(Two short blocks South of The Kimmel Center, between Thompson and Sullivan Streets)
Light Hors D'oeurves provided / Cash Bar
About the short films:
Eleven of the twelve songs on Esperanza’s Spalding’s latest release, Radio Music Society, are accompanied by conceptual short films, which further express Esperanza’s inspiration and story behind each track. Shot in various locations including New York City; Barcelona, Spain; and Portland, Oregon; all films will be available to purchasers as a digital download or on a DVD in the deluxe version.
Venue phone #: 212 353 3474
Writing about how jazz in the mid-20th century reflected lived experience in New York city’s tenements, the scholar Shane Vogel quoted Duke Ellington’s description of his swing symphony, Harlem Air Shaft
“So much goes on in a Harlem air shaft...You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker.” In the crowded city, the musician-composer becomes a living receiver, distilling a static field of sounds and sensations into an evocative whole."
This keynote event gathers together four prominent artists whose work reflects a cosmopolitan worldview, with each artist rooted in his or her particular urban home.
Grammy winning Beninoise singer-songwriter Angelique Kidjo has truly had a global career, having recorded albums in a staggering array of languages, styles, genres and cities. Her recently-released live album Spirit Rising is a career retrospective featuring diverse guests like Ezra Koenig, Josh Groban and the Kuumba Singers.
Grammy winner Esperanza Spalding is about to release her third album, Radio Music Society, a border-crossing blend of jazz, soul, funk and pop that reflects the cities she loves: New York, Barcelona, and her birthplace of Portland, Oregon.
Philadelphia-bred, Brooklyn-based Santigold (Santi White) is one of the brightest lights of the East Coast bohemian underground; her upcoming second album, Master of My Make Believe, takes her incendiary blend of hip hop, indie rock and dance music to a new level.
On his recent mixtape Nehru Jackets, Himanshu Suri (Heems) of the Queens-identified hip hop group Das Racist drops wit and wisdom about the ups and downs of life in Gotham’s five boroughs. Discussing their new work and how they’ve formed their own sound and vision in relationship to the urban spaces where they thrive, these artists consider what’s changed and what remains consistent in the half-century plus since the Duke found heaven in the clanging multiplicity of the air shaft.
Moderated by: Ann Powers
Books display (and coffee for participants) throughout day
Jeffrey Kim, Erin Cho, and Seung K. Yang, “Fashioning the Wave of K-Pop beyond Asia through Transnational Communities”
Myoung-Sun (Kelly) Song, “The S(e)oul of Hip-Hop: Searching for the Meaning of Hip-Hop in South Korea”
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, “Mare Liberum (The Free Sea) in Karen O’s Native Korean Rock”
Chris Randle, “Driving Freely Through the World:
Cosmopolitanism in K-pop”
Moderator: Hua Hsu
Patrick Deer, “‘The Cassette Played Poptones’: Punk’s Pop Embrace
of the City in Ruins”
Jessica Schwartz, “Conform or Die: Composing the City as National Security Threat, 1945-1962”
John Melillo, “Revenant Frequencies: Destructive Sound in “The Waste Land” to NYC Ghosts and Flowers”
J. Martin Daughtry, “Evocative Objects and Provocative Actions on the Acoustic Territory of War”
Moderator: John Melillo
Gayle Wald, “’Deliver De Letter’: ‘Please Mr. Postman,’ the Marvelettes, and the Afro-Caribbean Imaginary”
Emily J. Lordi, “Moving Out: White Flight and Sly and the
Family Stone’s ‘Stand!’”
Koushik Banerjea, “Cities of the Dead: Soundscaping Race, Memory
and Desire in a Forgotten London”
Wills Glasspiegel and Martin Scherzinger, “Beyoncé’s Afro-Future:
Power and Play in ‘Run the World (Girls)’”
Moderator: Banning Eyre
Rustem Ertug Altinay, “In Konya She Would Marry a Regular Dude, But Serife from Konya is Now a Lady”: Power, Sexuality and Cities in Gungor Bayrak’s Autobigraphic Songs”
Erin MacLeod, “Layers and Layers of Not-So-Dope Synths”:
Listening to the Music of Addis Ababa
Mark Lomanno,”Surfaces and (Archi)textures in Canarian Jazz”
Moderator: Barbara Browning
Steve Waksman, “On the World Stage: The Fisk Jubilee Singers and the World’s Peace Jubilee”
Keir Keightley, “From Hogan’s Alley to Tin Pan Alley: Media Synergy at the Turn of the Century”
David Brackett, “Fox Trots, Hillbillies, and the Classic Blues: Categorizing the 1920s”
Yuval Taylor, “’That’s Why Darkies Were Born’: Black Singers and the Minstrel Tradition in New York City, 1931–1933”
Moderator: Theo Cateforis
A discussion of the roles women have played in constituting radical counterpublic cultures within cities-—from Ellen Stewart’s La Mama theater to Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse project in the 70s to the contemporary explosion of “girls rock camp” programs throughout the world—and how the participants’ own feminist musicking and educational activism work is continuing, broadening, and redefining the terms of that legacy.
With: Lauren Onkey, LaRonda Davis, Karla Schickele, Maureen Mahon
Moderator: Daphne Carr
Banning Eyre, “Cairo Soundscape: Revolution and Cultural Renaissance”
Maysan Haydar, “Wild in the (Arab) Streets: Songs for the Revolutions”
Hypatia Vourloumis, “Bad Athena: Crises, Syntheses and Sounds of a European Other”
Moderator: Katherine Meizel
William Hutson, “Abrasive Nostalgia: A Noisescape of Deindustrialization”
Vivian L. Huang, “Not That Innocent: Britney Spears,
Laurel Nakadate and Strangers”
Julia DeLeon, “Dance Through the Dark Night: Distance,
Dissonance and Queer Belonging”
Moderator: Gustavus Stadler
Lori Brooks, “The Urban Poetics of Ragtime”
Jonathan Bogart, “The Little Window in My Shanty Streets: Urban Romanticism in Latin Music between the Wars”
Moderator: Charles McGovern
Kathryn Ostrofsky, “Taking Sesame to the Streets: Young Children’s Interactions with Pop Music in the Urban Classrooms of 1970s New York”
Mark Coleman, “’I Hear Music in the Streets’: New York’s Postdisco
Boombox Democracy”
Scott Seward, “Puerto Ricans, Black Men, and No Less Than One
Dominican: Slammin’ the Rock with Todd Terry, Chep Nuñez , Blade Runners, and The Blue Jean Regime—An Exegesis of 1990’s Warlock Records War Party Compilation Sliced and Edited in the Style Of Omar Santana”
Moderator: Jim Miller
Summer Kim Lee, “‘Singin’ Up On You’: Queer Intimacies of the Sonorous Body In ‘The New Sound Karaoke’”
Daniel Sander, “Girl. Reverb. Notes on Queer Tactics of
Sonorous Difference”
Kyessa L. Moore, “(Sub)Spacialized Urban Sound, Expressive
Communion and Identificatory Dislocations”
This panel is sponsored by the Feminist Working Group. Since 2008, we have organized panels, get-togethers and networking opportunities for all feminists who participate in EMP Pop Conference.
For more information about our activities, and to get involved,
please visit http://feministworkinggroup.blogspot.com
Moderator: Lucy O’Brien
RJ Smith, “There Was a Time: James Brown in Augusta”
Dave Tompkins, “The Beat Who Cheated Death”
Carlo Rotella, “Shipping Up to Boston: A Pecking Order”
Moderator: Andrew Ross
This rock camp music showcase will bring to life, and sound out, the spirit of feminist music empowerment through arts educational activism. It will feature a performance by the band Still Saffire, playing originally composed songs.
A ramble through the life of the man Robert Christgau called the other genius to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene, with pointers on the days before Bob, Harry Smith, the Fugs, playing music with Sam Shepard, Mississippi John Hurt, and Lester Bangs, the great Have Moicy album, and the recent recording of Have Moicy 2.
Matthew Carrillo-Vincent, “Ears to the Streets, Peripheral Beats:
The New Social Map of Backpack Rap”
Evelyn McDonnell, “The Roads to Ruin”
Rachel Devitt, “I Love a (Pride) Parade: Queer Community-Building,
Temporary Spaces and Politicized Kitsch among LGBT Marching Bands”
Moderator: Elizabeth Keenan
Jesse Jarnow, “From Gem Spa to the World: New York Rocker and
the Exploding City”
Lisa Jane Persky, “58th & 5th: My Dream Date With The Ramones”
Keith Harris, “Did New York Kill Indie Rock?”
Moderator: Evie Nagy
Tracy McMullen, “In the Beginning, You Are There: Cloning
Genesis and the Return of the Urbane”
Tavia Nyong’o, “Shame and Scandal and Zombies”
Karen Tongson, “Drive and Sounds of the ‘80s Metropolis”
Moderator: Charles Kronengold
Raymond Knapp, “The Sound of Broadway’s Mean Streets”
Jacqueline Warwick, “’Bigger than Big and Smaller than Small’: Child Stars, Street Urchins, and Little Orphan Annie”
Elizabeth L. Wollman and Susan Tenneriello, “Spider-Man: Turn off
the Dark and the Ambivalence of Spectacle”
Moderator: Caroline Polk O’Meara
This gathering will examine the economics, aesthetics and ethnicities of improvisational music culture in present-day NYC, with special emphasis on how older definitions of jazz have been provoked, transformed and morphed by contemporary urban artists and audiences. The role of digital technologies and social media will be in the mix too, as well as race, class and gender issues and the impact of gentrification.
With: Marika Hughes, Vijay Iyer, José James, Butch Morris, and Mazz Swift.
Moderator: Greg Tate
The explosion of international sounds in the pop sphere—associated with Pitbull, Black Eyed Peas, Shakira and M.I.A, among others-—has been paralleled and driven by a mirror-underground usually simply called global bass, ghetto bass, or tropical bass. This roundtable explores the power dynamics of cultural appropriation, tastemaking and music discovery within this digital space, looking at rap, Bollywood, kwaito, Baltimore club, dancehall, baile funk, bhangra, cumbia villera, etc., where they merge into this new melting pot/marketplace.
With: Rekha Malhotra aka DJ Rekha, Wayne Marshall, Venus X Iceberg
Moderator: Edwin STATS Houghton
Josh Kun, “Maquiladora de Sueños: Music in Factory City”
Blanca Méndez, “Tijuana Makes Some Noise: Ruidoson as a Response and Resistance to Violence in Baja California’s Largest City”
Jennie Gubner, “(Bar)rio Tango: The Politics of Locality in the Neighborhood Tango Scenes of Buenos Aires”
Kathleen Costello, “Manu Chao’s Sonic Embodiment of the Border: A Musical Ethics of the In-Between”
Moderator: Vivien Goldman
Myron Gray, “French Music in Federal Philadelphia”
Elijah Wald, “The Dirty Dozens: From Mississippi Blues to Gangsta Rap”
Reebee Garofalo, “Not Your Parents’ Marching Bands: ‘HONK! Pedagogy’ and Music Education”
Elisabeth Woronzoff-Dashkoff, “A Minor Representation as a Major Identity: Interviews with Musicians with Disabilities”
Moderator: David Suisman
Keith Negus, “Making it in the Big City: Small Town Boys, Country Girls and Suburban Dreamers”
Jennifer C. Lena, “The Ground on which the Race was Run:
Careers in Pop”
Carl Wilson, “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful:
The Death and Life of Great North American Scenius”
Kembrew McLeod and Loren Glass, “The Killer Apps Play the Sounds
of the Cities”
Moderator: Fabian Holt
Michaelangelo Matos, “A Trip to MARS-FM: The Story of L.A.’s Rave Radio Station, 1991-92”
Al Shipley, “Tough Breaks: The Story of Baltimore Club Music”
Benjamin Court, “Feeling the Political in ‘Can You Feel It?’”
Joshua Clark Davis, “G.I. Rap and Euro-Dance: How American Soldiers and Germans Created a Hybrid Hip Hop Culture in Cold-War Frankfurt”
Moderator: Holly George-Warren
Rebekah Farrugia and Kellie Hay, “‘The Foundation’ in Detroit: Challenging Conventional Ideologies about Sex and Gender in Hip Hop”
Denise Dalphond, “Eclecticism in Detroit: Diverse Dance Party Scenes in Electronic Music”
Carleton S. Gholz, “Remembering Rita: Sound, Sexuality, and Memory”
Moderator and Respondent: Marlon Bailey
The migration of sounds and ideas across time and place encourages synthesis; giving rise to avant garde, radical, and futurist voices. What (other) worlds open up and what (outer) spaces are formed? How do regional sites remix global flows? What factors/forces enable or prohibit certain voices from finding an audience in the national, global, or cyber scene? How do we reconcile organicism of sound, as musicians produce out of particular worlds, with the reckless and restless ways music circulates?
With: Kyle Dargan, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture), and the work of Barry Jenkins
Moderators: Jayna Brown, Daphne Brooks and Tavia Nyong’o
Join us for a toast to music writing at this end of day gathering, which marks the book launch of Pop When the World Falls Apart: Music in the Shadow of Doubt and will include an editor’s call for submissions to The Journal of Popular Music Studies. Sponsored by Rock’s Backpages (www.rocksbackpages.com), along with Wiley-Blackwell and Duke University Press.
Acclaimed music historian Tim Lawrence, author of Loves Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, calls New York dance party Libation “one of the few parties in New York where the sonically and socially progressive lineage that began with the Loft and carried on at parties such as the Gallery, the Paradise Garage, the Underground Network and Body & Soul lives on.” Ian Friday, Manchildblack, and Afro Mosaic Soul have teamed up with this conference to present a special evening of one of Gotham’s hottest underground dance parties: Libation (The Global Soul Experience). Resident mixologist Ian Friday (Global Soul Music) will spin a seamless set of deep, underground, soul-drenched music.
Admission: $10 for EMP/IASPM-US, $15 general
“Like being transported into another era. What an amazing performer!” -- Laurie Anderson
Join singer/archivist Bree Benton as Bowery waif “Poor Baby Bree” and musical director and frequent EMP presenter Franklin Bruno for a revue of comic and pathetic songs dating from the 1870s-1910s, the golden age of New York vaudeville. Hear songs by Irving Berlin (“Yiddle, With Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime”), variety impresario Tony Pastor (“In the Bowery”), Irish-American musical theater pioneers Harrigan & Hart (“The Market on Saturday Night”), and other rarely-performed numbers, reconstructed from original sheet music and songsters. With Franklin Bruno (piano), Karen Waltuch (viola), Jacob Garchik (tuba/trombone), and Nick Russo (banjo/mandolin). 60 minutes.
Please visit www.poorbabybree.com for more information and advance ticketing.
Admission at door: $8 for Pop Conference/IASPM-US attendees, $12 general
Books display (and coffee for participants) throughout day
Andreana Clay, “Feelin’ Mighty Real: Race, Space, and Identity in the Castro”
Dawn-Elissa Fischer, “Bay Area Hiphop Politics and Police”
Mako Fitts, “‘Third World Wide’: Transnational Narratives of Resistance Amidst Seattle’s Growth Machine”
Shana L. Redmond, “The Last Anthem: Police Power and the Prophesy
of Rebellion in L.A.”
Moderator: Deborah Vargas
Del F. Cowie, “Hardly Home, But Always Reppin’: The evolution of
Toronto’s Hip-Hop Sound”
Jason Lee Oakes,“’Who’s That? Brooown!’: Das Racist and the Queens Connection in International Hip Hop”
Justin D Burton, “Trillin in Harlem: The Unmistakable Crunkness of New York’s A$AP Rocky”
J. Griffith Rollefson, “’Ghettos du Monde’: Sounding the Ghetto from Paris to Berlin”
Moderator: Jalylah Burrell
S. Alexander Reed, “Industrial Music, Urban Squatting, and the Berlin Wall”
Jason King, “Berlin Outernational: The Weird/Wonderful Travels of George Kranz’s 1983 ‘Din Daa Daa’”
Alexander Weheliye, “White Brothers with No Soul? Technospaces in 1990’s Berlin”
Luis-Manuel Garcia, “BerMuDa in Berlin: Techno-Tourism, Music Scenes, and the Scale of Nightlife during the Berlin Music Days Weekend”
Moderator: David Grubbs
Esther Clinton, “The Gothic Menace, Then and Now: Gothic Literature, Heavy Metal Music, and Moral Panics”
Eric Smialek, “How Does Metal Mean? Ways that Musicology Can Contribute to Metal Studies”
Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, “Hell Bent for Metal: A Study of Queer Fans of Heavy Metal”
Nelson Varas-Díaz & Eliut R. Rivera-Segarra, “Heavy Metal music in the Caribbean Setting: Social Practices and Meanings of Music at the Periphery”
Moderator: Jeremy Wallach
Barry Shank, “All Your Rock Critic Friends Think Brian Wilson
Must Have Died”
Kevin Fellezs, “Another Song: Contemplating Karen Carpenter’s
Suburban Soul Music and An Aesthetics of Mainstream Pop”
Kevin Gaines, “Beyond Soul: The Case of Stevie Wonder, Jazz-Pop, and Music that will Last Forever”
Jessica Wood, “Noise and the Canon: The Meaning of Classical Music
in Late-1960s Rock”
Moderator: Andrew Bienen
With the internet, some urban spaces devoted to interaction around music are changing and even disappearing. Do internet-mediated musics like chillwave implode the notion of the urban, and, more generally, the local? Participants in this roundtable will discuss the dynamics of recent urban scenes, virtual communities of shared aesthetics, the movement of American artists and media from local scenes to global centers, and the changing notions of “place” in a world of home-based and mobile media.
With: Kyle Barnett, Paula Carino, Wendy Fonarow, Will Hermes, and Mark Richardson
Moderator: Holly Kruse
In 2015, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture will open on the National Mall in Washington, DC. This roundtable panel will discuss how regional variation and the impact of urbanization and migration on the history of African American music should be addressed in the museum’s exhibitions.
With: Chuck D., Dwan Reece, Kevin Strait, and Timothy Anne Burnside
Moderator: Dwan Reece
Philip Gentry, “The Erotics of Chance”
Emily Tartanella, “’A Country Mile Behind the World’: A Smithsian sense of place”
Elias Krell, “Singing the Contours of the City: Transvocality and
Affect in Lucas Silveira’s Toronto”
Moderator: Franklin Bruno
Matthew Hayes, “Preserving America’s Endangered Soundscapes: An Emerging Field in Historic Preservation”
Barrett Martin, “Preserving Musical Memory: Physical Space and dSocio-Economic-Cultural Identity”
Devon Powers, “Writing Music (Into) History”
Moderator: Laura Lavernia
Adrienne Brown, “Rehearing Hip-Hop Automotivity”
Francisco Robles, “’This bitter earth may not be so bitter after all’:
Political Promise and Sonic Geography in Killer of Sheep and We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite
Sonya Posmentier, “City Streets, Country Roads: Zora Neale Hurston’s Moving Sound”
Moderator: Alexandra T. Vazquez
Mark Burford, “Swing Low: The Rise and Fall of the Sweet Chariot”
Christina Zanfagna, “’Earthquake Music’: The Cataclysmic Landscapes and Soundscapes of Holy Hip Hop”
Danielle Brown, “‘Leroy, Where Yuh Mudda Gone’: Language, Gender, and the Urbanization of Trinidad Parang Music”
Moderator: Gregory Erickson
Jeremy Wallach, “Pluralism vs. Islamic Fundamentalism in Jakarta’s Extreme Metal Scene”
Aliza Shvarts, “Mimesis, Metal, and the Politics of Doom”
J.D. Considine, “Tokyo Style Wars: Death Metal, Shibuya-kei and Social Status in Detroit Metal City”
Moderator: Mark Spicer
Dave Laing, “Charlie Gillett: Sound Citizen of London”
Robert Christgau, “The Original Sound of the City: How Charlie Gillett Named This Conference”
Charlie McGovern, “’Up in the Streets of Harlem’: Black Vocal Groups and Postwar Urban Life”
Moderator: Karl Hagstrom Miller
This roundtable highlights Alice Bag’s new memoir. Violence Girl
seizes the opportunity to explore within the Hollywood punk scene the
relationship between women and the city and the relevance of Alice’s East L.A. community in her music making. With Alice accompanied by her guitar, the roundtable considers the 1970s Hollywood punk scene as a vehicle for entering, if temporarily, segregated social spaces, and as a space that nurtured a feminist-inspired humor as social critique.
With: Alice “Bag” Velasquez, Michelle Habell-Pallán
and Sean Carrillo
Moderator: Bibbe Hansen
This event contributes to the dialogue about Sounds of the City performatively, with a live, low-tech concert performance of “El Parque,” a half-hour episode from Vidas Perfectas, the Spanish-language version of Robert Ashley’s landmark work Perfect Lives (1977-1983). This all-new version features Ned Sublette, Elio Villafranca, Peter Gordon, Elisa Santiago, and Abraham Gómez Delgado, in the roles originally performed by Robert Ashley, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Peter Gordon, Jill Kroesen and David van Tieghem, respectively.
With: Ned Sublette, Elio Villafranca, Peter Gordon, Elisa Santiago, and Abraham Gómez Delgado
Matt Thomas, “From Counterculture 2 Cyberculture and Back Again”
Zaheer Ali, “MPLS (Minneapolis): As Site and Sound”
Moderator: Adam Sexton
Whitney Houston’s engrossing “homegoing” funeral service was a potent reminder of her local New Jersey roots and instantiation in traditional black Baptist gospel ritual, even as the service itself drove home how global, hybrid and ubiquitous her cross-over approach to superstardom had been. This roundtable considers the impact of Whitney Houston on singing, on music styles and formats, and on the business itself; and her contribution to the way we think about race, gender, class, and post-civil rights / post-soul politics.
With: Nelson George, Michael A. Gonzales, Margo Jefferson,
Scott Poulson-Bryant, and Danyel Smith
Moderator: Jason King
David Gilbert, “The Unlikely Musical Gumbo of Black Manhattan before World War I: James Reese Europe’s Syncopated Symphony Orchestras at Carnegie Hall”
Clarence Bernard Henry, “The Sounds of ‘Black Swan,’ A New York City Icon in Early Recording History”
Cookie Woolner, “’Ethel Must Not Marry’: Black Swan Records and the Queer Classic Blues Women”
Moderator: Jody Rosen
Kemi Adeyemi, “Hipster Soul: Sonic Blackness and the Gentrifying City”
Molly McGlone, “The Sounds of Philadelphia: Examining the Creative Economy in a Post-Industrial City”
Fabian Holt, “How Live Music Clubs in New York City Have Adapted to Gentrification: The Case of the Bowery Presents”
Moderator: Keith Negus
Carolina Gonzalez, “DomiNegro Turf: Whose Uptown?”
Keith M. Harris, “‘I don’t care anymore’: Deep Soul, Doris Duke, and the Allegory of Migration”
Michael B. Gillespie, “We Almost Lost Detroit: Sonic Historiography, 9/11, and Theo Parrish”
Moderator: Ken Wissoker
Christine Bacareza Balance, “Pinoise Rock”
Wendy Hsu, “Transforming Diaspora: The Kominas’s Translocal
Socio-musical Geography”
Shin Hyunjoon, “Translocal and Collaborative Creativity Between
Japan (Tokyo) and Korea (Seoul): Three Cases of Japanese Rock
Musicians in Seoul”
Moderator: Barry Shank
Mashadi Matabane, “‘All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave’: The Cultural Politics of Black Women Musicians with an ‘Axe’ to Grind”
Laina Dawes, “‘Black Metal is not for n@#$s, stupid b@#h!’: Black Female Metal Fans’ Inter/External Culture Clash”
Birgitta J. Johnson, “Women of the L.A. ‘Undergrind’: Female Artists Creating Alternatives to Mainstream Hip-hop’s Plastic Ceiling”
Moderator: Meagan Sylvester
Gustavus Stadler, “Aural Drag: Warhol as Pop Listener”
Eric Lott, “Andy’s Mick: Warhol Builds a Better Jagger”
Bryan Waterman, “It’s Too ‘Too Too’ to Put a Finger On”: Tom
Verlaine’s Lost Lisp and the Secret History of the New York Underground”
Moderator and Respondent: Jonathan Flatley
Jody Rosen, “‘Darktown Strutters’ Ball’: Shelton Brooks’ Chocolate City”
Greil Marcus, “‘Maybe Someday Your Name Will Be in Lights’: Robert Johnson Takes the City”
Ann Powers, “‘Free Your Head’: Psychedelic Rock’s Erotic Cities”
Rob Sheffield, “Gold Scenes Inside The Weirdmine: The Doors and LA”
Moderator: Eric Weisbard
David Cantwell, “Tired of this Dirty Old City: Country Music’s Freedom Problem, and Ours…”
Jasen Emmons, “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud, Loud Music: How the Bakersfield Sound Saved Country Music from Itself”
Sara Marcus, “Country Music and Urbanism”
Moderator: Lauren Onkey
On October 10, the Knight Foundation and the NEA announced the winners of the first Community Arts Journalism Challenge, projects based in Charlotte, Detroit, Miami, Philadelphia, and San Jose. That same day, the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program announced its 2011 Fellows and Engine29.org “Pop-up” Lab in Los Angeles. Both initiatives are evidence of new institutional recognition that arts journalism contributes to community building. This roundtable will ask what the individual projects awarded can tell us about future roles for arts journalists and critics as engaged participants in music scenes nationwide.
With: Douglas McLennan, Tatiana Hernandez, and Bill O’Brien
Moderator: Lara Pellegrinelli
This roundtable convenes two fields of scholarly inquiry—critical race studies and feminist theory/queer studies—to explore the following interrelated questions: How does sound construct racialized and gendered meaning and/or prompt processes of racial subjection? How might various hermeneutics of sound enrich and/or expand current ethnic and gender studies approaches to the study of racial formation? And how might we collectively forge a feminist, queer analytic for the study of racialized sound and sonic processes of racialization?
With: Kirstie Dorr, Roshanak Kheshti, and Deborah Vargas
Moderator: Kevin Fellezs
Lindsay Bernhagen, “‘Everyone Here is a Little Weird!’: Gender and Musical Intersubjectivity at the Girlz Rhythm ‘n’ Rock Camp
Maren Hancock, “Last Night a Shejay Saved My Life? Or, Do We Still Need Women Only Spaces to Nurture Female DJs?”
Marquita R. Smith, “Women of the City Underground: On Jean Grae’s ‘Tactical’ Use of Mixtape Culture”
Daniel Party, “Chile’s Revolution: Girl Style Now!”
Moderator: Kathryn Metz
The 2007 arrest of DJ Drama for copyright infringement signaled to that the era of rap mixtapes as both in the street and online had unalterably changed. We propose to examine what has been lost—or gained—from the disappearance of physical mixtape culture, both from its attendant spaces in the city and from the popular conversation. Where does
“authority” now lie in “making” and “breaking” such artists and how has this changed how they themselves make music and how it’s consumed?
With: Zach Baron, Tom Breihan, Ryan Dombal, Sean Fennessey,
Nick Sylvester, and Jamin Warren
Moderator: Sean Fennessey
David R. Adler, “Ghost Train: Pre-Swing Big Bands and Urban Experience”
Nate Chinen, “Nice Work: Jazz Agency and the New York City Cabaret Card, 1943-1967”
Phil Freeman, “From the Corner to Carnegie Hall and Beyond: The Urbanization of Miles Davis, 1972-1991”
Alex W. Rodriguez, “Deconstructing the Hang: Urban Spaces As Cross-Cultural Contexts for Jazz Improvisation”
Moderator: Paul Bresnick
The general membership meeting of IASPM-US is the organization’s opportunity to gather together and discuss the accomplishments of the past year, any concerns or issues that have arisen, and plans for the coming year. All IASPM members are welcome. We would also like to invite any interested regular EMP Pop Conference participants who might be interested in joining IASPM. Beyond our normal business, the general meeting this year will feature the announcement of the first winner of the Charles Hamm Memorial Award in recognition of lifetime contribution to Popular Music Studies. In addition, the David Sanjek Award for best paper by a graduate student at the meeting will be announced.
Conference attendees 21 and older are invited to continue the conversation into the night at Von, , located at 3 Bleecker Street between Lafayette and Bowery. Panelists will receive a wristband to enjoy cocktails at the bar. Sponsored by NPR Music
212-880-3430
DJ Rekha, Eddie Stats and guests, Visuals by Fictive
Since 2002, DJ Rekha and her crew have translated the exuberance and energy of the Bollywood screen to the New York dance floor. This special edition of Bollywood Disco has a Tropical Bass spin to coincide with the Roundtable her and her musical co-conspirator, Eddie Stats, have cooked up for the EMP Pop Conference. By digging deep into their digital and physical crates Rekha, Eddie, and special guests paint the sonic boom of an Indian Film Soundtrack collide with island vibes.
Admission: $10 for EMP/IASPM-US participants w/ unique badge, $12 advance, $15 at door
Jeremy Morris, “Hear, Here: Location-Based Music”
Van Truong, “Distant Sounds”
Mark Katz, “Analog and Digital: A Love Story”
Karl Hagstrom Miller, “I am Sitting in a Room: The Private Pop Experience”
Moderator: Tom Miller
This roundtable features accomplished scholar-practitioners of hip-hop, some of whom approach this work as hip hop artists turned academics; some as academics who became artists in the process of researching hip hop; and some who experience hip-hop as part of the ongoing negotiation of their everyday lives. Discussants are asked to reflect on the virtues and potential pitfalls involved in this cultural collision of research, performance, advocacy and personal expression. In what ways do these experiences reflect the condition of urbanity itself, which gave rise to hip-hop in the first place?
With: Sujatha Fernandes, Ali Colleen Neff, Joe Schloss, and Oliver Wang
Moderator: Anthony Kwame Harrison
Andy Battaglia, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
John Cline, “The Other Side of the Garage: The Los Angeles Free Music Society and Suburbia”
Charles Kronengold, “Sensing Thinking, Puzzling Interfacing in NYC Experimentalisms, 1979-84”
Ben Neill, “Beyond Downtown—The Impact of Lower Manhattan’s Music Scenes on Contemporary Musical Culture”
Moderator: Kembrew McLeod
Daphne Brooks, “‘One of These Mornings, You’re Gonna Rise up Singing’: The Secret Black Feminist History of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess”
Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Playing through the Changes: Mary Lou Williams’ Manhattan”
Salamishah Tillet, “Bethlehem, Boardwalks, and the City of Brotherly Love: Nina Simone’s Pre-Civil Rights Aesthetic”
Jayna Brown, “After the End of the World: Afro Diasporan Feminism
and Alternative Dimensions of Sound”
Moderator and Respondent: Imani Perry
Holly Hobbs, “Little Sparrows and Tender Maidens: Thoughts on Old and New World Balladry and Cautionary Tales”
Alison Fensterstock, “Fallen Angels: The Persistent Plotline of Woman’s Ruin in Hip-Hop, Hair Metal and Beyond”
Holly George-Warren, “Dolly Does Deflowered Damsels: How Dolly Parton’s Fallen-Woman Songcraft Took Her to the Top”
Moderator: Diane Pecknold
Tom Smucker, “When Bobby Went Bob: Darin’s Muddled Dylan Turn, The Assassination of RFK, and the Collapse of Ring A Ding Urban Masculinity”
Jack Hamilton, “‘Summer’s Here and the Time Is Right’: The Rolling Stones and the Death of Sixties Music”
Andy Zax, “Remapping The Woodstock Festival: How I Uncovered The True History Of ‘The Second-Largest City In New York State’ And Made Country Joe McDonald Hate My Guts”
Douglas Wolk, “Songs of The City”
Moderator: Michaelangelo Matos
Wayne Marshall, “Music as Social Life in an Age of Platform Politricks”
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, “Cunt Music: When Vogue House Dips Meet Dipset”
Max Pearl and Alexis Stephens, “New Jack City: Frenzied Cultures, Transitory Spaces (or, how I learned to stop worrying and embrace the hype cycle)”
Moderator: Eric Lott
Leah Tallen Branstetter, “Little Miss Swivel Hips 1957: In Search of the “Female Elvis”
Alexandra Apolloni, “Beat Girls and Dollybirds: Envoicing Swinging London”
Elizabeth Lindau, “’Mother Superior’: Maternity as Performance Art in the Work of Yoko Ono”
Moderator: Marilisa Merolla
Simon Balto, “‘Every Decent Citizen’: Jazz, Sex, and Policing in Postwar Milwaukee”
Charles L. Hughes, “‘The Spirit of the Music Was Black’: The Racial Politics of “The Memphis Sound”
Jeff Kollath, “Working the Line, Working the Crowd: The Soul of Indianapolis Music and Labor”
Moderator: Alexander Shashko
Jake Austen, “Icons of Obstinacy: The Urban Enablement of Rock ‘n’ Roll Delusionals 1980s-1990s”
Katherine Meizel, “Size Matters: ‘Mini-Popstars’ and New Dimensions of Celebrity Impersonation”
Eric Hung, “Stayin’ Alive: Senior Citizen Choirs Rocking Out in Korea, China and the U.S.”
Moderator: Carl Wilson
Christian John Wikane, “Radio Casbah: Inside the Kingdom of Casablanca Records”
Morgan Woolsey, “’Trying to Feel the Movie’s Zither Vibrations’: Film Music and the Construction of Subjectivity in William Friedkin’s Cruising”
Ryan Bunch, “Ease On Down the Road: Black Music and the Urban American Fairy Tale of The Wiz”
Moderator: Raymond Knapp
The fruitful relationship of jazz and “The Big Apple” stands as one of the foremost examples of a musical style benefiting from, and in turn helping to define, a supportive home. The first half of this event is a multimedia survey by Ashley Kahn of representative New York City jazz venues, from the 1920s through the 2000s; the second half is a panel discussion asking what is it about New York City and jazz that accounts for their lasting relationship, with a more contemporary focus on forums of free-flowing musical exchange and financial support for the music’s creators.
With: Legendary jazz impresario George Wein; veteran Jazz at Lincoln Center producer Billy Bank; and Jazz Standard creative director Seth Abramson
Moderator: Ashley Kahn
FOOD AND DRINK
The Market Place at the Kimmel Center offers a variety of international and traditional dining choices including:
The Italian Market
Faye’s Deli
Habanero Mexican
Halal
Yolato Frozen Yogurt
(image credit: Kai Regan/Alldayeveryday)
In 1995 GZA released Liquid Swords, the first of the solo Wu Tang Clan efforts. The album is constantly referenced among artists in the indie, electronic, and of course hip hop world as an inspiration for its eclecticism and challenge to standard ways of writing music. Pitchfork media, for example, invited GZA to perform the classic album in full at their summer festival. The GZA will discuss the album within the framework of a discussion of his career as an MC, his creative process, and the global state of an artform that began right here in New York City.
Moderator: Jon Caramanica
Jacobs oversaw public relations at two legendary venues in New York City, Basin Street East and the Rainbow Room and Rainbow Grill at Rockefeller Center, and can contribute to our understanding of the
music making which these spaces both enabled and constrained at a time during which jazz was fighting for its social life in the city. She also served as the publicist for such musicians as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Peggy Lee: public relations provided opportunities for women in an otherwise male dominated music industry.
Moderator: Judith Tick
Adrienne Day, “Occupy Greenwich Village”
Charlie Bertsch, Tucson after Giffords and the immigration bill
Noriko Manabe, “Music and Musicians in the Post-Fukushima Era”
Moderator: Stephen Duncombe
Patrick Rivers, “Rumble in the Concrete Jungle: Beat Battles in NYC and Their Impact on Hip-Hop Production”
Shanté Paradigm Smalls, “‘Voices Carry’: Queer Dissonance and the Travel of NYC 1980s Hip-Hop Sound”
Chris Tabron, “‘Boom It in Ya Jeep’: Low-end Theories of Black Aurality in 90’s NYC Hip-Hop”
Moderator: Oliver Wang
Whether a homesite for protest and resistance or, as Alain Locke suggests, an escape from the ‘medieval’ south, the city serves as both a muse and haven for black American cultural expression. Although cityscapes are heavily represented in African American music and popular culture, more discussion is needed about how the city is often a hegemonic space of black cultural expression. In other words, how does an urban setting dictate power and blackness in the (African) American community?
With: Regina Bradley, Fredara Hadley, Matthew Morrison, and Liana Silva
Moderator: Guthrie “Guy” Ramsey
Sonnet Retman, “Muddy the Waters: Other Stories of Love and Theft in the Making of the Delta Blues”
David Suisman, “The Urban Ear of Tony Schwartz”
Franklin Bruno, “Who Put the Arrow in ‘Cupid’? Hugo and Luigi’s Schlock ‘n’ Soul”
Moderator: Greil Marcus
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, “Sincerity in the City: Transnational Musical Collaboration Post 9/11”
Oyebade Dosunmu, “Lagos, New York City and Transnational Afrobeat Culture”
Deborah Pacini Hernandez, “Bachata, New York Style”
Moderator: Gayle Wald
Elizabeth Keenan, “Out in the Streets: 1960s Girl Groups and the Imagined Urban Space of New York City”
Sarah Dougher,“Making Noise in the Safe Space: How Girls’ Rock Camps Make Place in the City”
Diane Pecknold, “The Spectral Cityscapes of Tween Pop”
Moderator: Jacqueline Warwick
A select group of sounds familiar only to a small group of folks within a few square miles in the Bronx of the mid-1970s became the rhythmic foundation of global pop music for the next two decades. How and why did this convergence of urban geography and music history happen? And what were the consequences?
With: Kool DJ Red Alert, Nick deKreshewo, Bill Stephney, and Brian Coleman
Moderator: Dan Charnas
Barney Hoskyns, “The City That Celebrates Itself: Los Angeles on Los Angeles”
Ken Tucker, “L.A. Eccentricity in the 1970s: Thomas Jefferson Kaye, Hirth Martinez, and Moon Martin”
Robert Fink, “’This Is Los Angeles’: Sampling the Urban Jungle with Tom Brokaw (and Friends)”
Moderator: Tim Riley
Ben Sandmel, “Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans (“Mother-In-Law,” “Ma-Naughahyde,” and Grassroots Surrealism)”
Larry Blumenfeld, “Treme and the Abstract Truth: Fact and Fiction in New Orleans”
Zarah Ersoff, “Treme’s Aural Verisimilitude”
Shawn Macomber, “We Hated God BEFORE the Storm: New Orleans Sludge Metal in the Post-Katrina Years”
Moderator: Blake Leyh
Julia Sneeringer, “’I’d Never Even Been to Manchester’: Liverpool Musicians in Hamburg’s Entertainment Economy, 1960-1965”
Leonard Nevarez, “How Joy Division Came to Sound like Manchester”
Lucy O’Brien, “’Can I Have a Taste of Your Ice Cream?’ (Postpunk Feminism and the Yorkshire Ripper)”
Gillian Gower, “Riot Culture: Beats, Banksy, and the Bristol Sound”
Moderator: Devin McKinney
How can editors balance the demands for revenue-generating pageviews and the idea of serving their local communities? Should musicians go the shock-tactic route and try to become memes in an effort to transcend their geographic standing? Is the Internet becoming its own “local scene”? The panelists heading up this roundtable are journalists from markets large and small who have had weary showdowns with Google Analytics, but we encourage all those interested in the current state of local scenes to enter the fray.
With: Reed Fischer, David Malitz, Andrea Swensson, Christopher Weingarten, and Ryan White
Moderator: Maura Johnston
José Esteban Muñoz, “Calling Up Thunder: The Gun Club and the Punk Rock Commons”
Tim Lawrence, “Networking and Contact: Competing Forms of Queerness on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-88”
Jack Halberstam, “Losing Control: Grace Jones vs. Joy Division”
Alexandra T. Vazquez, “Swamp Things: The Viscosity of the Miami Sound”
Moderator: Christine Bacareza Balance
Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson loves his many jobs, from leading the Roots band on late-night TV to producing a hot list of current and heritage artists, not to mention his regular DJ gig at Brooklyn Bowl and drumming on stage for Jay-Z. But there’s one thing that really lights up his days and nights: talking about his favorite records. Known for his copious vinyl collection, ?uestlove can geek out with the best of ’em. On a weekend full of geek-outs, we’re gonna geek out with ?uestlove, and talk records, talk collecting: special vinyl moments, our first, our best, our ones that got away.
Moderator: Harry Weinger
Following a lunch session preview, the performers of Vidas Perfectas bring two episodes in a full concert version. Directed by Alex Waterman, this all-new Spanish-language version of Robert Ashley’s landmark work Perfect Lives (1977-1983) features Ned Sublette, Elio Villafranca, Peter Gordon, Elisa Santiago, and Abraham Gómez Delgado, in the roles originally performed by Robert Ashley, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Peter Gordon, Jill Kroesen and David van Tieghem, respectively.