The EMP Pop Conference Wants You (If You’ve Got Something To Say, That Is)

The Experience Music Project has sounded the trumpets to annnounce its call for papers for its seventh annual spring Pop Conference, a weekend in lovely Seattle where a bunch of people who spend more time thinking about music than geopolitics or their loved ones, from across the academic-to-blogger range of interests and experience, come together to shoot the shit for what might possibly be the most fun it’s possible to have sitting around listening to people read. Past years have included presentations^* from both of your current Idolators, your former Idolator Mr. Raftery, and third Idolator (in the “fifth Beatle” sense) Mr. Matos. Even if you’re not so much into the public speaking thing, I highly recommend it as a music geek’s getaway. The full proposal is after the jump:

How does music resist, negate, struggle? Can pop music intensify vital confrontations, as well as ameliorating and concealing them? What happens when people are angry and silly love songs aren’t enough? The migrations and global flows of peoples and cultures; the imbalanced struggles between groups, classes, and nations: what has music’s role been in these ongoing dramas. We invite presentations on any era, sound, or geographic region. Topics might include:

- In conjunction with the new EMP|SFM exhibition, American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music, how Latino musics have shaped the American soundscape and challenge black and white rock-pop paradigms, or more broadly, the unsettling effects of immigration, internal migration, displacement, assimilation, and colonization

- How music enters politics: social movements and activist responses to crises such as New Orleans; entertainment’s connection to ideology and propaganda; music within “cultural policy” and as part of the public sphere; debates over copyright, corporate power, and cultural democracy; performing dissent

- Social and musical fragmentation: segregation and constructions of whiteness, divisions of class and gender, versus musical categorization and niche marketing, from big genres to smaller forms such as “freak folk”

- “Revolution” as a recurrent theme in popular music, a social or technological reality it confronts, or an association with particular genres and decades of music

- Clashes between communal, local, identity — tradition, faith, nativism — and cosmopolitan, global, modernization

- Music in times of war, economic crisis, adolescence, and other intense stress

- Agents of change: tipping points, latent historical shifts, carnivalesque subversions, and accidents or failures of consequence

- The sound of combative pop: what sets it apart?

More details, including deadlines for proposals and the distinguished panel of know-it-alls who will be judging your words, can be found at the Pop Conference’s official Web site.

* My “presentation” was actually a panel discussion moderated by Matos about the virtues of blogging. LOL @ foreshadowing.