Pop Convergence 2021

FLUXED: MAKING POPULAR MUSIC IN THE MIDST OF CHANGE AND TRANSITION
A online keynote panel in collaboration with NPR Music
and New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music

featuring
DEVONTÉ HYNES (AKA BLOOD ORANGE)
ROÍSÍN MURPHY
ROSTAM
TAMARA LINDEMAN (of the WEATHER STATION)

Moderated by ANN POWERS, writer, NPR Music
Produced by JASON KING, New York University

When:
Thursday April 22nd at 6 pm ET
Go to NPR Music’s YouTube www.youtube.com/nprmusic
This event is free and open to the public. Please register in advance.

To kick off a four-day special “Convergence” version of the annual Pop Conference, the
keynote conversation invites a panel of four artists thriving within the highly
volatile environment of contemporary popular music to discuss how the spirit
and realities of change both challenge and inspire them. From taking on the
themes of transformation and precariousness in their own music, to fully
exploring what new technologies can communicate, to coping with a radically
altered social and economic landscape, musicians must act at the forefront of
new 21st-century modes of being. This open-ended conversation connects the
transforming craft and business of music-making to the art of capturing musical
meanings in a highly turbulent world.

The panel’s participants are leaders in reimagining what music and its cultures can be:
singer-songwriter-auteur Devonté Hynes, whose work under many different names
(Blood Orange, Lightspeed Champion) exemplifies the refusal to adhere to
outdated categories; producer and musician Rostam, who has been instrumental in
defining the anti-genre sound of 21st century pop; singer, songwriter and
producer Roísín Murphy, whose dance-inspired music finds the point where past
meets future, and Tamara Lindeman, who records as the Weather Station and
models how the singer-songwriter role is changing in response to both exploding
musical categories and a world in crisis. Ann Powers, NPR Music Critic and author of many books, most recently Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul, moderates. The event is produced by Jason King, hosted by New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, and presented in conjunction with NPR Music.

Hope in Darkness: Music That Reclaimed Our Joy (Room B: Oscillator)

Every revolution has its soundtrack. Sometimes, resistance starts in a voting line, while dancing the “Cha Cha Slide.” Other times, it looks like defying a tyrant by staying at home, singing “WAP” so loudly, your neighbors want to hit that little dangly thing in the back of your throat. In this panel, journalists, educators, and musicians will explore the music that helped us reclaim our joy during a backdrop of death and destruction. We’ll discuss bands who taught us to take our power back, like Rage Against the Machine; the role Calypsos and Soca songs played in the attainment of human rights across the Caribbean; the transformative power of the poetry of artists like Hozier in song; and the musicians behind inspiring videos and TikTok challenges who gave us something to dance about. Our panelists will speak to the question: what can we learn from the music that changed the world?

The paper order will be: Threadgould, Schou, Sylvester, and Lynn.

Revolutions or Spinning Wheels? JPMS at 33.3 (Room A: Sky Church)
 
In September, Journal of Popular Music Studies will publish an issue whose number is of particular significance to music people: Vol. 33.3. It would be a shame to let the RPM speed for LPs, so rich in connotations, go unremarked upon, so we will be publishing a range of short pieces this fall that think about 33 1/3 in relationship to different keywords and subthemes. Some of these will debut in this roundtable.
It’s easy to see how spinning LPs intersect with themes of change and flux. The encapsulation of sound on record, especially vernacular sound, was a central element of 20th century cultural upheaval, connected vividly to identity movements and collective struggles. Where Michael Denning’s Noise Revolution, on the 1920s implementation of electric recording, captures an earlier phase in this process, the late 1940s to early 1980s era of the LP was a further shift: Charles Keil’s “People’s Music Comparatively” noted this amplified sequel a generation ago, Albin Zak’s I Don’t Sound Like Nobody detailed 1950s record-making, and our own associate editor, Roshanak Kheshti, has explored the “aural imaginary” in Modernity’s Ear, with Alexander Weheliye’s work, such as Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, another important touchstone.
To what extent did the LP’s impact mark a sonic and cultural shift? If few listen to vernacular culture now with the revolutionary expectations of an Amiri Baraka, should we see 33.3 as a force for change, containment, or something else?

The five presenters on the panel will begin with short digital lectures that take up their own vantage points. After each of these, we’ll discuss the topic collectively, then open matters up for Q&A from those watching. Here are the opening topics:

Leal: “El Cometa,” by Los Cometas de Villa Juarez, recorded in sun-soaked McAllen, TX, at the U.S.-Mexico border, 1969. “El Cometa”: an LP from the personal collection of my now late-grandfather, Octaviano Gonzalez. “"El Cometa": a record for dancing, a spur to movement. I sit here, thousands of miles from home and family, and I imagine my grandfather singing along to this record. Memory atop memory, time atop time. What listening is this? I aim to think through what it means to listen to a lost loved one’s LPs—to try and listen through their ears, to measure the space between your life and theirs. As I listen to the record, I interweave my lyrical reflections as a child of the borderlands, my own perspective as a music-focused humanities scholar and practicing musical artist, and short excerpts from a music-centered oral history interview I conducted with my grandfather in early 2020.

Sterne : "Scattered Speculations on Synchronization" Pitch: The 33 1/3 RPM standard emerged from synchronized film sound in the 1920s and was only later adopted for the LP, whose playback speed immediately became an issue for projectionists, artists, musicians, dancers, and other users who sought to use the record's time with something else. In this short piece, I will suggest that synchronization is connected to chrononormativity, to borrow a term from Elizabeth Freeman, and further, that the measure of synchronization--rotations per minute--is itself political, since it papers over differences that exist even within the physical format itself. Through regulating time, rate, and recursivity, synchronization via RPM installs and enforces norms (and a "normal time") which then regulates the movements and interfaces among bodies, technologies and institutions. This piece will consider what lining up so that we are all in sync with 33 1/3 "rotations per minute" means in an age of technological media, for the people and for the institutions that use this measure.

Tongson: I’ll be exploring “BPM” through Wham’s lyric “my beats per minute never been the same” (from “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go). Instead of focusing on Make it Big, their aptly titled breakout album in the U.S., the piece will stage a return of the repressed—to their first album “Fantastic” (released under their original name, Wham UK). Fantastic’s BPM is high-octane gay leather disco, with samples of early white rap, Tropicalia, and the kind of raunchy loving and thieving George Michael modeled more explicitly later in his career.

Weisbard: Keyword: Spin--I want to track how the tone present in records early as Hoagy Carmichael's "Rockin' Chair" in 1930, fat and sated but self-aware, inhabited whole LPs by the time Ray Davies sang "sit right down in your old rocking chair, you need not worry you need not care," in "Shangri-La," off the Kinks album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). The rocking chair, going nowhere, as the record spinning, then the LP making that spin into an expanse: that's what I'd like to trace as an aspect of how song impacts format, how certain kinds of expression need a McMansion, and how the LP expressed affluence in its vinyl frontier but decline in its endless grooves almost from the start.

Messelink: “Cheesecake Album Covers.” The “girlie” cover was a significant part of the early 1950s LP market. While the disembodied legs on Jackie Gleason’sTawny in 1953 were thought to be pushing the bounds of propriety, by 1958 nudity had become commonplace. During the years (1949-1954) of upheaval and growth following the release of the LP, record companies devised the concept of “mood music” as a way of marketing and selling popular long play albums. By 1957 the consensus was that mood music had become nude music. Drawing from period industry publications and magazines, I will briefly examine how sexual representations, in particular those featuring female models, were a significant—and much debated— aspect of the early LP market.

For our breaks between the daytime sessions, members of our Programming Committee volunteered to curate/create short bits of "bonus beats" content.

For this break, we have:

1. "Ignore Facts," a music video by Clive Davis Institute student Computerwife. "The song and video are about a time when I suddenly was completely alone in New York, depressed, working a difficult job, and slowly turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms that destroyed me very quickly. I ended up having a come down that was so intense that I finally had to call my parents and ask to come home, giving up everything I'd worked for because I couldn't handle the way I felt....The song and video are about the most intense change I've ever had. It's about my first time experiencing real darkness and learning how to control that, use it, and become stronger and more well rounded because of it."
2. Michelle Habell-Pallan interviewing punk rocker Lysa Torres about her song "Decolonize My Love."

Room A: Sky Church

The politics and power of both dance and dance music take the parquet on this panel which brings together four different papers examining transformations within and wrought by forms of dance/music. This includes two papers looking at salsa in different ways: the role of salsa music in current prison abolition movements and on-going changes within a community of New York salsa dancers. Another paper travels further east, to Spain, to look at controversies in the flamenco community regarding issues of appropriation and exploitation. And to add some visceral bump, we have one paper/presentation oriented around the power of the stomp in tap dancing.

The paper order during the session will be: Zanfanga, La Rotta, Dormani and Slaughter. 

The Quarantine Boogie: Music in the Times of Pandemics (Room B: Oscillator)

It's a massive understatement to note that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the flows of "normal" life and this is no less true in the musical community than any other. This panel features four papers that highlights how music and musicians have responded to disruptive forces like pandemics, not just our current one but earlier examples as well. The paper topics range from looking at how individual artists have pivoted to adjust to new realities of social interaction, to how entire geographic regions have responded to the disruptions in their midst, to traveling back nearly 100 years to see how an earlier generation of musicians responded to similar pandemics in the past.

1.”Old Hits Verzuz New Technology: How a Pandemic Ushered Legacy Artists' Catalogs into the Clout Economy”
Jabari Evans, Center on Media and Human Development, Northwestern University

2."Dolly Parton in the Pandemic: New Constructions of Authenticity and Transmedia Storytelling"
Leigh H. Edwards, Department of English, Florida State University

3."TB Blues: Infectious disease and health communication in pop music"
Jessica Cassyle Carr, the University of New Mexico College of Population Health

4."Maldito Coronavirus! Mapping Musical Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic Across Latin America"
Dan Margolies, Virginia Wesleyan University + J.A. Strub, University of Texas at Austin

For our breaks between the daytime sessions, members of our Programming Committee volunteered to curate/create short bits of "bonus beats" content.

For this break, we have music scholar and musician, Charlie McGovern performing a pair of songs, "I Count the Tears" and "I'm Pulling Through."

RJ Smith helped pull this together and he shares why: "I met Charlie McGovern at a long past Pop Conference, and have seen him at many since. I only knew him through the annual event, until the last year or two. The uncertainty, the president, the guns and the lockdown, all brought him out in a new way on social media. I knew he could play, but this has been special. What he plays has been a crucial part of it—when spirits dipped especially low, he came through with a soul song, a lament, a ray of light. He’s been that in the moment."

Room A: Sky Church

Prince: Disrupting Notions of Blackness

Prince’s legacy as a Pop music icon is undisputed. His influence on popular culture is endless. In addition to being one of the greatest entertainers of all time, he was a groundbreaking songwriter, musician, arranger, composer, producer, and entrepreneur. Prince was also the ultimate disruptor. In a career that spanned five decades, Prince challenged systems, spaces, and sounds. In the process, he disrupted widely held notions about what it meant to be a black artist, activist, and, ultimately, a black person in a society that remains at odds with its own concepts of blackness, freedom, and equality. Through analysis of his music, lyrics, and individual acts of protest, this panel seeks to expand the discussion of Prince’s legacy by examining his role as a disruptor.

The paper order will be: Duff, Cummings, McInnis

Staying Flux-ible: Artists Adapting to Change (Room B: Oscillator)

Life is on hold: everything is changing. Artists have always drawn from their life in their work, and now Laura Jane Grace suggests how an emerging sonic transfeminine can challenge gendered and genre myths. Now, too, technology is rewriting seemingly finished work. The internet has shaped this threshold moment, and Tiktok users become co-creators, revising work and forgrounding vernacular contributions. Lurking over everything is the growing presence of AI, as musicians turn their vision to the machine-made. Nothing remains static: music is changing.

The paper order will be: Ashton, Murtishaw, St. Asaph, and Harper. 

For our breaks between the daytime sessions, members of our Programming Committee volunteered to curate/create short bits of "bonus beats" content.

For this break, we have Michelle Habell-Pallan interviewing Mexican-Australian MC, Maya Jupiter, about her song "Madre Tierra."

Black Music at its Interstices: From “Coon Songs” to Hip Hop (Room B: Oscillator)

The diverse topics presented on this panel explore the interstitial nature of Blackness, Black people, and Black sounds within popular music in the United States. Spanning from the 1890s, a key moment transition to the modern music industry, through the contemporary moment—as we find ourselves in a continuous state of political, cultural, and technological flux— each of the authors provide analyses and raise questions that unsettle normalized understandings of what is at stake in popular music making. From the “coon song” craze of the 1890s, to early 20th- century Black Pentecostal revival circuits, and culminating in 1970s soul (Minnie Riperton) and contemporary R&B/hip hop (and conceptions of the “ho” figure), we consider the following questions: how were Black children and adolescents (girls, in particular) formative and formed by Black Pentecostal revival circuits during the Great Migration?; how might sampling elicit resistance and temporality through its mechanisms of performance and improvisation?; how do the affective logics of horror, desire, and pleasure impact the spectatorial conceptualization of the ho figure’s corporeality and ontology?; and finally, how did the invention and employment of early recording technologies that coincided with the explosion of the “coon song” shape the making of the commercial music industry in its infancy?
                                   
  The paper order will be: Dromgoole, Fekade, Ibaorimi, and Morrison.   

ruins, rebellion, & resurgence (Room A: Sky Church)

Stories of popular music and change are not limited to the stage. Transformations resulting from physical places, intellectual spaces, music business controls; and image, identity, and race politics have resulted in symbolic strike-backs with metamorphic results. This panel explores popular music stories of transition, including recent efforts to raze Detroit's United Sound Systems, 20th century punk rock youth culture in El Paso; 21st century fusing of country, visual media, and gender and sexuality; and a Billboard chart resurgence of 1960s and 1970s white pop stars in the 1980s.

The paper order will be: Gholz, Soto, Lopez, and Mumme.

For our breaks between the daytime sessions, members of our Programming Committee volunteered to curate/create short bits of "bonus beats" content.

For this break, we have:

1. "i don't write songs for boys," a 2021 music video from NYU Clive Davis Institute student Livia O. 

2. ""Strings Attached": Melissa A. Weber interviews violinist, songwriter, arranger, producer and concertmaster Gina Kronstadt.

Black Critics Matter (Room B: Oscillator)

This roundtable session focuses on the indispensable role that Black critics have played in telling the story of Black music, and it brings together a cluster of multigenerational pathbreaking thinkers whose work has transformed critical writing about popular music culture. I am seeking to curate a session that documents this era of racial reckoning through the heightened recognition of Black cultural arts criticism—its vitality, its originality, its pioneering experimentalism and the daring interventionist role it has played (now as well as across the 20th and 21st centuries) in how we think about, theorize, and engage with Black sounds.

If 2020 has reminded us of anything, it’s that the struggle for African American autonomy in the American body politic is a multifaceted one tied to necessary and interlocking social, political as well as cultural revolutions in valuing Black life. Culture critics, we know, play a pivotal role in identifying and narrating the dimensions of that value. But in the history of popular music culture across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, how often have we extensively imagined Black folks as critics, as knowledge producers in relation to their own expressive cultures? Elizabeth Mendez Berry and Chi-hui Yang remind us that such questions “matte[r] because culture is a battleground where some narratives win and conversation about our collective imagination has the same blind spots as our political discourse.” Adds the venerable Black feminist culture critic Margo Jefferson, the “role of the critic of color is to unveil and unearth the structures that lie behind and underneath and propel these narratives which always star the same figures.” Arts criticism is, in effect and as they suggest, ultimately world-making. It has the power to both reflect and expand a community’s relationship to the expressive modes of being that saturate our quotidian lives and inform our communicative lexicons. Or, as Toni Morrison once put it bluntly, “as far as the future is concerned, when one writes, as critic or as author, all necks are on the line.”

As we consider the potential for radical transformation in this era defined by flux, we might take evermore seriously the ways that Berry and Yang urge the public to “think of cultural criticism as civic infrastructure that needs to be valued not based just on monetary impact”—that is, which artists receive the most exposure and reap the most revenue (though this is important, too, in a world of institutional inequities)—but also based on criticism’s “capacity to expand the collective conversation at a time when it is dangerously contracting. Arts writing,” they contend, “fosters an engaged citizenry that participates in the making of its own story.” From Harlem Renaissance era ballers like Sylvester Russell, Lester Walton and Nora Holt to post-Civil Rights era pioneers like Phyl Garland and Lorraine O’Grady, from Village Voice breakthrough geniuses like Thulani Davis and Greg Tate to break-the-glass-ceiling-at-Vibe- and-Billboard Danyel Smith, from New York Times early aughts trickster K Sanneh to the 2010 Black queer visionaries of the Times, Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, Black critics have been setting the record straight and engaging Black citizenry “in the making of its own story” since Black folks gained entrance to the segregated recording industry. They were the ones long beckoning us to “turn and face the [gloriously] strange...” before, in the time of, and after our dear Starman...

   

“South Gotta Change”: Southern Music in a Moment of Transformation (Room A: Sky Church)

The music of the South has long been a potent and contested symbol within popular music. Genres associated with the region – country, blues, “Americana,” bluegrass, Latinx music, Indigenous traditions, et cetera – have formed a sonic bedrock of U.S. pop styles while also standing in for larger conversations about race, region, history and “tradition” on a changing cultural and political landscape. In recent years, as the era of #BlackLivesMatter and “Make America Great Again” has reinvigorated conversations about the music and its meanings, the South’s artists and audiences have leapt into the center of these complex conversations. Artists from Rhiannon Giddens to Sa-Roc to Che Apalache to Adia Victoria and beyond have challenged genre boundaries, canonical narratives and contemporary representations in powerful interventions. Audiences have responded to these calls by reclaiming lost histories and proclaiming the music’s renewed relevance in contemporary conversations. And all have continued to push against the commercial exclusions, narrative distortions and socio-political backlashes that accompany their work.

This roundtable considers Southern music in this moment of disruption. The participants – a diverse group of scholars, writers and artists – will consider how artists, audience members and the recording industry have reacted to this moment, as well as challenges and opportunities characterize the future. They will also contend with the very notion of “Southern music” as a category, exploring both its potential and ambivalence in regards to race, gender, genre and other key issues. And they will discuss the music’s roles in assuring that, as Victoria suggests in her powerful 2020 release, “the South gotta change.”

Flower Bomb Friday: Songs In the Key of Stevie Wonder (Room A: Sky Church)

Flower Bomb launched on the Clubhouse platform in late 2020 and the idea is simple: every Friday at 7pm PST, hosts Morgan Rhodes, Joy Trible and Hans Elder pick an artist to "give flowers." Participants would select a song by the artist, then provide a short (1-2 minute) testimonial about why it's important to them. The Flower Bomb crew then plays a snippet of that song.

In association with this year's Pop Convergence, Flower Bomb is hosting a live, early show for us (on one of our existing Zoom channels) dedicated to the music of Stevie Wonder whose entire career has embodied the ideas about flux and transformation that this year's Pop Con is devoted to.

During their segment, the Flower Bomb hosts will call up people to share their testimonial about a Stevie song, and then Hans will play a snippet.

To facilitate the process, we're asking for interested folks to sign-up first and have a few song choices in mind. Flower Bomb can then draw from that list and have your song prepped to go.

The Power of Club Quarantine: A Special Conversation with D-Nice and Jason King about Uniting the World Through Music in Times of Flux (Room A: Sky Church)

A First-Time Collaboration between Pop Conference and the Kennedy Center’s Hip Hop Culture Program

This year's version of the Pop Conference focuses on themes of change and flux in popular music. Few artists in contemporary music have had a year marked by surprising shifts and pivots like New York born and bred DJ, rapper and producer Derrick “D-Nice” Jones. In the midst of widespread global pandemic lockdowns and social restrictions in March 2020, D-Nice launched Homeschool at Club Quarantine: a nightly DJ party on
Instagram Live designed to bring people together. Club Quarantine became an instant sanctuary and runaway success, virtually uniting people from all walks of life, including many prominent celebrities, to dance "together" and socialize online. Leveraging his Club Quarantine platform in service of others, D-Nice supported numerous social justice, civic and humanitarian efforts, and raised awareness about health and wellness protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic. For his vital contributions to music, culture and society, D-Nice was awarded the 2020 Webby Artist of the Year in the Special Achievement category, a LEVEL "Best Man of 2020" Award, a 2020 BET Hip Hop Award for Best DJ of the Year, a 2020 BET Shine A Light Award and the 2021 Entertainer of the Year Award at the NAACP Image Awards.

With a 30+ year trajectory of uniting people through music, D-Nice'ss pre-pandemic career has also been full of transitions and shifts: he was an early founder of Boogie Down Productions and produced the Stop the Violence Movement's classic Self-Destruction before becoming signed as a solo artist to Jive Records where he released his debut album and classic single “Call Me D-Nice.” As a DJ, he has rocked dance floors from Times Square to South Africa and events ranging from Essence Music Festival to the White House. Equally excelling as a photographer, he has both documented the Culture and provided its soundtrack. D-Nice will join Jason King—Pop Conference co-producer, Clive Davis Institute Chair, and fellow Kennedy Center Hip
Hop Culture Council Member—in a conversation about the connections between music, flux, change and the enduring connective power of the DJ.

This program is co-presented with the Kennedy Center Hip Hop Culture Program’s Council Conversations series.

The Flaming? Midnight Musical (Room A: Sky Church)

The Flaming? Midnight Musical is a late(r) night session that celebrates the spiritual and social fire, that is, great musical skill explored in the spectrum of Black music forms. Traditionally, the midnight musical serves as entertainment for churchgoing young adults that did not "go to the club" on Friday nights. However, somehow attendees managed to go to both venues. At these concerts, organizers showcased community and college gospel choirs to demonstrate their musical prowess, a sonic representation of the best "church party" that they could ignite. This concert will activate the virtual performance space, erasing the boundaries between sacred and secular, by featuring artists who represent the best of both worlds.

The Talent:

• Tamara Jade
• Charles Anthony Bryant
• Larry Brownlee
• Angela Marie Jones
• Patrick Dailey
• Harold Wheat
• Philip Bingham

Special thanks to Indiana University Global Pop Music Initiative for their sponsorship of this event. 

Flipping the Script: Traditions in Transition (Room B: Oscillator)

Music establishes a sense of place but no place remains static forever. Four takes on temporal sounds in eras of flux and flow. Questions emerge, including: In a year when live music is all but impossible, how can political and social transformation flourish on the internet? How do times and places defined in movies by period-specific sounds live—long after the period has past? What happens when the police disrupt a Black hip hop beach party in the heart of the Reagan era? Finally, what do TikTok’s participatory digital networks mean to our sense of who we are?

Paper order will be: Arrieta, Bimm, and McLeod.

What is the Creative? Rethinking the Social Value of Creativity in the Absence of Live Space (Room A: Sky Church)

We propose that the function of creativity has been distorted by the neolliberal economic structure, but the pandemic is a point of rupture seismic enough to force us to to re-imagine the role and value of the artist. We explore the way in which the capitalist alignment of artistry with income, creative practice with revenue and success with profit is fundamentally at odds with the ethos of art and creativity. We also look to the fourth industrial revolution as a pending/present technological and societal flux which adds a layer of complication for many artists, in particular musicians who, somewhat ironically, have often been pushed back into live work to sustain their livelihood. We use this moment of global pause to reimagine the role of the artist, including how technology might be used to establish new ways for music makers to survive, prosper and contribute during our moment of need.

When the pandemic hit, most musicians experienced a devastating loss of work, as global touring and live performances were suspended indefinitely. At the same time, the world looked to art for salvation; to escape, to heal, to hope. It became clear that art is not entertainment; it is humanity; in particular the cultivation of human connection and an ability to imagine a future different to—and better than—the one we inhabit. And so we are calling on creatives to step into the role of social curators; asking how we can realise this responsibility and use it to sustain a creative ecosystem as well as transform the world around us. The panel is a group of artists who have all pushed boundaries with their careers, technology and societal commitments, alongside a senior software engineer and myself—a producer and curator—as moderator.

We explore if the role of the artists can now be detached from the revenue they generate, and whether the intellectual labour of imagination is the foundation for building a new future. In this model, can we conceptualise art as a career that should be subsidised by governments—or can we establish cooperative organisations in which artists generate mutually supporting income streams and revenue possibilities? What functions of the music industry should we bring forward with us, and what should we leave behind? What can we contribute, what can we share, and what can we do to help our community and those beyond it?

Across all these questions we also ask how technology can be used to support these futures in ways that benefit the artists instead of the traditional gatekeepers of money and power within the industry.

The roundtable is a virtual cookout in which everyone brings a ‘dish’ to the table, an idea or proposal of how they would like to move the role of the creative forward, to be shared, sampled and debated around the room.

For our breaks between the daytime sessions, members of our Programming Committee volunteered to curate/create short bits of "bonus beats" content.

For this break, we have:

1. "You See Me," a 2020 music video by NYU Clive Davis Institute student Océane. "Can you ever truly see or know someone? "You See Me" relates to the idea "flux" by portraying the ways in which a person can be seen over the passage of time. We all fit into the story of history, and with this comes the ups and downs that come with life. Although it may be impossible to ever truly see a person, there is a beauty in appreciating darkness and light within each of us."
2. Michelle Habel-Pallán in conversation with recording artists Quetzal.

Listening Queerly: Sounds of the Asian/American Diaspora in Flux (Room A: Sky Church)

This critical karaoke session thinks alongside Asian American musicians and artists to reckon with the violence of the present. Across analyses of queercore, country, house parties, and gallery installations, we seek to listen queerly, which Thea Quiray Tagle theorizes as “otherwise possibilities for living together and being in relation that can better realize our mutual and collective survival.” In doing so, we collectively reflect on the political reverberations of 2020 through how Asian American racialization proceeds in flux--that is, we heed critiques in organizing and academic theory of how the Asian diaspora can perpetuate antiblackness and settler colonialism as part of a larger upheaval in socially engaged thought. Through the critical karaoke format, a presentation that emphasizes accompaniment and the mutual exchange between artist and critic, we seek to highlight Asian American artists’ interventions into race, space, and genre with a special attention toward mutual relationality. We argue that the sights and sites of Asian American sound are central toward that task.

Paper order will be: Liu, Ishii, Pereya, and Tagle.

Pop Musicking and Survivance in Native North Pacific Communities (Room B: Oscillator)

A growing community of scholars working with, by, and for Native North Pacific communities are rethinking the role of pop musicking in ongoing Indigenous-led self-determination movements. This roundtable focuses on community-based music projects with Quinault, Colville, and Yakama Nations, all of whom serve as stewards to the lands and waters currently known as Washington State. We seek to expand current understandings of survivance -- coined by Anishinaabe literary theorist Gerald Vizenor to better account for praxes of “survival” and “creative continuance” (1994, 2008) -- to account for the significance of Indigenous aurality, orality, and musicality. Our roundtable responds to the following three questions:

• What is the role of pop music in Indigenous survivance? 
• How do Native pop musicians sound and relate to ongoing colonial precarities?
• How are musicking projects for the Quinault, Colville, and Yakama Nations offering new ways forward to (re)imagine futures otherwise?   

Jessica Bissett Perea (Dena’ina) serves as the roundtable chair and offers introductions to our larger themes/questions.

SimHayKin Swawilla Jack (San Poil/Nez Perce/Moses-Columbia/Nespelem/Lakota) discusses her work as an immersion language teacher at the Salish School of Spokane, where she develops multimedia (print, audiovisual, digital, performance) materials to advance language learning and retention. She considers the significance of Indigenizing top 40 karaoke songs and performance as a tool for Nsilxcín (Colville-Okanagan) language resurgence.

Tory Johnston (Quinault) is an emerging musician-scholar working on the significance of collaborative composition as a community building project that can center Quinault approaches (theories, methods, and praxes) to productively bridge ecomusicology with tribal resource management. He explains how Quinault musicking is water-centered, or hydrological, and how we can listen to collaborative compositions as forms of sovereignty.

Jack Flesher describes his work with Music Alive! in the Yakama Valley (MAYV), which is an ongoing, collaborative project in the UW School of Music that engages in cross-cultural community work through music education. As a member of the MAYV team, Jack works to facilitate collective songwriting workshops for students at the Yakama Nation Tribal School. These workshops aim to empower Native youth to explore their identities through music and create their own songs to express self-determined tribal and cultural values.

John-Carlos Perea (Mescalero Apache/German/Irish/Chicano) serves as the roundtable respondent and offers questions/comments for future directions and facilitate Q&A with attendees.

For our breaks between the daytime sessions, members of our Programming Committee volunteered to curate/create short bits of "bonus beats" content.

For this break, we have:

1. "White Rabbit," a 2020 music video by Songs for Tony (including alumnus from NYU Clive Davis Institute): "Disruption and turbulence are foregrounded. The mechanical loop distorts and modulates before disintegrating and reemerging as a slower, more menacing version of itself (mirrored in the video by our transformation into otherworldly levitating vampires). We try to make each element sound like either an animal or a machine - fuzzed-out drum sequences, synthesizers and kaleidoscopic vocals glomming together into a mechanized White Rabbit to lead us into a new industrial dancepunk wonderland."
2. "ZD005," a 2021 music video by NYU Clive Davis Institute alumnus Zhon Doe: "We're in a pretty-person industry. But “prettiness” changes. And pretty people are interchangeable. Yet somehow what people find pretty seems set in stone."

 

Shifting Cultural Memory: Explorations in Black Voice (Room A: Sky Church)

“Don't waste your candor/On bystanders” sings Moses Sumney. This panel considers the power candid Black voices posess, how they can convert bystanders into activists, lovers, joyful children, writers, fans. From Sumney to Odetta, from Cynthia Dagnal-Myron to Chance the Rapper, the panel explores how Black voices and bodies have been marked by personal and collective history, and how they speak to it.

The order of papers will be: Landgraf, Shaviro, De Coste, and Mack.

Re / vision / ist History: A Focused Roundtable (Room B: Oscillator)


What even is time? This 2020 question will continue to haunt us into 2021, and Pop Con’s theme is the perfect invitation to interrogate and examine the dynamic interplay of art and time. Our proposed roundtable, Re / vision / ist History, explores multiple facets of music spanning several decades.

Erin MacLeod takes us back to the 2010s with the Alaclair Ensemble, an ambitious hip hop collective and concept group based on imagining an alternate history in which the lower Canadian Rebellion was actually won by the Patriots in 1838. In imagining an alternate history of Quebec, one of which is establishing the Declaration of Independence of Lower Canada, Alaclair Ensemble explores treconfiguring separatism, literally and figuratively. The multimedia and bilingual piece examines the limits and possibilities of Alaclair Ensemble’s efficacy, influence, and musicality.

Andrea Warner starts in 1965 and works her way through to the present day with “28 Ways of Looking at a Song.” She explores the feminist highs & hair-raising lows of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s most covered classic, “Until It’s Time For You To Go.” From Elvis, Cher and Päivi Paunu to Barbra Streisand, François Hardy, and the New Birth, this multimedia piece examines how a song changes or retains its shape depending on the cover, the singer, the context, and the pop culture climate.

Isis Semaj-Hall examines Lee Scratch Perry's music to consider how he upsets colonial time with his form of Jamaicanfuturism. Listening carefully to his haunted production in the 1970s to his riddles and wordplay he voiced in the 1990s on "African Hitchhiker", "Angel Gabriel and the Space Boots", "Too Much Money", "Lee the Upsetter", and "(I Got the) Groove", this lyric-focused piece argues that Scratch's Jamaicanfuturist time is not rooted in money as it is in the West that he rejects. Rather, for this musical African alien, he decolonizes time, making it sense-based not cents-based. If the listener repeats, rewinds, and replays, instead of fast forwarding through the musical message, colonial notions of time as money and time as space become less stable.

For our breaks between the daytime sessions, members of our Programming Committee volunteered to curate/create short bits of "bonus beats" content.

For this break, we have:

1. "New Year’s Day (Live)," a 2020 music video by NYU Clive Davis Institute student Sabrina Song: "This piece is a live performance of my song "New Year's Day". It was written on January 1st, 2020, and was inspired by the overwhelming and conflicting feelings that come with every new year. There is so much unnecessary pressure to create new goals, reflect and improve, and I always find myself feeling stress rather than optimism. "New Year's Day" illustrates the constant state of uncertainty and flux that I feel as a young person, with the camera lens perspective representing the pressure I feel to be "logged on" and always active on social media."
2. Michelle Habell-Pallán interviewing punk rock artist Alice Bag about her song, "Sister Dynamite."

Pod Out the Jams: Podcasting and the Changing Mediums for Music Writing (Room A: Sky Church)

Over the course of the 2010s, podcasting went from being dominated by informal, conversational/testimonial-style content to encompassing a wide range of formats, with varying levels of production quality, not to mention profit potential. As an inherently auditory medium, it’s unsurprising that music-oriented podcasts would arise and even within this specific subset, the range of styles has encompassed everything from song/album analysis to critic roundtables to history-driven storytelling to investigative journalism. This comes at a time where opportunities for print-based music writing continues to contract and web-based outlets have struggled to maintain long-term economic stability. Podcasting, for certain, is faced by similar challenges in navigating this mercurial landscape but the medium is still young enough where both the creative and financial potential is still under-explored. Our roundtable discussion brings together active podcast creators and hosts to discuss the possibilities – and liabilities – involved in turning to podcasting as a medium for music writing in all its diversity. Some of the key questions that our panel would be engaging in include:

-How is podcasting similar or different from other music writing mediums? What are some of its unexpected benefits or shortcomings?

-How challenging has it been to adapt to the medium for those used to text-based forms of music writing, whether creatively, technologically, etc.?

-What is the potential that has yet to be realized, whether creatively, financially or otherwise?

-How may the ongoing consolidation amongst podcast networks, combined with the threat of network-exclusive access, alter our expectations of music podcasting into the 2020s? Do similar consolidations in the print/web-world offer lessons or cautionary tales to learn for podcasters?

Session Players/Latina Feminist Critics: Nine Songs for Public Health (Room B: Oscillator)

Licia Fiol-Matta, Deborah R. Vargas, and Alexandra T. Vazquez

At this roundtable we are both session players and Latina feminist critics. The session player is a position that we collectively aspire to, as one who can and must go where the work is, without the fanfare of fame or social media profile or, just as often, credit. They go undeterred from bringing everything they’ve got, doing it properly, or in the words of our poet laureate Tego Calderon, “Dai, pero elegante” to any assembly. The Latina feminist critic is less an identitarian position--we don’t want to distract ourselves or you with scars we’ve accumulated in battle—but more a shared repertoire that we’ve been lucky to play together for some years, across the scalene area of Texas Mexico, Cuba Florida, Puerto Rico New York, the multitudes that have entered and left it, and the attention their stories deserve and require--not for a special issue of race, gender, and place in music--but for being more attuned to life and the living.

For our breaks between the daytime sessions, members of our Programming Committee volunteered to curate/create short bits of "bonus beats" content.

For this break, we have DJ Natasha Diggs and her 10 minute, "Soul in the Horn: The Pop Con Edition" pop-up mix. Known as the 45 Queen, one of the most sought-after DJs in the world. She has performed with artists such as Erykah Badu, Mark Ronson, Grandmaster Flash, Cut Chemist, Spinderella, Prince Paul, 45 King, and more. Thanks to Melissa A. Weber for inviting Diggs to share this mix.

“Going, Going, Gone: The Future After Marvin’s Masterpiece” (Room A: Sky Church)

Anniversaries are meant to mark the occasion of an opening: renewed life, new directions, committed love. In that, they inevitably carry with them something else, those things that are left behind or displaced on the day or season but inevitably linger, even through celebration. Loneliness, gloom, and vulnerability remain and yearly amass sharper and more expansive evidence of having been there. Music carries all of this and with each rotation reinvents the world, what we know and hoped to know. Marvin Gaye’s classic What’s Going On? (1971) responded to a terrifying, terrified, and fragile nation and asked a question with staying power. “Going, Going, Gone” assembles a panel of Black music scholars and musicians to offer multitextual and creative accountings of the future that Gaye queried. Prolonged listening in Washington, D.C. and Detroit, studies of technique in studio outtakes, and the poetics of his influence overlay a stunning record that, fifty years later, continues to shorten the distance between anniversary and memorial.

Artist Relations and the Power of the Interview w/ Jason King and Liz Pelly (Room A: Sky Church)

With support from Critical Minded, the Pop Convergence is expanding our mentorship offerings with seven hour-long sessions designed to assist up-and-coming music writers from underrepresented and marginalized communities. All sessions are now filled for direct participants but this is a public session that audience members are allowed into.

Session Description: Anyone who aspires to write music journalism needs to sharpen their skills at conducting artist interviews; the artist interview is also a core feature of music curation for podcasts, music documentaries, and live events. Writers are often tasked with artist relations, which can include finding, pitching and recruiting musicians for features, and for a wide range of curated projects and events—that wrangling is a skill on its own. In this workshop, writers and scholars Jason King and Liz Pelly discuss how writers can conduct effective interviews through by becoming skilled at asking savvy questions and by becoming effective listeners; and they’ll address best practices in artist relations that every music writer should master.

With support from Critical Minded, the Pop Convergence is expanding our mentorship offerings with seven hour-long sessions designed to assist up-and-coming music writers from underrepresented and marginalized communities.

Session Description: So you wrote a book, huh? Congrats! Now for the hardest fun you'll have in the book writing process: promoting your book. This workshop focuses on how to cultivate your "seller's pitch" for a wide-range of academic and non-academic readers and use social media to your advantage.

Note: This session is private and will only be open to invited participants. All spaces are now filled. 

With support from Critical Minded, the Pop Convergence is expanding our mentorship offerings with seven hour-long sessions designed to assist up-and-coming music writers from underrepresented and marginalized communities. Interested participants can sign-up here.

Session Description: From pithy reviews to longform reporting, all stories start with a pitch. How do you distill a complicated subject into a concise email? How do you persuade an editor to take a chance on a little-known artist or a big idea? In this mentorship session, we'll break down the art of the pitch from conceptualizing an idea to drafting that email and hitting send.

Note: This session is private and will only be open to invited participants. All participant slots are now filled. 

Public Writing For Academics w/ Hua Hsu and Oliver Wang (Room A: Sky Church)

With support from Critical Minded, the Pop Convergence is expanding our mentorship offerings with seven hour-long sessions designed to assist up-and-coming music writers from underrepresented and marginalized communities. All sessions are now filled for direct participants but this is a public session that audience members are allowed into.

Session Description: The goal of this session is to discuss ways in which academics and scholars can seek opportunities to bring their expertise to a wider, public audience. Especially in a time of rampant misinformation and anti-intellectualism, informed voices are more important than ever but it's not always easy to bridge scholarly expertise over to general audiences without making a concerted attempt at writing with greater legibility and understanding what venues would be most open to having academics contribute essays, op-eds, etc. Both speakers have spent their professional lives split between academia and journalism and will be offering suggestions on how to navigate between those spheres. 

How To Write a Hot Take…That Lasts w/ Ann Powers (Room A: Sky Church)

With support from Critical Minded, the Pop Convergence is expanding our mentorship offerings with seven hour-long sessions designed to assist up-and-coming music writers from underrepresented and marginalized communities. All sessions are now filled for direct participants but this is a public session that audience members are allowed into.

Session Description: The think piece has become the coin of the realm in cultural journalism -- often quickly produced in response to a new release or cultural event. This presents opportunities for music writers, but also serious challenges. How can writers be prepared to formulate ideas about music quickly, providing necessary context and interpretation, in ways that draw in readers -- and, more importantly, have an impact past the usual hot take's short sell-by date. Powers, who has been writing cultural criticism for the popular press, will discuss developing an information toolbox to use when writing quick-react essays; integrating first-person, historical and theoretical material to create balanced and compelling views; and developing an authoritative voice in a highly reactive world.

Writing Biographies w/ RJ Smith and Karen Tongson (Room B: Oscillator)

With support from Critical Minded, the Pop Convergence is expanding our mentorship offerings with seven hour-long sessions designed to assist up-and-coming music writers from underrepresented and marginalized communities. All sessions are now filled for direct participants but this is a public session that audience members are allowed into.

Session Description: This mentorship session examines the process of researching, writing and selling biographies. The session will open out into a discussion with all present regarding issues involved in writing about the arts, for few literary forms support such a sprawl of approaches and voices that both draw and diverge from traditions in criticism, history and personal history writing more than does the biography.

Finding Your Voice: A Writing Workshop with Joan Morgan and NYU Students of The Collective Blive Recorded Music Chapter (Room A: Sky Church)

With support from Critical Minded, the Pop Convergence is expanding our mentorship offerings with seven hour-long sessions designed to assist up-and-coming music writers from underrepresented and marginalized communities.

Session Description: In the age of cluttered timelines and constant social media commentary, finding one’s authentic voice can be just as challenging as it is crucial. The Collective Blive Recorded Music Chapter, a New York University Tisch School of the Arts club for rising Black multidisciplinary artists at NYU, is hosting a conversation and journalism workshop with Dr. Joan Morgan, in partnership with the Pop Conference’s 2021 Convergence Event “Turn and Face the Change: Popular Music in Times of Flux” and the grantmaking and learning initiative Critical Minded. After a discussion with Dr. Morgan concerning her journey to her singular, critically acclaimed writing style, NYU students will receive real-time feedback on their original music journalism pieces.

Dr. Joan Morgan is the Program Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. She is an award-winning cultural critic, feminist author, Grammy nominated songwriter and a pioneering hip-hop journalist. Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999, when she published the groundbreaking book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks it Down which is taught at universities globally. Regarded internationally as an expert on the topics of hip-hop, race and gender, Morgan has made numerous television, radio and film appearances. She has been a Visiting Scholar at The New School, Vanderbilt, Duke and Stanford Universities. She was a Visiting Assistant Professor at her alma mater, New York University, in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Her most recent book is She Begat This: 20 Years of the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Jamaican-born and South Bronx bred, Morgan is a proud Native New Yorker.

Note: While mentorship and workshop for this event with Dr. Morgan is available only to selected NYU students, the event is open to the public to observe and free to attend by all. You can sign up to receive the link for this event here.