Major Labels
By Kelefa Sanneh
- Genre
- Art, Culture & Creative Life
- Publisher
- Penguin Press (Penguin Random House)
- Publication year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 9780525559597
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres is a work of music criticism by the New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh, published by Penguin Press in October 2021. It devotes a chapter to each of seven genres. It was named a best book of 2021 by Pitchfork, The Guardian and others.
Most histories of popular music march by decade; Kelefa Sanneh organizes his by tribe. 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. A generous, genre-crossing education.