Among the blurbs on the back of Kelefa Sanneh's "Major Labels," a book about popular music, is this from David Letterman: "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."
The pop music critic of the New York Times for six years before joining the staff of the New Yorker in 2008, Sanneh provides musical history in a variety of genres. It's a book that, as Letterman says, crams a lot in.
Here are just a few of the things I learned from 'Major Labels':
--Waylon Jennings was a pinball fanatic.
--George Strait had 85 top 10 country singles.
--An early form of smooth jazz, known as the "quiet storm" format, was inspired by Smokey Robinson's "Quiet Storm" album of 1975.
--The album version of the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" ran 12 minutes long.
--Eric Church had a country hit called "Springsteen."
--Alanis Morissette, the Canadian pop star, sold 15 million copies of her album, "Jagged Little Pill."
Sanneh, whose first rock concert came in 1988 when, as a seventh-grader, he attended a birthday party that involved the Poison/David Lee Roth concert in Worcester, Mass., wasn't around for all the breakthrough rock of the 1960s but covers it, nevertheless, often with the judicious use of passages from Rolling Stone critics of the day.
But Sanneh has a critic's touch of his own: "'Soft rock' described, more or less, the duo Steely Dan, whose slick compositions were buoyed by astonishing musicianship, and enhanced by arch lyrics that hinted, softly, at perversion."
As far as rock goes, "the genre has faded in cultural importance, even as the music remains ubiquitous," states Sanneh. But he covers more than rock in "Major Labels." There's grunge, punk, soul music and hip hop as well as views on the breakup album and what alternative music really means.
In his interview with Steve Tarter, Sanneh reveals respect for the music he covers. I only wish he'd found a better title for what has to be one of the best musical histories of our time.
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