Bill Adler
Bill Adler is an American music journalist and critic. Since the late 1960s, he has worked in the music business in a variety of capacities, including as a record store clerk, radio disc jockey, critic, publicist, biographer, record label executive, documentary filmmaker, museum consultant, art gallerist, curator, and archivist. He is known best for his tenure as director of publicity at Def Jam Recordings, the period of his career to which the critic Robert Christgau was referring when he described Adler as a "legendary publicist".
Early life and education
William Adler, known as Bill, was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 18, 1951. He moved with his family to Detroit before he was five, and he lived in Michigan until 1976. He attended the James Vernor elementary school through the ninth grade, and graduated from Southfield High School. He later matriculated briefly at the University of Michigan.Career
Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Boston
Adler's first exposure to the music business came in the fall of 1969, when he was hired in the record department of a university bookstore. In 1972, he started to host a weekly freeform radio show on WCBN-FM, the University of Michigan's student station. In the summer of 1973, he began working at radio station WDET-FM, Detroit, as the board operator for Kenny Cox, a local jazz pianist and bandleader who hosted a weekly show called "Kaleidophone." Later that year, Adler began a three-year stint as contributing music editor for the Ann Arbor Sun, a weekly underground newspaper edited by the poet and activist John Sinclair and published by David Fenton. A year later, Adler began reviewing records for Down Beat magazine. In the spring of 1975, Adler was briefly a deejay at WABX, Detroit, a pioneering free-form radio station.Adler moved to Boston in February 1976. He deejayed at radio station WBCN-FM throughout the spring of 1977 and freelanced articles about music to the Real Paper and High Times. He was the staff pop music critic of the Boston Herald from April 1978 until April 1980.
Song production, Museum consultancies, Film production, Podcast
In 1987, Adler helped Run DMC write and produce its song "Christmas in Hollis." The details of that episode are spelled out by Joseph "Run" Simmons in ’'Jingle Bell Rocks!’', the award-winning 2014 documentary by Canadian filmmaker Mitchell Kezin.Adler has consulted for several museums on the establishment of their hip-hop collections, including Seattle's Experience Music Project, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
In collaboration with Hart and Dana Perry of Perry Films, Adler was the producer/writer of "And You Don't Stop: 30 Years of Hip-Hop," a five-part documentary film series that debuted on VH1 during the fall of 2004. Reviewing the series for The New York Times, television critic Virginia Heffernan wrote, "It may be the first monograph on this subject to position hip-hop confidently and specifically in the history of American music without having to make elementary arguments about its value or its significance."
In October 2024, Adler launched a podcast entitled "The Singer & the Song." It was inspired by his belief that "a singer or instrumentalist performing a song is like an actor bringing a script to life or a cook working from a recipe – every interpretation is going to have its own unpredictable flavor."
Collections
Adler's work as a hip-hop archivist commenced during his years at Rush/Def Jam. The Adler Hip-Hop Archive—which includes newspaper and magazine articles, publicity materials, press photos, advertisements, and posters—was acquired by Cornell University in 2013.In September 2015, the Eyejammie Hip-Hop Photo Collection, assembled by Adler, was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
In June 2021, Adler donated his collection of Underground comix to the Rhode Island School of Design.
Adler is featured in Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting, a book published by photographer Eilon Paz.