Top ten books about musical subcultures

Kelefa Sanneh has been a staff writer at The New Yorker 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.

Sanneh's new book is Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.

At the Guardian he tagged ten books about popular music by "writers who were imaginative and perceptive enough to notice that something was going on, and write about it." One title on the list

I’m With the Band by Pamela Des Barres

When this book was published, at the peak of the hair-metal craze, some readers might have mistaken it for a gossipy compendium of backstage tales. The book’s subtitle is Confessions of a Groupie, but the main draw is the way that Des Barres, sometimes drawing from old diary entries, charts her evolution from a curious consumer of rock ’n’ roll records to an important participant in the scene that helped create the myth of the rock star. Her writing is precise and perceptive, affectionate but unsentimental. In one memorable passage, she remembers listening to Led Zeppelin II while hanging out in Jimmy Page’s hotel room. “I had to comment on every solo,” she writes, “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 on to his satin jacket.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue