| Hear ye, hear ye
REVIEW
WAYS OF HEARING
by Ben Thompson
Orion, 347 pp.
Stina Nordenstam, a musician who refuses to be interviewed, once compared the media circus surrounding pop music to "being forced to listen to 24 Greatest Heavy Metal Ballads over and over again while someone screams the Swedish translation in your ear."
Although Ben Thompson may be a bit more subtle than that, the overall effect is the same because, instead of writing a book about pop music, he's filled 300 pages with recycled reviews and interviews. In the ’70s, a music critic could get away with this, as pop culture was a lot simpler then, and publishers allowed their writers space to develop an idea. Today, with reviews typically kept under the 500-word limit, there's little room for anything more than name-checking and one-liners, which is what we get here, in spades.
From Lee Scratch Perry to the Spice Girls, DJs to journalists, Thompson presents an irreverent iconography of the the U.K. pop scene, the soap-operatic tradition of which at least provides a memorable cast of characters – but the stragegy is to entertain rather than to inform. Reading this, you'll pick up some interesting gossip, but no new ideas, which is particularly annoying for a book that takes its name from John Berger's pop criticism masterpiece, Ways of Seeing.
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