There seem to be a lot of books lately subtitled “the making of modern Britain,” for good reason. The definition of what Britain is and what it means to be British is in flux. It is not that such definitions have not always been fluid: more that recognition of their fluidity has become more commonplace and more worthy of study. Irene Morra's academic work looks at the changing definition of Britishness through the lens of pop and rock music. Morra presents the case that the music on Britain's pop charts, radio stations, and Internet downloads is one of the best ways of perceiving the twenty-first-century identity of the British people and that in the sense of being representative of a true national identity and culture, pop and rock music are more “folk” than the English folk music that has long been held up as the chauvinistic standard of British culture. Morra is an interesting person to be chronicling this phenomenon. Her previous publishing efforts have focused on theater and literature, particularly her previous book, Twentieth-Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain (2007). A minor but significant part of her argument is that pop music has become the flag-bearer for British culture around the world since the 1960s, surpassing literature as Britain's most recognizable cultural product.

A reader can guess that Morra's work was at least grounded in, if not inspired by, watching the ceremonies attached to the opening of the 2012 London Olympics, which makes up her first chapter after the introduction. There, British rock music was presented as the best demonstration of modern British culture as a whole—Arctic Monkeys and Paul McCartney were among the live performers, while other examples of music excerpted for the ceremony included songs by the Jam, the Who, the Clash, Muse, Led Zeppelin, Blur, and others. Morra notes how the music choices confirmed at least two conflicting yet consonant themes about what pop music was supposed to say about British culture: that modern Britain is multicultural, working class and left wing, on the one hand, and that it is observant and reverent toward the industrial and imperial past, on the other. Even more, these contradictions were almost universally embraced by cultural commentators following the ceremony. The ones discussed by Morra hailed the ceremony's “progressive patriotism” (30), implicitly embracing the identity clash between the imperial, exploitative past and a diverse, populist, regional present. Morra returns to these ideas and the Olympic ceremony as touchstones throughout the book.

The rest of Morra's argument is an impressionistic, categorically defined study of these contradictions and how popular music presents them to the British and world public as an accurate display of a modern British cultural identity. The book is divided into three sections. The first section establishes parameters around what Morra sees as the national identity represented in popular music. As always in British history, Englishness tends to prevail over the Scottish, Welsh, or Irish contributions, unless older folk sources are mined from the other three national cultures. English folk music itself has become erroneously associated with the Far Right in national politics, thus marginalizing it all the more as a cultural signifier; most efforts to reverse that identification have worked best when coupled with a recognition of other folk traditions coming from the immigrant community that help redefine what it means to be a part of a British “folk.” Like English folk music, rock and pop music have found their own “authentic” sources that both musicians and critics recognize. Whereas the old folk music movement looked to agricultural workers, northern dockyards, and eventually factories for the “true” folk, modern British pop music is rooted in its connection to the bands of the 1960s, particularly the Beatles, the Who, the Kinks, and to a lesser extent the Rolling Stones, who themselves harked back to music hall, folk music, classical and experimental sources, and the empire for inspiration. All of this is meant to present pop and rock music as a cultural institution that is anti-institutional—that is, a rhetorical opposition to “the establishment” is necessary to the authenticity of the British identity as presented in popular music, even when popular music (the 1960s musicians in specific) represents a new establishment.

The second section is about defining who is included in the British “nation,” that is, who British pop and rock music are said to speak for. Morra concentrates on region, gender, and race, though she identifies “agency, social change [and] class” (15) as other divisions. She presents the argument that rock music is meant to be made by men, playing in groups as opposed to working as solo singers. Musicians no longer need to be focused around London; in fact, it's become a sign of authenticity for a rock musician to have northern provincial roots, and even better to come from an Irish family living in England, because it establishes credibility in one's working-class and antiestablishment roots (particularly after Thatcher, still the ur enemy). Morra's chapter on women is one of the most illuminating. She makes the point that no female singer or musician has established herself as representative of the national identity since the time of Vera Lynn. Despite claims for punk as a gender-bending genre, modern grrrl groups and female lead singers are still usually lumped together outside the mainstream of national identity. It is almost impossible for an Amy Winehouse, Adele, or Lily Allen to be taken seriously as a groundbreaking new performer in Britain: women are expected to be managed by male Svengalis and are taken to be copying older female singers of the 1960s. The Spice Girls may have been the worst example, a caricature of British identity manufactured by their management team and serving more as fashion plates for “cool Britannia” than as a serious contribution to a modern British identity. After this chapter, Morra's chapter on race is on shakier ground—she uses the same definitions to confine race as a way of contributing to the national identity. One begins to wonder what music artist in the modern era is not defined by reference to an older musical canon, what artist is not beholden to managerial manipulation, and whether a band is always responsible for who decides to become its fans.

The third section is about the contradictions between a modern progressive folk identity in popular music and the reverence that music has for a not-very-progressive past. As Morra puts it, she tries in these two chapters “to place [pop music] within a larger, more consistent and ongoing discourse of ‘New Elizabethanism’” (16). On the one hand, that discourse is a new version of “little Englandism”—seemingly, modern British musicians would prefer to pretend that the British Empire never existed. On the other hand, pop music's postmodern ability to embrace poetry, literature, high culture, and earthy folk roots makes it the most exciting art form of the modern age, and no nation celebrates that postmodern mixture more than Britain. Morra posits that the BBC's new Electric Proms are an excellent marketing of this quality and lend a stamp of approval to pop music as a marker of national identity. Her chapter “Yesterday Came Suddenly,” the only one where Morra actually analyzes the music, as opposed to how it is packaged and presented, shows how the Beatles, the Who, and the Kinks became touchstones for this new measurement of identity and Britishness. Finally, in her last chapter, Morra notes how British musicians have turned the idea of imperialism on its head by presenting the United States as a source of cultural imperialism, which twenty-first-century British rock musicians in particular have resisted as the home of commercialism and artistic bankruptcy. This stance is somewhat akin to the way that 1960s British rock musicians identified with African Americans as an oppressed minority, both generations emphasizing how they were subjugated to oppressive (and white) American mass culture.

Morra's book has its questionable points—the Rolling Stones are no longer relevant to Britain's cultural identity? Really?—but none of them take away from the overall impression that this is a brilliant work of interpretation of modern British culture. Its only problem is perhaps that it is not very historical; it is hard to determine just who would buy the book. Produced by a major press that markets largely to the academically oriented, its narrative is not linear, and it assumes a basic knowledge of musical oeuvres that, I know from experience, many students do not have. Yet it can be recommended wholeheartedly anyway for the challenges it presents. It will at least be a good book to read for people who are working on pop culture studies themselves, historical or otherwise: it gives words to a definition of modern British culture that many people have probably thought about but never articulated. Also, it will make for a good final reading in a modern British history course at the seminar level, especially one focused on the postimperial era. Any discussion of immigration and race, “swinging London,” punk, Thatcher, “cool Britannia,” and the decline of class as a social category will be greatly enhanced by reading this book.