Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh

Truly one of the most insightful, well thought-out, and, quite frankly, dopest books I have ever read on the history of just about anything, Kelefa Sanneh has put together a 455-page masterpiece that manages to hit on every major musical genre of the last 75 years. Although I do love all sorts and all types of music I would certainly not consider myself a music connoisseur, but as I read Major Labels I was heartened to realize that I had heard of, or listened to, just about all of the artists that Sanneh mentions at one point or another since I was a little kid. Sanneh describes his musical journey as a consumer, writer, and critic of all sorts of varieties of music alongside his descriptions of the seven genres — Rock, R&B, Country, Punk, Hip-Hop, Dance, and Pop — so you really get a sense that not only has he been obsessed with all of these genres at one point or another, but he has also been around long enough to see their evolution to the point where they are almost co-blended, co-dependent art forms that blur the lines of description as to how they should be classified in the present day. It seems to me that all of these genres basically overlap with one another on top 40 radio or the like, and the vast majority of the music consuming public — at least those of us like me that don’t really care what “type” of music it is and just want to listen to something upbeat and fun while I’m working out or driving—is able to now listen to whatever they want whenever they want, with limitless possibilities to explore with the touch of a finger on an iPhone. Sanneh also gets into some critical thinking around how music unites and divides us at the same time, and also dives into the racially complicated history of popular music, and how that history influences our musical choices today. SO many notes to consider here, I tried my best to whittle down the main points but there was too much good stuff to cut out, and it was well worth the effort because Sanneh’s breezy book was a absolute pleasure to read.

• musicians hate talking about genres
• don’t know why it can’t just be good music
• they hate being labeled
• book is a defense of musical genres
• strengthen and proliferate, refuse to change ,endure
• many musicians and listeners have belong to tribes — what’s wrong with that?
• some of the most excellent and interesting records in history were not popular, at least not at first
• Billboard, useful corrective to the distorting effects of history and hagiography
• what everyone else has been listening to, and why
• popular music to define out identities
• will necessarily be divisive, bringing us together while also pushing us apart
• late 60’s, rock stars were new
• deaths of Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison helped to popularize the idea of rock stardom
• rock 60’s gave way to the rock start 70s
• now rock bands were being judged by their albums, not singles
• music was splintering, genre into subgenres
• rock has endured as a musical tradition that successive generations have engaged with
• 60’s, acid rock to refer to bands that summoned up a countercultural spirit
• post acid sound, downer rock, Grand Funk Railroad
• term emerged for Black Sabbath: heavy metal
• Steppenwolf, Born to Be Wild, from the movie Easy Rider, “heavy metal thunder”
• musical shift was underway, bands could build songs around riffs
• Zeppelin helped to standardize the idea that a rock concert should be a grand spectacle
• Cooper, Queen, KISS, populist rock bands
• Aerosmith, Blue Army, devotion to denim
• upper rock — AC/DC, Maiden, brisk and exuberant
• MTV helped a generation of mainstream American kids discover how much fun this music could be, encouraging the bands to emphasize all the fun they were having
• hair metal, people hated it, and they knew it
• power ballad — form rose in the 70s, rock fans were not immune to the charms of a sentimental love song
• “Don’t Stop Believin”
• hair metal died in the fall of 1991, Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
• Cobain’s songs, especially the hits, were less confrontational than his interviews
• still loud guitar music, simple chord progression, still rock, really
• alternative — catchall that became increasingly synonymous with rock
• alternative form of rock and roll
• 90s, a band that played “rock”, sounding a bit like Nirvana
• new rock stars turned out to be just as polarizing as the 80s stars
• metal was thought to be evil, or at least to contain evil elements
• tremolo, repeatedly picking down and up on the same note, creating buzzing swarms o sound
• frenzied but highly technical style, death metal
• grindcore, so fast that the pulse was indecipherable
• doom metal, grimier, punkier offshoot
• repellant and attractive
• music can be a force for good, can be a force for evil
• power of music in its ability to plunge you into alien culture, blurring the line between observer and participant
• “Under My Thumb” = chronicle of sexual conquest
• revenge song filled with hatred for women
• 50s and 60s, rock an example of American integration in action, made and consumed by Black and white people alike
• 70s, undercut by pop segregation
• Black music categorized by R&B and Soul, rock was a white genre, debts to Black precursors
• when rock split from R+B, lost much of its Black audience
• dominance of guitars was total, and the electric guitar was perceived as a “white” instrument
• “Brown Sugar” much loved and loathed song about slavery and interracial sex
• 70s change: growing expectation that male rock stars should embrace elements of drag
• 70s, glitter rock, camp and theatricality, Bowie, Cooper, Elton
• 70s, pretty much how rock stars dressed
• hair metal was a success in attracting huge audiences that were largely female
• heartthrobs insisted that rock should be fun, liberal sensitivity was not
• 80s rock: defiant and resentful, increasingly out of place in the chaos of the big city
• grunge helped rock to become more musically isolated, popularizing a scrappier, purer form of hard rock
• pushed rock further away from its history as Black music
• soft rock, mixed rock with not only country, like the Eagles, but also with R+B and jazz
• never developed into a tribal identity, but it’s been everywhere since
• every discussion of singer song writer begins with Dylan, helped invent the form but kept reinventing himself
• 90s were a new golden age for confessional singer songwriters, particularly women — DiFranco, Apple
• early 70s, progressive rock, odd instruments, fantastical lyrics, complex compositions, concept albums — Yes
• populist avant garde movement
• Boston, Genesis, transformed into a top selling pop act: Gabriel, Collins
• most popular progressive band was Pink Floyd
• jazz rock, Chicago
• Dead embraced hippie identity, improvise, finding new musical inspiration at every concert, sensation of going somewhere new
• Allman Bros, much the same terrain as the Dead
• progressive rock: arena sensation that lives on as a cult favorite
• Dylan, Band, country rock movement that was ascendant in the early 70s
• Petty, Lewis, Mellencamp, Etheridge, inspired by the 60s, untouched by metal
• nowadays, rock history seems not linear but cyclical, endless process of rediscovery and reappraisal
• R+B traditionally been reserved for Black music
• 60s, less exclusive, thanks to Gordy, optimism and ambition often echoed in the records he released
• golden age of Motown was the golden age of RB, only lasted a few years
• Brown, Redding, Franklin, soul music, promised authenticity
• RB is the story of an embattled genre, forever grappling with its complicated relationship to the mainstream, and its own history
• durability is a testimony to the continuing salience of race in America, reality of segregation in our musical communities and elsewhere
• RB emerged in the 40s, popular, danceable, records made by Blacks
• records that would transcend the genre and go pop, Gordy
• jingling backbeat, a Motown trademark, became one of the most admired and imitated sounds in popular music
• Freed, white DJ in Cleveland, popularized the term rock n roll in the 50s, describe what he was playing — but most of what he was playing was RB
• 60s all music forms fused together
• rock began to be redefined as white music
• white performers became central to that story, Black performers became marginal to it
• RB world began to use a new term, soul
• suggested authenticity, linked to Black identity
• Motown, Whitfield, new style known as psychedelic soul
• end of 60s, definition of music industry success had changed: for RB acts, make important albums, James Brown
• Motown story, unapologetically hit driven record company managed to excel in the new era
• slow jam, 1983, RB group Midnight Star released a song by that name, but really born in the 70s, Pendergrass, Gaye
• singers promised to tell you whatever would make you feel good
• Gordy’s main ambition was to be ambitious
• disco was in many ways an extension of RB
• sound of it was predominantly female
• decline of disco helped RB regain its independence
• quite storm, mixture of RB ballads and so called crossover jazz, smooth jazz
• world of soothing love songs and upward mobility
• Thriller was so dominant, changed the general perception of what popular music should sound like
• an exuberant jumble of styles
• Prince was an RB favorite before he was a pop star
• like Jackson, an example of an RB singer could ascend to pop stardom
• RB became conventional somewhat, Black music still lived, in its own separate remunerative world — identity and independence
• start of 90s, relationship between RB and mainstream pop was shifting again
• Houston could be a crossover success, not by leaving RB behind but embracing it
• genres identity was increasingly shaped in opposition to hip hop
• Bobby Brown offered his own version of hip hop, My Prerogative
• Guy, new jack swing, athletic beats, inspired by funk and hip hop, cheerful harmony with plaintive RB vocals
• 90s, hip hop became the most popular and influential Black music in America
• RB was the other Black music
• Combs, RB singers learned to be a little less clean cut
• 90s, female RB acts who adopted more androgynous images, Blige, TLC
• RB often a guilty pleasure, often revolved around complicated questions of gratification and complicity — Chris Brown, R Kelly
• RB continued to be defined by race, Usher essentially teen pop, but he was Black, so RB; Christina considered a pop singer, partially because she was white
• neo soul, D’Angelo, Badu, looking back to the 70s, old sound, reintroduced
• attempt to merge RB and hip hop
• neo soul helped change the perception of RB
• Keys, pianist and singer
• RB twin impulses: outward, toward the mainstream and crossover; inward, deeper connection with the Black listeners who give the genre its identity
• Beyonce’s reinvention cross between a folk hero, cult leader, royal eminence
• Weeknd, Ocean, Monae, singers transformed the genres reputation
• early 10s, coolest, most creative genre in the country
• bittersweet truth is that RB as a whole, never crossed over comprehensively enough to disappear
• Country, legacy acts of Carter family, hillbilly music, not always kindly
• Western acknowledged influence of Texas and Southwest, increasingly popularity of cowboy music and imagery
• thanks to Parton’s success, country music was a national craze in the 70s
• small but insistent minority that country music is fiddles and banjos and pedal steel
• identity is cultural
• country has historically referred to music made by and for white people
• music is whatever those people want it to be, for some
• endures and thrives today because “country” listeners say it does
• Presley sounded black but was white, more appealing to many white listeners
• movement was a youth movement
• Jennings ceded his seat on the plane to the Big Bopper, who died with Holly, Valens
• Cash, no one had more success in country music while taking the industry less seriously
• Nashville sound, country as urbane music for grown ups
• Byrds, country rock, Stones experimented wit country rock in the late 60s
• outlaw country was a revolt, a revival, sales pitch, common with punk rock
• Shel Silverstein was a country songwriter in addition to author
• bluegrass, emerged in 50s to describe a sound that had solidified in the 30s, up tempo Appalachian music, acoustic and drumless
• just about every major country star found a way to change the Nashville status quo
• the way to join the Nashville elite was to challenge it
• Brooks created a new icon in American life: the suburban Cowboy
• Brooks was so popular that even noncountry fans paid attention
• in country, crossover success. can be dangerous, genres listeners expect dedication and gratitude from the singers they turn into stars
• especially true for women
• Swift helped change the image of country music, convert a new generation of young listeners to the genre
• 60s, identity of country music was linked to demographic identity
• genres tradition of patriotism and respect for military made it particularly compatible with the Republican Party
• no genre responded more decisively to 9/11
• early rock stars like the Stones tended to be self conscious about their whiteness, set them apart from the pioneering Black musicians who represented authenticity
• in country, contrast, it was the whiteness that was linked to authenticity
• hillbilly, cowboy, outlaw
• no way to separate Souther pride from the politics and the history that helped to make Southern identity so powerful
• contemporary musicians and listeners tend to share neither and agrarian culture nor a regional identity
• what they still have in common is being white, often
• decades since Garth, present themselves as normal, every day Americans, generally but not necessarily white, the kind of people politicians are always talking about representing
• 10s, bro country, dominated by hunky and cheerful men who sang about flirting and drinking
• Spotify era, grow hard to figure out what the country audience likes, because it is harder to figure out who the country audience is
• strange and remarkable about country, despite all the decades and all the change, it still functions as a genre, community with its own tastes and tolerances
• changed, and endured
• 70s, punk was used to describe a grimy approach to rock
• then to denote a movement
• mainstream world that they wanted no part of
• lots were wearing swastika armbands
• appeal was the negative identity
• demanded total devotion, expressed as a total rejection of the mainstream
• quasi religious docrine
• Nevermind turned punk inspired music into a national craze
• punk has endured, 21st century as an artistic ideal, evoking defiance and integrity
• separate whatever it is you care about from whatever it is that other people care about
• Punk in NYC was an accidental phenomenon
• punk in London was not
• Pistols, shock of them inspired lots of other acts
• most important contribution to popular music, an all purpose negation, linked to no particular positive program
• early days, unofficial logo was indeed the swastika
• Ramones evoked the Nazi Wehrmacht with “Blitzkrieg Bop”
• embrace if imagery, they said, was mere provocation, attempt to shock mainstream society by flaunting symbols of evil
• Clash offered an idealistic alternative to the seething fury of the Pistols
• conviction that punk should be linked to progressive politics
• part of the appeal was that most people didn’t like punk, loved to antagonize the non punk world
• never quite decide if it wants to win over the mainstream or just enjoy an autonomous existence in the margins
• rise of antifa and the rise of the Proud Boys represented, among other things, another manifestation of punk politics
• mosh parts, maybe have derived from the Jamaican term, mash up, meaning to destroy
• Fugazi was one of the most popular and influential underground bands in the country, able to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of its albums through Dischord
• possible to construct an entire history of popular music around the changing role of scarcity
• Idol, London punk who became a cartoonish rock start in America, to the enduring puzzlement of many Brits, who seemed to be glad to be rid of him
• Talking Heads, bittersweet post punk records
• sometimes seemed that Cobain got from the punk scene, the more punk he felt
• Green Day’s favorite topics were love and lovesickness
• Dookie, hit singles were Basket Case about anxiety and Longview about masturbation
• blink 182, pop punk, rock songs designed not to affront listeners but to gratify them
• independent, punk inspired way of working, indie rock, likeable genre with a recognizable sound, Feist, Wilco
• hipsters — cities filling up with young people who were cool and recognizably nonmainstream
• adolescent impulse that fueled punk has not disappeared, neither has the primacy of popular music
• hip hop is obsessed with respect, flourished and endured by shrinking the demands of respectability
• rappers are more exposed than singers because their form of expression is more similar to speech
• spend a lot of time explaining who they are, what they’re doing, why they deserve your attention
• Public Enemy helped popularize the idea that rappers should be revolutionaries
• hip hop has provided a lot of pleasure
• DJ Kool Herc, Jamaican immigrant living in the Bronx, early 70s, playing music you couldn’t hear anywhere else
• break: part of the record where most of the band dropped out, leaving the hard syncopated beat
• devised a way to play the break over and over
• Flash taught himself how to switch between turntables even faster, repeating their favorite musical phrases back to back
• keep partygoers partying to talk to them, MCs, before it was a genre name, hip hop was a command — hip hop you don’t stop
• Simmons, most influential figure in 80s hip hop, brother Joseph was Run, Beasties, Simmons built Def Jam with Rubin, signed Cool J, Enemy
• what happened in the Bronx really was different
• Melle Mel, say your name, make a claim, emphasize the backbeat
• Run DMC, records changed how hip hop was made, pushing the genre away from disco
• Rakim, pushing a thought or a phrase past the end of a line, enjambment
• rappers not to imitate pop stars — LL Cool J
• embracing sampling, scrambled musical history, new life to big names like James Brown
• no coincidence that a number of first blockbuster hits like Walk This Way were based on older songs
• Jamies Cryin, Van Halen, Tone Loc based Wild Thing on it with a riff, and based the video on Addicted to Love
• sampling from an act of appropriation into an act of collaboration
• why not pay to use the big popular refrain
• Combs did this, in the 90s, retrofitting old hits with new hip hop verses
• Spin, Leland, said that PSK was the “ultimate gangster rap record”
• Too Short, Ice-T, authentic voice of life on the streets
• NWA success helped convince the broader public that hip hop was not a fad, serious cultural development
• Straight Outta Compton, gangster rap, became a term everyone knew
• for any rapper whose rhymes featured heavy doses of four letter words, Black street corner tales found their way into the mainstream
• Dre had a knack for mixing together samples with electronic sounds
• futuristic style, 70s funk, Chronic proved that gangsta rap could sell like pop music without sounding like pop music
• took over, each album a series of stories, star as the daring protagonist
• deaths of Biggie and Pac drew extra attention to hip hop, helping to make the genre more popular than ever
• late 90s, rappers seemed to want to be thought of as mafiosi, tycoons
• fashion lines and record labels and other ventures
• real gangster, would never “rap”, paradox at the heart of gangsta rap
• hip hop is rapping
• artistic tradition and a cultural identity
• long been popular with whites
• white people love it because it is awesome, yes?
• black woman living at the intersection of racial and sexual subordination, “intersectionality”
• 2 Live Crew, what kind of music should be admitted into the lucrative world of mainstream culture
• socially conscious, used for decades to describe people who wanted to change the world around them
• 80s, Public Enemy
• Griff’s espousal of anti-Semite conspiracy theories was a legit political scandal
• controversy, and Chuck D’s equivocal response, undermined the sense that the group members were fealrless and clear eyed revolutionaries
• rappers did not always make great politicians
• conscious hip hop movement of the 90s was simultaneously conservative and progressive
• Miseducation of Lauren Hill, high water mark of conscious movement
• Def, Kweli, Common, Badu, Questlove
• futuristic electronic tracks, arranging unexpected collaborations, evolved from a self conscious oddball to arguably the most influential figure in hip hop — Kanye
• battling mental illness, he demands attention even when he seems to need privacy
• 90s, many cities had built their own local scenes, enabled by regional CD distributors that helped rappers build networks of supportive shops
• 2000s, rappers routinely collaborated with mixtape DJs to create CD mixtapes that were effectively unlicensed, in a sense illegal
• TI, rapped for niggas and the js in the trap — j’s were junkies, trap was one of the tumbledown houses that often served in ATL to drug dealers HQ
• Trap became a verb, trapping was what rappers did in the trap
• trap music — ATL style characterized by grand and eerie keyboards, lyrics focused on drug dealing
• Odd Future, one of the first major hip hop acts to build its audience exclusively online
• 90s and 2000s, radio and nightclubs, genre was side by side with RB
• hip hop tracks for the fellas, RB jams for the ladies
• hip hop evolved in symbiosis with RB
• 2000s, old formula had been reversed — more and more, pop was going hip hop
• 10s, became more popular and dominant than ever, thanks partly to the possibilities auto tune allowed
• cultivating its depressive streak
• cough syrup, known as lean
• two traditional definitions: hip hop is rapping, Black youth culture
• 2000s, Puerto Rico born genre known as reggaeton, Daddy Yankee, Despacito
• new hybrid, Latin Trap, blended sign rapping style of reggaeton with synthetic snare drums of modern hip hop
• Latin music became a kind of universal party music
• genres tendency to evolve in unpredictable ways explains why it has continued to draw both crowds and critics, why people who love it tend eventually to be heartbroken by it
• disco is short for discotheque, French for record library
• watching a live person play recorded music
• thrived because they emphasized the social nature of listening to music, no live band to gawk at, revelers were encouraged to gawk at each other
• rearranged the priorities of pop, great groove could be more important than a beautifully written song
• rise was fast, emerge from nowhere to take over everything
• death meant a rebirth of dance music
• dance music means techno and rave, electronica
• EDM, electronic dance music
• remained party music
• Moulton, extending songs by splicing and looping rhythm sections that dancers loved — remix
• most part, disco was RB, only smoother and faster
• dissolve boundaries of genre and race, driven by a sense of integration
• Village People, Willis, lead singer, was straight
• in Chicago, after death of disco, hard to find music was warehouse music, shortened to house music
• techno music became techno because the standard term for this Detroit born style, more mysterious than the house music of Chicago
• MDMA, make music sound better and people seem nicer
• acid trax, subgenre known as acid house, given to the budding party scene
• ecstasy, known as “E”
• acid house craze, partiers sometimes described what they were up to as “raving”, “rave” became a noun, name for an outdoor party
• disco era, drugs played an important role in the nightlife economy
• weed replaced E, dancing lost its mania, less ravey and out of control
• 80s, hip hop was slower and heavier, post disco years, American dance floors were increasingly dominated by sharp backbeats
• Madonna emerged from the world disco built
• Vogue, tribute to the drag ball culture that helped define gay nightlife in NY, electronic dance music
• hits occasionally broke through with dance music
• rave scene, backbeats, “break” is the section in a funk or RB record when everybody stops playing except the drummer
• Nine Inch Nails, in America, dance music rebranded as electronica
• American listeners kept discovering electronic music in the 2000s
• Bjork, Radiohead, Daft Punk
• MDMA, Molly, was everywhere, short for molecule or molecular
• EDM explosion of the early 10s was driven by the realization that nothing beats a great party
• dance for hours, lost in the music, something radical, disorienting, about dancing all night long and imagining that you might keep dancing forever
• hitmakers in pop, 80s, from Britain — Duran Duran, Depeche Mode
• Brit pop uprising was a double revolution, insurgency that defined itself against the insurgency that came before
• Boy George and his new pop contemporaries
• whatever was popular with young people
• pop suggested youth and exuberance
• embraces the star system
• consider possibility that rock was boring, so called pop was the future
• whole point of new pop was to encourage listeners to stop worrying about credibility in order to focus intently on pleasure
• pop is a non genre that became a genre
• idea behind Top 40 was to identify the most popular songs, regardless of genre, and play them to death
• new pop movement: mixture of punk spirit and disco innovation, coming together to nurture electronic music that sounded more and more like bona fide pop
• new pop meant electronic pop, faster and sharper successor to disco
• synthesizer
• emphasis on glamour and success
• new pop revolution, gay identity played an important role, though not always an explicit one
• led mainly by men
• pop band arrived from Britain, new wave
• handful of American acts were finding their way from punk to pop, Carlisle, Go Gos, Blondie
• 80s, America, pop often meant danceable songs with electronic elements
• popularity waxes and wanes, 80s were a great decade for pop in America
• 90s, pop consensus seemed to fray, genres reasserted themselves
• mid 90s comeback, Backstreet NSYNC
• no useful difference between loving a song and considering it good, or between not liking one and considering it bad
• Bourdieu, we love what we love because we hate what we hate, because we don’t want to be confused with those benighted people who love what we hate
• think of music less like politics and more like romantic love, which we don’t typically expect to be widely shared
• music critics once known for their contentiousness, had all but stopped writing about negative reviews
• Spotify might have driven further fragmentation, listeners to explore other genres
• Apple, you tube, new pop consolidation
• millions of listeners gravitated toward similar sounds
• note of convergence
• human beings tend to disagree about music because human beings are disagreeable
• when we complain about music, what we are really complaining about is other people