The San Francisco Chronicle (15 Best Books of the Year): “An examination of the ways we create a personal identity through our musical choices…. An intriguing argument in favor of opposing viewpoints.”
New York magazine: “An essential document from an inimitable critic.”
Publishers Weekly (starred): “[A] thrilling debut . . . Sanneh surveys the past 50 years of popular music through the dominant genres that shaped it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance music, and pop. . . . This remarkable achievement will be a joy to music lovers, no matter what they prefer to listen to.”
The Wall Street Journal: “Sanneh… gets high marks both for his encyclopedic knowledge and his breadth of taste. He also writes like an angel, making MAJOR LABELS one of the best books of its kind in decades.”
Chuck Klosterman: “There have been many attempts at explaining the modern trajectory of pop music, but MAJOR LABELS is quite possibly the best version I’ve ever read. Kelefa Sanneh is pure talent: an engaging, efficient writer with insightful observations and an openness of mind other critics only pretend to possess. I’m sure other people will attempt to publish books like this in the future, but they probably don’t need to. They should just read this one.”
Library Journal (starred): “This is quite simply a perfect book for any music lover… Sanneh has crafted a uniquely open-minded appreciation of a swath of popular music. It’s written not in the voice of a music critic but that of a deeply engaged and passionate listener.”
The Atlantic: “Delightfully provocative.”
Vox: “Kelefa Sanneh… is one of the most essential writers of music criticism working today…. Sanneh is an ideal guide for this journey, with a purist’s depth of knowledge and a gourmand’s indiscriminate love of the medium…. This whole book is perfectly fascinating…”
Chicago Tribune (“best reads for right now”): “[A] charming stroll through our sometimes useful, sometimes debilitating compartmentalizing of sounds. The point is not another survey of familiar classics, but rather, a far more ambitious consideration of how styles fuse and expand — in ways audiences often aren’t comfortable accepting.”
Rolling Stone: “Starting in the early 2000s… Kelefa Sanneh did more than any other critic to shake up the way people listen to and think about music.”
Pitchfork (11 Best Music Books of the Year): “A comprehensive overview of the last 50 years of popular music in the U.S. and U.K.… [Sanneh] finds unexpected connections and breaks down the music’s function for its audience, illuminating how identities and communities are built using these disparate sounds.”
The Boston Globe: “Covers everything from disco to pop to rap music, all explored with sparkling wit and enthusiasm. . . . immensely engaging.”
David Letterman: “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.”
Stereogum: “A beautifully observed history of the last 50 years of music. It fucking rules.”
Ira Glass, host of This American Life: “Kelefa Sanneh is somehow able to stand back and give the most clearheaded thoughts about the Big Picture while also diving in for the entertaining, memorable detail. MAJOR LABELS is a completely enjoyable history that told me a thousand things I didn’t know and—one of the book’s great pleasures—made me see lots of musicians I thought I knew, or half-knew, in a whole new light.”
Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker and author of The Rest Is Noise and Wagnerism: “MAJOR LABELS is the most elegant history of popular music ever written. That may sound like faint praise to those who want their pop criticism to channel raw passion, yet passion comes in many forms. 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.”
Kirkus (starred): “A lively, heartfelt exploration of the many worlds of popular music. . . . Throughout, the author shows himself to be a master of the mot juste . . . but it’s clear that he’s listened to just about everything with ears and mind wide open. A pleasure—and an education—for any music fan.”
The New York Times: “MAJOR LABELS [is] ecumenical and all-embracing. . . . [Sanneh] has a subtle and flexible style, and great powers of distillation. . . . he subtly makes you question your beliefs.”
Oprah Daily (20 Favorite Books of the Year): “The stars align in this virtuosic survey… Sanneh brings a contagious zeal for genres and cross-fertilizations to artists and records that are now playlists for an increasingly diverse America.”
LitHub: “As both an engine of commerce and the driving force behind myriad cultural shifts, popular music has shaped American society in ways we can only begin understand. But it would be hard to find a better guide than Sanneh to help us try.”
Chicago Review of Books: “Kelefa Sanneh is one of the most indispensable voices on the popular music beat… [V]ibrant and expansive… An ambitious but accessible tour through the last fifty years of American music, it’s an ideal primer for listeners both casual and expert.”
The Times (UK) (“Best Rock and Pop Music Books”): “An intellectually rigorous retelling of rock and pop history.”
The Independent: “Immensely readable, and full of rich detail.”
Los Angeles Review of Books: “An exhaustive, enthralling breakdown of the last 50 years in music… [by] one of our leading music writers.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer: “[Sanneh’s] punk true believer years give him insight to how fans of all genres use music to construct identity…. MAJOR LABELS is a formidable feat of cogent analysis.”