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Major Labels
A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
Kelefa Sanneh
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- 400 pagine
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eBook - ePub
Major Labels
A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
Kelefa Sanneh
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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.
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Music History & Criticism1.
ROCK
The Kingdom of Rock ânâ 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 idolâone of the biggest stars in rock ânâ roll. The girl was more than pleased, in fact. âDION!!!â she wrote in her diary. âOh Help!!! Iâm so excited, I think Iâll just DIE!!! I was runninâ around, chokinâ and cryinâ and yellinâ and screaminâ.â
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. âEvery day I sent Paul a retardedly corny poem written on an aerogram and sealed with a kiss,â 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. âYou could actually see the shape of his balls being crushed by the tightness of his trousers,â 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 âdirtyâ and âsloppyâ; she was discovering that these qualities were no longer so off-putting. âWith 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,â she remembered. Her diary entries recorded her fantasies, which were becoming distinctly physiological. âSomeday I will touch and feel him, I know it,â she wrote. âMick, my dear, dear PENIS!â
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, Iâm 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 ânâ 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 ânâ roll its mythic reputation, or about the complicated bond that unites performers and fansâand, 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 ânâ 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. âI wondered if I was going steady with the best guitar player in the world,â she thought while she was dating Jimmy Page, from Led Zeppelin. As part of the arrangement, she was expected to savor the bandâs 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 âMoby Dickâ 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 ânâ roll that came to be known as hair metal. Even people with no interest in rock ânâ 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 ârock starâ was commonly used to describe mildly quirky CEOs, faintly charismatic politicians, slightly unconventional athletes, and sometimesâalthough not so oftenâprofessional musicians. Sometimes it seemed as if ârock star,â as a description or a general term of praise, had left the genre itself behind. A song called âRock-star,â by Post Malone featuring 21 Savage, was one of the biggest hits of 2017, and an entirely different and unrelated song called âRockstar,â 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, âI feel just like a rockstar,â while DaBaby asked, âHave you ever met a real nigga rockstar?â) And both tracks were hip-hopânot rock ânâ roll.
In the late sixties, though, rock stars were new. So new, in fact, that they didnât really have a name yet. The term ârock starâ is mostly absent from Des Barresâs 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 âpop-star circle,â not the ârock-star circle.â Rolling Stone, which was the rock ânâ roll publication of record for many decades, didnât regularly use the term until the 1970s. The first prominent occurrence of ârock starâ 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 ârock singerâ and a âpop singer.â) 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 Barresâs diary was growing more explicit, at the end of the 1960s. And her evolving tastes tracked the genreâs 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 ânâ 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 âincredibly inconsequentialâ and âmonumentally irrelevant,â a sign of cultural decline. He argued that Ram represented âthe nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far,â confirming what the breakup of the Beatles had suggested. âThese days groups are little more than collections of solo artists,â he wrote. âThe idea of a group as a unit with an identity of its own has become increasingly passĂŠ.â
By the time Joplin was memorialized as a ârock starâ on the front page of the Times, the music had already shed some of its older associations. In the fifties, Elvis Presleyâs paradigm-changing rock ânâ roll records had been so broadly popular that they appeared atop the pop, R&B, and country charts simultaneously. But the path of rock ânâ roll grew more singular. In the fifties, rock ânâ 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 ânâ 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. (âStairway to Heaven,â arguably the definitive Led Zeppelin song, helped the group sell tens of millions of copies of Led Zeppelin IV, even though the track wasnât 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 Presleyâs 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 âa giant armored institution,â hailed for its âlegendaryâ power. âObviously we all liked Elvis better than the Pentagon,â Bangs continued, âbut look at what a paltry statement that is.â Even as he mocked Presley, though, Bangs found himself missing the so-called King of Rock ânâ Roll, because he missed the days when the kingdom of rock ânâ roll had been coherent enough to have a so-called king. âI can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis,â he wrote. âSo I wonât bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.â
In the 1970s, many musicians and listeners seemed to share Landauâs and Bangsâs sense that rock ânâ roll was decomposing or disintegrating. And many of them responded by doubling down, insisting that rock ânâ roll was not merely a musical category but an identity, a flag to wave. There was a rash of rock ânâ roll songs about rock ânâ roll, which tended to be rather nostalgic. âAmerican Pie,â the 1971 hit by Don McLean, was a wistful eulogy for the good old days of rock ânâ rollâbut so, too, was Led Zeppelinâs âRock and Roll,â which was released the same year. (âItâs been a long time since the âBook of Love,ââ 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. âI remember when rock was young,â Elton John sang in âCrocodile Rock,â adding that âthe years went by and rock just diedâ; the sweet, fifties-inspired tune helped sweeten a rather sour tale of cultural decline. âLong Live Rock,â by the Who, from 1974, followed its puffed-up title with a deflating afterthought: âLong live rockâbe it dead or alive.â And Mick Jagger offered the aging genre an affectionate shrug: âI know itâs only rock ânâ roll, but I like it.â
The defining attribute of rock ânâ roll in the seventies was self-consciousness, and in this sense the seventies never ended. Self-conscious rock ânâ 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 ânâ 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 ârockâ as an identity worth fighting over, which has created a never-ending debate over what constitutes ârealâ rock. Unlike country music, which sanctified rural white lifestyles, or R&B, which catered to multigenerational Black listeners, rock ânâ 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 ânâ roll has endured as a musical tradition that successive generations have engaged withâit is the most traditional, perhaps, of any major pop genre. It is also the most spiritual. Rock ânâ 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: âWhere two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I.â
If rock ânâ roll is an eternal spirit, then it must also be eternally itselfâcapable 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 ârock starâ was both a job and a character. (âI know your mama, she donât like me âcause I play in a rock ânâ roll band,â he sang in âRosalita.â) This enthusiasm for rock ânâ roll history is part of what made him prescient: he realized that, from the seventies onward, the future of rock ânâ roll would belong to the past. (âThere is no future in rock ânâ roll,â Mick Jagger said in 1980. âItâs only recycled past.â) 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 (ROCKâS 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 ânâ roll true believer, sometimes waxing sermonic between songs. âThere is no love without one plus one equaling three,â he exclaimed during the show. âItâs the essential equation of art, itâs the essential equation of rock ânâ roll.â He chuckled at his own teenage faith in rock ânâ roll and marveled at how little had changed since then. âItâs the reason true rock ânâ rollâand true rock ânâ roll bandsâwill never die!â
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 bandâs strongest claim to Beatleness was its status as the first band signed to Apple Records, the Beatlesâ label. (Badfinger had a handful of hits but never ascended to the rock ânâ 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 âCalling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft,â 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 Beatlesâ footsteps and, in some ways, succeededâselling 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 bandâs name was Grand Funk Railroad. Today the members are probably best remembered for âWeâre an American Band,â a cowbell-powered tribute to the rock-star lifestyle, and for their effortful versions of a couple of sixties hits, âThe Loco-Motionâ and âSome Kind of Wonderful.â 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 âloud,â or âpowerful,â or âstraight-ahead.â 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. âAnyone with a trace of taste in rock music canât seriously say that Grand Funk has produced any music in the slightest degree memorable except for its deafening racket,â 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 FUNKâS SUCCESS
HOT GROUP GETS THE COLD SHOULDER AT HOME
RECORD OFFICIALS PUZZLED BY GRAND FUNKâS SUCCESS
HOT GROUP GETS THE COLD SHOULDER AT HOME
Grand Funk Railroad was probably the first popular rock ânâ 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 ânâ roll seriouslyâthat is, a rock ânâ 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 Yorkâs 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. âNot all of the most popular rock was good,â he wrote, âbut most of the good rock seemed to be popular.â The rise of Grand Funk, though, was a sign that in the seventies, rock critics and rock fans were beginning to divergeâpermanently, it turned out. Rolling Stone once referred to Grand Funk Railroad, rather sniffily, as âthe worldâs biggest car radio.â And Christgau reviewed six of the bandâs 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 bandâs 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 ânâ 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 âin touch with . . . the spirit of American youthâ; similarly, Christgau eventually professed admiration for the groupâs âpopulist sincerity.â 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 âMy Grand Funk ProblemâAnd Ours.â (The title was a mischievous reference to âMy Negro ProblemâAnd Ours,â a despairing 1963 essay about racism by Norman Podhoretz.) Willis had initially dismissed the band as âabunchanoise,â but then, as she noticed that millions of young people were buying the albums, she was seized by a discomfiting thought: âHadnât my parents reacted the same way to Little Richard?â 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 ânâ roll, which was supposed to be her music. The rise of Grand Funk seemed to her like further proof of âthe fragmentation of the rock audience.â In the old days, rock ânâ roll had stood on one side of the generation gapâthe rising side. Now there was a generation gap within the genre. Where rock ânâ roll had once scandalized and polarized American culture, now a new crop of bands was doing something similar to rock ânâ roll itself. And they were doing it by making music that sounded, even to many rock fans, like âabunchanoise.â
In the sixties, writers sometimes used the term âacid rockâ 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 âacidâ in âacid rockâ indicated a connection to San Francisco hippie culture, but bands like Cream were helping to push rock ânâ roll away from hippies and into the post-hippie era. In 1971, in the Los Angeles Times, the critic John Mendelssohn cited âCream and its imitatorsâ as the chosen soundtrack of a new generation of fans who prized âdistortion-laden volume and exhibitionismâ above all else. âThese kids generally came to eschew the relatively benign psy...
Indice dei contenuti
- Introduction
- 1. Rock
- 2. R&B
- 3. Country
- 4. Punk
- 5. Hip-Hop
- 6. Dance Music
- 7. Pop
- Acknowledgments
- Index
Stili delle citazioni per Major Labels
APA 6 Citation
Sanneh, K. (2021). Major Labels ([edition unavailable]). Canongate Books. Retrieved from https://www.perlego.com/book/2580389/major-labels-a-history-of-popular-music-in-seven-genres-pdf (Original work published 2021)
Chicago Citation
Sanneh, Kelefa. (2021) 2021. Major Labels. [Edition unavailable]. Canongate Books. https://www.perlego.com/book/2580389/major-labels-a-history-of-popular-music-in-seven-genres-pdf.
Harvard Citation
Sanneh, K. (2021) Major Labels. [edition unavailable]. Canongate Books. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2580389/major-labels-a-history-of-popular-music-in-seven-genres-pdf (Accessed: 15 October 2022).
MLA 7 Citation
Sanneh, Kelefa. Major Labels. [edition unavailable]. Canongate Books, 2021. Web. 15 Oct. 2022.