Words and music - Paul Morley

It's late at night. Imagine tuning your radio to, let's say, Radio 3, in one of those places with wayward receptionThere are bursts that reveal the programme to be a vigorously expressed account of the genesis and evolution of pop music'Cage took the silences in the air around us, and spread them through his music'But then is this the John Cage who 'eventually ended up as a character in 'Ally McBeal' or the musician behind the completely silent 4'33? And talking of 'completely silent' - 'The Sound of Silence' - 'the thing about Simon & Garfunkel is that their songs were 96% heartwarming, with very little of the remaining 4 % anything like mindblowing. More sort of mind sucking'. And then there are bursts of the music itself, it's meanings, its hidden depths, its obvious shallowness. On the surface this book is essentially an explanation and a justification of tracks that might be included on a two-disc discography of seminal moments in pop music history, but Paul Morley is a man obsessed, and he's about to share his obsession with us, the reader, in pursuit of 'the sexily philosophical things crawling through the moist, scratchy undergrowth of rock and roll'.