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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 4:15pm - 6:00pm PDT
Lynette Dixon, “Shuttling Toward a New Blue Sun: The Southern Fantastic and Black Masculinity”

At the 1995 Source Awards, an award show celebrating hip hop, Andre 3000 declared in his acceptance speech for Best New Rap Group, "The South has something to say." This statement has continued to resonate in hip hop as a regional and stylistic intervention into a genre dominated by New York and Los Angeles. Nearly three decades later, Andre’s 2023 album New Blue Sun, a meditative flute-based project accompanied by a visual album (called Listening to the Sun), offers a striking departure from the lyricism in his earlier work. Andre, now 48, explained this shift by stating he does not “have anything to rap about” at this stage in his life. Yet, through this work, he articulates a rich embodied vernacular of play, imagination, and improvisation that reconfigures how we understand Black masculinity in hip-hop and popular culture more broadly.
In Listening to the Sun, the visual album, Andre engages in a series of quotidian, playful gestures: rolling on the ground with his flute, swaying like a tree, embodying a panther, and moving through meditative poses. This performance, though markedly different in style from his earlier work, resonates deeply with what I call the “Southern fantastic” style—a mode of performance that blends the quotidian and theatrical to imagine beyond “the American grammar book” (Spillers 2003) of Black gender. In my dissertation, I propose that style is not simply sartorial, rather it names modes of embodiment that short-circuit the logics of liberal subjectivity rooted in the violence of chattel slavery.  The “Southern Fantastic”, which my dissertation traces through Outkast, Missy Elliott, and other Southern hip-hop artists of the 1990s, foregrounds play, imagination, and fantasy as one strategy of “stylistic embodiment” and identification. Andre’s current work extends this lineage, pushing against the rigid grammars of Black masculinity in popular culture. His flute, rubber ducks, and yoga poses challenge the limited performances expected of Black male artists, demonstrating that even though he does not have anything to rap about, he still has much to say. 

Patrick Mitchell, “‘It's Not a Phase, This Is Who I Really Am’: Emo and the Contradictions of Protest Masculinity”

Between 2001 and 2008, emo grew from underground DIY scenes to sweeping commercial success, becoming one of the final mainstream rock genres. Central to emo’s cultural impact was its distinct fashion—long, side-swept bangs, black skinny jeans, and “guy-liner.” The emo fashion trend achieved its broad cultural impact amongst its predominantly suburban teenage fans due to the prevalence of retail chains such as Hot Topic (a clothing and accessories store specializing in “counterculture”) cropping up throughout American shopping malls. Emo’s expressive style underpinned the music’s notion of expressing one’s deepest emotions. Although some rock critics celebrated the male emo style for modeling a softer, emotionally open masculinity that resisted the post-9/11 gender backlash (Eisenstein 2002, Tickner 2002, Goldstein 2003, Faldui 2007, Coon 2013), scholars have begun to probe the genre’s legacy of entrenched chauvinistic narratives (Williams 2007; Ryalls 2013; De Boise 2014; Fathallah 2020, 2021; Mack 2021). In this paper, I examine how emo’s “feminized” fashion aesthetics masked deeper misogynistic narratives while normalizing its sentimentality and emotional openness. By applying R.W. Connell’s concepts of hegemonic, complicit, and subordinate masculinity (Connell 1995, 2005) to the post-9/11 socio-cultural sphere, I argue that emo’s countercultural veneer functioned as a protest masculinity that served as both an appeal and a defense of patriarchal ideology—effectively concealing and legitimizing the genre’s underlying gendered contradictions.

Christi Jay Wells, “Race-ing The Rock: Identity, Ideology, and Celebrity in Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s Wrestling Entrance Themes”

Reflecting on composing Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s entrance theme “Electrifying,”
World Wrestling Entertainment’s in-house composer Jim Johnston remarked that “Rock
was actually tough because he’s such a different guy, cross-cultural, cross races, he’s
tough to pin down.” Johnston’s words encapsulate the role of music in creating a
dynamic wrestling character through outfits, lighting, musical sound, and performer
affect as well as the specific challenges in a performance medium often driven by racial
archetypes of crafting a character for a mixed-race performer. In this paper, I analyze
versions and reworkings of The Rock’s entrance music as his character shifted from
Black Power foot soldier to WWE’s public face and a global celebrity.

Though The Rock was initially presented with music and costuming highlighting his
Samoan heritage, “Electrifying” stems from his time with the “Nation of Domination,” a
group of Black American villains whose mannerisms and fashion drew from the Black
Panthers and Nation of Islam. When The Rock became the group’s leader, their style
increasingly reflected the swagger of NFL players including Dion Sanders and Warren
Sapp, and their music was reworked to reflect ‘90s West Coast Hip Hop. When The
Rock became a mainstream protagonist, his music retained its “Nation of Domination”
bassline and tempo while adding electric guitar, often the featured instrument for
WWE’s most popular, and predominantly white, heroes. Informed by discussion of
masculinity, racialized sound, and “the mainstream” from T. Carlis Roberts, Steve
Waksman, and others, I identify the role of “Electrifying” and its antecedents in The
Rock’s process of self-fashioning as a mainstream celebrity, and specifically his
complex navigation of race. Toward that end, I highlight the role of 1990s affirmative
action discourse and backlash in both shaping and blunting the revolutionary
possibilities of the Black Power movement’s style and message within mainstream
professional wrestling.
Moderators
JE

Jorge Estrada

California State University, Fullerton
Speakers
LD

Lynette Dixon

Lynette Dixon (she/her/hers) earned a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality from Emory University and a Master of Arts in African American and African Students from The Ohio State University. As a doctoral student at UCLA, her research utilizes black feminist thought... Read More →
PM

Patrick Mitchell

Patrick Mitchell is ABD in musicology at the University of Cincinnati. Although his background is in classical voice, Patrick’s experiences in DIY music have led him to scholarly interests involving gender and popular music analysis. Between working at the public library and playing... Read More →
CJ

Christi Jay Wells

Christi Jay Wells (they/them, she/her) is an Associate Professor of Musicology in Arizona State University’s School of Music, Dance and Theatre and a Race, Arts and Democracy Fellow with ASU’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. She authored Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 4:15pm - 6:00pm PDT
Zaro Family Songwriter's Theater Zaro Songwriter's Theater, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

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