Joshua Clover's entertaining book belongs to the Greil Marcus school of music writing. It is not just that Marcus provides a cover puff and receives a fulsome acknowledgement from the author, 1989 shares the qualities that characterise Marcus's distinctive approach: a highly literate and aphoristic style, serving to invest popular music with the power to shape sensibilities and construct constitutions. It also shares its weaknesses; but more of this later.
There is much to enjoy. Like Marcus, Clover is a gifted writer, able to craft elegant sentences and clever phrases that tease and provoke: ‘Every genre enters the popular imagination as a novelty song that is later to be seen as a manifesto, a discourse on new form … To turn matters on their head, one might say that there are no novelty songs, only failed genres’ (p. 7). And like Marcus, Clover writes about music in a way that makes it seem to matter more than anything else. It is not just about touching the fan in all of us, but the citizen too. Caring about music is close to caring about your neighbour and your country. Just as Marcus unearths the secret histories of pop to trace the founding of invisible republics, so Joshua Clover does something similar with the year that, according to Francis Fukyama, marked the ‘end of history’.
Not, of course, that this is a work of history in the recognisable sense. ‘This is not a history book’ is the first line of the Introduction; later, we read: ‘The period around 1989 saw the greatest run of pop hits since 1962’, before being told that ‘There can be no evidence for this claim’ (p. 92). It is, however, a book obsessed with history, or with how ‘Lived history slips away’ and ‘is replaced with images and stories’ (p. xiii).
In the first part of the book, Clover takes four genre-changing moments from around 1989, and the social formations that constituted, and were constituted by, them. These moments are used to reveal, following Raymond Williams, ‘the structures of feelings’ that accompany them. The four moments are represented by: Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back; the second Summer of Love in the UK; Nirvana's Nevermind; and the pop singles that topped the Billboard charts in 1989 – from Billy Joel, George Michael, Deee-Lite, ABBA and Sinead O'Connor, among others.
There is much of value here. Clover is a very astute listener and observer, who tells the story of these moments in a subtle and nuanced way. We see how the hip hop of Black Power becomes Gangsta rap, and how this engendered a new cultural politics. We see with a new vividness the brief moment of unity that coheres around acid house, and the politics of an ‘apolitics’ organised around ‘Rave in Peace’ (p. 58). We see how Nirvana create a form of confrontation in which political fury ‘dwells … in the musical form, in the social imagination, in the structure of feeling’ (p. 77). We see how George Michael's ‘Freedom ’90' offers not just ‘freedom from’ restraint, but a transcendent ‘freedom through’ (p. 97; his emphasis). But even as Clover offers these claims and insights, doubts creep in. As he concludes his discussion of ‘Freedom ’90', he writes: ‘The song itself was blameless, charged with blithe omnipotence; as it persisted in the clubs into the summer of 1991, one came to suspect that we were letting it stand for something, letting it narrate a change in the world at large, one that we almost believed’ (p. 101). Really? Who might have entertained these thoughts? The clubbers? The writers? Anyone at all?
The much briefer second part asks how the monumental character of that year was revealed or experienced in the music that echoed through it. Does pop simply serve, as the familiar Adornian critique contends, ‘as machine for ideological reproduction, singing back to us messages of convenience in the guise of social truths?’ (p. 20). It is a question which, in a sense, challenges the assumption that often inhabits Greil Marcus's own work, but in answering it, Clover finds a kind of reassurance to the Marcus in all of us: pop continues to preserve within itself the hidden stories and overlooked contradictions that mark lived histories. Pop's role, he suggests, is to preserve the sense of discontinuity that is the truth of historical experience, and to speak out against neat theories of social progress that issue in the ‘end of history’.
The question that the reader is left with, however, is whether this too is a claim for which there is no evidence. Despite its disavowal as a work of history, 1989 aspires, I think, to be a history of the imagination, but tends more towards an imagined history. This may be in the nature of such projects, but there are occasions when Clover might have adopted a more sceptical tone and drawn more on writers who, like George McKay (especially in Senseless Acts of Beauty), have tried to do something similar.
Clover tends sometimes to allow his populist intuitions to override his analytical aspirations. This is most apparent in the way he slides between market success and popular sentiment. In writing, for example, about the politicisation of hip hop, he talks of ‘the fact that there was a desire, a market, for such representations and polemics. This desire was by any measure encompassing’ (p. 30). There was clearly a market for political hip hop; there may have been desire for it too. But the one cannot be adduced from the other, and certainly not by eliding the two rhetorically.
But I do not want to end this review on a negative note. Capturing the way music provides the structures of feelings in the past or the present is never going to be easy, and Clover's book is a pleasure to read (and to argue with). He recognises that he is placing much upon ‘the rather narrow shoulders of the pop song’ (p. 138). The book is, nonetheless, rich in suggestions and insights, and makes a valuable contribution to the efforts of all those who continue to believe in music's importance to our lives as citizens – people who insist that ‘Pop music is a way of knowing something’ (p. 139).
