Kelefa Sanneh

Kelefa T. Sanneh (born 1975) is an American journalist and music critic. From 2000 to 2008, he wrote for the New York Times, covering the rock 'n' roll, hip-hop, and pop music scenes. He now writes about culture for The New Yorker.

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 is now D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity and professor of history at 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 served as rock director for WHRB's Record Hospital and played bass in the bands Hypertrophie Shitstraw and MOPAR. He now lives in Brooklyn.

Career

Sanneh garnered considerable publicity for an article he wrote in the October 31, 2004, issue 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 critics about rockism, a term Sanneh defined inductively to mean "idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher." In the essay, Sanneh further asks music listeners to "stop pretending that serious rock songs will last forever, as if anything could, and that shiny pop songs are inherently disposable, as if that were necessarily a bad thing. Van Morrison's 'Into the Music' was released the same year as the Sugarhill Gang's 'Rapper's Delight'; which do you hear more often?"

Before covering music for the Times, he was the deputy editor of Transition, a journal of race and culture, based at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University.

His writing has also appeared in The Source; Rolling Stone; Blender; the Village Voice; Man’s World (“India’s classiest men’s magazine”); “Da Capo Best Music Writing” in 2002, 2005, and 2007; and newspapers around the world.

In 2008, he left The New York Times to join The New Yorker as a staff writer. Sanneh's New Yorker profile on syndicated radio host Michael Savage was published in August 2009. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America criticized the article as it "mostly set aside the host's nasty streak and suggested instead that the paranoid, gay-hating, xenophobic talk show host was really just misunderstood."

"Project Trinity"

Sanneh wrote the high-profile "Project Trinity," which appeared in The New Yorker's April 7, 2008, edition, to give context to the controversial comments of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who was Barack Obama's pastor. The article provides a historical context of the Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama's church, and to Wright, the former pastor of Trinity.

External links

• Column archive at The New Yorker
• Column archive at The New York Times
• Kelefa Sanneh on Charlie Rose
• Kelefa Sanneh at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Kelefa Sanneh in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Sanneh, Kelefa (24 November 2008). "On Television: Science Projects". The New Yorker 84 (38): 122–123. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2008/11/24/081124crte_television_sanneh. Retrieved 16 April 2009.  Reviews "Fringe" and "The Mentalist".