Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

Image source: Allen & Unwin

Do genres even exist in popular music anymore? Here's a comparison: a list of the Billboard top ten singles of 2021, compared with the same list from the pre-Internet era of 40 years earlier [1]:

# 2021 1981
Song Artist Song Artist
1 "Levitating" Dua Lipa feat. DaBaby "Bette Davis Eyes" Kim Carnes
2 "Save Your Tears" The Weeknd & Ariana Grande "Endless Love" Diana Ross & Lionel Richie
3 "Blinding Lights" The Weeknd "Lady" Kenny Rogers
4 "Mood" 24kGoldn feat. Iann Dior "(Just Like) Starting Over" John Lennon
5 "Good 4 U" Olivia Rodrigo "Jessie's Girl" Rick Springfield
6 "Kiss Me More" Doja Cat feat. SZA "Celebration" Kool & the Gang
7 "Leave the Door Open" Silk Sonic (Bruno Mars & Anderson .Paak) "Kiss on My List" Hall & Oates
8 "Driver's License" Olivia Rodrigo "I Love a Rainy Night" Eddie Rabbitt
9 "Montero (Call Me by Your Name)" Lil Nas X "9 to 5" Dolly Parton
10 "Peaches" Justin Bieber feat. Daniel Caesar & Giveon "Keep on Loving You" REO Speedwagon

In 1981 radio was the chief way most people heard new music. It was segregated into formats (Top 40, MOR [Middle of the Road]/Easy Listening, Quiet Storm, AOR [Album Oriented Rock], R&B, Country, etc.) and genrified playlists that were largely pre-determined by program directors and heavily dependent on major-label promotion of long-established acts. [2] 

Each entry in the 1981 list (with the possible exception of "Bette Davis Eyes," a synthpop arrangement of a 1974 Jackie DeShannon song) is pretty firmly associated with a particular genre/format. Notable for their absence are any artists associated with rap; notable for their presence are artists associated with rock (John Lennon, Rick Springfield, REO Speedwagon) and country (Dolly Parton, Eddie Rabbitt, and Kenny Rogers—although "Lady" was written and produced by Lionel Richie).  [3]

Kim Carnes: "Bette Davis Eyes" (1981). Image source: discogs.com

In 2021, most of the chart entries require slashes in their description (generally rap/R&B/dance: rapped or rhythmically delivered verses over a dance beat followed by a melodic chorus); more than half involve collaborations or feature guest stars (versus one in 1981). Three tracks are throwbacks (The Weeknd to 80s synthpop, Silk Sonic to 70s soul) while only one ("Good 4 U") could be described as rock; none are country.

Of course, since 1981 the U.S. has seen demographic shifts, the mainstreaming of rap, and changes in the way the chart positions are calculated so that they reflect more closely what (young) people are actually listening to. But I think something else is going on as well.

With the rise of streaming services, video platforms, and social media, virtually the entirety of recorded popular music (yes, I know, with exceptions) is available to everyone all the time. Since new popular music is often a recombination and reinterpretation of older elements, I'd expect genre boundaries to become blurred and get blurrier over time. And no, even though I've aged out of the target audience of popular music I'm not saying that it all sounds the same. I am saying that most hit songs seem to be converging on a hybrid style that draws on elements from multiple genres, especially rap, R&B and dance.

So Kelefa Sanneh's Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres appears at a time when genre may no longer define how popular music is made or heard, at least by people who came of age with YouTube (founded 2005), Spotify (founded 2006), and TikTok (founded 2016). Sanneh acknowledges this: at the end of the book he writes,

In theory, the popularity of companies like Spotify might have driven further fragmentation, because they made it so easy for listeners to explore far-flung genres. In practice, though, Spotify and its competitors, including Apple Music and YouTube, encouraged a new pop consolidation. Freed from the burden of having to decide which albums were the ones they wanted to pay for and add to their collections, millions of listeners gravitated toward similar sounds.

[Interjection from me: I would say that rather than listeners "gravitating" towards similar sounds, instead they are being pushed by social media algorithms that have been successfully designed to give them new music that closely matches the music they've previously listened to.]

In the new streaming era, the pop charts were full of moody, atmospheric songs that combined slangy, conversational lyrics with hip-hop-inspired beats. The new pop stars tended to draw influence from diverse sources, and yet their songs were highly compatible, blending seamlessly together on the online playlists that were displacing albums as the dominant form of music consumption. . .That development shaped this book, in which. . .many of the chapters end on a note of convergence, with broadly popular performers who are eager to shrug off the weight of genre identity. (p. 452)

Even before streaming, of course, many musicians rejected the confinements of genre. But indeed, popular music genres may be headed for the same obsolescence as (alas!) the record stores that used them as ways of organizing their stock. (Perhaps, then, one reason for Sanneh's loyalty to the idea of genre is the time he spent as a record-store clerk. In my fantasy record store, everything would be shelved alphabetically, so Motörhead would be flanked by Wes Montgomery and Mozart, and Handel would be next to Hendrix (as they were in real life). You can be glad you never had to shop there.)

The genres Sanneh chooses as his focus are rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, and "pop," each of which receives a separate chapter. Of course, entire books can be (and have been) written about each of these genres, so Sanneh can only provide a broad overview of each. He is an excellent, thoughtful guide to a huge range of music: his taste is broad, and he has interesting things to say about each of the genres he covers.

However, I think his book inadvertently illustrates the truism that the popular music we listen to from the time we enter our teen years (when many of us first start developing our own tastes) until the time we're exiting young adulthood 15 or 20 years later (by which time our tastes have become more-or-less fixed) remains the most emotionally resonant for us. Sanneh reports that "I didn't start obsessing over music until my fourteenth birthday, in 1990, when my best friend, Matt, gave me a mixtape. . .carefully compiled from his own burgeoning punk-rock collection" (pp. 216-217). (Ah, mixtapes, those unique gifts of friendship and musical seduction. Sorry, young moderns, but Spotify playlists just aren't the same, especially if you send the same playlist to different people.) Sanneh's teen years (late 1980s to the mid-1990s) also witnessed the emergence of rappers such as Public Enemy, Dr. Dre and NWA, Ice-T, Eric B. & Rakim, LL Cool J, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z. Guess which are the two most energetic, engaged chapters of Major Labels?

Public Enemy: "Fight the Power" (1989). Image source: discogs.com

But perhaps because he came of musical age in the late 1980s and 1990s, Sanneh does not always do full justice to developments in his chosen genres in earlier decades. For example, the chapter on pop highlights the Carpenters, jumps to Britain's New Pop bands of the mid-1980s (Human League, ABC, Culture Club, Pet Shop Boys), namechecks 1980s and 1990s boy bands (New Edition, New Kids on the Block, NSYNC), and briefly acknowledges Madonna, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, K-Pop bands BTS and BLACKPINK, and Canadian chanteuse Céline Dion (or more properly, Carl Wilson's slim book on the Dion phenomenon, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007)).

But pop existed for decades before the Carpenters: it can be traced back to 18th-century ballads, 19th-century music halls, early 20th-century Tin Pan Alley. Later came the influence of Broadway and film musicals on the hit parade in the 1930s and 1940s, and the development of the American Songbook of standards. Even if Sanneh wanted to focus on pop music after the emergence of rock 'n' roll, he doesn't discuss the refashioning of the music of black artists by mainstream white singers (Pat Boone's version of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" is a notorious example). Sanneh uses Lulu's "To Sir With Love" as an example of the pop that successfully co-existed in the 1960s alongside the Beatles, Stones and Hendrix, but doesn't mention chart-topping groups such as The Association ("Cherish," "(Everyone Knows It's) Windy"), The Seekers ("Georgy Girl"), The Mamas & The Papas ("California Dreamin'," "Monday, Monday," "Dedicated to the One I Love"), or the 5th Dimension ("Aquarius," "One Less Bell To Answer"). Also lacking any acknowledgement: New York's Brill Building, the L.A. session musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, or pop hitmakers Lou Adler, Don Kirshner, and Phil Spector (!), none of whom appear in the book's index.

Jerry Butler: "Make It Easy On Yourself" (1962). Image source: discogs.com

Also absent are 1960s pop performers such as Cilla Black ("Anyone Who Had a Heart," "Alfie"), Jerry Butler ("Make It Easy on Yourself"), Petula Clark ("Downtown"), Jackie DeShannon ("What the World Needs Now Is Love"), Tom Jones ("What's New, Pussycat?"), Sandie Shaw ("There's Always Something There to Remind Me"), and Dusty Springfield ("I Just Don't Know What To Do with Myself," "The Look of Love"). Most surprising, perhaps, is the glancing mention of Dionne Warwick ("Walk On By," "I Say a Little Prayer," "Do You Know the Way to San Jose," and many others), the great exponent of the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David—who don't appear in the book at all, and who wrote all of the songs mentioned in this paragraph except "Downtown" (written by Tony Hatch).

Sanneh was also born too late to personally experience punk in its original incarnations. (And back then punk could never have been described as "popular" except in the sense of "carried on by ordinary people." Tom Carson wrote a memorable Village Voice piece in the early 1980s entitled "25,000 Dead Kennedys fans can be wrong," a reference to the 1959 album 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong, which is itself a reference to the 1927 song by Willie Raskin, Billy Rose, and Fred Fisher, "50 Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong.") As a result Sanneh's account of 1970s and early 1980s punk and post-punk focuses on the records he played during his time as a college radio DJ two decades later, and draws on zines (primarily MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL) and other people's books.

The first issue of Maximum RocknRoll (1982). Image source: Fanzine Addiction

While I understand that Sanneh's project is to trace the histories of his chosen genres, rather than focus on specific bands, a lot is omitted. For example, he talks about the attention focussed on the punk scene's racial and sexual politics by the 1990s zine riot grrrl. But such questions were also hotly debated in the 1970s. Sanneh has a section on punk politics that discusses the contradictions in 1970s punk imagery (swastikas were worn at various times by the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, as well as by Siouxsie Sioux), the tensions between punks and racist skinheads, and the Rock Against Racism movement. But the multi-racial punk-adjacent ska-influenced 2 Tone bands such as The Specials, The Selecter, and The (English) Beat go unmentioned, and more could have been made of the influences of reggae, dub, and funk on the music of punk and post-punk bands such as The Clash, Gang of Four, and Public Image Ltd.

(One fond memory from my misspent youth is of a concert by the hardcore punk band 7 Seconds in 1983 or 1984 at Ruthie's Inn, a neighborhood bar in a working-class black area of Berkeley. The (black) promoter Wes Robinson had begun booking hardcore shows there, and the older black clientele at the bar would generally look on warily at the spike-haired white teenagers and early-20s who would throng the stage and mosh at shows by thrash bands. But that night when 7 Seconds launched into their anthem "Racism Sucks!" I watched in astonishment and delight as the band and stage divers were joined onstage by one of the Ruthie's regulars, dancing and singing along with the chorus: "Racism sucks! Racism sucks! Ra-cism fucking sucks!")

7 Seconds: Skins, Brains & Guts (1982).  Image source: discogs.com

It's not until Sanneh's discussion of the emergence of Bikini Kill and Riot Grrrl in the 1990s that the role of women in punk and post-punk is (glancingly) mentioned. This does a disservice to the many bands from the 1970s and early 1980s that were led by (or composed entirely of) women: The Slits, The Raincoats, Au Pairs, Delta 5, The Mo-dettes, Kleenex/Liliput, Essential Logic, Young Marble Giants, The Bloods, and Bush Tetras, to name a few (most of which are not referenced).

Sanneh mentions the admiration of the Riot Grrrl bands for Joan Jett, but what he doesn't say is that the admiration was mutual. After the brutal murder of Mia Zapata, singer for the Seattle band The Gits, Jett co-wrote the song "Go Home" with Bikini Kill's Kathleen Hanna to publicize and help fund the investigation into Zapata's death (the song was released on Jett's album Pure and Simple). Jett also toured with the remaining members of The Gits under the name Evil Stig ("Gits Live" backwards) to raise funds for the investigation and the social justice organization Home Alive. She also produced and performed on Bikini Kill's New Radio EP, which includes their signature song "Rebel Girl."

Bikini Kill: New Radio (1993). Image source: discogs.com

Another odd omission for a history of popular music: Sanneh doesn't discuss in detail the exploitative economics of the music industry, which have come to the fore once again in recent years as it has become clear that streaming services pay to artists an infinitesimal fraction of the value of their music. It's a rich subject that Sanneh avoids almost entirely.

I realize that this post sounds like a pan, but I don't intend it to be so negative. I enjoyed reading Major Labels very much. Sanneh is an excellent writer, and I will be forever grateful to him for untangling the differences among some of the main sub-genres of electronic dance music (Wikipedia lists nearly 400 sub-, sub-sub-, and sub-sub-sub-genres of EDM). He also makes interesting connections between seemingly disparate musical forms, such as his comparison of metronomic electronic dance music to the Grateful Dead:

Like dance music, the Dead's music was rather hard to put into words: listeners describing a particularly good live set tended to wax abstract about energy and vibes. Like dance music, the Dead's music sounded rather monotonous to people who didn't like it, and who couldn't register the subtle variations and innovations that so exhilarated fans. Like dance music, the Grateful Dead's music did not translate particularly well to albums; true believers insisted that studio recordings were no substitute for hours-long live sets. And like dance music, the Dead's music was said to be enhanced by chemical intoxication—and, by outsiders, to be intolerable without it. (p. 401)

Ultimately, Sanneh's project of is one of synthesis, not fission; his church is syncretic, not factional. And the sections of the book that deal with his own experiences and enthusiasms are highly engaging. Read Major Labels for its useful overviews of the past few decades' worth of developments in popular music, and especially for the experiences of a music obsessive who became a thoughtful critic for cultural arbiters such as the New York Times and the New Yorker at a time of fundamental change in the music industry. For in-depth analysis of specific musical artists and time periods, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. And in the interests of directing readers to those sources, may I suggest that the paperback edition might be enhanced by the addition of a "Further Reading" list? Just a thought.

  1. Of course, the very idea of a Top 10, 20, or 40 was antithetical to the way I approached music in 1981: I generally listened to albums, or album sides, not individual songs, and the idea of ranking them in numerical order would have been risible. But for comparison's sake, and a sense of how far the Top 40 was from the musical taste of at least some people in their teens and 20s, here is my personal list of the top 20 songs released in 1981 or late 1980, in alphabetical order by artist:


    Just missing the list: Joan Armatrading ("When I Get It Right"), Flipper ("Sex Bomb"), The Go-Gos ("Our Lips Are Sealed"), Rick James ("Give It To Me Baby"), Public Image Ltd. ("Flowers of Romance"), Ramones ("Don't Go").
  2. The average age of the charting artists in 1981 was 36, with the youngest (Robert "Kool" Bell) being 31; in 2021, the average age was almost a decade younger, with the youngest (showbiz veteran Olivia Rodrigo) being 18.
  3. Parton and Rogers are in the Country Music Hall of Fame; Rabbitt is in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, won Country Songwriter of the Year in 1979, and had been the opening act for tours by both Parton and Rogers.

Posted by Pessimisissimo at 6:49 AM

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