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Tell Me Why: a Beatles Commentary. By Tim Riley. London: The Bodley Head, 1988. 423 pp.

In musical terms, this means that Afro-American popular music was at its richest (from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s) when it not only expressed the experience and aspiration of black Americans but was also, in itself, an aspect of the community materially the music circulated through (and thus supported) a network of black radio stations, concert promoters, retailers, etc. Rhythm and blues 'died' when the music lost this economic function, when, in the pursuit of 'crossover' success, black performers, producers and broadcasters aimed for a mass, 'universal' appeal which meant, inevitably, handing over their cultural power to white-oriented leisure corporations, stadium and retail chains, and advertising agencies. In the 1980s black performers may have taken their place at the top of the entertainment pyramid, but little of their financial or cultural capital is ploughed back into the black community. George's book is important for its detail of neglected, institutional areas of rhythm-and-blues history (the djs and pluggers, the 'mom and pop store' owners, the agents and managers, etc.) but it is written as a tract (in empirical terms, George simply provides the sketch map of a territory scholars should now explore properly). His assumed readership is black; he is asking difficult questions about their individual and collective interests what is the future of Afro-American culture if it becomes divided between the 'integrated' few and the alienated many? (Hip-hop is, for him, the healthiest source of a musical counter to crossover.) But George's refusal to separate musical and political issues and judgements is a challenge to white readers too. As Hoskyns's book shows, it has been all too easy for us to move from a love of black music (and the belief that as a source of pleasure and beauty it has 'no colour') to the wishful conclusion that the politics of race is somehow irrelevant to its meaning.