The book by the classic of British music journalism, Iain Panman, “Bending the Path - the Way Home” is a collection of virtuoso essays about a number of figures who influenced the history of pop music: Charlie Parker, James Brown, Frank Sinatra, Prince, etc. Seemingly arbitrary at first and the fragmentary selection, upon closer examination, reveals the key theme of the collection – the reception and place of the African-American tradition within Western European popular culture. The line from the poem by W. Hugh Auden in the title suggests the leitmotif of these texts - the search for a home that exists as an elusive echo and reverberation of favorite compositions. Panman's essays are nostalgic in the literal sense of the word: it is homelessness, understood through the prism of everyday life, gender, art, society, politics, history and religion, that unites all the heroes of his book. Nevertheless, Panman's letter is far from mournful lamentations about an irretrievably bygone era. The British critic uncompromisingly dissects not only the biographies and works of iconic 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.