The Quest For Fascination In A Curious Mind

By Leslie Virostek

Kelefa Sanneh '93

As a staff writer for The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh has pursued quirky topics, often involving off-the-beaten-path research. For a profile of controversial comedian Shane Gillis, he spent time acclimating to New York’s raucous comedy club scene. For a piece about the revival of Bruichladdich Scotch whisky, he traveled to its distillery on an island in the Scottish Hebrides. His work as a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning is similarly eclectic. One week he will be asking probing questions of musicians and movie stars, and the next introducing viewers to such novelties as “plant walls,” akin to giant, living tapestries.

“Looking for rabbit holes to go jump down,” is one way he describes his quest for fascinating topics, noting, “It’s always a privilege when people let you into their world.” Finding a way to make one’s own obsessions interesting to others is the challenge. If the subject is obscure, how do you get people to care about it? If it’s well known, how do you deliver something original? Kelefa says it boils down to “wanting to be able to tell a story that somehow hasn’t been told before.”

Whatever else he’s chasing, Kelefa’s ongoing obsession is music. His new book, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, draws upon his lifelong love of music and work as a music critic for the New York Times from 2002 to 2008. Deftly illuminating the evolutions, devolutions, convolutions, and crossovers of rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, and pop music, the book also grapples with the very notion of genre. Are genres bad, just rigid boxes to be stuck in? Kelefa doesn’t think so. He sees genres as tribes or communities of listeners who are defined as much by what they are for as what they are against. When an artist pushes on genre boundaries — or narrows them by rejecting what’s trendy to revert a more “pure” style — it is a gesture of rebellion that only makes sense in the context of belonging to something. He says, “People talk about the way music brings us together, but I am interested in the divisive power of music.” For Kelefa, defiance and disagreement are the fun part of cultural phenomena.

Kelefa has always been curious about what American culture is doing at the moment. Having arrived in the United States at the age of five with his South African mom and Gambian dad, he believes that being an immigrant may have contributed to developing the mindset of a professional observer and analyzer. When a song called “Bad Habit” by artist Steve Lacy hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 list in October, it was an example of an extremely improbable pop star succeeding with a very unlikely pop song. In other words, exactly the kind of thing that makes Kelefa wonder: What’s up with that?

As Kelefa recounts in his book, his most formative experience in music happened at Choate: third form year his best friend, Matt Moses ’93, gave him a mixtape loaded with punk music. “It converted me,” says Kelefa, who with Moses began hosting a WWEB punk radio show from Hill House’s basement.

Back then Kelefa would scour New Haven record stores for the most defiantly punk, most anti-everything-else music he could find. Today, as a middle-aged dad and fixture of the mainstream media, he still delights in the punk sound and sensibility, noting it can be found in such disparate places as the songs of pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo and albums of hip-hop star Young Thug.

And the thrill of discovering new music is not gone in the least. On Fridays, when the major record labels put out a huge buffet of new releases, Kelefa is ready to dig in. “The streaming era seems almost too good to be true,” he says. “It’s as if I get to go on a nonstop record-shopping spree all the time.” He will spend all week digesting dozens of new songs until next Friday, when he gets to do it all over again. For Kelefa, there has always been joy in the immersive experience of listening to music. He says, “I love the idea of living inside a song.”