The 2007 Pop Music Conference [emp] continues through Sunday and is free to attend, which means that you don’t need to be an academic or professional critic to spectate (or participate) in the showcase of academics and professional critics. I went to yesterday’s morning session and found the proceedings both bizarre, fascinating, and occasionally entertaining. It is worth going for the mind-bending juxtaposition of seeing scholarly discourse on music taking place in a room decorated in blood red walls, cargo netting, a disco ball, and a flying saucer on the wall.

That was the scene where Sascha Frere-Jones discussed R&B’s dominance of the popular airwaves, the genre’s shedding of pain to become pop, the absence of a pop music response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and the repetitive tone poem that is the owners of the 2004-2005 Billboard Hot 100’s number one spot. In that same session, Robert Fink presented an audio-visual slideshow analyzing the rhythmic patterns of civil rights chants (”black power”), the parallels between that chant’s introduction and James Brown’s appropriation and response to it both rhythmically and in his dynamic performance transition into “Soul Power”. This, in a room that once housed the EMP’s Funk Blast “ride”. And later, Joshua Clover’s funny and insightful talk about the ways that pop music attaches itself to a year, how a year becomes a “year”, and the role of music in collective memory.

This all does get a little much for the non-professional. By the time I’d heard Patricia Jeehyun Ahn exasperated and excessively scare-quoted critique of the O.C. for portraying the overwhelmingly homogenous Newport as overwhelmingly racially, economically, and sexually homogenous (she must have missed the season where Marissa became a lesbian, the Johnny & Volcheck plotlines, Theresa, the Coopers exile in trailerparkland) while half complementing the show for its episode about Kpop (and I think erring in saying that Taylor Townshend’s Korean boyfriend was unable to speak english); I had to escape before finding out whether Devon Powers would answer her question about whether rock criticism is part of intellectual history. The previous, humorous talk by Randall Roberts concerning Creem magazine’s snarky news section may have been responsible for leaving me with a mindset incapable of following along on Power’s lengthy recursive introductory paragraphs expositing on why she wouldn’t be answering the question she posed for herself.

Scholarly overload aside, the rest of the weekend looks drop-in worthy. This afternoon includes a discussion of the rise and fall of the Rocket and tomorrow closes with an all-star panel discussion of the future of professional music criticism.

All of that pop music discourse should put you in the appropriate frame of mind for the rest of the night’s entertainment:

• Epic, spacey, dramatic rock from Blonde Redhead paired with Annuals, the most enthusiastic young rockers out of North Carolina [showbox]
• Up the hill, Junior Boys may hold the title of sexiest music made by sweater-vest sporting Canadians. [chopsuey]