Kelefa sanneh biography sample

American journalist and music critic

Kelefa T. Sanneh (born 1976) is a British-born American journalist and music critic. From 2000 to 2008, he wrote for The New York Times, covering the rock and roll, hip-hop, and pop music scenes. Since 2008 he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker. In 2021, Sanneh published Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres.

Early life

Sanneh was born in Birmingham, West Midlands, England, and spent his early years in Ghana and Scotland, before his family moved to Massachusetts in 1981, then to Connecticut in 1989. His father, Lamin Sanneh, was born in Janjanbureh, Gambia, and was a professor of theological history at Yale University and Yale Divinity School. Kelefa's mother, Sandra, is a white South African linguist who teaches the isiZulu language at Yale.

Sanneh graduated from Harvard University in 1997 with a degree in literature. While at Harvard he worked for Transition Magazine and served as rock director for WHRB's Record Hospital. Sanneh played bass in the Harvard bands Hypertrophie Shitstraw, MOPAR, Fear of Reprisal and TacTic, as well as a Devo cover band that included members of Fat Day, Gerty Farish, Bishop Allen and Lavender Diamond. Sanneh's thesis paper, The Black Galactic: Toward A Greater African America, combined interests in music, literature and culture in writing about The Nation of Islam and the Sun Ra Arkestra as efforts to transcend oppression in the African-American experience with desires to travel into outer space.

Career

Sanneh garnered considerable publicity for an article he wrote in the October 31, 2004, edition of The New York Times titled "The Rap against Rockism". The article brought to light to the general public a debate among American and British music cr

Just about everyone can agree on Dolly Parton. But when it comes to country music, people seem to disagree on just about everything else. From the start, it was marketed as unusually honest music, linked to the perceived simplicity of rural life in America. Country music is more old-fashioned than rock ’n’ roll, but less traditional—or, rather, more ambivalent about tradition. The basic template for a rock ’n’ roll band has remained remarkably stable ever since the seventies: drums, electric bass, and, above all, electric guitar. But in country music, traditional instruments like the banjo and the pedal steel guitar tend to fall in and out of favor, as country singers try to figure out precisely how “country” they really want to be.

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Music historians sometimes trace the birth of country music as a recorded genre to the 1920s, when the Victor Talking Machine Company—not primarily a record label, but a manufacturer of record players—sent Ralph Peer south in search of singers. Some of the Black performers he recorded, including Will Shade, leader of the Memphis Jug Band, later came to be viewed as R&B pioneers. And some of the white performers were later regarded as forefathers of country music. Peer recorded Fiddlin’ John Carson, a former cotton-mill worker from Georgia, singing a 19th-century minstrel song, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” that had originally been written by Will S. Hays, a white songwriter, using Negro dialect, or an approximation of it.

Peer recorded Jimmie Rodgers, a former railroad brakeman from Mississippi, whose playful, yodeling songs made him one of the first country stars. (In 1970, Dolly Parton took a forty-year-old Jimmie Rodgers song to No. 3 on the country chart, yodeling all the way.) And Peer recorded the Carter Family, from the Appalachian Mountains in western Virginia. “Mother” Maybelle Carter, a virtuoso on the guitar

Kelefa Sanneh

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).

This biography was last updated on 10/05/2021.

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