Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music by Eric Weisbard (Editor)

From the Publisher

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. Listen Again collects some of the finest presentations from the celebrated Experience Music Project Pop Conference, where journalism, musicians, academics, and culturemongers come together once each year to the boundaries of pop music culture, criticism, and scholarship. Building a history of pop music out of unexpected instances, critics and musicians delve into topics from the early-twentieth-century black performer Bert Williams's use of blackface, to the invention of the Delta blues category by a forgotten record collector named James McKune, to an ER cast member's performance as the Germs' front man Darby Crash at a Germs reunion show. Cuban music historian Ned Sublette zeroes in on the signature riff of the garage-band staple "Louie, Louie." David Thomas of the pioneering punk band Pere Ubu honors one of his forebears: Ghoulardi, a late-night monsters-movie host on Cleveland-area TV in the 1960s. Benjamin Melendez discusses playing in a band, the Ghetto Brothers, that Latinized the Beatles, while leading a South Bronx gang, also called the Ghetto Brothers. Michaelangelo Matos traces the lineage of the hip-hop sample "Apache" to a Burt Lancaster film. Whether reflecting on the ringing freedom of an E-chord or the significance of Bill Tate, who performed once in 1981 as Buddy Holocaust and was never heard from again, the essays reveal why Robert Christgau, a founder of rock criticism, hascalled the EMP Pop Conference "the best thing that's ever happened to serious consideration of pop music."

Barry Zaslow - Library Journal

This eclectic collection brought together by Weisbard (ed., This Is Pop) from several years of presentations at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference treats a wide variety of topics relating to popular music, including vaudeville, Jewish assimilation, African and Latin contributions to rhythms, Delta blues, punk rock, rap, and electronics. The contributors display subject expertise, and the writing is generally accessible and full of felicitous turns of phrase that belie the rather abstruse introduction. Evocative juxtapositions include philosopher Hannah Arendt with the Marx brothers and singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry with cultural critic Camille Paglia. The explorations of specific, well-known figures such as Roberta Flack and of iconic songs resonate more strongly than discussions of more obscure subjects like the little-remembered collegiate rebel Buddy Holocaust or Cleveland television personality Ghoulardi. A consistent theme and integrated whole as well as smooth transitions are missing, but this reinforces popular music's many guises. Recommended for academic and music collections that include studies of popular musics of the 20th century and beyond.

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Table of Contents