Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres: by Kelefa Sanneh, New York, Penguin, 2021, 496 pp., $28.00 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0525559597.

That is, while similar to Peter Falk's character, Sanneh is a likeable sleuth in the end his musical tastes often tend, following Columbo's, to come across as agreeably middlebrow in pursuit of some higher goal (Columbo's is to catch the killer, while Sanneh's is to validate the genre). Kelefa Sanneh's I Major labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres i tries to apply some kind of controlling narrative to an esthetic category that is shambolic beyond any other. Bouncing between myriad genres, subgenres, and sub-subgenres, inserting elements of memoir along the way, following some threads obsessively while bypassing others altogether, neither is Sanneh's book really a history of popular music: it's his I own i history of popular music and how it has impacted his life. [Extracted from the article]