Major Labels Quotes

“Sometimes when people talk about loving music, this is what they mean. You hear something that resonates with some fragment of your biography, and you feel you wouldn’t mind if those were the last sounds you ever heard.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Ever since the sixties, rock ’n’ roll had been the most prestigious form of popular music, beloved both by “rock critics” (the term itself suggested this bias) and by everyday fans, many of whom were inclined to accept the idea that mainstream pop music, no matter how much they loved it, was relatively inconsequential. The new pop revolution encouraged listeners of all sorts to question this hierarchy: to consider the possibility that rock ’n’ roll was boring, and that so-called pop music was the future.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Negermusik”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“There was Francis Grasso, who was an anomaly: a straight DJ at a gay club, the Sanctuary, who liked to play the orgasmic interlude from “Whole Lotta Love,” by Led Zeppelin, on top of the drumming section of “I’m a Man,” by Chicago.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“I didn’t think that literary references or polysyllabic words were necessarily anything to celebrate, or that rhymes about politics and racism were guaranteed to be more memorable, or less hackneyed, than rhymes about killing and fucking.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“You gotta keep it steady, baby / Got to keep it real,”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Punk rock is fundamentally incoherent, an anti-traditional tradition that promises “anarchy,” or a whiff of it, while providing its devotees something tidy and recognizable enough to be considered a musical genre.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Where the members of Green Day were, in their own self-effacing ways, serious and ambitious musicians, the members of blink-182 cultivated the impression that they were a bunch of idiots.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“I worked as a clerk and buyer at a small shop in Harvard Square, where I got a chance to try not to be one of those obnoxious guys behind the record-store counter.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Minor Threat’s first record included a forty-six-second-long song called “Straight Edge,”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Hardcore was both an intensification of punk and a rejection of it: a double-negative genre, rebelling against the punk rebellion from within.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“(People don’t tend to sing about—or fight over—New England or the Midwest, in large part because neither of those regions waged a bloody war of secession against the US government.)”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Nelson had a knack for writing easeful, jazzy-influenced tunes that slipped between genres, including “Crazy,” which had been Patsy Cline’s signature song and which is now so firmly installed in the American songbook that many listeners probably don’t even think of it as a country song.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“I loved the way the pedal steel could make even the goofiest song sound a little bit wistful.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“He witnessed “a petite blonde of incredible vanilla-ice-cream beauty,” equipped with “a quavering Appalachian soprano.” This singer and her band, he declared, represented “gut-country music at its purest.” Her name was Dolly Parton.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Agendalessness is what made the hair-metal scene seem contemporary and fun, setting it apart from more earnest, old-fashioned forms of rock ’n’ roll.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“A song about anguish is not necessarily any more meaningful than a song about partying, let alone any better.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Is it possible that, when we finally have easy access to just about any song we want, many of us end up wanting to listen to the same thing?”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“Like Grand Funk Railroad, for a time one of the most popular rock bands in America, even if many critics couldn’t figure out why.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

“We put on our headphones and escape from the world into our own curated soundtracks. But at the same time, many fans have kept faith with the idea that music brings people together, assembling audiences that cross boundaries. The truth, of course, is that both of these ideas are important and true. Popular songs or styles or performers can erase boundaries, but they can also erect new ones.”
― Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres