Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

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.

‘Kelefa Sanneh has achieved the impossible. Major Labels somehow manages to unspool everything you need to know about 50 years of music, but more impressively, he makes you care about all of it. Even the stuff you don’t care about. It’s funny, it’s personal, and as a piece of writing the book borders on poetry’ – David Letterman


‘Entertaining, diligent … His observations are always fresh and thought-provoking, and presented with clarity and wit’ – Mojo

Format: Paperback
Pages: 496
Imprint: Canongate UK
Publication date: 01/09/2022