Major labels a history of popular music6/11/2023 ![]() 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 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. ![]() His first book is called Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres (Penguin, 2021). The book refracts the entire history of popular music over the past fifty years through the big genres that have defined and dominated it-rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop-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 was a pop music critic at the New York Times from 2000-2008, and has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since then. ![]() Kelefa Sanneh was born in England, and lived in Ghana and Scotland before moving with his parents to the United States in the early 1980s. ![]()
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