Top 10 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:

Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus

Riot grrrl was at least two things at once: a musical movement, which bloomed briefly in the 1990s, and a literary movement, sparked by fanzines, which jammed together punk rock and feminism, challenging and changing the identities of both of them. This book is an indispensable cultural history that emphasises both the strangeness and the sensibleness of riot grrrl, an unlikely movement that seems, in retrospect, inevitable.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue