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An inspiring, provocative vision of the many ways popular music matters."
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"Could you perchance use an overview of everything that’s been thought in the 50-plus years since rock critics turned popular music journalism into an intellectually and for a while economically viable enterprise? Songbooks is it, only it goes back a lot further-two and a half centuries. "Weisbard’s book will be required reading for all music critics and journalists." - Henry Carrigan, No Depression "Weisbard’s comprehensiveness means he may introduce many music fans to works they might not know otherwise. A valuable literature review of American pop." - Kirkus Reviews It made me rethink what criticism can do, what music can do, and how both can change our lives.” - Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records Songbooks is an extraordinary look at how we try to make sense of the music that buoys and destroys us. “Eric Weisbard is the rare critic who can pair a deep, intersectional, and breathtakingly intelligent survey of music writing with the nuance and joy of someone who has actually done the strange, difficult work of parsing sound on paper. Heroic, acutely discerning, compulsively readable, and bound to be enduringly useful.” - Eric Lott, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism
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“Embracing the fact that there's no hearing any music without mediations of crosstalk, mythography, humbug, gatekeeping, and taste war, Eric Weisbard's exuberant and encyclopedic history of music writing delivers two and a half centuries of vernacular bounce-sheets of sound, if you will. With great verve, Songbooks provides both.” - David Ritz, co-composer, “Sexual Healing” “Entertaining scholarship! Entertaining criticism! What a revelation! Eric Weisbard is one of those rare writers who understands that in mirroring the music it addresses, literary analysis should provide pleasure as well as insights. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre-cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. 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.