EMPost

"Rock 'n Pop Swirl" – well, that's as good a way to describe it as any. [n.b. that this flavor, on offer at a Seattle Baskin-Robbins, features green grape and purple green apple sherbet.] Here's what I wrote for my rather ill-fated Citypaper blogs about EMP. (Electrifying Conclusion TK.]

EMP: the Project. the Music. the Experience.

Each April, scores of music critics, journalists, academics of various stripes, and assorted nerdy sorts descend upon the Frank Gehry-wrought undulating chrome of the Experience Music Project in downtown Seattle for the EMP Pop Conference, a vaguely academic-styled weekend of papers, panels, and presentations about all things pop. That's "pop" in the broadest sense, mind, which might mean anything from techno, T-Pain, and reggaetón (the subject of a panel this year) to honky-tonk country, big band swing, and pre-war minstrelsy. For this year's 8th annual event, the theme is "Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic." (That's a Prince ref, in case ya missed it.) I'm thrilled to be here; should be a fun weekend!

EMPirical Observations 2009: Day One

Nona Hendryx: Then and Now (top to bottom)

The conference kicked off this evening with an intriguing keynote conversation with veteran musician Nona Hendryx, conducted by Daphne Brooks of Princeton and Sonnet Retman of the University of Washington. Hendryx makes an entirely fascinating figure, especially in this context, not so much because she's a legend, per se, but simply because she's lived such an incredible amount and variety of popular music's history: from the girl group era of the early '60s, as part of Philly's own Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles (an experience she described as "a large pajama party"), to swinging London in the heyday of Carnaby Street, to New York in the groovily liberated disco '70s (by which time the group had morphed into glam-funk fantasists Labelle) and the arty, AIDS-plagued eighties (when she collaborated with Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, and Prince, among others, and launched her own Afro-futurist, avant-rock solo career.) And that's not even mentioning the "audio tutu" she's been experimenting with recently (an attempt, as she explains it, to become more of a cyborg.)

Add all that to the fact that she's black, female, and queer, and you could easily devote the whole weekend of intellectual discourse to dissecting just her life and work.

A generous hour and half proved hardly enough time to delve into that wealth of experience. The interviewers, fumbling with the powerpoint and fawning, at considerable length, over the current Labelle reunion, only managed to bring the discussion up through the mid-seventies before cutting to Q&A mode. Brooks' questions, while insightful and well-informed, sometimes tended toward overly academic cult-crit pontification – that's only customary for this conference, of course, but it didn't always seem fair to the mildly bewildered Hendryx, who offered up a few responses along the lines of "well, we just made music because that was what you did in those days." Still, she had plenty of perspective to offer, on the changing cultural and social currents of her times, and the education she picked up through collaborations and encounters with innumerable legendary musicians and producers.

It was a joy just to watch her relive some of those memories, even when (doubtless unlike any of the presenters who will follow her this weekend) she couldn't quite summon up the words to describe them.

EMPirical Observations 2009: Day Two

a (one-man) committee, working on the evolution of control

Today was the first full day of the EMP Pop conference, an annual gathering of rock critics, journalists, academics, and other musos. Last night's Nona Hendryx keynote (covered in great detail here), in addition to raising some resonant themes and offering some unique historical insight, made a very appropriate keynote in the way it hinted at the conference's fundamental strangeness. The subtly incongruous tone of the discussion, and the slight but tangible disconnect in mode between questions and answers, pointed up the tensions between conference-goers' often highly analytical manner of inquiry and the generally unacademic, and arguably anti-intellectual, nature of the subject material at hand: pop music and rock 'n' roll.

Similarly, many of today's presentations seemed, in various ways, intentional and otherwise, to embody some of the very themes they explored. Most obviously, and brilliantly, Douglas Wolk's presentation on the bizarrely disembodied activity of DJing, entitled "My Other Body is a Temple," enacted its thesis with striking literalness. Wolk never spoke, but instead "DJed" his paper in a bizarrely disembodied way, by playing recordings of other people's voices reading his words, over accompanying musical selections, as well as pressing play on a couple of highly entertaining archival video clips.

The inimitable Greil Marcus, a luminary not just as a music writer but as a writer period, shared a ruminative and highly poetic description of two seemingly unrelated artworks: Nan Goldin's "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," a slide-show of several hundred images juxtaposed with a carefully selected soundtrack of songs, and Lonnie Mack's little-known 1963 soul ballad "Why" (whose emotional resonance he described in aching detail and in real-time, as the song played, to incredibly potent effect), thereby creating his own sublimely artful juxtaposition.

On a more troublesome note, a promising-looking panel addressing issues of gender and sexuality in electronic dance music culture, among other things, threatened to exemplify some of the very problems it was raising, in a highly uncomfortable manner, as the three male DJs/electronic musicians at the table seemed to visually and vocally overwhelm the lone female, Swedish DJ and sociologist Anna Gavanas. For better or worse, I missed the beginning of the panel, which apparently included Gavanas speaking while a track that prominently and repeatedly sampled the word "penis" played in the background, after an unfortunate quote from Danger Mouse about beatmatching being "for cunts." (Er, ahem.) But I did catch part of a largely unrelated segment wherein the mad-scientist-looking Mark Gunderson, a.k.a. TradeMark G of the Evolution Control Committee (creator of the delirious "Rocked by Rape"), gave a demonstration of his experimental live DJing interface, the "thimbletron," which involves a infrared LEDs attached to each of his fingers, a pair of Wii Motes, and a visible-to-the-crowd rear-projection screen. (see above)

Other presenters took the more traditionaly approach of just reading papers, illustrating them with audio clips where appropriate, which, to be sure, can still make for pretty provocative material. For instance, Robert Fink's witty and intriguing, if somewhat conjectural thesis on the "masochistic lover" persona in Marvin Gaye's early 1960s work, which drew on Freudian psychoanalysis, lyrical close readings, and musicological analysis (e.g. handclaps that sound like whips) – but resisted focusing on Gaye's famously fraught biography.

But the day's most exciting panel was also one of its least predictable, which deviated considerably from the standard text-based argument format in ways that fit right in with the physicality central to the conference theme. The "Rap Memes" panel opened with a tantalizing if frustratingly underdeveloped exploration of sexual entitlement in dirty south hip-hop from Tamara Palmer in the form of an 11-minute audio track mashing up bits of the myriad recent pop hits containing the phrase "It ain't trickin' if ya got it" with commentary from anonymous YouTube users. From there we shifted to John Caramanica and Sean Fennessy's tag-team joyride through the highlights of the (as they argued) preternaturally brilliant career-to-date of Soulja Boy Tell'Em, mostly via a series of YouTube videos, all of which can be found on this Tumblr. Finally, writer/performance artist Holly Bass presented "Pay Purview," a piece incorporating sources from Sir Mix-a-Lot to Tina Turner to a documentary on the Hottentot Venus, which involved Bass gyrating in a gold lamé outfit with a comically massive "booty ball" posterior – check out this video clip, cuz words can't really do it justice (caution – starts with annoying test tone):



To close out the day, Ann Powers conducted a breathless interview with hit-making songwriter extraordinaire Diane Warren. Contra her notoriety as the doyenne of schlocky, extravagantly over-emotional power-ballads (her catalog includes "Un-Break My Heart," "I Don't Want to Miss A Thing," and numerous numbers by Michael Bolton and Celine Dion, as well as Milli Vanilli and Ace of Base), Warren turned out to be delightfully unsentimental, sarcastic, and potty-mouthed, with an endless string of stories.

Quite a whirlwind of the pop world in one day... tomorrow I do it all over again, and see if I can keep my brain from completely overloading.

over and over and over and over and over

i felt like there was something else to say about EMP, since i didn't really offer any general comments on my experience. like carl wilson, i didn't find it to be nearly as mind-blowing as
last year's conference, although it was plenty enjoyable.

of course, as my second exposure to this curious, ad-hoc community, there was less of a transcendant sense of new and unexplored possibilities. but there also just weren't as many papers or panels that stood out as really engaging and provocative (as, for instance, the girl-group panel and carl's own celine dion paper did last year.) somehow, there didn't seem to be many papers that addressed areas of directly relevant interest to me, though i don't understand how that's possible. i definitely felt like the expansion to four simultaneous panels diluted the energy and cohesion of the conference, and - although nobody else seemed to complain about this much - i found there to be strikingly little adherence to or concern with the con's decidedly vague "theme."

i guess this didn't bother folks because the theme is something of a red herring - the true theme is always simply "pop music," and the point is overwhelmingly to bring together the best and most prominent writers/thinkers on the music to share some of their work, rather than to enact a large-scale discussion around a set of more specific topics. which is certainly reasonable, given that this is really the only event of its kind. but it's also a shame, i'd say, since there are certainly a range of very potent and significant ideas to be explored even hewing quite close to this year's ostensible theme - the relationship between music, time, and place - which could have enhanced cross-resonances throughout the conference if more of an effort had been made to draw them out as the focus. it would have made it easier to come away with a sense that something particular had been discussed, considered, and, perhaps, in some small way, explained.

i don't mean to keep bringing this up - because i really don't want to complain about it -
but if my paper had been included (it was evidently not aided by the increase in accepted submissions - though it was, by-the-way, abso-bloomin-lutely on-theme) ... well, golly it would have been nice - i feel like i would have gotten a lot more out of the conference. not just for the obvious reasons, but simply because it would have given me more of an entree into the "hallway" conversations that form a lot of the substance of the conference. as it was, i didn't really end up talking to that many people. because i'm shy, but more because i didn't have anything particular or urgent to say to anybody there, even though obviously there are all kinds of things i could fruitfully discuss with most of them.

also, since i had friends to hang out with and things to do in the evenings, i didn't need to or attempt to join any of the myriad social activities that went on outside of but connected to the conference, such as what i'm sure was an awesome party at m. matos' house saturday night. i did end up going to lunch on sunday (after the big wrap-up discussion, which has been described/discused/dished on in detail elsewhere) with carl, ned raggett, tom kipp, and several others - most of that conversation was about the idea of creating something (a web forum? an online magazine? a print publication?) to carry forward the spirit and substance of emp throughout the rest of the year - an idea that despite some big talk has unsurprisingly not led to even subsequent e-mail dialogue (unless it has and i was weeded out.)

anyway, thanks to the lovely mr. kipp, who, like me, is what carl calls a "thinker without portfolio" (even though his 'folio does now include four popcon presentations, and mine stretches to fit some academic and some periodicalized pop writing.) at the end of the conference, he made some discouraging comments about the prospects of ever getting a paper accepted at there without some significant credentials. of course that's not entirely unexpected - but i'd previously have thought that the selection process would weight the quality and relevance of the proposal at least somewhat substantially against the "brief bio" and acknowledged insider status. kipp's doubtful about that, and he's probably in a position to know (himself standing as one of the few perennial exceptions, since "once you're in you're in.")

coming after the intense but inspiring final roundtable talk - on the fraught subject of "the future of thinking about music for a living," which left me musing optimistically about academia (as the academics were on the whole way more positive about said future than the journo-types) - that comment was a tiny buzzkill that brought me down to thinking about my future for living about music, period. which is to say, my position with respect to this group of people who inhabit emp-world. because, once more, i'm left feeling like these are my people, at least rightfully, but that i don't quite belong to/with them, at this point anyway. despite lots of rhetoric about inclusiveness and intermingling, i still end up on the outside. which is something i do to myself, more than anything. and i'm trying to figure out how not to.

one thing i want to do is to start focusing (on) my writing here; making an effort to create something more potentially accessible and reader-friendly. which means, mostly, to just write better. and also shorter, and maybe less erratically. we'll see. i've got a few several loose ends to tie up, as always, but i'm going to perhaps be playing around with format here in the coming weeks/months, to see if i can sculpt this blog into something more emphatic, deliberate...something with a stronger sense of itself. eh?

still over, still now

EMP hi-lites, cont'd. saturday:

• rob't xgau's reflections on pazz'n'jop - generally, and '06's poll(s) specifically - were as incisive and enjoyable as ever - he's just such a pleasure to listen to, with his inimitable, impassioned/impatient delivery of wry, wordily wrought sentences designed to maximize his "micromanaged microphone minute." the content of his talk was nothing unexpected either - i felt like i'd heard many of these opinions and anecdotes from him before, whether in print somewhere or other, or in person at the philly lit fest this fall. mostly, he sounds the authoritative, all-acknowledged voice of (post-Voice) reason, but in some moments an ambivalent dichotomy emerges - one pointed up by joshua clover's impish importunities - a perhaps generationally-derived, but less than precisely divisive, divide, of which i'm disinclined to decide on a side. where's the line between christgau's circumspect attention to the "residue" swept aside by the "blogging fools" [in an acronym; ABM] and the at-long-last lost-touch of fogey-dom? or between j-clo's futurological, fashion-forward championing of the "emergent" and impolitic impetuousity? the two needn't be irreconcilably opposed, of course, but it's something to be settled in the process of discovering value and meaning of silly little things like critics polls, and in grasping towards a sense of the "current state of music."

• daphne brook's panegyrical examination of TV on the Radio, which i found a good deal more compelling than the band itself (unlike greil marcus' commendation of early rod stewart shortly afterwards, which i just couldn't focus on, despite greil's grace and geniality.) brook's talk was also less abstruse than her abstract, though not necessarily less erudite. it certainly made me want to revisit their last record (wish she'd had more to offer re:it's title), even though i'm not sure i can articulate exactly what she was arguing about it. the most relevant thought i can cull from my sparse notes is about their music as "the sonic equivalent of the practice of diaspora."

• maura johnston's presentation on freestyle was perfectly delightful, even though it focused less on lyrical and situational paradoxes and more on a (helpful and necessary) history/explanation of the genre itself, grounded in her personal experiences of listening to it on the radio as young girl. she passed out a mix cd of favorites, which i'm enjoying even more than i anticipated. (most of the stuff still sounds surprisingly fresh.) it was nice to hear folks chime in with their own recollections in the q+a.

• i'm not sure i completely bought alexa weinstein's theory about headphone listening making us more present in the moment and in our surroundings, but it was cool to hear her offer some generalized analysis of this very personal phenomenon - headphones as 'non-diegetic music for life' makes a lot of sense. also cool: silent disco.

• brian goedde and elena passarello (no sign of their third partner who wrote a book with christine vachon) gave one of the coolest presentations at the con, for their format innovation alone - mairead case comes close too for her free-form poetic monologue about karen dalton, which i only caught the latter half of. bg+ep's piece was effectively documentary theater; a series of monologues culled from interviews with iowan hip-hoppers; a couple of rappers and at least one somewhat confused fan. a charismatic and touching combination of humor, poignancy, and anthropology, it offered no big generalizations or conclusions, but plenty to think about.

• carl wilson led an interesting lunch session about local music scenes, which he's already written about himself. i was hoping somebody might speak up about philadelphia - whose scenes-to-speak-of seem to be decently well covered in local media, actually - but it only got a passing reference, and i didn't feel qualified to comment, not being an active journalist.

• my buddy tom kipp showed us some pictures and played us some awesome recordings from the weirdo (post)punk bands he and his friends used to be in in montana in the '80s, which is a pretty rad thing to be able to do.

• my other sort-of buddy charles hughes ripped it up talking about southern soul and country crosspollinations (mostly in the '60s-'70s), something he could undoubtedly have gone on speaking about for many hours without flagging in knowledgeability or enthusiasm. he spoke of this interwoven tradition of soul, country, and adjacent genres as an alternate history of 20th century popular music, and presented his specific topic for the day - the influence of soul on country music - as an alternate history of that alternate history. now that i've read (the majority of) peter guralnick's book and encountered most of the major players there, i was much more easily able to follow along with hughes' rapid-fire narration, and to readily incorporate some of this new information into my mental picture of the history. but even so, what he gave us felt like merely a teaser; dude's been stewing in this stuff (working on his masters and now a phd) for several years at least, and his expertise and passion for the subject is simply inspiring. i did think it was kind of curious that his recommendation for current southern soul (in response to a question) was bubba sparxxx's deliverance (that is a great album though) - also mentioned ellis hooks, who's underwhelmed me a little. ["sharon jones to panel!"... i was thinking, not for the last time.]

• finally...as per carl's summary, the panel he moderated included interesting talks on woody guthrie and joanna newsom. i left after those to hear a couple of old white guys talk about sleater-kinney...yeah.

----

and then there was one more panel on sunday. actually this might have been my favorite panel of the whole conference (though, as noted before, it was one of only two i stayed at for its entire length.) this was the perhaps-winkingly titled "hard to place," which indeed at first blush seemed like an assortment of rather unrelated loose ends, but turned out to have more thematic unity and cross-panel resonance than even most panels organized around a single genre or subject. basically, these three papers dealt with issues of legacy, aging, historicality, traditionalism, and so forth, with regard to specific artists in three different genres: jazz, '60s vocal pop, and chicago blues. together, they offered an assortment of options for what can, and what should, happen to musicians and musical forms as they advance in years.

harvey cohen related how duke ellington "fought nostalgia" in the 1960s (in his sixties as well) not only by continuing to innovate musically, but also by seeking out new performance opportunities and audiences - performing and speaking at colleges, conducting international tours for the state department, composing overtly religious works for the first time, as well as involving himself in the civil rights movement and creating black history-themed pieces. in the q+a, christgau raised an eyebrow at cohen's assertion that by so doing ellington modelled a new role for the senior citizen in popular music, but although i'm not hugely familiar with his counter-examples (lawrence welk, rosemary clooney) i have to say it seems like a strong argument, even if he wasn't technically the first 'pop' musician to continue to innovating into old age.

tom smucker offered an insightful and highly entertaining exegesis of the four seasons' underheralded legacy - in the wake of the success of the musical "jersey boys" - according to smucker the first ever telling of the four seasons' story, after 43 years. much of his paper involved an abstract but intriguing mapping of - i suppose - pop narratology onto the political landscape, with the three major mythic types relevant to the 1960s consisting of motown/"overcoming adversity" narrative (analagous to mlk); the beatles/british invasion model (jfk); and southern/country music model (lbj/george wallace.) the four seasons don't fit into any of these schema; possibly they might have matched up with rfk, but his death, in smucker's formulation, meant to removal of this "frame" as a possible means for understanding their story. it's not clear that they have a political analogue now, either - but the socio-cultural environment has opened up room for them, most recently and pertinently in the form of the sopranos, which is not about creating a dynasty, but about a suburban family struggling to keep their business afloat. that's about as much of the gist as i can reconstruct from my notes - clearly, the paper was highly theoretical, but in its own curious terms it did make a lot more sense and work out better than it might seem.

carlo rotella's presentation concerned the perhaps questionable future of chicago blues as a 'living' genre, and held up the guitarist magic slim as one of the style's few remaining traditionalist practitioners. though hardly advocating a strict, static structure for the venerable form, rotella opined that things would be better for all concerned (innovators, newcomers, purists, and the vitality of the genre itself) if everybody took a lesson from slim (or, as he suggested, spent a couple of years in his backing band.) as he put it, the issue is not stasis but "passive innovation by default": on the one hand, pure stasis - the alternative to innovation - would lead to stagnation and then dessication; but the disappearance of an orthodox "center" can lead to the death of a genre too, as the remaining elements gravitate towards and "latch on" to other forms.

in the discussion period, folks tried to apply this formulation to other genres - country (which follows the same schema well), jazz (which, going off the ellington paper, seems perhaps to have the opposite problem) and indie rock ("everybody has to serve time in guided by voices"?), which as far as i can tell isn't stagnating or dying. soul was brought up but only tentatively, in a question about joss stone working with betty wright (which was news to me - that's cool), which prompted my only public verbalization of the whole conference (i pointed out that joss is already moving towards pop/r'n'b, far from stagnating in trad soul), and which i may get around to following up one of these days, on myspace. i do think there's a ton of relevance for soul here in all of these papers (well, maybe the four seasons one less so...though there were some gestures to thinking about them as in some ways like a soul group - many songs dealing with issues of class and social hierarchy, for one thing.) in fact, this would have been the perfect panel for my paper to have been included in (!) (and there were only three papers, so there could have been room too...) but perhaps i will contemplate that at another point.

it's all over now

like EMPtiness and harmony. (i need someone to conference me.)

ee em pee ee em pee ee em pee. let's see. what did i learn?

highlights from friday included:

• simon reynold's informative rundown of londoncentric dance music of the last 15-20 years, with awesome sample clips. apparently he went way over his time allotment (and he didn't get to finish his paper - he skipped his further comments on lady sovereign - but i really didn't notice at the time. i think this was the first time i understood the difference between jungle and drum'n'bass (which made me think i really need to listen to more of the former and less of the latter.)

• daphne carr's investigative report on hot topic, whose sources were primarily postings from the dozens of myspace groups whose sole purpose is to advocate for or against the store. i'm not sure i'd ever heard the terms "scene" and "scenecore" before (apparently they're what "glam-punk" and "emo" [the same thing?] are called by their detractors - that makes the new fall out boy single make a little bit more sense.

• robert fink's proposal that james brown's "soul power" is a rhythmic and political response to stokely carmichael's "black power" chant of several years earlier - riffing off the benjamin quip that aestheticized politics demands politicized art. [the jb tune had j-clo air-drumming along in his seat]

• douglas wolk's fascinating illumination of clydie king, a (mostly) forgotten-by-history soul/r&b/rock singer of the '50s/'60s/'70s, whose session work dominates classic rock radio but who never achieved success in her own right - perhaps as wolk posits because, as a black female, she was shunted into soul and disco and would never have been allowed to make a rock record. that presentation came with a fantastic and impressively eclectic mix-cd, which i'm listening to right now.

• discovering that joshua clover, sasha frere-jones, and dominique leone aren't really very much like my mental images of them. dom, in particular is so unassumingly ordinary, endearingly grinny and almost dadlike (though youngish) for the savvy p4k esoterica correspondent and abstractronica artist that he is. [man, i've been loving "nous tombons dans elle" for years now!] his virtually-interesting (but nicely extemporaneous) talk about the effect of p2p and the internet on the speed(s) of music consumption/digestion unfortunately got too bogged down in unnecessarily thorough explanations of message boards and the like - and really really unnecessary summaries of relativity physics - before it got the chance to reach any real insight. (the take-away message, as iterated later in the conference, was that some people will form an opinion about an album after only listen to 20 sec of each track.)

sasha is also very ordinary looking (and not youngish) with more self-effacing bumblingness than i might have guessed - his talk started as mostly verbatim from his rather lengthy précis, but rambled toward an unexpectedly insightful conclusion that R+B (especially the "cyborg strain" he opposed to the historically familiar likes of mary blige), is a "faceless raceless projection" (did he say holographic? something about shiny), ontologically self-contained; that it never extends beyond the world of the club, and so contains no potential for socio-political responses ("no rioting" my notes say); that it's the most incredibly awesome detention music ever devised - and "it's our music." he also inadvertently coined (?) the phrase "hip-nop," and read the titles of the 2005 and 2004 billboard #1 hits in sequence, with repetitions, as found poetry.

joshua's presentation was one of the best of the conference (as was this panel generally - maybe not coincidentally it was one of only two, the first and the last, that i stayed at for their entire duration), with excellent use of multimedia and what i guess was critical karaoke technique to discuss songs - by scorpions, jesús (?) jones, roxette, and deee-lite - from a period just slightly before my own musical awareness. as he put it, from "1989," though not necessarily from 1989 - his piece started with a discursus on scare-quoted dates and collectively imagined historical moments - in this case the putative beginning of something (the post-cold war era) that, from my perspective, doesn't seem to have unfolded in a way consistent with the tone and nature of those particular choice cuts; perhaps we've ended up at something closer to what clover called "nerf humanism."

there was also the ellen willis tribute session, with touching remembrances from folks that knew her or didn't - including christgau, who met her when they were eleven, and later lived with her and then had his heart broke, who said she was one of very few people he'd readily admit were smarter than him. "she wasn't shy" he said: "she was thinking" and probably ignoring you. most people read from her work and glossed her ideas on a broad range of topics. some phrases from my notes: "the ethical valence of not caring" "profusion of commodities offered as compensation for oppression" "the erotic as moral/ethical grounds of society" [on rock music:] "even when the content was anti-woman, anti-sexual, anti-human, the form [in its inherent humanity/sexuality] urges that chick in her bedroom forward." one young speaker, who had never met her, said that her writing had been a touchstone for him in trying to connect with and understand the '60s that he didn't live through. anne powers asked: "how did we get from pro-sex feminism to 'who wants to be the next pussycat doll'?"

so that's friday. more later.

preEMPtive [prehistory edition]

[because i already used that title once before, but it's too good not to recycle. which they're probably all about in seattle anyway.]

so. EMP panels are posted. (finally!) which means i will start thinking about actually making plans to attend (since until now i couldn't be entirely sure the conference was even going to happen.)

some general preliminary reactions:

• they really ought to have someone fix up the abstracts so that the quotation marks and hyphens don't all show up as ??s; it's really annoying.

• i feel like i'm going to have to make a mix cd (or three) of all the songs being focused on by various papers. (maybe i'll make a bunch of copies to distribute as a public service act of love.)

• i'm strangely underwhelmed by this year's batch of paper topics - not sure why, but there aren't nearly as many really exciting ones as i'd hope/expect. even though there are four panels per time slot this year (instead of three), almost all of them with four presenters, i'm not seeing a lot of cases where i'll be really torn in choosing among them. which is good, i guess, but it's definitely not the way it oughtta be.

• there are a lot papers that look way less interesting (and relevant) than my proposal. (grumble grumble - but that said i don't have too much of a grudge; i've already chalked my rejection up to bio-based bias, thereby further solidifying my general undercredentialed outsider self-image.)

• a lot of the papers seem to have nothing, or very little, to do with the ostensible theme of the conference. this is somewhat to be expected, but it seems like the organizers were especially lax about that this time around. to be fair, i guess that i had been mostly thinking of the theme as "history," but there's also "time" and "place" in there, and a number of the papers are related to place, especially, in ways that don't necessarily have much to with history per se. still, a whole lot of them - a majority, maybe - only seem relevant in that they're telling histories - that is, narrating stories about various pieces of pop/rock (artists, songs, styles, etc.), past and/or present; which i would say is not really enough to make them "about" history, time, or place. you know?

of the several vague suggestions in the original call for papers, this was probably the most intriguing to me:

*Evolving notions of musical revivalism: retro culture, questions of periodization in music, and the validity of the concept of youth culture as a sign of the times.

that is, to make it even broader, music historiography: discussions about the ways we writers/thinkers conceive of (and interact with) pop music history, and also the ways that musicians (conceive of and) interact with that history in their music. doesn't seem to be a whole lot of that going on.

this one - *How dichotomies of nearness/experience and farness/history affect music fanship, music writing, and music making. - gets a little more play. and i'm definitely interested in these questions. but get much beyond that and "place" can become a metaphorical abstract to the extent that it's basically meaningless as a "theme."

anyway. some specific things that are exciting/intriguing. (aka, which panels i would choose if the conference was tomorrow.) in chronological (future-historical!) order:

Thursday April 19
>> Keynote: Jonathan Lethem
i'm definitely sort of fed up with the way fiction/literature writers get to do high-profile sidelining "amateur" gigs in muso-dom (writing music columns in major periodicals; editing the da capo best music writing series; giving keynotes at EMP) more or less on the basis of their celebrity. that said, lethem's topic, even though it is pretty much completely irrelevant to the "theme" (y'know!?), is definitely quite relevant to me specifically (as well as to him specifically, as i just got done grumbling about) and to the current state of things in general (which seems to a more consistent topic across the board) - especially given the wide range of activities he places in the spectrum between fan and "professional." should be interesting.

Friday April 20

9:00 - 10:45

>> Year Zeroes

total no-brainer about which panel to attend firstfirst, mostly because of the irresistable star-power of alyssa's boyz (sasha and joshua), but also some pretty enticing subject matter - sf-j's paper maybe in particular, an examination of the changing (or not) nature of r&b, among other things. also interested in hearing about the '80s (especially the late '80s), definitely still the phase of pop history that i feel like i know the least about. plus: soul power!

(on the other hand, dom leone's abstract is pretty appealing; it's certainly a resonant an useful topic. but there is a lot of talk about the internet etc. effect on music listenership etc. anyway it's cool that dom will be there, i'll be interested to see what he's like.)

11:00 - 12:45
not too much standing out in this time slot. except maybe this one:
“Is Rock Criticism Part of Intellectual History?”
eh? good question.

>> Lunch Session - Ellen Willis Tribute
right on.

2:15 - 4:00

Michaelangelo Matos, “A Matter of Trustafarians: Behind the Bob Marley Poster on the Dorm Room Wall” got the heads-up on this from bedbugs. sounds like a promising piece of potentially enlightening entertainment - and matos' supremes paper last year was fantastic.

the other papers in that panel - on rock t-shirts, "selling sad" and american idol - are reasonably enticing too. even though it would also be interesting to hear tim hecker talk about glenn gould. and i don't know what to think about this:
"Anticipating The Re-Emergence of The Pre-Temperate Aboriginal Drone Form as The Root And Dominant Figure In Rock Music."

4:15 - 6:00
>> The Color Line
pretty easy choice - mostly for doug wolk's, which promises to be very illuminating (i've never heard of clydie king) - he seemed very cool last year too. i'm also very interested in the good night, and good luck. paper. on the other hand, the papers on the pet shop boys vis-a-vis aids and on cliches are also pretty appealing ("people act like clichés are overused." is a great way to start that abstract.) though who knows what the hell is going on with a panel title like "songitudes."

better stuff on saturday.

9:00 - 10:45
easy to pick christgau, though i'd likely just stay for his paper (which should be relevant as well as enjoyable) and then skip out (daphne brooks on tvotr? another piece about katrina/nola? no thanks. btw, katrina wasn't last year.) though not sure which for. the women's rooms one seems potentially intriguing, though maybe not as much as "conjuring the trickster in the church of crunk." (!) also, that's an organized grad-student panel, which makes me want to go both because it's nice to see grad students and because last year's (the UW girl group panel) was definitely the highlight of that conference for me.

11:00 - 12:45
>> A Seventies:Moment
is that punctuation intentional? again, not hard to go the obvious route with the holy greil, even if i don't particularly think i care about rod stewart (no - in fact i should go for that very reason - even the abstract gets me curious about his early albums.) yuval taylor's paper seems very promising. otherwise, i wouldn't mind seeing franklin bruno, tim quirk, or nate patrin, but none of them are talking about things of especial interest, except maybe quirky quirk.

the lunch session is much harder to pick - would be sweet to see joe bataan, but i think i'll have to go with my man carl wilson (especially since he's not doing a paper this year, sadly), and come to think of it, i am absolutely interested to talk about local music scenes.

2:15 - 4:00
biggest conflict of interest so far, and it's not a very big one. on a purely genre-based level, the techno/dance panel and the country-soul panel both tug at my allegiances. certainly it would be nice to catch simon reynolds and michael daddino (both of whose topics sound awesome), but sadly they're both slotted first (at least for now), which means i'll probably miss them both in favor of seeing my friend (maybe?) charles hughes, whose paper is most directly relevant to my professed interests. well, we'll see.

4:15 - 6:00
hmmm. not sure here either. joe schloss and o-dubs make an appealing tag-team. jd considine rubbed me the wrong way a little last year, but his paper should be interesting (unless it's boring, which is a distinct possibility.) however, the janet weiss-keith-moon paper is no-way gonna be boring. whoa, that gal went to elementary school with joanna newsom!

that leaves sunday - which is still up in the air for me (whether i'll get to be there for it) b/c there seem to be no plane flights leaving in the afternoon, which is what i'd need, unless i took work off on monday. it wouldn't be the worst thing to skip it, but...this in particular is hard to pass up:

�Why the Four Seasons did not and could not have a story until 2005.� his answer is really interesting, and theoretically challenging to grapple with. my question would be, though, is it the case that they now do have a story that anyone's interested in hearing? does anybody care about the four seasons these days? because i sure do: i've recently acquired three of their albums, and they are slowly but surely blowing me away.

>> The Future of Thinking About Music for a Living
obviously a big-deal topic, for most of the people involved at the conference. me included ( i hope.) might be tired of talking/thinking about it by this point however.

i do think it's weird that they scheduled another session opposite this, though i guess it's appropriate that it's "displaced listening" - the unfortunate thing is that all three of the papers in it seem worth checking out; especially maura johnston's on listening to freestyle at home and loneliness in dance music lyrics.

so that's that. now what?

to bed with history

this was my proposal for EMP:

Sharon Jones, Daptone Records, and Soul's Constraining Historicality

Sharon Jones was born fifty years ago - in James Brown's hometown, as she's fond of mentioning - but she didn't put out her debut album until five years ago. That record and its 2005 follow-up - both released on Brooklyn-based, musician-run Daptone records and recorded with that label's younger, mostly white house band, the Dap-Kings - consist of gritty, funky, rawly emotive Soul, of the sort that Jones was surely surrounded by growing up, but that has been strikingly scarce since the mid-'70s.

With their vintage-stylized album artwork and choreographed "super soul revue" concerts, Jones and her labelmates might strike some as "retro" novelty performers or niche-based nostalgia-mongers. But the honesty and artistic integrity of their music defies such facile categorization: this is, undeniably, living and contemporary music, albeit music with strong roots in tradition.

Aside from producing emotionally viable art (and fresh sample-fodder for the likes of Kanye West), how is the Daptone stable relevant to the current musical landscape? Despite inklings of resurgent interest, via reissues, feted comebacks, and newly emergent would-be revivalists, Soul still feels Old, inextricably shackled to its historical originary moment. In an age when decades-old genres from garage-rock to synth-pop, substantially liberated from their historical referents, can enjoy renewed artistic and commercial viability, what is it about Soul that sustains its rarified, ossified, antiquated air?

In considering this question, I'd like to examine Jones and her contemporaries in terms of the stylistic parameters of Soul, the historiography of R&B (including the debatable merits of the '90s neo-soul "renaissance"), the effect of changing performance conventions, production techniques and audience-reception models, and those ever-thorny issues of purity and authenticity, to glean what I can about the music's past, present and future.

it didn't get accepted. (sigh...) oh well. neither did dave's, which i thought would (also) have been a fabulous paper - but both of us are probably still going to attend. at this point i'm really curious and excited to read the abstracts for the proposals that did get accepted.

although it would be nice to think that i might still work on writing something formal and/or in-depth about the topics i raised there...well, who knows, maybe i will, but i'll start by trying to blog about them in some vaguely systematic way. or not.

i've been reading peter guralnick's evidently canonical sweet soul music: rhythm and blues and the southern dream of freedom, which i had figured would be necessary background for my paper, but is also something i possibly should have read years ago. i'm already slightly skeptical about guralnick because of something charles hughes said at EMP last year, part of the incredibly intense q+a session after the girl groups panel that i think i never actually got around to blogging about, in response to xgau's insistence that he "name names" about who he was attacking in his polemical paper (which i'd really like to get my hands on a copy of...i'll try asking him again) arguing that modern female pop acts are equivalent (and deserving comparable appreciation) to "classic"-era girl groups.

what i took from that is that guralnick may be something of a curmudgeon and a rockist (or soulist or whatever), which i suppose isn't an especially relevant concern in terms of a book whose scope is explicitly limited to the 1960s. though i'll keep it in mind as i go. so far i have read the introduction, which seems to do a good job of revealing and grounding his biases (as a listener and lifelong fan, but also an admitted outsider to the history he's reporting on, with a number of preconceptions that he'd to a greater or lesser extent debunked since starting his research.)

the introduction also nicely corroborates my conception (which i didn't have space to elaborate on in my proposal) of the short span and decisive endpoint of Soul:

"Soul music was a brief flowering, really. It first peered out in the mid-1950s, like rock'n'roll, as a kind of alternative to assimilation. It came into its own no earlier than 1960, crossed over by 1965 or 1966, and, despite lingering traces of its influence throughout the culture, was spent as a controlling force by the early '70s." [18]

he also offers a convincing depiction (presumably to be strengthened by the actual content of the book) of soul as the unique product of unique [historical, social, cultural, economic, geographic, etc.] circumstances. perhaps less helpfully for my project - or not, since it's helpful to have something to argue against, if that's even what i would to do - he asserts more or less outright that a popular rediscovery or even a stylistic return or would be impossible, because of the unrepeatable conjunction of those circumstances, and particularly because of the unlikely way in which artists who were in some ways "naive," or at least treading in uncharted waters, were able to achieve phenomenal commercial and popular success:

"I've tried to view it...as a combination...of art and commerce in which the music attained its highest level when the marriage was closest and in the absense of which the form cannot be revived today." [p. 19]

(also: "Soul music...was the product of a particular time and place that one would not want to see repeated, the bitter fruit of segregation, transformed...into a statement of warmth and affirmation" [p. 3])

actually, i agree with him; history of course can't be repeated, and an authentic "revival of the form" is unimaginable. and it's hard to conceive of what a "real" soul revival would look like in the contemporary music milieu (even though in some ways it seems like it might be happening) (would it be like the swing and ska "crazes" of the 1990s? - more on those later...) is it possible to distinguish a "true" stylistic revival from a more general return to relevance that would take some other form?

there's a central problem though, and this is where the (alleged) allegations of guralnick's curmudgeonliness come into play: to him "it almost goes without saying that soul was an incomparably greater form (because it was incomparably more passionate, emotionally expressive and individualistic) than its more celebrated contemporaries" [i.e. motown and the beatles...and also, i think implicitly though maybe i'm reading too much into it, greater than any other pop music that's come along since.]

in some ways i'm tempted to agree again, because there is something incredibly powerful and emotionally expressive about southern soul music, which doesn't necessarily make it "greater" than less nakedly emotional pop or rock, for instance, but does seem extremely special. but if the essence of that music is now gone forever, does that mean that degree of expressiveness married to that level of artistry is destined to remain the province of this one brief historical moment, never to be recaptured or equalled?

it seems clear that that's an unacceptable conclusion. and not an especially hard one to poke holes in. but it's still a tempting trap to fall into, and one that seems to be manifested and reinforced by the mythologizing tendencies that prevail in the discourse surrounding soul music.

john and sharon: live and in person

01. in d.c. this weekend, i got the chance to see and hear two of my favorite performers: the mountain goats and sharon jones and the dap-kings. in both cases, a total treat. the latter was particularly lovely; not only was the concert free and outside (on the terrace in the back of the kennedy center), i hadn't known it was happening until the night before.

and sharon sounded better than ever. her singing was at its most dynamic and technically impressive; it seemed like her vocal chops have improved in the months since i've seen her. and the band - tight as ever, of course - appeared more comfortable on stage; binky griptite's emceeing was more commanding, the horn section choreography less put-on, and the interplay between sharon and individual band-members - in a spotlighting series of solos that i think was a new addition to the show as i'd seen it - more substantial and touching. despite her weirdly formal pale green pants-suit, sharon's characteristic playfulness and uninhibited pre-song banter (the first thing she told us was that she loses her mind when she gets on stage) won over the demographically mixed and potentially awkward haute-d.c. crowd of mostly daptone neophytes right away. (the incongruous and futile six-count swing dance lesson before the show hadn't made matters easier.) still no sign of "N.B.L." or "all over again" in the live show, but that's a drag i've come to expect by now, and there were several promising new songs that were almost as exciting. oh yeah, and her dance breakdowns on "there was a time" (ooh, checkit) and the bit about her ancestors are as awesome as ever.

as for the mountain goats, they're riding the wave of their growing popularity (a sold out show at the black cat, definitely the largest venue i've seen them at save the pitch4kfest) with typically casual aplomb. which is to say the show wasn't appreciably different from the intimate set i saw at haverford last year (not different, in "mode", let's say, except that that show was many times more special and awesome, partly because of its intimacy.) the setlist drew about equally from sunset tree and get lonely, reminding me how much i like the former ("lion's tooth"! "love love love"! ...as if i needed reminding) and gently enhancing my positive take on the latter, either in spite or because of its lyrical cohesiveness-bordering-on-monotony. (i liked how he introduced "moon over goldsboro" as a song about a guy who walks to the gas station and wishes he could keep walking, but ends up having to walk home.) a couple of older selections too, though nothing older or more potent than "baboon" from the coroner's gambit (a treat) - and an excellent new song (key chorus line: "hold onto your dreams 'til someone beats them out of you.") the set was cut short (i'm pretty sure) by the glitchy twofer of a sound snafu (no guitar in the house) and a broken string. but they pulled through (rather than dealing with these issues) with a bass-and-vocals only closer and encore, including "best houseguest" or whatever that franklin bruno song is called, and an audience sing-and-flip-off-along to "no children."

2. this was my seventh time seeing the mountain goats and my third time seeing sharon. i'd wager you can't see musicians that many times (or else you don't - and certainly not thrice in one year!) without developing the sense of a "personal" relationship with them that affects how you experience their concerts and (perhaps to a lesser extent) records. it's hard to characterize, but it definitely adds a dimension to the "typical" artist-listener relationship, and i imagine it has a lot more to do with why people like going to live concerts than the straightforward pleasure of watching music be created.

i started off by calling sharon jones and the mountain goats two of my favorite performers, but i have to say it feels incongruous to leave that as an unqualified description, and particularly that something rubs me a little funny about using that word to describe john darnielle. and that's the thing i'd like to tussle out a minute here.

3. darnielle (who still, effectively, is the mountain goats) presents himself as an ordinary guy. i hesitate even to say "presents," but you've gotta know that anything that happens on stage, particularly if it happens night after night for years (and seven times in my presence) is some sort of presentation, just as much as 19th century realist fiction involves construction and artifice, as i've spent three hours every recent wednesday being made to realize despite spending [1000 pages in three weeks times ~20 pages per hour averages to] roughly seventeen hours a week (!) allowing tolstoy to try to delude me otherwise. so darnielle's performance mode is "unaffected" - he gets up there, plays songs on his guitar, talks to the audience (or to himself, or to peter) in a witty but off-the-cuff manner that one gathers is not dissimilar to the way he speaks in everyday life (except insofar as he probably doesn't spend much time in everyday life introducing songs), responds to things people in the crowd say, and sometimes acknowledges the artificiality of the concert setting and an awareness of the broader context (for instance, before playing the new song he suggested he'd prefer for people in the audience not to post the song on the internet right away.) that's about it.

"the dap-tone super-soul revue" on the other hand - which apparently is the title of every sharon jones concert even if the "revue" part merely consists of the band playing a number or two (with binky singing) before "the brightest star in the dap-tone universe" takes the stage - is obviously a very different, and much more complex, kind of presentation. one could of course talk about the mountain goats show in terms of costuming, set composition, pre-planned routines to accompany songs (parts where peter sings back-up on a line, for instance), and the deliberate creation of a persona - and it would be a mistake to assume that john and peter don't put thought into these things, even though they don't call attention to them in the way the dap-kings certainly do. but it's perhaps more interesting to consider the more overt ways in which their performance styles are similar (and different) and how these affect their relationship with the audience.

4. for one thing, both concerts have a similar type of predictable conventionality: without having seen either performer before, i could have told you which parts of each show were "standard" (that is, which ones happen at every SJ or MGs concert) and which were unique to that evening. in the goats' case, it's easy to predict (correctly) that the setlist varies from night to night, with some songs turning up at a majority of shows and others only making rare appearances - a traditional approach for singer-songwriters attempting to balance the desires of a "cult" following and newer fans hoping to hear the "hits" - and that the "banter" is effectively different at every show, but that the basic format is fixed and unchanging. at the dap-tone revue, it's possible to distinguish sharon's off-the-cuff banter from the more "scripted" (or at least standardized) patter which probably makes up at least 60% of her talking on stage. and the complexity of concert-going conventions require that we on some level "suspend disbelief" and pretend that her extended monologues-cum-dance-demonstration routines are completely impromptu, something special she's deciding to share with us on this lucky night, even though it's obvious they aren't.

of course, in both cases, this conventionality is only "predictable" with a large amount of cultural conditioning about how to interpret these performances in context - and i can't really speak to how someone with a different set of cultural expectations would understand these concerts. there are definitely concerts and performers that willfully attempt to defy conventional expectations or else at least engage with in novel ways (although eventually every "experimental" performance styles develops its own conventions) but these two are notably standardized modes - folk/singer-songwriter performance and funk/soul revue - that are drawing on well-established traditions.

5. in sharon's case, the relationship with historical tradition is an especially pertinent consideration. everything about daptone records - the music, the stage shows, the visual aesthetic, the preoccupation with LPs and 45s, etc. etc. - is based on (or should i say "taken from"? their website says "channels the spirit of") the culture of soul music in the mid- to late 1960s. this is overt - or, well, obvious - but not quite explicit in the sense that, for example, there is nothing in the "daptone revue" show that says this kind of music and presentation is not standard practice in 2006. it's presented neither as nostalgia (though it could certainly serve as such for the appropriate audience members) nor as "retro" revivalism, but, straight-facedly, as living and contemporary music, albeit music with strong roots in tradition. i would say this choice of presentation is exceptionally canny, since it neither limits nor presupposes their audience (thereby allowing their appeal to range broadly, without the assurance of a given target market), although describing it as a "choice" raises issues as thorny as those it addresses. it's worth noting that daptone is an artist-owned and -run independent label, a manifestly self-propelling and, one imagines, somewhat communal organization whose labor-of-love ethos does wonders for the sense of authenticity purveyed by the music. and authenticity, predictably, is one of the largest issues at stake in all of this.

one significant factor i have yet to mention is the unique position of sharon herself: born in 1956 (i was at her 50th!) in augusta, georgia, she wasn't quite old enough to have been a performer in the "original soul era" (or whatever), but she was sure old enough to have been around for it, which affords her a free pass beyond the quagmire of authenticity issues that plague james hunter, for instance - a young and british musician working in a similarly "spirit-channelling" vein. it's even to her credit that she wasn't a known figure in the old days (she did some back-up singing in the '70s, but didn't record under her own name until the late '90s), since she can't be a "comeback" (read: nostalgia) artist like candi staton; also, even at fifty she's got plenty enough youthful spark to convey the adolescent excitement of classic soul along with its "mature" aspect.

[there's a lot to say here...and i'm getting off the immediate topic of this post...but i've just realized that i'd really like to and ought to think and write more about daptone, and then propose to deliver a paper about it at next year's EMP! fits in perfectly with the theme of history, time and place.]

[EDIT: another thing to think about: sharon and agency/authenticity w/r/t ashlee/paris/et. al., considering her songs are all written/arranged/produced by bosco mann. who's also the bandleader, even though he never says anything on stage, just hides behind his big shades. looking vaguely sinister: like a spector/svengali. she acknowledged him at this show - saying that whenever anything's going on in her life she tells bosco and he writes a song about it - which i hadn't her do before.]

i have no problem whatsoever accepting sharon jones and the dap-kings as fully legitimate, authentic (proviso caveat) and (even!) relevant musicians. actually, it's almost weird to feel it necessary to state that, but i can easily imagine someone taking a different view (seeing them as "nostalgic," "novelty," "niche," or whatever.) and - to get back on track - i'd attribute a good chunk of this willingness to my having seen her now three times, to the relationship we've developed (i mean, even apart from bringing her flowers and being pulled on stage to dance with her) and my investment in and awareness of her as a person. put another way, when you've actually seen a band and recognize them as "just people"/artists trying to make it - even though their onstage presentation belies that image (because they act like they're the biggest stars in the world playing at the apollo) - it fosters an artist-to-audience/community relationship that's decidedly different from the cultural-phenomenon-to-consumer-of-culture relationship. whew. (i'm not sure i want to privelege and valorize the live concert experience the way i seem to be doing here: it's not necessarily so that a concert will change one's relationship with the performer in the manner i'm describing; furthermore there are other ways of that change occuring, including just by listening to the records.)

6. i said a while ago that john darnielle presents himself as an ordinary guy. that's not quite right: he presents himself as "himself." or just as himself (maybe). in any case, he's quite clearly not an ordinary guy. except for being white, male, having a guitar around his neck and writing songs about relationships between men and women. (all of which is more than enough to relegate him to rockist purgatory in case somebody wants to make this into a post about rockism, which i don't really feel like touching.) alyssa once said that being a mountain goats fan is about liking (or at least being interested in?) john darnielle himself, which i think is very true in a way it's maybe hard to see with respect to even other similar artists (i'd have to think about this more thoug - i do see some parallels with dylan, especially q.v. the dylanology essay in best music writing 2002.) given that, the live show is an especially significant locus of the fandom experience, the opportunity to encounter the goathead (?)

more specifically, the live show simultaneously furthers and, in moments, seems to diffuse the mystification that i see as central to the mountain goats' appeal - that is, the tension between fiction and lived reality in darnielle's songwriting. to what extent are john's songs autobiographical versus purely fictional? are they based on emotions and situations that he's experienced, but with details reinvented or obscured? these questions are hard to ask about most of his lyrics, as elliptical as they tend to be, and to be honest they aren't especially relevant to enjoying his work - the flawed logic of "guy with guitar => confessional songriter" trope has been plenty dismantled elsewhere. still, i can't help but wonder, in the wake of two widely-hailed "autobiographical" (but still markedly abstruse) albums and a third that sure feels starkly confessional but flies in the face of the fact of his happy marriage - unless it's a tortured and album-long revisitation of a past breakup(s) in which case i wonder what lalitree's thinking - where, exactly, is john in all of this.

plus, if goats-fanboy = darnielle-spotter, there are tantalizing glimpses of the carefully-selectively-hidden man himself that come in his confessional song introductions (i reckon maybe two or three per show are revealing in some way - his banter at the haverford show last year significantly changed my understanding of the sunset tree, and even if there's something distasteful in the smack of "detective work" i'm sort of surprised there isn't more of an online community devoted to exchanging such "clues") and even in the emotionally charged delivery of certain lines. there may not be much "content" conveyed in his passionate delivery, but the unmistakable intensity (his forceful whisper, his removed glasses, his clenched face and taut, raised palm, his open mouth and its 'silent shout') confirms the emotional resonance of songs whose lyrics only hint at the possibility of great emotion. i love the way he seems to inhabit each of his songs as he performs it; the sense that he is re-living (even the fictional?) scenarios whose essence they capture. that way that, although their substance may remain ineffable, their impact is unmistakably there in that moment, and if you're there, you can share the moment with him too.

key example of this at the black cat show: he introduced "baboon" with the repeated mantra, "hope it never happens to you" - solemnly proferring the wisdom that, though we can't know another's hopes, he hopes we share with him the hope, that "it" never happens to us or to anyone else, hope it doesn't. the song is wonderfully intense, as performed there and on album, and although the lyrics are hopelessly elusive about what's actually happening, darnielle's spoken prologue attests to the gravity of its horror, and affirms the underlying sense that even his most impenetrable songs are about something deeply real to him.

7. john darnielle's mystery is that he's an ordinary-looking, overly articulate, jovial and wisecracking but - it sometimes seems - also painfully introverted, bespectacled, place-name-obsessed boxing fan and classics geek who has the ability to craft marvelously concise and - if you surrender to them - hauntingly poetic songs about the emotional experience of contemporary life and relationships. sharon jones' mystery is that she makes soul music not only vital and relevant, but personally meaningful as a contemporary individual. these mysteries - not all that mysterious, perhaps, but entrancing nevertheless - are at their most pronounced in these artists' respective live performances, where they are, in turn, perpetuated, complicated, investigated, rendered insignificant, debunked, reenacted, and never, we hope, quite resolved... but that's why you gotta go back and see them again.

contEMPt and redEMPtion: day two

way overdue, obv., but i've still got it in enough my head to do this, with my notes. so, saturday.

the first panel i went to was a disappointment. i already the intriguingly titled "another darkchild classic: the role of forgery in shaping rodney jerkins' sonic signature" (or something like that) was not going to be presented, but i didn't find out until the panel started that cynthia fuchs, with her paper on "selling linsday lohan," was also a no-show. especially a shame because i think that would have been the only teen-pop-related paper in the whole conference, except for "girl groups in the modern mix," which i'll get to in just a minute. i tried to email ms. fuchs (this page seems out of date, but it still conveys that she r0xX - check out those syllabi) to see if she'd send me a copy of her lindsay paper, but i haven't gotten a response (should prob. try harder.)

the two papers that were left had some potential, but turn out to be that interesting. thom swiss is a cultural studies type who was just starting his exploration of "pop portraits," and it just wasn't very well-formed; basically a non-art historian using rudimentary art historical techniques (like juxtaposing contemporary images with reference 'source' images from 'classical' art or whatever) to try to say "something" about the way images operate. i guess the something was that they resonate in reference to other images in an established cultural context, and that we perceive them ("celebrity" pop portraits) as cultural artifacts and never as art. (also he misreferenced the title of john berger's book throughout, which was a little weird.) then courtney young, despite her enticing title, did an informative but pretty surface reading of political incorrectness in beyonce's (passive?) "passing" [not so convincingly unique - mariah carey seems like a more interesting case, as was discussed in the q+a] and gwen's (substantially more disturbing?) "cultural vampirism - w/r/t the harajuku girls (also earlier no doubt stuff, but to lesser extreme.) the discussion was a little better; her friend in the audience had much more insightful things to say. well, i wish i'd gone to the "listening closets" panel on the indigo girls and ani difranco, like skelly did. but whatever.

the next two panels were fantastic. the black composers one was just a pure joy, especially joe schloss on sly stone and janet sarbanes on p-funk. schloss dissected the complex rhetoric of sly and the family's highly deliberate ("artificial") self-(mis)representation based on the manipulation of contrast - the contradictory image of the black hippy or 'freaky wild man' vs. genius frontman/puppetmaster; the communally-focused aesthetic of soul music blended with the confessional mode of rock; and particularly the disconnect between upbeat, uplifting music and sardonic, often bleak lyrics. he pointed out examples of bizarre self-reference (the weird "look at mister stewart!" interlude in "life"; the great "living, loving, overdubbing" in-joke in "sing a simple song") and went on to examine how sly couched his personal desperation and nihilism in shades of deceptive redemption. well, i hope he makes it into a soul-sides post, as insinuated, because then we can read it and enjoy it instead of me trying to summarize it. janet sarbanes had somewhat less of an interpretive agenda, but a very engaging presentation that shed a lot of light on george clinton's project of "redefining the terms of transcendence" and creating a metaphorical cosmology that functions as a radically subversive political "poetics."

[whoa. i wrote this forever ago and never posted it, because i never finished it. hands-down the most memorable thing at the conference was the very next panel; this one:

>> Girl Groups and Yacht Rockers: Male Sexuality and Its Discontents*
Moderator: Craig Werner
Venue: Demo Lab
Featuring:
Heather Stur, "Nobody Knows What's Goin' on in My Mind: The Girls Tell the Story"
Mike Cepress, "Pink Taffeta Gowns: Girl Groups and the Iconography of Sexual Identity"
Leah Mirakhor, "What a Fool Believes: The Enduring Popularity of Yacht Rock"
Charles Hughes, "From Little Eva to Lil Kim: Girl Groups in the Modern Mix"

very briefly, since nobody's likely to read this - well, this was i think unique in being a pre-organized panel; all of the speakers (save one maybe?) were craig werner's grad students from wisconsin. being grad students they were less polished than a lot of the presenters, but they were also closer to my age, which made it more exciting for me. also exciting is that they were talking about girl groups. except for ms. mirakhor, who didn't so much "give a talk" as "show clips from the 40-year old virgin for no apparent reason." (which isn't to say i didn't enjoy her presentation.) but the clear highlight was charles hughes' polemic about modern girl-pop acts (not very many are groups) and how they occupy a directly analogous place to the 'classic' girl groups of the '60s, and should be valued comparably. actually, it wasn't even so much his paper (although his impassioned delivery was definitely inspiring) as the q+a firestorm that followed, wherein the choir bristled at the notion that they were being preached to. this included christgau calling hughes out and telling him to "name names" (including guralnick, as i've alluded to elsewhere), and some kind of nasty intergenerational sniping that i don't entirely remember. (popism may be approaching gospel but it's clearly still a battlefield and a sore subject...)

anyway, i wish i'd written about it at the time, but that's the gist of what happened. i'd still really like charles hughes to send me a copy of his paper, maybe i'll bug him again.

oh yeah, and after that i heard the much more relaxed and low-key (thank goodness!) panel that featured a fairly silly and left-field discussion of rock novels, an entertaining exploration of ELO's out of the blue album, and the consummately enjoyable greil marcus talking about nothing especially interesting, but you didn't care because he's just so articulate and intelligent and kindly that he's a pure pleasure to hear regardless of the subject. his paper was about commercials, but most saliently he talked about enjoying the kinks and the our new orleans album.

*wow, i totally don't remember that bizarre subtitle, i think they might have ditched that before the conference.]

EMPirical EMPathy: day one

time to talk about the conference. before it gets any longer ago. i'm just going to go day by day and discuss the panels in order, and see where it gets me. so this is about the presentations i heard on friday.

as mentioned, i missed the opening/keynote discussion with st. merrit, which seems to have engendered the most debate of anything at the conf, sparking a 'net controversy that i need to make myself stop reading now and get on with this - seems to me that it's less about rockism and racism per se (though there are of course lessons to be extrapolated) than about jess hopper jumping to unfriendly conclusions and being called out before she realized her mistake and apologized (at least she got her brain fite!) - i wont even link to it, but you can find it, i promise.

well anyway, my conference EXPerience didn't start until friday morning, in the "demo lab" - the most intimate of the three conference spaces, which is why it had maybe the best post-q+a discussions i was around for all weekend. notwithstanding some great storytelling and insights about the conflicting racial images in the marketing of blues from yuval taylor, the highlight of the panel was easily drew daniel's multivalent reading of "sweet home alabama." taking as a starting point one particularly fraught experience of hearing the song among a crowd of 'bama frat boys on july 4th, he delved into the minutia of (as he air-scare-quoted it) "how it means," in the context of the cultural politics of the south, among other things. interestingly, apropos of earlier discussion on this site, he labelled it a Perfect Pop Song, citing in particular its malleability; the vagueness of intention that lets it function either as a vehicle of self-knowing wit or chest-thumping pride, depending on the listener. however, he was less interested in teasing out intention than in examing how it has been adopted, noting for instance that, in the line "in birmingham they love the governer", the jab at george wallace is nullified as the line effectively becomes a shout-out for folks from birmingham. more disturbingly, he suggested that, with its defiant, playgrond-style rebuttal to neil young's simplistic "southern man", the song can be taken as a too-facile vindication of southern culture, collapsing the political to the ethical and equating the wrong of yankee stereotyping of southerners with the wrong of slavery. the ringing retort to the former, he proposes, comes with only a "muffled apology" for the latter (an implied moral race-consciousness in the form of the wallace barb and the musical miscegenation of the backup vocalists, among other things.)

all this plus some ably-deployed if not strictly necessary references to a handful of theorists. the discussion that followed offered the audience some opportunity for music-knowledge flexing, as folks bandied about cover versions and other songs relevant to the skynyrd-young paradigm, by randy newman, warren zevon, tom petty, and others. as well as the first invocation of american idol. (at 10:35, as i marked in my notes.)

as is already obvious, race was a major focal point of discussion at the conference in various ways, probably most interestingly in considerations of music-listening guilt deriving from concerns of political-correctness rather than cultural-correctness - for example, the hip-hop panel that i unfortunately missed (including robt christgau), and in taylor's blues-condescension piece. the rock & roll double-consciousness panel i attended next took up some more convoluted narratives about race and identity, with guilt playing more of a personal/esthetic than political/ethical role, if that makes sense.

rj smith, who's working on a intrguingly narrowly focused book on l.a. music in the 40s, told the fascinating history of johnny otis, a figure in that scene who, greek-american by birth, effectively lived his life as a black man as seen by many of his peers and perhaps - this is tantalizingly unclear - himself. otis, as smith offhandedly mentioned, is a perfect example of a trickster character as discussed by lewis hyde, in his transgressively inhabiting racial boundaries and exploiting that position for both magic and mischief (smith played us a clip from otis' raunchy novelty outfit snatch and the poontangs that, he suggested, allowed whites forbidden access to black vernacular culture.) (interesting questions - from christgau maybe? - about double consciousness as double agency.)

devin mckinney gave a very personal account of his childhood obsession with, psychological empowerment through, and susequent college-theory-inspired rejection of (and more recent return to) the "feminine fear and ferocity" of black female pop. although i identified strongly with the first and to a lesser extent the second phases of this narrative, i was somewhat taken aback by the intensity of the shame he described in the third. he talked about college being a place where minds expand and emotions contract - definitely not my experience, in part because pc concerns are not so stifling as they were during his college days - and also described his rejection as something like rebelling against ones parents, children's literature, or anything that inescapably defined your formation as an individual, before, perhaps, later returning to it. i spoke with him for a while after the presentation, but i wasn't able to get beyond fumbling nods of agreement and identification to talk about the ways my experience differs/has differed, and why there has to be such shame in finding resonance with the work of singers of other race and gender. (too bad that he didn't talk more about bodies too, as daphne brooks brought up in the q+a). he had said in his paper, sort of maddeningly, that to answer the confused queries about the necessity of shame-based analysis, from those who don't feel shame, "would be to answer everything."

meanwhile, nate patrin (full paper there) talked about some other music that i know well from my childhood - well, some of it, anyway, not so much the boz scaggs. his thesis - about the trend of white rock musicians in the '70s incorporating elements of r'n'b having become a critical blind spot in rock historiography because of the macho and arguably racist/homophobic backlash of the punk ethos - seemed like it should be so obvious not to be worth mentioning, but probably it's really not, and the feeling that it might be is actually a powerful confirmation of its rightness. you know? (also, i enjoyed his line "if 'play that funky music' was a shock, then the disco reinvention of the beegees was an electric chair.")

the next panel, "bad subjects", was absolutely one of the highlights of the weekend, despite the looseness of its theme - the presenters were all very articulate and interested in talking to one another even if their papers didn't have the most readily evident connections. charlie bertsch stayed pretty theoretical and non-specific in what i was hoping would be a more personal or at least sociological discussion of power dynamics in pop listenership - but he did do some helpful groundwork for the theory of guilty pleasures, talking about taste and maturity and proposing a (not entirely convincing) parallel between the development of the physiological (literal) palate and the development of the metaphorical musical palate.

michaelangelo matos, whose paper (linked there) is really worth reading, gave such an engaging presentation that i barely took notes on it, but his paper, like drew daniel's, was an exemplary close reading of a song-as-phenomenon that focused on its personal and political ramifications. (and, has been discussed elsewhere, the paper involves some personal revelations that hit on quite an emotional level.)

and (conference organizer) eric weisbard's survey of the isley brothers convincingly painted them as remarkably ubiquitous as they are underheralded in music writing - despite their elevated positioning within black cultural heritage. his proposed explanation involved the absence of a serious/arty/experimental position (as in the rock side of the rock/pop division) in the context of r+b or black music in general. personally, i have been struggling with a closely related issue (as a record collector/librarian) - whether to explore the isleys through compilations or albums (sort of sorry to say, i'm leaning toward the glowingly-reviewed box set that's available through bmg.)

the most fascinating paper on the panel, however, and possibly of the whole conference, was by carl wilson whose blog (and its comments) has some of the best discussion of the conference (including the 'racism' "controversy") that i've read. there's a decent summing-up of his paper (“touch me, celine: a dionyssee or, poptimism versus the guilty displeasure”) here, which essentially grappled with the contradictions between celine's tremendous popularity and the possibly even more tremendous hatred she engenders, while asking some tough questions about distaste and what it reveals about us. the presentation was as full of serious insights as it was of humor (inevitable, but particularly well-deployed.) here are a few excerpts of ideas, paraphrased from my notes: • unlike cultural populism, which strives to find a sense of community beyond marketing demographics, poptimism is solipsistic • the displeasure many people find in opera is not comparably "guilty," since it doesn't involve mockery in the same way (but perhaps there is a correlation between celine and 'lite' opera stars such as jenny lind.) • dion's excesses can't be enjoyed as camp because they aren't in bad taste • her lush, technically prodigious voice is positioned as a luxury item - something to be "touched" [q.v. her comments on looters during katrina, to "let them touch things," because maybe they've never touched anything so luxurious] • she aspires to an outdated version of high culture, and is a figure of ridicule because of her inedptitude at symbol manipulation (which wilson called "our new sport"), as well as her unapologetic emotional directness • her songs aren't really memorable or "catchy" in the conventional sense because they are based on a different aesthetic of melody, coming from the european chanson tradition. also, one of the many amusing quotes that wilson shared with us; celine on why her music isn't more memorable or dynamic: i don't want to bother people while they're baking, [...] or making love - it would be rude to interrupt!

anyway, lots to talk about there, but i won't do it now. one more panel on friday, on lounge and muzak, which offered sort of a respite after some headier discussion earlier in the day. i'm definitely sorry that i missed christgau (who was speaking opposite this), but i'm glad i went to this one, because i met jentery sayers, who i got to interact with on a more personal level than anybody else i met (which isn't really saying that much.) also, even though jessica wood's presentation on harpsichord pop (which i probably could have skipped out on and caught xgau) turned out to be both sort of awkward and not very interesting contentwise (or at least relevant to the general discussion), it did offer a useful contrast to the rest of what was going on that revealed something about the specific fluencies and shared conceptions of discourse that exist even in the scatterbrained non-discipline this conference represents. (also, she showed some very amusing album art, including some prime enoch light covers.) with the probably exception of keir keightley's tone-setting opening paper - which faulted rock's selective historiography for overplaying the 'false patrimony' of american roots music and ignoring continuities of industrial pop, a tendency tied to rock's 'foundational rejection' of the shameful 'parents music' of '50s mainstream (and resisted in jonathan richman's "the old world" - this panel felt a little like the conference's amateur hour, which isn't to say it wasn't plenty revelatory or worthwhile. in this ironic milieu, as the "pop portraits" and "girl groups" panel on saturday made plain, it's the academics that are more likely to come off as amateurs or at least outsiders.

this panel marked the only time i raised my hand to ask a question - of mr. sayers, whose paper on my darlings the dan was a great pleasure to hear, although i think there are some issues left to consider in the distinction between their music as music and as phenomena - broadly, between intentionality and reception - as matos' and daniels' papers, among others, demonstrated. i also wish he had delved more into the lyrics (as he had originally planned), though it was a thrill for him to quote (arbitrarily) the lines immediately preceding my maybe-favorite steely dan line (the one i unpacked at length at the very bottom of this reminced post.) mostly, i think he and i just hear the band in very differently because of our personal histories, and, being younger than many of the conference attendees, certainly younger than most steely dan fans, and hearing them several decades removed from their original context, differently again from lots of other people - something that was evident from some of the audience comments on his paper. was it greil marcus that said the linkage between steely dan and punk was about disgust?

as far as michael daddino's (doesn't he look like joe kille?) paper "how not to defend muzak"... i don't even know what to say. you can read it here. i was really impressed at the level of expertise that emerged in the ensuing discussion from several avowed muzak devotees in the audience.

after all this, i chatted for a while with jentery and brooken (oh look they're married. whoa, that feels weird. well...they're easy to google) and they may have been inviting me to hang out, but i just went and chilled with sarah, because, you know.

so. i really didn't think i was going to get that in depth about all the presentations, but there it is. we'll see about saturday later. time to go play or something.