EMP Pop Conference ’09 Goes “D.M.S.R.”

All the white people will be clapping their hands on the four when they get a load of the theme for next year’s Experience Music Project Pop Conference, where music writers from academia, journalism, blogs, and other places get together to collectively obsess over pop music. “Dance, Music, Sex, Romance: Pop and the Body Politic” is about as far to the other side as you can get from last year’s explicitly political focus, and ought to inject a little blood into things after this past April’s rewarding but fairly dry sessions. Below the jump, conference organizer Eric Weisbard fleshes things out a bit:

Though Prince seems to have bowdlerized “D.M.S.R.” in his concerts since becoming a Jehovah’s Witness, the relationship of pop music to sex, love, physical movement, and the body rarely stays hidden very long. For this year’s Pop Conference we invite presentations, addressing any period or style of music, that bring erotic and sensual issues to the forefront and connect them to political and aesthetic concerns. Rock and roll has long congratulated itself on riding the Big Beat over all sanctimonious opposition, but can we take our sense of these archetypal struggles somewhere beyond, say, Footloose?

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

* Languages of desire and union in pop: the relationship of ballads, tenderness, and couplehood to carnality and the commerce of bodies.
* Dancing and dance crazes as forces in pop history and the dancefloor as a particularly charged space of friction, play, and unsettling possibility.
* Pop passion as a conduit for capitalism, modernization, and transnational flows, but also local scenes, community formation, and religion.
* How the pop body is marked by, and marks out, race, gender, nationality, class, and region; music as a means for bodies sharing space.
* Music and the negotiation of sexual norms: sonic fetishism, erotics of pain and disorder, representations of beauty and ugliness.
* Social media and D.M.S.R. A YouTube answer video as a kind of love letter; the libidinal economy of music-sharing communities and Web 2.0 culture.
* Scandal and excess: the pop urge to take it to the limit; celebrity culture and indie puritanism; humor and hyperbole.
* Voice, gesture, and other modalities of embodiment and disembodiment.
* The diva figure, with all the complexity/trouble/pleasure that term carries.
* The many musical iterations of what a German Jewish immigrant, arrived at the dawn of modern pop, called “Makin’ Whoopee.”

Makin’ whoopee, indeed. The Conference is always a good time, and any excuse to visit Seattle is a good one. Can’t wait to see what gets accepted. (And yes, I am working on my own proposal right now.)

Call for Proposals: 2009 Pop Conference [EMP]