EMP Pop Conference 2014

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.

I dunno who else was at Carl Wilson's country panel, but the back and forth between the panel and audience was among the most intelligent and edifying experiences I've had in four years of attending these things.

Sounds like a good panel, Alfred

Heartlandia
Anthony Easton, "Hurry to Get Done: Chasing Deer and Chasing Class in Contemporary Country Music"
Jewly Hight, "Drag and Slide: Country Connotations, Clogging Steps, and the Power of Breaking Routine"
Tom Smucker, "When Michigan Moved to Tennessee and Texas: Regionalism and Globalism, the Rust Belt and the New South in the Music of Toby Keith and Brad Paisley (and Ted Nugent and Kid Rock)"

Guessing it was much better than the Lefsetz emails I just read on the huge Stagecoach country music fest out in Cali (where Coachella is held)

I admit that that country panel was the one time all weekend that I switched rooms mid-panel, as I was just not processing Anthony's lexicon at all. But it was clear to me that that was me, so I'm very glad to hear that other people made sense of it!

Well, the discussion ooncretized, if you will, Anthony's paper. The discussionists by the way: Ann Powers, Jody Rosen, me, Josh Langhoff, Jewly Hight.

Audio of my talk, thanks to Matos' recorder: https://soundcloud.com/glenn-mcdonald/every-noise-at-once-emp-pop-2014

That was awesome.

this is mine. i’d recommend listening and reading at the same time, since sometimes there’s different information on the slides and the audio. also, on one of my clips, i couldn't figure out how to turn the sound off, so there's some lulz.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/w0awt2 (.wav)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/w0awt2 (.pdf of powerpoint slides)

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