Music to My Ears: The Billboard Essays, 1992-1996: Profiles of Popular Music in the '90s

This eclectic gathering of White's ""Music to My Ears"" Billboard columns combines interviews with recording artists and reviews of their records. Spanning rock, new wave, punk, blues, jazz, rap, country, reggae, world music, calypso, Latin, classical and other genres, his essays fuse critical acumen with an unerring sense of the music business. Along with pieces on veteran artists like Eric Clapton, George Harrison, David Byrne, Ray Charles, Wyonna Judd, Joni Mitchell and the Eagles, White conveys the excitement of discovery generated by Liz Phair, Joan Osborne, Alanis Morissette, the spiritual dance sonorities of the Haitian group Boukman Eksperyans and English conductor John Eliot Gardiner's renditions of Mozart's operas. White, Billboard's editor-in-chief, infuses these essays with his belief that the best rock 'n' roll and pop is an expression of personal truths, a celebration of the human scale that is increasingly absent from our lives. Photos. (Nov.)