From his allegiance to punk rock in his adolescence to becoming an essential voice on music and culture, Kelefa Sanneh makes a deep study of how popular music unites and divides us. Distilling a career's worth of knowledge, he explores the tribes music forms, and how its genres, shape-shifting across the years, give us a way to track larger forces and concerns.
This is a book to shock and awe the deepest music nerd, and at the same time to work as a heady gateway drug for the uninitiated.
"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 *
"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 *
"
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 *
