bebe's first SAM

This time, I mean it: No more double-headers.

Planes

I perceive myself a terrible traveler, mostly because of how I feel before and during the travel itself. Part of this anxiety lifts when I actually arrive wherever it is I’m going, but part of it doesn’t; I am a person who depends on routines, and in all honesty, a careful arrangement of objects within reach in order to feel like myself. Traveling makes this difficult, particularly when my head is occupied by other matters (almost always) and I forget something I will soon think of as essential.

Of course, I am also a person curious about the world, who almost inevitably finds the effort expended getting someplace worth it, in the end, for how my view of things has expanded. But in the era of fired air traffic controllers, academics getting their phones searched by TSA, and on a personal level, my own semi-regular barfing during turbulence—I’m finding all of this a heavier lift than usual.

Society for American Music

This year, the Society for American Music conference happened the week right after IASPM, which was also on the west coast. Having never been to SAM, I decided to tack on an extra week of travel and scoot right up from LA. It has been a good experience, if tiring. I had an interesting conversation with a colleague about what kinds of scholars this conference tends to attract, and how their work does or doesn’t overlap with other, similar spaces. Part of what I’ve learned since finding conferences that I like to attend regularly¹ is how repetition and desire to return create relatively consistent cultures that can become perceptible over time.

With SAM, I got the sense that the culture is based around on the one hand, a 20th century onward timescale (though this could just be a reflection of the sessions I chose to attend) and on the other, an archives-based methodological orientation (although I saw papers that proved exceptions to this lean). Being both wider in scope (not limited to just “popular music,” however defined) but quite a bit smaller than the American Musicological Society resulted in my being in more rooms more often where the subjects discussed were outside my primary areas of concern, putting me in a place to expand my view of what music scholars are up to. So while the conference as a whole felt generally less tailored to my interests (popular music, gender, and affect), the experience was nevertheless gratifying.

Here’s some of what I saw:

• In my session, Erin Fitzpatrick talked about the lesbian materiality of Sleater-Kinney’s music, focusing on Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s intermingled arrangements (both guitar and vocal), as well as the band’s longstanding de-emphasis on bass guitar (read as both masculine and interfering with the intimate duality of their sonic constructions). I also found this interesting to think about in the context of the “woman as bass player” trope common to so much rock music in the 1990s and beyond.

• Emmalouise St. Amand delivered threw an incredible polemic at jazz studies, in some ways captured by a single graph:

There is (or was) an intimate public of women and girls who are interested in and knowledgeable about jazz that are simply not discussed in extant literature on the topic, which, for however the “new jazz studies” has broadened out its questions and concerns, remains focused on largely the same source materials (e.g. Down Beat). The girl readers and writers of Seventeen magazine, St. Amand argues, are more representative of “women in jazz” in the 1960s than any of the exceptional performers on whom jazz scholars, seeking to think through the music’s gender dynamics, have heretofore focused.

• Kelli Smith-Biwer gave a lightning talk on “push buttons” in hi-fi culture and advertising specifically, arguing that buttons take on two primary functions in the mid 20th century: On the one hand, they simplify operations (and so appeal to women/caretakers in the marketing imaginary) and on the other, they offer increased levels of control (a masculine appeal in line with hi-fi culture’s appeals to scientism and overall critical role in the masculine coding of sound technology during this period). In what she calls the “control/simplicity dyad,” the “click” sound of pushbuttons performs valuable sonic evidence that work is being successfully performed, evidence with which the era of screen controls largely dispenses.

• Mike Levine talked about Cuba’s USB stick economy, showing how the “friction” of a largely inaccessible internet infrastructure produces unexpected routes of circulation and creativity among musicians and fans alike, who buy and sell music in “paquetas” that get distributed weekly.

• Emmie Head tackled the “irreconcilable disagreement” between U.S. copyright law and the promises made by Soundful, a background music company that uses AI to produce music understood as IP rather than art.

• Louis Niebur talked about “gay punk in a disco world,” showing how interrelated these ostensibly opposed genres actually were in the intimate and vibrant queer scene of 1970s San Francisco. I found this a striking contrast to discussions of the LA scene, characterized in scholarship by the kind of nihilistic and suffocated portrait cut by Darby Crash in The Decline of Western Civilization.

• Vicky Mogollón Montagne interrogated the ethnographic impulse to mine testimonials for evidence of scholarly claims, asking to what extent this impulse participates in the same relation to witnessing and fact assessment as the legal system, which prosecutes Black and Latino hip hop performers disproportionately, taking their creative output as factual evidence rather than allowing it creative agency like other artforms.

• Arlo Banta jumped off Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discussion of gossip in The Epistemology of the Closet to show how (accounts of) queerness can never be contained by the archive, and thus arguing for “scholarly gossip” as a valuable resource for more nuanced accounts of everyday (musical) life.

• Finally, I saw two incredible Billie Eilish papers in the same session. Kelly Hoppenjans used “Bad Guy” to show how Eilish creates an auditory version of Donna Haraway’s famous cyborg, subverting the gendernormative and feminized connotations of ASMR care work into a horrifying critique of intimacy—or in other words “evoking the bedroom in order to haunt it.” Caleb Herrmann performed a close reading of “What Was I Made For?” in order to argue that he song recuperates a relation between self and world out of the total disintegration of the social fabric, making the most out of the least. Responding to the offloading of all the labor it takes to “hold things together” onto individuals (and disproportionately women), “What Was I Made For?” makes relief for listeners by furnishing something coherent for us, bearing all the uncertainty we can’t deal with, if only momentarily.

Rec

When I need to calm my nervous system, I often reach for something like this:

Cry hard.

1. This took me a very long time, a fact about which I have often reflected, as it also contributed to a profound feeling of isolation and a lack of community from grad school all the way through my first jobs.