The popular music Contemporary music has been defined by the labels imposed on it by the record industry, the media and, above all, by listeners to our favorite songs. Genre classifications go beyond how to order a music library, a record store, a radio station’s lineup, or a magazine cover. The taxonomy of popular music has also helped build our identities. They are the ones that define us as rockers, punks, metalheads, poppers, and differentiate us, apparently, from the others like a tribe of macaques.
In Major Labels: A history of popular music in seven genres, the American journalist and music critic, Kelefa Sanneh, traces the history of American popular music from the second half of the 20th century to 2020 over seven musical genres: Rock, R&B, Country, Punk, Hip-Hop, Dance Y Pop. In addition to making a brief review of the origins of each style, Sanneh forces us to explore the contradictions of each genre and the similarities that exist in their relationship with the popularity of the music or simply and simply: pop music.
These musical labels are also the way we segment the world and our own affiliations. Pop that has always been seen as a commercial, superfluous and disposable genre; while rock became a predominantly white genre that put on a pedestal a pantheon of guitar gods and built an idea of intellectuality and supposed aesthetic superiority that remains within the genre.
The punk identity was conceived as a rejection of the old-fashioned and conservative values of rock, that genre that appropriated African-American expressions, which has always been in opposition to the superficiality and commercial and disposable aspects of rock. pop, although it also sells millions of records.
Sanneh forces us to break with the rock-centric theory that in 1967 the appearance of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from The Beatles and other albums of the time made rock a more important genre that transcended the ephemerality of popular music, and where a conceptual narrative dominated that only evolved towards expressions such as metal or becoming more complex as was the progressive rock.
The hip-hop which arises as a bifurcation of the soul and the funk and it becomes an identity of its own that has become internationalized. The country who lives in a world apart. The R&B, a genre that, although born from the Afro-American identity, has always sought to cross into the pop world and conquer other ears without losing its essence. They are communities that have the same capacity to integrate as to separate and distinguish themselves from other musical identities.
Music for dancing in all its aspects —such as disco, house, EDM The trance— emerged as truly revolutionary countercultural movements in New York and Detroit that brought together Latino, LGBT, and African-American minorities on a single utopian, democratizing dance floor. These expressions became popular currents and even became the target of other genres, only to later lose popularity and remain in their niche again.
This exploration of the history of popular music from the genres by which we divide the music we listen to is a discussion of how we relate to music and how it helps build our own personal identities. Each genre adopts its own style of dress, language, symbols and on them we build our own musical and personal identities.
Major Labels It also looks at how these phenomena have been written about and covered in the press, music literature, and more recently in the ephemeral world of the internet, from Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, Jim DeRogatis, Ann Powers, until Carl Wilson with his treatise on pop and the music of Celine Dion.
Kelefa Sanneh It invites us to find pleasure in the contradictions of these genres on which we have sought to delimit our libraries and have built our musical identities. Deep down, it’s just our way of wanting to classify all the music that obsesses us, about which we argue endlessly, and an excuse to listen to our favorite songs again.
antonio.becerril@eleconomista.mx
Operations coordinator for El Economista online