Musical notes: Scorsese, Madonna, and the awfulness of millennium pop

In our new monthly roundup of our music critics’ musings, we explore a forgotten corner of middle-class post-Britpop angst, and a book that argues for pop’s intrinsic magic

Alexis Petridis, chief rock and pop critic It was pure coincidence that I found myself reading Ted Gioia’s Music: A Subversive History when I heard about the launch of the “first full-service record label built on AI music discovery”, but the two fitted together perfectly. Gioia is an American musician and author: in the past, he’s written a series of acclaimed books about jazz, but Music: A Subversive History is by some distance the most wide-ranging and provocative thing he’s come up with.