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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 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
Moderator: Jalylah Burrell, Loyola Marymount University

Victor Arul, “Fabrics of Rebellion”

I am proposing the presentation of a work-in-progress experimental, non-linear collage film
exploring the intertwined evolution of fashion and music within the counterculture of the 1960s.
Utilizing archival footage, original imagery, archival audio, and layered visual techniques, the
film examines how the fashion of the era became an emblem of musical rebellion, cultural
identity, and political dissent.

The aim of the film is to present fashion not as static artifacts but as living expressions of the
dynamic ethos of the 1960s counterculture. I hope to provoke an atypical presentation of how
fashion and music were pivotal in challenging social norms, redefining aesthetics, and
empowering communities.

The film employs a collage aesthetic as opposed to a manner of chronological storytelling. The
aim is to capture a mosaic of impressions, textures, and sounds which mimic the fluidity and of
the countercultural movement.

  1.  Juxtaposing stark monochrome imagery of postwar conservatism with vivid,kaleidoscopic visuals of
    countercultural attire inspired by psychedelia, and DIY aesthetics.
  2.  Layering performances from acts including The Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Janis Joplin
    with snippets of protest chants, spoken word, and fashion show soundtracks to emphasize the synergy
    between sound and style.
  3. A featuring of how clothing ranging from bell-bottoms to tie-dye, became tools for individualism and
    collective identity, directly tied to movements like civil rights, feminism, and antiwar protests.
  4.  Incorporating interviews with designers, musicians, and activists of the era alongside depictions of contemporary reimaginings of 1960s fashion, highlighting its enduring legacy.

The film will last for 20 minutes.

The aim of the film is offers an account of historical and cultural narratives through an
experimental filmic lens. By prioritizing non-linear storytelling, the film seeks to resonate
emotionally and historically, evoking lasting impact of the 1960s counterculture.

Jalylah Burrell, “She Flew over the Bridge Wars: Faith Ringgold Rings the Changes”


In 1988, Faith Ringgold completed “Change 2: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pound Weight
Loss Performance Story Quilt,” comprised of panels, paint, patterns, photos, stories, and
self-described “songs and raps.” With a body of work included oil painting, acrylic
painting, prints, soft sculptures, textile arts and performance, the nimble artist and
activist was always experimenting with and exhausting the possibilities of form.
Ringgold performed this and other quilts over the course of a few years and this paper
attempts to hear them through formal analysis of her stitches, world play, memoir, We
Flew Over the Bridge, as well as reviews of these performances. This talk lends an ear to
the songs and raps brought into view with this quilt to examine how Ringgold’s style
melded sight and sound. To facilitate this conversation, I put this quilt in conversation
with the work of a Rozeal, a more contemporary Black woman artist whose work
transposes hip hop’s sonic features onto canvasses. If, as Rozeal recognizes in her own
work, “sampling, scratching and blending, all of these elements show up in the
paintings,” what elements show up in Ringgold’s story quilt and how do they help us to
hear a louder, and contemporaneous, moment in hip hop historiography, the Bridge
Wars?

John Wood, “White Men / Black Leather”


In the second half of the 20 th century, the black leather jacket (BLJ) became omnipresent
in Western popular culture. As an index of rock-‘n’-roll rebellion, the BLJ today graces the
shoulders of everyone from babies and pets to Taylor Swift and Elon Musk. Yet for all its
ubiquity, scant scholarship has attempted to document the BLJ’s history, let alone interrogate its
significance. And while plenty of critics have accused White rock ‘n’ rollers of appropriating
African-American music, no one, it seems, has thought to question the racial implications of
literally wearing black skin.

This paper hypothesizes that the black leather jacket functioned as a marker of racial
difference during the era of the American civil rights movement. I begin by tracing the history of
the BLJ from motorcycles to movies to music subcultures. Using methods of structuralism
(popularized in the same era as the BLJ), I then compile a schema of oppositional binary codes to
explain the BLJ’s significance in relation to music, politics, and race. This schema is then tested
by comparing two performances by Elvis Presley. Placed in historical context, these analyses
imply that Presley strategically performed both whiteness and blackness at alternate times in his
career, and that the latter was sartorially backed by the BLJ. However, drawing on
poststructuralist queer theory (Halberstam 2005), I suggest that the BLJ was not simply a means
of racial mimicry (in the minstrel tradition), but rather served as a technology of transracial
performance for individuals challenging the binary structures of midcentury American society.

In light of recent political trends, this paper concludes by considering how the BLJ in its
“frozen” mass-commodity form (Hebdige) may confirm Susan Sontag’s assertion that the
popularity of black leather portends a turn toward fascism.
Speakers
VA

Victor Arul

Victor Arul is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University. His research interests include 1960s counterculture, the aesthetics and metaphysics of audio spatialization, and the semiotics of Western classical musical notation. He is in the composition program at Harvard and makes experimental... Read More →
JB

Jalylah Burrell

Jalylah Burrell is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Her scholarship on Black feminisms, humor, and music appears in WSQ, CLA Journal, Theater, Studies in American Humor, and Sound Bites: Big Ideas in Popular Music. A deejay, oral historian... Read More →
JW

John Wood

John C Wood studies the political economic and ecological relationships of 20th-century popular music. As a performer, he has played everything from empty coffee houses to the Grammys. John is a PhD student in musicology at the University of Oregon. He recently completed his first... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
Zaro Family Songwriter's Theater Zaro Songwriter's Theater, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

Attendees (4)


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