These ten music books lead you into the mysterious tribe of genre music

The book list comes from Kelefa Sanneh, a wide-ranging music lover. As a long-time new Yorker writer and veteran music critic, he did an amazing job of plunging himself into an ocean of seven musical genres: rock, rhythm and blues, country, punk, rap, dance music, and pop, exploring the formation, development, and fission of the communities behind genre music. This is the subject of his new book, Major Labels.

Caleb fa Sonny

Gallephat Sonny's identity is first and foremost an authentic music fan. As he wrote the book, he was able to allow himself to swim into the vast expanse of material, tracing how a genre of music became a cultural phenomenon (or conversely, a wave of culture spawned music). Along the way, he met countless idiots like him, and everyone swam in it without distraction, delving into a kind of music, a scene, a sound. The more he explored, the more Galley Sonny rejoiced that he could hear such a variety of music, and the more he thanked the musicians who focused on a certain genre and dedicated their lives to it.

At the age of fourteen, Caleb sonny got a mixing tape. The mixing tape changed his musical taste. Before, he listened to whatever his friends listened to. After that, he turned into a punk head. The short sixty-minute tape was enough to show him what punk music was. The rich differences between the songs made Sonny understand that punk music can also have seventy-two variations.

Teens are drawn to punk for granted. Punk, from the music itself, the stage performance to the attitude of life, is very ... punk. They are completely submissive to the nature of people in groups, and they distinguish between what is punk and what is non-punk. Punk is a special kind of paradise in its own right. Green Day, once the most popular punk band on earth, was removed from its local club; Maxim Rocknroll, an authoritative U.S. punk fan group, openly dismissed it as "the enemy of the punk movement."

These are the discoveries that Caleb sonny made growing up. As a teenager, the punk world had everything he cared about. He was proud to be one of them. After his work, his vision overflowed the punk world, discovering that it was just one of countless microcosm of the human community. In every major music community, punk world-like events are staged. Each music genre is a tribe, and the border guards can be tight or loose, but no one can break into the forbidden land without knowing it.

1、《Deep Down in the Jungle》——罗杰· D.亚伯拉罕（Roger D Abrahams）

Folklorist rooted in Philadelphia, Roger M. D. Abraham changed a magic trick: he published the first book in history about rap. The book was published in 1964, well before the rise of rap culture. How did he do it? Through field recordings, Abraham collected many popular black oral literatures, especially the most exaggerated and bizarre, violent and gorgeous rhetoric, and studied the rhythm and rhythm of contemporary black street language. In the book, he would record in detail a spark-filled street battle, analyzing the traditional black poem "The Signifying Monkey", and the first line of the poem became the title of the book.

2. "The Nashville Sound" – Paul Hemphill

Strictly speaking, Paul Hampshire is not an insider in Nashville. This in turn became one of the charms of the book, giving him the sobriety of an outsider. The Nashville Sound was published in 1970, at the very time when country music was on the rise and spread from Nashville's cafes to the wider world. Hampshire was acutely aware of the trends of the time: country music was divided into two camps, one belonging to the traditional, and the other switching to the embrace of new musical trends. He noticed that Nashville was full of performers who modernized the Southern folk songs they had heard as children, blurring the line between country and pop. This trend is still there.

3、《Like Punk Never Happened》——戴夫·瑞莫（Dave Rimmer）

The strange thing about the book is that by the time it was published (1985), the cult Club, the symbol of punk's pinnacle, had lost its ability to occupy the top row of the charts and officially disbanded the following year. After the "punk explosion", the fireworks disappeared in the air in an instant. Since then, new people in British pop music have emerged, and punk seems to have never arrived. But Dave Remo's point is that it was punk's self-detonation that spawned the latecomers. His writing is cunning and humorous, and the essence of popularity is fleeting.

4. "I'm With the Band" – Pamela Des Barres

The cover of the book is a girl who looks like a spring goddess, but the protagonist is the metal music that was ridiculed as "long-hair metal".

Subtitled: A Confession of Flesh and Blood, about the growth of rock fanatic Pamela Deis Barrys. She embraced the title of "Flesh and Blood Skin", describing how she moved from the edge to the center and participated in creating the myth of rock stars. Her writing is precise, objective, passionate but not sentimental.

5、《The Death of Rhythm and Blues》——内尔森·乔治（Nelson George）

In the mid-1980s, Nelson George was music editor for Billboard magazine. Thanks to his work, he was able to delve into the R&B industry and gain insight into what forces nourished and strengthened the industry. This book is a classic study of R&B, stating both history and love. Nelson spoke in detail about the black businessmen who underpinned R&B and discussed the direction of R&B music. Superstars Michael Jackson and Prince, who made a new move out of it, eventually became pop giants. How do they get through this path? Why them?

6. "Black Noise" – Tricia Rose

Tricia Ruth's Black Noise confides in a parable that rap will still face the dilemma it has today long into the future—it will continue to be popular and will continue to disappoint its most loyal fans. Published in 1994, the author is an avid fan of rap music and an objective insight. She saw that the rap was shrouded in shadows, and she also had a stubborn disease. The industry is in the hands of wealthy whites, and artists are mostly black.

7. "Energy Flash" – Simon Reynolds

It's a book about the history of house music and techno, but the author puts more effort into how to make readers really fall in love with these so-called dancing music. He tells readers that dancing music is more than just sensory. In the book, he explains the relationship between dancing music and medicine. A secret that outsiders won't know: when the illusion of the drug changes, the drum beat changes with it.

8 Lords of Chaos – Michael Moynihan, Didrik Soderlind

The two authors join forces to show readers the powerful and frightening world of black metal. In the 1990s, black metal absorbed the dark, evil parts of heavy metals and developed its own system. The author tracks a series of murders, hatreds, and insanity, assuring the reader that even if you're not very interested in the genre, you'll be attracted to it.

9、《Love Saves the Day》——蒂姆·劳伦斯（Tim Lawrence）

It usually goes like this: the party is over, people are leaving, the DJs are packing their bags and getting ready to leave, and the mess is full of people's smells. In the smoke, few people can catch the essence of the party. Tim Lawrence did. In New York in the 1970s, he was on hand to witness how nightclubs surged and gradually developed into a new form of music. This history written by Lawrence is equivalent to a disco prequel. The first thing is always exciting, let alone the already bizarre disco.

10 Girls to the Front – Sara Marcus

The Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s consisted of two aspects: punk music and social movements. After it happened, the realm of punk rock and feminism changed a lot. The book covers both, focusing on its eccentricity, turmoil, and far-reaching impact. It also points out its uniqueness: why it can only happen at that time, and it is difficult to happen again.