If the story fragments from epic noir into an hysteria of list, it’s because Morley sees the list as the form most suited to this city. The list is
a way of abbreviating the speed and complexity of modern life into easily understood sections of naming and numbering. It’s a handy way of fixing fixations, of reducing the enormity of everything into a simple series of notes and hints. But, let’s face it, it is also a way of defining the shape of the universe, a list of equations, a list of provisional understandings and subsequent qualifications.
And so the lists writhe like an opened can of worms: hit lists, myth lists, reading lists, shopping lists, content lists, index lists, wish lists, shit lists, track lists, lust lists, lest-we-forget lists, lost lists and last lists. Morley wants to pataphysically push Hornboid listfetish that has consumed pop publishing and tv to absurd limits. Because once you begin making a list, it’s not really clear where to stop. It’s just a click and cut from the bite-sized ‘I Love the 80s’ to the would-be encyclopedic ‘I Love Music’, a hop and a skip from securely mapping ourselves in fictive space-time to getting lost in a Borgesian garden of forking filepaths.
Because lists are provisional and arbitrary, never definitive, composed of bits and bobs of data that can be updated and rearranged at will and whim, they appeal to the fragmatist in Morley. Titled ‘a history of pop’, W&M is, in effect, more of a teeming antihistory, a sky so milky with incident and accident that no one constellation could consider all its luminescence. You could no more write a definitive history of pop than you could plot an exhaustive route through the streets of London, New York, Paris or Munich.
Bill Drummond once proposed exploring a new city by writing one’s name across the centre spread of the A-Z and following contingency where it led, and W&M is a similarly capricious trip. But I wonder if even the fabricated glamour of Kylie is spell enough to bind this book. The promise of Morley’s adventure is that in brazenly and inventively indulging the arbitrary it might free us from the thrall of certain master maps and lists, encourage us to plot our own desire lines across the beaten tracks. While tragic or elegiac histories are written out of a sense of responsibility to the past, to summing up the glorious achievements of those awesome giants, our parents, sci-fi or bastard history is inspired by the shadows of futurity, inspired by provoking undreamt-of possibilities. The hope is that if the pop pups who read W&M are shaken up enough to stop worrying ‘how can we possibly continue the long sonata of the dead?’ and instead start wondering ‘how about if we think of ourselves as the missing link in an as-yet unwritten equation?’ then the future might be ever more open to novelty and surprise.
But this secularisation has its flipside, its minor-key B-side. When nothing’s definitive, nothing’s to be taken seriously, is the game worth playing, is anything at stake? A book so thick with list runs the risk of reading like a telephone directory or catalogue, dull as a database. Infinite difference is just as likely to spawn indifference as it is to inspire infinite jest. For all the ideal qualities of the list, it is also, let’s face it, a little old-fashioned, a little too humble, a bit too analogue for the electric dreams Morley wants to describe. You get the sense that W&M is, in fact, straining against the limitations of this form, straining, even, against the sequential form of the book, wants to explode out of the remorseless plod of listeria into a promiscuity of hypertext or at least a choose-your-own-adventure tale. A CD-ROM like Chris. Marker’s Proustian ‘Immemory’ makes W&M, for all its ludic footnotes, seem a little quaint.
As Stephen Daedalus defined a pier as a disappointed bridge, so I might define a list as a disenchanted poem. What transforms an indifferent list of ingredients into magic, something that empowers us, something we take to heart, is, after all, the quality of incantation, its becoming song through our tone of voice, the make-believe music of our words. You sense that, after leading us up the garden paths for so long, Morley would like his lists to cohere into a fabulous poem, a supreme fiction. And, indeed, he makes a last-gasp bid to re-enchant the glittering splinters of W&M in the final pages of the book. But I’m not sure I’m convinced. W&M stops short, I think, of taking flight. But, as it taxies on the runway, with all its exasperations and fiddling, its prevarications and ponderousness, it remains, in its imagination of possible futures, a fantastically seductive invitation au voyage, a content-list for the twenty-first century rather than an index of the twentieth, an imaginary gazetteer to the possible prospects and vistas of the City of Sound. It’s just that it may be up to you to compose the days between stations into a journey, forge the metaphor that transports your magic carpet, mash the bootleg that introduces Alvin to Kylie, cast the spell that binds. Haven’t we always known, in our hearts, that pop should be a spell?