Pop Conference 2025: Full Schedule

POP CONFERENCE 2025

Baby, It’s a Look!
Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge

March 13 - 15, 2025

Los Angeles, California

Presented by USC Thornton School of Music

With the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) and Critical Minded

Over three exciting days of panels, roundtables, keynotes, and special events, the 23rd annual Pop Conference will explore the deep and complex relationship between popular music, style, and fashion. This year’s theme, “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge,” draws its inspiration from a 2017 Leikeli47 lyric and marks the first joint gathering of PopCon and IASPM-US since 2012.

Fashion and music are inextricably linked, from Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, Cab Calloway’s zoot suits, Billie Holiday’s signature gardenia, to The Beatles’ mop-top haircuts. Today, the connection between pop music and fashion remains stronger than ever. Visualizers thrive on streaming platforms; fashion runways in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg deploy pop music to bring designers’ visions to life; and musicians themselves blaze new trails designing streetwear collections and serving as creative directors for major fashion houses.

But style has always been much more than just commerce or escapism—it has long been a space for critique, refusal, defiance, and radical expression. At its most powerful, style challenges norms, blurs boundaries, and pushes artistic and cultural frontiers, moving us right to the edge.

This year’s conference returns to USC’s Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles just months after January 2025’s catastrophic Eaton and Palisades wildfires, and during a time of profound global upheaval and turmoil. The 2025 “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge” conference presents a remix, an opportunity to reconsider how fashion and music shape the world we live in, reflecting our realities, struggles, and aspirations while leading us toward the very edge of what feels possible.

Open to the public and free admission with conference registration on Eventbrite. Some events may require separate registration.

12:00pm PDT

So, What Now?

Thursday March 13, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT

Simon Ramo Recital Hall

Make no mistake: we are currently living through an extended period of crisis — climate crisis, an assault on trans people, as well as threats to bodily autonomy, freedoms of association and speech. Our communities, livelihoods, and ways of life are at risk, and some of us will experience these impacts more than others. As popular music scholars, what shape(s) might our research, teaching and advocacy take in times of crisis? What accommodations are we prepared to make? How can we support each other and our broader communities? How can we keep ourselves and our loved ones safe from harm? In this session we’ll open the floor to the concerns of the PopCon and IASPM-US communities during the current political moment.

Speakers

madison moore

Brown University

Co-Producer, Pop Conference 2025madison moore (any pronouns) is an artist-scholar, DJ and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive... Read More →

Lauron J. Kehrer

Western Michigan University

Thursday March 13, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Simon Ramo Recital Hall 820 W 34th St BMH 100, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

Mentorship

12:00pm PDT

Striking a Chord: Pitching Music Books

Thursday March 13, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT

Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall

This workshop focuses on tips and strategies to pitching a book-length manuscript around pop music artists/topics. We'll cover approaches to making a book bitch appealing, what areas should be addressed/included within the bitch, and, time-permitting, workshopping book ideas among attendees. This workshop will be lead by Oliver Wang, the former acquisitions editor for both the American Music and Music Matters trades series (Univ. of Texas Press).

Speakers

Ann Powers

Writer, NPR Music

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

Oliver Wang

Professor of Sociology, CSU-Long Beach

Associate Producer, Pop Conference 2024Oliver Wang is a professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach and the author of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews of the San Francisco Bay Area (Duke Univ. Press, 2015). He is a founding member of the Pop Conference Executive Committee... Read More →

Thursday March 13, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

Mentorship