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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.
Saturday March 15, 2025 11:00am - 12:45pm PDT
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.



Moderators
avatar for Eric Weisbard

Eric Weisbard

American Studies prof, Univ of Alabama, University of Alabama
Eric Weisbard is professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, author of such books as Top 40 Democracy, Songbooks, and Hound Dog, co-founder and longtime organizer of the Pop Conference, and a former Village Voice music editor and Journal of Popular Music Studies co-editor... Read More →
Speakers
EG

Emily Gale

Emily Gale is a feminist music scholar and assistant professor of musicology/ethnomusicology at the University of Lethbridge on Blackfoot Confederacy Territory in so-called Alberta, Canada. Emily’s book in progress, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People: An Unheard History of... Read More →
JR

Jordan R. Brown

Graduate Candidate, Harvard University
Jordan R. Brown (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology and Presidential Scholar at Harvard University with a secondary field in African and African-American Studies. She is currently co-chair of Harvard’s Southern-Pian Society, co-chair of Project Spectrum, and a UNESCO... Read More →
MB

Marita Buanes Djupvik

Marita Buanes Djupvik is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Inland Norway. Her research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing musical theoretical and socio-cultural analysis, audiovisual analysis, and music theory. Dr. Djupvik has published extensively... Read More →
CS

Craig Seymour

Craig Seymour has been studying Black music for nearly 30 years. He is the author of Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross and has published in such publications as The New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post. He has a Ph.D. in American Studies.
AB

Alex Blue V

Alex Blue V is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Media and Technology at McGill University. Blue is currently working on two books. The first, A Matter of Death and Life, is a “necrographic” study of narratives of death and dying in contemporary Detroit hip-hop. The second... Read More →
avatar for Kyle DeCoste

Kyle DeCoste

Visiting Assistant Professor, Tulane University
Kyle DeCoste (he/him) is a scholar of popular music from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Music at Tulane University. He specializes in U.S. popular music. His work, which is often collaborative and (auto)ethnographic... Read More →
avatar for Ann Powers

Ann Powers

Writer, NPR Music
Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She has worked at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Village Voice, and is the author of four books, most recently Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (2024). With Evelyn McDonnell, she edited Rock She Wrote: Women... Read More →
SM

Sara Marcus

Sara Marcus is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Marcus is the author of Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2023)—which was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award in literary... Read More →
avatar for Dan DiPiero

Dan DiPiero

Dan DiPiero is a musician, Assistant Professor of Music Studies, and Affiliated Faculty in Race, Ethnic, and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His first book, Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life (University of Michigan Press) was... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 11:00am - 12:45pm PDT
Newman Recital Hall

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