Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

Praise for Major Labels

"Major Labels [is] ecumenical and all-embracing. . . . [Sanneh] has a subtle and flexible style, and great powers of distillation. . . . The best thing about Sanneh may be that he subtly makes you question your beliefs."

—The New York Times

"As a guide to the erosion of fervent musical loyalties that seems to be under way, few could have better credentials than the New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh."

—The Atlantic

One of the most essential writers of music criticism working today . . . An ideal guide for this journey, with a purist’s depth of knowledge and a gourmand’s indiscriminate love of the medium . . . This whole book is perfectly fascinating.

—Vox (Best Fall Books of 2021)

A beautifully observed history of the last fifty years of music. It f***ing rules, and I recommend it without reservation.

—Tom Breihan, Stereogum

"Kelefa Sanneh has achieved the impossible. Major Labels somehow manages to unspool everything you need to know about fifty 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

A formidable feat of cogent analysis.

—Philadelphia Inquirer

A charming stroll through our sometimes useful, sometimes debilitating compartmentalizing of sounds. The point is not another survey of familiar classics but, rather, a far more ambitious consideration of how styles fuse and expand—in ways audiences often aren’t comfortable accepting.

—Chicago Tribune (Fall Book Preview)

An essential document from an inimitable critic.

—Vulture

This is quite simply a perfect book for any music lover and an ideal primer on the last fifty years of popular music in the United States.

—Library Journal (starred review)

[A] thrilling debut . . . Equally fascinating are Sanneh’s insights into the way race has shaped music, particularly in the overlapping worlds of R&B and rock ’n’ roll. This remarkable achievement will be a joy to music lovers, no matter what they prefer to listen to.

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

As both an engine of commerce and the driving force behind myriad cultural shifts, popular music has shaped American society in ways we can only begin to understand. But it would be hard to find a better guide than Sanneh to help us try.

—Lit Hub

"There have been many attempts at explaining the modern trajectory of pop music, but Major Labels is quite possibly the best version I’ve ever read. Kelefa Sanneh is pure talent: an engaging, efficient writer with insightful observations and an openness of mind other critics only pretend to possess."

—Chuck Klosterman

"Kelefa Sanneh is somehow able to stand back and give the most clearheaded thoughts about the Big Picture while also diving in for the entertaining, memorable detail. Major Labels is a completely enjoyable history that told me a thousand things I didn’t know and—one of the book’s great pleasures—made me see lots of musicians I thought I knew, or half-knew, in a whole new light."

—Ira Glass, host of This American Life

A lively, heartfelt exploration of the many worlds of popular music . . . It’s clear that [Sanneh has] listened to just about everything with ears and mind wide-open. A pleasure—and an education—for any music fan.

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Major Labels is the most elegant history of popular music ever written. That may sound like faint praise to those who want their pop criticism to channel raw passion, yet passion comes in many forms. 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, music critic of The New Yorker and author of Wagnerism

Penguin Books

MAJOR LABELS

Kelefa Sanneh has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2008, before which he spent six years as a pop-music critic at The New York Times. He is also a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning. Previously, he was the deputy editor of Transition, a journal of race and culture based at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University. His writing has also appeared in a number of magazines and a handful of books, including Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z, a Library of America Special Publication, and Da Capo Best Music Writing (2002, 2005, 2007, and 2011). He lives in New York City with his family.

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

Published in Penguin Books 2022

Copyright © 2021 by Kelefa Sanneh

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

ISBN 9780525559610 (paperback)

the library of congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Names: Sanneh, Kelefa, author.

Title: Major labels : a history of popular music in seven genres / Kelefa Sanneh.

Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2021. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021008355 (print) | LCCN 2021008356 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525559597 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525559603 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Popular music—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML3470 .S25 2021 (print) | LCC ML3470 (ebook) | DDC 781.64—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008355

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021008356

Cover design by Darren Haggar

Designed by Amanda Dewey, adapted for ebook

pid_prh_6.0_148814534_c0_r0

Contents

Introduction

Wearing Headphones • Literally Generic • Excellent/Popular/Interesting • Divide and Conquer

1. ROCK

The Kingdom of Rock ’n’ Roll • Abunchanoise • Less Monstrous and More Glamorous • The Edge of Wuss Cliff • Alternative Everywhere • Heavy Metal Rules • The Power of Evil • Cock Rock • Counter-Countercultural • The Opposite of Noise • Confessional • Making Progress • Old-Time Rock ’n’ Roll

2. R&B

An Exclusive Music • Race Records • Soul Music Is Ours • Selling Soul • Ain’t Nothing to This Disco • The Comforts of Crossover • The Other Black Music • Shame and Shamelessness • Guilty • Deplorable • A Rebirthing Process • Mea Culpa

3. COUNTRY

At Its Purest • What Is Country Music? • Absolutely No Hollering • A Revolt, a Revival, and a Sales Pitch • Make Country Country Again • The Horseshit Rebellion • Suburbs and Sippy Cups • Good Luck on Your New Venture • Where Are Your Guts? • Only in America • The White Experience • What Makes You Country • What’s Right with the Format

4. PUNK

Converted • Incoherent and Inescapable • Rock ’n’ Roll at Its Finest • Punk Explosion • Punk Politics • Tougher Than Punk • An Incantation • Feasting on Crumbs • Stubborn Purists • The Opposite of Punk • Hipsters Everywhere

5. HIP-HOP

Rap Music Don’t Have to Teach You Anything • The (New) Sound of Young America • Music in Every Phrase • Making Records Out of Records • Street-Corner Rhymes • I’m Not a Rapper • The Real Face of Rap • Raging Sexism • Self-Conscious • Ambition and Hunger • Escape from New York • Serious Rapping • Your Voice Too Light • Mixed Up

6. DANCE MUSIC

What Else Is Music For? • One Big Mix • Very Much Alive • Party Monsters • Different Worlds • The Upward Spiral • Get Lost

7. POP

Pop Revolution • The Monster with Seven Letters • The Triumph of Poptimism • The Most Popular Records in the Country? • Pepsodent Smiles • The Perils of (New) Pop Stardom • Pure Pop Music • You’ll Grow Out of It • The End of Taste • How Can Anyone Listen to That Stuff?

Acknowledgments

Index

INTRODUCTION

Wearing Headphones

When my father was lying in a hospital bed in New Haven, Connecticut, struck down by a sudden illness, and the doctors and nurses were searching for any sign that he was still alive, my mother decided that he needed a soundtrack. She brought his Bose noise-canceling headphones to the bed and we took turns playing him his favorite music. Over the next week, as we kept him company and said goodbye, one of the albums we put into heavy rotation was Clychau Dibon, a shimmering collaboration from 2013 between Catrin Finch, a Welsh harpist, and Seckou Keita, a kora player from the Casamance region of Senegal, in West Africa—not far from where my father had grown up, in the Gambia.

The kora, a harp-like device with twenty-one strings held taut between a wooden neck and a calabash body, was my father’s favorite instrument—no doubt it reminded him of the village life he left behind when he was a teenager. He named me after a legendary warrior who is the subject of two of the most important compositions in the kora tradition, Kuruntu Kelefa and Kelefaba. And I once spent a surreal summer in the Gambia as a kora student, taking long daily lessons from a teacher with whom I communicated mainly in improvised sign language. I remember how excited my dad had been when he discovered that harp-and-kora album, a warm and atmospheric hybrid that sounded instantly familiar to him. Sometimes when people talk about loving music, this is what they mean. You hear something that resonates with some fragment of your biography, and you feel you wouldn’t mind if those were the last sounds you ever heard.

Often, though, falling in love with music is a more complicated and contentious process. When I was growing up, I thought of my dad’s beloved kora cassettes as finger-chopping music, because of the keening voices of the griots, who sounded to me as if they were howling. I had no interest in it, just as I had no interest in classical composers who were often heard in my house, and whose creations I learned to play on the violin, starting when I was five. Like most kids, I liked the idea that music could carry me out of my house and into the streets, into the city, and beyond. I started by asking my mother to buy me a cassette of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, because everyone at school was talking about it. And soon I moved on to early hip-hop, old and new rock ’n’ roll, and eventually punk rock, which transformed my moderate interest in music into an immoderate passion. Punk taught me that music didn’t have to express consensus; you didn’t have to sing along with whatever was coming from the family stereo, or whatever you saw on television, or whatever the kids at school were into. You could use music as a way to set yourself apart from the world, or at least some of the world. You could find something to love and something—perhaps lots of somethings—to reject. You could have an opinion, and an identity.

Does that sound obnoxious? Probably it does, and probably it would have sounded even more obnoxious if you had asked me to explain it when I was a teenager, newly converted to the gospel of punk. But I think that musical fandom tends to be at least a little bit obnoxious or embarrassing, which is why it’s so easy to make fun of obsessive listeners, whether they are pretentious music snobs or wide-eyed pop stargazers, owlish record collectors in basements or aggressive stans on social media. (The term stan comes from a track by Eminem about a fan who is morbidly and romantically fixated on him; both the track and the term reflect a widespread belief that there is something shameful and scary and unmanly about fans’ hunger for their idols.) We can, for the sake of politeness, agree to disagree and not to mock one another’s musical tastes. But even those of us who are nominally grown-ups may find that we never quite outgrow the sense that there is something profoundly good about the music we like, something profoundly bad about the music we don’t, and something profoundly wrong with everyone who doesn’t agree. We take music personally, partly because we learn it by heart; songs, more than movies or books, are designed to be experienced over and over, made to be memorized. We take it personally, too, because we often listen to it socially: with other people, or at least while thinking of other people. Especially in the late twentieth century, American popular music grew increasingly tribal, with different styles linked to different ways of dressing, different ways of seeing the world. By the 1970s, different genres had come to stand for different cultures; by the 1990s, there were subgenres and sub-subgenres, all with their own assumptions and expectations.

In some ways, this is a familiar story. Many people have a vague idea that in the old days, popular music was popular, and that somehow popular music got increasingly fragmented and obscure. We put on our headphones and escape from the world into our own curated soundtracks. But at the same time, many fans have kept faith with the idea that music brings people together, assembling audiences that cross boundaries. The truth, of course, is that both of these ideas are important and true. Popular songs or styles or performers can erase boundaries, but they can also erect new ones. The early hip-hop records, for instance, sparked a movement that drew fans from all over the planet. But that movement also helped sharpen a generational divide, giving young Black listeners a way to renounce the R&B that their parents loved. And in the 1990s, country music became more suburban and more accessible. But it nevertheless remained a world apart from the pop mainstream. (Country music gained new listeners, in fact, by portraying itself as a gentler, more tuneful alternative to the increasingly truculent sounds of nineties rock and hip-hop.) Often, the economics of the music industry helped reinforce these divisions. Radio stations encouraged listeners to think of themselves as partisans, loyal to their favorite stations. Record stores arranged their wares by genre, hoping both to enable efficient shopping and to inspire serendipitous discoveries. And record companies scrambled to identify audiences and trends, searching for ways to make the listening public a little less unpredictable.

It is easy enough to acknowledge the evident diversity of popular music. But diversity is a rather uninspiring term, conjuring up a polite and static world where people have the serenity to accept one another’s differences. More often, popular music has been not merely diverse but divisive, riven by crossover successes and cruel excommunications, rival fan bases and sneering feuds; full of musicians and listeners who keep finding new ways to set themselves apart. This is the divisive spirit I first heard in punk, and through punk I learned to hear it everywhere, even in my father’s kora music, which he loved partly because it represented the world from which he had set himself apart. Unlike virtually all of his many siblings and half siblings, my father left his country and his family in order to build a very different life in America, where he became a celebrated scholar of global Christianity and Islam. He didn’t pretend to share my infatuation with popular music, but he couldn’t have been too surprised by my interest in the stubborn and restless people who made it and loved it, and by the fractious musical communities they created.

The Bose headphones that my dad wore in that hospital bed were brand-new. A week earlier, I had given them to him for Christmas; a week later, we brought them home from the hospital and they were mine again. I am wearing them now as I write, listening to mixes of wordless house and techno tracks on the music-sharing platform SoundCloud. This is background music for me, and maybe comfort music; it’s what I often turn to when it’s time to read or write. But even a serene, gently propulsive DJ set is in some sense an argument: it rewrites the unsettled history of the disco movement; it elevates a handful of tracks over innumerable others; it endorses a particular view about how they ought to be combined. Electronic dance music is infamous for its proliferating categories, which can seem absurd to anyone not inclined to investigate the basic distinction between house music and techno, let alone the subtler distinctions that separate, say, progressive house from deep house. But those differences matter greatly to a DJ, not least because they help determine who shows up to the party and who sticks around. Dance music, no less than country or hip-hop, brings people together by keeping other people out. These musical tribes pull and they push, drawing some of us close while keeping others of us outside. And sometimes they come to feel like home.

Literally Generic

I am always a bit puzzled when a musician is praised for transcending genre. What’s so great about that? In visual art, genre painting refers to works that depict normal people doing normal things. In publishing, genre fiction is the down-market counterpart of literary fiction. And moviegoers talk about genre films, a term applied to films that fulfill the basic obligations of a certain genre, like horror movies or heist movies—and, it is often implied, do no more than that. But in popular music, genres are all but inescapable. In the old days of record stores, every record in the store had to be filed somewhere. And even streaming services find it useful to rely on these categories; if you want to explore Spotify, the first option you are offered is to browse by Genres & Moods. The idea of transcending genre suggests an inverse correlation between excellence and belonging, as if the greatest musicians were somehow less important to their musical communities, rather than more. (Did Marvin Gaye transcend R&B? Did Beyoncé?) Sometimes musicians are praised for mixing genres, although I’m not convinced that mixture is necessarily better than purity, or a more reliable route to transcendence. It is strange, anyway, to praise genre mixing without also praising the continued existence of the genres that make such mixing possible.

Musicians, I have learned, generally hate talking about genres. And reasonably enough: it’s not their job. Virtually every music interview I have conducted has elicited some version of the sentence I don’t know why it can’t just be ‘good music.’ No doubt this sentiment captures something true about many musicians, especially accomplished ones. They hate being labeled. And they think more about the rules they break than about the ones they follow, reveling in a sense of freedom—especially in the recording studio. (I wouldn’t know firsthand: although I eventually moved from playing violin in my high school orchestra to playing guitar and bass in bands, I never achieved anything beyond rudimentary competence, and that only sometimes.) But typically musicians have a sense of who their peers are, even if they insist that comparisons are worthless. Typically, too, they have a sense of industry and audience expectations, even if they say they love to confound them. Often their comments, like their albums, reflect a series of assumptions that they’re scarcely even aware of: about what qualities might make a track acceptable to radio programmers; about what sorts of collaborations might be considered valuable, or surprising; about how songs are made and when they are finished. Country singers, for instance, have sometimes bucked country tradition by recording their albums with members of their touring bands instead of Nashville session musicians. But most noncountry singers probably didn’t even know this tradition existed. You can’t really rebel against a genre unless you feel part of it, too.

In many conversations and books about music, genre obsessives are the enemy. They are the mercenary record executives, intent on fitting each new act into a neat little box, just to make life easier for the marketing department. And they—we!—are the myopic music critics, too busy categorizing music to truly listen to it. Still, this book is a defense of musical genres, which are nothing more or less than names we give to communities of musicians and listeners. Sometimes these have been physical communities, revolving around record stores or nightclubs. More often, they have been virtual communities, sharing ideas and opinions through albums and magazines and mixtapes and radio waves; especially in the era before social media and before the Internet, fans sometimes had to take it on faith that there were other people out there listening, too. I think the story of popular music, especially over the past fifty years, is a story of genres. They strengthen and proliferate; they change and refuse to change; they endure even when it looks as if they are dying out or blending together. (It seems that every decade or so, a genre becomes so popular that people worry it is disappearing into the pop mainstream.) The persistence of genres—the persistence of labels—has shaped the way music is made and also the way we hear it. And so this book aims to acknowledge that. This book is literally generic.

It can be slightly deflating to view popular music this way, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Pop music, broadly defined, has a tendency toward irreverence, and yet it is often discussed in worshipful tones, as the product of a succession of charismatic geniuses. And indeed, many of those familiar geniuses play a role in these histories, from Johnny Cash to the members of N.W.A. But if you emphasize genres, you inevitably find yourself thinking about the other stars, too—the hitmakers who don’t tend to get celebrated in blockbuster movies. Like Grand Funk Railroad, for a time one of the most popular rock bands in America, even if many critics couldn’t figure out why. Or Millie Jackson, an R&B trailblazer who couldn’t quite reconcile herself to disco. Or Toby Keith, who epitomized so much about what people loved, and hated, about country music in the 2000s. Many of the musicians in this book didn’t transcend their genres, sometimes because they didn’t care to try, and sometimes because they tried and failed. Some of them battled the perception that their music was generic in a pejorative sense—as if any musical act embraced by a particular community must therefore be unimaginative. But this criticism of generic music is merely a restatement of the most common criticism of popular music in general: that there is something corrupting about certain kinds of popularity. Over the past half century, many musicians and listeners have belonged to tribes. What’s wrong with that?

Excellent/Popular/Interesting

In 2002, I was hired as a pop critic at The New York Times, a dream job that allowed—or, rather, obliged—me to do almost nothing except listen to music and write about what I was hearing. In 2005, the newspaper sent me to the California desert to cover the Coachella music festival, an event so influential that it helped jump-start an entire economy of American outdoor music festivals. I scrambled from stage to stage, trying to see and hear as much as I could, while lingering over any performances that seemed especially excellent or popular or interesting. Those were my standards, at festivals and in general: I wrote about music that was excellent or popular or interesting, in that order of importance, with a special focus on musicians who satisfied at least two of those criteria, and extra scrutiny aimed at musicians who fulfilled only the last and least one. (Too much music coverage, I think, is devoted to music that is supposed to be interesting, despite arousing no particular passion in either the general public or the person doing the story. If it’s not popular and it’s not excellent, are we sure it is nonetheless interesting?) By the time I arrived at Coachella, I had long since gotten used to the cognitive dissonance of essentially going to parties for work, clutching my notepad like a weirdo while wandering among oblivious revelers. I never loved music festivals, perhaps because of the enormously privileged musical life I led: as a resident of New York with a prominent music-writing job, I had access to every club and concert in probably the most exciting city on the planet; no festival could rival that. But Coachella was by no means an unpleasant assignment, especially once you managed to navigate the complicated hierarchy of VIP areas.

I was sitting on a very important lawn one night with some friends, after most of the music was finished, when a stylish guy with a big smile wandered up: Yasiin Bey, the rapper who was then known as Mos Def. I had interviewed him once, a few years before, and he gave me a warm handshake and an unexpected greeting.

I’m sorry you didn’t like the album, he said.

I had forgotten about that. Six months earlier, I had described his most recent album, The New Danger, as dreary. I braced for confrontation.

Bey kept smiling. "But I did," he said, with a shrug. It was an extraordinarily graceful response to a highly awkward but unavoidable situation.

Musicians have a right to feel wounded when writers who have been friendly in person publish negative reviews. Then again, they probably wouldn’t feel much better if those writers were unfriendly in person. Partly for that reason, I generally avoided interviews during my years at the Times. Usually I was just one more listener with a CD, or a concert ticket, and some strong opinions about whatever I was hearing.

Some of those opinions have changed and softened—indeed, The New Danger sounds a bit better to me now than it did in 2004. More often, though, I find myself still enjoying now what I did back then, whether or not the listening public ever agreed. And I am skeptical, in any case, of the way we all revise our opinions over time, the better to conform with contemporary peer pressure. In this book, I try to focus on the way popular music was heard at the time that it was released, which means I rely heavily on contemporaneous interviews and articles, as well as metrics like album sales and singles charts. It is no secret that these figures can be manipulated by record companies, although it is also true that many such efforts fail; there is a reason why not every hyped-up release makes it to the top of the charts. And throughout pop history, charts like the ones compiled by Billboard, the music industry’s definitive weekly magazine, have shaped broader perceptions of success and failure, sometimes complicating familiar stories in interesting ways. (Some of the most excellent and interesting records in history were not popular—at least, not at first.) Our historical musical data are noisy and patchy: the record companies had a rough idea of how many people bought each album, but no way to measure how often those albums were played. But measurements like Billboard charts can serve as a useful corrective to the distorting effects of history and hagiography. It takes nothing away from the astonishing legacy of Aretha Franklin, for instance, to observe that she had only two No. 1 singles in her career: Respect, her defining 1967 hit, and I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me), her 1987 collaboration with the English heartthrob George Michael. Franklin had one of the greatest voices of her era, but she was generally not—judging by the numbers—a pop star.

I pay attention, too, to what contemporary critics were saying. Not because these opinions were necessarily correct, or even influential. During my own time as a critic, I quickly realized that I had relatively little power, beyond the ability to occasionally aim some extra attention at an unknown performer. And this seemed like a healthy state of affairs. Among music critics, what looks like power is more often prescience, the ability to identify a hit before it hits. (I was never much good at that part of the job.) But even without make-or-break power, critics have retained a certain influence, because their collective judgments affect the way musicians are regarded, and the way they regard themselves. Performers whom critics disdain sometimes come to conceive of themselves as populist rebels, waging war against a stuffy musical elite. And performers whom critics adore can sometimes help shape the general perception of what a genre should sound like, even without drawing huge audiences. Of course, as a critic myself, I am hardly unbiased about criticism and the people who practice it: by way of disclosure, I know a number of them, and wrote occasionally for some of the publications I quote in this book, including The Source, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. As a result, I don’t have a particularly exalted view of the job. Music critics are just people who listen to lots of music and find ways to share their thoughts—which generally tend, in my experience, to be less judgmental than the thoughts of casual fans.

Part of the fun of revisiting older writing about music is the opportunity to be reminded how judgments and reputations can change. Many modern listeners might scarcely believe, for instance, that some knowledgeable listeners once considered Prince a sign of everything that was wrong with R&B. In the past few years, there has been an intense effort to reassess a number of musical careers, especially ones characterized by misbehavior or offensive views. This is not a new phenomenon: musicians and styles are constantly rotating in and out of vogue, sometimes for good reason and sometimes for no obvious reason at all. Many contemporary listeners want to be reassured that the performers they love are also people they would like—a common enough desire, although probably a more radical one than some listeners realize. (A playlist of unimpeachably good-hearted, well-behaved musicians would probably not resemble anyone’s idea of a greatest-hits collection.) There is something intriguing about older music that meets the requirements of newer listeners, but there is also something intriguing about all the older music that doesn’t, for whatever reason. Anyway, this book isn’t meant to tell you what to listen to now. It’s meant to tell you something about what everyone else has been listening to, and why.

Divide and Conquer

There is an idea, common and possibly even accurate, that music changed in the 1960s. Usually this claim involves the Beatles, and youth culture, and something about the Vietnam War. But the Beatles broke up at the end of the sixties, and this is a book about what happened afterward, over the next fifty years, as told through the stories of seven major genres. The first three are the most venerable: rock ’n’ roll, R&B, and country—older genres that remained so popular, and so distinctive, that they came to seem like permanent features of the American cultural landscape. The next three are younger: punk rock, hip-hop, and dance music—upstarts that inherited different versions of the rebellious spirit that once animated rock ’n’ roll. And the last genre is pop, which is barely a genre at all. At various times, pop has referred to the entirety of popular music, or merely to those performers who don’t have a genre to call home; it arrived only relatively recently, and unexpectedly, as a genre unto itself.

This structure is necessarily more hospitable to some performers than others. And the story told here is necessarily a partial one. Classical music is excluded, and so is jazz, which by the time these stories begin had largely drifted away (or been cut off) from the world of pop charts and hit singles and big concert tours. Likewise, the story of modern popular music has generally not been a story of blues and folk and gospel and other traditional forms that survive with little help from the mainstream music marketplace. This book is a reflection of my lifelong fascination with America, where I have lived since I was five, and so the focus is firmly on American pop—and, sometimes, its British counterpart. It does not attempt to do justice to the wider world of global music, including my father’s beloved kora music. (I hope he would understand, especially because he is the reason my family came to America in the first place.) And Latin genres, which could and should be the subject of an entire book like this one, mostly developed in parallel to the ones set down here. Latin music makes only occasional appearances in these stories, although it has lately become central to the sound of American pop—in an account of the next fifty years of popular music in America, Latin genres would doubtless play a dominant role.

A story about musical genres is necessarily a story about conflict, as anyone who has watched the animated film Trolls World Tour can attest. (In it, tribes of trolls devoted to different genres wage war—and, rather less convincingly, make peace.) Performers and listeners alike figure out how and when to police the borders of their communities and argue about the status of those who find ways to cross over. Often, crossing over means going pop, abandoning your genre to make music that is meant to be more universally appealing. But the process can work in reverse, too, at moments when a genre gets popular enough to make pop stars jealous. Gone Country, from 1994, was a wry Alan Jackson hit about singers moving to Nashville in search of country cred. (She’s gone country, look at them boots, Jackson sang. She’s gone country, back to her roots.) And in 2020, the former teen star Justin Bieber complained that the Grammy Awards had categorized him as pop instead of R&B. I grew up admiring R&B music and wished to make a project that would embody that sound, he explained on Instagram. Performers, when they deign to talk about genre, can be strikingly ambivalent, reaffirming their genre affiliations while simultaneously claiming total music freedom. In many genres, a stronger sense of cultural identity can enable a looser sense of musical identity: in the eighties, hair-metal bands struck exaggerated rock ’n’ roll poses while recording the mushy love songs known as power ballads. They were eventually displaced by a generation of so-called alternative-rock bands, some of whom couldn’t quite decide if they wanted to bury old ideas of rock ’n’ roll glory or bring them back to life.

When I was in high school, in the early 1990s, popular music was going through an unusually tribal phrase, and maybe that is why I wanted to write a tribal book. Many people who are roughly my age can still remember the taxonomies that defined their teenage years: some schools had metalheads and kids in cowboy hats; some schools had goths and classic rockers; nearly every school had a cluster of hip-hop fans, and many had a faction of ravers; different parts of the country had different kinds of punks. There was even, in 1990, a multi-genre music festival called A Gathering of the Tribes. (It helped blaze a trail for Lollapalooza, which began the next year.) One of the organizers was Ian Astbury, from the British band the Cult, who was proud to bring together a wide range of alternatives to mainstream pop: the punk pioneer Iggy Pop, the hip-hop group Public Enemy, the folk duo the Indigo Girls, and many others.

Us and them doesn’t exist any more, Astbury told the Los Angeles Times, although of course the festival’s organization was not quite so ambitious. The tribes, after all, were supposed to be gathering, not disappearing.

Again and again, moments of heightened visibility for musical genres have also been moments of existential anxiety—moments when they seem on the point of disappearing. In the 1980s, some people worried about the long-term viability of R&B, precisely because of its success: with stars like Michael Jackson and Prince defining the sound of mainstream pop, how could R&B maintain its identity and its audience? In the 1990s, the success of Nirvana thrust alternative culture into the mainstream, creating both an opportunity and a paradox for a generation of formerly underground bands. And these days, the dominance of hip-hop is so total that the term itself is under some stress: if most of the most popular songs in America can be described, more or less, as hip-hop, then where does that leave all the rappers and producers who don’t tend to make pop hits? On music-streaming services, the top songs tend to be hip-hop hybrids that exist just beyond the reach of genre. Slow-rolling beats with synthetic snare rolls; moody and sometimes spooky electronic ambience; sullen vocals, often under-enunciated, that split the difference between singing and rapping. Has the problem of genre been solved? Is it possible that, when we finally have easy access to just about any song we want, many of us end up wanting to listen to the same thing?

This is not usually the question we ask about ourselves, especially in contemporary America, where conventional wisdom holds that our divisions are deeper and more destructive than ever. It is still the case, in some places and some times, that music can bring people together, across partisan and other divides. But the energy and anger that characterize many modern political debates reflect something important, too, about the very human—and perhaps very American—tendency to draw boundaries, and heighten differences, and to define ourselves as much by what we hate as what we love. For more than half a century, listeners, especially in their formative years, have used popular music to define their identities. And for as long as it serves this function, popular music will necessarily be divisive, bringing us together while also pushing us apart.

1.

ROCK

The Kingdom of Rock ’n’ Roll

One evening in 1962, a thirteen-year-old girl named Pamela was pleased to see, on her television, a twenty-two-year-old man from the Bronx called Dion DiMucci. He was the former lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts, and a preeminent teen idol—one of the biggest stars in rock ’n’ roll. The girl was more than pleased, in fact. DION!!! she wrote in her diary. Oh Help!!! I’m so excited, I think I’ll just DIE!!! I was runnin’ around, chokin’ and cryin’ and yellin’ and screamin’.

Like many American teenagers in the 1960s, Pamela was obsessed with rock stars. And as she grew older, her obsession grew more intense, in tandem with the increasing intensity of its objects. A few years after Dion came the Beatles, and in particular Paul McCartney. Every day I sent Paul a retardedly corny poem written on an aerogram and sealed with a kiss, she recalled. She had a particularly vivid memory of a Paul McCartney trading card emblazoned with a photograph that some other fans might have considered infelicitous. You could actually see the shape of his balls being crushed by the tightness of his trousers, she later wrote. She and her similarly besotted friends called themselves the Beatlesweeties, and they composed romantic Beatlecentric stories for one another, imagining themselves into the Beatleish lives of their idols.

But Pamela soon realized that she was sweeter still on someone else: Mick Jagger, from the Rolling Stones, whom she and her friends had always found dirty and sloppy; she was discovering that these qualities were no longer so off-putting. With my precious Paul, I never really got past the hoping stage, but now I dared to imagine Mick with his widewale corduroy trousers down around his ankles, she remembered. Her diary entries recorded her fantasies, which were becoming distinctly physiological. Someday I will touch and feel him, I know it, she wrote. Mick, my dear, dear PENIS!

The young diarist eventually turned her passion for rock stars into a lifestyle, and then a literary career. She is Pamela Des Barres, and in 1987 she included those diary entries in her first book, I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. The title is accurate enough: Des Barres was for years a leading light in the Los Angeles rock ’n’ roll scene, and her adult life turned out to be even more interesting than her girlhood diary. (Her Jagger prediction, for example, proved accurate soon enough.) But the true subject of her book was rock stardom itself. Few people have ever written as insightfully, or as sympathetically, about the peculiar enthusiasm that gives the genre of rock ’n’ roll its mythic reputation, or about the complicated bond that unites performers and fans—and, just as important, divides them. Often in the book, Des Barres and her idols seem to be trying to figure out exactly how they are supposed to relate to each other. After all, Des Barres was not just a fan but a minor celebrity, and also a recording artist: a member of the GTOs, or Girls Together Outrageously, a rock ’n’ roll performance-art troupe that released an album on an imprint owned by Frank Zappa, the rock eccentric who served as their mentor. Still, she was clear-eyed about the seductive power of rock stardom, and about the corresponding imbalance of power in many of the relationships she had. I wondered if I was going steady with the best guitar player in the world, she thought while she was dating Jimmy Page, from Led Zeppelin. As part of the arrangement, she was expected to savor the band’s forthcoming album:

On his day off, we stayed in my bedroom, listening to the test pressing of Led Zeppelin II over and over again while he took reams of notes. I had to comment on every solo, and even though I believed the drum solo in Moby Dick went on endlessly, I held my tongue and went on pressing his velvet trousers and sewing buttons onto his satin jacket.

By the time Des Barres published her book, the rules of this world had been codified. It was 1987, and MTV was thriving, fueled by a particularly glamorous and decadent form of rock ’n’ roll that came to be known as hair metal. Even people with no interest in rock ’n’ roll had a pretty good idea by then of how rock stars were supposed to look and act. Rock stars outlived the Los Angeles scene that Des Barres chronicled, and they outlived the eighties, too. By the 2010s, the term rock star was commonly used to describe mildly quirky CEOs, faintly charismatic politicians, slightly unconventional athletes, and sometimes—although not so often—professional musicians. Sometimes it seemed as if rock star, as a description or a general term of praise, had left the genre itself behind. A song called Rockstar, by Post Malone featuring 21 Savage, was one of the biggest hits of 2017, and an entirely different and unrelated song called Rockstar, by DaBaby featuring Roddy Ricch, was one of the biggest hits of 2020. Both tracks were about rock stardom as a form of celebrity, or a state of mind. (Post Malone declared, I feel just like a rockstar, while DaBaby asked, Have you ever met a real nigga rockstar?) And both tracks were hip-hop—not rock ’n’ roll.

In the late sixties, though, rock stars were new. So new, in fact, that they didn’t really have a name yet. The term rock star is mostly absent from Des Barres’s book, even though rock stardom is her subject; in one typical diary entry, written in the early months of 1970, she refers to her world, instead, as the pop-star circle, not the "rock-star circle." Rolling Stone, which was the rock ’n’ roll publication of record for many decades, didn’t regularly use the term until the 1970s. The first prominent occurrence of rock star in The New York Times came on October 5, 1970, in a front-page headline: janis joplin dies; rock star was 27. (The term was not used exclusively; the accompanying article described Joplin, variously, as a rock singer and a pop singer.) The deaths of Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, in 1970, and then Jim Morrison, from the Doors, in 1971, helped to popularize the idea of rock stardom, reinforcing the link between rock music and drugs and alcohol, while also fostering the impression that the life of a rock star was wild and dangerous and, as a consequence, quite possibly short.

The rock-star era started around the time that Des Barres’s diary was growing more explicit, at the end of the 1960s. And her evolving tastes tracked the genre’s evolving sense of itself. Dion and McCartney, her early favorites, were not rock stars, in the modern sense, but she threw them over for Jagger, Page, and others, who certainly were. Many listeners thought they heard something changing, as the rock ’n’ roll sixties gave way to the rock-star seventies. When McCartney released his second solo album, Ram, in 1971, Rolling Stone published a despairing review by the critic Jon Landau, who called it incredibly inconsequential and monumentally irrelevant, a sign of cultural decline. He argued that Ram represented the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far, confirming what the breakup of the Beatles had suggested. These days groups are little more than collections of solo artists, he wrote. The idea of a group as a unit with an identity of its own has become increasingly passé.

By the time Joplin was memorialized as a rock star on the front page of the Times, the music had already shed some of its older associations. In the fifties, Elvis Presley’s paradigm-changing rock ’n’ roll records had been so broadly popular that they appeared atop the pop, R&B, and country charts simultaneously. But the path of rock ’n’ roll grew more singular. In the fifties, rock ’n’ roll split from country; in the sixties, it split from R&B; and in the seventies, it split from pop, developing its own media and its own benchmarks. Now rock ’n’ roll bands were being judged by their albums, not their singles; record and ticket sales, not pop-chart performance, determined which bands were on top. (Stairway to Heaven, arguably the definitive Led Zeppelin song, helped the group sell tens of millions of copies of Led Zeppelin IV, even though the track wasn’t released as a single.) At the same time, though, the music was splintering, attracting a host of new modifiers that threatened to turn the genre into a collection of subgenres: acid rock, soft rock, folk rock, progressive rock, arena rock, art rock, punk rock. In 1977, when Presley died, one of his many obituaries was written by the critic Lester Bangs, who generally appreciated the increasing weirdness and rudeness of rock music, and who was predictably contemptuous of Presley’s late-career incarnation as a Las Vegas oldies act. Bangs compared Presley, unfavorably, to Hendrix and Joplin, and, more favorably, to the Pentagon, which was not a band but the headquarters of the US Department of Defense. Each, he wrote, was a giant armored institution, hailed for its legendary power. Obviously we all liked Elvis better than the Pentagon, Bangs continued, but look at what a paltry statement that is. Even as he mocked Presley, though, Bangs found himself missing the so-called King of Rock ’n’ Roll, because he missed the days when the kingdom of rock ’n’ roll had been coherent enough to have a so-called king. I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis, he wrote. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.

In the 1970s, many musicians and listeners seemed to share Landau’s and Bangs’s sense that rock ’n’ roll was decomposing or disintegrating. And many of them responded by doubling down, insisting that rock ’n’ roll was not merely a musical category but an identity, a flag to wave. There was a rash of rock ’n’ roll songs about rock ’n’ roll, which tended to be rather nostalgic. American Pie, the 1971 hit by Don McLean, was a wistful eulogy for the good old days of rock ’n’ roll—but so, too, was Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll, which was released the same year. (It’s been a long time since the ‘Book of Love,’ roared Robert Plant, paying thunderous tribute to an oldie from 1957.) Sometimes these rock stars seemed to be delivering backhanded compliments to the genre they were supposed to love. I remember when rock was young, Elton John sang in Crocodile Rock, adding that the years went by and rock just died; the jolly, fifties-inspired tune helped sweeten a rather sour tale of cultural decline. Long Live Rock, by the Who, from 1974, followed its puffed-up title with a deflating afterthought: Long live rock—be it dead or alive. And Mick Jagger offered the aging genre an affectionate shrug: I know it’s only rock ’n’ roll, but I like it.

The defining attribute of rock ’n’ roll in the seventies was self-consciousness, and in this sense the seventies never ended. Self-conscious rock ’n’ roll turned out to be surprisingly versatile, and surprisingly durable. Ever since the seventies, rock bands have had to find ways to acknowledge their allegiance to a genre that is not at all young and not at all dead. And ever since the seventies, virtually every rock ’n’ roll movement has portrayed itself as a kind of reformation, on a mission to revive the spirit of some golden age, real or imagined. Generations of musicians and listeners have viewed rock as an identity worth fighting over, which has created a never-ending debate over what constitutes real rock. Unlike country music, which sanctified rural white lifestyles, or R&B, which catered to multigenerational Black listeners, rock ’n’ roll does not generally derive its identity from the demographics of its audience. (It may be the case that white suburban dads, for instance, are disproportionately likely to love rock music these days. But rock bands cannot earn credibility by bragging about their popularity among white suburban dads.) Instead, rock ’n’ roll has endured as a musical tradition that successive generations have engaged with—it is the most traditional, perhaps, of any major pop genre. It is also the most spiritual. Rock ’n’ roll is regularly described not as a set of practices or a particular sound but as a presence, emerging anywhere there are true believers, in rough accordance with the formula that Jesus gave to his disciples: Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I.

If rock ’n’ roll is an eternal spirit, then it must also be eternally itself—capable of being revived but not fundamentally changed, despite the progression of new styles and poses. One of the most effective revivalists over the years has been Bruce Springsteen, who was a bit of a throwback even when he first emerged, in 1973. He understood that rock star was both a job and a character. (I know your mama, she don’t like me ’cause I play in a rock ’n’ roll band, he sang in Rosalita.) This enthusiasm for rock ’n’ roll history is part of what made him prescient: he realized that, from the seventies onward, the future of rock ’n’ roll would belong to the past. ("There is no future in rock ’n’ roll, Mick Jagger said in 1980. It’s only recycled past.") Springsteen became a top-of-the-heap rock star in 1975 with the release of Born to Run, an album that put him on the cover of both Time (rock’s new sensation) and Newsweek (making of a rock star). And then Springsteen did something even more impressive: he remained a rock star, enduring for decades as one of the most popular singers in the country, and one of the most reliable ticket sellers. He was still among the biggest names in rock in 2017, when at the age of sixty-eight he began a solo theatrical residency, singing songs and telling stories in a Broadway theater, five nights a week, for more than a year. Even without his band, he played the part of rock ’n’ roll true believer, sometimes waxing sermonic between songs. There is no love without one plus one equaling three, he exclaimed during the show. It’s the essential equation of art, it’s the essential equation of rock ’n’ roll. He chuckled at his own teenage faith in rock ’n’ roll and marveled at how little had changed since then. It’s the reason true rock ’n’ roll—and true rock ’n’ roll bands—will never die!

Abunchanoise

Over the course of 1970, the Beatles released their final album, Let It Be, all four members released solo albums, and, on December 31, Paul McCartney began the legal process that culminated in the official breakup of the band. As a consequence, some listeners began to consider a question that probably sounded reasonable then, although it sounds very unreasonable now: Who would be the next Beatles? Many of the proposed answers were rather far-fetched, even back then. There was Badfinger, known for spirited and catchy rock songs; the band’s strongest claim to Beatleness was its status as the first band signed to Apple Records, the Beatles’ label. (Badfinger had a handful of hits but never ascended to the rock ’n’ roll elite.) In 1976, a band called Klaatu released an album with so little information, and so many Beatlesy flourishes, that a number of listeners grew convinced that the band was the Beatles in disguise. (Klaatu, as people soon discovered, was a progressive-rock band from Canada, now best remembered for Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, a curiously affecting space ballad that became a minor pop hit when it was covered by the Carpenters.) But there was one act that tried to follow in the Beatles’ footsteps and, in some ways, succeeded—selling out Shea Stadium in Queens, even more quickly than the Beatles had, and becoming for a time one of the most popular bands in America.

The band’s name was Grand Funk Railroad. Today the members are probably best remembered for We’re an American Band, a cowbell-powered tribute to the rock-star lifestyle, and for their effortful versions of a couple of sixties hits, The Loco-Motion and Some Kind of Wonderful. Often, though, they are not remembered at all; many listeners who hear the name now might wrongly but reasonably assume, as I did for years, that it belonged to some sort of funk band. In fact, the guys from Grand Funk Railroad played what might be called hard rock: critics described their music as loud, or powerful, or straight-ahead. Mainly, though, critics described it as lousy. Writing in The New York Times, in 1972, Loraine Alterman rendered a judgment that was unsparing but not at all unusual. Anyone with a trace of taste in rock music can’t seriously say that Grand Funk has produced any music in the slightest degree memorable except for its deafening racket, she wrote. The same year, the band released a greatest-hits compilation that included, on the record sleeve, a collage of newspaper stories, many of them unflattering:

GRAND FUNK IS LOUSY

RECORD OFFICIALS PUZZLED BY GRAND FUNK’S SUCCESS

HOT GROUP GETS THE COLD SHOULDER AT HOME

Grand Funk Railroad was probably the first popular rock ’n’ roll band to define itself in opposition to rock critics, who were a fairly new species. Rolling Stone was launched in 1967; its founding publisher was Jann Wenner, an ambitious fan and journalist from San Francisco who figured out that there would be an audience for