Books by Eric Weisbard

In Songbooks veteran music critic and popular music scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to American popular music writing, from William Billings's 1770 New-England-Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded.

Love it or hate it, the world that radio made has steered popular music and provided the soundtrack of American life for more than half a century. The author studies the evolution of this multicentered pop landscape, along the way telling the stories of the Isley Brothers, Dolly Parton, A&M Records, and Elton John, among others.

A crossover venture begun at Seattle's Experience Music Project, this book captures the academic and the critical, the musical and the literary in an impromptu dialogue that suggests the breadth and vitality of pop inquiry today.

Shows how the album - "Use Your Illusion" - has matured into a work whose baroque excesses have something to teach us about pop and the platforms it raises and lowers, about a man who suddenly found himself praised to the firmament for every character trait that had hitherto marked him as an irredeemable loser.