Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kelefa Sanneh has been a New Yorker staff writer since 2008, before which he spent six years as a pop-music critic at The New York Times. He is also a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning. Previously, he was the deputy editor of Transition, a journal of race and culture based at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University. His writing has also appeared in a number of magazines and a handful of books, including Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z, a Library of America Special Publication, and Da Capo Best Music Writing (2002, 2005, 2007, and 2011). He lives in New York City with his family.
 

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1.

ROCK

The Kingdom of Rock 'n' Roll

One evening in 1962, a thirteen-year-old girl named Pamela was pleased to see, on her television, a twenty-two-year-old man from the Bronx called Dion DiMucci. He was the former lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts, and a preeminent teen idol-one of the biggest stars in rock 'n' roll. The girl was more than pleased, in fact. "DION!!!" she wrote in her diary. "Oh Help!!! I'm so excited, I think I'll just DIE!!! I was runnin' around, chokin' and cryin' and yellin' and screamin'."

Like many American teenagers in the 1960s, Pamela was obsessed with rock stars. And as she grew older, her obsession grew more intense, in tandem with the increasing intensity of its objects. A few years after Dion came the Beatles, and in particular Paul McCartney. "Every day I sent Paul a retardedly corny poem written on an aerogram and sealed with a kiss," she recalled. She had a particularly vivid memory of a Paul McCartney trading card emblazoned with a photograph that some other fans might have considered infelicitous. "You could actually see the shape of his balls being crushed by the tightness of his trousers," she later recalled. She and her similarly besotted friends called themselves the Beatlesweeties, and they composed romantic Beatlecentric stories for one another, imagining themselves into the Beatleish lives of their idols.

But Pamela soon discovered that she was sweeter still on someone else: Mick Jagger, from the Rolling Stones, whom she and her friends had always found "dirty" and "sloppy"; now she was discovering that these qualities were no longer so off-putting. "With my precious Paul, I never really got past the hoping stage, but now I dared to imagine Mick with his widewale corduroy trousers down around his ankles," she remembered. Her diary entries recorded her fantasies, which were becoming distinctly physiological. "Someday I will touch and feel him, I know it," she wrote. "Mick, my dear, dear PENIS!"

The young diarist eventually turned her passion for rock stars into a lifestyle, and then a literary career. She is Pamela Des Barres, and in 1987 she included those diary entries in her first book, I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie. The title is accurate enough: Des Barres was for years a leading light in the Los Angeles rock 'n' roll scene, and her adult life turned out to be even more interesting than her girlhood diary. (Her Jagger prediction, for example, proved accurate soon enough.) But the true subject of her book was rock stardom itself. Few people have ever written as insightfully, or as sympathetically, about the peculiar enthusiasm that gives the genre of rock 'n' roll its mythic reputation, or about the complicated bond that unites performers and fans-and, just as important, divides them. Often in the book, Des Barres and her idols seem to be trying to figure out exactly how they are supposed to relate to each other. After all, Des Barres was not just a fan but a minor celebrity, and also a recording artist: a member of the GTOs, or Girls Together Outrageously, a rock 'n' roll performance-art troupe that released an album on an imprint owned by Frank Zappa, the rock eccentric who served as their mentor. Still, she was clear-eyed about the seductive power of rock stardom, and about the corresponding imbalance of power in many of the relationships she had. "I wondered if I was going steady with the best guitar player in the world," she thought while she was dating Jimmy Page, from Led Zeppelin. As part of the arrangement, she was expected to listen to the band's forthcoming album:

On his day off, we stayed in my bedroom, listening to the test pressing of Led Zeppelin II over and over again while he took reams of notes. I had to comment on every solo, and even though I believed the drum solo in "Moby Dick" went on endlessly, I held my tongue and went on pressing his velvet trousers and sewing buttons onto his satin jacket.

By the time Des Barres published her book, the rules of this world had been codified. It was 1987, and MTV was thriving, fueled by a particularly glamorous and decadent form of rock 'n' roll that came to be known as hair metal. Even people with no interest in rock 'n' roll had a pretty good idea by then of how rock stars were supposed to look and act. Rock stars outlived the Los Angeles scene that Des Barres chronicled, and they outlived the eighties, too. By the 2010s, the term "rock star" was commonly used to describe mildly quirky CEOs, faintly charismatic politicians, slightly unconventional athletes, and sometimes-although not so often-professional musicians. Sometimes it seemed as if "rock star," as a description or a general term of praise, had left the genre itself behind. A song called "Rockstar," by Post Malone featuring 21 Savage, was one of the biggest hits of 2017, and an entirely different and unrelated song called "Rockstar," by DaBaby featuring Roddy Ricch, was one of the biggest hits of 2020. Both tracks were about rock stardom as a form of celebrity or a state of mind. (Post Malone declared, "I feel just like a rockstar," while DaBaby asked, "Have you ever met a real nigga rockstar?") And both tracks were hip-hop-not rock 'n' roll.

In the late sixties, though, rock stars were new. So new, in fact, that they didn't really have a name yet. The term "rock star" is mostly absent from Des Barres's book, even though rock stardom is her subject; in one typical diary entry, written in the early months of 1970, she refers to her world, instead, as the "pop-star circle," not the "rock-star circle." Rolling Stone, which was the rock 'n' roll publication of record for many decades, didn't regularly use the term until the 1970s. The first prominent occurrence of "rock star" in The New York Times came on October 5, 1970, in a front-page headline: janis joplin dies; rock star was 27. (The term was not used exclusively; the accompanying article described Joplin, variously, as a "rock singer" and a "pop singer.") The deaths of Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, in 1970, and then Jim Morrison, from the Doors, in 1971, helped to popularize the idea of rock stardom, reinforcing the link between rock music and drugs and alcohol, while also fostering the impression that the life of a rock star was wild and dangerous and, as a consequence, quite possibly short.

The rock-star era started around the time that Des Barres's diary was growing more explicit, at the end of the 1960s. And her evolving tastes tracked the genre's evolving sense of itself. Dion and McCartney, her early favorites, were not rock stars, in the modern sense, but she threw them over for Jagger, Page, and others, who certainly were. Many listeners thought they heard something changing, as the rock 'n' roll sixties gave way to the rock-star seventies. When McCartney released his second solo album, Ram, in 1971, Rolling Stone published a despairing review by the critic Jon Landau, who called it "incredibly inconsequential" and "monumentally irrelevant," a sign of cultural decline. He argued that Ram represented "the nadir in the decomposition of Sixties rock thus far," confirming what the breakup of the Beatles had suggested. "These days groups are little more than collections of solo artists," he wrote. "The idea of a group as a unit with an identity of its own has become increasingly passŽ."

By the time Joplin was memorialized as a "rock star" on the front page of the Times, the music had already shed some of its older associations. In the fifties, Elvis Presley's paradigm-changing rock 'n' roll records had been so broadly popular that they appeared atop the pop, R&B, and country charts simultaneously. But the path of rock 'n' roll grew more singular. In the fifties, rock 'n' roll split from country; in the sixties, it split from R&B; and in the seventies, it split from pop, developing its own media and its own benchmarks. Now rock 'n' roll...