You learn things at the EMP Pop Conference. For instance, I did not know that rock T-shirts and posters were full of significance and meaning until I attended a panel this afternoon on "Iconography." Also, not being a mallrat, I had never heard of Hot Topic before but found out at the same panel that it's a mall retailer despised by the rock cognoscenti because it's not really punk, dammit!
In keeping with the general tone of the panel i.e., finding deep meaning where there is none there was also a paper on "American Idol" which postulated, shockingly enough, that all the contestants oversing!
Who knew?
Of course, being a highfalutin intellectual talk-fest, the word "oversing" was never used, because it's too understandable. Oversinging was referred to as "melisma.
" Upping the intellectual quotient even more, Machiavelli's "The Prince" was cited because Idol "is political," according to panelist Katherine Meizel, a Ph.D. candidate on ethnomusicology at UC Santa Barbara.
"It's an election, after all," she explained, to titters of laughter.
Michaelangelo Matos, a local rock writer who sometimes freelances for The Seattle Times, read his paper about Bob Marley posters on dorm room walls, without ever saying what he thinks of Marley's music, or its significance. His point seemed to be that "wasptafarians," or white college-age Marley fans, deserve to be sneered at because the only reggae artist they know is Marley, and they only like him because he smoked pot.
It didn't seem to occur to Matos that maybe white male college students have Marley posters on their dorm-room walls because they actually like his music. There's probably an academic word for it, but I call it "good taste."
The jazz talks this morning at the EMP Pop Conference were excruciatingly academic and unimaginative.
Court Carney's "Black Los Angeles and the Diffusion of Early Jazz" offered some fascinating details. For instance, the vocals in the famous Amos and Andy film, "Check and Double Check," in which Duke Ellington appears, were dubbed by the (white) Rhythm Boys (with Bing Crosby) and that Duke's band "blacked up" for the movie (as in minstrel shows).
But Carney's consideration of "The Jazz Singer" (which, as he pointed out, ironically features no jazz), ignored the significance for jazz of the film's equation of Jewish and black outsiders.
He also provided no concrete evidence whatsoever for a repeated (and probably true, not to say obvious) assertion that the film industry helped popularize no, pardon me, "became the dominant mechanism for the commodification of" jazz.
Andrew Raffo Dewar's talk about avant-garde trumpeter Bill Dixon's solo trumpet composition, "Webern," started out strong, especially when he played recordings of three versions of this brief, abstract etude, explaining its workings well. However, since no score or even set of instructions for playing the piece exist, his subsequent exegesis on the relationship between score and performance, using the idea of a "recipe" as metaphor, felt slightly how should I say this?
irrelevant!
So far, nothing at EMP's 2007 Pop Conference has risen to the level of novelist Jonathan Lethem's keynote speech, but a couple of bright moments on the pop and hip-hop fronts surfaced late this morning. Joshua Clover's multi-media presentation "1980: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About" explored how pop music dealt with the fall of the Berlin wall, pointing out that, after the Velvet Revolution, Czech radio continuously played that really revolutionary song by Roxette, "Listen to Your Heart.
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In another well-prepared and pleasantly-presented talk, Roni Sarig traced the journey of a minor, 1986 hip hop novelty record, "Drag Rap," from Queens, New York dance halls to the creation of the Memphis Buck Jump and New Orleans Bounce. With a protagonist called Triggerman and "dum-da-dum-dum" quotes from the old "Dragnet" TV show, "Drag Rap" may, Sarig speculated, have been the first "gangsta rap," though he was as disarmingly What-Me-Worry? about that assertion as he was about why the song caught on in the South in the first place.
By contrast, another song-sleuthing talk by Michael Barthel on the seady rise of the Leonard Cohen anthem "Hallelujah" (a favorite of Seattle-bred jazz singer Sara Gazarek) made Sarig look fastidious. Though Barthel did a nice job showing how Jeff Buckley and John Cale subverted the lyrics, and a quasi-comic graph tracing the song's covers and TV usages from "Crossing Jordan" to "West Wing" got a good guffaw, Barthel ultimately didn't seem to understand why anyone actually likes or sings this song. His flip befuddlement about why TV producers use it to hit the same emotional "chord" again and again was downright coy.
April 20, 2007
The theme of this year's EMP Pop Conference is "Waking Up From History: Music, Time and Place," and the "Dancing About Architecture" session this morning neatly epitomized that theme.
You had to wake yourself up after some panelist dryly reading his academic paper droned on about epistomology, dialectics, binary portals, aesthetics, etc., had put you to sleep.
You had to step back in time as the panelists honed in on the 1970s, when they apparently thought rock criticism started (I began in 1962 at the P-I, and certainly wasn't the first rock critic, but that's another story), and place was a factor in at least one presentation, dealing with Creem magazine and its off-the-beaten-track home of Detroit.
Oh, and music came up a few times, too. Not actual music, mind you, but occasional references to it.
2007 Pop Conference "Waking Up from History: Music, Time and Place," through next Sunday, Experience Music Project, Seattle Center; free (register in advance; info at ).
The most entertaining presentation, as much for its PowerPoint visuals as for its subject, was online writer Randall Roberts' talk about the "snarly aesthetic" of Creem's "Rock 'n' Roll News" section in the early '70s. Because such gifted writers as Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh and Richard Meltzer contributed to it, the news was always readable, if not always factual.
Roberts drew laughs quoting some of the news section's juicier quotes, and the page's illustrations, especially of glam rockers like David Bowie and the pre-wrinkly Rolling Stones, got oohs and ahhs.
New York University instructor and Ph.D.
candidate Devon Powers' talk, titled "Is Rock Criticism Part of Intellectual History?," was drawn from her dissertation on rock criticism in The Village Voice in the '70s, but she was the least pedantic of the four panelists. She was also the most up-to-date, calling the Voice's firing last year of its longtime, self-appointed "dean of rock critics," Robert Christgau (a panelist at this year's conference, as well as the four previous), "a proverbial slap at criticism.
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Answering her own question, she concluded that rock criticism is neither intellectual nor historical but somewhere "in between." In answer to a question from the audience, she said current rock writing, so much of it online, is best when balanced between "erudition and readability."
Thursday, April 19
Novelist Jonathan Lethem ("The Fortress of Solitude," "Motherless Brooklyn") opened the EMP Pop Conference on Thursday night in Sky Church with an operatic, confessional sweep.
He surely is the first keynote speaker to refer to the confab as a "ferschlugginer enterprise."
Culled from Mad magazine, the faux-Yiddish word (meaning "wretched") felt appropriate for the gathering. In the grand tradition of rock criticism inaugurated in the '60s by Crawdaddy magazine, ogle-eyed grad (and ex-grad) students conflate with a straight face Sanjaya, Iggy Pop and the Beatles with Nietszche, Marx and Joyce.
Lethem commanded this pop culture/high culture territory so seamlessly (perhaps too seamlessly), that if he didn't exist, EMP surely would have been forced to invent him. (Lethem's talk suggested that, in fact, his life had in some sense been "invented" by the popular culture that has swaddled him since childhood.)
He set the tone perfectly, peppering his talk with evocative descriptions, such as the one of Bob Dylan as "your (scolding) grandmother in a wolf's costume," and opened rich veins for further discussion: the artist as charlatan and the critic/fan as "fifth Beatle" wannabe who wishes to be both as close, yet as far away, from the object of desire as possible.
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