Factually! with Adam Conover - How Genres Shape Music with Kelefa Sanneh

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Many musicians and fans reject genre labels as narrow-minded restrictions on what music can be. But what if the opposite is true? What if our notions of genre actually shape what it means to make and enjoy music on a fundamental level? Joining Adam on the show today is journalist and music critic Kelefa Sanneh. Check out his book Major Labels at factuallypod.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright Yeah, that's okay I don't know anything Hello everyone, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me once again for

honestly my favorite part of my whole week when I talk to an incredible expert about their new book or their work or whatever incredible thing they know that I don't know. And my mind is blown. Your mind is blown. We have a great time learning from them together. We're going to have a great time. Thanks for joining me. In this episode, we are going to talk about music. Now, music is like one of the most basic things that humans do. I mean, you cannot find a culture in which music does not exist. You cannot find a person who does not prefer some combination of sounds to some other combination of sounds, right? For some ineffable reason, some combinations of sounds just make us feel good and we seek them out.

That is part of being a human and we don't know why. But here's the thing. It's not just about the sounds themselves. The culture behind music plays an incredibly important role in our lives. It's something for us to obsess over and identify with in a really intense way. For instance, when I got into, yes, indie rock in the late 90s and early 2000s, I will confess I was a Yola Tango flaming lips listening nerd, all right? If you couldn't tell from just looking at me or hearing the sound of my voice and knowing how old I am. When I got into those things in those years, it wasn't just because I liked the sounds, even though I did. It was because liking that music said something about me. It defined who I

was and what I was interested in and how I define myself in relationship to other people. All of that stuff came along with the music. And all that stuff together is what we often call genre, right? When we say genre, we're talking about not just a sound of music, but a set of values that are embedded within the music about what is cool, what is not cool, what is legit, what is not legit, what is selling out versus what is not selling out. Oh, Britney Spears sucks, but Limp Bizkit is awesome. Right? All of that stuff. Now, a lot of us who are music fans, we eventually grow out of that, right?

We stop thinking about music in such a limited genre-based way. And we start to expand our consciousness about it. We start to realize that all those genres we thought were so important were really just given to us by the labels on the boxes at the Sam Goody at the mall. That they're artificial. And moreover, that they're often wrong. That genres don't actually define real boundaries of different music, that sounds and ideas bounce around and influence each other between genres, and that great music can be found anywhere, and that most importantly,

these genres are often just marketing categories made up by some dude in a suit who's trying to sell me more bullshit when I should just be focusing on the music. When we get to that stage, we start to realize that genre can be something that separates us from understanding and connecting with music. And we start to think that, hey, if we could just dispel those limitations and open our minds to everything music has to offer, we could have a much more fulfilling relationship with this art form. That's a transition that I went through. Maybe a lot of you did, too. form. That's a transition that I went through. Maybe a lot of you did too. But here's a question. What if that's wrong? What if there is an even bigger, more open-minded, fully galaxy-brained way of looking at genre? Because what if our cultural enjoyment of music is in fact inseparable

from it? What if genre is just a term for the ideas and values and community that we use to talk about music and to determine whether or not we like music at all in the first place. What if our cultural beliefs about music can shape our feelings about it and in fact can shape the music itself just as much as the invention of a new instrument or a new recording technology? In other words, what if genre is truly an essential part of listening to and enjoying music? What if instead of separating us from it, it actually connects us to it? This is exactly the revelatory perspective I got from my conversation with our

guest today. His name is Kala Fasana. He's a music writer for The New Yorker, a former music critic at The New York Times, and the author of the new book, Major Labels, A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. This was an incredibly fascinating conversation. I think you're going to love it as much as I did. Please welcome Califasana. Califasana, thank you so much for being here.

Exciting to be here. Thanks for having me. I've read your writing about music in The New Yorker for years. I've always found it fascinating and perceptive. But tell me about the book. What do you cover in the book? So the book is called Major Labels, A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. And I had this maybe kind of foolhardy or insane idea that I wanted to write a history of music. I'm someone I've been obsessed with music since I was 14.

And I've been writing about music here and there since like the 90s when I was writing in fanzines in the 2000s. For a while, I was a pop music critic at The New York Times. And so I felt like I've listened to a lot of music. I kind of have a theory about how it works, how it all fits together. And so I wrote this story that's actually seven stories about seven different genres that kind of have defined popular music. The idea is that people know or like we think we know what happened in the 60s. Like we figure it's like something about like the Beatles or the Vietnam War, like we've heard some Woodstock. We kind of know, but that in the 70s, things started to get weird and obscure

and all these genres and sub genres started proliferating. And so the book I wrote, these seven stories are an attempt to explain what happened since basically the Beatles broke up. And so the seven genres are rock, R&B, country music, punk rock, hip hop, dance music, and pop. And so I kind of explore each of those genres. That's the friendly way to describe what I'm doing. The slightly more mischievous way to describe it is that I feel like genres get a bad rap. I feel like when people talk about music, they're like, oh, this band is so good. They really transcend genre. He's not just an R and B singer. He's also drawing from this or from that. And like, there's this idea that genres are kind of like little closed minded, right? Oh,

those, those ignorant people who only listen to country music, those people who only know about hip hop. And so I kind of wanted to speak up in defense of genres and kind of try to explain why genres are cool. Genres are interesting. They really help us understand music and that if you want to understand what happened in the last 50 years and how we got from the Beatles to Lil Nas X, the way to understand is by thinking about genres. That's really cool. I mean, there have been I've read a couple really bits and pieces of other books that have made an attempt to be a history of music. David Byrne wrote a book about music a few years ago. How Music Works. Very cool book. That's that a lot of that is about how it works

acoustically or about really what it's like as a performer to play. There's the Oliver Sacks book about music. It's neurological. This is the first book I've heard of that is charting. It's almost how music changes in our cultural memory, like how the culture as a whole is processing music and changing it. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, you know, those authors you mentioned have some slight advantages I lack. David Byrne is a brilliant musician, and no one's ever described me that way. Oliver Sacks is like this great scientist. Likewise, never been described that way. So lacking either of those two bodies of knowledge. Yeah, I kind of interpret music sort of as a listener, which sounds, I think it sounds kind of redundant, but the idea is to think about fans and to think about

communities. To me, what a genre really is, is a community. Like it's a group of listeners and musicians who like some of the same stuff and who argue over some of the same stuff. And part of why we listen to music is because we like being part of a community. But part of what it means to be part of a community is to get sick of that community sometimes and to fight against that community sometimes, right? So like the surest way to, you know, if you hear someone complaining about Nashville and how country radio is terrible, that's how you know you're talking to a country music fan,

right? Because no one else would care. No one else would bother. So those arguments, and you know, also arguments are just fun to read about. So those arguments are kind of the core of this book, because I think if you want to understand how R&B evolves, you follow the various arguments. Like why did people start calling it soul music in the late 60s to separate it from R&B? Like why did some people think Prince was a sellout in the 1980s? Why did people think R&B was going down the wrong path in the 1990s? And so, you know, as much as when you talk to musicians, often they say like, I don't really want to think about genre and like what the labels are. People trying to categorize me. It's just good music, man.

Like that's what musicians always say. That's what they've often said to me when as an annoying music journalist, I've had to ask them these kinds of questions. But inevitably, when you talk to a musician, you find they do think of themselves as part of a community and sometimes get bummed out when they're being treated as if they're not part of a community, right? Recently, Kacey Musgraves was kind of upset because she got nominated for a Grammy Award in the pop category and not the country category. And she went public and was like, wait a second, I think of myself as part of the country music community. That's who I want to be. So at different times, musicians kind of want that freedom to be free from genre. And they also want to be in there. They want to be part of the community, part of the tradition. Yeah. And we, but that results in us constantly having debates over what the genre constitutes,

the genre, which obviously this is what your book is about. But like Lil Nas X is a perfect example of that. I made, you know, probably an explosion of music criticism around whether or not he's country, the relationship between country and hip hop. And all that is also happening in the context of like, I mean, maybe I'm coming to a late, but a rediscovery of the, you know, the black roots of country music and, and about how, you know, the, the bifurcation of those genres of like, you know,

of white country music from, you know, black music back in what, the thirties and forties, like the early days of recorded music. Yeah. And, and there's all that, all that conversation happening at the same time. The Lil Nas X conversation happening now. And yeah, it's obviously I know it's a really fertile field to write about. Clearly. Yeah. And it's something that, you know, I think sometimes it can sound maybe hopefully not when I'm talking about it, but maybe even then it can sound like something that only the nerds and the kind of like craven record executives and the obsessive record collectors, like it's just something for them to argue about. But what you talk about with Lil Nas X is a good example of how like musicians and listeners are actually thinking about this

stuff all the time. Even if we're not using those exact words, we're thinking about that stuff. And what you raised with Lil Nas X and the idea of the black roots of country or whether he's country, right? This is also a debate about how we think about those terms and how we think about ourselves. I think most people, many listeners are comfortable with the fact that there are so-called black genres. In fact, there's a moment in the early 1980s where Billboard renames its soul music chart. It renames it Black music. And it's a fascinating moment because there's something exciting about that, right? Like the idea of like, oh, this is a very inclusive way to talk about this tradition because it's a way of acknowledging, A, that this music is linked to Black communities

and Black cultures and Black traditions. And B, it's a way of saying like, oh, a radio station that plays Black music might also play jazz and blues and R&B and gospel. Like it's kind of broad minded in that way. And so some people celebrated that change. And then other people were like, wait a second, like we don't want to be segregated. We don't want to be over here, just like considered as black music while these other groups are white music. But of course, the truth is, even when the name went back to R&B and R&B and hip hop, I think it's, or hip hop and R&B, it might now be called. The truth is we do still talk about and think about the idea of black music. And, you know, and that's an interesting thing to think through because mathematically, if you have Black

music, you're also going to have white music, right? Black people are only 12% of the population in this country. So if you have a genre where the majority of listeners are Black, or even when a disproportionate number of the listeners are Black, you're also going to have white genres. And that's something you certainly saw in the 70s, where R&B and rock and roll kind of split off from each other, right? In the 60s, the Supremes and the Rolling Stones are both considered part of this like rock and roll revolution that's happening, right? The who are maximum R&B. These terms are used almost interchangeably. In the 70s, they split, right? And you have soul music over here and rock and roll bands over there. And by the 70s,

split, right? And you have soul music over here and rock and roll bands over there. And by the 70s, rock is starting to be considered white music, right? Rock and roll is epitomized not by some black guy playing a saxophone, but by a white guy, usually a guy, playing a guitar. And so that was a split. And you saw that often that affected how we thought of these groups, right? Sly and the Family Stone, Chaka Khan and Rufus, George Clinton, Parliament, Funkadelic. You know, these are groups that use electric guitars, and in some ways these are rock bands, but often they're considered kind of R&B over here, separate from the world of like Led Zeppelin. So that's a good example of something that a lot of us know intuitively, right? If I say rock and roll, if I say Led Zeppelin is a rock and roll band, like that's not controversial, but Led Zeppelin also changes what we think of by rock and roll.

And so when a lot of people picture a rock and roll band, it might be a band that looks and maybe sounds a little bit like Led Zeppelin. And in music, you know, the reason why I wanted to tell these stories is in music, these paths are always diverging and then coming back together. Even I mentioned the Rolling Stones and Diana Ross. By the end of the 70s, they're both going disco. By the end of the 70s, the Rolling Stones are doing Miss You, right? Diana Ross is doing her Diana album with the guys from Chic. Everyone's going disco.

Rod Stewart, Star Wars, like there's disco everywhere. And so that was one of these moments of like coming together. And of course, what that produces is the next generation of people pushing each other apart. The next generation of musicians saying disco sucks, saying we don't want to be disco. Even musicians who were making disco records started saying, no, we're going to do something a little bit different now. We know everyone's sick of disco. And so the fact that listeners and musicians are kind of fickle and we're always changing our mind about what we want from music, I think partly because what we want from music is

like incompatible things, right? We want to listen to music and feel part of a group, but we also want to listen to music as a way of defining ourselves and proving to the world and to ourselves that we're not like everybody else. And maybe we're not like anybody else and that we're unique. Yeah. That's so true. And it like, I don't know, it's funny how the audience's perception or the audience, the public's perception of these genres shapes the music that's made within them. That like, and we changed so quickly i remember like when i went to i went to college in the year 2000 and i was i had like just made friends with some kids who were like really into the velvet underground and sonic youth and so i

was on this like really hard indie rock track right like the flaming lips had just come out with the soft bulletin and my roommate who was really into the counting crows and dave matthews band hated that i was listening to flaming lips soips so much, but I was so into that. I was like reading those magazines and things. And then by like, then like four years later, indie music was suddenly really mainstream, right? You had like, like within, you know, six, seven years that you had Arcade Fire and bands like that. And at that point, I stopped- It was that post Garden State moment, right? Yes, exactly. And I stopped listening to that music entirely. Like I, I was like, I tuned out of it. I didn't get into any of those bands. I was living in New York city at that point around the time of like the, you know, like the height of a

lot of that. And I didn't even go to those shows because I was like, well, now everyone's into there was some, there was some level to which I pushed myself away from it. Yeah. But that wasn't because of, I liked the sounds any less. It was something to do with all of the cultural impact of all of it coming together. Right. Which I guess you would summarize as genre in this way. Like there's the culture, the whole cultural hairball. Yeah. And that's, I mean, part of the fun of listening to music, right.

Is that it's like voyeuristic. You can, you can enter into this world, right. You don't, you don't have to live it 24 seven, but like you can put on a Waylon Jennings record and like, imagine yourself into his brain. Right. Yeah. You can listen to like a Cindy Lopper or the first Cindy Lopper record and be in like Cindy Lopper world. And it's an awesome place to be right. That's part of the fun of it.

And sometimes that's a real life community, especially with some of these kinds of punk influenced or underground worlds, right? Green Day has, Billy Joe Armstrong from Green Day talked about this, where they're nurtured in this super idealistic, do-it-yourself Bay Area punk scene. And when they sign to reprise records and become probably the most popular punk band of all time, they're banned from their favorite club. Like they can't play 924 Gilman street anymore because they're like a big major label band. And he was really pissed off about that. And so, and you can, you can sympathize with why he's like, look,

I'm just a dude just like you. My happens to be, my band is really good. Like that seems weird for there to be backlash based on. Sorry. Sorry. Everybody loves us so much that we're so good at our chosen profession and now we can't be part of our community anymore what the hell yeah but the flip side of that is if the rules those tight rules around something like the bay area punk community in the 80s where billy joe armstrong came of age that's what made it feel so tight-knit that's what made it feel like such a community. And that's what probably helped draw in kids like Billy Joe Armstrong, who could feel like they could go to 924 Gilman and be in like a secret

lair. Like that's part of the excitement. So yes, it makes sense. Of course, he's like pissed off if he can't play that club anymore. But at the same time, part of the appeal of punk and part of the appeal of a lot of genres is that they're set off a little bit from something else. You can't have a community without having some idea about who's included and who's excluded. And in fact, the dynamic of any community is always a dynamic of both, of inclusion and exclusion at the same time. And usually in music and probably in other places too, any community that says, oh, everyone's welcome. It's cool. Anyone's allowed in is probably finding other ways to determine who's really in, right? Even in some of the more commercial mainstream, if you think about something like pop music, which is the seventh and final

genre I write about, it's not even clear whether pop music is a genre at all. Like it's kind of weird to say like the pop community, but because pop music is sort of open to everyone, it's the one that's most obsessed with chart positions, right? Because there's no rules about who's in or who's out. Well, the way you determine a pecking order is like who makes hits. And in some ways that's really democratic, right? Of saying like, well, your record went number one, you're a pop star. People like it. But obviously that that creates a whole lot of competition and a whole lot of your, you know, as soon as you stop making hits, you're like sort of kicked out of the pop mainstream, like by definition. So you see this constantly with people trying to figure out ways and it waxes and wanes and some communities are more exclusive and some are a little less. And some communities are more exclusive and some are a little less. But always there is this desire for both of these things that you can't have at the same time for a really nice sense of community and for an idea of like freedom and everyone's mingling and we're all just doing whatever.

And that's like that's a push and pull. Yeah, there's like a self-policing that always has to happen. Like I'm reminded of, I was just on TikTok and there's this kid country fan on TikTok and he just made a whole series of videos where he would like play clips from country songs and be like real country, not real country. And I consider myself a country fan. I went through a huge, like 10 year long classic country phase, you know, stemming from my dad loving Lucinda Williams

and me getting into that and then going back and the Johnny Cash revival and all this stuff. But I didn't know any of the artists that this kid was playing. And I had no idea why he was calling half of them real country and half not. Now this kid is from the South. I'm not from the South.

This kid's like, could have been living in Nashville, right? So like, I'm not gonna argue with him because he's got a different connection to the music than I do. But like, that is, seems to be part of what we are like part of the essential thing when we're talking about genres, like all the things that you're, all the genres that you're talking about do that to some extent. Yeah.

And one of the funny things is that like what really, when I was, I was kind of going back to the archives of like the last 50 years writing this book. And, you know, one of the things that really struck me was how traditional rock and roll was, right? Like the lineup of a rock and roll band in 2021 is kind of the same as it's been for more than 50 years, right? You need a drummer and a bass player, a guitarist or two, maybe a keyboardist, get a lead singer, like that's it, right? And not only that, but if you talk to someone today and they say like, you're like, oh, like what music are you into? And they say like, oh, I listen to a lot of like rock and roll. Like that probably means they're into the Rolling Stones.

That probably means they're into Led Zeppelin. And the modern bands they're into probably don't sound too terribly different from that. So rock and roll has been, you know, you could call it traditional or you could call it stuck in a rut. Or, you know, there's different ways to frame that. But rock and roll has really stayed the same. Whereas two of the genres that seem to arouse the most fighting over real and fake good and bad are hip hop and country. And those are the two genres that have really kept evolving, right?

Like country music is a nonstop argument over like, well, do we have a banjo? Do we have a fiddle player? No fiddle, but a string section. Oh no, string sections aren't cool anymore. So maybe are we allowed to use a keyboard? Or are cowboy hats not country anymore? Because too many people are wearing cowboy hats. And one of the things that R&B and country have in common is an obsessive focus on their listeners, on the idea that they have this core demographic that they're trying to please. And there is a sense in both of these genres that, for example, in country music, that country maybe is whatever those people want to listen to. And if what they want this year is like Blake Shelton

rapping, just as if, you know, then like that's what country music is, right? If what they want is like programmed 808 kick drums and electronic elements, as you hear now in a lot of country records, like that's what's going on. And so, you know, it's funny, that's helped keep a genre like country sort of unpredictable. It's helped keep it fresh so that the country radio now, say whatever you want about it. I happen to love country radio, but country radio in 2021 does not sound like country radio in the 80s or the 90s. Like it's not you can tell it's a different era. And so, of course, what that also creates is backlash and people saying like, no, country music should sound like this should sound like that.

But those are both ways of being exclusive. Right. You can say like, look, you don't have to be from the South. You can be from wherever. And as long as you're into like fiddles and banjos and mandolins and pedal steel, like you can make country music. That's one way of thinking about it. It's inclusive in a sense, but that's also a little bit exclusive of anyone whose music doesn't sound like that. And the other definition is more like the Dolly Parton definition where like Dolly Parton

was born country. She's raised country. She is country. So even when she's making nine to five, like she's basically making a disco record, it's going was born country. She's raised country. She is country. So even when she's making nine to five, like she's basically making a disco record, it's going to be country. And that's inclusive in its own way, because it means that someone like Dolly Parton or Morgan Wallen, who's like maybe the definitive modern country star has freedom to do

whatever they want. But it also means that the way to be part of this community is to be born into it. And so those are just two different ideas of how you can have, you know, musical freedom, right? Or how the music can be not all embracing, but kind of some embracing. And I would argue the reason we still argue about country music and the reason why people still want to be part of it is that there's such a big audience. There's such a big culture of people that love it and respond to it, right? It's not something that exists in a museum somewhere. It's such a big culture of people that love it and respond to it, right? It's not

something that exists in a museum somewhere. It's like a real, big, living, breathing thing. And so, one way I would answer to circle back to the Lil Nas X thing we talked about a minute ago, one thing I would answer that question, to answer that question of like, is Lil Nas X country, certainly the Old Town Road song, one way of answering that is like, well, the country fans listen to it. And one way of defining that genre is like, look, if Lil Nas X is not particularly popular among country fans, then maybe he's not country in that definition. And, and that might show that the fans are like small minded and you might

say, Oh, I wish they would be into this. But I've always tried to not as someone who's never been a great musician, you know, I played a little bit, but I they would be into this. But I've always tried to not, as someone who's never been a great musician, you know, I played a little bit, but I just don't have that thing. I'm like, I'm good enough so that if my best friend in high school had been a brilliant singer-songwriter, I might have been able to play bass well enough, like not to be kicked out of the band when they got popular. But with all due respect to my best friend from high school, he was not a brilliant singer-songwriter. So as a non-musician, when I was writing as a pop music critic at the New York Times, I always tried to avoid giving advice. I tried to make sure I never did that. Like that

my reviews, if I'm writing a review, I want it to be like, oh, I really liked this song. I didn't like this song. I think it's, but I'm never being like, well, after the second chorus, what you should have done, like, that's not really my place. But I would also zoom out, and this is maybe a little more controversial. I try not to give advice to genres either. I try not to like say, oh, country music would be better if it evolved this way. Country music would be better if it sounded like that, because I'm always surprised and often, but not always pleasantly surprised by like what happens and how things evolve. And I'm like, oh, we're doing that this year? Oh, that's interesting.

And sometimes it grows on me and sometimes I get it right away and sometimes I'm just not into it. But so in that debate over Lil Nas X, I feel like a lot of people were asked, were answering the question like, should Lil Nas X be country? Or like, should Kacey Musgraves be country? As opposed to the question that I'm interested in is like, okay, Nas X be country? Or like, should Kacey Musgraves be country? As opposed to the question that I'm interested in is like, okay, we have this community. Are they into it? Or are they not into it? And traditionally, the country charts, when we looked at that, there's been a really nerdy, but like sort of important change in some of the charts where the country charts traditionally measured basically what country radio stations were playing. Whereas now

a lot of the pop charts, what they do is they look at the most popular songs on streaming services and they pick out which ones are country. And that's the country chart. Whoa, really? Like, but how do they decide which songs are country or not? Well, this was the Lil Nas X debate because at that point, it's like the people who make the charts have to decide what's country. And, and it's also harder to measure when you have an artist like Lil Nas X, who's wearing a cowboy hat, but maybe not resonating among the same people who listened to Luke Bryan.

And, and, and, and so, so that's one thing that's changed. That's one thing that's kind of changed over the years is, is we know that these communities still exist and radio stations give us a good way to measure them because you're like, well, this community, people listen to this radio station and, you know, it's helpful for radio stations, right? To be able to say, this is the wolf number one for country, or, you know, you're home for rock and roll.

Like that's a really good sales pitch, but it also helps people like me who are interested in like, oh, what record is charting over here, but not charting over there? What, like the hip hop audience is not responding to it, but the pop audience is like, that's interesting. And that's real, right? That sounds nerdy, but that's like, you see that playing out in the career of Whitney Houston. Whitney Houston comes out in the eighties and has enormous success right out of the gate. Whitney Houston comes out in the 80s and has enormous success right out of the gate. You know, she's a black woman from New Jersey singing, you know, what sounds like R&B, but it gets really embraced by pop radio.

And that helps create this perception that Whitney Houston is like a pop star and like not a real country, not a real R&B singer. I think it's Time Magazine called her the prom queen of soul, which is like. Wait, is that a compliment? Hold on a second. Like it sort of is and it isn't, but it's related to this famous and kind of heartbreaking thing that happens in 1989 at the Soul Train Awards, where she gets booed by some people when she's up for like an R&B award. Because again, the perception is like that she's not R&B enough. And so on the one hand- It's like Bob Dylan getting booed at whatever- At the Newport Folk Festival.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly right. Because the idea is like, you're not part of this community anymore. You're doing something else. And so what seems like a nerdy debate about chart positions, it's shaped Whitney Houston's career. She huddles with Clive Davis

and they go and recruit some like specifically R&B producers in an effort to like shore up her popularity in the R&B world to make sure she can be accepted by this community that feels to her like home. And it's an example of how these things really do shape careers and really do shape the way we listen to music because often it's musicians as much as listeners who want to be part of something except when they don't. Wow. I really relate to that. Let me just say from my own position as a comedian, like it's extremely important to me to be considered a standup comic, right? Even though almost nobody knows me from doing standup comedy. I mean, fans of my, for sure, folks who are listening have come out to see me do standup and I I'm hoping to

get back on the road now that we're out of COVID for, or at least we're able to perform again. But it's like really because that's the community I came out of. Right. And I want other comedians to remember, Oh yeah, this guy's a standup comic. He doesn't just do TV shows. Doesn't just do a podcast. He also tells jokes on stage. And like, that would be, that would be, that would be crushing for me if I were to be rejected by that community or the, or that community of fans.

And part of that community, right. Is that like standup comedy is hard. Like in theory, anyone could do it, but not everyone can do it and not everyone does do it. And part of what gives community membership in that sense, it's power is that it's a little bit exclusive, right? They're like, yo, like you haven't, you haven't done this. You haven't done these bringer shows and you haven't, right? Like that's part of it. And so that's what makes it feel like a community. You're right. It's inclusive and exclusive because my favorite thing about standup is,

and I forget where I heard this, but I, as soon as I heard, I was like, this is absolutely true. All you got to do to be a standup comedian is to do it. Like as long as you're doing a couple sets a week, if you do three sets a week and you do that for a year, you're a comic, you might be a bad comic. You might be a bad open mic comic. You might be a bad open mic comic who no one has ever paid a single dollar to perform, but you're still a comic, you know? And so it's like, you have to go through that fire a little bit. But you know, once you're once it's yeah, it's inclusive and exclusive simultaneously.

And at various times within the comedy world, it's been more divided than that. Right. You have nights where the black comic does chocolate sundaes or whatever. Right. And there's like a black comedy world. You have you have people playing alternative rooms that don't want to play like the normal stand up rooms. And like comedy. Yeah. It was a big was a big divergence that now kind of yeah i don't know if it exists to the same degree it's certainly certainly not the debate certain yeah yeah because wasn't that part of the knock on like alt comics is like look they can't hack it at giggles in cincinnati like they wouldn't last on that stage like they need to this like little

comfy stage and like and and you and, you know, it's, it's such a human, I mean, I suspect it's a very American tendency, but it's also just like a very human tendency to form these, form these communities and be like, you know, deep down, like me and my friends are doing something and you guys, I don't know. Yep. And there's a lot of comedy fans. And one of my least favorite things, things that comedy fans do is there are comedy fans who will go, oh, this is real comedy. And that's not like these are real comics. And that is always supporting some narrow vision of comedy that like I personally object to. And I'm like, well, fuck you. You know, this is just this is just your little your little own thing over here. Well, I was going to say, but there's no way to get away from that, right? Like when I was converted to the gospel of punk rock as a 14 year old, my friend gives me this mixtape and I'm like, okay, that's it. I'm in, this is all I do now is punk rock. This is like all I care about. Like that was of course, extreme, like an extreme

version of that narrow mindedness. But I think all of us who listen to music, the experience of listening, of listening to a song that we love, like deep down when you're listening to a song you love, you believe it's actually good. And you believe that like on some level, anyone who doesn't get it is like actually stupid. Like, you know what I mean? like, I don't, I don't, you know, the idea of music snobbery actually turns out to be really hard to get away from because there's no way to have an opinion about something, to love something without like kind of hating something else or disliking or not being interested in something else. Like those things go together. There's no way to have any musical opinion or any musical taste without being in some sense, a snob, whatever that means. Everyone is snobby about something.

And often professional music critics are actually less snobby than like your average person who might be like, I hate Justin Bieber. I hate everything to do with Justin Bieber. Whereas like you won't find anyone who's writing about music that would be likely to say that, right. They'd be like, well, you know, this song or that song and I really like peaches, but the rest of the album wasn't so good. But yes, all of us, that's what it means to be a fan, to love music, is on some level to hate something else and feel like people are wrong for liking that crap that they

like, right? On that note, let's go to break. When we get back, I want to ask you about rock specifically, because I feel like for me, that's the genre that like hovers above my life. And I want to get into it, but we'll be right back with more Califasana. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. Okay, we're back with Califasana. I want to ask you specifically about rock music because I grew up with rock music as almost being like the hegemony of music. Just being, this is what music is.

Everything else is either old and dusty or like new crap. you know uh i specifically like i said earlier grew up with you know my my cool friends the velvet underground sonic youth a lot of post-punk that sort of world um and i always had broader taste than that but i always sort of existed in that universe and now i'm living in a world where i'm looking around and i'm like i think rock is like dead like not not dead dead dead but i think it's kind of in with jazz as like a thing that people talk about as being in the past and there'll be revival acts you know like i love i love war on drugs right but at the same time i'm like the war on drugs it's kind of a revival act to a certain extent.

It sounds like something older, right? Or a new band will come out. Like, I love this musician here from LA, Jay Som. She also put out a record with a group called Bachelor last year. And I love it, but I'm like, I love it because it sounds like the Pixies. You know?

Sure. And so I didn't expect to see that happen, not just in my lifetime, but in a very short span of my lifetime. Well, yeah, it's a short thing. And it's, I mean, it's two things at once, right? One is the kind of ongoing, even still to some extent, hegemony of rock and roll, as you put it, right? Like the Rolling Stones are pretty central even now, like pretty popular. Like you can hear them in every bar even now, right? Like even now a Rolling Stones are pretty central even now, like pretty popular. Like you can hear them in every bar even now, right? Like even now a Rolling Stones tour is a big deal.

Even now the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is like a big institution and you can get in there as a rapper, but like it kind of helps to have a certain like rock and roll spirit. So there is that, right? Like the rock and roll is still, you know, it's maybe not, you know, it's, it's maybe kind of old fashioned, but it's still huge and still hugely popular. You know, if you spin around the radio dial, if you have a, still have like an FM radio in your car, like there's rock and roll everywhere. But, but, but it's going to be old acts, right? It's not going to be like, we're long past the point where like the strokes were like a band you'd hear on top 40 radio. Right. Right. And, and, you know, the, you know, bands like Imagine Dragons or even Coldplay, you know, have succeeded partly

by in some ways, like de-emphasizing rock a little bit, embracing electronic, you know, bits of production being sort of like pop acts as much as rock acts and, you know, collaborating with Rihanna or whoever. So there is that, but there's also this other thing. And I talk in the book about a specific discussion that begins in England in the early 80s. In the aftermath of punk rock, there is this new crew of musicians, you know, from Boy George to the Human League, you know, a lot of what's called like new wave or new romantic or new pop here in the 80s. And they kind of had a rallying cry. And they talked about something called rockism. And rockism was the idea that like this rock and roll way of thinking was bullshit. Like this rock and roll way of thinking was boring. It was lame. It was just like a bunch of

like scruffy, sweaty dudes in bad clothes. And like it wasn't cool anymore. And that pop was going to be the cool thing. And and so that was the whole thing. Like, we're not going to pretend to be afraid of selling out. We're going to try and make a hit single. We're not going to be, you know, earnestly telling you about our guitar tone or about politics. We're going to be having fun. And and so this movement, the kind of and people in the press had arguments about this,

about like maybe rockism is lame, maybe even like making albums is kind of like passe, right? It should all be about singles. Like why, you know, maybe music videos are like cooler than concerts actually. Like maybe we should rethink all of this. When I was at the times in 2004, I wrote an essay about rockism that kind of helped revive that debate in America, I think. And, and people, by then people were talking about something called poptimism and poptimism could be like the opposite of rockism. Right. And like the optimism part suggests that it's kind of fun and celebratory, but the pop part means like, well, let's rethink what we value. Like, let's think about, let's think about how the fact that the rock and roll archetype that's so often celebrated is like a bunch of white dudes. And let's let's let's celebrate music that's made by other kinds of people.

And that can go in a whole bunch of directions. But in the world of people who argue about music for a living, what people would say is that poptimism won. Like the idea, like when I wrote that essay, I was like, yo, this is ridiculous that we don't take Destiny's Child seriously. Like I was Destiny's Child fan. You know, nowadays, like Beyonce is like the most admired musician on the planet. Yeah. She's like, she's like Bob Dylan level considered a genius and will be considered a genius 50 years from now. And she doesn't care about rock and roll. Like it's not like, you know, it's not like the old fashioned thing where she like, you know, where she like grabbed an acoustic guitar and sat down in a chair with Rick Rubin to make her serious album. No, like she has a totally different musical tradition and people

love that. But one of the reasons I wrote this book is to explore the fact that every genre has its own ism. Like none, they weren't as dominant as rock, but there's R&B ism. There's country ism. There's pop ism. There's definitely hip-hop-ism. And so, you know, every genre has like an ethos, has a way of looking at the world. And, you know, the effort to push back against rockism was partly an effort to say, look, if we're just looking for the next Springsteen all the time as critics, but also just like as listeners, if we're saying like, oh, this album is not that good because it's not that earnest or it's not that scruffy or it's not that rebellious, then we're

going to miss a lot of stuff, right? We're going to miss like Anita Baker's like super smooth kind of jazz inflected R&B, right? We're going to miss the country ballads of Alan Jackson. We're going to miss stuff because it doesn't fit that paradigm. But the further irony is like, as listeners, even professional listeners who listen to an unholy amount of music, we're always missing stuff. Like whatever we're focusing on, there's something going on outside our periphery. And whatever broad-minded, inclusive way we think we have of listening to music,

like we're excluding some stuff. Because you have some ism that you are following that you're maybe not even aware of. Is that the implication? Yeah, because you have some, you know, you have some preconception. Preconception, I sometimes think, is just a fancy word for an idea, right?

Like you have some ideas in your head about like what kind of music you like and what kind of music you don't like. And sometimes someone comes along and makes you rethink all that. And like, just because it like connects with you on some like level that you don't even understand.

And sometimes more often you just miss stuff because it's like, not what you're looking for and not what you're paying attention to. And again, I don't want to like blame anyone to that. I think that's just how brains work. And like, you can't take everything in. And as I say,

like if you were someone take everything in. And as I say, like, if you were someone who literally liked all music, that would mean you literally had no taste because like you were just like accepting everything. And to me, the beginning for me, like the beginning of loving music, really like really obsessing over it, as you might be able to tell, was from getting into punk rock as a 14-year-old and realizing like, oh, you can actually like rule some stuff out. Like you can say like the Sex Pistols are great and the Rolling Stones are bad. Like mainstream music is bad, not just in the sense of being mediocre in terms of quality, but in terms of being like wrong, like, like evil, maybe like is,

is like represents all that is wrong with the world. And so the idea, obviously I did not stop listening to the Rolling Stones forever, but the idea that music can matter in that way, right. That like, it can really, you can, it can really make a difference what you like and what you don't like. And you can reject some stuff if you want. In fact, you will end up rejecting some stuff. That was really powerful to me because it kind of got me interested in just thinking about music. I mean, thinking in other stuff beyond music, but punk was kind of my gateway into that way of looking at the world. The value judgments that at least some of these genres apply to certain behaviors or certain ways of making music like the ethical judgments are really interesting i i got a couple questions to you

about that first do you think that that is universal to all these genres like is because obviously rock i know what the i know what the ethical judgments are you know punk obviously diy and you know mainstream bad country same thing does you know, mainstream bad country, same thing. Does, you know, does dance music have, are there people going like, ah, that's not real. Like that's a bad way of doing it. Absolutely. Absolutely. So you have, you have disco, which it was ironic because disco was like almost open source. Like there weren't, there weren't like disco, there weren't prominent disco critics making pronouncements and writing manifestos. It was more like anyone could kind of make disco records. And eventually it seemed like everyone was making disco records. And I think that's what led to the backlash, right? Is that it gets associated with this thing that's

just like inescapable and we're sick of the Bee Gees and this John Travolta movie. It's just too much, right? That drives the backlash. You know, ironically, disco is the one genre that is the most associated with literal gatekeepers, right? There's someone with a clipboard at the core of the Studio 54 saying like, no, you can't come into this club. In fact, one of the greatest disco songs, Freak Out by Chic, was written as a protest song after they got denied admission to Studio 54. Wow. But out of disco, you know, disco get, you know, is huge. It's all kind of all embracing.

It generates this huge backlash and then obviously gets rediscovered, right? It spawns all these dance undergrounds, the house and techno genre scenes that emerged in Chicago and Detroit respectively in the 1980s. And these days, some of the people that are the most into that music, the most into like obscure house and techno records, the most into these like these these disco 12 inches from the 1970s that you never heard on the radio, but are actually totally amazing. Those are often some of the people that are the maddest at like EDM and the spectacle of like a bunch of kids dressed in like fluorescent fishnets going apeshit in a stadium. And so, and so, yeah, like, yes, it generates just like anything else. It generates true believers. And, and, and, you know, often these rules, it's not always musical, right? Like in, in hip hop, you have a, you know, you have ethical codes, right? You had for a long time, people were talking about like no snitching and like that was related to like your hip hop authenticity, you know, in country music, likewise, like being, you know, being like really part of that world in some vague sense is kind of more important sometimes in some scenes than what instruments you use. And, you know, even the question, even, even in R&B, which has sometimes been a little less of a kind of a battle flag genre, you get these discussions about like, you know, about who's really making R&B.

What does it mean to be making R&B? What's that? What does that word even mean? arose, part of the idea of soul music, of like Stax records, of Isaac Hayes, and some of these records was that somehow they're going to be a little more authentic than what Motown is doing. That Motown is making these kind of pop crossover records where everyone's smiling and wearing matching clothes. And soul is going to be a little more Southern and a little more gritty and have a little more funk to it. maybe have a little more message to it, maybe be a little harder to co-opt, right?

Soul isn't just like a genre you play. It's like something you have. And in that sense, it seems a little more intrinsically linked to black communities and black cultures in America, right? So soul music is maybe perceived as being a little blacker than R&B. And so, and even, even Motown, which in the sixties has been making these like beautiful records that we can all kind of like tap our foot to in the 70s. It's like Marvin Gaye. What's going on? It's those five incredible Stevie Wonder records.

It's so even Motown gets kind of psychedelic and they're doing some protest music and and they're doing basically soul music as a reaction to that. And then by the 80s, it switches again and soul starts to seem really old fashioned. And so you get like a new version of R&B, which then has to do battle with hip hop, right? Because for so long, R&B is like the definitive black music. And now all of a sudden, you know, by the time hip hop gets mega popular in the late eighties, early nineties, R&B becomes like the other black music. And it's kind of like, well, what is this? Who is, who's this for even? Is this, is this just for old folks? Is there some way we can kind of keep up with hip hop? So yeah, these, these communities are always struggling to, to redefine each other.

And again, that's what keeps it fun. That's what means that like, you know, the, the, the top songs in America are always a little bit different, that it's always a different kind of golden age going on somewhere. And there's always stuff to explore that hopefully, probably will maybe, if you fall in love with it, kind of change the way you think about music. Yeah. But when we talk about these labels, you know, you said that a lot of musicians and a lot of fans like to think of them as being artificial. And to some extent though, they are, right? I mean, there's a history of when you say rhythm and blues,

my understanding is that's like a racially based label that record executives came up with close to 100 years ago. And, you know, hey, it's a matter of, you know, the people at the record stores want to come up with different names for the boxes, right? Yeah, absolutely. We know that's what's happening. And yet that somehow shapes the music. I don, absolutely. We know that's what's happening.

And yet that somehow shapes the music. I don't know. How does that factor in your analysis? Because you've been talking about it so positively, but there's another view where it's like, hold on a second. This is, you know, we were tricked into classifying music this way because it served a particular racial narrative,

a particular commercial narrative. How about that question? Well, I think there's something in music where people, there is often a suspicion like, oh, the record companies are just like tricking us into liking this. And, but the truth is like, there's lots of record company plots and like most of them fail. And there's lots of artists that are hyped as like the next big thing. They're not smart people. Well, no, I wouldn't even say that. I think that we're just really kind of unpredictable and fickle as listeners, thank God. certainly when i was a uh doing a music critic full time like that's what i noticed was

that the the record company executives were always scrambling to keep up with like what was going on and half the time they were baffled and sometimes even bummed out by what we the public were buying they were like oh you oh really like you guys bought, you know, whatever, five, 6 million copies of Nelly's album. Like I love that record, but I don't think the executives at universal were expecting like, Oh, this is going to be one of the decades, big stars. Like I suspect some of the people who worked on that album might not even have liked it that much. They're just like, Oh, here's some other, some,

here's some rapper from St. Louis doing some thing that seems to be resonating. So we'll put it out. Right. I don't know, but that's, that's my sense. So, and I also think I'm also very, very skeptical, have been for a long time of any musical narrative that says, if only it weren't for those dastardly record companies, people would be listening to the stuff I like. Right. And that's always a temptation, right? Like here's this great record. Why isn't it more popular? Wow. Those horrible record execs. They don't want people to hear it I like, right? And that's always a temptation, right? Like, here's this great record. Why isn't it more popular? Wow, those horrible record execs. They don't want people to hear it.

Like, no, maybe like often, again, often the record companies and the other industry professionals are like a step behind what's going on, A. And B, certainly as a listener myself, I have no sense that I know better than everyone else what they like or what than everyone else, what they like or what they should like, or what they would like. I'm not going to go to a country fan and say like, you know, you shouldn't be listening to that. You should be listening to this. I might,

if I meet someone and they tell me what they're into, you know, I might have a more, a few suggestions along those lines of other stuff they might check out. But yes, the idea that somehow things would be better or different and similar to the world we imagine if it weren't for the people trying to make money off of music. I don't think that's really true. I think one of the fun things about music is now, but also in the past, the barriers to entry have always been relatively low. Compared to how hard it is to make a movie, it's not that hard to form a band, form a band or sing a song. You can throw a lot of music out there.

And that means it can really be audience driven. Like the audience can like hear a lot of stuff and really respond to certain stuff and not others in a way, again, it seems often kind of mysterious. Thank God that even now we're, we're kind of hard to predict as listeners. Yeah. But I mean, there's no, like, there's no part of you that says like, oh, this, you know, these decisions

that were made at some point, like, you know, this label that we all use today, you know, is there not an irony in that it came from like a strange place and yet we all still use it, you know? I mean, yeah, we're talking about popular culture in America in 2021, right? There's ironies everywhere you look

and there's, you know, none of these categories or these ways we think or these institutions are innocent in some sense. I'm not even sure what it would mean for them to be innocent. Like they reflect our society and they reflect the segregation of our society, the divisiveness of our society.

They reflect our grudges and our prejudices as well as our hopes and aspirations, right? Like it's all there in the music and you would expect it to be all there in the music. And you'd expect that if we're living in a society where, for instance, there are patterns of residential segregation, you'd expect to see some similar patterns reflected in the music. You'd expect there to be Black music for at least as long as there are Black neighborhoods. And so in that sense, no, I don't think these categories are innocent in a sense, but I do like that they reflect really well because there is so much music and because the barriers to entry are relatively low. I like the way it reflects the way we live and the way we have lived. And that's not always the way we would like to live or the way we would like to think we do live. Yeah. It's just, I guess my

only hope is that, like, I wish we had, I wish we as listeners, as a community of music listeners, were able to build more of a historical understanding of what you're talking about, the way the genres have grown and changed. And, you know, I remember the first time we did an episode of Adam ruins everything about music. And we were looking at, you know, the history of rock music. And I saw for the first time, like a clip of like big mama Thornton playing guitar. Right. And I was like, holy shit. How have I never seen this before? Like I've heard of Chuck Berry at least. Right. But like, I'm, I'm'm watching this clip going like this is the rock guitar and this is being played by you know a middle-aged black woman like in england and like the rolling stones why and all that you know all that narrative and i

was like this was just left out of everything that of of my you know musical education as someone who'd been listening to rock music my whole life and uh I don't know, it's like that, that that's a, that's a shame in my view. I don't know. But, but, but the thing is like, I think, you know, if you think about, if you think about how long ago that was and you think about how much we know now, the average listener even might know about what was happening 50 or 75 years ago. Like there is a lot of historical knowledge. And in some ways that stuff is easier

to come by than it ever has been. Yeah. The other part is that most normal people are only going to have so much musical knowledge in their brain. Right. And like, and so this is what I go back to, like, whatever you're paying attention to, that means you're leaving something else out. And like, it's great to know about Sister Rosetta and like Black pioneers of rock and roll. You know, I would be the last person to say we shouldn't know that, but like, there's lots of other stuff you could know too, right? Like you could learn about the history of like dance hall music in England and how that affected the Beatles, right? You could listen to the history of Irish song and how that came to America and was a different influence

in country music, like another stream, like it's incredibly complicated when you go back. And so I think that's one difference between now and 20, 40, 60 years ago is there is maybe a little more knowledge of the historical context just because that stuff is accessible. I mean, I'm old enough to remember where like, even if you heard about like some of these black pioneers of rock and roll, like you're going to go get like an Ike Turner record. Like where? Like where are you even going to even if you even if you read about that in a book, you might not go and buy the CD. Right. Whereas now you can click on what you want and hear what you want. So there is a lot of history available.

I think it's true that like most listeners aren't necessarily doing that research. But, you know, that's true of most people in general, right? There's only so many hours in a day and you know, on the, on the, on the grand scale of like how much musical research you want, you want to do in a day, you know, I'm probably close to one end of that scale. But one thing I learned like really quickly when I was a pop critic at the New York times was like, I'm never going to be an expert, man. Like compared to the real experts, whatever the subject is, I'm always going to have so much to learn. Like I might think I'm really into like death metal or whatever compared to like a normal person. But when you meet someone who's been running a death metal

label for 30 years, like you're just ignorant. Right. And so, and so that is one of the exciting things. And one of the humbling things is that like, there is so much more to learn about anything and you can, you can push back in any, in any direction. And certainly the history of the history of race and the story of black contributions to popular music, you know, I think there's probably more, there's probably more effort being put forward and more of a spotlight on that than there has like certainly in any time in recent history.

So I think that's one thing that separates the current moment from a lot of earlier moments. I love, first of all, I love your optimistic viewpoint on all of this, the positive viewpoint on it, but it also rhymes with exactly what I love about music so much is that like, for me, it's always been a process of, oh, I'm into something. Let me like dive deep into it and like discover like all the different

hidey holes of like, you know, I don't know, in the last three years I've gotten into ambient music and I've learned all the different little micro movements within it and et cetera. And a bunch of other, I'm not the only one doing this. It's like a whole little resurgence of ambient music happening, uh, over the last half decade or so. Um, but that's like, that's very fun. And that's a thing that we are able to do now that we weren't able to do, uh, prior to the MP3 era, at least, or at least it was a lot harder to do. You had to go to the public library, check out some vinyl. And the flip side about music is like, you also don't have to be a nerd, right? That's the other nice thing about it is that like, unlike a movie where you've kind of

got to like stop your life and turn on the light, turn off the lights and like spend a couple hours, like music is so sneaky, man. Like, it's like you're in the supermarket, you're watching a commercial and it's in the background and you like, you can go and learn the roots of ambient and read the Brian, you know, manifestos and think about how Wyndham Hill and the new age tradition fits into the more like avant-garde ambient tradition. Like you can do all that work because it's fascinating, but you can also just type ambient into Spotify or YouTube and sit back and listen to whatever you get, right? Like it's possible to enjoy music and especially popular music

without becoming a nerd, without becoming a scholar. And so certainly like when I wrote this book, that was part of the hope was that someone who's like, if you're not a nerd and you like, you heard there was like, you hear the terms house and techno, but you were like a little afraid to even ask what the difference between house and techno even was. Like, it can be fun. You don't have to like, you know, spend years and years,

like listening to old 12 inch records in order to like, maybe enjoy a story of like how these people created this, these things. And so that's the fun of music is that you don't have to be a, you don't necessarily have to be a nerd to find some stuff you like and some stuff you hate. It's so funny how the, how, how much the stuff you hate matters though like i you know it took me until i was age like 35 to stop self-evaluating what i was currently listening to about how cool i thought it was and how cool i thought other people would think i was for listening to it right right um i like i simultaneously had what I would call snobbish taste. I was very iconoclastic in what I liked

and would go down these weird rabbit holes. But in the back of my head, there'd always be someone going like, oh, you're listening to that? That's not cool, man. That's not cool to be into that. And now I finally treat music more just like food I'm eating. Is it pleasurable to have it right now? There's not

much other value judgment to put on it. Why do you think that happens so much with music more than, I would say, other art forms that we put up these fences and walls and judge it on ethical grounds, on grounds of coolness? I think it has something to do with the social and antisocial nature of music, right? Often we listen to it together. Often it's a soundtrack to people getting together. Maybe historically it was that. And if you look at like deep human history, I don't know. And so I think as a result, certainly for me, I often find that when I'm listening to music, even now I think about other people. Obviously, I think about the musician, right? Part of what we love about music is the connection to the human being or human

beings who made it. But I also find myself thinking about who else is listening to this music? Who else likes this music? And, you know, that doesn't have to be like second guessing and hoping you're cool or whatever. But for me, that's part of the fun of listening to it is knowing that like, okay, here's a group. Who are the other fans? Like, what are they like? What are they into? What are their lives like? What are they getting out of this thing? What am I getting out of this thing? And so being part of a virtual community is one of the great joys of listening to music. And one of the reasons why we're always like fighting over people, right? Like when we're insulting music or we're thinking music is bad, what we're really doing is saying like, we think these people

who listen to it are bad. And that impulse, again, that's a very human impulse is to be like, oh, I'm not kind of like these people. I'm like those people. In fact, the idea that music or some kind of music is somehow cool, even now, is what draws a lot of people toward music, right? Like, that's a lot of the fun. Like, even if it's something as simple as like, the way you like nod your head when you listen to like your favorite hip hop track or something, like the fact that it's cool is part of what's so seductive of it. And what cool means is, and cool is a social term and a relative term, right? It means you're somehow, you're somehow above someone else socially, right?

And so, and that reflects a competitiveness in humans, but it also reflects like a desire for connection and a desire to be part of this particular group that other people maybe aren't part of. So I think it's hard to get rid of that, just like it's hard to get rid of, you know, snobbery or judgmentalism or any of these things, right? These are, these are baked in and music can maybe sometimes be a, maybe sometimes a relatively harmless way to work out those, those warring feelings that most of us have.

See, I love your point of view because not only are you, you know, you're, you're, you're taking like a broad-minded view three or four steps back because, you know, not only are you looking are you looking at okay well here are the value judgments that these genres are placing on each other that we maybe you know should understand and not cleave to you're also then saying let's be accepting of the fact that those value judgments exist because they're kind of fun to have and we don't need to beat each other up for participating in rockism because rockism is like part of what is fun about rock. Like as long as we're aware, we're still going to want to beat each other up.

Right. Yeah. Cause I, you know, like, and in the book and I kind of go back to this experience of being like a punk rocker and being a few years older and being part of a hardcore punk collective in Boston,

which is literally like everyone's vegetarian and straight edge, no drinking. And we're having like potluck meetings and we're planning protests and we're putting on shows by bands and all the bands are part of this thing. And all the labels that the bands are on are part of this thing. And like that tribal spirit is like so powerful and it's so exciting. And, you know, that's not my life now, but I would never want to, not only would I not want to begrudge people that tribal experience, but I actively seek out music that creates, helps create that tribal experience for people now, because that's one of the many powerful things music can do, even as some other music gives you a sense of freedom,

of an artist that's kind of like unfettered and just going on their own journey. Yeah. Wow. You just connected for me because you were saying all that and I was like, ah, the tribal experience that explains K-pop fans. I'm under, you're drawing the line from like punk to like K-pop. And also as to why, when I was, you know, in my own youth, I saw all those punk communities and I was like, know, in my own youth, I w I saw all those punk communities and I was like, Oh, those punk kids are such nerds about it. You know what I mean? I had my own rejection of that tribe because I was in my, in my own little bubble that I was trying to create for myself. Yeah. I think it's, you know, it's, it's this thing where like,

when we're talking about, um, we're talking about other topics, when we're talking about politics or something, it's easy to sort of decry the sort of divisiveness of America. And part of what I like about music is it just gives you a different lens to look at that divisiveness. And so that's the, as I say, the slightly mischievous thing I tried to do in the book is kind of say something about the upsides of that kind of divisiveness, or at is why that reflects something deeply human about us wow that is a that is a truly avant-garde contrarian position that might be the most contrarian position anyone's ever espoused on this show the benefits of tribalism that will that that will get you canceled in 2021 i think to say tribal no i but no i love that that is so that's such a wonderful point of view because it acknowledges our humanness, even as we're as we're describing this thing that we're doing.

Well, it's not a it's not a coincidence that tribes keep forming. It's not a coincidence that like in the history of music, right, like after this 1960s explosion, when it's like we're all listening to rock and roll and R&B youth culture forever. Like it goes off in a billion different directions. Like, you know, that's, that's something that, that, that keeps happening and maybe music is a place where you can see that particularly clearly. That is so fucking cool. I, I, I can't thank you enough for coming here to talk to us about this. The book, the book is fast. I can't wait to read it myself at this point,

because this has been such a fascinating conversation. If folks want to pick up the book, it's called Major Labels. You can get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books, or wherever you buy your books, your local bookshop, anywhere in particular you want people to check out to get it. Anywhere books are sold, you should be able to find it. And after you read it, I'd be happy to come back and then we could argue. Oh, that would be amazing. I would love to do that. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I can't thank you enough. Thanks, man. It's been great. Well, thank you once again to Kelif Asana for coming on the show. If you loved that conversation

as much as I did, hey, check out his book once again at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And's factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting not just this show, but also your local bookstore as well. That is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on.

Check them out if you're looking for a gaming PC yourselves. If you want to find me on the internet, you can find me at Adam Conover, wherever you get your social media, or at adamconover.net. And you can send me an email at factually at adamconover.net. I do love to hear from you, and I sometimes even reply. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next week on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.