I am very pleased, proud even, that as we approach our first anniversary, Blogcritics has been able to strike a satisfying balance between intellectualizing and a more visceral approach to popular culture, specifically music. Yeay us. Check out this funny, noteworthy survey of an intellectual summit on pop music from the New Yorker:
- One weekend last spring, a few hundred scholars, journalists, musicians, and onlookers arrived in downtown Seattle for Pop Conference 2003, entitled “Skip a Beat: Rewriting the Story of Popular Music.” The Pop Conference was created two years ago by Eric Weisbard, a former Village Voice rock critic, and Daniel Cavicchi, an assistant professor of American Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. The decision to bring scholars and journalists together was unusual. It gave the critics an opportunity to drop arcane allusions instead of having to pretend to sound like teen-agers, while the academics could loosen up a little. Weisbard and Cavicchi hope that the two worlds can cross-pollinate each other, breeding a sensibility that is scholarly but not stuffy, stylish but not frivolous.
The conference took place within the wavy-gravy walls of the Experience Music Project, a Frank Gehry culture palace, housing artifacts and bric-a-brac from a century of pop. The dress code was diverse to the point of incoherence: some of the older academics showed up in business attire, while younger ones wore T-shirts and jeans. (The divergence of styles became especially dissonant when sixties-generation scholars espoused radical political agendas while Gen X doctoral students sounded a neo-formalist, let’s-just-talk-about-the-music tone.) For three days, participants hawked their wares in a tight twenty-minute format, taking persnickety questions afterward. At any given time, there were three different panels running in the various rooms of the E.M.P., meaning that the curious onlooker had to choose among equally tempting offerings. In order to attend the Bob Dylan panel - entitled The Dylan - you had to skip panels on art music (one paper was "Changing the System: Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, and the Combination of Rock and Experimental Music") and contemporary R. & B. ("Supa Dupa Fly: Styles of Subversion in Black Women's Hip-Hop").
Some of the presentations, a few too many for comfort, lapsed into the familiar contortions of modern pedagogy. Likewise, in the many pop-music books now in circulation, post-structuralist, post-Marxist, post-colonialist, and post-grammatical buzzwords crop up on page after page. There is a whole lot of problematizing, interrogating, and appropriating goin' on. Walter Benjamin’s name is dropped at least as often as the Notorious B.I.G.’s. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu gets more props than Dr. Dre. At the Pop Conference, I made it a rule to move to a different room the minute I heard someone use the word “interrogate” in a non-detective context or cite any of the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Thus, I ducked out of a talk on Grace Jones’s “Slave to the Rhythm” album when I heard a sentence that began with the phrase “Invoking Walter Benjamin.” And I bailed on a lecture entitled “Bruce’s Butt" - Bruce Springsteen’s butt, as seen on the cover of "Born in the U.S.A." - when the speaker began to interrogate the image of the butt, which, under sharp questioning, wouldn’t give anything away.
Article comments
1 - viv
"It gave the critics an opportunity to drop arcane allusions instead of having to pretend to sound like teen-agers..."
Right on. Although I ever became a music critic (dream job number 1), I'd never lower myself to adopting the mangled English tongue of America's youth.