Eric Weisbard
Eric Weisbard organizes the annual Pop Conference at Seattle's Experience Music Project, a gathering of music writers of all kinds thatfirst launched in 2002. He has edited two collections of writing from the conference: This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project Harvard, 2004) and Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (Duke, 2007).
Also at Experience Music Project, Weisbard curated the exhibits Disco: A Decade of Saturday Nights and Off the Charts: Pop in Progress.
Before his time at EMP, Weisbard worked as an editor in New York, from 1995-1996 at Spin, where he edited the Spin Alternative Record Guide (Vintage, 1995) and was a senior editor, and from 1997-1998 at The Village Voice, where he was music editor. From 1999-2001, he was a regular contributor to both Spin and the Voice, while also writing for such publications as The New York Times and GQ.More recently, Weisbard has written a book in the 33 and 1/3 series of pop album monographs: Use Your Illusion I & II (Continuum, 2006).
He is currently finishing a dissertation for the history department at the University of California, Berkeley, titled Top 40 Democracy: Pop Music in the Rock Era. He lives with his wife, Ann Powers, and daughter Rebecca in Los Angeles.
Experience Music Project Pop Conference
List of articles in the library by artist
Live Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, April 1998
TORI AMOS believes in the rhythm method. ...
Laurie Anderson: Outside the Whale: Laurie Anderson plays Moby
Live Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, October 1999
Songs and Stories From Moby Dick, BAM Opera House, Through October 16 ...
Live Review by Eric Weisbard, Spin, September 1994
THE DIFFERENCE between Lollapalooza 1994 and Lollapolooza Past is that this year Perry Farrell and colleagues decided the music being offered couldn't just be loud, ...
Barenaked Ladies: Theatre at Madison Square Garden, NYC
Live Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, October 1998
"A ROCK 'N' ROLL show, for us, is a celebratory experience," said the unbearably revivalistic drummer-singer of the opening band Cowboy Mouth last Wednesday. In ...
Ben Folds Five: The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (550/Epic)
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, May 1999
THE NOTORIOUS thing about the "college rock" I grew up on, over a decade ago, the same time Ben Folds was gestating in the university ...
Drive-By Truckers: Pizza Deliverance (Soul Dump/Ghostmeat)
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, December 1999
WE DROVE TO Pittsburgh the weekend before Halloween, to watch the leaves change and attend a three-day fest called the Haunted Hillbilly Hoedown. ...
Drive-By Truckers: The Mouth of the South
Profile and Interview by Eric Weisbard, Spin, July 2003
The Drive-By Truckers are hard-ass punk rockers from Alabama by way of Athens, Georgia. They drink too much. They love Lynyrd Skynyrd. And their Southern ...
Green Day: Young, Loud, and Snotty
Interview by Eric Weisbard, Spin, September 1994
GREEN DAY's unexpected rise from Gilman Street punk urchins to MTV poster children has not come without a price. Eric Weisbard wonders if they can ...
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, September 1998
COULDN'T SAY which color most becomes her, but Courtney Love's best vowel is u. She throws herself into them all, of course, like a stage ...
Jurassic 5: Quality Control (Interscope)
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, July 2000
"IN THE sixties we believed in a myth – that music had the power to change people's lives," Stanley Booth writes in the afterword to ...
Leadbelly, Nirvana: A Simple Song That Lives Beyond Time: Leadbelly via Kurt Cobain
Essay by Eric Weisbard, New York Times, November 1994
IMMEDIATELY after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the rock band Nirvana, last April, MTV broadcasted almost continuously an hourlong Unplugged special that ...
Limp Bizkit: Significant Other (Flip/Interscope)
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, July 1999
WHEN MTV and BET air the new Eminem video 'Guilty Conscience', they run into the small problem of the song's conclusion, where bad-angel Slim Shady ...
Shelby Lynne: I am Shelby Lynne (Island)
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, April 2000
HERE'S WHAT intrigues me about Shelby Lynne, the country singer whose new album has been enjoying the sort of blanket media salivation only Dave Eggers ...
Jim O'Rourke, Jon Langford, Wilco: Chicago: Indie City
Report and Interview by Eric Weisbard, Spin, September 2000
Sick of a world ruled by Britney and Backstreet? Visit Chicago: a salt-of-the-earth midwestern town where old-world pleasures like community, cheap rent, cheap beer, gritty ...
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, September 1999
The first thing I asked him to do was get me a tape from the studio. He came back with it in five minutes. The ...
Ramones, The: The Ramones: Anthology: Hey Ho Let’s Go! (Warner Archives/Rhino)
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, July 1999
FROM THE punk oral history Please Kill Me to Joey and Johnny Ramone on Howard Stern, the mythology around the Ramones lately seems to emphasize ...
Paul Simon: You're the One (Warner Bros.)
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, November 2000
PAUL SIMON has an image you wouldn't wish on a real estate developer. ...
Smashing Pumpkins: Adore (Virgin)
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, May 1998
TRUE, BILLY Corgan has removed most of the guitars, the pounding, the rat-in-a-cage rage from Smashing Pumpkins' new album. But don't worry: he remains stupendously ...
Overview by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, October 2000
IN HIS FAMOUS essay "Kafka and his Precursors," Jorge Luis Borges argues that Zeno, Han Yu, and Kierkegaard, though nothing alike, all now seem Kafkaesque. ...
Review by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, November 2004
The eternal hustler works his gloomy-gus shtick and leaves the hipsters wanting more ...
Wu-Tang Clan: Wuclear Fission: A Nutcase and a Point Guard Rise Above Wu-Tang’s Solo Overkill
Overview by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, February 2000
THE STUPIDEST, greatest, lovingest, most problematic-yet-simple moment in pop last year was a guy not content to be called Ol' Dirty Bastard letting it all ...
List of genre pieces
A Golden Age: MTV Names The Only 10 Songs That Matter
Comment by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, October 1999
A COUPLE OF weekends back, MTV presented a late-night Hard Rock A-Z special: wide-ranging sets of several videos in a row, with minimal VJ banter. ...
Conjunction Junction: The All-Music Guide Wants To Make Scrabble out of Babel
Report by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, February 1999
THE ALL-MUSIC Guide bills itself as "an ongoing project to review and rate all music" – emphasis on the all. ...
Generation Ex: Some Get A Decade; We Get A Moment
Essay by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, July 1999
THIS TIME IT'S personal. High school student Reese Witherspoon leaves teacher Matthew Broderick cursing his so-called life in Election. No shocker; couldn't be a teen ...
Report by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, May 2000
At Pho, a Thousand E-mails a Month Track the Great Digital Debate ...
Napsternomics: The Pop Solution to Downloading
Comment by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, August 2000
HERE'S THE smallest of Napster's ironies: the service shut down last week by Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, then granted a stay of execution by the ...
Pop in the 90's: Everything for Everyone
Essay by Eric Weisbard, New York Times, April 2000
GEORGE STRAIT is a middle-aged country singer with an easy grin about him; even his boxed sets go platinum. Ice Cube is an intense rapper ...
Proxy Music: Electing the Pop Star in Chief
Essay by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, October 2000
IN 1822, NOAH Ludlow dressed himself in a buckskin hunting shirt and leggings, donned moccasins and an old slouch hat, put a rifle on his ...
Smart, Lyrical, Even Genteel, But Is It Rock?
Essay by Eric Weisbard, New York Times, August 1999
FOR ONE breed of rock fan, last year's most important album was probably Lucinda Williams's Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, a dozen perfectly turned ...
The Graying of Indie Rock: What do you do for an encore after the spark is gone?
Essay by Eric Weisbard, Village Voice, March 1999
WHEN THE guy in Fuck announced his 37th birthday, people thought he was joking. The occasion was too cruddy: the rumpus-room attic of a gross ...
back to LIBRARY
Best Databases: RBP is Runner-up in Best Niche category
Video: Johnny Marr talks about Rock's Backpages
download eBooks and audio interviews
RBP on Spotify: The genius of Judee Sill
RBP Album Club in Chicago, June 30th: Paul Yamada and Liam (Plush) Hayes celebrate a Curtis Mayfield classic
Essential Listening: Roy Trakin meets the Replacements in '87
Essential Reading: Andrew Smith's history of the first dotcom boom
RBP Album Club, July 11th: Nick Hornby and Nick Coleman celebrate Southside Johnny's debut
Join the Facebook group now