EMP 2008 Pop Conference

I'll eventually have more to say than this, but for now, just THANK YOU to everyone who shared their papers, their questions, their opinions, their food and booze, their homes, their smiles, their rides, their music. It was an amazing several days.

OTM. This was my first year. I had a total blast. Thanks to everyone.

Wait, remind me, did we ever introduce ourselves?

Never got the chance -- I think I saw you down the hall at one point before getting whisked away for another fine meal. I'd just say, "I was the guy with the glasses," but that would eliminate almost no one. Anyway, next time!

who was Mackro?

B. Mackrodonald, if that helps.

oh for god's sake do I feel silly

That's all right. Who were you again?

First wrap-up post -- these are linked back to the overall notes, which have now been cleaned up some and contain as many relevant links as possible to the subjects as well as the authors of the presentations.

i'll try and go next year. i missed you guys. this thread is a constant reminder of how much fun we had last year. and how long ago that seems now.

You were very much missed! But since Yeti 5 came out that meant we could all read your piece from last year in it.

i had fun and i didn't even go to the conference
it was great to meet you ned. it was great to meet you alfred

Likewise!

I raise my glass!

good times had by all

wait what you weren't even there

oh sorry i thought this was the ancient disaster thread

Give it time.

ok, now for some good old fashioned Pop Conf gossip..

so, apparently, Leonard's piece on Muslimgauze was "apologist"? Someone said that to him in the Q&A? I missed the Q&A, wandering over to the Latino Queer/Morrissey panel after the Muslimgauze piece. But Leonard's piece seemed to be objective, dare I say, the most not-so-endearing-to-Bryn paper/piece/thing I've ever encountered to date. Boggled.

Completely agreed. If it was apologist, it was in Leonard feeling as if he had to apologize for his liking of the music given his own uneasy feelings about Jones.

http://offbeatpoplife.blogspot.com/2008/04/emp-conference-notebook-dump-pt-2.html Alex Rawls from New Orleans' Offbeat magazine

Way way xpost: Good to meet you, Joseph!

Yeah, what Rickey said. And it was lovely to see everyone, and meet new folks also.

A final thoughts post. Time to start thinking about other things!

My google blog alert showed that a few others blogged about this further. Will post later if I see something especially interesting. Years back, the NY Times wrote about the event, but the novelty seems to have worn off. I did not see any follow-up from Maura and company at Idolator, who had mentioned it when proposals were first being sought. Some year I too will finally make it out there.

Chris M. from Idolator made it out -- great guy!

Def. great meeting you, Joe! Also quite nice seeing Ned, Alfred, whoever else from out of town I'm forgetting.

I get very excited by EMP each year -- I've been to 6 of the 7 -- and this was no exception.

I missed the wrap-up session, wish I'd had more time for hanging out and stuff, but I saw some exceptional presentations and from the sounds of it I missed a lot of great stuff too.

Nabbed at least one amazing piece for the Fall issue of YETI, so that was swell too (since we can't pay $$ the EMP's been a consistent source of cool stuff for us since the second issue with Luc S's brilliant "Birth of the Blues" piece).

Chris M. from Idolator made it out -- great guy!

I heard him on the Sound Opinions podcast talking about CD quality being superior to vinyl quality.

Mike! Mono record player through a mic and out a PA at the Yeti party = genius. Nice clean copy of Physical Graffiti, too.

Chris M wears great blazers.

It was great meeting all of you. Not the greatest slate of panels this year.. but I did think Amy Philips' "Not a Rape Patient, Looking Good Fly Colored Asian: The Semiotics of Sexual Identity and The Occident Vis-à-vis the Wu-Tang Clan" was a major standout. Kudos.

Wau.

I would go to this more often if I could tolerate human company

Ha.

Christgau's been doing some post-EMP blogging. He liked Regina (formerly Gina) Arnold's presentation on less well-known festivals around the time of Woodstock, and he liked his sister's talk.

That post in particular.

someone differs a bit with Alfred re: academics-speak

April 24 posting

http://www.michaeljkramer.net/cr/

I don't know him.

I'm not sure how bemoaning the use of academic jargon adduces my anti-intellectualism.

Yep. Nor am I sure how bemoaning some dense music-critic speak addresses unclear academic jargon.

"'You Say Tomato': An Attempt to Decontextualize the Retrofitting of Academese Into Weblogging Communication Via Message Board Interaction, or, GOT BLOG?!?"

Here's a list of words from (A) Soto's post, (B) Roberta Smith's New York Times article, (C) the Culture Rover post, and (D) various Christgau pieces, since Culture Rover brought him up:

A.

"praxis"
"teleological"
"heteronormative" as in "heteronormative valences"
"valences" as in "heteronormative valences"

B.

"reference" as a verb, rather than "referring to," as in "referencing late capitalism"
"privilege" as a verb, rather than "favor," as in "privileging the male gaze"
"imbricate" as in "Artists 'imbricate' ideological subtexts into their images," rather than "weave"
"practice" as in "Duchamp's practice" or "Picasso's studio practice" rather than "work"

C.

"deploy" as in "deploy words poorly," rather than "use"
"probe" as in "probe the concepts," rather than "make sense of"
"discourses" as in "these same discourses are at work in criticism," rather than "word choices and perspectives" or "conversations" or "the way we think about things"
"embedded" as in "the opinions of arts journalists are embedded in specialized trivia," rather than "grounded"

D.

"meliorist" as in saying "I have a meliorist streak"
"jiving" as in Otis Blue contains "live tracks that preserve for history Redding's country-goes-uptown style of fun--even emoting 'I've Been Loving You Too Long' like his whole future depends on it, he jives a little."
"bumptious" as in "bumptious takeover of Sam Cooke's 'Shake'"
"trancey" as in "Trancey desert guitar patterns are cut by a sour two-sax horn section"
"pungently" as in "On his first major-label album, Carll rocks as needed across a rowdy life-scape he describes pungently ('Pills in the tip jar, blood on the strings')..."

My opinion:

Most of these would probably be unfamiliar to people on the street, at least in the way they are used. But that can't be the standard for rejection--we learn good new words all the time.

For me, the only compelling reason to use a widely unfamiliar word is that it is simply the best, most exact, or descriptive word for something, and that anyone looking it up would feel they've learned something about what you're describing.

Along these lines, Culture Rover (C) shoots himself in the foot somewhat with those examples, because in each case the academic word is vaguer, more pointlessly loaded, or burdened with a meaning that's entirely different ("probe" does not mean "makes sense of").

Same with each one of the words Roberta Smith rightly attacks (B). In each case, the new word is more broadly evocative, and thus in more need of unpacking (there's a good academic word). If you "privilege" something, are you giving it a place of privilege in your own thinking, or granting it something akin to the social privileges of class and race? And in either case, what does that mean exactly?

Of the words Soto dismisses (A), I think the case could be made for "teleological" as good shorthand for anything that smacks of the pursuit of purpose or design in world. As for the rest, I can't find a compelling reason to use "praxis" in place of "practice." "Valence" is poetic only if you're a chemistry major--it's a kind of chemical bond. "Heteronormative" seems useful, but actually muffles the impact of the words you'd use to describe its concept. (You could say the same for "heterosexism," which is even broader, but most people at least know what that word means.) Isn't it more pointed to say that someone endorses a homophobic view of what's normal and what isn't, rather than say that person is being "heteronormative"?

Christgau (D) regularly sends me to the dictionary, but always for good words: "Meliorism" basically means faith in social progress as something real. I knew "jiving" is black English for joking or teasing, and can vaguely infer what this might mean musically without hearing it. "Bumptious" means "presumptuously, obtusely, and often noisily self-assertive." I recognize "trancey" as rock-critic slang shorthand for that which is designed to induce a trance, or anything resembling something so designed, but I imagine I could guess what he meant if IO didn't. I usually hear "pungent" as "strong" before the word "smell," so I take "pungently" as an appropriately poetic variation on "vividly."

I really don't really don't see this as a town-gown battle, in other words. It's a jargon vs. anti-jargon battle.

Of course critics use a specialized vocabulary, but the point is to draw the public in and teach them something, just as you would need to use a few fancy words to describe the workings of the sun or the human body. Anyone who thinks complex ideas can't be expressed in everyday language should read A Brief History of Time. Or, I don't know, any good writer.

Very very well put, Peter -- I feel exactly the same way and you articulated it perfectly.

there's a real exclusionary/ classist angle to this (ab)use of language that I've always been annoyed by.

Thanks for the analysis, Pete. To sum up: it should be clear from my post (if not, it's my fault), and, heck, my published work, that I don't squirm around Big Words; but I always try to keep my audience in my mind, and if form meets content in the snuggest of ways. Hell, it's what I do as an instructor! Orwell's one of my mentors.

*and TO ASSURE that form meets content in the snuggest of ways.

I should add that I actually got a lot out of the EMP presentations that used a lot of academic jargon--but not because of the jargon!

http://www.najp.org/articles/2008/04/emp-iii.html

more christgau

Hey y'all -

I stumbled onto this conversation on the web. Hope it's okay to clarify my post on Culture Rover. My point was not to say viva jargon! The comments of Peter and others here sound right to me: there's a danger of misusing language. My point was that when we critique jargon, is it possible to still explore the ideas that might lurk behind that jargon? Yes, sometimes the jargon is full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but at other times the jargon hints, in its stilted way, at new perspectives and approaches. It shines a light of stangeness across familiar topics. It can get us out of our heads to see (or hear, or just sense in general) things in a new way. In other words, I'm worried that in our (rightful) focus on keeping jargon out of the language that we use, we might be throwing out the intellectual baby with the jargonistic bathwater.

A very cool intellectual historian, Eliot Gorn, once commented (I'm paraphrasing here): "We cultural historians do not 'interrogate' things. We don't trace 'trajectories.' We don't explore the 'terrain.' Those are things the military does." Gorn was suspicious of the way in which cultural historians were using the language of war, slipping into frameworks that distorted culture. Okay, yes, I agree. But it is kind of intriguing, just for a moment, to think about culture through those metaphors (jargoned up as they are).

So I basically agree about policing and limiting jargon, but I don't want to close down the language too much. Can't this also limit and police ideas, keep people from getting outside of the assumptions in which they might feel trapped? Being trapped in this way seems as potentially Orwellian to me as any doublespeak.

Glad to listen more to your ideas and thoughts and comments about all this. Hope it was okay to barge in with my own perspective here.

Best,
Culture Rover (Michael)

Bump a bit (since I don't know if people noticed this). My coherence is rapidly dying today so I have nothing to add beyond the belief that there is a middle ground which is always negotiable in situations like this.