Pop Conference 2025

This roundtable will explore the fashions present and developed within the Los Angeles Eastside sound music scenes throughout different historical eras by showcasing key fashion items that will be part of the upcoming A Great Day in East L.A.: Celebrando the Eastside Sound. This is a multi-media exhibition that explores the dynamic musical influences of East Los Angeles artists who developed an eclectic musical identity and history that, against all odds, developed a rich musical tradition that became known all over the world in the last century and into the present.
The roundtable will center the discussion on the concept of self-fashioning as one of the key elements within the Eastside Sound music scenes, past and present. As Marci McMahon reminds us, “the term self-fashioning highlights the intersections of dress with bodily performance and the possibility of these sites in the negotiation of gendered and racialized ideologies.” Ethnic Mexican women —who have long been a part of the Eastside music scenes— have pushed against gendered ideologies of domesticity through self-fashioning as pachucas or reinventing punk-rock and gothic aesthetics in the 1970s and 1980s, even when faced with a scarcity of materials due to their marginalized economic status. In the 1990s and the beginning of the twentieth-first century, artists within the “Chicano Groove” scene used their clothing, such as t-shirts, jackets, and shoes to highlight their connection to their Mexican roots, messages on jerseys a form of social commentary, while also displaying their pro-immigrant and global-left solidarities. The participants will assess how clothing, and the look of the Eastside Sound community (artists and fans) are more than just fashion statements, but in fact are artistic expressions that highlight the development of their Eastside identity formation.
Piero F. Giunti and Jorge N. Leal the exhibit co-curators, along with textile and fashion conservator Laleña A. Vellanoweth, will showcase and discuss both visually and on site, various attires worn by musicians and fans of the Eastside sound, such as the suit zoot worn by Lalo Guerrero, early Chicano music icon, the coats worn by Thee Midniters in their performances, the leather jackets customized by Chicano hip-hop group Aztlan Underground, artisan-made shoes worn by Marisoul, the singer of La Santa Cecilia among other fashion-related objects worn and created by fans of the Eastside Sound artists. Media and cultural studies scholar Veronica Paredes will moderate the conversation.

Moderator: Veronica Paredes, University of California, Los Angeles

Piero F. Giunti
Jorge Nicolás Leal, University of California, Riverside
Laleña Arenas Vellanoweth

Moderator: Ambre Dromgoole, Cornell University

LaTasha Bundy, “The Whole Hood Watched Dragon Ball Z: Megan Thee Stallion, Anime, and Black Culture”

Megan Thee Stallion is the culmination of decades of the intermixing of East Asian and Black American cultures. Her use of specifically anime in her style and even cosplaying characters, has endeared her to fans of both hip-hop/rap and anime alike. Megan is not the first Black American super star to use East Asian and even specifically anime influences in her style and music. She comes from a long line of artists borrowing from East Asian culture (i.e. RZA, Kanye West, Thundercat, Lil Kim, and Nikki Manaj). She is however the most outspoken woman artist that exhibits “nerd culture” in both her music and her aesthetic.

Japanese artists have also benefitted from this relationship over the years. Anime like Cowboy Bebop, Lupin the Third, and Samurai Champloo use jazz music and hip hop as their backdrop to go with visuals that are seemingly irrelevant to the music. While all these anime end up a part of the zeitgeist, no show has the unanimity of Dragon Ball Z. The show was the biggest reason for the proliferation of anime in American culture at large, but more importantly Black Culture in America.

From Blaxploitation and Kung Fu, J. Dilla/Nujabesu, Black aesthetics in anime in Japan, Frieza calling Goku a “monkey” with a hard ‘R,’ and how a Black woman broke through the nerd fandom bubble and became a popular artist that specifically embraces what was once a niche interest. I would like to explore how we get to a figure like Megan Thee Stallion, who is uniquely positioned herself as the most famous vocal anime nerd in 2024.

Sean Davis, “Sounding Cool: The Aural Politics of Style in Video Games”

While the digital age may seem far removed from the era of James Dean, the specter of an aloof male in jeans and a leather jacket continues to haunt portrayals of so-called cool characters in film, television, and video games. Whereas the visual of coolness remains somewhat consistent in popular media, albeit with variations that reflect contemporaneous style and fashion, the sound of coolness continues to be elusive. This paper seeks to identify what, if any, the commonalities are among representations of implied cool characters in video games. The complex relationship between style, emotion, and gendered expression with depictions of coolness in game characters reveals multifaceted approaches to cool, ranging from the tongue-in-cheek critiques of game culture in Goichi Suda’s No More Heroes to the stereotypically standoffish attitude of Sonic in Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Using sociological and psychological conceptions of cool (Haynes, Brown, Frank) as a framework through which to apply semiotic and topical analyses (Tagg, Hatten, Monelle) to the music ascribed to cool characters in video games, I argue that portrayals of cool often emphasize masculinity, emotional avoidance, and aversion to authority by highlighting contextual cues in the music (genre or topical association, thematic development, character motif, etc.).
As Brown and Frank argue, coolness routinely assumes a predominantly masculine category determined in part by lack of emotional expression and perceived indifference in the face of challenges; however, when women are portrayed as cool, the expectation includes performance of male sexual fantasies (Brown 2021, Frank 1997). Using Sonic and Shadow from Sega’s Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, Travis Touchdown and Sylvia Christel from Grasshopper Manufacture Inc.’s No More Heroes, and Bayonetta from PlatinumGames’ eponymous title as examples, I will explore musical characterizations of cool as they relate to these parameters, engaging in either the subversion or fulfillment of cultural expectations.


Morgan Bates, “‘Is That My Camera?’: Voicing Camp on RuPaul’s ‘Snatch Game’”
Since its second season, RuPaul's Drag Race reality competition series has brought the practice of celebrity impersonation to the limelight in its seasonal, highly anticipated "Snatch Game" challenge. A parody of The Match Game, each contestant impersonates a celebrity with the goal of attaining the most laughs from RuPaul and the guest judges. These contestants are expected, if not required, to engage in camp aesthetics through volleyed jokes and cultural commentary. On All Stars Season 7, Jinkx Monsoon revitalizes camp by portraying and singing as Judy Garland. While Monsoon’s audience extends beyond the queer community, many of Monsoon’s jokes, vocal stylings, and gestures speak directly to a queer audience across generational and social divides, from Garland’s longtime fans to young Drag Race connoisseurs. Amidst corporatization of drag performance, Jinkx-as-“Judy” asserts her own power through camp performance designed specifically for her queer audience members.
In this paper, I position camp as an invariably queer artform, allowing members of the queer community to situate themselves in a heterosexist world. Reflecting upon Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes On Camp” (1964), as well as writings by Newton (1972), Meyer (1994), and Ross (1999), I engage with Monsoon’s performance to showcase four foundational functions of camp as 1) queer code and social commentary, 2) an act of parody and failure, 3) a “time machine,” bridging the gaps between temporal spaces, and 4) a radical act of queer worldmaking. Further, I identify the complex web of vocal references from queer popular music that tie these purposes together, notably the reallocation of RuPaul’s house music and the Drag Race title sequence, as well as Monsoon’s “hauntological” play with vocal “Judy-isms.” Through camp, Monsoon serves far more than looks and jokes; she brings viewers into a world where queerness is understood amidst the constraints of capitalism and heterosexism.
Chris Molanphy, “Mad Men and the Forgotten ’60s”

How the most over-lionized decade in pop culture revealed its fundamental squareness on the charts—and how a 21st-century TV show depicted the decade’s music as it was actually experienced“Blowin’ in the Wind.” “A Change Is Gonna Come.” “For What It’s Worth.” “Purple Haze.” “Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud.“ “My Generation.” What do these ’60s anthems have in common? They came nowhere near the top of Billboard’s Hot 100.
Now here are some ’60s songs that did reach No. 1: “Stranger on the Shore.” “Telstar.” “Sukiyaki.” “Dominique.” “Love Is Blue.” “Harper Valley PTA.”
Incidentally, these chart-toppers also appeared on Mad Men, the 2007–15 premium TV show that depicted, over seven seasons, a stylish advertising agency plying its trade across the 1960s. As ring-a-ding cool as Mad Men was—from its fashions to its set design—the music that show creator Matthew Weiner chose as syncs schooled modern audiences on how square the ’60s really were.
Ten years after Mad Men completed its run, it remains the most accurate depiction in popular culture of the lived ’60s, especially as reflected through popular music. By portraying a team of Silent Generation and older adults selling the American dream back to their fellow Americans, Weiner was presenting the ’60s as they were actually experienced—not so much a hippie decade as a kitsch decade; less a sociopolitical watershed than a pop-culture curiosity shop.
In this paper, I will walk through categories of ’60s hits—from instrumentals to quirky novelties, easy listeners to deep cuts—and discuss not only the songs featured on Mad Men but other Hot 100 chart-toppers that defined the decade but are largely forgotten today.

Moderator: Sarah Kessler, University of Southern California

Destiny Meadows, “Glittery Gowns, Holiday Cheer, and Caroling Capitalists: [Re]Configuring Intimacy through Modern-Day Christmas Specials”

In 2019, streaming giant Amazon Prime Video released The Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show, a Christmas variety special starring Kacey Musgraves and featuring a revolving door of musical guests including Troye Sivan, Leon Bridges, and the Rockettes. As Musgraves moved through holiday standards like “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” her wardrobe, too, continuously changed. Custom Gucci brooches, Giambattista Valli gowns, and Manolo Blahnik pumps provided a stark contrast to the intimacy suggested by her covers of World War II-era classics.
Musgraves’ Christmas Show, though perhaps novel in its brazen nods to designer fashions, comes from a lasting lineage of holiday variety specials—starring prominent figures—that were produced in the latter half of the twentieth century. From Judy Garland (1963) to Dean Martin (1967), and the Captain and Tennille (1976), celebrities have capitalized off the intimate affordances of the televised Christmas variety special. However, a larger communication circuit including new streaming partnerships with musical artists have reconfigured—through both fashion and capital—the imagined domestic space produced by these specialized variety shows. New forms of mediation have redefined such concepts as closeness and attainability while simultaneously reifying celebrity through visual signifiers, specifically through luxury clothing.
This paper examines two musical Christmas variety shows created by pop artists Kacey Musgraves (2019) and Sabrina Carpenter (2024). Drawing on the work of sound and media scholars Christina Baade (2022), Karen McNally (2012), and Eric Drott (2024), I argue that the connection between fashion and present-day media technologies has contributed to shifts in audience perceptions of celebrity intimacy in Christmas programming. I suggest that newer variety shows reify investments in both the celebrity and the streaming services, whose strategic, capital-driven partnerships are demonstrable through changing fashion and visual spectacle.

Clay Conley, “Black T-Shirts and Cargo Pants: The Disguised Labor of Sound Engineers”

Just like theatrical tech crews, sound engineers have a uniform: all black, black work pants, black band t-shirts, and black comfortable sneakers or boots (Curtin and Sanson 2017, Mayer, Banks and Caldwell 2009). Because live music productions center around the spectacle of an artist performing, black clothing allows the laboring body of the sound engineer to blend in with the black stage and curtains of most venues (Kielich 2024). The illusion of invisible laboring bodies can best be described as a “swan effect” (Behr et al. 2016) where essential work is below the surface, behind the musicians, their instruments, and the stage. Beyond wearing black, sound engineer’s technological extensions are visually disguised through cable management, discrete mixing stations, pre-show sound checks, etc.
In amplified venues, sound engineers have audible traces through the balance of the mix, prevalence of feedback, monitor levels, and/or audio effects. During ethnographic research working as and alongside sound engineers at mid-sized independent venues both in Ann Arbor, MI and New York City, I observed that sound engineers work to minimize these audible traces. In addition to invisibility, sound engineers are also inaudible. Jacob Faraday (2021) recognizes this concealment as a culture of control wherein the eponymous sound guy is distinctly masculine.
In this cultural space, essential workers prefer to cease to exist. Sound engineers find pride and success in convincing ticket holders that the artists are the primary actors in the realization of liveness. As visually and audibly disguised laborers serving the success of the performer, a job well done for an engineer hinges on the eclipsing of the barrier between artist and audience. In the pursuit of liveness, mediation, sound engineers and their technology, yearns to be hidden, drawing the audience closer to the living presence (Emmerson 2007) of the artist. 

Rebecca Rinsema, “Putting the Brakes on Accelerated Consumer Culture: Pedagogy, Fashion, and Comedy on ‘The Voice’”

The 13-year-old singing competition show ‘The Voice’ can be read as an example of our contemporary accelerated consumer culture. Biannually producers cast singers from all over the United States to compete in becoming the next pop phenom. The show trades on packaging and cycling through the traumatic life journeys of the cast members and attached emotional vocal performances. With a new potential phenom spotlighted every five minutes, roughly, (during ‘The Blinds’), the show can be viewed as a microcosm of the consumer culture it exists within. In this presentation, I complicate the above reading of the show by emphasizing the characteristics of ‘The Voice’ that I argue decelerate consumer culture, and of popular music in particular. Typically, an accelerated consumer culture focuses consumers’ attention on the ‘now’ and ‘next,’ and, while this is true for the attention that audiences pay to the contestants, the attention paid to the coaches requires further framing. The coaches are popular music ‘icons;’ that are seasoned in the music industry; by industry standards, they are old. The coaches, thus, call to mind ‘the past,’ encouraging viewers to locate the contestants’ versions of the songs within a meaningful (nostalgic) historical lineage. As one would expect, the coaches are teachers of the contestants, which encourages viewers to reassess notions of ‘born-with-it’ vocal talent that more easily aligns with accelerated pop music culture. The coaches bring something ‘new’ to the table, in that they position themselves for the reality television medium as fashion influencers (Gwen Stefani, Ariana Grande, Snoop Dogg) and comedians (Michael Buble, Blake Shelton). I read this reinvention of the ‘old standards,’ along with the coaches’ pedagogical and contextualizing functions, as supporting a kind of stasis and continuity of pop culture that works against the inertial motion toward and allure of the ‘always new.’

Karlyn King, “Witchcraft Feminism: Conjuring Rebellion in Music and Fashion”
This presentation explores how the symbolism and aesthetics of witchcraft have become powerful expressions of feminist resistance in contemporary music and fashion. I delve into the ways artists and creators use witchcraft-inspired imagery and narratives to challenge patriarchal norms, empower marginalized voices, and remix societal expectations. By focusing on the intersection of witchcraft, feminism, and pop culture, I illustrate how music and fashion create spaces of resistance and empowerment, transforming these cultural expressions into tools of social and political critique.Through case studies from the Riot Grrrl movement to contemporary artists like Florence Welch and FKA twigs, I analyze how the “witch” archetype resurfaces as a force of creative rebellion, with style and sound as its primary mediums. In both music and fashion, witchcraft aesthetics—dark florals, ritual-inspired accessories, and mystic symbolism—become expressions of defiance, resilience, and female empowerment. This convergence not only celebrates individual agency but also fosters a collective identity rooted in strength, mystique, and self-possession.

By examining album art, music videos, performance styles, and fashion trends, this presentation reveals how witchcraft feminism remixes traditional narratives, turning them into powerful commentaries on contemporary issues. Here, fashion and music are not just forms of self-expression but spells cast to challenge oppressive structures, conjuring alternate realities where women’s voices, autonomy, and creativity are central. In listening to these rebellious frequencies, we witness how witchcraft-inspired feminism pushes us toward the edge of what’s possible—where style and sound become acts of reclamation, transformation, and collective empowerment, offering a vision of a world where self-expression is both magical and revolutionary.

Larissa Irizarry, “Cowboy Carter: Cosplaying American Womanhood”

In 2024, Beyoncé was all but consumed with citing national belonging: she introduced Team USA for the Paris Olympics, she dressed in red, white, and blue, was crowned with various cowboy hats, and in her promotional photos for her most recent album she rode astride a horse while wielding an American flag. Although 2024 visually stands out as Beyoncé’s “cowboy era,” she has cited her southern American roots since (at least) 2016. It was that year that she performed with The Chicks (previously The Dixie Chicks) at the Country Music Association Awards. Despite her real-life credibility as a native Texan and her adherence to the sonic signifiers of the genre, her reception by country fans ranged from mixed to racist.

During the release of Cowboy Carter, the album’s promotional photos were accompanied by the caption, “[This album] was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcome.” Beyoncé has yet to explicitly connect Cowboy Carter to the reception of her CMA Awards performance; regardless, the album brings to the fore the historical race gatekeeping of not just country music, but American womanhood. Beyoncé's citing of Americanness took a campy turn in a surprise release of the music video “Bodyguard.” In the video released on election day, she urged people to vote while cosplaying white American womanhood via Pamela Anderson’s most famous television, movie, and awards looks. In this paper, I contribute to the growing discourse on national identity (Hoffman), nostalgia (Ahmed; Berlant), and genre (Goldin-Perschbacher), and I argue that Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s most important political work to date in her pointed satire of American womanhood via cowboy culture.

Blair Smith, “Black Femme Frequencies: DIY Style Cassettes as Archives of Rebellion”

This experimental session blends live performance, soundscapes, and participatory art-making to explore the creative potential of Black femme cassette tape culture. Centering the cassette as a tool of sonic and visual storytelling, I examine how Black femme artists use the medium to remix their realities and imagine radical pasts, presents, and futures. I draw from Black feminist thought, sound studies, and cultural histories of cassette tape aesthetics to investigate how sound, style, and materiality intersect at the edges of pop music, fashion, and artistic expression.

We begin with a live sound collage that immerses participants in the textures of DIY cassette culture. Featuring loops of Black femme recordings layered with archival sounds, spoken-word excerpts, and experimental beats, the performance highlights the imperfections and distortions—such as tape hiss and warping—that characterize cassette sound. Following the performance, the session transitions to a showcase of recreated DIY cassette covers inspired by Black femme artists. These hand-drawn, collaged, and text-based designs are presented as visual archives that extend the radical potential of the cassette beyond sound.

We then move into an interactive art-making activity where participants are provided with materials to design their own cassette covers. This hands-on exercise mirrors the DIY ethos of Black femme cassette culture, inviting attendees to experiment with visual storytelling while reflecting on their own narratives of resistance and creativity. The final segment features a collective playback of the audience’s contributions, integrated into a live soundscape created on-site. This collaborative act reinforces the communal nature of Black femme DIY practices, emphasizing co-creation as a method of rebellion and world-building. By situating Black femme DIY cassette culture at the intersection of pop music, fashion, and creative rebellion, this session aligns with the conference’s call to listen intensely to the frequencies of agitation and revolt.

Teresa Turnage, “‘I Choose Violence’: An Exploration of Feminist Rage in a Man v. Bear World”

Feminist rage serves as a powerful political tool, channeling women's collective anger for sociocultural change. Social media has become a pivotal space for expressing and disseminating such political content in mediated forms, including music, movement, and text. Here, I offer a reading of feminist rage musically expressed in contemporary social media discourse. Pop musician Jax released the 2024 song "I Choose Violence,” in part as response to the so-called #manvsbear trend. The trend posed a hypothetical question—would women prefer to be left alone in the woods with a man, or a bear?—and sparked widespread debate over women's perceived safety in society. Jax’s musical response combines powerful lyrics with a striking visual: Jax holding hands with a bear, evoking both vulnerability and strength. The visual plays a crucial role in connecting the song to the broader viral discourse, highlighting the intense emotional expressions of feminist rage, such as frustration, empowerment, and defiance, alongside the psychological impact of societal gender expectations.

I argue that the amalgam of audiovisual aesthetic choices in "I Choose Violence" constitutes a reckoning with feminist rage in 2024. The song is situated within an emergent genre of digitally-curated feminist music, which leverages social media’s viral nature to amplify its message. This genre’s ability to engage with online publics and viral phenomena connects individual anger to collective movements for social change. Jax's song responds to media trends, while contributing to ongoing dialogues about women's rights and safety.

Drawing on feminist aesthetic theories (Cusick, 1994; Ngai, 2009) and a philosophy of responsive listening (Kramer, 2019), I explore how digital musicking might contribute to projects of social change. I show that sonic and visual practices might offer new tools for analyzing emotionality, activism, and the intersection of media and justice in reshaping digital spaces and society.

Moderator: Lauron J. Kehrer, Western Michigan University

Katie Moulton, “Nelly's Band-Aid: Physical Vulnerability as Pop Fashion Statement”
In the early 2000s, at the height of his pop domination, rapper and hip-pop artist Nelly began sporting a Band-Aid on his left cheek. The small adhesive immediately sparked speculation, imitation, and derision. Was the unmissable Band-Aid an idiosyncratic fashion choice, a blemish cover, or a deeper political message? The answer is some combination of all three, but the facial decoration became his much-debated signature for a decade. Nelly ditched the bandage many years ago, but the image looms large in cultural nostalgia. In this talk, I will tell the conflicting stories behind and the legacy of Nelly’s Band-Aid. And I will explore why this provocative adornment – a pop icon demonstrating physical vulnerability as part of their style iconography -- is particularly rare and deeply tied to expressed masculinity, connecting it to other examples from Axl Rose’s leg casts to 50 Cent’s bulletproof vest, and even – woefully – Trump followers’ ear bandages. 
As a millennial St. Louisan, I have grown up with Nelly-as-cultural-icon and written extensively about his impact. As I did with my 2023 presentation on The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” and how wedding playlists predict future pop canon, I hope to examine a piece of seemingly fluffy pop ephemera from a new, illuminating, and entertaining angle. 

Paige Chung, “Grills and Bling: The Entanglements of Johnny Dang and Black, Excess Aesthetics in Hip-Hop Culture”

In Erykah Badu’s 1999 song “Southern Girl”, she sings “home of the teeth that’s gold,” proclaiming the American South’s reign on grills, gold, and lineage of grill beauty rooted in a Black aesthetic of excess. Teeth have a long sociocultural history as an expression of beauty and class status. Hip-hop culture elevates teeth beauty with grills, such blinged-out embellishments are boasted in raps communicating upward mobility. Johnny Dang is a famous Vietnamese jeweler based in Houston, Texas. Since the mid-1990’s he’s been recognized as the top celebrity jeweler amongst icons Migos, Soulja Boy, Simone Biles, etc. How does Johnny Dang, a Vietnamese refugee, become a symbol of hip-hop grills culture, a culture rooted in Black diasporic aesthetics? 
Aesthetics of excess, in Jillian Hernandez parlance, is a physical representation of abundance by Black and Latina women that boast their beauty and establish their humanity despite oppressive conditions. Shine and bling aesthetics, as theorized by Krista Thompson, function as forms of resistance through agency and empowerment for African Diasporic communities. In this paper, I trace the collaboration between rappers and famous Vietnamese jeweler Johnny Dang through Dang’s guest appearances across music videos from Nelly’s “Grillz” to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Bigger in Texas” to think critically about the material products (grills) and aesthetic codes (Blaccent) that Dang sells and embodies. Hip-hop’s entanglement with Blackness as a fixed, ontological category is troubled through the intimate relationship between Johnny Dang and hip-hop celebrities, I argue, showing hip-hop’s changes through time and dissemination of cultural exchange and conversely, Vietnamese migration post-1975 end of the Vietnam war. By traversing through these relationships and music video moments, I unravel the entanglements of hip-hop with Johnny Dang that reveals the tensions, contradictions, and displacements of Black aesthetic practices that arise when adapted by other diasporic communities. 
Shiva Ramkumar, “Aesthetics of Authority: Styling Contradiction in Tamil Hip Hop”

Artists in the world of Global Hip Hop face a difficult challenge: to stylistically authorize themselves as Hip Hop artists while also performing authenticity in their own cultural contexts and audiences. Tamil Hip Hop in particular deals with the distinct, complex worlds of American Hip Hop (and the specificities of Black culture encoded within it) and Tamil media and culture. Both these worlds are full of multiple, competing aesthetic ideologies along lines of gender, race and/or caste, class, and more. I focus specifically on Tamil aesthetic ideologies as they draw from Tamil film, and how male protagonists in particular have long been a key stylistic influence on Tamil youth. I trace Hip Hop’s aesthetic ideologies to music videos and red carpets, which boast a diverse variety of styles across different time periods and genres, from streetwear to gender-fluid high fashion; styles that have not only been taken up within Hip Hop communities, but that have gone global in popular culture more broadly.

I interrogate the ways in which the aesthetic ideologies of Tamil films and Hip Hop interact in the music of Tamil Hip Hop artists, and how they might emerge as both complementary and conflicting in different contexts. I center this investigation on the music of Tamil rappers Yung Raja and Paal Dabba in particular, analyzing their music videos to (1) identify the specific aesthetic ideologies they draw from, and (2) discuss the ways in which they are privileged, transformed, or contradicted. An examination of how these aesthetic ideologies are negotiated can offer new insights into how authority and status can be constructed in the diverse world of Global Hip Hop.
Alexander Moore, “‘Wear Your Halo Like a Hat, That’s Like the Latest Fashion’: Hip-Hop Identity, Merchandising, Fandom, and Chance the Rapper’s ‘3’ Hat”


In 2016, posters for Chance the Rapper’s upcoming mixtape Coloring Book were wheatpasted around major metropolitan cities across the United States. The cover features Chance (real name Chancelor Bennett) with a smile on his forward-tilted face, wearing a New Era ® snapback embroidered with the number “3,” which Chance has stated represents his third mixtape, the Holy Trinity, and his 3-part family (himself, his partner, and daughter). Other than the “3,” the mixtape cover art does not include an artist name or album title, as it is presumed that Chance the Rapper had enough of a strong following to market without any titles. 
    Chance garnered a massive fandom from his independently released mixtapes 10 Day (2012) and Acid Rap (2013). Coloring Book was no stranger to the same process of his previous mixtapes. He recorded the album without a major label and released the mixtape online for free. The record eventually went on to become a critical success, winning Chance a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album in 2014. After the breakthrough success of Coloring Book, he began selling the “3” hat online and, in 2018, 2 years after the album was released, claims that he made $6 million on selling the hats. 
    From “peacocking” to “hypebeasts,” there are various motives to express fashion within the culture of hip-hop. While acknowledging the commercialism and exploitation of fans that merchandise may have, this paper investigates how Chance the Rapper’s hat has given him an iconic look, allowing fans to engage with the merchandise and feel a personal connection to the artist, who has consistently gone on record about his philanthropic work of donating his income to arts education in Chicago.  

Moderator: Alex Diaz-Hui, Princeton University

In his 2013 review of Charli XCX’s debut studio album True Romance, Pitchfork writer Marc Hogan despairs at the growing tendency to treat Internet platforms like genres in their own right. For Hogan, this kind of “technology-based shorthand” includes both earlier disparagement of Charli’s singles as “fucking terrible Myspace music” and the association of her eventual debut with the aesthetic sensibilities of popular microblogging site Tumblr. Eleven years later, still riding the aftershocks of Charli’s Brat summer, the close relationship between digital cultures and pop music feels as inevitable as ever, from the algorithmically- generated playlists and social media pages that structure our consumption (Galloway, Goldschmitt, and Harper 2020) to the growing expectation that our favorite artists double as influencers, tastemakers, and brands in their own right (Vesey 2023). And yet, even in this increasingly digital and disconnected musical landscape, questions of the body and embodiment are never far behind. This panel brings together papers that consider this intersection of music technology and the body across four distinct case studies, reflecting on the ways that users remix, reprogram, cover, and camp. As the panelists consider subversive cover songs, nostalgia-imbued music media, the seeming paradox of using AI to drive technostalgia, and the radical potential of accessible queer signifiers, we understand embodied listening and music fandom as a practice that transcends eras and upends framings of contemporary music cultures as disembodied or depersonalized. How do we maintain a connection to the voices, bodies, sounds, and technologies of the past? What are some of the ways that technology helps music and listeners play dress up? And how do we continue to listen, perform, record, and accessorize in ways that foreground bodies and embodiment, even — and especially — in the context of our digitally mediated world?

Amy Skjerseth, “Wearing Out Genres: The Cover Song as Radical Refashioning”

How do singers who perform cover songs wear or refashion the voices and genres associated with the “original” singers? In this paper, I explore cover songs as a form of embodied fandom that rehearses familiar debates in popular music: the status of the original versus “copy,” the stickiness of genre categorizations, and perceived markers of “authentic” singing. I examine how Chance the Rapper transforms Nelly’s 2002 “Hot in Herre” into a country rock bop. Chance performed this cover in December 2021 on Jimmy Fallon’s That’s My Jam, a Tonight Show spin-off that showcases music and comedy games. The “Musical Genre Challenge” selects a song for Fallon’s guest to sing in a completely different genre—supposedly selected randomly, but the show’s high-polished performances seem preplanned. For critic Jessica Wang, Chance adapts Nelly’s hip hop/rap hit with a “silky smooth [...] southern accent so convincing you might just think you’re at the Grand Ole Opry” (2021). Wang emphasizes Chance’s vocal suaveness as if it’s only through cunning that a Black rapper has pulled off country music, much like the reality show’s audience reactions racialize a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing perception of Chance’s voice and accent. These reactions to his cover’s embodiment of country underline the recording industry’s long association of country music with whiteness, despite recent calls to acknowledge country’s roots in Blackness (Giddens, 2019; Royster, 2022; Beyoncé, 2024). Moreover, the audience’s surprise recalls rapper-turned-singer judgments about T-Pain that separated rapping from singing in Black virtuosity. As I argue, fashioning one’s voice into a supposedly antithetical genre from the original can expose the arbitrariness of genres and other aesthetic judgments about music (Brackett, 2016). By exploring cover songs as something artists can wear in order to refashion expectations about genre, vocality, and race, I show their force as cultural intermediaries in the music industry and beyond.
Morgan Bimm, “The Children Yearn for the Cords: Tech Anxieties, iPod Nostalgia, and the Resurgence of Wired Listening”
Chris Anderson, “Sonic Hauntology, Technostalgia, and the Implications of AI-Generated Retro Aesthetics in New Music Production”

Morgan Bimm, "The Children Yearn for the Cords: Tech Anxieties, iPod Nostalgia, and the Resurgence of Wired Listening"

In the midst of a retro tech renaissance that has seen retail giants like Urban Outfitters selling refurbished iPods and campaigns to evade Apple’s DRM to preserve “lost” clickwheel-era games, there’s another nostalgia-tinged marker of bygone MP3 cultures making its way back into cultural relevance: wired or corded headphones. One recent explainer connects the newfound popularity of wired headphones to their affordability and functionality. It’s far easier to ensure lossless audio, reports SoundGuys (2024), by plugging in. Other explanations for the phenomenon are more ephemeral, rooted less in tangible benefits and more aligned with the new cultural and political relevance of “vibes” (James 2021). An Instagram account with over 16k followers, Wired It Girls describes wireless Apple AirPods as “functional and practical, which is the antithesis of cool. We use them because Apple forced us to.” In this paper, I examine the cycles of nostalgia that have contributed to 2000s MP3 cultures’ seemingly unshakeable place in our collective, cultural imaginary — or, as music writer Niko Stratis (2023) wryly observes, how “time make[s] easy fetishists of us all.” How do wired headphones represent a tangible and literal tie to the past? How have the aesthetics of vintage music technology also been invoked to signal certain ideas about one’s gender, class, privilege, and subcultural capital (Thornton 1995)? And in what ways might this apparent rebellion against the consumer logics and homogeneity of today’s technologies be unknowingly replicating certain stories of music’s materialist histories note for note? This paper explores wired headphones as more than a reactionary tech impulse to argue that this moment of technological remix culture can teach us something about the surveillance capitalism that defines contemporary streaming, the power of wired media as signifier, and what room for resistance we have left.

Chris Anderson, "Sonic Hauntology, Technostalgia, and the Implications of AI-Generated Retro Aesthetics in New Music Production"

Advances in music recording software and virtual instruments have empowered music creators with a greater set of tools to produce content. Yet many producers harbor a nostalgia for older vintage and retro music aesthetics as evidenced in music that presents what writer Simon Reynolds (2011) considers endless retrospection within the start of the twenty-first century. This nostalgia is not only a longing for the sounds of the past but also manifests as a longing for vintage recording methods and retro equipment in a form of technostalgia (Burns 2021). A twenty-first century fetishization of vintage gear, analog synthesizers, and the tactile nuances of tape recording has led to a resurgence of music technologies in both hardware and anachronistic software plug-in forms, while music styles such as vaporwave, chillwave, and synthwave reimagine retro aesthetics through recycling the consumer market-driven aesthetics of the 1980s in films, video games, television programmes, and advertising (Ballum-Cross 2021). This paper argues that not all musical styles that integrate retro aesthetics of the twentieth century are a pastiche of consumer kitsch but are instead in critical opposition to the reliance of retro aesthetics in popular music. Mark Fisher discusses sonic hauntology as a style of music that is not so much a longing for retro aesthetics but is instead a critique on culture’s current reliance on nostalgic depictions of the future that cloud the sense of imagining a different future (201

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.

Moderator: Victoria Xaka, Cornell University

Andrés Amado, “Refashioning of La Catrina in Drag: A Queer Latine Vision for Día de los Muertos”
This paper explores how drag shows, as exuberant performances of gender, can offer a queer vision of Latine/x identity in the interstitial space of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through music, dance, and fashion. While Latine/x queer communities in the Texas Rio Grande Valley had remained at the edge of both mainstream and queer cultures in the United States, they began to draw media attention with the increased politization of the border region brought about by Trumpism. For instance, in 2019, NPR covered a protest drag show at the border wall in Brownsville, Texas, that raised funds to support LGBTQ+ asylum seekers. In popular culture, the 2024 season of the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race featured Geneva Karr, a contestant from Brownsville. In these instances, local drag artists put on display elements of their transnational identities as queer Texan-Mexicans through music and fashion. To further investigate the local refashioning of intersecting identities through drag, this presentation analyzes a performance I observed in the border city of McAllen, Texas on November 3, 2019, which celebrated the Mexican holiday día de los muertos. Studying the musical, choreographic, and costume design elements of the performance, I argue that this display of music and fashion offers a queer utopian vision as described by José Esteban Muñoz: a world not quite existing as a present reality, but a reconfiguration of elements from the past that project a queer aesthetic possibility. This vision came to life through juxtapositions of binary elements commonly associated with Mexican and queer cultures—sometimes in tension with each other. By refashioning La Catrina, the skeleton-like demure lady symbolizing the Mexican holiday for the dead as a sexualized burlesque character, the performance offered a queer vision of local traditions at the edges of borders and identities.
Chaz Antoine Barracks, “Durag Matter: Everyday Aesthetics and Black Queer Spectacle”
The Black queer-femme body as a site of rebellion within the homeplace (bell hooks, 1990). I got my first durag from my favorite cousin’s boyfriend. While babysitting me, he gave me a fresh line-up and a wave-brushed my curls down into an active ocean breeze. He then stood behind me, tying on the durag with a joyous sense of Black pride that bonded us. Since the making of my 2020 film Everyday Black Matter, I have been in critical dialogue with artist-scholars whose work contextualizes Black popular and material culture(s) from the everyday as archival sites of queer worldmaking. Becoming a popular trend in the late 90’s into 2000’s, durags have evolved as a marker of innovative style owned by the Black community— who is solely responsible for transforming this protective style item into iconic and industry-disruptive style (hiphopcloset.com). Fashion designer Kadeem Fyffe recently inserted durags into his most recent NYFW show “Wedding and a Funeral” at the Park Ave Cathedral stating, “playing off the typical high-fashion show practice of including a bridal piece as the closing look, I featured a white lace durag on the “groom” to offer contrast to his black structural look. I saw it as a critique of rigid gender roles in fashion through (re)placement of the “veil.” It was a look!!”

This innovation through durag fashion-art that I mark as rebellious Black queer representation, is what I plan to explore in this lo-fi critical kiki about mundane Black matter. It features rich auto-theory and mixed-media methods (sound/oral history, short film, fashion photography) to center durag fashion as sites of rebellion that ferments Black politics of pleasure and joy in industry/institutional critique. I’m also displaying my own 8-ft long durags as research material to help blur the lines between resistance and refusal in Black archives that disregard rigid respectability in order to complicate the straight/queer binary. 

Black artist have been engaging durags style as disruptive style for quite some time now and I want to enter the chat, at PopCon 2025 to explore the fugitive possibilities of Black everyday style. This is a work-in-progress exhibition in the making that builds onto my recent durag exhibit works, presented at Honcho Campout (2022), Studio 23 (Richmond, Va), and the Iridian Gallery (Richmond, 2022). 
Sofi Chavez, “‘She’s So Solid,’ ‘She’s So Soft’: Butch-Femme Style in MUNA’s Lesbian Erotic Gaze”
LA-based indie pop band MUNA builds a lyric lesbian erotic world grounded in felt materials. In their 2022 self-titled album, the band lingers in the aesthetics of lesbian life: how it feels to see a girl’s silk dress “dancing in the wind,” or to be with a girl “of material substance” who is “so solid” (“She’s using her hands, she’s pulling the levers”). This essay explores the ways in which MUNA’s attention to style reveals a lesbian erotic gaze. I first take up their chart-topping hit “Silk Chiffon” (MUNA ft. Phoebe Bridgers) to elucidate femme style and desire, and then turn to the more subtle elaborations of butch desirability in their less commercially popular track “Solid.” Through close-readings of the lyrics, music video, and the band’s self-produced merchandise, I attend to the ways in which lesbian identity emerges from encounters with the material world; beauty for MUNA and their listeners emerges not from normative or conventional femininity, but is found in the ways that women manipulate the world around them. The essay also considers the endurance and transformation of contentious categories of “butch” and “femme,” turning to popular music’s resignification of these historic, situated social identities.

Ryan Lambe, “A Battle Cry for Queer Worlds: Voice, Music, and Sound in Live-Action Roleplay”
In August 2022, a transgender woman in red armor and top hat shouts, calling for archers—including myself—to volley our foam-tipped arrows at people in imp costumes while she whacks her foam sword against a large round PVC shield. In an interview, she tells me that playing this game gave her the confidence to speak up and ask for a raise at work, where many transgender women face discrimination. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in two fantasy live-action roleplaying games (LARPs) in California and Florida to examine how LGBTQ players use music, sound, and vocality for queer world-making. Unlike digital roleplaying games (RPGs), LARPers fully embody their characters, using voices, playing music, swinging swords, shooting arrows, and dressing in medievalist garb. LARPers craft  “kits”—costumes that, with vocalism, accent, and music, perform their character. I situate LGBTQ LARP performance using ludomusicology and transvocality. Queer games scholars document how transgender players in massively multiplayer online RPGs try out gendered identification and performance before risking their bodies in reality. Similarly, ludomusicologist William Cheng amplifies how queer and trans gamers in online games risk discrimination when speaking. Where these scholars attend to digital games, I argue that queer and trans LARPers in analog games use music and voice to refigure social spaces. However, LGBTQ LARPers also play against a trend in LARP celebrating violent, militant masculinity. This paper builds on ethnomusicologist Luis Garcia-Misprieta’s insights about surface positive affect in creating queer worlds by locating LARP as engaged queer solidarity amidst escapist gaming. The sonic queer world-making of LGBTQ LARPers becomes more urgent for queer and trans survival in the context of legislation targeting queer and trans spaces for elimination. 

Moderator: Eddy Francisco Alvarez, Jr., California State University, Fullerton

Emma Jensen, “Dressing Fat: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Sophie Tucker, and Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton”
Willie Mae Thornton hated wearing dresses. Sophie Tucker insisted on expensive dresses that accentuated her body type. Despite being known for extravagant gowns and weighty jewelry, a popular image of Gertrude Rainey features her wearing a suit in an advertisement for “Prove It on Me Blues.” How did dressing for, or around, fatness influence the perception of a musician’s gender in the early nineteenth-century United States? Furthermore, how did the fashion choices of a fat performer affect their positionality in a rapidly changing music industry?
In this presentation, I argue that the fashion choices of fat, nineteenth-century femme musicians in the United States allowed, and occasionally forced, fluctuation in their perceived genders, genres, and social desirability. Such fluctuations largely depended on a performer’s body size, race, and class, as I demonstrate with case studies of Rainey, Tucker, and Thornton. Comparisons among these three fat femmes showcase how fashion choices enabled them to assert autonomy over their bodies, cement their legacies through specific sartorial choices, and influence how audiences heard and engaged with their public personas.   
Ellie Martin, “Radicalizing Pregnancy: Black Femininity, Fashion, and the Reclamation of Bodily Agency in the Public Eye”
In recent years, Black female musicians have transformed pregnancy into a radical and empowering form of self-expression, rejecting societal norms that historically silenced and concealed maternity. Artists such as Rhiannon, Beyoncé, and Cardi B challenge traditional expectations by celebrating pregnancy through fashion and art, reclaiming agency over their bodies. In her 2022 Vogue interview, Rhiannon redefined maternity as an integral aspect of her artistic identity, using fashion to highlight her pregnant belly rather than conceal it. These artists position pregnancy as a visible, empowering act, challenging the historical pressures of the entertainment industry to maintain a polished, unaltered professional persona (Gimlin, 2007; Harrison, 2014).
This paper explores how Black women use pregnancy as a creative rebellion, reshaping cultural narratives of beauty and motherhood. Beyoncé’s iconic 2011 MTV Video Music Awards performance and Cardi B’s unapologetically pregnant SNL appearance in 2018 are pivotal moments where pregnancy became a statement of strength, creativity, and defiance. These acts reflect broader societal shifts, as Black women confront systemic inequities while redefining their public identities.
The 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade complicates this reclamation of bodily autonomy, disproportionately endangering Black women, who are 3.5 times more likely to die during pregnancy or postpartum than white women due to systemic racism in healthcare (PRB, 2023). These public celebrations of pregnancy by Black artists not only reject societal expectations but also amplify awareness of racial disparities in maternal health. Through an analysis of Rhiannon’s Vogue interview and other iconic examples, this paper examines how Black women challenge traditional norms by transforming pregnancy into an act of empowerment. Ultimately, these artists use their visibility to celebrate motherhood, reclaim agency, and resist societal and systemic limitations, asserting their creative and personal autonomy as acts of radical empowerment.
Aliyah Martinez, “BIG MAMA: How Women in Hip Hop Take Up Space”
Whether a woman is strutting towards a private jet in a 30-inch middle part “bussdown” or infamously walking the red carpet with one exposed breast covered with a dainty purple pasty, women in Hip Hop, like many of their round-the-way counterparts, consistently challenged the status quo. Female rappers in a male-dominated industry use intersectionality to challenge notions of femininity, invisibility, and autonomy. This paper examines how female rappers take up space through their style and dominating personalities. I will visually analyze music videos, red carpet footage, and performances from artists Lil Kim, Nicki Minaj, Megan Thee Stallion, and Latto. All four women have notably been centered in conversations regarding hyper-sexuality and respectability.
    In contrast, many discussions revolving around female rappers in the past engage in finding a balance between modesty and bashfulness. This study will highlight the cultural shift from women finding empowerment through emulating a baggier style towards figure-hugging garments, colorful hair, bold makeup, and decorative accessories. It is imperative to understand further the intentionality of how many female rappers choose to position themselves by emphasizing their sensuality and taking hold of the male gaze within their parameters. To widen the scope of research for women’s fashion practices is crucial to understanding how embodiment and adornment can challenge subversive societal ideas.
    Furthermore, I find it increasingly necessary to deepen the scope of research on Black American women’s beauty and fashion practices as much innovation within the past decades become globalized, risking an erasure from their historical markings. Subculture and sexualized historical caricatures aimed towards Black women serve as foundational theoretical concepts that continue to be at the forefront of the politics in female rap. This paper unpacks Black women’s desire to be unapologetically themselves while challenging their worthiness through derogatory perceptions contrasting notions of modesty and respectability. 
Melanie Ptatscheck, “From Heroin Chic to Shape Wear. Body Images, Fashion Trends, and (Mental) Health in Popular Music”
Concepts about the body, health, and illness are socioculturally and historically variable; they represent social constructions that reflect cultures, politics, and moral ideas of a society at a particular time. Popular music and its diverse cultures may also have a decisive impact on those constructions and thus contribute to the social definition of a ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ body. Health-threatening effects can also accompany this notion: The (re)production of toxic fashion trends (e.g., ‘heroin chic’ in grunge or ‘size zero’ low-rise pants) and unrealistic ideas of norms (e.g., flawless, overtrained bodies of pop stars) can lead to distorted perceptions of self- and body images and even to mental illnesses such as depression and eating disorders. Especially in the last decade, however, it has become apparent that popular music can also function as a health-promoting tool, make diverse body performances visible, and challenge ‘unhealthy’ fashion trends. In particular, female pop musicians such as Lady Gaga, Billie Eilish, and Lizzo broke with heteronormative ideas of the body and mental health stigmata by personally addressing issues such as self-love and body-positivity. The latest with Ariana Grande’s statement on TikTok about body shaming over her ‘unhealthy’ look, a ‘healthy’ discourse around body images was initiated against the background of self-determination and subjective wellbeing. Based on an interdisciplinary research project, this paper is located at the interface of popular music studies and public health. It provides a discourse-analytical approach to the ‘healthy turn’ in popular music relating to prevalent body norms and fashion trends at the intersection of the music/celebrity industries and contemporary self-improvement culture. Body- and health-related transformation processes will be reconstructed by focusing on body images and fashion styles of selected pop musicians and their (self-)representations, discussing how these trends shape/are shaped by (gendered) discourse and power dynamics.

Moderator: madison moore, Brown University

Zoey Greenwald, “TURNING LOOKS AT THE CLUB: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY”
My residency behind the bar at one of Brooklyn’s most popular nightclubs; my best friend’s residency behind the counter at one of Brooklyn’s most popular vintage shops: our jobs, day-in and day-out; the wild glamor we clock into and out of.
The act of turning looks at the club has always been and will always be political. As queer people, nonwhite people, and otherwise people for whom the narcotic glamor of the club and of high fashion are vital to survival—people for whom nightlife may be safer than the daytime— a new internal social structure forms. Informed by drag and queer history, what we wear to the club is still, in constantly new and different ways, important.
Whether or not the club acts materially as a place of employment, the club inscribes and situates social politics and hierarchies. The club is a venue for the careful breaking of time—tracks spin into sets, stretching the late-night pliable; drugs open perception wide; dancing renders the body ecstatic. It is exactly this undefined and mutable state which allows queer life to thrive and community to grow. Within this schema, the Look takes on the weight of the Signifier—for which High Fashion is remixed and re-interpolated.But what happens when we, in these spaces, are interpolated into workers? Workers towards the club; towards high fashion? The question becomes: what can we take. No, literally: what can we take from this place. Teflar bag. Floor drugs. Anna Bolina dress. Shots. DJ slot. Gucci corset. Won’t fit me might fit you. Does anybody have a safety pin? A slicing moment of precious, slowed conversation in the greenroom. Ringing in ears. Rick Owens shorts. We’re going to be icons forever. I mean we’re going to be sisters forever.

Carla Vecchiola, “Unyielding Underground: Detroit Techno's Legacy of Resistance, Creativity, and Resilience”
Detroit techno is black music, born out of the city's African American community in the 1980s. Due to both geographic and cultural distance from mainstream music industry benefits, Detroit techno has produced a distinctive sound reflecting the city's unique cultural and historical context. This presentation explores how Detroit's techno scene used music as a form of rebellion and self-expression, laying a foundation for what would be possible in any future electronic music production.
Characterized by its DIY ethos and willingness to experiment, Detroit's music scene has sustained an underground culture valuing creativity and self-expression over commercial success. Examining the intersection of music and social change in Detroit's techno scene highlights music's power as a tool for resistance and innovation, particularly against systemic inequality and marginalization.

From the beginning, Detroit’s techno scene was futuristic. Along with Chicago house, it laid a foundation that influenced all electronic music that would follow. Detroit techno musicians have never remained stagnant and are still pushing electronic music forward. Therefore the original techno musicians simultaneously serve as both legacies and innovators. The current social scene in Detroit mirrors that timeless approach by being intergenerational. To be out in Detroit is to see 50 and 60 year old DJs playing for crowds that are multiracial, sexually diverse, and young and old—including parents who sometimes attend parties with their adult children. Detroit's intergenerational danceclubs offer a unique space for connection and innovation, evoking the strengths of the past while maintaining continuity with the futurism that existed at the start of techno in Detroit. 
Young, up-and-coming artists and traditionally overlooked early musicians share commonalities in their efforts to maintain an underground culture. Could this collaboration lead to more equitable compensation for underground artists? This presentation will contribute to the conference themes by highlighting music's power as a tool for creative rebellion and social change, shaping the sound and attitude of a community, and challenging dominant cultural norms.

Isabel Gurrola, “Runways in the Underground: Fashion, Sound, and Identity in Los Angeles Techno Culture”
his presentation explores the intersection of fashion, sound, space, and performance within the contemporary Los Angeles underground rave scene, focusing on a bi-monthly event that hosts a techno runway show. My conceptual framework of sonic spatial resistance is central to this analysis, which integrates Gaye Theresa Johnson’s spatial entitlement, Jose Anguiano’s sonic citizenship within Latino cultural citizenship, and Deborah Vargas’ lo sucio framework. This approach emphasizes the reclamation and repurposing of spaces by marginalized communities, where music fosters identity, resistance, and solidarity. These underground runways are heavily influenced by ballroom culture, where participants challenge and play with gender roles, much like the ballroom houses of queer Black and Latinx communities. Like ballroom culture, this underground runway lets attendees—especially queer men, women, and trans individuals—challenge gender norms through fashion, with queer men in skirts, women’s clothing, and others blending masculine styles. This defiance of binary gender expectations embodies lo sucio, as Vargas (2014) describes it, where genderqueer people of color resist erasure by engaging in non-conforming performances. Spatial entitlement, as defined by Johnson (2013), describes how marginalized groups form new collectivities through imaginative uses of space and technology, fostering belonging and solidarity in spaces such as speakeasies, warehouses, and these techno events. Sonic citizenship, according to Anguiano (2018), highlights how music and sound technology become tools for marginalized communities to assert presence and resist assimilation. The sonic environment of raves, often active from 11 PM to 6 AM, underscores this defiance through music that challenges silence and discipline. In addition, this presentation contributes to Ethnic Studies by illustrating how underground runway raves embody cultural expression, resist dominant power structures, and foster identity through sonic and spatial practices that echo decades of underground culture.
Viet-Hai Huynh, “Cosplaying Dystopia: Techno-Orientalism and Cyberpunk at Raves”
Asian American rave fashion has historically been marked by representations of “Asianess” through forms of popular culture, including anime, Sanrio, and Pokémon. However, Asian American rave fashion has recently shifted towards cyberpunk aesthetics, utilizing its grunge and punk inspirations to incorporate their ethos of refusal, rebellion, and dissatisfaction with society. While cyberpunk subcultures replicate dystopian realities as a form of social commentary, raves have often been conceptualized as spaces of utopianism. My paper asks what it means for the Asian American rave scene to embrace an aesthetics of dystopia through cyberpunk aesthetics when Asian Americans have suffered from the negative tropes of tecno-Orientalism. As David Roh states, Asian Americans have been contained within tropes of techno-Orientalism that frame Asia as a dystopian cyberpunk future (Roh et al. 2015). Scholars of rave culture have also argued that the rave is a less-than-utopic space given its racial exclusions (Garcia-Mispireta 2023). Building on this work, I argue that Asian Americans’ embracing of techno-Orientalism through rave fashion constitutes a refusal of the rave as a utopian space while envisioning new radical futures that embrace messiness and imperfection. Through their conceptualization of the rave as a dystopia, Asian American ravers contest the common perception of the rave as a space of belonging, community, and togetherness, revealing the inadequacy of the ideas of peace and perfection. I postulate that raves are alternative dystopias that exist alongside our current dystopia, a

Moderator: Chi Chi Thalken, Scratched Vinyl

Tyler Bunzey, “Styling the Self: The Music Video as a Primary Site of Hip-Hop Persona Development”
Since the rise of the popularity of the hip-hop music video in the 90s with platforms like Ralph McDaniels’ Video Music Box and Yo! MTV Raps, the music video has been central to many artists’ artistic practice. The medium itself is flexible and has expressive aims that serve multiple ends. For example, the music video can be simultaneously a marketing tool for a label’s new release and an aspiring filmmaker’s artistic medium. It can be simultaneous publicity for a new artist and a visual representation of aurality. Put simply, the music video is not singular in its expressive purpose. 
This paper argues that varied music video performance strategies in hip-hop culture serve as a medium for artists to develop their respective hip-hop identities. The music video performance impacts everything from the compositional process to the development of artists’ personas. Put simply, the music video is not an extension or reflection of live performance but a key performance practice itself, one that extends the artists’ presence beyond the stage or recording booth.  Music videos, I argue, are largely autonomous platforms in hip-hop culture. Rather than being contingent on an artist’s stage presence, fan base, or recorded archive, the music video is a primary site of identity development for hip-hop artists. After a brief discussion of the history of the music video in hip-hop culture, this paper will examine how the video bibliography of Busta Rhymes works to extend and develop two distinct personas in his work: the trickster and the mafioso. This persona shift highlights how persona development is an artistic practice in its own right and how the music video is a predominant platform in the production of persona.
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher and Elizabeth Lindau, “Thrift Store Queens: The Musical Fashioning of White Working-Class Femininity in 80s Film and Music Video”
John Hughes’s 1986 cult classic Pretty in Pink materialized on a tip from its 17-year-old star Molly Ringwald. The two regularly shared music, and Ringwald’s recommendation of a 1981 Psychedelic Furs song inspired the film’s title, screenplay, and heroine, Andie. Like many of Hughes’s teen drama protagonists, Andie comes from a working-class background. Out of financial necessity, she cultivates a distinctive fashion sense using handmade and hand-me-down items. Andie’s thrifted self-styling is, crucially, linked to music–she works at a record store owned by Iona (Annie Potts), who continually reinvents herself through vintage looks.
Andie’s thrift-store chic was part of a larger trend within early MTV videos, as superstars Cyndi Lauper and Madonna layered garments and accessories of different styles and eras. In “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Lauper cavorted about the Lower East Side in a vintage pink satin dress and porkpie hat. In “Lucky Star,” Madonna writhed on the ground in an all-black assemblage of cropped mesh tops, fingerless lace gloves, and rubber bracelets. The mistaken identity drama of Madonna’s 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan stems from a jacket exchanged for sequined boots at a used clothing store. 
This collaborative presentation will explore thrifted fashion in 1980s pop music and pop-music inspired film. In these texts, white working-class women (real and fictional) use eclectic, vintage, gifted, or handmade clothing to reframe their class status as a cool, outsider persona–what Theo Cateforis (after Kathleen Hanna) calls the “Rebel Girl.” Vintage shopping and “visible mending” are seeing a resurgence among consumers and online fashion influencers, who present these practices as sustainable solutions to fast fashion and textile waste. Gen Z’s craze for thrifted fashion is prefigured in the “thrift store queen” sartorial styles of early 1980s white working-class pop singers and film characters. 
Del Cowie, “The X Factor”
With iconic videos like Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” Usher’s “Yeah!” and Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” to his name, music video auteur Director X has applied his visuals to some of the biggest hit singles of the last 25 years, directing well over 100 music videos of countless hit songs. While many of the aforementioned titles in Director X’s musical oeuvre are unapologetically commercial in nature, serving the needs of the artist and the song, there is also a counternarrative present in his work. In many of his music videos, X, born Julien Lutz in Toronto, Canada has navigated the music video world to consistently communicate Black diasporic culture, specifically Black Canadian culture in his work. By tracing and situating the roots of his emergence and creative inspiration in 1990s Black Toronto – a time that according to Idil Abdillahi and Rinaldo Walcott’s BlackLife represented an unprecedented explosive presence of Black Canadians in music and other creative arts –  this paper will recontextualize Director X’s use of the music video medium as asserting the presence, viability and resonance of Black Canadian culture. Through additional analysis of videos such as Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” and Rihanna’s “Work” I will explore how X extends this cultural foundation to facilitate a visual representation of Black diasporic culture.
Eric Lott, “Recording Western Recording”
In 1969, Harry Nilsson recorded the song “City Life” at United Western Recorders on Sunset Boulevard for release on his fourth album Harry, which arrived in August of that year.  In a gentle falsetto and head voice that descends into the chest only on the third verse, a plinking soft-shoe arrangement behind it, the singer declares himself fed up with the city life, but his pledge to grab a plane and come back to his folks withers in the light of the city’s promised dollars and dreams.  There was nothing obviously rebellious about the style of the tune, despite Nilsson’s soundtrack association with the X-rated film Midnight Cowboy, released earlier that year; in fact it carries the same unplugged innocence of his “Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me.”  In 2003, celebrated mixed-media artist Mathias Poledna made a short film called Western Recording (on exhibit in 2023, where I saw it, at Vienna’s modern art museum the Mumok) that depicts the recording session that produced Nilsson’s song.  In an unassuming button-down shirt and beige bell-bottom slacks, a Nilsson lookalike wearing monitor headphones does a credible version of “City Life” into a boom mic while reading from a music stand and surrounded by speaker cabinets and other studio paraphernalia.  That is the work Poledna gives us, and it is a fine puzzle: a primal scene of recording for which we have no original, only a copy of the record; a loving historical gesture recreating a hallowed but unheroic late-60s L.A. session subculture that raises all kinds of questions about mechanical reproduction, in this case the mechanical reproduction of a moment of mechanical reproduction.  Far from revolt or rebellion of a “Dick Hebdige” kind, the studio scene here nonetheless depends on certain uncanny reversals that unsettle history, the solidity of reference, 60s commonplaces, and the musical given, exploring the operation of artifice in a modality of artifice that appears to deny artifice.  This “transvaluation of the norms of reality” in aesthetic formations is what Herbert Marcuse in The Aesthetic Dimension (1977) called “stylization,” for him a mode of transcendence that was a technology of liberation.  Both Godard’s 1+1 and Warhol’s screen tests seem to lurk in Poledna’s provocation.  But this is not the workaday studio boredom of the Rolling Stones in the former or the withering of the star image in the latter but an insistence on the scene of Recording, something like the infrastructure of style, the styling of style itself.  T

Moderator: Alan Parkes, University of Delaware

Aidan Levy, “Way Out West: Stetsons, Mohawks, and Frontiers of Sound and Style”
The cowboy hat and the mohawk are deeply entrenched symbols in the iconography of American popular music, synonymous with punk nonconformity and country swagger. However, there is a counternarrative of artists of color who have signified on the fashion and style of cowboys and Native Americans to critique America’s founding myths, exposing the country’s settler colonial past while simultaneously honoring indigenous culture and claiming a shared cultural heritage—an emancipatory vision through sound and style. This presentation begins with Sonny Rollins and traces this history of sartorial and coiffed resistance to the present. In the 1957 album Way Out West, Rollins paid tribute to one of his idols, Herb Jeffries, the “Bronze Buckaroo.” Rollins and photographer William Claxton shot the iconic cover photo in the Mojave Desert, with the rogue saxophonist wearing a Stetson and holster, brandishing his tenor like a six-shooter with a rented steer’s skull in the background. The album crossed a new sonic frontier while subverting racial stereotypes as a forerunner to Blazing Saddles. In 1963, Rollins started wearing a mohawk haircut, not as a metonym for nonconformity, but to pay homage to indigenous music and culture. In performances, he would frequently wear a cowboy hat only to remove it mid-performance and ironically reveal a mohawk underneath, claiming not only the tradition of the western as his own cultural inheritance, but also the buried history of dispossession that represents the dark side of the American dream. To what extent has this tradition been an act of cultural appropriation? To what extent has it been used for cultural critique? I will consider this lineage of resistance through the iconography of the cowboy hat and the mohawk, including Joe Strummer, Lil Nas X, Taboo from Black Eyed Peas, Shaboozey, and Cowboy Carter. 
Hannah Moltz, “Y2K Cowgirl or US Imperial-Core? Examining the Enduring Legacy of the Cowboy and Reconfiguring the Contours and Limitations of the Cowgirl Aesthetic as Subversive Resistance”
What does the rising popularity of Y2K styles, particularly the Y2K cowgirl, reflect within the contemporary context of challenges to US imperialism, counter-offenses to these challenges from coalitions of formerly colonized nations, some of the largest protests in US history, and widespread disenchantment with the United States’ imperial agenda at home? Pop feminism continues to supply a steady stream of subversive starlets like Chappell Roan, Kacey Musgraves, and Sabrina Carpenter - whose looks and sounds can be linked to the many cowgirls before them in Dolly Parton, The Chicks, Madonna, and many more. The cowgirl motif enjoys a far reach, found in Mitski’s Be the Cowboy, Rina Sawayama’s “This Hell,” and arguably the highest impact homage to the cowgirl in Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. This paper will examine the roots of the cowgirl aesthetic, the signals deployed by the aesthetic, and compare the critical gaze applied to different bodies who utilize it to send messages to their audiences about who they are. It will ask if this look constitutes an aesthetic of resistance and liberation, and what the limits and accomplishments of that aesthetic might be, or another nostalgic trend to drive over-consumption and diminish attention given to aesthetics that signal counter-cultures and drive organization and direct action. It seems worth wondering whether or not this is an aesthetic of resistance or a continuation of a decades long infatuation with subverting the cowboy to create the cowgirl - one with equal opportunity to dominate and exploit rather than liberate from a culture of imperial violence. To consider these questions I will engage the work of Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, Nell Irvin Painter’s History of White People, Tansy E Hoskins Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, as well as journal publications from Nicole Doer, Lisa Jacobson, Lydia Goehr, and Meredith Levande.  
Lisa Sorrell, “From the Saddle to the Stage: Country Music and the Evolution of Cowboy Boots”

Cowboy boots have long been the standard footwear of country music, both for the performers and their fans. Exploring the history of the cowboy boot, examining how they evolved from plain black boots the cowboys of trail drives wore, to the brightly colored, high-heeled, pointed-toe footwear we recognize today, this project proposes how this evolution happened alongside, and for the benefit of, entertainment. Given that there is little academic research on cowboy boots, and that the craft of cowboy boot making is traditionally passed along orally from master to student, primary sources are limited to historical photos, vintage boot catalogs, and the memories of aging boot makers. With over thirty years of experience as a cowboy boot maker, I have access to the craft and its embedded knowledge, giving me unique access into its history and traditions. This project will highlight how cowboy boots, the most universal staple of country music fashion, contributed visually and aesthetically to country music from its beginnings to today.
Jacob Kopcienski, “‘White Trash Revelry’: Rural Queer Style, Narrative, and Strategy in Adeem the Artist’s Country Music and Media” 
In their 2023 Opry Debut, the non-binary, queer, Knoxville-based musician Adeem the Artist performed their single “Middle of a Heart” wearing bright red lipstick, wide-brim hat, and a floral jean jacket. Their flamboyant working-class apparel and twangy country vocal affectations underscored the song’s lyrics, which trace tensions between pride, restrictive expectations, and violence in small-town American life. Critics lauded Adeem’s performances and Americana Emerging Artist of the Year nomination as a progressive shift in rural politics and country music industries. Yet, performers like Jason Aldean and conservative legislators in Tennessee claimed rural landscapes, iconography, and styles for conservative values through performances and queer/transphobic legislation. This paper examines the sonic, narrative, and aesthetic strategies Adeem the Artist uses to navigate contested symbols and experiences in rural life and Country Music. 
Using quare (E. Patrick Johnson, 2001) as an intersectional framework, I argue that Adeem “sincerely” uses country aesthetics (Goldin-Perschbacher, 2022), narratives (Thomas-Reid, 2020) and sound (Royster 2012; Stoever 2016; Murchison 2018) to represent queer negotiations with rural power structures. Cast Iron Pansexual (2021) queers Appalachian aesthetics and gender conventions to construct non-linear narratives through shame, identity, and place (Halberstam, 2005; Gray, 2009). White Trash Revelry (2022) reworks sonic and narrative tropes structuring white, working-class masculinity in 1990s Country Music to express disappointment in rural economies and national politics, while imagining intersectional coalitions (Marcus, 2024).
Adapting “acoustic citizenship” (Sonevytsky, 2019), I argue that Adeem uses these stylistic moves in ways that model aesthetic strategies for navigating country music industry and re-envisioning rural municipal politics. Adeem’s grass-roots social media “Redneck Fundraisers” (2022-2024) to produce country albums by circumventing queerphobic industry barriers. Their music videos (e.g. “Run This Town”) use rural queer styles to reflect rural activists' ambivalent attachment to municipal politics, while constructing coalitions that address federal and state-level political failures. 

If we are “the belly of the world,” as Saidiya Hartman, as Hortense Spillers, as
Gayl Jones, as Dame Toni Morrison, have repeatedly shown, if the brutal
history of Black women’s dispossession resulting from slavery—the “theft,
regulation and destruction of… sexual reproductive capacities…”—frames the
conditions of modern racial and gender inequality then what good is pop
spectacle? What difference does the sumptuousness of Beyonce Knowles
Carter’s luxurious and effulgent, two-decade iconicity steeped in late-capitalist
fetish and reified meme fodder mean in the perpetual struggle for fully-realized,
liberated Black life?

This multi-media, collaborative, audio-visual lecture makes a case for
considering the long arc and evolution of Beyonce’s elements of style—sartorial,
kinesthetic, and choreographic, vocal, auditory and otherwise—as the means
through which a Black feminist history of modernity is staged and relitigated
for popular consumption and rigorous reflection. It takes seriously Stuart
Hall’s influential claim that “style—which mainstream critics often believe to be
the mere husk, the wrapping, the sugar coating on the pill—has become itself
the subject of what is going on…. We have worked on ourselves,” Hall sagely
concludes, as the canvases of representation….” (emphasis Hall’s). Beyonce as
canvas acts as the portal through Black women’s historical imagination has
moved squarely to the center of the pop imaginary in the twenty-first century
with increasing stylistic depth and complexity and with a boldly curatorial
vision and strategy of execution over the past decade in particular. The result
is one of the most unprecedented, multi-faceted, complicated (and sometimes
contradictory) long-game arguments ever made in popular music culture about
Black women’s pursuit of their own material reclamation in the western world.
This lecture pursues a way in which to reckon with the scale of Beyonce’s epic
style-as history-style-as-Black-feminist historiography canon of werk. It aims
to do so through a mixing and melding of sounds from Beyonce’s archive and
that of her citational references across a multiplicity of recordings,
performances and concert sets.

So cue up the sound and vision—of 2002 Yonce’s Betty-meets-Angela-Davis
conjuring, the funk redux sexual rebellion coded in the soundtrack for a
humble leap into solo adventures; of 2006 Yonce turning Josephine’s banana
dance into “Déjà vu” head games, an expulsion of colonial wonder and empire
mounted in the belly of the Fashion Rocks beast; of Bday video packages staged
in the Louisiana swamplands as lush Trojan horse aesthetics that take you
first ludically, ironically to the site of America’s unsettled afterlives of racial
and gender subjugation; of fabulist Motown Dreamgirls glam as artful
meditation on the shibboleths of Black celebrity; of reimagined Fosse-Verdon
choreography as a theory of Black women’s virtuosity, as weaponry, as flight
and catharsis; of Lemonade plantation citationality as Daughters of the Dust
post-emancipation “Freedom” dreams; of Beychella Homecoming as long Civil
Rights struggle uplift pedagogy; as the Renaissance cinematic universe as
Marvel movie meets Afrofuturist formations; of a “II Most Wanted” on the run,
outlaw rodeo persona breaking the laws of Jim Crow recording culture and
riding us into the sunset.

Through collaborative co-sound curation, visual and sonic arrangement and
illustrative storytelling that yokes together the form and content of Beyonce’s
recording repertoire with her multi-dimensional performances, this lecture
aims to trace the story of Beyonce’s “born free” style and the way in which it
amounts to a “letting go” of the body that bears the traces of that history that
hurts. As our H-town queen begs us to do, we take seriously her call to “look at
that horse…” We’re on it with her. Riding with all this majesty, decked out in
Uncle Johnny’s finery, holding fast to that white Stetson, gathering up the
pieces of our wildly rich and rarely-regarded, prodigious lifeworlds in the
continual making, doing and undoing of something that Hall beautifully refers
to as “profoundly mythic…. a theater of popular desires, a theater of popular
fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves,
where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to the audiences
out there who don’t get the message, but to ourselves for the very first time….”

Bibliography

Hall, Stuart, “What Is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Social Justice
(1993).

Hartman, Saidiya, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,”
Souls (2016)

Jones, Gayl, Corregidora (1975)

Morrison, Toni, Beloved (1987)

Spillers, Hortense, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar
Book,” Diacritics (1987)

Country rap, also known as “hick-hop,” has a passionate fanbase on the ground and a
massive online following. Performed primarily by white people in the Southern U.S.,
country rap encapsulates many seeming discrepancies. It offers images and sounds
associated with rural, white working-class identity while also drawing from a sonic
vocabulary derivative of–and associated with–Black urban experience in the U.S.
Country rap crafts a self-contained aesthetic world wherein, according to the logics of
the genre, a white woman twerking in a confederate flag bikini carries with it no
contradictions. Many practitioners of the genre offer no clear genre history; numerous
artists within country rap speak of its aesthetics and stylistic conventions as if the
genre’s provenance was spontaneous, and in a vacuum, like a backwoods big bang.
With a focus on sound and image, our research into the genre explores issues of race,
gender, place, and nation. This group panel considers the (un)fashionable aesthetics of
country rap, in particular the use of mud and the Confederate flag as signifiers of
defiance.

Rebellious Style: Country Rap and Confederate (Un)Fashion
(Alex Blue V and Kyle DeCoste)

One of the most prominent recurring visual signifiers in country rap music videos is the
Confederate flag. As many bearers and wearers of the Confederate flag would note, to
them, it’s about “heritage, not hate.” However, this obscures the very real histories sewn
into the fabric of the symbol, namely the true reason behind the Civil War: the South’s
resistance to ending chattel slavery. Rather, it contorts and refashions it into a hollow
symbol of rebellion. We argue that similar to this ahistorical recontextualization of the
Confederate flag, country rap attempts to vacate hip-hop of its history and attachment to
Black cultural production, instead remixing the music genre itself into a rebel yell.

Mud It Up: The Filthy Aesthetics of Country Rap
(Kyle DeCoste and Alex Blue V)

Out of all of country rap's recurring themes, mud is one of the most prominent strategies
for authenticating artists and making territorial claims on the country. It’s seen covering
trucks, as the central thematic of mudding (the practice of driving vehicles through mud
bogs); covering bodies as a visual signifier of class difference and deviance; and
referenced in lyrics meant to represent place, identity, and class. Mud is so strongly
caked onto the genre that it appears in numerous song and album titles – it conveys
authenticity as a rural counterpoint to rhetorical uses of “the streets” in mainstream hip-
hop. We claim that mud serves the slippery purpose of collapsing categories of race,
genre, and space into a portable, general idea of “countryness” that can be worn at will.

Lesbian pop music, despite rare instances of becoming fashionable and achieving chart viability,
has been construed as otherwise niche and embalmed in past eras like the 1970s and 1990s. As
we’ve entered deeper into this millennium, the lesbian/queer woman presence in pop been
revivified through the expansive sexual and aesthetic imaginary of “sapphism,” a fluid and
purportedly trans-inclusive term that signals the explicitly gay, as well as the more implicitly
“queer coded.” Women pop artists, whether they’ve made a point of being out or not, have
inspired an au courant interest in sapphic pop culture comprised of both performers (like
Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, MUNA, Janelle Monae, Girl in Red, Adrianne Lenker, and others),
and a robust fan culture who draw upon the historical archives and intimate reading practices
of lesbian cultures and queer theory—including the resurgence of actual Sapphic poetry and
aesthetics.

This roundtable explores the explosion of sapphic pop over the last decade, while revisiting
some of the historical and aesthetic touchstones of sapphism. Among the topics we plan to
cover include certain controversies about“Gaylorism,” queer baiting, and queer coding more
broadly. We will also parse between flourishing, open and out expressions of sapphic sexuality,
and the loud insinuations or expressions of “allyship” that set themselves ever-so-slightly apart.

This roundtable discussion centers on the profound and lasting influence of Teresa L. Reed’s
pathbreaking, award-winning book, The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music (2004).
Reed opens her text by questioning how “the black church, once the most vehement opponent of
secular indulgence, could spawn so many celebrated performers of ‘the Devil’s music’” (Reed
7). This curiosity, born of her experience growing up in Gary, Indiana’s Open Door Refuge
Church of God in Christ, launched a groundbreaking line of inquiry. Reed’s exploration of how
the Black church — often seen as a moral and spiritual authority, yet also a site of personal and
cultural tension for Black artists — became the foundation for a reimagining of sacred and
secular relationships. Her work calls attention to how Black musicians, while shaped by religious
influences, often engage with and challenge the strict boundaries placed upon them. Reed’s
insight provided a critical framework for understanding these artists’ lives and their navigation of
sacred and secular binaries, laying the foundation for scholarly explorations that, even two
decades later, continue to grow.

Our roundtable considers how Reed’s questions and insights have expanded the field,
particularly as they apply to notable Black artists whose music, performance, and public
personas complicate simplistic readings of religious and cultural affiliations. Ambre Dromgoole
examines the genre-bending religious performances of Black women artists like Sippie Wallace,
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, and Alice Coltrane, each of whom embodies Reed’s “holy
profane” dynamic. Ahmad Greene-Hayes explores the Black religious self-fashioning of Little
Richard, whose boldness in style and performance made him both a celebrated and polarizing
figure. Similarly, James Howard Hill, Jr. further extends the conversation to the contested legacy
of Michael Jackson, homing in on his complex relationship with Black religious traditions and
his own self-styled, genre-defying spirituality. These artists are not only musical innovators but
also figures who subverted expected norms. They have challenged misrepresentation and
misunderstanding, crafted a performance of interiority that melded personal and public devotion,
and negotiated complex histories of family, abuse, and trauma within Black (sacred) music.

Through this lens, we observe how each artist, while situated within or in proximity to
marginalized religious communities like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists,
and/or Pentecostals, wrestled with these traditions as sites of both inspiration and heartbreak.
Our inquiry builds on Reed’s legacy, emphasizing the “powerful connection between the holy
and the profane in the black-American psyche,” by paying close attention to these artists’ sonic,
sartorial, religious, and gendered performances. These musicians were rule breakers, genre-
benders, stylistic innovators, and culture bearers who engaged with religious traditions not only
as sources of theological meaning but as spaces where creativity flourished even under
constraint. Reed’s work, therefore, remains foundational to the field as we seek to further
examine how Black artists navigate and reframe their religious identities, thereby contributing to
a rich, ongoing dialogue about Black spirituality, culture, and self-expression.

Overview:
This proposed performance and panel discussion offers an immersive experience that bridges the music, fashion, and political identities of three of Oakland’s most iconic blues musicians: "The Cowboy" William McCallister, "The Pimp" Fillmore Slim, “Lady” Earnestine Barze, and Ronnie Stewart. These legendary figures will headline a live blues jam session, followed by a panel discussion where they will explore the intersection of their music, fashion, and political expression.

The Performance:
The jam session will feature a four-piece blues band led by McCallister, Slim, and Barze, whose distinctive styles—characterized by the deep roots of traditional blues, mixed with the rich cultural history of Oakland—offer a powerful sonic and visual experience. Audiences will be immersed in an authentic blues jam, showcasing the raw emotion and spontaneity of the genre.

The Panel Discussion:
After the performance, Dr. Victoria Xaka will lead a panel discussion centered on the ways in which these musicians iconic fashion choices—ranging from McCallister’s cowboy hats and boots to Slim’s nostalgic street-inspired wardrobe, to Barze’s bold aesthetic—reflect both their individual identities and their political stances. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Victoria Xaka, a Black feminist music theorist, who will guide the conversation through topics of cultural appropriation, political resistance, and the role of fashion in articulating the cultural significance of blues music in the context of Oakland’s Black Radical history. The panel will provide attendees with an insightful look into how fashion is used as a tool for political and personal expression within the intergenerational community supported by Oakland’s local blues scene.

Conclusion:
This performance and panel discussion will offer a unique lens into the intersection of music, fashion, and politics, celebrating Oakland’s rich cultural heritage while fostering important dialogue about identity, resistance, and artistic expression.

Alan Parkes, “Nailed to the X: The Sounds and Styles of Later 1980s Straight Edge Hardcore Punk”

With a playing time of just two minutes, hardcore band Bold’s “Nailed to the X” adhered to the
assaultive sound that characterized early hardcore punk – distinct from its punk predecessor by
its simplicity, increased speed, and aggression. In it singer Matt Warnke shouts:

Working together with straight clean souls
Working for a common cause, the youth unite
Join with us in our fight
Nailed to the X

Expressed by an emphasis on “the X,” a symbol of straight edge identification, and cleanliness,
the song represented a broad embrace of straight edge – abstinence from drugs, alcohol, and
promiscuous sex – among hardcore fans and band members. Straight edge, along with
disavowing nihilism popularly associated with punk and the metal sound that many earlier
hardcore bands turned toward by 1985, helped to recover hardcore punk from what many
hardcore scene members saw as a mid-decade nadir. However, by the end of the decade, straight
edge hardcore’s success came at the cost of immersing itself in cultural influences beyond its
venues and hangouts. While straight edge bands created music in line with that of their hardcore
predecessors, they signified a dependency on latent support of broader cultural trends, marked a
drug-free philosophy that mirrored prevailing approaches to anti-drug programs of the decade.
At the same time, the popularization of a hip-hop style alongside a growing hardcore youth
culture at the end of the 1980s signified a new phenomenon in which white hardcore fans
retained a distinct musical form while embracing a hip-hop inspired fashion. This paper will
assess changes in hardcore punk at the end of the 1980s, exposing more than the evolution of a
youth culture. Through analysis of hardcore music, zines, and flyers, this paper will argue that an
adherence to a rising white consumer culture, inspired by black music makers and icons, and the
popularization of anti-drug messaging mediated hardcore’s subversion of American cultural
norms in the late 1980s.

Robbie Segars, “Gatekeeping Punk: Tim Yohannan, Maximumrocknroll, and the East Bay Scene”

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Tim Yohannan had a significant, though often overlooked,
influence on reshaping underground values within the East Bay punk scene. With his local
radio show, Yohannan gained a large teenaged following by promoting lesser-known bands whose
musical style reflected his “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) ethos, political views, and preference for socially
conscious punk. In 1982, he extended this influence into a national magazine, Maximumrocknroll,
which many fans revered as the “punk rock bible.” The success of his local radio show and magazine
eventually enabled Yohannan to fund the Gilman Street Project, an all-ages music venue in the East Bay
intended to be inclusive and collectively run. Despite its stated values, however, Yohannan continued to
exert his influence to exclude bands and overturn policies that with clashed his personal tastes.

This paper explores Tim Yohannan’s position as a gatekeeper in the East Bay punk scene. Building on the
work of David Pearson, Pamela Shoemaker, Timothy Vos, and Charles Goshert, I trace Yohannan’s rise as a key spokesperson in both the local and national punk communities. By analyzing interviews with Yohannan,
oral histories with other scene members, and columns from Maximumrocknroll, I argue that Yohannan
was a highly influential figure who used his outsized status in the East Bay scene to help redefine punk
as an anti-capitalist, DIY practice—a philosophy that many insiders still use to police punk’s boundaries
today. This process allowed Yohannan to problematically act as the authority on punk rock, which had adverse consequences for the bands he personally disliked, who both had trouble finding acceptance within the
punk communities, and, after the fact, had their impact on punk history diminished. Ultimately, this research
illustrates how punk gatekeepers like Yohannan have problematically wielded their social power to promote
their personal tastes as the new “universal” standard.

Abigail Ryan and Jerika O'Connor Hayes, “Latex, Whips, and Minivans: 
How Be Your Own Pet’s Mommy (2023) Confronts Youth through Punk’s History of BDSM Aesthetics”

Two concepts that have accompanied the legacy of punk rock are the spirit of youth
rebellion and incorporation of subversive countercultures, namely the aesthetics of BDSM. Early
feminist musicians including Poly Styrene, Siouxsie Sioux, and designer Vivienne Westwood,
used these styles to create social commentary, push the envelope, and demonstrate the personal
liberation found in youth revolting against the established systems of old. Both the adoption of
the subversive visuals of BDSM— an acronym from three sets of terms: bondage/discipline,
domination/submission, and sadomasochism—and punk's ties to youth have unfortunately led to
the acceptance, visibility, and opportunity within the music subculture to decline drastically for
those outside the youth demographic. In 2023, American garage-punk band Be Your Own Pet
unexpectedly released a new album, a full fifteen years after their untimely breakup in 2008. The
album, titled Mommy, was both a return to their biting, noisy rock, and a new venture for the
band as they unabashedly explore aging, motherhood, and politics through BDSM related
metaphor and aesthetics. Our findings are established through close readings of music and lyrics
from the album, informed by literature on punk and feminism by Vivien Goldman and Sheila
Whitely, aging and pop music by Abigail Gardner, as well as Margot Weiss’ concept of
“working at play” in BDSM subculture. In this paper, we argue that on Mommy, Be Your Own
Pet uses BDSM signifiers to carve out space for 30 and 40-something punks to explore
adulthood with the freedom and fearlessness usually reserved for youth. Through these complex
juxtapositions, we posit that Be Your Own Pet not only furthers the lineage of punk and BDSM,
but offers a fresh perspective on the difficulties of aging, feminism, and what it means to be
punk.

Jocelyn Aguilera and Yadira Arroyo-Díaz, “Fashioning Resistance: Race, Gender, and Style 
in LA's Punk Scene”

Led by secondary rockera educators, this presentation explores how marginalized punks in 1970s
and 1980s Los Angeles crafted resistance through DIY fashion. Focusing on East LA's and Hollywood's
vibrant scenes, the presentation will uncover how people of color, women, and queer punks challenged
both mainstream society and punk's white heteronormative culture.
Through an interactive gallery walk featuring archival photographs, participants will explore how pioneers
like Teresa Covarrubias and Alice Bag incorporated political messages and cultural elements into their fashion,
while Vaginal Davis's drag performance art and DIY style challenged gender norms and racial boundaries
in the punk scene. By examining these intersectional fashion practices, the presentation reveals how clothing
became a crucial medium for expressing political dissent and cultural pride in LA's diverse punk community,
offering valuable insights for all attendees but especially educators looking to incorporate these themes into
their classroom.

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.

Since the 1994 publication of Tricia Rose’s seminal Black Noise: Rap Music and Black
Culture in Contemporary America, hip hop studies has rooted and grown in U.S.
universities, its rhizomes linking varied humanistic methods and critical ethnic studies.
Yet the institutional embrace of hip hop in the 21st century has often diverged from hip
hop studies’ academically radical beginnings; to riff off Sara Ahmed, hip hop’s
incorporation into traditional humanities departments lets them sound and look a little
less white without necessarily challenging the anti-Blackness upon which they are
founded. How might hip hop studies scholars center praxis, broadly defined, as a
corrective to the institutional cooptation of hip hop in U.S. higher education? How do
performance, ethnography, creative work, teaching, and engaged scholarly projects, for
example, suggest alternative ways of knowing that begin from a point of embodied
collaboration, and what could this mean for creating and sustaining solidarities with and
across the communities in/about/for whom we work?

Participants in this roundtable occupy multiple shifting and interconnected points along
a spectrum of hip hop praxis that includes performance, community engagement, public
facing scholarship, teaching and research. Drawing on our experiences as professors,
rappers, teachers, writers, and ethnographers, we consider how praxis and
collaboration allow alternative and potentially subversive modes of knowledge
production even as institutions continue to harness hip hop in the service of vacuous
“DEI” initiatives. As we explore issues of power that complicate praxis-oriented work, we
consider the following questions: From international research relationships to
engagements with local U.S. communities, how do hip hop scholars identify community
needs and address them meaningfully and without centering ourselves? How do hip
hop practitioners—many of us in novel roles within our respective institutions—respond
to the shifting terrain of what life means for hip hop artists who lack any kind of
institutional protection? And within the institution, what are the strategies for remaining
rooted in community while keeping pace with the sonic and music industry-related
changes happening in the rap world? What role does embodied knowledge play for hip
hop scholars positioned differently vis-a-vis performance? How can prioritizing
embodied knowledge, collaboration, and community spur meaningful, material
institutional change?

This innovative roundtable unites Oaxacan music educators and scholars to explore the dynamic soundscape of Oaxacalifornia, focusing on Midcity and South-Central Los Angeles—home to the most significant Indigenous Oaxacan community outside of Mexico. Through critical dialogue and live musical demonstrations, our panel examines how gender, leadership, and cultural preservation intersect within traditionally male-dominated musical spaces, particularly in Oaxacan philharmonics and community-based bands. Drawing from their roles as practitioners, cultural bearers, and scholars, the presenters will demonstrate how women's increasing participation has transformed leadership paradigms while maintaining deep connections to cultural heritage. Additionally, how Oaxacan youth seek musical opportunities in higher education and mainstream venues. 
Addressing the conference themes of "Music, gender, and performance" and "Music, rebellion, agitation, protest," our roundtable explores how musical practices in Oaxacalifornia push against traditional boundaries and hierarchies. We examine how these musical borderlands serve as sites of both cultural preservation and innovation, challenging conventional notions of gender roles, leadership, and artistic expression. Integrating live performances by panelists will provide attendees with direct engagement on the sonic dimensions of these transformations, illustrating how musicians navigate the edges and borders of place, sound, genre, and style.
Our discussion illuminates how transborder networks facilitate the exchange of musical knowledge while creating new possibilities for cultural expression and community building. Through this combination of scholarly analysis and musical demonstration, we offer unique insights into how Oaxacan musical traditions adapt and evolve across borders while maintaining their cultural essence.

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.

Rory Fewer, “Cause Every Time We Touch: The Sickly-Sweet Affective Politics of 
Asian American Eurodance”

In the early 2000s – and largely mediated through the Japanese video game Dance Dance Revolution
that had just arrived to the U.S. – Eurodance hits could be heard pumping from LED-outfitted rice rockets
and Asian American nightclubs in the Bay Area. Tracks like Darude’s Eurodance-inflected trance hit “Sandstorm,” with its famously cloying style, was derided by most American audiences for its excessively “emotive sound” (McCarthy 2019) but found a special place in Asian America alongside similarly cloying tracks like Smile.dk’s “Butterfly” and DJ Sammy’s “Heaven.” Eurodance and its subgenre bubblegum dance are also stylistically tied to tropes of “Asia,” with artists sporting anime-inspired clothing and music videos with Asian children cast as salary men (“Butterfly”) and geishas (“Heaven”) navigating futuristic worlds, or what scholars of techno-Orientalism have named the “technologized Asian subject” portrayed as “unfeeling, efficient, and inhuman” (Roh et al. 2015, 8, 11). Techno-Orientalism as an analytic, however, needs further augmentation in order to account for a seeming contradiction of Eurodance’s style: the unfeeling cyborg of a technologized "Asia” is also the repository of full-bodied, cloying emotion. My paper reads Eurodance's popularity in Asian America as a disidentificatory practice, whereby Eurodance’s cloying style responds to one’s “minor feelings,” or “non-cathartic states of emotion” that occur when “American optimism...contradicts your own racialized reality” (Hong 2020, 46). I argue that Eurodance’s saccharine style constitutes an affective-political intervention even as it negotiates representations of techno-Orientalism, aiding Asian America in feeling otherwise as, in Cascada’s words, we listen to “get this feeling” (“Everytime We Touch”).

Paul David Flood, “White and Black Blues: The 1990 Eurovision Song Contest and the Prospect of European (Racial) Integration”

The 1990 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest aired at a pivotal moment in European history, one that anticipated the establishment of the European Union through the 1993 signing of the Maastricht Treaty. While many songs in the 1990 edition gestured toward bright Europeanist futures, the show’s runner up sang of a different kind of unity: racial integration. The Guadeloupean singer Joëlle Ursull was France’s first Black representative in the Contest, with her song “White and Black Blues.” The song, written by the infamous French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, addresses her desire to overcome racial prejudice and celebrate her Blackness in a white society, and features influences from the French Antillean genre zouk that became popular in France in the 1980s and 90s (Guilbault, 1993), as well as in Guadeloupe during its concurrent independence movement (Camal, 2019). Drawing from Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, I argue that Ursull and her song “White and Black Blues” imagined racial unity as a key component to the emerging prospect of European integration while resisting assimilationist techniques and politics that would seek to erase her Blackness, as well as demonstrating her allegiances to both her homeland Guadeloupe and to France.
According to interviews from the time, Ursull was motivated by Black internationalist rhetoric and interested in representing globally racialized (post)colonial communities through her participation in Eurovision. But her song’s musical aesthetic, ostensibly drawn from zouk music, is primarily characterized by the essentialist markings of Blacksound (Morrison, 2024) that evoke vague sonic depictions of a fixed ethnic somewhere else. By positioning Eurovision as an active force within Afro-diasporic cultural flows during a time of geopolitical instability in Europe, and interrogating how Eurovision has become a fraught benchmark for what Europeanness can look and sound like, we can more clearly understand the limits of belonging in Europe.

AJ Kluth, “Sartorial Signifyin(g) on Maroon Culture with Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah”

In the pulsing opening of the eponymous song of his 2023 Ropeadope release, Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah calls out: “Mau Mau, Maori, Egba, Igbo, Olmec, Aztec, Sioux…” invoking multiple nations connected by histories of self-determination in the face of imperial domination and diaspora. The fifteen-minute performance featuring Chief Adjuah’s voice and kora-like “Adjuah Bow” over Afro Indigenous drumming and droning bass is a recent manifestation of his ongoing genre-blind project, “Stretch Music.” Complementing his musical choices, the Chieftan of the Xodokan Nation of Maroons—a New Orleans Black Indians group—who is also recognized as Grand Griot of New Orleans, deploys a thoughtful self-presentation signifyin(g) on complex personhood. Perhaps best known as a “jazz” trumpeter (despite his opposition to the term) Chief Adjuah’s recent records and personal investments continue the creolizing project of New Orleans musics, drawing broadly from Afrodiasporic, American indigenous, and popular styles in a project of recovery and critical fabulation of ancestral memory. Beyond Stretch Music’s musical inclusivity, Chief Adjuah’s custom trumpet-related instruments and the newly created “Adjuah Bow” demonstrate an awareness of dramatic visual presentation in addition to the sonic. Moreover, his provocative jewelry and clothing that index West African and contemporary urban styles as much as New Orleans Black Indian ceremonial regalia further evince the superabundant hyper-signification of his plural identities. Developing ideas regarding diasporic identity from Stuart Hall and Thomas Turino, this paper investigates how, in the greater ecosystem of jazz musicians that either lean into the neo-classical jazz suit-and-tie or streetwear looks, Chief Adjuah’s sartorial signifyin(g) demonstrate his understanding of how self-presentation ties to his overall projects of self-determination, celebration of Maroon culture, and radical globalized connection.

Elena Razlogova, “The Politics of Race and Style on Freeform Radio in the Black Power Era”

When Black Panther Elaine Brown released her first album of political songs Seize the Time in 1969, its cover, by Panthers’ Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, featured a woman’s arm with nails painted purple gripping an AK-47. After stores refused to stock the record, Brown’s label Vault added a second “front” cover—a lyrical headshot of Brown—so clerks could display the LP with the militant image facing the wall. Brown’s vocal delivery aligned with classical and folk traditions—“someone accused me of not having a black sound,” she later remembered. The record was both too militant and not funky enough for the times. Neither Top 40 nor Black-oriented stations played it. But it got airplay on “underground” freeform stations, where underpaid and volunteer DJs (mostly white men) had autonomy to mix in music of any genre. Underground FM spurred enough sales to convince the Black Panther Party to continue its record producing ventures. Eventually, its “house band” the Lumpen broke into the Billboard charts.
This paper uses the Seize the Time story to examine the politics of race and style on majority-white underground freeform radio in the Black Power era. Drawing on the work of Nina Sun Eidsheim and others who link and critique racialized aural and visual expectations and fashions, the paper analyzes West Coast underground stations’ alliances with the Black Panther Party; the art of Black freeform DJs such as Roland Young, who was fired from for-profit KSAN but welcomed at nonprofit KPFA; and live free and benefit concerts organized by noncommercial freeform stations WBAI and WFMU in New York that included Black folk, blues, “psychedelic soul,” and free jazz musicians. Noncommercial freeform stations more consistently supported Black artists, bands, and DJs who did not fit into genres and forma

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

An Eventbrite reservation is required. Seating at this event is limited and will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

With:
Keith Clinkscales
Rob Kenner
Joan Morgan
Scott Poulson-Bryant
Emil Wilbekin

In the early 1990s, Quincy Jones launched Vibe magazine, a hugely influential publication that forever changed the landscape of Black popular culture. With its cutting-edge journalism, bold photography, and deep coverage of hip-hop, R&B, and the cultural movements surrounding them, Vibe became the definitive voice of a generation.

This special panel will feature original music writers, critics, and editors from the early days of Vibe, reflecting on the magazine’s impact, legacy, and the evolution of music journalism. It is the final event in USC Thornton School of Music’s yearlong Quincy Jones: Beyond Category tribute series, as well as the Closing Night special event of the 2025 Pop Conference, with its focus this year on the connections between music, fashion and style.

Confirmed panelists include Joan Morgan, a pioneering hip-hop feminist and author who served as an original staff writer for Vibe Media Group's Vibe magazine from 1993 to 1996; Emil Wilbekin, a founding editor and former editor-in-chief of Vibe, and a key voice in shaping the magazine’s vision and influence; Rob Kenner, a founding editor of Vibe who joined in 1992 and whose nineteen-year run at the magazine played a key role in chronicling hip-hop’s rise to global prominence; Keith Clinkscales, who helped Quincy Jones establish Vibe in 1993 and was named president and chief executive officer, and founded the publication's digital counterpart, Vibe.com, in 1994; and Scott Poulson-Bryant, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, and a founding editor of Vibe who has written for Spin, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, The Source, and Essence. They will discuss the groundbreaking stories they covered, the artists they profiled, their connection with Quincy Jones, and the behind-the-scenes moments that shaped Vibe’s influence.

Vibe set the stage for today’s media landscape and its continued resonance in contemporary culture. Join us for an evening of storytelling, insight, and celebration of a singular publication that changed the way we see, hear, and write about music.