plan ahead! EMP Pop Music Conference
Sometime this week, the EMP announced the schedule for this year’s Pop Music Conference. Like last year, registration is free and open to the public; so if you like hearing people talk academically about things musical it is well worth your time to check out at least one day of the proceedings. I’ve been to parts of it for the last couple years — Stephin Merritt’s infamous categorization of Celine Dion as “non-white” in the context of a panel discussion on rockist racism [mb] and the merits of “Zippity Doo Dah” was the firestorm highlight of 2006. I was extremely impressed and had a phenomenal time at last year’s event [mb]. It convinced me that the conference is among the best and most important things that the EMP does all year.
For 2008, the organizing theme includes the following questions:
- How does music resist, negate, struggle?
- Can pop intensify vital confrontations, as well as transform and conceal them?
- What happens when people are angry and silly love songs aren’t enough?
There’s a performance by the Blue Scholars on Saturday and more than 160 panels over the four-day (10-13 April) event. Some of the Friday standouts include The All-Ages Movement: Youth Cultural Spaces for Music and Activism; Deformation of Mastery, which feaures a talk by Kyra D. Gaunt called “Downloading P2P Networks & Uploading Underground Hip-Hop (How Spain, Russia, J Dilla and Garage Band Inspired a Brooklyn Brother to Produce)”; and Music and the War in Iraq with J. Martin Daughtry’s presentation of “A Symphony of Bullets’: Toward a Sonic Ethnography of Contemporary Baghdad”. On Saturday there’s Critiques of Populism (includes Kristine Weglarz on “Lifting the Curse: Pearl Jam’s ‘Alive,’ ‘Bushleaguer,’ and the Marketplace of Meanings”); Vote Music (with Mike Barthel & Rachel Arnold discussing “Yesterday’s Gone: The Use of Pop Songs in Presidential Campaigns”); and Conflicted (with Wendy Fonarow on “Singing About Love When All You Want to Do Is Strangle Someone”).
Obviously, I’ve revealed myself to be a huge nerd here. If you’re also the sort of person that gets super excited about complicated titles in service of discussions of pop culture, this event has my highest possible recommendation.
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I’m so sad I’m going to be out of town for it this year. (Well, ok, not THAT sad.) Trying to figure out if Stephin Merritt had just said that Celine Dion was black was definitely a highlight.