Get Ur Freak On: Music, Weirdness, and Transgression

2015 EMP Pop Conference
April 16-19, 2015, EMP Museum, Seattle, Washington

Exploding conventions has long put the bomp in pop: the uncontainable desire of those deemed sexually unnatural, racial impostors, gender outlaws, obsessed fans, willful bohemians, or just plain weird. “We feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in “The Imp of the Perverse.” Music often sanctions transgression, challenges or corrupts the status quo depending on your perspective, gives us Prince in one era (called Imp of the Perverse by a biographer), Miley Cyrus in another, an Iggy Pop then and an Iggy Azalea now.

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Special Issue of Rock Music Studies: The Velvet Underground

Guest-edited by Alex DiBlasi and Steven Hamelman

“[T]he first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years…. [T]hat record was such an important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”—Brian Eno, 1982

With the recent passing of Lou Reed and the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of their groundbreaking debut, the Velvet Underground remain one of the most influential recording acts in rock. Each of their four studio albums with Lou Reed at the helm—The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), White Light/White Heat (1968), The Velvet Underground (1969), and Loaded (1970)—inspired entire genres, setting the precedent for alternative, indie, goth, punk, noise, post-punk, and experimental music in the decades to come. This special issue of Rock Music Studies seeks to examine the Velvet Underground’s lasting impact on popular music while also reappraising their own influences, works, and other realms of their career.

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Jazz and Modernity

Call for papers #1 : Jazz and Modernity [full version here]
Coordination: Thomas Horeau, Édouard Hubert, Raphaëlle Tchamitchian

Since its birth, jazz has often been perceived as a musical paradigm for the modern age, a technological and rhythmical age characterized by an unprecedented “acceleration”, considered as a danger by some philosophers. The idea of modernity, which has been progressively legitimized and used within the field of aesthetics, is generally defined as a distance taken from the tradition and/or an orientation toward the future. The argument of modernity and positioning in relation to tradition is at the core of controversies relating to jazz legitimacy, from Berendt and Adorno, Panassié and Vian, to the recent controversy about the nomination of Olivier Benoît as director of the French Orchestre National de Jazz. Then, can and/or must one consider jazz a “modern” music, considering it is often constituted by a tension between rupture and continuity.

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Over and Over: Exploring Repetition in Popular Music

Over and Over: Exploring repetition in popular music aims at identifying and studying the recent aesthetic and analytical developments of musical repetition. From the 32-bar forms of Tin Pan Alley, through the cyclic forms of modal jazz, to the more recent accumulation of digital layers, beats, and breaks in Electronic Dance Music (EDM), repetition as both an aesthetic disposition or formal musicological property stimulated a diversity of genres and techniques. After decades of riffs, loops, vamps, reiterated rhythmic patterns, as well as pervasive harmonic formulae and recurring structural units in standardized song forms, the time has come to give these notions the place they deserve in the study of popular music.

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Hip Hop Studies: Global and Local

Saturday, 13 September 2014
University of Helsinki, Finland

The Finnish Youth Research Society and the University of Helsinki’s discipline of Social
and Cultural Anthropology are pleased to announce an international and
interdisciplinary symposium showcasing contemporary studies of hip hop from
established and emerging scholars from Finland and around the world.

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Five student bursaries on offer for ‘Worlds of Popular Music’ conference

IASPM UK & Ireland are pleased to announce an additional five student bursaries to cover registration costs at the forthcoming ‘Worlds of Popular Music’ conference in University College Cork, Ireland (September 12-14th 2014). These bursaries are valued at €80 each, to cover early registration costs.

To apply, please fill out the application form and send it to [email protected] by June 23rd. Successful applicants will be notified by June 30th 2014.

Special Issue of Rock Music Studies: The Rolling Stones

Guest-edited by Neil Nehring, University of Texas at Austin

Rock Music Studies is a new popular music journal launched by Taylor & Francis in 2014, under the co-editorship of Gary Burns and Thomas Kitts. Contributions are invited to a special issue of the journal on the venerable Rolling Stones, to be published in February 2016.

With the Stones recently celebrating the 50^th anniversary of their first appearance as recording artists, the possible topics are nearly endless, of course. After 50 years all sorts of historical phases stand out: “The Golden Era” (or “Mick Taylor Years”) from 1969 to 1974, including the legendary tours of the United States in 1969 and 1972; the wild Clockwork Orange phase circa 1964, instigated by manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham, and/or the centrality of the Stones in Swinging London through 1966; the “lost” European tour of 1970, on which the Stones were arguably at the peak of their powers and dubious reputation among the New Left as political radicals; and the response to punk represented by the Some Girls album and tour in 1978.  Subsequent periods are fine, too; personally I agree with the music critic Bill Wyman that the Stones might well have bitten the dust long ago if not for the lingering cachet of the 1981 hit “Start Me Up” (written several years before) over the hiatus in the mid-’80s as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards feuded, and after, culminating in its use in the rollout of Windows 95 in 1995.

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Music and shared imaginaries: nationalisms, communities, and choral singing

October 30^th-November 1^st, 2014

Hosted and organized by the University of Aveiro and INET-MD (Portugal), and co-organized by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) , Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Italy), and the University of Rioja (SPAIN).

Keynote speakers:

Ruth Finnegan – The Open University, UK; Mário Vieira de Carvalho – Universidade Nova de Lisboa; Salwa Castelo-Branco – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Call for papers

Philip Bohlman’s writings about music, nationalism and the construction of the “new” Europe proposed a “multitude of angles” that comprehended the plurality of actors and musical practices that weave and fray national identities. In relation to the study of music and nationalisms, this is not merely a question of genres and repertoires, and top-down narratives, but also how musicians negotiate their own nationalities in performance.

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One Century of Record Labels – Mapping places, stories and communities of sound

International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
November 6^th – 7^th 2014
Keynote: Dr Pete Dale (Slampt Records, Manchester Metropolitan University)

This two-day interdisciplinary conference will expose, question and celebrate the enduring role of independent and commercial record labels in the construction of musical patrimony, from the early days of the record industry to the present. Record labels have traditionally functioned as organs of representation (replicating for instance racial stereotypes), codification (setting genres and trends), as well as emancipation (allowing for marginal trends, voices and groups of artists to emerge). They exist at the intersection of the public and the personal, capturing the collective imagination as well as the private fascination of the collector. They occupy different spaces and scales, from internationally influential, legendary record labels (Stax, Motown, or Columbia) to more obscure, bedroom-run, non-commercial labels (Sarah Records, Musical Traditions Records). The aim of the conference is to gather a variety of perspectives on the past and present legacy of record labels, and to examine their changing status and relevance in an age of increasing dematerialisation.

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IASPM UK/Ireland Conference 2016

Dear all, In recent years, we have organised the location of the next IASPM UK/Ireland biennial conference electronically, with proposals and voting all taking place via the email list. This time, I’d like to try and increase participation by conducting the voting at Cork for the location of the 2016 conference. (This is the model used for the IASPM International conferences.) In advance of the Cork conference, then, I would like to receive proposals for the 2016 conference. I will then circulate these for perusal at members’ leisure, and an informed vote can take place in September. Read the rest of this entry »