Major Labels

A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

By: Kelefa Sanneh

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Paperback | 1 September 2022

At a Glance

Paperback
496 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 12.9

Paperback

$39.90

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A comprehensive and celebratory journey through the history of popular music, from the former New York Times music critic.

From his allegiance to punk rock in his adolescence to becoming an essential voice on music and culture, Kelefa Sanneh makes a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us. Distilling a career's worth of knowledge, he explores the tribes music forms, and how its genres, shape-shifting across the years, give us a way to track larger forces and concerns.

This is a book to shock and awe the deepest music nerd, and at the same time to work as a heady gateway drug for the uninitiated.

'Kelefa Sanneh has achieved the impossible. Major Labels somehow manages to unspool everything you need to know about 50 years of music, but more impressively, he makes you care about all of it. Even the stuff you don't care about. It's funny, it's personal, and as a piece of writing the book borders on poetry' - David Letterman

'Entertaining, diligent ... His observations are always fresh and thought-provoking, and presented with clarity and wit' - Mojo

Industry Reviews

'The most elegant history of popular music ever written . . . Sanneh not only delivers a coolly dazzling overview of the battlefields of genre but also revels open-heartedly in the music itself, his taste unbound by dogma or prejudice. The operative word is keen: zealous in spirit, exact in execution, ferociously acute from the first sentence to the last' - ALEX ROSS

'Kelefa Sanneh has achieved the impossible. Major Labels somehow manages to unspool everything you need to know about 50 years of music, but more impressively, he makes you care about all of it. Even the stuff you don't care about. It's funny, it's personal, and as a piece of writing the book borders on poetry' - DAVID LETTERMAN

'An intellectually rigorous retelling of rock and pop history' - Sunday Times, Best Books of the Year

'The most wide-ranging music book of the year . . . elegantly written' - Herald, Music Books of the Year

'Inside this big, ambitious hybrid book was a smaller, more personal and altogether more compelling exploration of belonging and identity through music' - Guardian

'The book is immensely readable, and full of rich detail' - Independent

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