Book Review: "Major Labels" by Kelefa Sanneh

When I read books about music I normally choose autobiographies of musicians or biographies written by people well-researched and well-versed in the subject. For example: I have read the autobiography (no matter how true or false) of Bob Dylan entitled: “Chronicles”. I have also read numerous biographies of Bob Dylan, the seminal ones including the expansive “Song and Dance Man” by Michael Gray and the experimental but mind-blowing accounts of “Friends and Other Strangers” by Harold Lepidus. I have read numerous biographies about Charlie Chaplin (yes, he sang to - so it counts!) and also, his heartbreaking autobiography - which seems to surpass them all. When it comes to books about people, especially musicians and actors I really do prefer to see some really extensive research going on and not for the book to look like one big Wikipedia Page. Sometimes though, this is not wholly possible and the book must be presented as a series of chaptered articles on particular subjects in order to get the message across. I have not come across many that do this in a way that is compelling until now. “Major Labels” is not a ‘long Wikipedia (page)’ as stated by some reviewers. Instead, it is a compilation of chapters on subsections of genres of music - helping us to see the stories within stories and the meaning behind some of the greatest genres ever to be performed.

I think many people know that I, in fact, listen and love to listen to different denominations of Rock Music. My parents are huge Elvis Presley fans and that was basically how I was raised - I was raised on rock, if you will (pun intended). This book here takes its time to get to mentioning Elvis Presley in the ‘rock’ section which though I thought it would have been earlier, I like the way the career of Elvis was introduced. Various large sections on Bob Dylan appealed to the Bobcat that I am and linking between Bob Dylan and other artists such as: Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon and others meant that there was a very coherent argument being made here.

In the section regarding R&B music, it first goes through the Motown background with the differences between the arrival and performance of this type of music against something like modern rock music. My favourite sections included: “Soul Music is Ours” - which is about Ray Charles, Nina Simone and others and their very much revolutionary music, “Ain’t Nothing to this Disco” - which covers Disco/R&B music and the early days of the Jackson Five, and “The Comforts of Crossover” which has an extensive analysis on the success of the seminal album “Thriller” by Michael Jackson.

Personally, I learnt a lot from the section on country music because the only ones I know are in and around the Johnny Cash circles. I liked the section “A Revolt, A Revival and a Sales Pitch” as it had a lot about Bob Dylan yet again - especially concerning the song “Girl from the North Country”. Though I do think that this analysis is great, I was also in the mind about how much of a Bob Dylan fan the author is (possible Bobcat alert). The section on Pop was also interesting considering that the chapter ‘Pop Revolution’ brings up the article in Newsweek in which Boy George was called “Liberace” - which I can definitely get on board with because I love both of them. Large sections on the British Pop Scene including but not limited to Boy George and Annie Lennox makes for an interesting read about the evolution of the genre.

One thing I have to say is that I didn’t expect this book to be so deep at all. It had a brilliant amount of detail, research into articles and books and was still written well. I would highly recommend this book for any fan of music and culture because honestly, it is very, very good.