ABOUT THIS BOOK

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 journalists, musicians, academics, and other culturemongers come together once each year to stretch 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 monster-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, has called the EMP Pop Conference “the best thing that’s ever happened to serious consideration of pop music.”

Contributors. David Brackett, Franklin Bruno, Daphne Carr, Henry Chalfant, Jeff Chang, Drew Daniel, Robert Fink, Holly George-Warren, Lavinia Greenlaw, Marybeth Hamilton, Jason King, Josh Kun, W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Greil Marcus, Michaelangelo Matos, Benjamin Melendez, Mark Anthony Neal, Ned Sublette, David Thomas, Steve Waksman, Eric Weisbard

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Eric Weisbard is the organizer of the annual Experience Music Project Pop Conference. He was a curator and senior manager of the Experience Music Project from 2001 until 2005. Before that, he worked as an editor and contributing writer at Spin and The Village Voice. He is the author of Use Your Illusion I and II and the editor of This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project and the Spin Alternative Record Guide.

REVIEWS

“The EMP papers are a text radio, spilling out evidence of so many strange brilliant forays into the starry night of our common culture. Here’s where my American history—and yours—goes to find itself.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of You Don’t Love Me Yet

“[T]he papers featured in this volume are typically eclectic, eccentric and unorthodox while remaining highly readable and sometimes quite brilliant. . . . As original as it is refreshing and engaging, Listen Again and, by implication, the work of the EMP Pop Conference, represents an important contribution to the serious consideration of pop music—essential reading in an era in which our experience and understanding of music is fragmenting, mixing and morphing at a bewildering pace. “

-- Alex Seago American Studies

“This collection of essays on subjects ranging from ORCH5, a Stravinsky phrase turned synthesizer blip that helped forge the sound of early hip-hop, to James McKune, a record collector who single-handedly invented the Delta-blues genre, deftly analyzes marginal and telling moments in pop history. Listen Again is a brilliant reimagining of last century’s most accessible art form.”

-- Nick Moore LA Weekly

"Listen Again has the guiding vision and rigorous analysis that so much current journalistic and scholarly writing on popular music lacks. . . . The eclecticism on display here isn’t distracting; the book benefits by drawing on many perspectives. Instead of reading as a throwback to music criticism’s glory days, Listen Again maps a future for the field."

-- Geeta Dayal Bookforum

"Time and again, I found myself putting down the book to download a song or to search YouTube for a dimly recalled performer evocatively discussed here. But this isn't a book of pop trivia, a scholarly version of TV nostalgia shows. Anyone who wants to revisit the pop past will find enjoyment in Listen Again, but learning and scholarship too."

-- David Hesmondhalgh Times Higher Education

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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