Pop Conference 2025: Full Schedule

POP CONFERENCE 2025

Baby, It’s a Look!
Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge

March 13 - 15, 2025

Los Angeles, California

Presented by USC Thornton School of Music

With the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) and Critical Minded

Over three exciting days of panels, roundtables, keynotes, and special events, the 23rd annual Pop Conference will explore the deep and complex relationship between popular music, style, and fashion. This year’s theme, “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge,” draws its inspiration from a 2017 Leikeli47 lyric and marks the first joint gathering of PopCon and IASPM-US since 2012.

Fashion and music are inextricably linked, from Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, Cab Calloway’s zoot suits, Billie Holiday’s signature gardenia, to The Beatles’ mop-top haircuts. Today, the connection between pop music and fashion remains stronger than ever. Visualizers thrive on streaming platforms; fashion runways in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg deploy pop music to bring designers’ visions to life; and musicians themselves blaze new trails designing streetwear collections and serving as creative directors for major fashion houses.

But style has always been much more than just commerce or escapism—it has long been a space for critique, refusal, defiance, and radical expression. At its most powerful, style challenges norms, blurs boundaries, and pushes artistic and cultural frontiers, moving us right to the edge.

This year’s conference returns to USC’s Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles just months after January 2025’s catastrophic Eaton and Palisades wildfires, and during a time of profound global upheaval and turmoil. The 2025 “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge” conference presents a remix, an opportunity to reconsider how fashion and music shape the world we live in, reflecting our realities, struggles, and aspirations while leading us toward the very edge of what feels possible.

Open to the public and free admission with conference registration on Eventbrite. Some events may require separate registration.

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10:00am PDT

Very Demure, Very Mindful: Transgressions of Fashion in Metal and Punk Cultures (Roundtable)

Friday March 14, 2025 10:00am - 11:45am PDT

Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall

Heavy metal and punk music fans share something in common: they wear their fandom on their
proverbial sleeves. Through their band t-shirts, leather jackets, tattoos and hairstyles,
metalheads and punks are often recognizable by choice. While rules and regulations are often
unspoken, there is a common understanding among these music fans that they will often be
judged, not just for their chosen appearance, but in how they make their fandom public.
This roundtable discussion will consider what happens when metal fandom is shared within
cultural communities that are not perceived as being “metal.” With the growing ethnic, gender
and sexual diversity within these scenes, metal and punk fans are no longer just intimidating
straight white men with an appearance that would make you cross to the other side of the street.
How do Muslim women metalheads dress? Do black punk fans wear mohawks? This panel will
look at growing metal and punk scenes from across the globe to explore how their visual
aesthetics reflect the growing diversity within these scenes and how these fans negotiate space,
identity, and present visual narratives.

Moderators

Laina Dawes

Case Western Reserve University

Laina Dawes, Ph.D is the John J Murphy Postdoctoral Scholar at Case Western Reserve University. She is an ethnomusicologist and the author of What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal (Bazillion Points Books, 2012; 2020). A lifelong heavy metal... Read More →

Speakers

Joan Jocson-Singh

Joan Jocson-Singh is the inaugural Director of Library at The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. She has previously worked as the Institute Librarian (Dean) at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), as the Head of Technical Services at Lehman College and as an Acquisitions Librarian... Read More →

Jeff Treppel

Jeff Treppel writes about heavy metal and for children’s animation (but not at the same time). His music journalism can be found in Decibel, The Shfl, Bandcamp Daily, MetalSucks, and Noisey. He currently resides in Los Angeles.

Tracey Panek

Historian, Levi Strauss & Co.

Tracey Panek is the Historian for Levi Strauss & Co. and Director of Archives at the company’s world headquarters in San Francisco. She manages the day-to-day workings of the Levi Strauss & Co. Archives as a key corporate asset, answering historical questions, assisting designers... Read More →

Mark LeVine

Mark LeVine is a Guggenheim-winning musician who has recorded and toured with acclaimed performers, including Mick Jagger, Chuck D, Dr. John, Ozomatli, Hassan Hakmoun, Seun and Femi Kuti, and other leading Middle Eastern and African artists. His recording on Ozomatli’s album Street... Read More →

Friday March 14, 2025 10:00am - 11:45am PDT
Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

Roundtable

4:00pm PDT

IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Book Award Roundtable: Looking Back and What’s to Come

Friday March 14, 2025 4:00pm - 5:45pm PDT

USC Carson Television Center

In this roundtable, four past Woody Guthrie Book Award winners discuss their writing processes, methodological approaches, and reflect on their past and future work.

Francesca Royster (Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions)
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher (Queer Country)
Áine Mangaoang (Dangerous Mediations: Pop Music in a Philippine Prison Video)
Daphne Brooks (Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound)

Moderators

Lauron J. Kehrer

Western Michigan University

Speakers

Francesca Royster

Professor of English, DePaul University

Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University, Chicago. She is the author of Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave MacMillan... Read More →

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher

Associate Professor of Music Studies, Temple University

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher is Associate Professor of Music Studies at Temple University. Her first book, Queer Country, won IASPM US’s Woody Guthrie Award and was highlighted as one of the best music books of 2022 by Variety, Pitchfork, No Depression, The Boot, and Ticketmaster... Read More →

Áine Mangaoang

Daphne Brooks

Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke... Read More →

Friday March 14, 2025 4:00pm - 5:45pm PDT
USC Carson Television Center 3450 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA

Roundtable