EMP Pop Conference 2014

For those of us not there, how was that opening night event?

Really great! Sharon and Meshell were easily the standouts but Alison and Mike M had some good answers.

Sharon Jones was a marvelous lived-in presence, with Ndegeocello not far behind. Mike McCready couldn't help but look like a victim of privilege. A few minutes after Jones admitted she hadn't seen any real money from sales and tours until 2006, McCready mentions being stuck writing songs in a condo.

So how was this one--“The Sublime of New Orleans Bounce and Jamaican Dancehall"?

OK, will look to twitter for updates from those of you out there

So far my only complaint about the conference is that I neglected to bring three clones so I could go to all four simultaneous sessions in each slot. I missed Nadia's bounce/dancehall talk to go to another session with Elijah Wald defending Katy Perry's critical interestingness, Sarah Dougher talking about young girls' reactions to "inappropriate" music and imagery, and Lindsay Zoladz eviscerating Justin Timberlake for obliviously appropriating the phrase "Take Back the Night", all three of which were excellent.

My panel was second, and featured Michaelangelo Matos doing a fascinating and meticulous history of the DJ mixtape, Katharine St. Asaph making a plaintive plea for archiving and collective memory, and Chris Molanphy surgically dissecting the interactions between chart dynamics and release formats. And then I talked about music discovery by playing the first 4 seconds each of a lot of songs.

I got back a few minutes late from lunch, and thus regretfully missed Franklin Bruno's talk about the pop/folk divide, but got to see the other three impressively studied talks in that set, all of which seemed like they could easily expand into whole books: Jody Rosen situating Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Brian Jones tracking the discourse around PJ Harvey's Rid of Me and 4-Track Demos, and Eric Harvey following the parallel developments of rap and reality TV.

Franklin then ironically repaid my lateness to his session by being (slightly) late to the following one he was scheduled to moderate, which turned out to be as poetic as the previous one was academic: Nate Patrin seeking the elusive "Night Bus" genre and the music of public retreat, Will Creason following the emergence and dissolution of grime, Josh Ottum poking through parallel metaphors of environmental disaster and James Ferraro's music, and Chris Estey in beautiful storytelling flow about homelessness and recovery and loving and losing and refinding music.

This is my first time attending this conference. I'm a technologist, professionally, not a critic or an academic, and this is a wildly different sort of event from the tech ones I'm more used to. Just to pick the few most obvious things: far better demographic diversity in gender and age (and maybe in economic status, although that's harder to tell; but not in ethnicity), way more emotional engagement in the topics from both speakers and audience, and seas of paper notepads (and a few iPads) where I'm used to seeing seas of laptops (and a few iPads).

And I've lost track of how many people I've just now met in person after years of only knowing them online, in many cases through ILM. Including at least 2 where our initial interactions online, long ago, could be fairly described as flame wars.

And now there's a whole other day of it!

And that's part of the fun!

Need to read that Matos essay on the history of DJ Mixtapes ASAP. Are these published somewhere?

Some in years past have ended up in EMP books, others have been posted online

Matos claimed to still be writing it on Thursday night, and then was reading it aloud on Friday morning, so at least it seems like it is structurally suitable for publication.

I also admit that I am not used to hearing people reading "papers" aloud. Tech presenters more often use slides, rather than word-for-word scripts. I wouldn't say this produces better experiences, necessarily. And I guess in many cases here the presenters are kind of selling themselves as writers, so the writing itself is kind of the object on display. Where in tech contexts the talk is almost never the object itself.

i'm glad you made it, glenn! i knew you would dig it there.

OK, Christgau is on now, doing a great speed-homage to 50s car-songs that's at least as entertaining as the music he's talking about. Josh Clover just gave him a time warning and he peered at it and then said (cheerfully) "Where am I? I think I'm alright." And then muttered "And if I'm not, fuck you." This is the first time I've seen him in person, and I think now I need to re-read all his reviews I've ever seen as if he were performing them aloud.

Christgau's voice sounds a lot like Dustin Hoffman's, to me, so its fun to imagine his reviews being performed aloud.

Geeta Dayal just apologized for not bringing her vocoder to do her talk about Kraftwerk and the artistic reclamation of German identity in pop.

you are making me sad i didn't go to this one. hanging with all these glenns and geetas and mark sinkahs would have been so much fun! oh well. it would have been crazy for me to go this year. too much going on.

Andy Zax just did a great, depressing explanation of the fragility (both physically and culturally) of masters, echoing the same themes Katherine St. Asaph talked about yesterday. Millions of songs heard now can never be improved. His punch line, maybe, was to bemoan that, like we can only hear music from the 20s on scratchy old 78s, future listeners may only hear today's music on lossy MP3s played into white earbuds.

Paula Mejia is now talking about Ian Mackaye's obsessive archiving of Fugazi-related material, and using the archive to find examples of Fugazi's songs evolving over time. Which underscores Zax's anxiety about what we're losing.

But I'll go ahead and take a devil's-advocate role as an ahistorian to ask: how tragic is it, really, if our past tends to crumble away behind us? Josh Ottum, yesterday, talking about James Ferraro and grime and night-bus, made the excellent point that the means of reproduction are actually part of the cultural presence of music. Similarly Wayne Marshall's recent essay about Treble Culture. So what if we can't travel back in time? I don't want to forget our past, but I also don't want to become consumed by a sense of loss for every triceratops I can't pet. I might listen to 100 hours of 1982 Big Country rehearsals, exhumed and remastered to sound like I was there in the room with them. But if I can't, because somebody throws those tapes away, I will have no trouble finding something else to listen to for those 100 hours.

Nobody records straight to mp3. It's a dumb argument.

No, his argument is that masters get lost, so we're left listening to MP3s, or CDs, or whatever.

What I mean is, saying an mp3 is all that will remain of a recording over time is ridiculous. Some music may only be distributed digitally but that doesn't mean it only exists as an mp3.

Well, that's not the fault of the format, that's the fault of the artist or label being dipshits.

What was the point about the earbuds? Wish I had gone now since I'm sure context would have cleared up my questions.

Actually, that is exactly his point. If we lose tapes and hard drives and backups, or lose the ability to find or play them, then for some things we may only have MP3s. Or Windows Media files, or badly mastered early CDs, or whatever. We may end up finding old files the same way Jerry Zolten (who is talking now in this same panel) talks about finding 78s at flea markets.

xpost: right, he's not blaming the formats that remain for remaining, he's talking about the preservation (or non-preservation) of masters.

Yeah, that is an issue I would have assumed would be solved by now. Definitely need something. Labels and publishing companies should probably take care of that.

Carl Wilson just did a simple but excellent talk about the responses he got when he asked everybody he knew about songs that make them cry.

I took a break at lunch to smash some drums a little in the Sound Lab, and saw grime expert Will Creason coming out of the drum booth before me.

And now Keidra Chaney is explicating YouTube's function as a fan-curated music archive and community for K-Pop (and everything else).

JD Considine walking us through the rather different images and narratives of 소녀 시대 and 少女時代, Girls' Generation's alternate identities and marketing campaigns in Korea and Japan.

According to Twitter, the Beyonce roundtable is either the "greatest thing" or laughably awful.

fuck twitter, it is the greatest thing

(admittedly the "greatest thing" person was me)

re: upthread -- what immediately springs to mind is that thing a few months(?) ago where de la soul making their entire (warners-controlled) catalog available for free online, where "their entire catalog" was their entire catalog that they downloaded from some russian site

(obviously it's not a perfect one-to-one comparison, given the amount of rights disputes and outright feuding that appear to be involved, but it's also tangential/germane, I think)

A bunch of us after the Beyonce roundtable (which was otherwise great) had this big conversation about how terribly straight it was, when there have been all these very specific ways that queer audiences have been responding to the album.

Oh, I guess you liked the roundtable more than your tweets indicated.

yeah, my main issue with the roundtable is I wish there was another hour of it, rather than a lot of amazing ideas cut short

I'd love a detailed summary of the roundtable.

Critical Karaoke begins! Ian Balfour introduces the concept with Dump's slow, pulsing version of Prince's "1999".

Second cover: Dirty Projectors doing Usher's "Climax". Turning a seduction song into something about the climax never coming!

Third: Limp Bizkit's cover of George Michael's "Faith". Emily Lordi spoiling the suspense about whether this is her "best" pick or "worst" pick.

Fourth: Aztec Camera's deflation of Van Halen's "Jump".

Fifth: BenZel's SoundCloud cover/mash of Brownstone's "If You Love Me".

Sixth: The Deep Six turning The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" into a sunny Mamas & Papas folk-pop trifle.

7: The Dynamite Hack cover of NWA's "Boyz-N-The-Hood". A joke about white people? Or just white people?

8: Mariah Carey covering Harry Nilsson's cover of Badfinger's "Without You". Without breathing, but with octave jumps.

Also, Emily Lordi is the grand master of this form.

9. David Bowie covering the Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together". Cover of a great band's great song by a great artist that sucks!

10. Joshua Clover pulls Johnny Cash doing NIN's "Hurt". Nobody will ever listen to the original again. The fucking first half of Freebird.

Bonus round starts with Prince covering Joni Mitchell's "Case of You". From a sexy place nobody has ever been to except while listening to Prince.

Bonus 2: Rachid Taha doing the Clash's "Rock el Casbah". The theme of the conference was supposed to be "mobility", people.

Bonus 3: The Pretenders doing Radiohead's "Creep". Undoing overweening male narcissism as self-pity.

It was a treat, Mark's talk. And hi dere sir.

I entertained a horrifying vision of several of us, still maneuvering to cross Aurora yesterday morning.

Maybe next time it will all be sweetness and light, with a holographic Jeff Bezos pointing out the walkways around his domain.

http://thelearnedfangirl.com/2014/04/28/emp-geography-of-music/

A presenter's blogpost about the conference

And another

http://hamptonroads.com/2014/04/rashod-goes-seattle

mine, now up at FT:
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/05/adam-ant-in-seattle-with-me/

(the last gif -- no.7 -- always takes an age to appear: this may be bcz they are somewhat colossal, and in aggregate overloading my website, where I'm hosting them... or it may be some other reason)

(i will look into solving this later]

in fact it seems to be crashing some ppl's computers, hmmm

(much smaller gifs now mostly in place)

http://www.popmatters.com/feature/181585-emps-pop-conference-goes-mobile-and-returns-home/

An overview

call for papers e-mail is out there, definitely trying to go this time around. is there a 2015 thread yet?

Theme

Get Ur Freak On: Music, Weirdness, and Transgressions

Exploding conventions has long put the bomp in pop: the uncontainable desire of those deemed sexually unnatural, racial impostors, gender outlaws, obsessed fans, willful bohemians, or just plain weird. “We feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in “The Imp of the Perverse.” Music often sanctions transgression, challenges or corrupts the status quo depending on your perspective, gives us Prince in one era (called Imp of the Perverse by a biographer), Miley Cyrus in another, an Iggy Pop then and an Iggy Azalea now.

For this year’s Pop Conference, we seek presentations that connect music of any style or period to notions of transgression, perversion, and the weird, such as:
histories of the strange from minstrelsy to cabaret, rock and roll to black metal, “Tutti Frutti” to “Super Freak”
twistings of form—of the song, the voice, the genre, language; versioning and remixes; sonic markers of the polymorphous
queer pop, gender subversion and the perverse diva
transgression, social movements, and culture wars; the role of the state; drugs
racialized notions of otherness, margins/difference as center, carnival
exploitation–marketing “Blurred Lines,” the limits of dissolute star/fan behavior
technology and the estrangement of the human in pop
comparative cultural ethnographies of outrageousness
fetishization of records, the past, the disease of collecting

Submissions

Deadline

November 17, 2014. Email Eric

http://www.empmuseum.org/programs-plus-education/programs/pop-conference/pop-conference.aspx?t=call-for-proposals#Tabs

xpost -- not yet, so time to make one!

EMP Pop Conference 2015