Pop Conference 2025

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.