Kelefa Sanneh on Rockism, Disappearing Genres, and His New Book Major Labels

The New Yorker writer wrestles with the forces that divide and unite us as he charts the evolution of popular music.
The cover for the book Major Labels by Kelefa Sanneh
Graphic by Maddy Price

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If you’ve ever found yourself on social media observing (or participating in) a debate about the merits of “poptimism” and the pernicious influence of “rockism,” you have Kelefa Sanneh to blame. The journalist and critic didn’t invent these terms—they were kicking around in the UK music press during the 1980s—but his 2004 piece “The Rap Against Rockism” certainly brought them to the mainstream. If you’re interested in music criticism as an idea instead of just a way to discover new artists, at some point you’ve had to grapple with the ideas in his essay: what we value in music, how those values arise, and what forces exist to sustain them.

Sanneh wrote the defining piece on rockism when he was a staff critic at the New York Times—his job from 2000 to 2008—and since then, he’s been a staff writer at The New Yorker. Covering a wide array of topics for the magazine, he has developed into one of the best profile writers in journalism. But for fans of his earlier work, it’s always a treat when Sanneh returns to music. He’s written revealing features on Grimes and George Strait, and his 2015 piece about New York hardcore remains one of the most insightful explorations of the punk subgenre.

Sanneh’s first book, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, is a collection of essays that weave together strands from across his career. With chapters on seven genres—rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, and pop—it’s a comprehensive overview of the last 50 years of popular music in the U.S. and UK, but the book’s real strength is Sanneh’s criticism: the way he finds unexpected connections and breaks down the music’s function for its audience, illuminating how identities and communities are built using these disparate sounds. He writes about how these genres developed, where they fit in culture, and what matters most to performers and fans. He’s also deeply interested in which genres are respected by critics and why, and how this favorability shifts over time. The book is pure catnip for anyone interested in both music history and the history of the conversations surrounding music. “Even now, when people talk about ‘pop’ as a genre—‘pure pop,’ they sometimes say—they are often talking about people whose music sounds a bit like [Madonna]’s ‘Borderline,’” he writes.

Kelefa Sanneh (Photo by Jason Nocito)

Sanneh shares more of his life here than he has in his previous work. Throughout the book, he talks about his cultural background, often to illustrate that his first encounters with a given genre were as an outsider, before he immersed himself and became an expert. He was born in England. His Black father, a professor of theological history, is from Gambia; his white mother, a linguist, is from South Africa. Sanneh spent his early years in Ghana and Scotland and moved to the U.S. when he was 5—first to Massachusetts, later Connecticut. At Harvard, he landed a gig at the student radio station that required deep study of punk rock; later, in the 1990s, he was an intern at The Source when the hip-hop magazine was at the height of its influence.

“This is a book about musical obsession, and the ways in which different people have defined themselves by their musical identities,” he tells Pitchfork. “It seemed to me, necessarily, it was also going to have to be a book at least partly about my musical obsessions and my musical identities.” By the book’s end, Sanneh’s critical obsessions have become the reader’s. We spoke to the writer via Zoom from his apartment in Manhattan.

Pitchfork: It’s common now to say that streaming has broken down lines between musical genres, and that genres have become less meaningful, maybe even unnecessary. Why write a book about genre in 2021?

Kelefa Sanneh: One of the things that I didn’t quite realize until I started looking at archives was the idea that genre is disappearing. It reoccurs in the history of music, whether it’s Billboard getting rid of the R&B chart in the 1960s for a minute, because R&B records were going pop and they’re thinking, Maybe it’s kind of all one music. There was a similar impulse in disco—the Rolling Stones and the Star Wars soundtrack are now the same genre; everyone’s making disco hits, so maybe disco is going to be universal. And you have bits of that in the ’80s with R&B and pop coming together. You have that in the late-’90s and early 2000s, the TRL era on MTV, when all of a sudden it’s like teen pop, and N-SYNC is a pop group, but they’re making R&B records. And they’re collaborating with hip-hop producers and rappers.

My former colleague Ben Ratliff wrote a really smart book five years ago about listening to music, Every Song Ever. And he wrote that genre is a construct for the purpose of commerce. I think that’s true, and that’s a common idea—that genre is a music industry conspiracy to sell music. All popular music is inseparable from the industry’s desire to sell something to you. And certainly, for the last half century—the period I’m writing about—genre worked. In other words, the reason it worked to sell records was because musicians and listeners believed in it and identified with it.

The rockism piece you wrote for the New York Times is something that keeps coming up in your life. In my mind, that piece is referenced so frequently, there had to be a book that builds from that in some way.

If you’re a writer, the rockism piece is the best-case scenario: that you write something people actually read and respond to and refute and argue about. I knew that [debate] was something I wanted to include in this book, partly because this is a book about genres. The rockism piece was partly about genres and about how we reckon with the ways in which our listening to music has been shaped—even if we don’t know it—by the history and dominance of rock’n’roll.

One of the ironies is that the climate has changed so much in the 17 years since. I wrote that we should take R&B more seriously—well, here we are in 2021 and R&B is taken super seriously. At the same time, other genres aren’t. Some of the same people who would never sneer at R&B, maybe they’re coming around with country, but maybe EDM just seems ridiculous.

Why did you divide punk from rock in the book?

It was partly because punk, to me, becomes a way of looking at the world that other genres borrow from. And so punk really does help inspire these other alts, like alt-hip-hop, certainly alt-country. This idea of: there’s this angry, righteous underground with integrity, and it’s railing against a musical mainstream. That became an idea that slipped way beyond the boundaries of punk. If punk had only ever meant “bands that sound sort of like the Ramones,” then maybe it doesn’t get its own chapter. Because even now, that might feel like a somewhat smaller tradition. The reason it becomes a bigger tradition that eats everything is because [punk] is this kind of ethos. And the ethos, in some ways, is even more influential than the music.

Of the genres that you write about in the book, country has the most heat right now, in terms of questions about its boundaries and history. There’s an ongoing reclamation of Black country music history, and challenges to country gatekeeping that surround something like “Old Town Road.” You mention that when you first came to love country, you mostly thought of it as white ethnic music.

Usually, when a genre is mutating, when the sound of it is really changing, cultural identity becomes more important. You see that with Morgan Wallen, who’s borrowing from hip-hop in all sorts of ways but is also careful on his album to say things like, “Look, I’m not a hip-hop guy. I’m culturally country, even though I’m using some of the tools and tricks of hip-hop.” And you saw that earlier this year, where he’s pulled off of country radio stations because he’s caught using the n-word on video, and then he ends up back on country radio because that audience loves him. That’s one way you see the power of genre—Morgan Wallen is not exactly a mainstream pop star, but he’s embraced by the country audience.

Insofar as we are looking for and celebrating Black contributions to this tradition, that’s great, and that’s important. Similarly, for current singers, you want to look and say, “What are the barriers that might prevent an artist from succeeding in this or that genre?” At the same time, America is a country that is, judging from the last census, 58 percent white. And so, if there’s going to be genres that are “Black” genres, where listeners and the musicians are disproportionately Black, numerically, there will probably also be genres where the listeners and the musicians are disproportionately white. And it can be a tricky thing to write about.

Throughout the book, I was careful to try not to be too prescriptive. Because that’s not really how I think about music. I don’t really think about music as: well, here’s what this genre should look like, here’s how music should work, here’s what country music should be. I don’t necessarily trust that my ideas about that are going to be more interesting or more fruitful than what actually happens. And that’s something I’ve learned throughout the years of listening to music and being a music critic: I’m often surprised by the way a genre evolves, or by what record goes number one. It’s often stuff I wouldn’t predict.

You seem less interested in saying, “This is wrong, and this is what needs to happen.” And your tone throughout the book is pretty cheerful.

Part of what’s appealing to me about popular music is the alienness of it, the fact that the people who make it aren’t “like me,” whatever that means. I enjoyed that in punk, I enjoy that in hip-hop, I enjoy that in country and pop music. I enjoy the sense that these people are different from me, they talk differently from how I talk. It’s a different approach [to criticism], and not one critical approach is necessarily better than another.

In the hip-hop chapter, you write that some listeners think of Public Enemy as the platonic ideal of what rap music should do. But the truth is, that kind of political music is and always has been just a part of what hip-hop does. And you talk about the importance of rapping as sound, versus just being a way to deliver ideas.

If you look at contemporary hip-hop, you’re looking at a moment where it’s a little less driven by quotables, whether it’s punchlines, or anything else, and a little more driven by rhythms and the rhythms in the language and the use of melody when you’re delivering your rhymes.

There’s a famous quote by Chuck D saying that hip-hop was like CNN—broadcasting the truth. I understand the power of that. But to me, I’ve always worried that talking about hip-hop as “these people are giving you the truth” makes it sound kind of boring. It’s not that a rapper can’t have something to say, but if they were actually a politician, I’m not sure I’d want to listen to like an hour-long recording of that. Part of what makes hip-hop so fun to listen to is that rappers are saying all sorts of stuff. They’re giving you true and moving observations about their lives. They’re bullshitting. They’re telling jokes, they’re saying things that are maybe indefensible, they’re saying things that feel important and really resonate. They’re doing all that at once. And it’s all kind of jumbled up. And that jumble is part of what gives the genre its appeal.

In the pop chapter, you put forth the idea that “pop” as a genre really started in the ’80s. You’re talking about the post-disco Madonna part of it, and then the new pop movement that happened in the UK. These days, it’s taken for granted that pop is a genre.

The idea of people being loud-and-proud pop artists—like this is our genre, our genre is pop music—is a strange and relatively new idea. One of the many ironies of the new pop movement in the UK with people like Boy George, ABC, Scritti Politti, and all these acts—most of them didn’t end up being super popular. Most of them ended up doing well, but they were not as big as AC/DC. There’s something really slippery about the pop identity.

I put that chapter last because, to me, it makes you rethink the whole idea of: What are we doing? What does musical judgment mean? What do we mean when we say something’s good, or something’s bad? One of the most radical ideas of pop is, what if longevity doesn’t matter? What if future generations are less likely to understand what was happening at a given moment than the people who live through it? Those people are going to die off, and no one will ever understand again why “Rude” by Magic! was such a big hit in 2014. If you really love pop, maybe you wouldn’t want it to last. Maybe part of the ethos of pop is we’re going to celebrate the songs that burst really big and then disappear. That’s something that obviously has big implications for the way all of us think about music and write about music.

Once you remove the question of whether it’s going to matter in the future, that’s a scary proposition for a critic. Because that’s the cornerstone of the job for many people: “I’m here to figure out what stuff is going to be important in the long run.” And “what’s important in the long run” is—to bring it back to rockism and poptimism—a very “rockism” thing.

Even if you say that historians get it wrong, you’re still making a claim about what posterity should be valuing. I tend to think that when you look at those claims of what history is valued, you’re talking about a consensus that gets manufactured. If you’re going to be skeptical of various music and music industry consensus, why not be a little skeptical of that consensus, too? Every history, every story, very much including mine, leaves stuff out, and it reflects a series of judgments, some of which are explicit, and some of which are implicit. There’s always part of me that’s going to be interested in what’s left out.

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Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres