Pop: When the World Falls Apart is the third volume in a series edited by Eric Weisbard and composed of papers from Experience Music Project conferences – annual events held in high esteem by scholars of popular music and described by the music critic Robert Christgau as “the best thing that's ever happened to serious consideration of pop music” (335).

Perhaps because these EMP conferences differ from typical academic events by combining presentations from a range of experts from inside and outside the academic sphere, the resulting papers – written by music journalists, scholars of American studies, obsessive fans and a variety of professional specialists – are often highly original and occasionally quite brilliant.

Pop: When the World Falls Apart is a collection of papers from EMP conferences held between 2006 and 2008, years in which the rapid withering of the music industry was accompanied by Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global banking crisis and general economic collapse. As Weisbard explains, the unifying theme of this volume is an explanation of the ways in which “pop music lovers confront crisis – recognize cracks in the fundament and shake their stuff anyway” (2). The theme of music in times of trouble (of both interior and exterior varieties) is explored in papers ranging from an analysis of the relationships between the musical and “belliphonic” sounds which characterized US military listening during the Iraq war, to the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the musical heritage of New Orleans, to the reception of black “urban music” in the “white” heartland state of Iowa, to analyses of the appeal of “highly technical modern extreme metal,” to the influence of Mexican cancion-ranchera on the shrieking vocal delivery of the fearsome Alice Bag of all-women 1980s Hollywood punk outfit the Bags.

Analyses of interior trouble and cultural crisis are represented in two of the finest papers in this volume – both devoted to exploring the inner cultural life of suburban southern California and both focussing on the music of the 1970s pop duo the Carpenters. Veteran music critic Tom Smucker's “Boring and Horrifying Whiteness: The Rise and Fall of Reaganism as Prefigured by the Career Arcs of Carpenters, Lawrence Welk and the Beach Boys in 1973–74” is a tour de force of cultural analysis focussing on the ways in which a “very white” version of rock ’n’ roll became embedded in even the most conservative sectors of the US body politic by the time the 1960s ended and the Reagan years began (50). Smucker refers to the Carpenters’ 1973 album Now and Then as “one of the greatest pop music explorations of whiteness in the last half century” (47), and it is this group, smugly claustrophobic in their affluent, repressed and perfectionist suburban Orange County cultural cul-de-sac, that is the focus of Eric Lott's “Perfect Is Dead: Karen Carpenter, Theodor Adorno and the Radio, or If Hooks Could Kill.” This brilliant essay uses the Carpenters’ highly produced, synthetic, anodyne pop and the example of Karen Carpenter's anorexic demise to illustrate the veracity of Adorno's critique of pop music and his nightmare of culture industry commodification.

Now in their eleventh year, EMP conferences have exerted considerable influence on the study of popular music in the United States. The final paper in this volume, Carl Wilson's reflections on the “guilty displeasure” of loathing Celine Dion, exemplifies this process and also the academic importance of serious pop-cultural discourse (5). In one of the early EMP conferences Wilson presented a paper on the problems of assessing the aesthetic worth of the widely detested (but also hugely popular) ululating Québécoise superstar. That paper formed the foundations of Let's Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007), a book that received widespread pop-cultural exposure, from glossy magazines to the Academy Awards to the late-night US satirical TV show The Colbert Report. The book is now on the reading lists of many academic courses on popular culture and in his postscript Wilson reflects on its intellectual boomerang journey from the EMP conference to the world of mainstream pop culture and back again to the academy. As he says,