Mr. Sanneh, a staff writer for the New Yorker, 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.

Major Labels isn’t a sharp-prowed vessel that’s going to help break poptimism’s icy grip. It’s ecumenical and all-embracing. The good news is that Sanneh...has a subtle and flexible style, and great powers of distillation. He’s a reliable guide to music’s foothills, as well as its mountains. The bad news is that this book about genre is—pun intended, I suppose—sometimes generic. It’s closer to a textbook, a Ken Burns-style history lesson, than a series of well-aimed arguments.

... an essayistic medley rather than a straight chronological history, with a generous helping of memoir included along the way. The autobiographical jags allow Sanneh to explore his own still-evolving relationship to music, and the various attachments and antipathies he’s picked up and discarded as he goes.

In a postmodern pop cultural moment, when notions of purism and authenticity seem irredeemably old-fashioned, it may seem like an odd time to write a book that is not only a history of popular music’s defining categories – rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance and pop – but an unapologetic defence of them.

... a bodacious single-spaced index and five densely packed chapters, plus an intriguing introduction, Major Labels can look and feel intimidating. As both music and cultural criticism, and also as an autobiography, it’s heavy in more ways than one. But not to worry. Kelefa Sanneh’s new book is user friendly.

A lively, heartfelt exploration of the many worlds of popular music.

... thrilling.