Pop Conference 2024

It's back in LA for the first time since 2011, you have six weeks to submit a proposal, the theme is legacy! See you there.

https://www.popconference.org/post/2024-pop-conference-call-for-presentations

I had quite a time in LA that time. I went to In-N-Out Burger with Ned Raggett! I saw all these ilxors. Good times.

and it looks like my 2011 paper fits the 2024 theme perfectly. i'm always one step ahead...

I went to In-N-Out the day before the conference started. I had to fly home for a wedding that year, alas. The weather was fabulous.

I went to In-N-Out Burger with Ned Raggett!

I was thinking about that the other day! Saw a photo of your kids now and I'm all "Well the height difference is less now..."

The weather was fabulous.

Early March, especially since this is looking like an El Niño, could very much be on the cooler/wetter side, but still worth it I'd say!

I am not going to be there and so hope the Friday 1 pm pacific time Pop Con presentation by USC professor Josh D Kun on the Mexican musical legacies of New Orleans will be streamed or recorded

Some of the P Funk related ones too

https://popcon2024.sched.com/

lots of interesting stuff

Mine is Friday afternoon and it will definitely be recorded…

oh looks good Ned. Good luck--

“The Three Shadows (of the Past): Trying to Tell the Story of Bauhaus”
Ned Raggett

By the time that the Internet had become a relative late 1990s commonplace, the band Bauhaus gave its blessing to a press cutting/discographical compilation about its first incarnation, Behind the Mask, edited by Andrew J. Brooksbank. By the time social media had reached the TikTok era, drummer Kevin Haskins had organized and presented a collection of archival photos across its various stages of life, Bauhaus Undead. But if you were a curious listener in the late 1980s wanting to know something — heck, anything — more about them, an anonymous bootleg fan-created staplebound collection titled after the band was the only way to go. This presentation looks at these three separate attempts to codify the still evolving legacy of Bauhaus, each telling, in their own specific way, a ‘true’ story of the group — depending on your point of view.

https://x.com/DDDrewDaniel/status/1765962962584613154?s=20

I hoped they videotaped this George Clinton talk. Sounds great

DJ Soul Sister (Melissa W) panel with P-Funk family members sounded great too

It was marvelous! Lynn Mabry is a star

It was grand all around!

And here's my presentation from it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYpT_GKxz3k

My unexpected favorite from this was Oscar Garza’s charming projected-nostalgia exercise of imagining the histories of 45s he found in used record stores with people’s address labels on them.

The Pop Conference’s greatness, I think, is pretty clearly its cheerful mix of modes: academic discipline, fan effusion, insider glimpses, perspective, sentiment, revelation. I’ve left feeling inspired after every one I’ve been to. I talked to Eric Weisbard, yesterday, missing his first PopCon ever from his adventure in Sweden, and reassured him that the spirit of the thing remains and thrives.

It does indeed! I think it repeating at USC next year will provide some useful stability.

Thanks for sharing the vid documentation! As a non-academic I still find the conference presentation format novel.

(Am also glad that Zax's intro reminded me of the existence of theshfl.com; didn't realize you were a contributor--great immersion/inviting-poking-around format on that site IMO.)

Ha, I have, how to put it, a FEW pieces there.

https://theshfl.com/source/Ned-Raggett

Here's my paper.

https://robertchristgau.substack.com/p/i-have-to-deal-with-it-it-is-the

Christgau has a lot of books and records , that I guess he spoke about for his Legacy presentation and showed the photos as well

He sure did!

My response to that piece (and most of all the accompanying photos): "Damn, bitch, you live like this?" I forwarded it to my wife and we shuddered in horror. Sorry, but living in the back room of a used book and record store is no kind of life, and (for me anyway) not at all conducive to clear thinking or good writing.

I mean, I wouldn't mind one office stuffed to the gills with music like that, but not lining all the hallways and other spaces. No thanks.

Carl Wilson looking at various presentations made at the conference, including ones from Alfred, Glenn and myself among others:

https://carlwilson.substack.com/p/sweeping-up-some-kernels-from-pop

Not sure where Greil Marcus read this RJ Smith discussion of Pop Conference 2024 but it made Marcus’ latest Real Life Top 10 in his substack

6. RJ Smith reports on the 2024 Pop Conference at USC (March 7-9). “Since 2002, the annual Pop Conference has been a chance for writers, scholars, musicians and fans of various strains of pop music to share their work. It had a stable home for many years at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture; when the Microsoft money was rerouted, the Pop Con rerouted itself. Six years ago conference organizers regrouped as a leaderless cooperative, which has planned the annual days-long conference through COVID, past stops at NYU, UCLA, Brooklyn, and now to the University of Southern California. (I’ve been going since the beginning and am a member of the cooperative).

“‘Legacy! Legacy! Music Collections and Archives’ was this year’s theme; in a conversation with USC’s Music School dean Jason King, the journalist and filmmaker dream hampton—she made the 2019 series Surviving R. Kelly—held the room with a smile that hardly hid the fire she was shooting. ‘I’m ready to be dragged again,’ she said of the hip-hop documentary she was currently shooting. ‘Hip-hop fans are such fucking Neanderthals.’ hampton said she never listened to Kanye and barely to the music today: ‘I grew up and hip-hop didn’t. Jay is just rapping about his wife or his stocks . . . I’m bored with men yelling at me. Bored with that.’ ‘I realized that archives were ultimately about death,” Robert Christgau had said in a talk about what to do with all that he had accumulated over nearly 60 years of practicing rock criticism; King said he wanted to talk about mortality. ‘They say history is told by the victors,’ hampton said. ‘I don’t know who won in hip-hop,’ her voice tailing off for maybe a second. ‘Capitalism. Sprite will be telling the history.’

“George Clinton is in and of himself an archive of beats, taboos, and sick sounds. In a keynote session with the writer Danyel Smith, a great story showed how fragile the idea of an archive might be. Shedding light from a silver-and-red spangled skipper’s cap and a Rorschach-print drape, Clinton broke off the tale of how the wicked forever guitar solo on Funkadelic’s 1975 ‘Get Off Your Ass and Jam’ came to be.

“The band was mired in a studio, wondering how they were going to top Motown when they couldn’t afford costumes for their show. Meanwhile a twenty-year-old white kid who had drifted into their field of vision said he could play some guitar on the track they were messing with. The kid raced home to get his instrument. They cut the song. Clinton said he gave the stranger 50 dollars and would have given him more, but by then he was gone. No credit on the album, no spotlight for the pedestrian who fell into Funkadelic history and then fell out for all time, into the archive of the unknown.

“‘I never got a chance to get his name.”

Did anyone do a thread or go to Pop Con 2025 in Los Angeles?

It looks like Ned R and alyxvesey are posting on Bluesky about #PopCon2025

I think today is last day

I presented yesterday afternoon.

How did it go? You were talking about Bryan Ferry's hair and other glam folks , right?

The last sentence read like a parody of a Lord Sotosyn paper.

His and Bowie's hair (r)evolutions, yeah. I'll post the paper tomorrow when I'm settled.

Thanks.

https://popcon2025.sched.com/list/simple

Here is/was the 2025 popcon schedule

It was a fun time! Here’s a full panel video I made with ex-ILXor Jeff Treppel as part of the team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t63jXGAg4i0

About Pop Conference 2026 | Proposals Due October 22, 2025

2026 Thematic Considerations
At this pivotal moment in cultural history, when pop music confronts extraordinary creative and
existential challenges, when journalism battles for its autonomy and survival, when the nation
experiences profound social and political upheaval, and when higher education faces ongoing
pressure to shift its foundational principles, we invite papers about the ways music and writing
has always led us back from, or toward, precariousness and the edge—the very brink of
despair, meaning, performance conventions, community, change.
Participants might situate their work amidst any number of seismic shifts, historical or
contemporary. Those may include the death of local radio and the consolidation of cultural
gatekeeping (echoing the decline of community-based stations and the earlier monopolies of
The 24th Annual Pop Conference - Call for Presentations
network-era broadcasting); the hegemony of a handful of producers dominating the charts
(connected to earlier eras of concentration of power, from Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building); the
ideological battles within and around country music stretching back to the culture wars of the 1960s and controversies over artists like The Chicks; the rise of AI-generated content flooding
streaming platforms (a disruption resonant with earlier technological upheavals such as the
player piano, the phonograph, or Napster).
There is also the nostalgic resurgence of vinyl and tactile music culture; the reckoning with
hip-hop’s legacy as its founding generation passes from the scene, paralleling how jazz, blues,
and rock were canonized only after their pioneers aged or died); and resource and
programmatic/curricula challenges in music and journalistic education, recalling earlier crises of
legitimacy in conservatories and journalism schools during times of cultural transition).
Other spaces of exploration include the ongoing vitality of marginalized communities creating
music despite displacement and erasure, as has occurred across the Great Migration, diasporic
movements, and other historical dislocations. There’s also the vanishing infrastructure for music
criticism — from profiles to reviews to the training and mentorship of neophytes to the very
definition of what constitutes “criticism” in 2025 and beyond, following earlier transformations in
cultural authority from the rise of mass-market magazines to the blog era.
We seek proposals that confront these challenges with scholarly rigor, journalistic urgency,
cultural insight, and outside-the-box thinking. Below is a partial list of big ideas that Pop
Conference presentations might address. Your submissions needn’t explicitly answer these
questions, nor do they need to be as sweeping in scope. Consider them guiding concepts:
● Music as an escape from or into “mayhem” (with thanks to Lady Gaga).
● Musical expression or arts coverage that skirts the edges of convention or propriety.
● Country music’s battlegrounds, from the Nashville Sound to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter to
BigXthaPlug.
● Protest music across ruptures: Depression, Civil Rights, AIDS crisis, and today’s
movements.
● Artists exploring the outer reaches of vocal, instrumental, or performative possibility.
● The intricacies and aftershocks of women’s impact on pop from Rosetta Tharpe to Lilith
Fair to Janet Jackson to Chappell Roan.
● Pandemic/quarantine music and how 2020-23 disrupted music creation, music touring,
and music culture across genres.
● The viability and essentiality of “fringe” or subaltern communities.
● The meaning of critical discourse in an age of algorithmic curation.
● The meaning of authenticity in an era of manufactured sound.
● The continued dominance of digital media and its profound impact on journalistic design
and the visual storytelling of pop and its tangents.
The 24th Annual Pop Conference - Call for Presentations
● The stakes of agency and resistance in a moment of radical disenfranchisement.
● The faceless gatekeepers of a no-gatekeeping era: Apple Music, TIDAL, Spotify,
Amazon Music and YouTube Music.
● Historical precedents for music on the brink, from the Harlem Renaissance to punk.
The politics of sonic censorship, from “obscene” jazz and rock to TikTok bans to
incomplete catalogs at streaming services.
● What we lose when we lose liner notes and other contextual and factual materials.
● The shifting infrastructures of music history, news and criticism, from Rolling Stone,
Behind the Music, and VIBE to reviews and storytelling via Instagram Reels, Substack
newsletters, and defunct and vibrant social spaces from MySpace to Tumblr to Bluesky.
● Cycles of disruption, from the phonograph to Napster to AI.
● Music as diasporic resistance, from spirituals to reggaeton to drill.
● Nostalgia as critique: vinyl, analog, and retro revivals across eras.
● Global experimentation at the edge: Japanese noise, South African gqom, Mexican son
jarocho and beyond.
● And more…

https://www.popconference.org/

proposals due today

Not pitching this time (would rather hear other voices) but I'll be there in March as ever!

Submitted a pitch I was really with last year, no dice. Realized it’s just never going to happen for me

*.really happy with

Quite simple -- send a check or money order to yours truly.

Bribery! Scandal!

I knew it! :)