One of Oprah Daily's 20 Favorite Books of 2021 * Selected as one of
Pitchfork's Best Music Books of the Year "One of the best books of
its kind in decades." -The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement
and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the
past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined
and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance
music, and pop Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our
time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular
music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become
communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career's worth of
knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous
reckoning with popular music-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 explains the history of slow jams,
the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in
trouble. 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. 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 debunks cherished myths,
reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical
greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn't
transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and
they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a
powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism.
This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone
hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The
opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full.
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