THE FABER BOOK OF POP BY HANIF KUREISHI & JON SAVAGE

Charting the course of pop from its underground origins, through its low- and high-art phases, out to the mainstream, this book takes in fiction, reportage, fashion, art and fantasy, as filtered through pop music. It includes work by authors such as Joe Orton, Roddy Doyle and Malcolm X.

The Faber Book of Pop is everything that the Companion to 20th-Century Popular Music isn’t. It’s an anthology of articles and stories and essays – pieces first published in magazines or small-press books. It’s an eclectic collection: Bruce Bliven’s 1944 New Republic piece tells of early bobbysoxers swooning for Frank Sinatra, and Neil Tennant writes from the 1985 performance that ended the career of a drag singer called Marilyn. Dozens of others, too, tell their own little stories, each tracing a small part of the culture’s 50-year evolution. Much of the writing is still fresh, but every once in a while, a line like Nik Cohn’s appears: “The Stones were mean and nasty, full-blooded, very tasty, and they beat out the toughest, crudest, most offensive noise any English band had ever made.” The book has several spots like that, weird moments where once-street-wise rock criticism begins to sound impossibly quaint.

Readers won’t consult this book to settle arguments or to look up dates, but I’d still call it a first-rate reference for one simple reason: it’ll age well. In the lightning-quick world of pop culture, that’s no mean feat.