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.
Eric Weisbard uses Elvis Presley’s 1956 recording of Big Mama Thornton’s song “Hound Dog†to reflect on the history of rock music, race, commodification, and popular culture.