Q&A: Matthew Restall delves further into pop music history with recent books

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Anthropology, and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Matthew Restall has spent years building a reputation as a first-rate scholar of Latin American history.

Somewhere along the way, though, his curiosity led him to an entirely different realm of scholarship — pop music history.

The past year has been a busy one for Restall. His latest book, “The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus,” was published earlier this month by W.W. Norton & Company. And earlier this year, he published two pop music-themed books — “On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide” (Oxford University Press) and “Ghosts: Journeys to Post-Pop” (Tewkesbury, UK: Sonicbond Publishing).

They follow on the heels of Restall’s first book of music scholarship, 2020’s “Blues Moves,” a deep dive into Elton John’s 1976 album of the same name and part of Bloomsbury USA’s “33 1/3” series focused on popular music.

In “On Elton John,” Restall examines John’s legendary six-decades-plus career through the lens of other artists and the continually changing pop culture landscape. “Ghosts,” meanwhile, finds Restall coining a new term, “post-pop,” to describe the avant-garde genre developed by English musicians during the 1980s and ’90s, with a focus on three in particular — Kate Bush, Mark Hollis of the band Talk Talk, and David Sylvian of the band Japan.

“With these two books, I’m trying to develop a reputation as a serious pop music historian,” Restall said. “Which may be way too ambitious, and a humbling experience more than anything else!”

Restall recently discussed his continuing journey as a pop musicologist.

Q: Why did you decide to tackle not only two more pop music-themed books, but a second one focused on Elton John? What makes him a compelling subject worthy of continued examination?

Restall: When I finished “Blue Moves,” I imagined it would be a one-off book; I didn’t think of myself as a pop music historian. But after I wrote it, I was hooked. I found it so stimulating and such a great challenge to write a pop history book using the same techniques and methods I use in writing Latin American history.

Typically, a scholar writes about one particular topic, and then may be inspired to write about something different, but there’s a kind of a centrifugal force that pulls the scholar back to that original topic. So, I became an Elton John scholar without intentionally seeking to. I think it is possible that I am the only Elton John scholar — what a concept! In any case, I hope that people pick up the book even though they might not be an Elton John fan.

Q: In what ways were you able to expand upon your Elton scholarship with this book?

Restall: Elton’s story can be used as a way to better understand and appreciate the evolution of pop culture in the Western world during his lifetime.

For instance, take the story of his own sexual identity. He has said things like, “I’m the most famous gay man in the world.” What I tried to do was talk about that within the context of these other subjects. Does his homosexuality have some influence over his continued cultural relevance? The answer is yes. His tortured relationship with being “in” or “out,” and how it was extended over decades, has kept him in the public eye. You can take Elton John seriously as a pop culture icon if you consider all the ways his story reflects the last 50 years of cultural history.

There’s also his relationship with the British royal family, which tells us something about class in Britain. For Elton, it stems from the modest middle-class culture he grew up in. Then 10 years later, he’s living in a huge house down the road from Windsor Castle. His neighbors are the royals and he has a relationship with the royal family that I found had never been properly analyzed. What does it tell us about class and sexual identity, for example? It seemed to me he was closest with the women of the family, Princess Margaret and then Princess Diana. He also adopted the role that in the Tudor Court of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I was played by jesters and troubadours and storytellers. Elton offers two lessons — social mobility is possible through financial success and celebrity, but it kind of reinforces the class system because only if you’re Elton John can you really achieve that.

Q: Have you found similarities between your Latin American historical subjects and a pop music luminary like Elton John?

Restall: Yes. I’m not only making arguments that use the techniques and methods and skills that I developed over the decades writing Latin American history, but I’m also connecting to that history in surprising ways. In my book “When Montezuma Met Cortés,” I described Montezuma as a zookeeper and a collector; he collected every kind of living thing and object that he could. And there’s a chapter in “On Elton John” detailing the ways in which Elton is a collector. He’s been a phenomenal collector of records during the last half century, but he collects other objects as well. He has an incredible collection of Versace clothing, for example, much of which has never been worn. Perhaps more significantly, he also collects relationships with other musicians, both as someone who earlier in his career sought out patrons, and then as his career developed as a patron himself. And that’s absolutely elemental to understanding why Elton John is still around in the world today. It’s because of how he nurtures these relationships with other musicians.

Q: Where did the idea for “Ghosts” come from?

Restall: “Ghosts” was a labor of love. It was inspired by decades of following pop musicians into unusual places — musically not literally! There was no book about post-pop — I invented that category and defined it and picked three musicians who emerged in the suburbs of London around the same time. I made the argument that they are three key figures in this particular strain of pop music. They wanted to be pop stars and achieve success. And what did they do with it? They then turn around and start making pop music that really pushes the boundaries of what pop music is. They’re making albums that are not commercially viable, that are inventive and embracing the dramatic changes in technology happening in the 1980s in terms of instruments and studios.

Q: What was fascinating to you about these three particular musicians? How are they connected to each other?

Restall: I first started thinking about the book when Mark Hollis died, in 2019. He hadn’t made a record in 20 years, but the seriousness with which his music was talked about, especially in the U.K. and continental Europe, where Talk Talk had their greatest success, was intriguing to me as a narrative. Because I remember loving their first record as a teenager, and then being kind of perplexed when their career took kind of an avant-garde turn.

Then I thought about another Londoner, David Sylvian, who did something similar. I had followed him, too. I was a Japan fan and loved his early solo albums in the late ’80s. And then I watched him sort of just jumping the shark. His stuff became very strange, so out there and odd that it made Mark Hollis’ most avant-garde, uncommercial work sound like Taylor Swift!

With Kate Bush, my argument on how she connects to the post-pop concept is that she’s still flirting with the journey. Sylvian and Hollis just abandoned pop, whereas Bush went back and forth. Even early in her career, she made an incredibly avant-garde album, “The Dreaming,” which you could argue was the first post-pop album ever. And it got a mixed reception — it is greatly admired now, but at the time a lot of people were unhappy with it. After that, she hunkers down and produces “Hounds of Love,” which is her biggest album and launches her in the United States. After that, she swings back and forth.

Basically, these are musicians who did whatever they wanted. They had success, and from there had the opportunity to do what they wanted, even though that might undermine their success and potentially make them bankrupt and destroy everything they achieved. But they went ahead and did it anyway. And that tells us something interesting about creativity. These post-pop musicians have taken a journey into obscurity, into silence. The notion of silence is sort of the ultimate destination of post-pop. Take away the pop elements and in the end, nothing is left.

Q: While you’re analyzing these artists, you’re also including snippets of your own personal history as a young music fan in the 1980s. Why did you decide to incorporate that?

Restall: So, in trying to make the book more readable, I included about 10% memoir-type elements to bring the reader around and help them connect with me and the material. I’m making this journey that I want readers to accompany me on. At first, I had my doubts, thinking, “I’m not interesting, nobody wants to read a book about me.” But, when I’m talking about myself here, I’m not really talking about me — I’m talking about someone who is a music lover and consumer and listener of music. It makes me ordinary, an everyman. There are millions of people out there who have that same experience.