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Articles by Eric Weisbard
Taking A Spin Round Mattson’s History of Punk in the Reagan Years
Great Music Has Often Been Based On Limited Thinking; Can the Same Be Said For Great Scenes, Great Politics?
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American music writing: an unruly history
At the University of Illinois, Bruno Nettl related in his memoir Encounters in Ethnomusicology (Nettl Reference Nettl2002), he joined a poker game with a colleague even friendlier towards popular music as a subject, musicologist Charles Hamm. The two set up a plenary on pop topics at a joint American Musicological Society/Society for Ethnomusicology gathering in 1971, with Albert Goldman, Charles Keil and bossa nova scholar Gerard Béhague, irritating more established scholars.
Not Fade Away: Our 1995 Neil Young Cover Story
This article originally appeared in the September 1995 issue of SPIN. It’s getting harder and harder to remember that, for much of his career, Neil Young has been regarded—if loved—as a self-destructive oddball. Even in his most celebrated decade, the 1970s, he shelved entire albums; others, such as Time Fades Away and On the Beach, were so determinedly marginal that they’ve never been reissued on CD.
Early Gems of American Music Writing: A Reading List
The provisional status of popular music authors, due to identity, funding, or creative obsession, shaped their output. Enduring stuff came from outsiders: women and/or writers of color, authors displaced by sexuality or partial education, deviants from orthodoxy. Efforts to fix music’s meaning by discipline or genre have often meant less than a glimpse useful enough to pass around the way DJs would a breakbeat, comparable to the verse a songwriter distills from experience to suggest a world.
Project MUSE - Listen Again
Arguing that pop music turns on moments rather than movements, the essays in Listen Again pinpoint magic moments from a century of pop eclecticism, looking at artists who fall between genre lines, songs that sponge up influences from everywhere, and studio accidents with unforeseen consequences.
Duke University Press - Songbooks
The Literature of American Popular Music Share Book Pages: 552 Illustrations: 40 illustrations Published: May 2021 Subjects American Studies, Cultural Studies, Music > Popular Music In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded.
Radio, Radio: How Formats Shaped, Splintered And Remade Pop Music
Music critics these days love to argue about "rockism," the unexamined prejudices we bring to our musical judgements, and "poptimism," an effort to celebrate commercial stuff that some think goes way too far.
Top 40 Democracy
Introduction Chapter 1. It’s Whose Thing?: The Isley Brothers and Rhythm and Blues Chapter 2. Duets with Modernity: Dolly Parton and Country Chapter 3. Contemporary Adults: A&M Records and Middle of the Road Chapter 4. Madman across the Water: Elton John and Top 40 Chapter 5. The Wrath of the Buzzard: WMMS and Rock Chapter 6. This Generation’s Radio: Music Formats in the Early 2000s Acknowledgments Notes Index Wall Street Journal “Consistently provocative and engaging.
Revisit Our August 2001 Pearl Jam Oral History: Past Ten
When Pearl Jam’s Ten came out a decade ago on August 27, 1991, pretty much nobody cared. Unlike Nirvana’s Nevermind, which a month later revolutionized music faster than Kurt Cobain could pull the hair from his eyes, Ten took a full year to climb the charts. “Jeremy,” the third single and the band’s only true video, finally unleashed the floodgates in the summer of ’92. Yet even then we had little sense what Pearl Jam represented.
Just around Midnight — Harvard University Press
From Little Richard and Chuck Berry to the Dominoes, Ike Turner, and Howlin’ Wolf, rock and roll’s founding figures were African American, yet ‘rock’ as we know and hear it now is coded white…In some of his sharpest passages, Hamilton shows how much rockism’s whiteness depended on [the] confining ideas of blackness…He contributes a new and valuable piece to a larger and still contentious project: the struggle against the essentialization of racial and ethnic identity.
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