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Kalefa Sanneh: Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres book (2021, Penguin)
My house doesn’t have central heat, and it’s been quite cold here in North Carolina (well, cold for us at least), so I’ve been reading a lot. Last week I plowed through this book by former New York Times pop music columnist Kalefa Sanneh, and I thought y’all might want to know about it.
Sanneh’s conceit is right in the book’s subtitle. He gives us capsule histories of seven different genres that were and are popular in the 20th and 21st centuries, which add up, more or less, to a history of popular music during that time period. It’s such a straightforward idea that it’s surprising no one has done it before, but part of the issue is that artists and music writers are often reluctant to talk about genre. Artists don’t like their work to be limited or pigeonholed by genre, and critics tend to view the best music as somehow transcending genre… that if something is “just” a country record or a dance record that it can’t be great. Sanneh’s book takes these biases head-on.
What is genre, though? Ostensibly, genre refers to categories of artistic works based on form, subject, or style. In literature, epic poetry and sonnets are different genres… one is very long and deals with heroism; the other is exactly 14 lines and deals with romantic love. In popular culture, though, genre means so much more than that. Just look at the term “genre fiction” in the literary world. Today, “genre fiction” refers to literary works that fit into established genre categories like science fiction, romance, crime, etc. However, “genre fiction” is typically distinguished from “literary fiction,” which somehow transcends genre, the implication being that genre fiction is formulaic or less interesting.
Much like genre fiction, musical genre is not strictly about formal categorization, but just as much about who listens to particular artists or styles of music. This is rooted in the ways stores categorize records, as well as radio programming, where stations target a certain demographic profile and serve them with a particular style of music. Thus, R&B became music that black people listened to. Country music became music for rural white people. The interesting thing, though—and this is where much of the tension in Sanneh’s narrative comes from—is that both things, the musical styles and the communities they serve, are changing constantly. Obviously, you can listen to country music from the 1950s and country music from the 2020s and they sound very different (albeit with some through lines). The demographics also change. Rock and roll started out as black music, but was basically whitewashed over the course of the 60s. Country music’s changes were less dramatic, but changing from targeting rural white people to suburban white people had a big effect on the genre’s style and politics. These changes were always gradual, anything but synchronous, and generated a lot of controversy as they were happening. Sanneh looks at the careers of stars like Dolly Parton, Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, and many others, illustrating how they navigated the changing landscape, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much.
One of the seven genres Sanneh examines is punk, and obviously I was particularly interested in this chapter. The book’s tone shifts with this chapter, the narrative becoming much more personal because Sanneh grew up in the punk scene in the early and mid-90s in the northeastern US. He covers the standard histories of how punk developed in the US and UK and how it transformed through the 80s, 90s, and beyond, but really the chapter is about how Sanneh himself engaged with punk and what he took from it as his listening habits widened after his teen years. As I was reading, I couldn’t figure out how I felt about the book shifting to more of a first-person perspective… I worried it overemphasized parts of the punk scene Sanneh experienced himself. For instance, Sanneh writes about one revelatory Fugazi gig he saw in the early 90s, which gets more ink than the Sex Pistols’ entire career. In another of the book’s most memorable passages, Sanneh writes about training at the Harvard radio station, which was a crash course / boot camp in punk history. Each week, the station’s elders assigned ten albums, and the trainees would have to listen to those albums, write up their thoughts, and then the group would have heated discussions about their impressions. (This sounds like heaven to me BTW.) It’s interesting that while record company executives, radio programmers, and (to a lesser extent) journalists policed other genres’ formal boundaries, in punk this happens at a grassroots, word-of-mouth level. Further, Sanneh’s punk education seems to foreground skepticism about the very idea of genre, since they encouraged debate at these meetings. It seems like the station’s elders weren’t so much policing punk’s boundaries as pressing their initiates to think through what punk meant to them, and to articulate and defend their reasoning.
Anyway, the book is really good. I was riveted and would have read the whole thing in one sitting if that were possible. I should also note that I haven’t spoiled anything for you… there’s plenty more insight in there, particularly if your interests extend beyond punk.
I think part of what Sanneh tries to do in the book is rehabilitate the idea of genre within music discourse / criticism, or at least to establish it as a useful lens through which you can look at music. I used to hate thinking about genre. I remember when Sorry State opened, we didn’t have genre-based sections, just new records, used records, and bargain bin. When we introduced genre sections, we saw a spike in sales, because most people weren’t interested in digging through a bunch of records they didn’t care about in order to find the rock, hip-hop, or metal they were interested in. The store’s staff still gets into debates over this… a long-running one is whether we should have a goth section at the store, and if so, what records would be in it? What music is and isn’t goth?
I also grapple with genre in my writing for the Sorry State newsletter. A lot of the music we carry and that I write about explicitly engages with the idea of genre. Sanneh points out in his book again and again how people use genre as a kind of social lever to raise up or push down certain artists or trends, or to include or exclude certain people from an in-group. (For instance, it’s hard for white artists to get played on R&B radio, and even harder for black artists to get on country radio. Does that mean Justin Timberlake’s solo music isn’t R&B? Or Lil Nas X isn’t country?) I remember when Disclose was putting out records, reviewers often dismissed them as Discharge copycats; this was doubly the case for bands like No Fucker who picked up Disclose’s mantle. Eventually, this style of music became so popular that you couldn’t simply dismiss… you had to come up with some way to understand or justify its popularity lest you look like an old man yelling at a cloud. This happens with a lot of genres; a new trend emerges and the powers that be dismiss it until it gets so popular that they have to contend with it (especially if they want the money it generates). I’m personally very uninterested in policing genre boundaries. I don’t want to be the one who decides whether something is hardcore or not. My policy, insofar as I have one, is to let the work frame how I contextualize it. If an artist seems to engage with the idea of genre, then I’ll write about it; if they aren’t, then I won’t. I certainly wouldn’t want to use genre as a cudgel to beat artists who are too close (or not close enough) to some imagined ideal.
One more aside: I’ve noticed that in some circles it’s become something of a meme to say “d-beat is a drumbeat, not a genre.” This annoys the shit out of me. D-beat has established stylistic parameters (going well beyond just the drumbeat), a community that coalesces around the sound, a canon of classic releases, and even its own fashion sense. If that doesn’t qualify something as a genre, I don’t know what does. There is no Moses that comes down from the mountain to certify the existence of a new genre. To say that d-beat is any less of a genre than grindcore or alt-country or Soundcloud Rap is just absurd.