Pop Conference 2025

Music memoirs use first-person narration to print or revise artistic legacies by aestheticizing
intimate proximities between author and reader. As members of a book club dedicated to music
biographies, we are compelled by the construction of these mythologies as well as by our own
engagement, recirculation, or disavowal of them. Public School is a consortium of music
scholars, cultural critics, and journalists who convene every month over Zoom to talk about
various works of musical non-fiction. In our monthly conversations, we have identified several
stylistic conventions associated with music memoirs that merit critical interrogation. We have
also noticed efforts from authors and publishers to make music memoirs more interactive and
multisensorial in recent years in order to turn reading into an immersive experience.

In this roundtable, we focus our attention on four motifs that make the music memoir legible as a
distinct non-fictional genre. First, we consider the dominance of portraiture in music memoir
cover art and pay particular attention toward how memoirists like Lucinda Williams and Margo
Price use portraits to foreground their authority and legacy not only as musicians detailing their
lived experiences, but also as writers translating their virtuosity as songwriters into a different
literary form. Next, we interrogate how memoirs like Flea’s Acid for the Children and Prince’s
The Beautiful Ones use photographic inserts and unorthodox prose to reframe archival footage
of artists’ childhood photographs, promotional materials, and candids as scrapbook material that
strengthens readers’ emotional connections through nostalgia. Then, we examine the genre’s
associations with first-person address and reminiscence as articulations of authorial voice by
considering how divas like Mariah Carey and Barbra Streisand, and actors like Michelle
Williams who interpret Britney Spears’ recollections, have transformed the memoir as a listening
experience by showcasing their singular voices as narrators and recording artists. Finally,
building from Carey and Streisand’s innovative approaches to audiobooks, we consider how
memoirs like Hua Hsu’s Stay True and Dante Ross’ Son of the City enhance life-writing in the
digital age with supplements like zines and playlists.

Memoirs are also reflexive and adaptive to technological change. Thus, we conclude by
contemplating our own gathering practices. Since we are scattered across the United States,
Public School exists entirely online. Zoom’s interface affords us a particular type of mediated
intimacy during our conversations and interviews with invited guests that let us see each other’s
homes, even if we have never actually occupied shared space together offline. Furthermore, we
use Zoom’s chat function to distribute additional reading, screening, and listening material
related to our conversations, which we have archived in a shared Notes app list that we update
after each meeting. Historically, in-person book clubs have enforced a formalized mode of
decorum that is gendered, classed, and raced. However, the intimate proximities of the
mediated domesticated space via Zoom illuminate an aesthetics of reflexivity about our own
living spaces and dwelling practices. In this roundtable, we wonder what the remediation of
book clubs as digital salons reveals about the anti-aesthetic potentialities of virtual communal
engagement.