Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

Product Description

“One of the best books of its kind in decades.” —The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop
Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become communities. In 

Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career’s worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with popular music—as an art form (actually, a bunch of art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we use to build our identities. He explains the history of slow jams, the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in trouble.
 
Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending on the moment, there has been Black music and white music, constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music
isn’t transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The opposite of a modest proposal,
Major Labels pays in full.

Review

“
Major Labels [is] ecumenical and all-embracing. . . . [Sanneh] has a subtle and flexible style, and great powers of distillation. . . . The best thing about Sanneh may be that he subtly makes you question your beliefs.”
—New York Times

“Mr. Sanneh, a staff writer for the
New Yorker, gets high marks both for his encyclopedic knowledge and his breadth of taste. He also writes like an angel, making
Major Labels one of the best books of its kind in decades.”
—Wall Street Journal

“As a guide to the erosion of fervent musical loyalties that seems to be under way, few could have better credentials than the
New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh, who has published a delightfully provocative new book,
Major Labels.”
—The Atlantic

“Kelefa Sanneh has achieved the impossible.
Major Labels somehow manages to unspool everything you need to know about 50 years of music, but more impressively, he makes you care about all of it. Even the stuff you don’t care about. It’s funny, it’s personal and as a piece of writing, the book borders on poetry.”
—David Letterman

“A beautifully observed history of the last 50 years of music. It f****ing rules, and I recommend it without reservation.”
—Tom Breihan, Stereogum

“A charming stroll through our sometimes useful, sometimes debilitating compartmentalizing of sounds. The point is not another survey of familiar classics, but rather, a far more ambitious consideration of how styles fuse and expand—in ways audiences often aren’t comfortable accepting.”
—Chicago Tribune Fall Book Preview

“An essential document from an inimitable critic.” —
Vulture

“This is quite simply a perfect book for any music lover and an ideal primer on the last 50 years of popular music in the United States. It’s written not in the voice of a music critic but that of a deeply engaged and passionate listener . . . A thoroughly enjoyable and perceptive book that champions the art of popular music.” —
Library Journal (starred review)

“[A] thrilling debut . . . Equally fascinating are Sanneh’s insights into the way race has shaped music, particularly in the overlapping worlds of R&B a