Major Labels

A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

Kelefa Sanneh

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781838855956
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

From his allegiance to punk rock in his adolescence to becoming an essential voice on music and culture, Kelefa Sanneh makes a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us. Distilling a career's worth of knowledge, he explores the tribes music forms, and how its genres, shape-shifting across the years, give us a way to track larger forces and concerns.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.

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 “Rock-star,” 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 sweet, 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 farfetched, 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 a magazine that took rock ’n’ roll seriously—that is, a rock ’n’ roll magazine that took itself seriously. This was a good idea, especially since the tastes of critics and everyday rock fans tended, then, to coincide. In 1969, The Village Voice, New York’s leading countercultural newspaper, began publishing a column called Consumer Guide, written by a stern but openhearted critic named Robert Christgau, who assigned letter grades to albums, as if they were homework. Christgau later wrote that back then, rock critics like him were generally in sync with the listening public. “Not all of the most popular rock was good,” he wrote, “but most of the good rock seemed to be popular.” The rise of Grand Funk, though, was a sign that in the seventies, rock critics and rock fans were beginning to diverge—permanently, it turned out. Rolling Stone once referred to Grand Funk Railroad, rather sniffily, as “the world’s biggest car radio.” And Christgau reviewed six of the band’s first seven albums, giving them marks ranging from C-to C+.

From a distance of decades, the Grand Funk Railroad discography scarcely seems controversial: the band’s fuzzy, bluesy rock songs sound exactly the way you might expect them to; it is not hard to understand why a young listener looking for loud rock ’n’ roll may have settled on Grand Funk and been satisfied, at least for a time. Some critics fought against their own potential irrelevance by fighting for Grand Funk. Dave Marsh, from the raffish Detroit rock magazine Creem, praised Grand Funk, lustily but not quite convincingly, for being “in touch with . . . the spirit of American youth”; similarly, Christgau eventually professed admiration for the group’s “populist sincerity.” In The New Yorker, Ellen Willis, who was one of the most insightful rock critics of that era or any other, published a column titled “My Grand Funk Problem—And Ours.” (The title was a mischievous reference to “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” a despairing 1963 essay about racism by Norman Podhoretz.) Willis had initially dismissed the band as “abunchanoise,” but then, as she noticed that millions of young people were buying the albums, she was seized by a discomfiting thought: “Hadn’t my parents reacted the same way to Little Richard?” When the essay was published in 1972, Willis was thirty, and yet she felt herself wondering if she was already out of touch. The new teenagers had found their own music, only it was rock ’n’ roll, which was supposed to be her music. The rise of Grand Funk seemed to her like further proof of “the fragmentation of the rock audience.” In the old days, rock ’n’ roll had stood on one side of the generation gap—the rising side. Now there was a generation gap within the genre. Where rock ’n’ roll had once scandalized and polarized American culture, now a new crop of bands was doing something similar to rock ’n’ roll itself. And they were doing it by making music that sounded, even to many rock fans, like “abunchanoise.”

In the sixties, writers sometimes used the term “acid rock” to refer to bands that summoned up a countercultural spirit, often through trippy lyrics and squally electric guitars. The term was regularly affixed to Hendrix, whose playing and persona suggested psychedelic exploration, and also to bluesy and raucous bands like Cream, featuring Eric Clapton, and Blue Cheer, whose joyfully unrefined songs were destabilized by wild, cork-screwing guitar solos. The “acid” in “acid rock” indicated a connection to San Francisco hippie culture, but bands like Cream were helping to push rock ’n’ roll away from hippies and into the post-hippie era. In 1971, in the Los Angeles Times, the critic John Mendelssohn cited “Cream and its imitators” as the chosen soundtrack of a new generation of fans who prized “distortion-laden volume and exhibitionism” above all else. “These kids generally came to eschew the relatively benign psy...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. Rock
• 2. R&B
• 3. Country
• 4. Punk
• 5. Hip-Hop
• 6. Dance Music
• 7. Pop
• Acknowledgments
• Index