This, I have to say, is something I’m only dimly aware of, but I’d noticed a parallel phenomenon in which country borrows arrangemental devices from 1970s and ’80s FM rock, from Fleetwood Mac to Bon Jovi. Sanneh zeroes in on the recent phenomenon of male country stars delivering melodically simple but rhythmically complex toplines that sit pretty much on the border between singing and rapping. Sanneh feels, and I tend to agree, that the majority of modern fans either don’t really think about the music they like in terms of genre, or – if they do notice that the country they listen to sounds more like rock, and the rock sounds more like pop, and the pop sounds more like hip-hop, and so on – they feel that it’s a healthy phenomenon, or at worst a neutral one. Particularly in the section about pop, which in many ways is the summation of the ideas he bats around in the preceding six chapters, Sanneh questions whether the dissolution of genre boundaries is altogether a positive thing. It’s not, as you might guess, a book about the history of large record companies, but rather a history of the division of popular music into genres – how those genres came into existence, who named and codified them, how they’ve changed over the decades, and who controls and polices the boundaries of them.Ī continuing theme throughout the book is how the walls between genres have broken down in the last 20 years. I’ve recently finished reading Kelefa Sanneh’s Major Labels, which I was given as a Christmas present.
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