Eric Weisbard

Eric Weisbard built a career in music criticism, editing, and scholarship by treating popular music as both cultural history and public argument. A former editor at Spin, he founded the Pop Conference, an annual gathering that brings critics, musicians, journalists, and academics into conversation. Listen Again, which Weisbard edited for Duke University Press, grew from that conference and carries the subtitle A Momentary History of Pop Music. Its essays focus on revealing moments instead of presenting one continuous march of genres, moving across songs, performers, studio accidents, and artists who resist neat categories. Weisbard contributed alongside writers including Greil Marcus, Jeff Chang, Daphne Carr, Josh Kun, and Holly George-Warren. The collection shows Weisbard's curiosity about how listeners build meaning around commercial music and how critical language changes what enters the historical record. His later books include Top 40 Democracy and a 33 1/3 study of Use Your Illusion, continuing his examination of mainstream audiences, formats, institutions, and taste.