From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment, the Home Edition.

In reading this new book, Major Labels, The History of Popular Music and Seven Genres.

Weirdly, I found myself thinking of Loebbeyer's Sentimental Education, which is basically

about a guy falling in and I love with the same older woman over the course of the book.

And he says, I think he said, you want the book to be the moral history of my generation

or the history of the feelings of my generation.

And this book, which is a look, again, at popular music in seven genres, is, I think, a history

of the feelings of a generation, which is what Flo Behr is talking about. My guest, of course,

is boxing enthusiast, former New York Times music writer and New Yorker writer at Calphicenna.

Kay, thanks so much for being here. And I find weirdly, it is about falling in and out of love with

something, isn't it? It is. I got to say, this is the first and probably last time in my career

I'll be compared to Flaubert. Like most musical stories, you know, this is partly a love story.

It's partly about me falling in love with music.

In my case, it was punk rock, which was the first music I fell in love with.

And that kind of got me thinking about all kinds of music and all the ways in which people

fall in and out of love with music.

And with music as with people, the existence of love kind of implies

the existence alongside it of hate as well. And so I wanted to write a book about that push and

pull, about the music we love and the music we hate and how we use those two emotions to form

musical communities, really, which is what a genre is.

Again, in sentimental education, I will never mention this again, just trying to show off

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