Pop Conference 2025

This roundtable will explore the fashions present and developed within the Los Angeles Eastside sound music scenes throughout different historical eras by showcasing key fashion items that will be part of the upcoming A Great Day in East L.A.: Celebrando the Eastside Sound. This is a multi-media exhibition that explores the dynamic musical influences of East Los Angeles artists who developed an eclectic musical identity and history that, against all odds, developed a rich musical tradition that became known all over the world in the last century and into the present.
The roundtable will center the discussion on the concept of self-fashioning as one of the key elements within the Eastside Sound music scenes, past and present. As Marci McMahon reminds us, “the term self-fashioning highlights the intersections of dress with bodily performance and the possibility of these sites in the negotiation of gendered and racialized ideologies.” Ethnic Mexican women —who have long been a part of the Eastside music scenes— have pushed against gendered ideologies of domesticity through self-fashioning as pachucas or reinventing punk-rock and gothic aesthetics in the 1970s and 1980s, even when faced with a scarcity of materials due to their marginalized economic status. In the 1990s and the beginning of the twentieth-first century, artists within the “Chicano Groove” scene used their clothing, such as t-shirts, jackets, and shoes to highlight their connection to their Mexican roots, messages on jerseys a form of social commentary, while also displaying their pro-immigrant and global-left solidarities. The participants will assess how clothing, and the look of the Eastside Sound community (artists and fans) are more than just fashion statements, but in fact are artistic expressions that highlight the development of their Eastside identity formation.
Piero F. Giunti and Jorge N. Leal the exhibit co-curators, along with textile and fashion conservator Laleña A. Vellanoweth, will showcase and discuss both visually and on site, various attires worn by musicians and fans of the Eastside sound, such as the suit zoot worn by Lalo Guerrero, early Chicano music icon, the coats worn by Thee Midniters in their performances, the leather jackets customized by Chicano hip-hop group Aztlan Underground, artisan-made shoes worn by Marisoul, the singer of La Santa Cecilia among other fashion-related objects worn and created by fans of the Eastside Sound artists. Media and cultural studies scholar Veronica Paredes will moderate the conversation.

Moderator: Veronica Paredes, University of California, Los Angeles

Piero F. Giunti
Jorge Nicolás Leal, University of California, Riverside
Laleña Arenas Vellanoweth

he Oxford Handbook of Pop Music, edited by Eric Weisbard, will feature about forty contributors thinking about pop music studies in relationship to popular music studies, with sections on the emergence of pop, pop forms, pop as music, intersections of identity, icons, and 21st century developments. For this roundtable, we propose to gather some of the book’s contributors and discuss pop style from the perspective of their different chapters. As of the conference, ideally, the collection will have just been sent off for peer review. This would be a perfect moment for an exchange of ideas and to receive feedback on particular approaches.
Roundtable participants will make opening remarks that showcase their project in general and how in particular style factors. Here are the topics that presenters are working on.
Moderator: Eric Weisbard, University of Alabama

Emily Gale, “’Oh, Lady, Touch Thy Lute Again’: Sex in Early Pop” -- case studies from an 1844 collection of song texts, The Parlour Songster, Containing A Superior Collection of the Most Popular Sentimental Songs. In particular, I am interested in how early pop song writers engaged musical instruments as sexual metaphors—lutes and guitars, in particular, feature prominently.
Jordan Brown: “Queen Bey: The Sampling Historiographies Behind the Icon” -- what aspects of her artistry solidify her as a “pop icon.” I stress the sampling practices within her own music, creating a sonic archive of popular music  and Black socio-political movements, blending cultural context with the usage of 1s and 0s. 
Marita Buanes Djupvik, “Vocal resistance – The defiant virtuosity of Whitney Houston”—critical musicology of how gender and race are negotiated in Houston's vocal performances, which resulted in both her popular success and her exclusion from forms of popular music seen as more "authentic" and worthy of serious academic study.  
Craig Seymour -- “Be Your Natural Self:” How Black Queer Men Influenced Pop Music -- an attempt to map several animating moments when Black queer men—as innovative artists, taste-making curators, and interpretive audiences—helped birth sounds and performance styles that were later adopted as part of the pop mainstream.
Alex Blue V and Kyle DeCoste, The Dirty, Dirty South: Authenticating Place and Identity in Country Rap –for this roundtable, how country rappers use the Confederate flag to symbolize being outlaws and the aesthetics of mud as fashion.
Ann Powers, “The Beatles Are Not What You Think They Are”-- the Beatles as pop icons, as flexible and emblematically translucent as they were group-bonded and “progressive.” Given our tendency to default to a view of pop icons who suffer or overcome, might we need to reach, as well, to Abba and BTS, and think about collective icons, with the sustained success made possible by a diversified portfolio?
Sara Marcus, Pop Anthems -- pop songs that have been identified as feminist and/or queer anthems. What makes a pop song sound “anthemic,” aside from its lyrics or performer? What formal qualities in a song signal its intended reception as an anthem, and how do the songs’ receptions bear this out or pull against it? What’s the relationship between the pop anthem and the pop protest song? 
Dan DiPiero, “Be Sweet”: Reflections on the Indie/Pop Nexus -- contemporary indie, including its feminization in music discourse, return to DIY roots, and the ways that its expansive approach to genre opens potential for crossing over into mainstream popularity. The idea that music can be widely popular while remaining recognizably “indie” by listeners is supported by shifts in the term’s usage over time.

Country rap, also known as “hick-hop,” has a passionate fanbase on the ground and a
massive online following. Performed primarily by white people in the Southern U.S.,
country rap encapsulates many seeming discrepancies. It offers images and sounds
associated with rural, white working-class identity while also drawing from a sonic
vocabulary derivative of–and associated with–Black urban experience in the U.S.
Country rap crafts a self-contained aesthetic world wherein, according to the logics of
the genre, a white woman twerking in a confederate flag bikini carries with it no
contradictions. Many practitioners of the genre offer no clear genre history; numerous
artists within country rap speak of its aesthetics and stylistic conventions as if the
genre’s provenance was spontaneous, and in a vacuum, like a backwoods big bang.
With a focus on sound and image, our research into the genre explores issues of race,
gender, place, and nation. This group panel considers the (un)fashionable aesthetics of
country rap, in particular the use of mud and the Confederate flag as signifiers of
defiance.

Rebellious Style: Country Rap and Confederate (Un)Fashion
(Alex Blue V and Kyle DeCoste)

One of the most prominent recurring visual signifiers in country rap music videos is the
Confederate flag. As many bearers and wearers of the Confederate flag would note, to
them, it’s about “heritage, not hate.” However, this obscures the very real histories sewn
into the fabric of the symbol, namely the true reason behind the Civil War: the South’s
resistance to ending chattel slavery. Rather, it contorts and refashions it into a hollow
symbol of rebellion. We argue that similar to this ahistorical recontextualization of the
Confederate flag, country rap attempts to vacate hip-hop of its history and attachment to
Black cultural production, instead remixing the music genre itself into a rebel yell.

Mud It Up: The Filthy Aesthetics of Country Rap
(Kyle DeCoste and Alex Blue V)

Out of all of country rap's recurring themes, mud is one of the most prominent strategies
for authenticating artists and making territorial claims on the country. It’s seen covering
trucks, as the central thematic of mudding (the practice of driving vehicles through mud
bogs); covering bodies as a visual signifier of class difference and deviance; and
referenced in lyrics meant to represent place, identity, and class. Mud is so strongly
caked onto the genre that it appears in numerous song and album titles – it conveys
authenticity as a rural counterpoint to rhetorical uses of “the streets” in mainstream hip-
hop. We claim that mud serves the slippery purpose of collapsing categories of race,
genre, and space into a portable, general idea of “countryness” that can be worn at will.

Lesbian pop music, despite rare instances of becoming fashionable and achieving chart viability,
has been construed as otherwise niche and embalmed in past eras like the 1970s and 1990s. As
we’ve entered deeper into this millennium, the lesbian/queer woman presence in pop been
revivified through the expansive sexual and aesthetic imaginary of “sapphism,” a fluid and
purportedly trans-inclusive term that signals the explicitly gay, as well as the more implicitly
“queer coded.” Women pop artists, whether they’ve made a point of being out or not, have
inspired an au courant interest in sapphic pop culture comprised of both performers (like
Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, MUNA, Janelle Monae, Girl in Red, Adrianne Lenker, and others),
and a robust fan culture who draw upon the historical archives and intimate reading practices
of lesbian cultures and queer theory—including the resurgence of actual Sapphic poetry and
aesthetics.

This roundtable explores the explosion of sapphic pop over the last decade, while revisiting
some of the historical and aesthetic touchstones of sapphism. Among the topics we plan to
cover include certain controversies about“Gaylorism,” queer baiting, and queer coding more
broadly. We will also parse between flourishing, open and out expressions of sapphic sexuality,
and the loud insinuations or expressions of “allyship” that set themselves ever-so-slightly apart.

This roundtable discussion centers on the profound and lasting influence of Teresa L. Reed’s
pathbreaking, award-winning book, The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music (2004).
Reed opens her text by questioning how “the black church, once the most vehement opponent of
secular indulgence, could spawn so many celebrated performers of ‘the Devil’s music’” (Reed
7). This curiosity, born of her experience growing up in Gary, Indiana’s Open Door Refuge
Church of God in Christ, launched a groundbreaking line of inquiry. Reed’s exploration of how
the Black church — often seen as a moral and spiritual authority, yet also a site of personal and
cultural tension for Black artists — became the foundation for a reimagining of sacred and
secular relationships. Her work calls attention to how Black musicians, while shaped by religious
influences, often engage with and challenge the strict boundaries placed upon them. Reed’s
insight provided a critical framework for understanding these artists’ lives and their navigation of
sacred and secular binaries, laying the foundation for scholarly explorations that, even two
decades later, continue to grow.

Our roundtable considers how Reed’s questions and insights have expanded the field,
particularly as they apply to notable Black artists whose music, performance, and public
personas complicate simplistic readings of religious and cultural affiliations. Ambre Dromgoole
examines the genre-bending religious performances of Black women artists like Sippie Wallace,
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, and Alice Coltrane, each of whom embodies Reed’s “holy
profane” dynamic. Ahmad Greene-Hayes explores the Black religious self-fashioning of Little
Richard, whose boldness in style and performance made him both a celebrated and polarizing
figure. Similarly, James Howard Hill, Jr. further extends the conversation to the contested legacy
of Michael Jackson, homing in on his complex relationship with Black religious traditions and
his own self-styled, genre-defying spirituality. These artists are not only musical innovators but
also figures who subverted expected norms. They have challenged misrepresentation and
misunderstanding, crafted a performance of interiority that melded personal and public devotion,
and negotiated complex histories of family, abuse, and trauma within Black (sacred) music.

Through this lens, we observe how each artist, while situated within or in proximity to
marginalized religious communities like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists,
and/or Pentecostals, wrestled with these traditions as sites of both inspiration and heartbreak.
Our inquiry builds on Reed’s legacy, emphasizing the “powerful connection between the holy
and the profane in the black-American psyche,” by paying close attention to these artists’ sonic,
sartorial, religious, and gendered performances. These musicians were rule breakers, genre-
benders, stylistic innovators, and culture bearers who engaged with religious traditions not only
as sources of theological meaning but as spaces where creativity flourished even under
constraint. Reed’s work, therefore, remains foundational to the field as we seek to further
examine how Black artists navigate and reframe their religious identities, thereby contributing to
a rich, ongoing dialogue about Black spirituality, culture, and self-expression.

Since the 1994 publication of Tricia Rose’s seminal Black Noise: Rap Music and Black
Culture in Contemporary America, hip hop studies has rooted and grown in U.S.
universities, its rhizomes linking varied humanistic methods and critical ethnic studies.
Yet the institutional embrace of hip hop in the 21st century has often diverged from hip
hop studies’ academically radical beginnings; to riff off Sara Ahmed, hip hop’s
incorporation into traditional humanities departments lets them sound and look a little
less white without necessarily challenging the anti-Blackness upon which they are
founded. How might hip hop studies scholars center praxis, broadly defined, as a
corrective to the institutional cooptation of hip hop in U.S. higher education? How do
performance, ethnography, creative work, teaching, and engaged scholarly projects, for
example, suggest alternative ways of knowing that begin from a point of embodied
collaboration, and what could this mean for creating and sustaining solidarities with and
across the communities in/about/for whom we work?

Participants in this roundtable occupy multiple shifting and interconnected points along
a spectrum of hip hop praxis that includes performance, community engagement, public
facing scholarship, teaching and research. Drawing on our experiences as professors,
rappers, teachers, writers, and ethnographers, we consider how praxis and
collaboration allow alternative and potentially subversive modes of knowledge
production even as institutions continue to harness hip hop in the service of vacuous
“DEI” initiatives. As we explore issues of power that complicate praxis-oriented work, we
consider the following questions: From international research relationships to
engagements with local U.S. communities, how do hip hop scholars identify community
needs and address them meaningfully and without centering ourselves? How do hip
hop practitioners—many of us in novel roles within our respective institutions—respond
to the shifting terrain of what life means for hip hop artists who lack any kind of
institutional protection? And within the institution, what are the strategies for remaining
rooted in community while keeping pace with the sonic and music industry-related
changes happening in the rap world? What role does embodied knowledge play for hip
hop scholars positioned differently vis-a-vis performance? How can prioritizing
embodied knowledge, collaboration, and community spur meaningful, material
institutional change?

This innovative roundtable unites Oaxacan music educators and scholars to explore the dynamic soundscape of Oaxacalifornia, focusing on Midcity and South-Central Los Angeles—home to the most significant Indigenous Oaxacan community outside of Mexico. Through critical dialogue and live musical demonstrations, our panel examines how gender, leadership, and cultural preservation intersect within traditionally male-dominated musical spaces, particularly in Oaxacan philharmonics and community-based bands. Drawing from their roles as practitioners, cultural bearers, and scholars, the presenters will demonstrate how women's increasing participation has transformed leadership paradigms while maintaining deep connections to cultural heritage. Additionally, how Oaxacan youth seek musical opportunities in higher education and mainstream venues. 
Addressing the conference themes of "Music, gender, and performance" and "Music, rebellion, agitation, protest," our roundtable explores how musical practices in Oaxacalifornia push against traditional boundaries and hierarchies. We examine how these musical borderlands serve as sites of both cultural preservation and innovation, challenging conventional notions of gender roles, leadership, and artistic expression. Integrating live performances by panelists will provide attendees with direct engagement on the sonic dimensions of these transformations, illustrating how musicians navigate the edges and borders of place, sound, genre, and style.
Our discussion illuminates how transborder networks facilitate the exchange of musical knowledge while creating new possibilities for cultural expression and community building. Through this combination of scholarly analysis and musical demonstration, we offer unique insights into how Oaxacan musical traditions adapt and evolve across borders while maintaining their cultural essence.