Major Labels

Major Labels devotes a chapter each to rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance and pop, tracing how genres function less as sonic categories than as communities, arguments and identities. Sanneh, a New Yorker staff writer who spent years as a critic, is that rare guide equally fluent in Merle Haggard and Wu-Tang, and equally unwilling to condescend to any of them.

The result is opinionated, encyclopedic and consistently surprising, alive to the snobberies and loyalties that make music fans who they are. intendle recommends it as the ideal book for the person who loves one genre and is suspicious of the rest. Named a best book of 2021 by Pitchfork, The Guardian and others, it makes a persuasive case that how we sort music says as much about us as about the songs.