Category Archives: Music books

‘Our music charts are still kind of segregated’: critic Kelefa Sanneh on pop, fandom and race

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The New Yorker writer’s book Major Labels examines why we tag music with a genre, be it for commerce or community. He explains why people still argue over great songs – and why they can thrive on cultural appropriation

When Nik Cohn wrote Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock in 1969, he only had 15 years of the rock’n’roll era to process. Five decades later, telling the story so far is such a daunting prospect that, while writing Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, New Yorker staff writer Kelefa Sanneh’s trick was denial.

“I figured if I thought too much about the span of it, I would go insane,” he says cheerfully. “The idea of sitting down to write the history of music is horrifying. It feels more fun if I’m telling seven overlapping stories.”

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The message: why should hip-hop have to teach us anything?

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Almost since it first emerged on the streets of the Bronx, audiences have expected hip-hop to express a revolutionary purpose. But perhaps this music shouldn’t have to take a political stand

Halfway through side one of A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, the 1991 debut album by the hip-hop duo Black Sheep, some protesters interrupt the music. “Yo, man,” one guy says. “Why don’t you be kicking some records about, y’know, the upliftment of the Blacks?” Another asks why Black Sheep is silent about “the eating of the dolphins”. Someone else mentions “the hole in the ho zone”, turning environmental degradation into a dirty joke – perhaps unwittingly.

In response to all these demands for instruction, the guys from Black Sheep can only chuckle. Something about hip-hop makes listeners greedy for more words, better words. But Black Sheep made a brilliant album. What more could anyone want?

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‘I saw something in Bruce Springsteen that nobody else saw’: the world according to Stevie Van Zandt

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The Boss’s trusty sideman has many plans – from saving central America to TV Hogmanay at the Playboy Mansion – and he’s more than happy to share his rock wisdom

It is the middle of the 1980s, and Stevie Van Zandt, having departed the E Street Band and left Bruce Springsteen’s side, is pursuing a solo career. He has also parlayed decades of experience playing in bar bands into a new and unusual role: international activist and campaigner against injustice. And so he finds himself, in company with Jackson Browne, in Nicaragua, against which the US is waging a proxy war.

He arranges a meeting with Rosario Murillo, the wife of Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, as he notes in his memoir, Unrequited Infatuations. “After a few drinks, I moved off the small talk and suddenly asked her if she loved her husband. She was taken a bit aback but said, Yes, señor, very much. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you should spend as much time with him as possible, because he’s a dead man walking. It’s just a matter of time and time is running out’ … She was a very smart woman married to a revolutionary. But she was expecting a pleasant conversation about the arts, and the reality of what I was saying hit her hard.”

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Beatles on the brink: the truth about the Fab Four’s final days

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The director’s new documentary weaves together hours of unseen footage to dispel many myths about the band’s final months. John Harris, who was involved in the project, tells the inside story

On paper, the idea looked brilliant. In the opening weeks of January 1969, the Beatles were working up new songs for a televised concert, and being filmed as they did so. Where the event would take place was unclear – but as rehearsals at Twickenham film studios went on, one of their associates came up with the idea of travelling to Libya, where they would perform in the remains of a famous amphitheatre, part of an ancient Roman city called Sabratha. As the plan was discussed amid set designs and maps one Wednesday afternoon, a new element was added: why not invite a few hundred fans to join them on a specially chartered ocean liner?

Over the previous few days, John Lennon had been quiet and withdrawn, but now he seemed to be brimming with enthusiasm. The ship, he said, could be the setting for final dress rehearsals. He envisaged the group timing their set so they fell into a carefully picked musical moment just as the sun came up over the Mediterranean. If the four of them had been wondering how to present their performance, here was the most gloriously simple of answers: “God’s the gimmick,” he enthused.

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Paul McCartney to reveal unseen Beatles lyrics in new book

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The Lyrics will feature a ‘self-portrait’ in 154 songs, including the unrecorded Tell Me Who He Is

Paul McCartney will include the previously unseen lyrics to an unrecorded Beatles song in his forthcoming book The Lyrics.

On Monday, the former Beatle revealed the 154 songs to feature in the book, which will be based on conversations McCartney had with the poet Paul Muldoon. Described as a “self-portrait in 154 songs”, The Lyrics will feature songs from throughout McCartney’s career, including Blackbird, Live and Let Die, Hey Jude, Band on the Run and Yesterday.

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The Who Sell Out: still a searing satire on pop’s commercial breakdown

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Filled with product placement and advertising, the band’s newly reissued 1967 album put the pop in pop art, by showing how closely music was entwined with capital

These days, we think of the period between 1965 and 1967 as one of white-hot musical progress, a dizzying three-year period during which innovation followed innovation, a succession of totemic albums and singles were released and pop music changed irrevocably. But, as Jon Savage’s superb book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded made clear, not everyone at the time was impressed with how things were going. Savage’s research revealed a succession of contemporary naysayers, devoted to “ringing the death knell” as he put it: 1966 – The Year Pop Went Flat was noted music journalist Maureen Cleave’s assessment of 12 months that had seen the release of Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Reach Out (I’ll Be There), Eight Miles High, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and 19th Nervous Breakdown.

The most striking contemporary quote of all might be one that didn’t appear in Savage’s book. “People aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more, like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’,” it lamented, before qualifying: “I like some of the new sounds, purely as sound, that are coming out of pop music.”

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From Soul Train to Beyonce: the joy of black performance in America

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In A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib set out to celebrate black artists across music, dance, comedy and more, who succeeded even when their own country refused to honour them

When I began A Little Devil in America, I was thinking about Josephine Baker. The title of the book comes from Baker, from her speech at the March on Washington in 1963. It is a speech that is often overlooked. The legacy of the march so often centres on its male speakers (Martin Luther King Jr, A Philip Randolph), and Baker was well past her most notable prime. At 57, she chose to return to the US from France and make a small speech – but also to confront the country she’d left and vowed to not return to. The speech is at times tender, at times funny, at times teeming with rage. There was a fullness to it; Baker considering the vastness of her life and the many lives she’d lived. Her speech is defiant and brilliant, punctuated by Baker aligning her experiences with the national plight of black people in America:

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

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