File this one under “Podcasts sell books,” because I was made aware of it by an episode of The Press Box. This was in the early days of their “How to…” interviews, and Bryan Curtis spent half the pod talking with Kelefah Sanneh on “How to Be a Music Critic,” including a bit about this book. The conversation was enjoyable, and the book concept sounded interesting, so when I saw it on the shelf while doing some Christmas shopping, I picked it up for myself. (I’m going back to doing a lot of reading on paper, as it makes me less likely to backslide into doomscrolling through social media rather than actually reading new books.)
Sanneh is a staff writer at The New Yorker and was previously a music critic for the New York Times, so he’s got serious culture critic credibility. The conceit of the book is pretty much clear from the subtitle: it’s a deep dive into seven different genres of popular music: Rock, R&B, Country, Punk, Hip-Hop, Dance, and Pop. Each genre gets a chapter tracing its history from roughly the 1960’s through the 2010’s, and trying to sketch out the most important trends and subgenres within the broad category. This is mixed with a bit of personal history, from Sanneh’s undergrad days as a punk-obsessed DJ at Harvard, through rediscovering hip-hop, and diving into various other genres when assigned to write about them for the Times.
The individual sections are pretty wide-ranging, but also fairly compressed, as they’re trying to pack in decades of history. The Rock chapter runs 85 pages, which might seem like a lot, but it’s covering fifty years each of which saw dozens if not hundreds of albums released. It moves pretty quickly, of necessity.
When I wanted the picture to go at the top of this post, I put the book next to Elijah Wald’s How the Beatles Destroyed Rock’n’Roll, because in a lot of ways this book made me think of that one. Wald’s book starts circa 1900 and moves up through the 1960’s looking not at what was most critically acclaimed, as many music histories do, but what sold the best. It’s an interesting alternative approach, and leads to reconsideration of a number of artists. It also shows a pretty clear theme: the most popular music across multiple eras from ragtime to rock is “Whatever young women want to dance to.”
Sanneh’s book, probably coincidentally, picks up around the time Wald’s leaves off. This actually feels kind of sensible, as Wald’s reason for stopping with the Beatles is that their decision to stop touring and focus on albums marks a kind of break point, a decoupling from dancing. Studio albums began to be considered more in isolation, and you get a kind of fragmenting of the pop landscape into very distinct genres that no longer have as much connection to one another, or necessarily to parties and dances.
In that light, it makes a good deal of sense to pick up with considering the genres separately from around that time, and that’s part of what made Sanneh’s book sound appealing to me. While I enjoyed the idea of that connection, in practice it doesn’t quite work. Sanneh’s selections of what to talk about feel a bit less systematic, based on some mix of popularity, critical interest, and personal attachment. And, this being a 2021 release, some element of politics.
The sections that worked best for me were the ones about genres where I already know a bit of the story, and recognized many of the artists and songs he was talking about— rock, country, some punk, and the earlier bits of R&B. Those were helpful in putting songs I already knew into a broader historical context. Hip-hop and dance are very much Not My Thing, though, so those were harder to follow— I didn’t recognize many of the artists and songs he was referencing, and couldn’t quite tell how much of that was a matter of my ignorance vs. his making idiosyncratic choices. In the hip-hop chapter in particular, I was hoping for something that would make me eager to reconsider the genre, but the selections of lyrics he chose to highlight were mostly pretty underwhelming. This also highlighted the essential meaninglessness of a lot of critical vocabulary, as many of the adjectives applied to beats or voices of artists I wasn’t already familiar with just left me scratching my head.
The concluding section on Pop was probably the weakest for me, partly because I largely decoupled from Top 40 circa 1990, but mostly because it was more concerned with a kind of reconsideration (not quite relitigation) of the “rockist” vs. “poptimist” critical argument. Sanneh takes some credit for kicking off one of its major waves, and so is obviously considerably more invested in this than I am. (I tend to be of the opinion that everyone involved in that needs to take themselves about 80% less seriously.)
This is a highly readable book— I tended to blow through each chapter in a single sitting, despite the fact that they’re pretty lengthy. There are some sharp insights here, particularly regarding the tension between inclusivity and exclusivity in the various scenes being described, though I would’ve liked to see that extended across the genres a little more. All in all, it was an enjoyable read, and if you’re interested in popular music and its history, I recommend checking it out.
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