A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres (and almost 500 pages), MAJOR LABELS by Kelefa Sanneh, is on our shelves and student researchers have really been enjoying it. Sanneh, a staff writer at New Yorker who was also a music critic for The New York Times, explores Rock, R & B, Country, Punk, Hip-Hop, Dance Music, and Pop. In each case, he describes the trends and changes, citing bands and musicians who had a major impact. He notes, for example, that "in the nineties, Nirvana and Pearl Jam helped push alternative rock into the mainstream. But in the 2010s, even mainstream rock was simply one more alternative." Although the text tends to be rather dense and an index would have been useful, music fans will still be enthralled by this unique resource.
MAJOR LABELS received starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly.

Kelefa Sanneh did an excellent job with this book, even though the concept of musical genre is one that I struggle with. Well done.

A thorough, interesting look at how various music genres developed separately and together. Not for the casual music listener, though; Sanneh's knowledge is deep and almost academic.

At the beginning of his new book Major Labels, Kelefa Sanneh acknowledges that while critics (and radio programmers) are fascinated by genre, musicians definitely are not.

“Virtually every music interview I have conducted,” he writes, “has elicited some version of the sentence ‘I don’t know why it can’t just be “good music.”’ No doubt this sentiment captures something true about many musicians, especially accomplished ones. They hate being labeled.”

And yet, as Sanneh notes, the concept of genre carries more weight in the world of music than for most other media. If someone asks you to describe a movie or a book, you might easily describe its plot or characters…but if they ask you to describe a song or an album, you’ll very likely start with genre. Artists can’t escape it, which doubtless has a lot to do with why they hate it.

Sanneh’s book is subtitled A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, and it’s the kind of book only someone of his stature could (or, really, should) make the case for. A veteran critic with years’ worth of bylines at the New York Times and The New Yorker, Sanneh is fascinated with the winding paths of music history. His book is a personal history of popular music, framed around seven broadly defined genres.

It’s a book about how musicians relate to each other, but also about how they relate to their listeners. Genre is, in an important sense, about what you’re promising to that listener: an instrument? An attitude? An identity? If musicians are uncomfortable with genre labels, it might be both to avoid being beholden to such promises - and because they know the label can be taken away as easily as it’s given.

The book starts with a chapter on rock, the genre that essentially inaugurated the current era of popular music when it emerged in the 1950s. Although The Kid LAROI is a long way from Little Richard, rock and roll reset the terms for how recorded music would function in the lives of its listeners: the leading ratchet on a wheel of generational progress that’s kept revolving for an entire lifetime now.

Even so, as Sanneh notes, it wasn’t until the ‘70s that rock and R&B (the subject of chapter two) were fully institutionalized as genres separate from one another, and from pop (chapter seven) - which took another decade, in Sanneh’s account, to emerge in its modern sense as post-disco electronic songcraft without an inherently rebellious bent. It was the opposite of punk (chapter four), which persisted as a label for music with an agenda long after its purely musical trappings faded away.

As Sanneh notes, that happened as soon as the early ‘80s, when post-punk bands like Talking Heads continued in the “punk” tradition writ large while sounding absolutely nothing like the Sex Pistols. Eventually the punk impulse led to alternative rock and indie rock, and by the time Nirvana’s former label Sub Pop signed the Shins, indie rock “was neither fierce nor ironic. You bought a CD by Death Cab for Cutie, or Feist, or Wilco, not to make a statement or flaunt your taste - nobody would have been impressed - but because you loved listening to it.”

Country, of course, has long been music’s most notorious genre due to its racial and political policing. “The number one thing they absolutely drill into you as a country artist,” Sanneh quotes Taylor Swift observing in 2019, “is ‘Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks!’”

In the author’s view, the Chicks’ 2003 exile from country music was “somewhat depressing, because it made it easier for smug partisans on both sides to feel vindicated.” The country establishment framed the band as unapologetic, unpatriotic snobs; while the fans who embraced the Chicks on the other side of the political divide were left even more certain that country listeners were homogeneous bigots.

As Sanneh notes, country is far from the only genre to frequently attract largely white audiences, it just stands alone in how “unusually unapologetic” it is about that. Even so, Sanneh seems to admire country for the sheer chutzpah with which Nashville moves its aesthetic boundaries while retaining a very sizable clutch of “fans who want to claim it and critics who want to fight over it; radio stations that play it and record companies that sell it. No one quite knows the rules, but everyone knows that there are some rules.”

By contrast, Sanneh notes that hip-hop - which “may be the quintessential modern American art form, the country’s greatest cultural contribution to the world” - is starting to go the way of “rock,” becoming so overwhelmingly popular and influential that it becomes a signifier divorced from any actual style of music. Unlike with rock, though, which became the popular province of white groups from the British Invasion onward, hip-hop has retained its essential association with the Black community that invented it. There are massively successful white rappers, but from Debbie Harry (Blondie’s “Rapture”) to Eminem to Macklemore, they deferentially emphasize their connections to Black culture. “Like country music,” writes Sanneh, “it is both an artistic tradition and a cultural identity.”

Of course that’s true, to some extent, of every genre - and every sub-genre, down to every artist and every album and every track. When we listen to music, we’re saying something about ourselves, both to others and to ourselves. Genre can be a trap (the vast body of work we collectively consider “classical music” has been trying to free itself for well over a century, with mixed results), but it can also be liberating. That’s how Boy George saw it when he embraced the “pop” label in the ‘80s, as Sanneh writes.

“‘By the end of 1976,’ Boy George recalled, in his first memoir, ‘anyone who was anyone was punk.’ But punk, in his view, quickly became a ‘joke’; in its zeal to ‘reject conformity,’ it enforced a conformity of its own, which he found unspeakably drab, all loud guitars and leather jackets…’Punk was safe,’ he wrote. "‘We were spinning forward in a whirl of eyeliner and ruffles.’”

An absolutely fantastic overview of the history of popular music. The book hints at the current death of the fixed genre; perhaps that's the follow up in the series. In the meantime, it's a great gift for the music lover in your life. Each chapter goes deep on a genre and provides historical context; I'm a former professional rock critic and even I learned a ton. Not surprisingly given his pedigree, Sanneh's writing is fantastic and the book is an absolute pleasure to read.

I began reading this book believing the author and I were going to have to agree to disagree. I firmly believe the idea of genres as we know them has expired, and as this book journey began Sanneh spoke to how the idea of genres developed and the tribism that came with it. I didn't disagree with the historical perspective but feared this may become a treatise on why genre can be good in uniting and helping us find common ground.

While the book did explore advantages of genre, it took a much broader dive into how genres change over time - how jazz used to be "popular" music and as it faded from the mainstream "pop" became defined by whatever the mainstream craze drove to the top of the charts. As such, each section's foray into particular genres like R&B, Rock and Pop acknowledges that both the music and the fans in those categories have greatly shifted with time, and no less so during the digital music era.

I particularly appreciated the granular look at the kind of competition and criticism each era's contemporaries faced, often on the heels of the lineage of their predecessors or successors. Listening to many of the greats who were before my time, yet whose music remains timeless, it's easy to forget who their contemporaries were or how fighting for airtime and concert venues between them sometimes shaped their view of their audience or indeed their sound. As a songwriter and musician myself, I'm struck by examining of how some of those careers were longer than expected or shorter than initially believed. The book examines not only the artists, but also the favoritism of the listeners and reviewers, and how an artist or genre mocked and criticised today can become someone's favorite tomorrow (and vice versa).

Whether you're a consummate music fan and/or a music creator, there's bound to be some explorations within that you'll enjoy.

Major Labels
A HISTORY OF POPULAR MUSIC IN SEVEN GENRES
By KELEFA SANNEH
Available now

#Bookstagram #Rock #R&B #Country #Pop #HipHop #Punk #Dance
#Music #History #MusicMakers #KelefaSanneh #MajorLabels #NetGalley #Nonfiction #BookRec #BookReview

Read if you: Want an entertaining, very opinionated, and rollicking journey through the last 40+ years of music.

When I learned that Kelefa Sanneh is a black Gen X-er, I was doubly excited for this book. I enjoy reading books about (popular) music history, but so often, the authors are from the Boomer generation (not being anti-Boomer!) ,and give scant attention to pop/rock music post Beatles (and little regard for genres outside that). Sanneh goes beyond the Top 40 to examine country, R&B, EDM, punk, and rap.

Of course, there will be readers that wish he had focused more on certain genres or artists. That's to be expected with books about entertainment. And there will likely be more sections that keep the reader's interest longer than others. However--this is one of the most balanced and fascinating books on modern music history that I've read in several years.

Librarians/booksellers: Definitely purchase to round out your music historuy collection.

Many thanks to Penguin Group and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Well constructed sections, with manic (and very welcome) jumps in topics.

The primary categorization of the "major labels" works well... nice wordplay to boot!

I was more impressed with how the author eschewed traditional chronological or "talking head" oral histories by jumping around topics. This immediately made me think of the manic conversations I have with fellow music nerds, where one thought spurs another.

Who doesnt love pop music??! I was excited to see this book and can say that even this reluctant music history reader was able to follow along. Loved it and highly recommend.

This is an incredible tome that dissects and synthesizes 70 years of popular music in fun, fascinating and often unexpected ways. There’s insight on every page.