Music lovers are converging on Seattle in droves this month, but
many of them are more likely to be wearing tweed jackets than
flannel shirts.
Today marks the beginning of the third annual Experience Music
Project Pop Music Conference in Seattle. The four-day conference
brings together a mixture of academics, journalists, musicians and
other aficionados from all over the country and is dedicated to
music-writing in all its various forms.
At least five of the presenters are affiliated with UCLA:
philosophy graduate student Franklin Bruno and musicology graduate
student Caroline O’Meara, School of Public Health staff
member and alumnus Max Hechter, musicology doctoral student
Jacqueline Warwick and musicology chair and professor, Robert
Fink.
The conference signifies the increasing popularity of pop music
studies.
Celebrated critics Robert Christgau and Marcus Greil will square
off against and exchange ideas with their academic counterparts.
Presentations range wide in subject, with titles from “Punk
Without Progress: Critiquing Momentous History” to
“Feel Me Flow: Notes on Black Music and Feng Shui.”
Three-minute pop songs are scrutinized with a depth and
meticulosity previously reserved only for classical and operatic
works, as a generation of music scholars and critics turns its
collective analysis on the music it grew up with.
“Part of it is the move to historicize popular music and
especially rock ‘n’ roll. In the last 15 years
it’s finally reached its critical mass,” said
O’Meara.
And though the conference may be partly all in good fun ““
among the events is “critical karaoke,” in which
writers interpret their favorite songs for exactly the length of
the song, speaking over the music. The ideas discussed and
exchanged are no less valid academically.
“Pop music is no longer seen as kind of a bastardized form
of music. I think it’s now a perfectly acceptable cultural
product. Rock ‘n’ roll has been around for close to 50
years now, so it’s almost reached antique status. People who
grew up on it take it as the music of their heart, and it’s
drawn these people to become academics,” said Hechter, an
epidemiologist at the UCLA School of Public Health and former
KPFK-FM disc jockey. Both O’Meara and Hechter will be
presenting on the “Know-Nothing Pop” panel, dedicated
entirely to inept and unintentional music.
Bruno, who has written for publications such as LA Weekly and
Salon in addition to recording music with Jenny Toomey, The
Mountain Goats, and Nothing Painted Blue, agrees.
“There are younger academics around that grew up with pop.
That’s their music. That’s as important to them as
opera or classical was to generations before, and they take it as
seriously as their predecessors took anything else,” said
Bruno.
“UCLA is a hotbed of this new musicology,” he
added.
UCLA indeed has been at the forefront of popular music studies,
a credit to the faculty hires made by the musicology department and
its commitment to expanding the scope of its studies. Walser, the
president of the International Association for the Study of Popular
Music, came to UCLA in 1994.
“At first, they were almost all European 20th-century
studies. Now UCLA is the leading place for 20th-century music
across a huge range. We’re attracting amazing grad
students,” said Walser, who wrote his dissertation in the
late 1980s on heavy metal and has attended the previous two EMP
conferences.
But this new approach also has drawn its share of criticism from
those who articulate that intellectualizing rock ‘n’
roll is itself not very rock ‘n’ roll. Hechter noted
this posed a challenge to his own writing.
“It’s a very emotional response, and I have to say
my greatest struggle in writing the first draft of my presentation
was trying to come up with language to transmit what I was feeling
emotionally and trying to do it in a more analytical
form.”
But Bruno rejected this dichotomy completely, drawing from his
own experience as both a music critic and rock musician.
“Academics are very passionate people,” Bruno said.
“If you’ve ever been in a studio, it’s often
detailed, painstaking work with lots of small decisions, and
it’s the same on stage and touring. It’s a real
oversimplification to think that rock music is just this very
direct romantic expression of pure feeling unmediated by craft or
thought or analysis.”
Unsurprisingly, this year’s meeting will have a panel on
the topic of writing about music. The panel will be moderated and
presented entirely by music critics.
“The academics bring a certain level of detail and care,
and sometimes rock critics are more interested in ideas about the
big picture and what’s happening right now,” said
Bruno.