Major Labels

<p>From his own adolescence, when his allegiance was to punk rock, to his work as one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture at the <i>New York Times</i> and the <i>New Yorker</i>, Kelefa Sanneh has made a deep study of how our popular music unites and divides us. Distilling a career's worth of knowledge, Sanneh explores the tribes music forms, and how its genres, shape-shifting across the years, give us a way to track larger forces and concerns.<br><br>He debunks cherished myths, reappraises beloved heroes and upends familiar ideas of musical greatness, arguing that sometimes the best popular music isn't transcendent: it expresses our grudges as well as our hopes, and is motivated by greed as well as inspiration. Throughout, race is a powerful touchstone: just as there's always been a 'Black' audience and a 'white' audience (with some overlap) there is Black music and white music and a whole lot of expropriation.<br><br>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.</p>