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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.
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Seeking Altadena: The Music, the Memories
Saturday March 15, 2025 6:15pm - 7:15pm PDT
USC Carson Television Center
This panel looks at the history of Altadena, a Southern California community devastated by the Eaton Fire. In January the fire claimed 17 lives, burned 14,000 acres, and destroyed at least 9,000 buildings in this area north of Los Angeles. Robin DG Kelley grew up in “Afrodena,” on the Westside of Pasadena/Altadena, and has written and lectured on the life of the community. Until January Bobby Bradford lived in Altadena, where he had long established a club-concert room called the "Little Big Horn," a place where he and John Carter, James Newton, and others would gather to play. Erin Aubry Kaplan has written about the impact of the Eaton fires on Black Los Angeles and on the prospects for rebuilding. The panel will take up a question posed by the New York Times: Why Did It Take a Fire for the World to Learn of Altadena’s Black Arts Legacy? And it will take joy in the life and work of Altadena’s own, musician Bobby Bradford.

Moderator: RJ Smith
Panelists:
Bobby Bradford
Erin Aubry Kaplan
Robin D.G. Kelley
Moderators
avatar for RJ Smith

RJ Smith

RJ Smith is the author of The One: The Life and Art of James Brown (2012) and Chuck Berry: An American Life (2022) among other books. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute and a Visiting Community Scholar at USC. He haw written for The Village Voice, GQ, and... Read More →
Speakers
BB

Bobby Bradford

Bobby Bradford is a trumpeter, cornetist, bandleader and composer who was born in Mississippi in 1934 and raised in Dallas. He came to Los Angeles in 1946, and has been making music, teaching music, and inspiring listeners ever since. His long-term associations with Ornette Coleman... Read More →
EA

Erin Aubry Kaplan

Erin Aubry Kaplan is an L.A native and journalist who has been writing about race, place, and culture since 1992. She's been a staff writer for the LA Weekly, opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and is currently a columnist for the progressive news site Capital and Main... Read More →
RD

Robin D.G. Kelley

Robin D.G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash professor of American History at UCLA. His books include Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 6:15pm - 7:15pm PDT
USC Carson Television Center 3450 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
  Special Event

Attendees (15)


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