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Kelefa Sanneh has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2008, when he left his position at the New York Times , where he had been the pop-music critic since 2002. 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).

The paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2022 by Canongate Books First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition published in 2021 by Canongate Books
Published in the USA in 2021 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
Copyright © 2021, Kelefa Sanneh
The right of Kelefa Sanneh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 594 9 eISBN 978 1 83885 595 6
Designed by Amanda Dewey
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
W HEN 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 wide-spread 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 l