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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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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
LJ

Lauron J. Kehrer

Western Michigan University
Speakers
FR

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 →
avatar for Shana Goldin-Perschbacher

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 →
AM
DB

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

Attendees (25)


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