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.

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.