Kelefa Sanneh is an author, journalist and critic who is currently a New Yorker staff writer. He spent six years as a pop music critic at the New York Times and his writing has appeared in a number of magazines and books, including Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z and Da Capo Best Music Writing.I n March, American music writer Amanda Petrusich wrote an insightful article in the New Yorker about a defining aspect of contemporary pop: the ways in which young musicians constantly evade categorisation by borrowing from and merging what were once rigidly defined styles. The opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which.

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. Sanneh debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn't transcendent. 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. He explains the history of slow jams, the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in trouble. 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.

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.

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