Though musicology had offered little intellectual guidance in my efforts to write about popular music and was under attack in the 1980s for its dedication to empirical, positivist scholarship, it nevertheless seemed that with its tradition of disciplined and responsible scholarship it should be able to deal effectively with popular music.

Albert Goldman's biography of Elvis Presley (New York, 1981), pieced together from facts, rumors, insinuations, and out-and-out fabrications, struck me as a particularly blatant instance of irresponsible and undisciplined writing about popular music. Even worse, there was no responsible or intellectually challenging biography of Presley or any other popular musician of the time against which to measure Goldman's misreadings of its protagonist and the culture from which he had come, and no satisfactory analysis or even description of the music itself against which to measure the distortions and outright absurdities of the book's frequent attempts to address musical issues.

Accordingly I wrote what was intended to be another call to action in the form of a review of Goldman's book, boldly accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Musicological Society by Ellen Rosand, editor-in-chief, and Edward Roesner, review editor. It was the first time that Presley, or for that matter rock ‘n’ roll itself, had been mentioned in that venerated journal. But the piece sparked no rush to welcome popular music into the musicological canon, and popular music study flourished elsewhere.