Artists hate genres. Kelefa Sanneh thinks that’s all wrong.
Early in your book you write that “musicians … generally hate talking about genres.” Why do you think there is such an allergy to claiming a genre identity among artists?
You clearly value the “tribes” that spring up around music fandom. One of the reasons your writing has been important for a lot of people is because it introduced them to so much music that was outside of the “tribes” they were a part of, and that they might not have found otherwise. Help me make sense of that contradiction: loving the single-minded approach but also jumping between groups.
After Blackout Tuesday, the music industry briefly attempted to address its racist past. You had people like No I.D.because pop is less of a genre and more a way to make sure that more resources go to white artists than non-white artists. Does No I.D.’s argument resonate with you? At what point can genre and taxonomy start to do damage?
But this is what’s so interesting to me. What does it mean for pop music to reflect America? Part of the story of pop of course is that Black music and Black musicians have been disproportionately influential, on the one hand. On the other hand, part of that story is that often the most successful and most popular artists, sometimes even in Black genres, have been white.
You mention Maze, someone like Luther Vandross. You can think of it as a point of pride. Here’s Luther, who never had a Number One pop hit, but those records are incredible. If you’re someone kind of into R&B, and you’ve never listened to a Luther Vandross record, your life is about to get way better when you sit down with those records.
“One of the things I loved was going into the archives and reading all this old stuff and realizing how alien some of these earlier eras were. There’s times when people are like, ‘Is Prince a sellout?’ … We’re like, ‘Everyone loved Prince!’ No, they didn’t.”Ashanti was better than BeyoncéDude, when you go that viral — I still see that headline [on Twitter] once in a while. I thought the time had come to explain myself. , A.O. Scott, wrote that “the sacred duty of a critic is to be wrong.
In the years since writing that review, I’ve spent more time listening to Beyoncé than Ashanti. But I thought it would be interesting and maybe fun to walk through how I got there as a way of thinking about how these judgments are made. In general, I’m not that great at predicting what America will love. I’m usually pretty good at predicting what I’m gonna like. I like almost all the same records that I said I liked 10 or 20 years ago. That’s a critical skill too.
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