[In the following excerpt, Bowen offers an unfavorable assessment of The Faber Book of Pop.]

The culture of rock music is a notoriously excessive affair. Anthologies are one way of capturing some of its monstrosity, and in these two fat collections, culled from a half-century or so of writing about rock and pop, we encounter, among other things, Elvis’s 19,000 drug prescriptions in two and a half years, Ike Turner’s thirteen wives (and innumerable affairs and one-night stands), and countless trashed hotel rooms and wrecked lives, to say nothing of such curiosities as Lou Reed’s interview with President Havel and the peculiar charms of Dahlia the Dog Act. Dylan Jones’s Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy, orthodox to a fault, starts with Elvis and ends with Blur and Oasis; the more ambitious and eclectic Faber Book of Pop begins with the future Malcolm X learning the “lindy hop” and “the kangaroo” in a dance-hall in Boston in 1942, and ends with Andrew O’Hagan’s moving 1994 account of Temazepam injectors on a Glasgow housing estate. …

Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage, the editors of The Faber Book of Pop, are interested in everything to do with pop culture—clothes, sexuality, dancing, politics—and they give plenty of space to its female, gay and black contributors. In what is so often a world of cliques and exclusions, they have a cheeringly broad view of pop; they have trawled autobiographies and novels (but no plays or films) as well as obscure fanzines, poetry collections and record-sleeve notes to make up the more than 150 pieces of their collection. The book has a nicely catholic range of contributors—we find Bob Dylan cuddling up to Noël Coward, William Rees-Mogg sitting alongside Angela Carter and Derek Jarman putting on “My Beatles Hat” at the very moment Paul Johnson is warning of “The Menace of Beatlism”. This generosity is paid for by a certain lack of shape. In what is not, alas, a parody of Raymond Williams’s Keywords, Savage’s introduction “word-surfs” the meanings of “pop”, leaping from “popular music” via “popping the question”, the sound of a pistol-shot and the pawn-shop (as in “Pop goes the Weasel”), to “Pop” as the name of the Eton College elite.

The articles are distinctly uneven in quality, and too often the book seems like one of those unfortunate triple albums from the 1970s, meandering, eclectic and inconsequential, with endless unrelated solos and no structure. Even the titles that the editors inflict on the book’s chapters (“Red, humming neon”, “Shadows of boredom”) give it the unmistakable air of the adolescent synthesizer player. The charitable populism of the book extends to too many trivial pieces from such sources as Picture Post, Hello! and the Sun.

If it were a rock album, Jones’s would be, as the homage to The Who in the title suggests, professional and competent in a swaggering sort of way, whereas Kureishi and Savage resemble rather one of those “All-Night Party” records with some good tracks and rather too many fillers. They represent Chuck Berry, for example, by a maundering piece of autobiography, incomprehensible even by rock-star standards. Jones, cruelly but compellingly, gives us an account of his conviction for installing television cameras in the toilet bowls of the women’s lavatories at his country club. It is striking in both books how impoverished the descriptions of the music are. Barbara Hulanicki in the Faber Book remembers in loving detail the colours, shapes and fabrics that made the Biba boutique what it was, and George Melly can make you momentarily yearn for the beads and flares of the first Summer of Love; but almost no one tries to do the same for the music. Indeed, the best writing often has very little to do with it, as in Nick Kent’s chilling account of Sid Vicious attempting murder for a pair of motorcycle boots, or when Charles Shaar Murray captures Little Jimmy Osmond for eternity looking like “a small constipated toad on methedrine”.