The eclecticism the Roots display on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon is in step with a move toward a genre-less pop music over the last two decades, hastened by technological developments from the iPod shuffle button to the all-music all-the-time access streaming services provide.īut Sanneh’s book bucks that trend and argues in defense of genre. Particularly in its Pop section, Major Labels is an expansion of ideas Sanneh laid out in a 2004 NYT essay that took “rockist” criticism to task for lionizing “straight white men” and suggested that “critics ought to pay more attention to genres, like disco and R&B, that were more closely associated with Black people, women and gay people.” his late father, was Black and from Gambia, and his mother, who’s white, is from South Africa. But he’s also the son of academics who emigrated to the U.S. Sanneh’s critic credentials are common in one sense: He took violin lessons as a kid, played guitar in bands, and worked in record stores. He knows everybody, and has stories to tell. In Questlove’s case, we get the perspective of a Black musician with a Philly origin story who’s become an ultimate insider. But the Beatles broke up at the end of the 1960s, and this is a book about what happened afterwards.”īoth the Sanneh and Questlove books are welcomed because they represent fresh points of view on a history usually told by white male rock critics. “Usually this involves the Beatles, and youth culture, and something about the Vietnam War. “There is an idea, common and possibly even accurate, that music changed in the 1960s,” Sanneh writes.
Notorious big pop movie#
No decade in pop music is obsessed over more than the 1960s - witness the anticipation for the Thanksgiving week Disney+ premier of Peter Jackson’s Get Back movie about the Beatles’ Let It Be.īut like Questlove, Sanneh is primarily interested in the music made since then. Sanneh is a former New York Times music critic and current New Yorker staff writer with a breadth of knowledge to rival Questlove’s who presents his musical history within the same time frame as Music Is History. It’s a promising concept, and one that chronologically overlaps with another prominent new music book that’s even more ambitious: Kelefa Sanneh’s Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. and the history of Questlove - by using one song from each year of the author’s life to reflect on the times that shaped the music, and music that shaped the times.
It aims to offer a perspective on the history of the U.S. The book - his sixth including the 2013 memoir Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove - uses its creator’s origin as a logical starting point. The album “was released on January 11,” he writes. It’s because he gravitated toward the environmental anthem “Mother,” and the “Tattered Flag” album cover that spoke to a historical moment as the Vietnam War divided America.īut there’s another reason reason Questlove was so keen on Chicago III: the timing of its 1971 birth. That’s not because it had the biggest hits - “25 or 6 to 4″ and “Saturday in the Park” are found on other albums. The album by the band Chicago that Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson has been most drawn to, the Roots drummer explains at the start of his new book Music Is History, is Chicago III.