Serge G. An International Conference on Serge Gainsbourg

Paris-Sorbonne University
IReMus
Collegium Musicae
9–10 April 2018

In 1989, a survey of French cultural taste revealed that Serge Gainsbourg was both one of the most popular singers and yet a near outcast in his native country. When he died, two years later, President Mitterrand called him “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire”, claiming he had “elevated chanson to the level of art”. But he might just as well have acknowledged Gainsbourg as the first artist to top the British charts with a single in a foreign language. With the hindsight of almost thirty years, one thing is, in any case, certain: sampled by Beck, De La Soul, Massive Attack and Fatboy Slim, remixed by Howie B. and David Holmes, translated by Mick Harvey and covered by Iggy Pop, Donna Summer, Portishead, Madeleine Peyroux, the Pet Shop Boys and Franz Ferdinand, “the man with the cabbage head” remains the Francophone songwriter whose contribution to the international appeal of French popular music has been the most significant in the post-war era. To celebrate the 90th anniversary of his birth, the IReMus’s CRMP (Centre de Recherche sur les Musiques Populaires) is organising the first international conference on this protean creator standing at the crossroads of pop music and chanson. We welcome papers on topics including (but not restricted to):

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Cool Retro Camp Trash. Aesthetic Concepts in Popular Culture

University of Freiburg, 3–5 May 2018
https://www.zpkm.uni-freiburg.de/coolretrocamptrash

The aesthetic quality of the popular is now undisputed. In fact, it can be argued that popular culture has become the dominant cultural paradigm of our days, which takes shape in music, film, literature, social media, fashion etc. In order to meet this cultural transformation with due attention, the aesthetic concepts of popular culture are to be scrutinized for the first time from a broad academic perspective.
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HardWired. Discussion about Heavy Metal-Research VI: So far, so good…so what? Approaching the Metal Realities

University of Siegen (Germany)
May 03-05, 2018

Organisers: Florian Heesch, Reinhard Kopanski, Laura Patrizia Fleischer and Aleksandar Golovin (University of Siegen; Faculty II; Department of Arts and Music; Popular Music and Gender Studies)

Deadline for submitting proposals: 31^th October 2017

Confirmed speakers: Anna-Katharina Höpflinger (LMU Munich, Germany / University of Lucerne, Switzerland); Holger Hübner (Promoter of Wacken Open Air, Germany); Susanne Sackl-Sharif (FH Johanneum – University of Applied Sciences Graz, Austria); Karl Spracklen (Leeds Beckett University, UK); Holger Stratmann (Publisher of Rock Hard Magazine, Germany);

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Jazz Research Journal special issue: Jazz Television

In an account of Roland Kirk’s appearance on the television programme Soul!, Gayle Wald argues that the mediation of a television camera “renders the affective power of Kirk’s performance more immediate and more suspenseful than it might have been in a nightclub setting” (2015: 124-125). With these words, Wald explodes dominant myths in jazz regarding the primacy of live performance and counters widely-held suspicions regarding the possible accomplishments of jazz television (see Frith 2002: 277-290). As understandings of jazz reach beyond the musicological, scholarship has paid closer attention to questions of production and visual style in small-screen presentations of jazz (McGee 2009: 201-244; Long and Wall 2015; Pillai 2016; Heile et al. 2017) but there remains much to be explored.

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Jay-Z special issue in Black Camera

As a supplement to the Fall 2017 Close-Up on Beyoncé, Black Camera invites submissions for a Close-Up devoted to JAY-Z. Recently inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame by President Barack Obama, JAY-Z is one of the most influential rap artists of all time.

With the release of 4:44, JAY-Z has once again shifted the terrain of hip-hop and his own image. Revealed as a philanderer in Beyoncé’s ground-breaking Lemonade, JAY-Z embraces vulnerability and responsibility in his fourteenth album. How does this new perspective elucidate a rapper once renowned for his masculinist lyrics and aggressive posture?

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The Social and Cultural Study of Music: Then and Now 

A Symposium in Honour of John Shepherd

Carleton University, Ottawa, 24–25 Nov. 2017

During the late 1970s and early 80s, an emerging body of literature based in sociology, popular music, feminism, cultural and critical theory began to infiltrate the study of music, challenging the objects and methods of conventional music theory and musicology, on the one hand, and questioning Western classical music as the primary musical text, on the other.  Issues of class, identity, race, gender and sexuality, technology, industry, values and aesthetics came to the fore and popular musics, genres and fandom slowly gained status as legitimate areas of study. Today, these issues continue to inform much writing and theorizing about music but new areas of inquiry – ethnography, music in everyday life, sound studies, music and the moving image, cities and scenes, disability studies, digitalization and others – have added to the increasingly inter-disciplinary character of music as an area of cultural study.

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2017 IASPM Postgraduate Student Conference

Dear colleagues,

I’m delighted to announce the call for papers for the 2017 IASPM UK&I Postgraduate Students’ Conference on the theme ‘Negotiating Popular Music’. This two-day conference takes as its starting point the position that encounters with popular music involve a dialogue between varied forces and agencies. It offers an opportunity for research students to come together to interrogate these myriad interactions with popular music as analysts, makers, tastemakers, and so on.

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‘Imagining Kingston’: A Conference on the Regeneration of a City

November 9-12, 2017

The restoration of old, historic, depressed or derelict quarters of cities is a common feature of social, economic, aesthetic and environmental development strategies around the world.

Restoration and regeneration are often used as the basis to catalyse and to chart pathways for economic growth and renewal, to pioneer new sectors of social and economic endeavours, and to cultivate pride and civic feeling in a people’s existential journey. The scholarship and expertise in this area are growing globally and providing governments/policy makers, investors/entrepreneurs, citizens and various publics with knowledge, advice, training/agential capacity, building facilities and skills for urban renewal, regeneration and a multiplicity of possibilities, including imagining and realizing new exciting urban spatial creations alongside the iconising of spaces.

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Transnational Fields of Production and Consumption

RC14 Sociology of Communication, Knowledge and Culture (host committee)
Language: English

According to Meulemen and Savage (2013: 232), Bourdieu’s work on cultural consumption employs a “Franco-centric” model of cultural hierarchy, and most empirical studies of cultural consumption still focus on nationally-based fields (Meulemen and Savage 2013). This emphasis on the national at the expense of the transnational has been repeated in many analyses of cultural production. For example, many previous Bourdieusian analyses of popular music focus on fields at the local and/or national level of analysis and do not focus on the diasporic and/or transnational character of fields.
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Football, Politics and Popular Culture: 2017 Annual Conference of The Football Collective.

Hosted by the Popular Music and Popular Culture Research Cluster, University of Limerick.

‘The Football Collective’ is a dedicated International network of over 200 academics and practitioners across a range of disciplines (Sociology, Musicology, Business Management, Economics and Finance, Political Science, Gender Studies, History, Social Media and Fan Studies, Corporate Governance etc.). Through sharp analysis and research it has provided a platform for thought provoking critical debate in football studies.

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