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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Tonight / Upcoming Tonight (and Beyond) in Music Geekery

Posted by Eric Grandy on Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:49 AM

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Two items of note for fans of music criticism (pity the poor souls):

1. Tonight, Carl Wilson, music critic for the Globe and Mail in Toronto and author of the absolutely essential 33 1/3 book Let's Talk About Love: a Journey to the End of Taste—which is ostensibly about Celine Dion but is really about how we construct notions of good taste, bad taste, guilty pleasures, mainstreams, alternatives, and so on—will be on the Colbert Report tonight. Apparently, this is in part because Freaks & Geeks alum James Franco gave the book a shout-out on the red carpet at the Academy Awards (?!).

2. The EMP Pop Conference, an annual symposium of critics, academics, musicians, and fans, is now open for registration (and it's free!). The event takes place April 16th-19th at the Experience Music Project, and you can register online here. Having been to this the last few years in a row now, I cannot recommend the Pop Conference highly enough for anyone who likes thinking and talking about music as much as they like listening and dancing to it. This year's theme is "Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic." There's too many great looking panels and presentations to list them all here, but here are a few anyway:

J.D. Considine - "Standing on the Verge of Getting It On: Foreplay, Anticipation, and the Musicology of ’70s Funk"

Mike McGonigal - "Stained Panties & Hoarse Metaphors: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers' Performance of "Nearer My God to Thee" at the Great Shrine Auditorium Concert in Los Angeles, CA in 1955"

Michaelangelo Matos - "'House Is a Feeling': Chuck Roberts and Dance Music’s National Anthem"

Douglas Wolk - "My Other Body Is a Temple"

Jon Caramanica & Sean Fennessey - "Crank That? Yahhh! Soulja Boy Wants You To Dance Forever "

Sean Nelson - "Let’s (Not) Get it On— Or, “Fucking to Songs About Fucking and Other Uncomfortable Developments in the Awkward Relationship Between What We’re Going to Have to Just Agree to Call Indie Rock and Sexuality in the 1990s.”"

David Grubbs - "I Am a Recording. I Don't age."

Carl Wilson - "T-Pain & The Real Girl: The Autoerotics of Autotune, Falsetto & Other (Un)Manly Modes of Oral Self-Gratification"

Dapne Carr - "Computer Love"

Drew Daniel - "Why Be Something You're Not?: The Afterlives of Queer Minstrelsy"

Robert Christgau - "The Old Folks Wish Them Well: Romantic Marriage in Rock and Roll"

Jody Rosen - "'Oh, You Kid!': How Tin Pan Alley Discovered The Cheating Song"

Sara Marcus - "'All Girls Interested in Revolution Write on Yr Hands': Punk Rock Feminism All Over the Body"

Comments (7) RSS

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The overindulgent intellectualism of music has to stop. Then again, that sentence probably could be used in one of those papers. I can't win.

Posted by Jason Josephes on March 4, 2009 at 11:12 AM

...says the ex-Pitchfork writer (I know, I know, it was a different site back then, but still).

Posted by Eric Grandy on March 4, 2009 at 11:23 AM

@1: Jason

1) which definition of "intellectualize" do you mean?
a) To furnish a rational structure or meaning for.
or b) To avoid psychological insight into (an emotional problem) by performing an intellectual analysis.

2) For people who are heavily into music, what do you propose people do instead of make conferences?

As for "overindulgent". Well, duh. That goes for any convention. People tend to overindulge in a hobby if they're going to a convention for it.

Posted by mackro mackro on March 4, 2009 at 2:20 PM

Thanks for posting. I'm already looking forward to Dr. Drew Daniel's paper. He always brings it (and that includes his work with Matmos).

Posted by Kathy Fennessy on March 4, 2009 at 7:47 PM

Fuck, I thought for sure Drew was going to pitch post-punk anti-sex. I would have pitched my idea for it if I'd known he was going to submit what he did instead. (He would have kicked my ass at it.)

Great to see Sara Marcus back, and DO NOT THINK of missing M. Matos, Douglas Wolk, or Mike McGonical.

Jody Rosen and Jon Caramanica & Sean Fennessey will actually be essential experiences as well.

There's my early cheat sheet from these choices given.

Posted by Chris Estey on March 5, 2009 at 10:32 AM

And I chickened out on submitting my Freddie Mercury proposal... Would also recommend anything Nate Chinen and Randall Roberts have up their collective sleeves.

Posted by Kathy Fennessy on March 5, 2009 at 2:30 PM

I've been the last two years and it was a disaster both times.

This is not a conference. The academics who presented were, for the most part, prepared and ready to give talks that were engaging and unique. The music critics? Not so much. There were people still writing as people were filing in and presenters who were clearly winging what ended up being an insulting mishmash of unprepared garbage. And yet, they still gave one another endless handjobs for hours afterward.

Also, Jason, you couldn't be more right when you said, "The overindulgent intellectualism of music has to stop."

Posted by Susan T. on March 26, 2009 at 1:43 PM