Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom Tony Richardson POP FROM THE BEGINNING BY NIK COHN (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 36s) THE POP PROCESS BY RICHARD MABEY (HtIzchinsonz 30s) Ntii Cohn is Superfan -just that. He's no deviant musicologist, crrant literary critic or solid sociologist. So he doesn't care to write about counterpoint, cultural inter- change or the influence of John Donne on John Lennon. Pop is myth. authority and style. It's the charge he gets from the rings on Fats Domnino's fat fin- gers, the splits in P. J. Probys pants or the snap of Elvis's hips. It.s the fascination of creepy little Phil Spector and his Gor- terduimmerzing of sound; or the perfection of teendream in Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues, and the legend of a new Atlantis in Surfinl, U.S.A. He sums it up like this: " The way I like it. pop is all teenage property and it mirrors every- thing that happens to teenagers in this time, in this American twentieth century. It is about clothes and cars and dancing, it's about parents and high school and being tied and break- ing loose, it is about getting sex and getting rich and getting old, it's about America, it's about cities and noise. Get right down to it, it's all about Coca-Cola.- He writes in a frantic, grab- bag style which I found bla- tantly contrived and perfectlv irresistible. He's fond of zippy little phrases like "Johnny Ray . . . the Nabob of Sob, the Million Dollar Teardrop", and at his worst moments hes all speed and no movement. But at his best he'll find the exact few words to release Chuck Berry, Proby or Mick Jagger on the reader in all their awful, living glory. That's the novelist. That beautiful archaic defini- tion of pop is bound to get him into trouble. What about Viet- nam, acid, Black Power, bau- bles, bangles and beads ? Where are Bob Dylan or the Beatles ? Well, ithe short answer is he doesn't care for any of it. The Beatles' public today he des- cribes as " maybe a million acid- heads, pseudo-intellectuaLs, muddled schoolchildren and generatised freaks ". Their musi- cal successors for the most part have " wallowed in- third-form poetrics, fifth-hand philoso- Pooter is on holiday, and returns next week. phies, ninth-rate perceptions ". It was probably Sgt. Pepper that really did the damage. From that moment Art and the Intelligentsia began to weave their insidious spells around the willing innocents of the pop world, and metaphysical thoughts and Baroque noises came out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. Pop became soft, vaporous, unauth- entic, redeemed only by groups like the Stones, the Who or those Americans who still chose to play rock. I think the general picture is a fair onc, but the death of teen- age pop fills me with nostalgia, not distress. I doubt somehow that it's any longer possible to have a classic teenage music because all the myths seem shat- tered-above all the essential myth of the teenager himself. I'm sure, too, that pop can only benefit from the expansion of musical resources and ambition that we've seen since Sgt. Pepper, however bad and fake the results so far. And, after all, there'll always be rock even if, sadly, we've seen the last of Dion or Neil Sedaka and that rock/ballad style which characterized teendrear;, better than anything. Despite, or perhaps because of his prejudice and his blank refusal to look at pop in terms of other ideologies, Nik Cohn has written a brilliant book. I know of nothing else in which pop as life-style and mythology is so fully realized. tule Pop Process is less ambi- tious, less personal, less exciting. The author has a lot of good but dated material (written 1965) which has only been very marginally revised because he argues that pop fashion moves too fast to make it worthwhile doing so: for his purpose, which is to instruct "curious adults ", he believes his judg- ments hold, cven if many of his examples have faded away into some museum of forgotten dreams. But it is, for instance, a little strange-and surely most misleading for curious adults- to read in 1969 that nobody goes to bed in pop song. All this said, the book could be useful for those to whom pop is some kind of barbaric mys- tery. It's sensible, lucid and wcll- written-it seems unjustly diffi- cult to make those words sound complimentary in this context. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom