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A review by jonmichaelnoise
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh
informative
medium-paced
3.0
The breadth of history presented is admirable, but devotees of any one of the genre chapters will realize how shallow those histories are.
The personal reflections are more interesting but not delved into enough to sustain the book’s momentum.
The last parts of the book, especially the pop chapter, seem to shift into what I suspect might be the book’s intent overall, to discuss the importance of genre categorizations.
If I find it tedious when people argue about what is and isnt “metal”, let alone any of the infinitely divisible subgenres within, I can only suspect that other genre’s similar purity tests are likely similarly tedious.
Unfortunately, if this was the point of the book, more of the book should have been about that, and not shoved into the last chapter.
The personal reflections are more interesting but not delved into enough to sustain the book’s momentum.
The last parts of the book, especially the pop chapter, seem to shift into what I suspect might be the book’s intent overall, to discuss the importance of genre categorizations.
If I find it tedious when people argue about what is and isnt “metal”, let alone any of the infinitely divisible subgenres within, I can only suspect that other genre’s similar purity tests are likely similarly tedious.
Unfortunately, if this was the point of the book, more of the book should have been about that, and not shoved into the last chapter.