Ep. 124: Kelefa Sanneh on American Pop Music

Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk

“I relate to the idea that music can be a kind of a home, but also the restlessness…the idea that you might want to leave home, the idea that you might want to try and chose something different from what your life, your parents have chosen for you."

Kelefa Sanneh, staff writer at The New Yorker, joins the podcast. Music, now more than ever, is in. Pop, country, rock, R&B, Hip Hop… Americans are listening to more, and a wider range of music, than ever before. In his recent book Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, Sanneh delves into the history of popular music in America, genre by genre. He attacks some of the questions we all wonder about. How can divisiveness in culture shape the character and tone of music? How does music help us both self-identify and escape our surroundings at the same time? How does the history of race in America play in to our music? Can we partially credit racial struggles with the production of such an extraordinarily varied uniquely American musical songbook? Sanneh takes us on a guided tour through the past fifty years of American popular music, from Bob Dylan to Lil Nas X.

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Kelefa Sanneh has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2008, before which he spent six years as a pop-music critic at The New York Times. He is also a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning. Previously, he was the deputy editor of Transition, a journal of race and culture based at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University. His writing has also appeared in a number of magazines and a handful of books, including Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z, a Library of America Special Publication, and Da Capo Best Music Writing (2002, 2005, 2007, and 2011). He lives in New York City with his family.