exposure. MacDonald’s deep appreciation of music and its place in culture is everywhere evident and his astute reading of some of the most written about pop artists manages to provide many new and strikingly precise analyses. His work on The Beatles is, as ever, right on the money – and his commentary on Dylan has so much truth in it you want to throw away most else written about the man.

The stand out work has to be the last two chapters though. The penultimate piece - “The People’s Music” – is an attempt to comprehend the period specificity of great pop music and a challenging defence of the argument that it has pretty much all been downhill for the last thirty years or so. The final chapter is the real killer – “Exiled from Heaven: The Unheard Message of Nick Drake”, a millenarian stand for difference, poetic consciousness and Magic. A call for the re-enchantment of everyday life.

That MacDonald’s own suicide shortly after the book’s publication might be considered prima facie evidence in the case for disabusing oneself of his conclusions regarding Drake and the world as he presents it – is an awful irony, as this exactly parallels the readings of Drake’s work that MacDonald challenges in this piece.

I suggest that you read the whole book, here’s how it ends:

“Nick Drake’s work reminds us that life is a predicament and that the world is an insoluble mystery. It can tell us that a ‘magical’, contemplative way of seeing can keep us aware of this, preventing us from destroying the world through the arrogant assumption that we know what it is. We do not. We’re all exiled from heaven, though some of us don’t realise it. But when magic reveals heaven to us in a wild flower, we remember. And then we hear the chime.”