Dispatch from LA
On Pop Con / IASPM
Hello friends,
I write from the happy haze of a post-conference weekend. Last week, IASPM-US and the Pop Conference held a rare joint meeting in Los Angeles, which I’ve been looking forward to all year. When I started attending conferences as a grad student, I had no idea what they could become, how it was possible to find and build a scholarly community that cares about the same things that you do, that supports one another through work and life, that has fun besides. Many years later, I have found those people, and seeing them a handful of times a year sustains me through much of what’s difficult in our profession. Each chance we get to commiserate and scheme is a special occasion.
I’m on my way now to my first Society of American Music conference, where I’ll be talking about Big Feelings plus a few stray thoughts on Black Belt Eagle Scout. Before that happens, I wanted to post a quick recap of some IASPM highlights.
Up first and early, members of the the Public School book club talked about music memoirs as phenomena, taking seriously a narrative genre often dismissed as epiphenomenal stuff for superfans alone. This fun conversation also touched on playlist culture in the streaming era, how organizing listening to accompany reading can help build community and share knowledge.
Antonia Randolph shared work from her much anticipated book project, in this case, a paper that examined haircuts as a praxis of intimacy in homosocial hip hop culture. Crew intimacy does something unique in the post-civil rights era, Randolph argues, insofar as its forms of collective care allow Black men to redefine themselves and to care for one another in ways that step in for the systematic absence of state support. The “homosocialization of intimacy,” as Randolph calls it, is a multifaceted and ambivalent phenomenon that on the one hand allows for practices of “patriarchal decency” (as when one crew member gifts a haircut to another) in the face of relentless media stigmatization of Black men, and which on the other hand excludes women from the totalizing sphere of homosociality.
On the same panel, Corey Miles described his broader work’s ambitions to reverse the typical formulation whereby we approach hip hop culture through music, instead aspiring to arrive at the music through a more robust investigation of hip hop culture, the small moments in practitioners’ daily experiences. In this paper, I was particularly struck by Miles’s use of “liquid emotions” as a concept for understanding Black sentiment as a fungible asset, as material that can be cashed in at any time by white supremacy and for whatever purpose it needs.
On my own panel, Kate Grover did some great work breaking down the feminist and queer aesthetic strategies deployed by boygenius in service of their broader critique of masculinist rock music, which run the gamut from female masculinities to high femme parody and are tied together by performances of joy and fun, rendered strange in the ostensibly Serious rock genre.
Amy Skjerseth used Chance the Rapper’s incredible (if not quite improbable) country cover of Nelly’s “Hot in Here” to question our “instrumental presets,” the ways that dominant culture bakes in assumptions about genre and identity which have to be modified time and again in our critical work.
And speaking of modding, Morgan Bimm followed up with a paper on the queer uses of nostalgic mp3 technology like ipods and chorded headphones, the manifold uses of which speak back against Apple’s hegemony even as they rearticulate neoliberal sensibilities by fantasizing a simulacrum of authenticity.
In addition to presenting my paper on crushes and girl styles in indie rock1, I was delighted to sit on a panel of contributors to the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Pop Music, edited by Eric Weisbard. We had a great and loose conversation about all things pop, including its difficulty as a concept. This panel was mostly a preview of coming attractions; but the lineup of writers is indeed formidable. Keep your eyes out.
Finally, I’ll note that the business meeting of IASPM-US was in itself a hopeful gathering. Liz Przybylski won the inaugural Greg Tate book award for Sonic Sovereignty and Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta won the Woody Guthrie book award for Together, Somehow. We also announced a new article prize, still in the works but nearing completion: The Christine Capetola Prize in Sound and Social Theory will be awarded biennially to an article published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies that best advances IASPM’s—and Christine’s—commitment to interdisciplinary music studies along the axes of identity and politics. Robin James and Alyx Vesey have been critical for helping bring this prize into the world, and along with the rest of the IASPM leadership, we are hopeful that it will continue to encourage forward thinking work from new generations of scholars—rather than recognizing the accomplishments of (only) already established thinkers. Reflecting Christine’s approach to working as much as their work itself, the prize will also include a shortlist in an effort to promote a sense of community and to uplift a group of scholars rather than single individuals. Young popular music scholars, take note
and
cry hard!
Thank you to everyone who came to our panel! The conversation was so energetic and enjoyable, maybe the best one I’ve ever had following a paper. This morning, scanning instagram, I remembered the smart question about crushes that someone asked regarding Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus’s rumored romance, now confirmed. It’s a delight and a privilege to gossip academically, by which I mean to nerd out in public.
Thank you for this recap! So exciting to read.