Bill Adler
| Bill Adler | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 18, 1951 Brooklyn, New York |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan |
| Genre | Hip-Hop |
| Subject | Music |
| Spouse | Sara Moulton |
| Children | Sam and Ruth |
Bill Adler is an American music journalist and critic who specializes in hip-hop. Since the early 1980s he has promoted hip-hop in a variety of capacities, including as a publicist, biographer, record label executive, museum consultant, art gallerist and curator, and documentary filmmaker. He may be best known for his tenure as director of publicity at Def Jam Recordings (1984–1990), the period of his career to which the critic Robert Christgau was referring when he described Adler as a "legendary publicist."
William Adler, known as Bill, was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 18, 1951. His family moved to Detroit before he was five, and he lived in Michigan until 1976. He graduated from Southfield High School and later matriculated briefly at the University of Michigan.
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 free-form 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 (and occasional substitute host) for Kenny Cox, a local jazz musician 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.
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