Overall, I thought the conference was a success. Sure, there was the occasional overlong talk, the surprising lack of multi-media in presentations at a music conference, the stray ill-defined claim or unspecified argument, but the highlights more than compensated. Here are a few of mine:

Most cohesive and inspirational panel (even though I missed the first talk): the All Ages Movement. Chris Wilsee talked about the remarkable achievements of Youth Movement Records in engaging Oakland teens, teaching them practical artistic skills, opening their worldview, and drastically improvig graduation rates. Kevin Erickson, from the Department of Safety [4], on the quiet radicalism of exploring the possibilities of small towns in an era where exodus of progressives to liberal urban centers leaving vast tracts of “red” cultural deserts in their wake. Joshua Powell concluded the session with a history of the Vera Project, its birth in the hostile climate of the Teen Dance Ordinace, its expansion to incorporate the visual and recorded arts, and the continuing struggle of arts organizations in a citywide housing crisis. This was the first panel I went to during the conference and it left me with a fuzzy warm glow throughout.

Least expected imagery: A slide suggested an equality between Timbaland and Hillary Clinton. [5]

Just because no one knew exactly what the talk was about doesn’t mean it wasn’t excellent: Jesse Fuchs speaking against the false paradox with more, and funnier, slides than anyone else at the conference. Among the head-spinning sound bites: “truth is ontologically infinite, epistemologically null”, Trio & Error’s time bomb CD skip joke, They Might Be Giants showing us how to do a real “hidden track” in the CD era, and a handy heuristic for gauging the right amount of meta artwork. [6]

Best reason to show up on Sunday morning: Greil Marcus and his prose poem review of the I’m Not There</ tribute concert. The ultimate elevation of a show review, it began by hinting at a glorious takedown (of Tift Merrit’s performance of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”: “afternoon tea served by Shawn Colvin”) with the best of backhanded compliments (”the blandness of the performance revealed the magnificance of the song”), concluded with a celebration of the Roots and their referencing of Jimi Hendrix’s electric national anthem for “Masters of War”, and in between was packed with lyrical insight.

Most educational talk in the hardest-to-find room: Alex Stimmel in the Demo Lab. He related the history of the outstanding success of the Federal Music Program One during the Great Depression, which avoided controversy by not funding composers, was the most successful Depression-era arts employment effort, was led by a Russian immigrant, and heralded the rise of folk inspired music into the national consciousness. This would make a great PBS documentary and I have a feeling that Stimmel ends up the favorite teacher for a whole lot of kids in his school

Most startling hairpin turn: Wendy Fonarow spent a majority of her talk about how pranks relieve tension for touring bands rattling off stereotype-based jokes (”how many lead singers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”, “what’s the difference between a guitarist and a mutual fund?”, et c.) that concluded with ones about dumb drummers. Then, bolstered by a Cadbury advertisement featuring a gorilla drumming for a Phil Collins songs [youtube], she swept into a dramatic conclusion that drummer jokes are inherently racist because drums are from Africa, they are viewed as primitive, there is an unspoken desire to denigrate the African elements of rock, and we are all gorillas who fear our animal selves. I am still not sure whether this was a high concept meta joke. If so, it was sort of brilliant.

Who needs CNN when you’ve got a well-curated Pop Conference? There was a whole lot about the intersection of music, politics, and war. A fascinating compare & contrast of the recruiting music of the U.S. military and the Iraq Insurgency, the listening habits of U.S. soldiers during wartime, the sonic ethnography of Baghdad, the utilization and underutilization of pop music in political campaigns, the semi-ironic dependence of social justice music festivals on excessively popular artists to draw crowds and media attention (Live8 vs. the G8), and the radical electronica of Bryn Jones. (Jonathan Pieslak, Lisa Gilman, J. Martin Daughtry, Mike Barthel & Rachel Arnold, John Street, and Leonard Pierce, respectively)

Session most missed from last year: the end o’ the conference pow-wow. It provided a nice wrap-up, a vibrant conversation, and a more ceremonial ending to the proceedings.

Potential unintentional revelation of my own deep-seated underlying nihilism: Realizing that maybe it’s weird to think that the suicide in the face of the crushing modern condition ethos embraced by Kid A is much warmer, inviting, inspirational, and reasonable than the [allegedly] warmer antidote record of Amnesiac during Marianne Tatom Letts’s talk about Radiohead and directed forgetting. [7]