Kelefa Sanneh
Appearances
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
well, maybe it's not that great. Maybe it's not built to last. Maybe these teenagers are going to move on and find something else. And one of the most fun and exciting things about pop music is how wrong those judgments often are, right? You think about the way people looked at Led Zeppelin in the 1970s, and the idea is this is music for a bunch of high school morons smoking dope, right?
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And it turns out that Led Zeppelin is almost as popular now as they were then, right? This turns out to be kind of one of the classic bands that generations discover and rediscover. In a very different way, if you think about Madonna in the 1980s, there was this idea like, oh, well, this is very superficial music. This is MTV era.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
People just like these music videos that look good and there's really no substance there. And now we look back at Madonna's career as one of the most important figures in popular culture probably in the past half century. So often people are making these judgments about popular music, about what will last and what will fall away.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And often it's really hard to predict what is going to be popular and what is going to have influence over the years. Where did rap come from? Rap? It's funny, rap... There's a way of thinking about it where it's almost not quite a mistake, but rappers weren't supposed to be the stars. In the early days, this movement starts with DJs.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
It starts with cool DJ Herc and other people basically who had big sound systems and big record collections, and they'd play a party. And they found ways to go mix back and forth between records so they could play funk records or disco records or R&B records. And they'd find the most rhythmic part, the break, where everything would stop except the drummer.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And they could play the break backwards and forwards. And so they'd be able to create a great soundtrack to a party where people would dance and it would be really up-tempo. And it was kind of like they were manipulating these records in an interesting way. So in the early days, the rappers were just the hired help. They were the guys on the microphone.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
They were emcees in the old-fashioned sense of the term, E-M-C-E-E, right? They were the party host saying they'd welcome everyone. They'd say, I hope you're having a good time. They would sing the praises of the DJ. Isn't this the best DJ? And as they started doing that, they started doing that in rhyme. And then, you know, they ended up basically stealing the spotlight.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
The rappers became the star of the show and the DJ became just this extra appendage. You know, you think about someone like Will Smith. When Will Smith first gets popular, he's part of a duo. And the duo is called DJ Jazzy Jeff X. and the Fresh Prince, right?
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
In the early days, the rappers often got second billing to the DJ, even though it turned out that rapping is such a powerful and charismatic form that many of us end up paying more attention to the rappers than the DJs, and the rappers kind of take over, and now you have a whole form of music that's basically built around rapping.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
But the way it started was, yes, in this funny way, a little bit backwards.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
One of the things that hip hop did was it retained this connection to the cultures where it was born. And this is generally working class, predominantly black neighborhoods. And one of the really surprising things about hip hop is that over the decades, it has maintained this connection to those neighborhoods.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Part of what that means is that means that through hip-hop, we get to hear from people that we otherwise wouldn't necessarily get to hear from. People who wouldn't necessarily end up making a film or even making a podcast make records, and those records really resonate. And so that's really exciting.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
But part of what it means is that in these communities, if there are these issues, if there are issues of crime, not only are you going to hear rappers talk about that, but there is an expectation that rappers really be part of that community. And sometimes being part of that community can be really dangerous if that's a dangerous community, if that's a dangerous place to live.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And because the culture is so important in hip hop, there is an expectation that rappers not separate themselves from that culture and still be part of that culture. And I think that's a very double-edged thing. It's part of what makes the genre even now still so vivid. But it can mean that the lives of these stars are really dangerous because they're in dangerous places with a big target on them.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And they're talking in ways that make it seem as if they're still part of these communities.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Well, this is one of the really interesting and really vexing things about genres in music, especially in America, which is that one thing that popular music is great at is reflecting the world that we live in. And to the extent that we live even now in a segregated country, you'll see that segregation reflected in music.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And over the years, R&B musicians themselves have had mixed feelings about that. Luther Vandross, one of the great R&B singers who had a string of incredible records in the 1980s especially, never had a number one pop hit. And he used to, you know, he used to say he really wanted one.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And he was kind of upset that he was sort of – and he was upset that he was sort of categorized as R&B and in that sense kept away from the pop chart. Right. The flip side of that is someone like Whitney Houston comes out and she is – from the moment she comes out, she has big success on the pop chart and she is often categorized as a pop artist or as being, quote unquote, not really R&B.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
headline in either Time or Newsweek called her the prom queen of soul, which was kind of a compliment and an insult at the same time. And so by comparison, Whitney Houston sometimes suffered from the perception that she wasn't R&B enough.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And, you know, one of the things I talk about with genres is that generally to have a genre, just like any community, you need some inclusion and you need some exclusion, right? That's what makes it feel like a community. And one of the things we love about a musical community is it gives you a sense of intimacy, a sense that we're all here listening together. It's just us.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And so one of the things you get in R&B is that sense of intimacy precisely because it's a tradition that doesn't include everybody.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Radio has always been, and actually still is to a surprising extent, old-fashioned, what they call terrestrial radio, still does a really good job of introducing listeners to new musicians they might enjoy. And all these newer outlets are trying to figure out how to do that, right? If you're Apple Music or you're Spotify or even you're YouTube, you're trying to figure out how do we –
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
How do we get people and point them towards something that they love? For someone like me who's a music obsessive, I love logging on to Spotify and I'll just go to the new release page and listen to everything, literally everything. But to someone who's a more casual listener, sometimes that interface can be a little intimidating sometimes.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
You pull up Spotify and Spotify says, great, we have almost all the albums ever made. What would you like to listen to? And for a lot of people, that's a little bit paralyzing, right? Too much choice. And so one of the things you're seeing now is a bunch of companies and a bunch of technologies trying to figure out how to get people into what they like.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And one thing that can be a little difficult, in fact, in the streaming era is finding that sense of community, right? Do you have a sense that, okay, there's a playlist you might like to listen to on Spotify? Do you have a good sense of who else is listening to that playlist? Do you feel like you're part of something?
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Sometimes I think that that sense of community is shrinking down to the individual level of an artist. If you're a fan of a particular artist, whether it's a huge K-pop band or a relatively unknown country singer-songwriter, it's really easy now to find other fans, to go on social media or go on Reddit or... go wherever.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And so you can really become part of a community in a way that makes the fan club era look really prehistoric, right? The era when you'd send your name in an envelope to some address and join the fan club, which is the way it used to work. Now it's much easier to become an active fan and feel like you're part of a community of fans. So I think you've seen that on the level of an individual artist.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
But I talk to listeners all the time who are trying to figure out, like, what should I be listening to? And that's a question that companies like Spotify are trying to help them answer.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And it's generational, of course, right? For a younger listener, they're discovering stuff on TikTok all the time. And if a song – if a snippet, right? On TikTok, it would just be a snippet. But you're seeing snippets of songs go viral. You're certainly seeing people get signed to record deals and become stars because they first were discovered on TikTok. And you're seeing the somewhat –
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
somewhat comical phenomenon of established stars trying to figure out how to use TikTok as well as the teenagers do because they're trying to get that kind of engagement there on TikTok as well.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Thanks. That was great. That was so much fun.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
rock and roll, R&B, country music, punk rock, hip hop, dance music, and pop, right? A genre is, in some sense, a musical community. I feel like within each of these communities, within each of these genres, there is a story to tell.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
In fact, often when you ask people that I've found, you get the opposite, right? You get people saying, I like all kinds of music, right? And my mischievous response is usually, I bet you don't. Which is just to say we like to think of ourselves as being very open-minded, right? And many of us are to one extent or another.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
But for most of us, loving music also means there is some other kind of music that we don't love quite so much.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Well, it's often a little bit of both, which is that they come from below and they come from above. What I mean by that is they come from people getting together, doing a thing, right? You think about a Jamaican immigrant named Kool Herc throwing parties in the Bronx in 1976. He wasn't necessarily saying like, oh, I'm starting a genre. He was just playing records at a party.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
In the 1960s, people used pop music to refer to, like, everything. Like the Beatles were pop, the Rolling Stones were pop, the Supremes were pop. And in the 1970s, that starts to change and you start hearing people using pop as a derogatory term.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And more and more people started playing records at these parties, and they're playing old disco records, and they were kind of cutting them up, and people started maybe talking over them a little bit. And soon you had this thing that came to be known as hip-hop, right? So you had a cultural phenomenon and just – For ease of reference, people give it a name.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
People in other parts of the city and then other parts of the country start hearing like, oh, there's this thing going on. There's this thing. And a couple of different, you know, people called it rap music. There's different words for it. But hip hop ends up being the name that kind of sticks. So in that sense, a genre can be a really grassroots phenomenon.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
At the same time, you have these big corporations always trying to figure out how to make money off of this stuff, how to market to us more effectively. And so for these corporations, it's really helpful for there to be a name, a genre, sometimes a subgenre.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
You think about classic rock, which is a radio format that's born basically in the early 1980s is when it really starts to thrive as a way of radio programmers realizing like, oh, there are some maybe – young but also not quite so young listeners who would love to hear the music of the 60s and the 70s, and it's not exactly oldies, and we'll call it classic rock.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
So sometimes a genre can feel a little bit like a publicity stunt or a conspiracy, and sometimes it can feel kind of like a secret or a local tradition that gets discovered. And often... I mean, this is often true in popular music that you see a bit of both, right? You see the sort of grassroots phenomenon, and then you see the corporate marketing scheme.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And many of the things that we love, including rock and roll itself, end up being a bit of both.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
It's a great question. When I started working full time as a music critic back in 2002, one of the things I realized that was kind of heartwarming to me is that record labels were always trying to launch you know, new acts, new bands, sometimes new sub-genres, and much of the time they failed, right?
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Much of the time, the thing that the record companies told you was the next big thing turned out not to be. And that was heartwarming to me because it made me realize that there was a limit to how much anyone, even these powerful record companies, could control anything. And so I tend to think at the end of the day, the most important force is what people are into.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And you see that well in country music where there's a bunch of different definitions of what country music might mean, right? You might have someone who is country music because of the instrumentation, right? They have a band and there's a fiddle and a banjo player and a mandolin, maybe a pedal steel.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And they're doing something that sounds as if it's inspired by Hank Williams and maybe Johnny Cash and some Patsy Cline in there, right? That's one way to be country music. But there's another way to be country music, which is there is now an audience that thinks of itself as country fans. They listen to country radio. And to a large extent, country music is whatever those people say it is.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
Whatever those people want to listen to is country music. And so that's why country music evolves over the years. Generally, what happens in musical genres is in order for the genre to stay vibrant and stay popular, usually it has to change. And often what that means is there are a number of people who are upset about the way that it's changed. You see the same thing in hip hop.
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People sometimes say that the question of when hip hop sounded best is whenever you were in high school. That was really the peak of hip hop. And, you know, today's hip hop doesn't even sound like it sounded 20 years ago, let alone 40 years ago. And again, I think that's proof of the health and the vibrancy of hip hop. But it's also tricky for anyone who loves, you know, the older sounds.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
And the question of how it's possible for hip hop to evolve and yet remain recognizably hip hop is a really interesting question.
Something You Should Know
The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
in the 1960s, people used pop music to refer to like everything. Like the Beatles were pop, the Rolling Stones were pop, the Supremes were pop. It was just what was popular with young people. And in the 1970s, that starts to change and you start hearing people using pop as a derogatory term, right? The Carpenters are merely a pop act. Because they aren't rock and roll.
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And pop is often used in the 1970s to describe musicians who don't belong to any musical genre. They are homeless in terms of musical genre. Or maybe they've been kicked out of a musical genre because they've tried to cross over. They've left genre behind, right? Olivia Newton-John had some country songs, but really she goes pop.
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And so this idea of going pop and this suspicion that maybe going pop is a bad thing really takes hold in the 1970s. And in the 1980s, that's where you have an interesting reversal. You have, especially in the UK, you have a whole cohort of musicians. They're glamorous. They're wearing makeup. They're very kind of theatrical, influenced by David Bowie. And they're reclaiming the idea of pop, of
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pop music as a good thing. Pop music is cool. The idea is like, actually, rock and roll is old. It's been around too long. It's a bunch of sweaty guys in blue jeans. We're going to do something cooler, younger, sexier, more fun, more glamorous, and we're going to embrace this term, pop.
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And so, you know, ever since then, you've seen pop used as kind of a narrower sense, often to describe a particular sound. And so nowadays, if you think about a pop artist, a pop singer like Katy Perry or someone like that, she really is working. You can hear in her music that tradition of 80s pop, right? The tradition of Madonna and musicians like that.
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The Backstories of Your Favorite Music & Money Mastery in a Changing World - SYSK Choice
So in that sense, pop sort of starts as a catch-all. It becomes an insult. And then especially since the 1980s, it becomes a real genre unto itself, which is to say a community and a musical tradition.
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Well, I got to say, Barry Manilow has had an extraordinary career and by many metrics remains an extremely popular singer. But it's true that over the years, I mean, this is part of what makes popular music different from some other things, right? It's devoted to novelty and innovation, right? Those are values that traditionally have been championed in popular music.
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There's always someone new doing something new, catching people's attention. And also because often the target audience has been so young, there's always been this idea or perhaps this fear that the young people that love popular music, broadly defined, are going to move on to something else. And that's linked to an idea that if what you're doing is popular among young people,