Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh review – an unapologetic defence of music’s defining categories
In March, American music writer Amanda Petrusich wrote an insightful article in the New Yorkerabout a defining aspect of contemporary pop: the ways in which young musicians constantly evade categorisation by borrowing from and merging what were once rigidly defined styles. This genre fluidity, she noted, was inevitably causing problems for traditional music institutions, from record shops and radio stations to the organisers of awards ceremonies and the marketing departments of record companies, for whom categorisation remains a defining aspect.
One way they have responded is by inventing more genres and subgenres. This year’s Grammy awards, for instance, featured 83 separate categories, including rock, alternative, folk, Americana, American roots, urban contemporary and progressive R&B. “It’s difficult to imagine a Grammy ceremony that doesn’t rely on genre as its organising principle,” wrote Petrusich, “yet genre feels increasingly irrelevant to the way we think about, create and consume art.”
In a postmodern pop cultural moment, when notions of purism and authenticity seem irredeemably old-fashioned, it may seem like an odd time to write a book that is not only a history of popular music’s defining categories – rock, R&B, country, punk, hiphop, dance and pop – but an unapologetic defence of them. “I’m always a bit puzzled when a musician is praised for transcending genre,” writes Kelefa Sanneh in his introduction to Major Labels. “What’s so great about that?”
There are, of course, several answers to that question – Astral Weeks, Bitches Brew, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, to name but a few classic albums that immediately spring to mind, all of them unbound by the confines of genre. Likewise, Prince’s entire back catalogue, which, you could argue, is one long effortlessly audacious exercise in genre transcendence. For Sanneh, though, devotion to a sound, whether hip-hop or hardcore, is essentially about community and belonging; a way to signify our togetherness and signal our difference, often through allegiance to one style at the expense of all others. “For more than half a century,” he writes, “listeners, especially in their formative years, have used pop music to define their identities.”
This idea grounds his argument to a degree and is given weight by his recollections of his own formative musical loyalties, most notably his teenage identification with punk, a genre born of disaffection and demanding the total devotion of the faithful. Sanneh himself pledged his allegiance to punk in high school after his best friend made him a mixtape-cum-primer that ranged from the Sex Pistols to the Exploited and beyond to the post-punk noise of Hüsker Dü. His evocation of that time, coupled with a lingering devotion to the cause, lends his chapter on punk a personal resonance that is missing elsewhere in a fascinating but often frustrating book that is part memoir, part critical overview and – the frustrating bit – part potted history of popular music.
For any self-respecting music fan not tied to a single genre at the expense of all others, Sanneh’s retelling of great chunks of pop history, though light of touch, will be all too familiar from countless other titles. To be fair, that became less of a problem for me the closer his narrative got to the present moment when, ironically, the genre model he adheres to begins to become altogether more porous.
The term pop, for instance, now seems more like a lazily applied label than a genre. Likewise, dance and R&B, terms that barely hint at the plethora of styles, strategies and practices underpinning forms that are producerdriven, dizzyingly shape-shifting and geared towards constant reinvention. Even “rock”, perhaps the hoariest of all
generic terms, now stretches from 60s Laurel Canyon introversion to 90s Norwegian death metal.
As I read, I kept thinking that lurking inside this big, ambitious hybrid book was a smaller, more personal and altogether more compelling exploration of belonging and identity through music. “As a teenager, I was drawn to punk,” writes Sanneh at one point, “for the same reason I was not drawn to, say, the majestic Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour... I loved punk because I didn’t see myself represented in it, at least not in some of the major identity categories that my biography might have suggested: Black, brownskinned, biracial, African. It was thrilling to claim these alien bands and this alien movement as my own.”
I would have loved to read more about the singular tensions of his American punk life in a culture that, apart from the pioneering hardcore band Bad Brains, was resoundingly white. Those tensions are hinted at, but skimmed over, in his account of a “tense” gig by hardcore band Fugazi. “I saw skinheads there for the first time in my life,” he recalls, “and I tried to figure out how scared I should be.” In other ways, too, his punk life was – how shall I put it? – singular. At Harvard University, of all places, he found an unlikely punklight community founded on anorak expertise rather than attitude. The college’s music radio station actually vetted would-be DJs via “a semesterlong class in punk rock history” and a written examination. “I would never again be prepared for a test as I would on that afternoon,” writes Sanneh. Down these mean streets a man must go, I guess.
The author packs a lot in. He is an informative guide to hip-hop and country, for so long the polar extremes of American musical identity. In 2019, though, a young black rapper, Lil Nas X, released the genre-bending Old Town Road, a deft merging of both, which became the longest running No 1 in
Dance and R&B are terms that barely hint at the plethora of styles that are dizzyingly shapeshifting
American pop history, despite having been removed from Billboard magazine’s country chart for not being authentic enough.
Given that pop’s present fluidity is making genre traditionalism seem suddenly, hopelessly outdated, Major Labels may yet become an elegy for a time when it mattered above all else. Why it mattered so much, though it is often lost in the telling, is the essential question that propels this book. Why it no longer matters so much is perhaps the more pressing one.
• Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply