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Kelefa Sanneh of the New Yorker comes thru talkinâ hardcore punk, rapâs âhand-to-handâ era, the magic of WARRING MUSICAL TRIBES â and vibey rare artifacts from his archives
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If you came up to us and said, âWow, Blackbird Spyplane, you are undisputed masters of the sletter game, by the way, who is yr favorite music writer of all time??â our answer, without hesitation, would be todayâs GOATLY guest â Kelefa Sanneh.
At the New Yorker, where Kâs a staff writer, heâs published fantastic features on The Safdie Brothers, Katt Williams and Bruichladdich whisky, among other unbeatable topics (links to all below) â BUT we first started reading his s**t when he was a pop critic at the New York Times, flaunting SURPRISING & OMNIVOROUS tastes while getting off these breezily elegant turns of phrase and casually brilliant insights along the way, partner!
(SpyTrivia tidbit â Kâs 2007 NYT review of an early concert by Blackbird SpyFriends Vampire Weekend was the first thing I ever read about them!)
So when we heard K was about to drop his first book â a history of post-â60s pop music (and musical tribalism) called Major Labels, OUT TODAY â we knew we had to hit him on the SpyPhone to talk about Mach 3+ matters such as booking leftist hardcore-punk shows as a H*rvard undergrad; interning at The Source in 1997; âthe power of insularityâ; and some cherished vibey artifacts from the Sanneh ArchivesâŠ
Blackbird Spyplane: Youâve written great pieces about all kinds of s**t, but since I first knew you as a brilliant pop critic, itâs always a special treat to see you writing about music again... Iâm up to the hip-hop chapter and this bookâs amazing. Did you always know yr first book was going to be about MONSTER CHUNES ?
Kelefa Sanneh: âI had no master plan. But what I realized at the New Yorker was that I was still paying a lot of attention to music even in years where I wasnât writing about it â I still loved it, that never went away. So I decided it might be a fun thing to delve back into, because I had a theory â an idea of what had happened to music in the years since the Beatles â and I realized that there was an opportunity to share my theoryâŠâ
Blackbird Spyplane: Drop the theory, king!
Kelefa Sanneh: âWell, thereâs this conventional wisdom that in the â60s, with the Beatles, everything came together, everyone was on the same page â and then, starting in the â70s, everything got weird, music got more fragmented and more obscure, and it came to a point where everyone seemed to be off in their own little worlds. So when I was in high school in the â90s it was very tribal â you had punks over here, country fans over there, goths, ravers, hip-hop kids. There was this big, increasingly complicated menu of choices of what you could listen to, and for some people that was heaven, and for others it was hell: Too confusing, too annoying.
âSo I wanted to tell a story about how things got that way, and what I found in writing these 7 chapters about 7 quote-unquote major genres is thereâs actually a pendulum thing: In all genres you have moments that swing away from the mainstream, and you have moments of coming together. Like, at the end of the â70s it seemed like disco was eating everything â the Rolling Stones went disco, R&B went disco, the Bee Gees were huge, and it made sense to say, âMaybe music is disco now. We all came together.â
âWe might be living through a moment like that now, actually, in the Lil Nas X era. What genre is he? Maybe all of them! But of course that tends to generate its own backlash and things swing the other way, and genres splinter off into their own universes againâŠâ

Blackbird Spyplane: At least since the iPod shuffle came out, critics and musicians have been telling us that genre boundaries have become fluid verging on obsolete. But in the book you make the case for âthe very humanâand perhaps very Americanâtendency to draw boundaries, and heighten differences, and to define ourselves as much by what we hate as what we love.â
Kelefa Sanneh: âYouâll see some people voice frustration with the idea of genres â âWhy canât we just listen to music? Why do we have these rules?â Theyâre suspicious of the ways genres throw up boundaries and enforce orthodoxies. But I wanted to speak up in defense of genres, because genres are also communities â each one is a community of musicians, a community of listeners, and itâs been about virtual communities, too, long before the internet, because youâd be listening to a record while imagining all the other people listening to it, or listening to a certain radio station and knowing you were part of the community of all the other people listening. Communities are important, and they rely on inclusion and exclusion.
âWhen I was lucky enough to get this job writing about music for the Times, I learned that I was never going to be an expert compared to real experts. Someone who does nothing but listen to death metal every day for decades has ideas about guitar tones that I have no idea about. So that job gave me an appreciation for specialists who go deep into a genre, where they know the tradition forwards and backwards and hear things that a dabbler wonât ever hear â and that they wouldnât hear if they were listening to everything.â
Blackbird Spyplane: After this many years, are you still capable of straight-up HATING something?
Kelefa Sanneh: âThe longer I worked as a professional critic, the less inclined I was to say, âThis is terrible,â and I wonder if that was because of going to concerts and being in the physical presence of people being made actively happy by music: Itâs one thing to be at home, saying, âThis is no good,â and another thing to be at a concert seeing people experience joy and say, âTheyâre wrong to enjoy this.â So as a critic I found myself getting more interested in the question of, âIf I donât respond to this, what life would I have had to live in order to respond to it? Can I hear what people are hearing?â And the joy is that you spend a lot of time listening to music you donât think youâre going to like, and sometimes you find a thing you like way more than you were expecting.
âBut I donât think that visceral feeling of dislike ever completely goes away. And Iâm not sure we would trust a listener who said they liked everything. To like everything means to literally have no taste.â
Blackbird Spyplane: I asked you to choose some rare & cherished possessions that connect to the book â the first thing you sent over is this very vibey flyer you made for a hardcore show you put on as a YOUNG ERUDITE PUNK in the â90s at H*rvardâŠ
Kelefa Sanneh: âI love this first and foremost because I drew such a terrible map for how to get to the venue â Iâm not sure it helped anyone get from the T station to the concert. But it was a great show, and I was excited to be involved in a Dropdead performance. Theyâre this great band from Rhode Island â very political, furious lyrics about animal rights, songs that last like a minute and a half â and theyâre a good example of the musical power of insularity. There were maybe 100 kids at this show, tops, but theyâre all fired up, feeling something that a lot of listeners are rediscovering now, which is the sense that the music you listen to reflects something about who you are. The musicians believe what you believe, youâre all in it together⊠Thatâs an upside to insularity. Itâs a different kind of thrill from the thrill of hearing something on the radio thatâs really popular and having your mind blown.
âSo, again, when people talk about, âI listen to everything, whatâs a genre, we should come together and break down boundaries,â I think, Yeah, thatâs pretty cool, but then you donât get things like this show and this flyer and this world â you only get those things when musical and cultural barriers exist.â
Blackbird Spyplane: Speaking of getting yr mind blown by popular stuff, one thing I loved in yr book is that while you were putting on Dropdead shows you were also starting to hear Aaliyah and Timbaland on the radio and flipping outâŠ
Kelefa Sanneh: âThat came a little later, but yeah, with a producer like Timbaland, his power was not only to inspire this first reaction in you, where you go, âHeâs a genius, this doesnât sound like anything else in R&Bâ â but to inspire a secondary realization where then you go, âOh wow, R&B is full of geniuses, even the ones making quote-unquote normal R&B, and Timbaland helps me hear something in the genre that I hadnât been able to hear before.â
âThereâs also this punk-rock thing where, once youâre part of this community that prides itself on defiance and rebellion and skepticism of musical rules, that can lead you into loving a band like Dropdead or it could lead you back out, because if you follow that reasoning to its logical conclusion you wonder, Whatâs being excluded from this community? Whatâs out there that weâre not hearing?
âFor me, after a while of being part of the punk scene in Boston, the local R&B station, JAMâN 94.5, started to seem alien and exciting in a way that punk didnât. That points to something unstable about âthe punk-rock identityâ â this sense that, if youâre doing it right, youâre always looking for something new and different.â
Blackbird Spyplane: Looking at the flyer, I see there was discounted admission if you donated a can of food. Itâs cool in hardcore that a kindvibed communitarian impulse often gets mixed in with hyper-aggressive, deliberately off-putting energyâŠ
Kelefa Sanneh: âThatâs something that emerged in the early years of punk â the Sex Pistols were messing with everyone, saying, âIâm an anarchist,â but then you get bands like the Clash and Crass who tried to turn that impulse into a coherent leftist philosophy, and years after that you get hardcore, which I describe as anti-antisocial â the hardcore spirit is a little more âLetâs build our own community and write songs discussing whatâs happening in our community.â
âAnd those things are both appealing: Mindless violence is appealing, and mindful fundraisers are appealing, too.â
Blackbird Spyplane: The other thing you sent over is this BEAUTIFULLY AGED bootleg Wu-Tang tee. Whatâs up with this gem?
Kelefa Sanneh: âI bought this somewhere on the streets of New York City in summer 1997. Itâs when Wu-Wear was happening, so I went to the Wu-Wear store on Staten Island but I was disappointed to not find anything I could pull off â a lot of the clothes had more of a snowboarder vibe than was compatible with my wardrobe.â
Blackbird Spyplane: Peace to Raekwon the JORTS & SNOW BEACH GOD. I think he might have been the muse for the Wu-Wear aesthetic early on, and yeah if I recall correctly the store didnât sell straightforward merch like this teeâŠ
Kelefa Sanneh: âItâs a funny thing about t-shirts â as a kid in high school I had the valuation exactly backwards: at the dawn of the â90s Iâd have said my CDs, which were the most expensive thing I owned, were the most valuable, then records, then tapes, then t-shirts. And now thatâs pretty much inverted. If Iâd kept some of my Dead Kennedys shirts in good condition theyâd be worth a lot more now than my Minutemen CDsâŠâ

Blackbird Spyplane: I actually remember going into the Wu-Wear store a bunch as a kid and knowing which member of the crew was visiting on any given day by which color Range Rover was double-parked outside â like, if it was a red Range Rover, that was ODBâs, if it was gray that was RZAâs, black was Method ManâŠ
Kelefa Sanneh: âI love that. Itâs hard today to remember how mysterious Wu-Tang was. Iâm old enough that I remember the first time I ever used the Internet â I went to OHHLA.com to look up Wu-Tang lyrics! Because their albums werenât packaged with lyrics, and I needed to know what they were talking about. You hear those records now and they sound great, but a lot of us then were hearing them without a lot of context.
âThat was part of the draw for me â having these mysterious and audacious worlds to explore, whether it was Wu-Tang or OutKast or 8Ball and MJG or Juvenile.â
Blackbird Spyplane: Do you still wear this?
Kelefa Sanneh: âI do occasionally. Itâs got some holes. Should I not?â
Blackbird Spyplane: Oh you absolutely should. When it comes to rocking a jawn vs. stocking a jawn we are firmly pro-rock. I also like that this tee is a street-vendor bootleg â that actually feels more âauthenticâ than like, an officially licensed version that got sold at Urb*n O*tfitters after Wu-Tang Forever went 4x platinumâŠ
Kelefa Sanneh: âYeah back then hip-hop was really this hand-to-hand culture â you had street teams, guerilla marketing, youâd walk around seeing posters and flyers stapled onto telephone poles. There was something nice about that and, yeah, getting a bootleg shirt felt right. I was interning at The Source that summer, and it really felt like a privilege to be in New York â it was the summer of New York hip-hop: the summer Puffy takes over, the summer of Jay-Z vying for Biggieâs crown. It felt like everything was happening right there, and this shirt reminds me of that.â
Blackbird Spyplane: Having grown up deeply loving Wu-Tang I feel like Iâm hardwired to love Griselda⊠Do you f**k with them?
Kelefa Sanneh: âYou know, sometimes itâs hard for me to get that excited by music that seems too obviously retro, though sometimes I fear that my suspicion of retro is its own form of nostalgia for a time when things were less retro. So maybe itâs me whoâs retro? But yeah, these days Iâm more likely to be listening to NBA Youngboy or Kodak Black or something like that â and if Iâm listening to something more âold fashionedâ it might be Mozzy.
âI enjoy Griselda but it hasnât transported me yet. And I say âyetâ because thatâs the way I think about music now â I havenât had the experience of being thrilled by it, but maybe I will.â
Kelefa Sannehâs Major Labels is out today, and you can cop it here. His New Yorker pieces are collected here.
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