For the past few years, Scorpio season has moved at an unbelievable pace for me, a development for which I’m grateful, even if I wish that there was a little more time to sit and be present with my favorite time of year. Hannah has almost always been off somewhere for reasons of timing or coincidence, as her job requires regular sojourns to see art in real life, to speak with dealers, make research appointments, and all the rest. For me, November is the month for the two major conferences I have historically attended, the American Studies Association (massive, uncountable), and the American Musicological Society (about 1700 people when not combined with another conference, such as the Society for Music Theory or the Society for Ethnomusicology). In the spring I attend smaller, more focused gatherings. But the fall is a different beast.
On the train to Chicago I fell asleep listening to podcasters speculate about the incomprehensible damage that each one of the new cabinet appointments could inflict on entire populations of people, those categories overlapping so thoroughly that no one at all is safe, and even if they were, what would be the point of safety in a world where one’s friends and neighbors are under attack?
I can’t bear to listen to NPR anymore, a ritual I’ve conducted habitually since college, when I first felt myself nostalgic for simpler times, in the back of my dad’s Accord on the way to school, listening to the old Morning Edition theme etch itself into my childhood. I’m predisposed to like NPR, not least for its public funding model, not least for the brilliant people who I know work there. But while I’ve always been critical (catch me yelling at the radio like an old lunatic), the coverage of trump is increasingly, seriously infuriating, not to mention what has passed for coverage of Palestine.
It’s beyond the pale for me now: Too credulous, still so diplomatic even after everything we learned from the last time around, still just quoting police or government officials without a hermeneutic of suspicion intervening despite mountains of evidence that they’re just lying, have been lying, still basically reporting what two political parties say without mediating in any way the differences in validity between them. It’s a cliché at this point, but NPR seems constitutionally incapable of looking out the fucking window.
At the same time, one lasting effect of the last trump administration is this need I have for noise in the background, for company even if it’s squabbling pundits, even if what they’re talking about is dark, the silence somehow worse, a void fertile for panic. So podcasts suffice, for now. Lulled to sleep by anxiety on a train that’s 6.5 hours late because it subsists on inadequate infrastructure from another age, the last time we were able to build anything, a lesson in living here.
AMS
In the two AMS meetings I’ve attended, I’ve been very heartened to see strong representation from popular music studies, which is to say that I’ve been happy to see my friends. Among the highlights for me this year were the following papers:
-Catherine Provenzano talked about autotune as an index of emotionality in rap and hip hop, but one with uneven social connotations and stakes. While autotune made it possible to emote in hip hop without sounding wrong in the genre, it took white rappers—who largely took a more banal and generic approach to mumblerap—before listeners recognized the emotionality and feeling-forward orientation of what is now, mostly retroactively, understood as emo rap. Wrapped in what Provenzano (incredibly!!!!) termed the “technological swaddle” of autotune, such performances guard against the feminized associations of emotionality while letting men unevenly reap the credibility that comes with feeling when it’s recognized as a marker of personal authenticity. At worst, she argued, depression and melancholy aren’t just expressions of real, structurally informed pain but can be used to help reassert white supremacy when white people are the only ones allowed to emote in public, the only ones who receive the kinds of praise that associates emotionality with depth and profundity.
-Shiva Ramkumar gave a great talk on Yung Raja, a Singaporean rapper who grounds “stylo mylo” (maximalist, overmuch style) and sometimes misogynist braggadocio in hyper-local references to the material worlds of his hometown in Tamil Nadu, using gangsta rap’s characteristic vernacular to represent his community and resist homogenizing narratives across India and South Asia more broadly. In short, “keeping it real” for Raja involves cultural specificity.
-Jasmine Henry argued in a hilarious paper that we’re not paying enough attention to humor in hip hop culture, and the work that it does to theorize Black experiences in the world. After listening to the entirety of Fergie’s infamous national anthem performance, Henry shifted to reading DJ Suede’s remixes of that performance as well as more serious subject matter in the context of Black music history and the tradition of signifyin’. Far from simple, superficial internet memeing, DJ Suede’s remixes index a complex site of Black knowledge production while also making us laugh.
-Alex Reed gave an incredible and suddenly more timely paper about fascism and popular music by digging into the Spotify playlist that Richard Spencer used on his university tours in 2017, initially unearthed by the Gainesville Sun. Featuring mainly 80s punk and new wave bands like Depeche Mode, Reed shows that the playlist isn’t just largely ignorant of the politics intended by the artists themselves (as in the famous case of Paul Ryan getting rebuked by Rage Against the Machine), but rather that fascism works in large part through such purposefully de-contextualizing and parasitic appropriations. All that’s necessary is the bare functionality of form, which in this case works for the alt-right because of its alignment with Western functional harmony, whatever the lyrics say. In rendering the particularities of the music moot, fascism attempts to combat the present by creating an alternative temporality that overrides lived reality with a narrative of totalizing inevitability. It’s our job to try to render that specificity essential.
-On the same panel, Robin James discussed the aggrieved entitlement represented in and cohered by 90s alt rock, which reduces problems caused by structural changes into matters of personal grievance and injury. I won’t belabor the point1 because you can read the whole paper here (! !).
-Finally, Sara Marcus’s keynote paper for our Popular Music Study Group session was deeply moving and insightful, a pleasure to listen to at the level of syntax, but also a talk with the power to really level a room. In moments of crisis, Marcus reminded us, it is helpful to turn to history for lessons regarding how to get on. Even within consistent periods, Marcus shows, there are minor nodes where change does happen, the gaps that appear in hindsight. To listen for those gaps might sound something like hope: Following political disappointment’s migration in and around the arts, Marcus raises W. E. B. Du Bois, showing “What Du Bois can’t hazard through rational thought, he musicalizes”—represented through sound is that consistent insistence on a better tomorrow voiced in all the Sorrow Songs, “a faith in the ultimate justice of things.” Even if there are no direct answers to be found in music or history, feeling less alone and more connected to the common project of liberation is an important part of how to cope.
After the conference, I made it back to KC, taught a week of classes, and played the final show of this semester’s experimental music series.2 Here’s a recording of that set, as a special treat for making it this far. (cry hard.)
Though I will (briefly and from the safety of a footnote) brag about the fact that Robin also shouted out this. very. newsletter! in the Q&A, a totally unexpected moment that made my heart swell.
For those who missed my last post about this, the experimental music series is a once-monthly concert split between UMKC’s improvising student ensemble and a set played by faculty/alumni, in this case myself, Thomas Rosencranz, Seth Andrew Davis, and Paul Rudy.
I remember the November conference chaos! (ASA, Comm Studies, and NWSA for me). Thanks for the report back & media coverage venting, I am right there with you on that one.