The bend of the path is the way home. Panman I.

The book of the classic of British music journalism, Ian Panman, “The Beam Home” is a collection of virtuoso essays about a number of figures that had an influence on the history of pop music: Charlie Parker, James Brown, Frank Sinatra, Prince, etc. And fragmented choice for a closer examination allows you to detect the key topic of the collection - the reception and place of the African American tradition as part of the Western European popular culture.

A line from the poem Whisten Hugh, the leitmotif of these texts, which exists in the title, is a search for a house that exists as an elusive echo and an echo of favorite compositions. Panman's essay is nostalgic in the literal sense of the word: it is the homelessness, understood through the prism of life, tender, art, society, politics, history and religion, unites all the heroes of his book. Nevertheless, Panman’s letter is far from the mournful lamentations in the irrevocably departed era.

British critic uncompromisingly dissects not only the biographies and work of cult musicians, but also the mechanisms of Western European pop culture as such. As a result, we have before us one of the most striking books about love: love, full of contradictions and flaws, love for pop music-perhaps the main event in the history of culture of the second half of the 20th century.