During the final event in a long weekend of geeking out about music, an open discussion about “The Future of Thinking About Music For a Living,” Pitchfork news editor Amy Phillips stood up in a Thermals t-shirt and told a room full of critical and academic heavies that they are basically dinosaurs. “Kids don’t care about Robert Christgau or Simon Reynolds,” she said (Christgau had left to catch a plane, but Reynolds was still there, and he seemed rather unconcerned about these “kids”). Phillips went on to say that kids want their music (and presumably their musical discourse) fast, yesterday even, that they want to hear their own voices online, and that critics no longer have the “luxury” of taking time to think about music.

Of course this upset a few people. Taking time to think about music is the nature of the job, they said, or in the words of Tim Kipp, “We can’t accept The Death of Rumination, or of cognition.” At the edges of all this conversation was the fear (perhaps stronger for young critics than for veterans) that the “Future of Thinking About Music For a Living” might not look that bright.

It was an important discussion to have, but it was also kind of a sour way to end a weekend full of awesome, even luxurious, thinking about music.

Friday 4/20, 2:15-4:00pm: Urban Dance Squads

One thing I learned at that panel was that sometimes my favorite writers aren't my favorite speakers. I think Simon Reynolds is a genius, but his presentation ran long, had some poorly timed musical snippets, and read a bit dry. That said, the actual text of his presentation—about the evolution of London-specific musical forms such as jungle, garage, grime, and dubstep—was nothing short of fascinating. Cosmo Lee and Geeta Dayal both discussed Berlin techno, though they approached it from different angles. Both talks were fairly informative, but Dayal's was definitely more fun. Tim Lawrence's anecdotes and slide-show—about translating legendary New York DJ David Mancusso famous, utopian Loft parties to London and clashing with a certain lager-swilling lads-night-out dance culture—was hilarious and unexpected, a standout presentation.

4:15-4:45pm: Futurisms

I was excited for Dominique Leone's ambitious "What You Hear is Never What They Heard, and What You Get is Never What They Had," an attempt to apply theories of relativity to the time/space warping of musical discussion and distribution on the internet. But the tiny room was packed and fromthe floor in the back Leone's (un-amplified?) voice got lost in the buzz of ventilation. Even still, his effort to chart response times to the new LCD Soundsystem record, from its first leak to the consensus formed before its release to the eventual critical weighing in, was important and well-researched. After his talk I left to go blog.

Saturday 4/22, 11:30am-12:45pm: A Seventies Moment

On Saturday, I arrived just in time to catch the end of Yuval Taylor's "Pretty Good: BAd Vibes and American Rock Culture, 1970-1972," which from what I heard sounded— wait for it—pretty good. The next presenter, Nate Chinen, wins the award for best timing ever. He delivered his speech, "Destination Nowhere: Miles Davis and Neil Young at the Filmore East," with a live recording of Neil Young playing quietly in the background. His talk was timed so perfectly that he made his points and came to breaks just as Young's vocals would appear after long instrumental passages, at which point Chinen would signal the sound guy to crank the volume and stand back. It was electric. Mairead Case delivered a fittingly personal and poetic ode to Karen Dalton, another obscure treasure unearthed by the Light in the Attic crate diggers.

12:00-12:45pm: Displaced Listening

I left that panel before Greil Marcus' "Time, Place, and Manner: The Rod Stewart Moment." I know, I know, it's Greil Marcus, but I felt more compelled by the promise of Brain Goedde and Elena Passarello's examination of rural Iowan responses to urban hip hop culture, "Urban Music in the Teenage Heartland." As a bonus, I caught the tail-end of Mike Powell's "Pyongyang Hit Parade." Powell, who looks a bit like Blur's Damon Albarn (ie. better than music critics ought to look), looked at the official popular music (and there appears to be no other kind) of North Korea with a mix of curiosity, love, and impossible distance.

Geodde and Passarello's presentation was the only "documentary theater" of the weekend, with Passerello delivering monologues culled from interviews with three Iowan hip hop fans. Her portrayal felt like caricature at times, especially during the second monologue when the interviewed girl asks if Gwen Stefani is a hip hop artist and talks about learning about 50 Cent from Forbes magazine. The presentation also stood out as the only one I saw that completely lacked an authoritative voice, which is to say that these Iowans weren't experts and they could only communicate so much about hip hop or even their own relationship to it. It was one of the only moments in the conference that cut through the critical discourse to actually show what popular appreciation really sounds like.

2:15-4:00pm: Selling the Scene

Tom Kipp's "Secret History of Montana Postpunk: The LAst Great Undiscovered Scene in Rock and Roll!" (a nod to moderator Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces was a funny and fond personal account about a handful of college kids who tried to instigate a postpunk scene in Montana to little success (although that group of kids launched both Steve Albini and Joel RL Phelps). Courtney Harding traced the arc of local rag The Rocket, an interesting story maybe, but not the most riveting presentation. RJ Smith's "City Slang: The Art of Detroit & Detroit in the Art of Destroy All Monsters" was a fun and knowledgeable deconstruction of the art collective's revisionist murals of Detroit rock history.

4:15-5:30: Breaks In Time: Rethinking Hip Hop Roots

By Saturday evening, I was starting to feel a little brain-dead. Even so, this was one of the most enjoyable panels of the weekend. Ned Sublette was an involved and entertaining moderator, stepping in to clap or count out the occasional beat, and genuinely digging on every song sampled throughout the talk. Another thing that elevated this panel was how tightly connected the topics were. Oliver Wang's "We Like it Like That: The Black and Brown Sound of Boogaloo" traced a kind of pre-history for the hip hop break that Jeff Chang picked up for his "1969-1973: The Birth of the Bronx Beat." Garnette Cadogan's exploration "Begin at the Beginning: Jamaican Popular Music in Jamaica" was great even if his patois was sometimes confusing initially difficult (that voice would prove an integral part of the entertaining presentation). I left before the fourth panelist, exhausted.

That night, former Weekly music editor and all-around good guy Michelangelo Matos hosted a humid, boozy house party where nerds and critics talked shop, drank, and danced to an iPod-driven sound system playing all the critical hits. Thanks, Matos.

*One frustrating thing about the conference was how much great material was scheduled at nine in the damn morning. I know there's a lot to cram in at a conference like this, but I feel like rock criticism shouldn't really start before noon. We all have concerts to go to at night, right? I missed Christgau, Sasha Frere-Jones, and an entire panel about the Wu Tang Clan all because I had nightlife to sleep off.