"In Major Labels, Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our time on music and culture, has made a deep study of popular music and how it unites and divides us. Sanneh distills a career's worth of knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous reckoning with everything from his own punk youth to the racial dynamics of rap and country to the genius of Shania Twain. Sanneh shows how musical genres have been defined by the tension between mainstream and outsider, authenticity and phoniness, right and wrong. He upends familiar ideas of musical greatness as he relays the history of each genre and the artists and events that have shaped them. This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full." --