Loading…

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.
Saturday March 15, 2025 9:00am - 10:45am PDT
Karlyn King, “Witchcraft Feminism: Conjuring Rebellion in Music and Fashion”
This presentation explores how the symbolism and aesthetics of witchcraft have become powerful expressions of feminist resistance in contemporary music and fashion. I delve into the ways artists and creators use witchcraft-inspired imagery and narratives to challenge patriarchal norms, empower marginalized voices, and remix societal expectations. By focusing on the intersection of witchcraft, feminism, and pop culture, I illustrate how music and fashion create spaces of resistance and empowerment, transforming these cultural expressions into tools of social and political critique.Through case studies from the Riot Grrrl movement to contemporary artists like Florence Welch and FKA twigs, I analyze how the “witch” archetype resurfaces as a force of creative rebellion, with style and sound as its primary mediums. In both music and fashion, witchcraft aesthetics—dark florals, ritual-inspired accessories, and mystic symbolism—become expressions of defiance, resilience, and female empowerment. This convergence not only celebrates individual agency but also fosters a collective identity rooted in strength, mystique, and self-possession.

By examining album art, music videos, performance styles, and fashion trends, this presentation reveals how witchcraft feminism remixes traditional narratives, turning them into powerful commentaries on contemporary issues. Here, fashion and music are not just forms of self-expression but spells cast to challenge oppressive structures, conjuring alternate realities where women’s voices, autonomy, and creativity are central. In listening to these rebellious frequencies, we witness how witchcraft-inspired feminism pushes us toward the edge of what’s possible—where style and sound become acts of reclamation, transformation, and collective empowerment, offering a vision of a world where self-expression is both magical and revolutionary.

Larissa Irizarry, “Cowboy Carter: Cosplaying American Womanhood”

In 2024, Beyoncé was all but consumed with citing national belonging: she introduced Team USA for the Paris Olympics, she dressed in red, white, and blue, was crowned with various cowboy hats, and in her promotional photos for her most recent album she rode astride a horse while wielding an American flag. Although 2024 visually stands out as Beyoncé’s “cowboy era,” she has cited her southern American roots since (at least) 2016. It was that year that she performed with The Chicks (previously The Dixie Chicks) at the Country Music Association Awards. Despite her real-life credibility as a native Texan and her adherence to the sonic signifiers of the genre, her reception by country fans ranged from mixed to racist.

During the release of Cowboy Carter, the album’s promotional photos were accompanied by the caption, “[This album] was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcome.” Beyoncé has yet to explicitly connect Cowboy Carter to the reception of her CMA Awards performance; regardless, the album brings to the fore the historical race gatekeeping of not just country music, but American womanhood. Beyoncé's citing of Americanness took a campy turn in a surprise release of the music video “Bodyguard.” In the video released on election day, she urged people to vote while cosplaying white American womanhood via Pamela Anderson’s most famous television, movie, and awards looks. In this paper, I contribute to the growing discourse on national identity (Hoffman), nostalgia (Ahmed; Berlant), and genre (Goldin-Perschbacher), and I argue that Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s most important political work to date in her pointed satire of American womanhood via cowboy culture.

Blair Smith, “Black Femme Frequencies: DIY Style Cassettes as Archives of Rebellion”

This experimental session blends live performance, soundscapes, and participatory art-making to explore the creative potential of Black femme cassette tape culture. Centering the cassette as a tool of sonic and visual storytelling, I examine how Black femme artists use the medium to remix their realities and imagine radical pasts, presents, and futures. I draw from Black feminist thought, sound studies, and cultural histories of cassette tape aesthetics to investigate how sound, style, and materiality intersect at the edges of pop music, fashion, and artistic expression.

We begin with a live sound collage that immerses participants in the textures of DIY cassette culture. Featuring loops of Black femme recordings layered with archival sounds, spoken-word excerpts, and experimental beats, the performance highlights the imperfections and distortions—such as tape hiss and warping—that characterize cassette sound. Following the performance, the session transitions to a showcase of recreated DIY cassette covers inspired by Black femme artists. These hand-drawn, collaged, and text-based designs are presented as visual archives that extend the radical potential of the cassette beyond sound.

We then move into an interactive art-making activity where participants are provided with materials to design their own cassette covers. This hands-on exercise mirrors the DIY ethos of Black femme cassette culture, inviting attendees to experiment with visual storytelling while reflecting on their own narratives of resistance and creativity. The final segment features a collective playback of the audience’s contributions, integrated into a live soundscape created on-site. This collaborative act reinforces the communal nature of Black femme DIY practices, emphasizing co-creation as a method of rebellion and world-building. By situating Black femme DIY cassette culture at the intersection of pop music, fashion, and creative rebellion, this session aligns with the conference’s call to listen intensely to the frequencies of agitation and revolt.

Teresa Turnage, “‘I Choose Violence’: An Exploration of Feminist Rage in a Man v. Bear World”

Feminist rage serves as a powerful political tool, channeling women's collective anger for sociocultural change. Social media has become a pivotal space for expressing and disseminating such political content in mediated forms, including music, movement, and text. Here, I offer a reading of feminist rage musically expressed in contemporary social media discourse. Pop musician Jax released the 2024 song "I Choose Violence,” in part as response to the so-called #manvsbear trend. The trend posed a hypothetical question—would women prefer to be left alone in the woods with a man, or a bear?—and sparked widespread debate over women's perceived safety in society. Jax’s musical response combines powerful lyrics with a striking visual: Jax holding hands with a bear, evoking both vulnerability and strength. The visual plays a crucial role in connecting the song to the broader viral discourse, highlighting the intense emotional expressions of feminist rage, such as frustration, empowerment, and defiance, alongside the psychological impact of societal gender expectations.

I argue that the amalgam of audiovisual aesthetic choices in "I Choose Violence" constitutes a reckoning with feminist rage in 2024. The song is situated within an emergent genre of digitally-curated feminist music, which leverages social media’s viral nature to amplify its message. This genre’s ability to engage with online publics and viral phenomena connects individual anger to collective movements for social change. Jax's song responds to media trends, while contributing to ongoing dialogues about women's rights and safety.

Drawing on feminist aesthetic theories (Cusick, 1994; Ngai, 2009) and a philosophy of responsive listening (Kramer, 2019), I explore how digital musicking might contribute to projects of social change. I show that sonic and visual practices might offer new tools for analyzing emotionality, activism, and the intersection of media and justice in reshaping digital spaces and society.
Speakers
avatar for Karlyn King

Karlyn King

Freelance Music Consultant
Karlyn King is a dynamic music researcher, lecturer, podcaster, and published researcher, as well as a regular panel speaker and BBC contributor, with a focus on gender, media, and cultural influence. With a PhD in UK vinyl culture and audience evolution, Karlyn’s work examines... Read More →
LI

Larissa Irizarry

Larissa Irizarry joined the Music Conservatory and Africana studies faculty at Gettysburg College in 2022 as a visiting assistant professor. She is currently working on the manuscript for her book on alter egos in hip-hop. Her specialty areas include queer theory, Black feminist theory... Read More →
BS

Blair Smith

Blair Ebony Smith (artist alter ego, lovenloops) is a practicing artist-scholar and lover. As a sample-based sound artist, DJ and homegirl with Black girl celebratory collective/band, Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) We Levitate, Blair deepened her love for Black sound... Read More →
TT

Teresa Turnage

Teresa is a first-year PhD student at the University of Chicago, exploring social justice activism through digital musicking on social media. She focuses on feminist movements on TikTok, examining how music, sonic mediations, and visual markers spread messages and reclaim personal... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 9:00am - 10:45am PDT
USC Carson Television Center 3450 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA

Attendees (8)


Sign up or log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Share Modal

Share this link via

Or copy link