Mulholland’s first book, This Is Uncool: The Greatest 500 Singles Since Punk and Disco, became something of a mini-classic – required toilet reading for poppickers who preferred the thrill of a three-minute single over the beard-stroking contemplation of a 70-minute LP. Its popcentric bias threatened to scupper this inevitable follow-up – subtitled The Greatest 261 Albums Since Punk and Disco – but Mulholland’s deep obsession with pop, and his ability to link his criticism into broader political and aesthetic territory, survives unscathed. 

He’s still got plenty of great critical riffs: Portishead’s Dummy is ‘hip hop on a life-support machine’; Sly & Robbie’s backing on Grace Jones’s Nightclubbing ‘felt like the inside of a taxi that knows a secret 30-minute route from Kingston to Studio 54 via Paris and Brixton, but only for the beautiful and damned’; Chic’s music is ‘a sneaky critique of the entire notion of black people dancing away their blues, instead of using them as triggers for political change’. And he is brilliant on hip hop, disgusted at its growing misogyny and homophobia (and its attendant glorification of black-onblack violence), but also guiltily thrilled by the thuggish sonic implications of its key players NWA, Cypress Hill, Tupac, Eminem and co. 

As with This Is Uncool, the only issue is with the premise. Mulholland claims to be rectifying trad-rock notions of acceptability, but there is little that is ‘uncool’ or off-message here – why else would he spend a whole page apologising for picking The Police’s Reggatta de Blanc? His is as much of an authorised rock canon as any constructed by Dave Marsh or Robert Christgau, and it shares their world-weary snootiness about, say, Coldplay, Girls Aloud or 50 Cent. The key differences are an infectious enthusiasm that will have you listening afresh to those Rolling Stone-approved après-punk staples (Clash, Iggy, Bowie, Smiths, XTC, Radiohead, Talking Heads, Costello, Springsteen, Bunnymen, etc), and a long-overdue championing of pop that is black, gay or female (Pet Shop Boys, Siouxsie, Missy Elliott, Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire).