About the Author

Kelefa Sanneh has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2008, when he left his position at the New York Times, where he had been the pop-music critic since 2002. 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).

Reviews

The most elegant history of popular music ever written . . . Sanneh not only delivers a coolly dazzling overview of the battlefields of genre but also revels open-heartedly in the music itself, his taste unbound by dogma or prejudice. The operative word is keen: zealous in spirit, exact in execution, ferociously acute from the first sentence to the last
* * author of The Rest is Noise * *

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*

An intellectually rigorous retelling of rock and pop history
* * The Times, Best Books of the Year * *

The most wide-ranging music book of the year . . . elegantly written
* * Herald, Music Books of the Year * *

Intriguing, controversial, personal . . . a unique and absorbing read
* * Guardian * *

The book is immensely readable, and full of rich detail
* * Independent * *

This is a long-haul read, yet charmingly conducted in that languid, laconic New Yorker style that makes such a mammoth undertaking even possible. Its kick is to sew into the stories some near hidden gems - and socking ones too
*ANNIE NIGHTINGALE*

Sanneh's hospitable prose makes understanding this labyrinthine history feel like an adventure
* * Guardian * *

Entertaining, diligent . . . His observations are always fresh and thought-provoking, and presented with clarity and wit
* * MOJO * *

Inside this big, ambitious hybrid book was a smaller, more personal and altogether more compelling exploration of belonging and identity through music
* * Observer * *