Pop Conference 2025

Music memoirs use first-person narration to print or revise artistic legacies by aestheticizing
intimate proximities between author and reader. As members of a book club dedicated to music
biographies, we are compelled by the construction of these mythologies as well as by our own
engagement, recirculation, or disavowal of them. Public School is a consortium of music
scholars, cultural critics, and journalists who convene every month over Zoom to talk about
various works of musical non-fiction. In our monthly conversations, we have identified several
stylistic conventions associated with music memoirs that merit critical interrogation. We have
also noticed efforts from authors and publishers to make music memoirs more interactive and
multisensorial in recent years in order to turn reading into an immersive experience.

In this roundtable, we focus our attention on four motifs that make the music memoir legible as a
distinct non-fictional genre. First, we consider the dominance of portraiture in music memoir
cover art and pay particular attention toward how memoirists like Lucinda Williams and Margo
Price use portraits to foreground their authority and legacy not only as musicians detailing their
lived experiences, but also as writers translating their virtuosity as songwriters into a different
literary form. Next, we interrogate how memoirs like Flea’s Acid for the Children and Prince’s
The Beautiful Ones use photographic inserts and unorthodox prose to reframe archival footage
of artists’ childhood photographs, promotional materials, and candids as scrapbook material that
strengthens readers’ emotional connections through nostalgia. Then, we examine the genre’s
associations with first-person address and reminiscence as articulations of authorial voice by
considering how divas like Mariah Carey and Barbra Streisand, and actors like Michelle
Williams who interpret Britney Spears’ recollections, have transformed the memoir as a listening
experience by showcasing their singular voices as narrators and recording artists. Finally,
building from Carey and Streisand’s innovative approaches to audiobooks, we consider how
memoirs like Hua Hsu’s Stay True and Dante Ross’ Son of the City enhance life-writing in the
digital age with supplements like zines and playlists.

Memoirs are also reflexive and adaptive to technological change. Thus, we conclude by
contemplating our own gathering practices. Since we are scattered across the United States,
Public School exists entirely online. Zoom’s interface affords us a particular type of mediated
intimacy during our conversations and interviews with invited guests that let us see each other’s
homes, even if we have never actually occupied shared space together offline. Furthermore, we
use Zoom’s chat function to distribute additional reading, screening, and listening material
related to our conversations, which we have archived in a shared Notes app list that we update
after each meeting. Historically, in-person book clubs have enforced a formalized mode of
decorum that is gendered, classed, and raced. However, the intimate proximities of the
mediated domesticated space via Zoom illuminate an aesthetics of reflexivity about our own
living spaces and dwelling practices. In this roundtable, we wonder what the remediation of
book clubs as digital salons reveals about the anti-aesthetic potentialities of virtual communal
engagement.

In the video for his blockbuster debut single “Old Town Road,” Lil Nas X sparkles in an eye-
popping multicolored cowboy suit, with macho side-kick Billy Ray Cyrus crushing it in
shocking- pink buckaroo style. Since then, Beyonce, Orville Peck, Brandi Carlile, and Post
Malone have also joined previous generations of artists going back to Hank Williams, George
Jones, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Janis Joplin, Elton John, and Jack White who’ve worn
custom-made embroidered and fringe-flying finery to personify their music and their image. The
original name for such attire? The Nudie Suit. Where did that name come from? How were such
stage clothes used to define an artist’s image, background, and song catalogue? And how did
such a distinctive sartorial style evolve from the look of white male singing cowboys and C&W
stars to adorn a diversity of today’s artists? Those are the topics of our proposed roundtable
discussion, “The Nudie Suit: Past, Present, and Future.”

We’ll start with Nutya Kotlyrenko (1902-1984), the son of a Jewish bootmaker who immigrated
from the Ukraine to New York in 1913 – renamed “Nudie” Cohn at Ellis Island. Nudie spent
decades hustling on show-biz margins (vaudevillian Eddie Cantor’s errand boy, featherweight
boxer, B-movie extra) and the garment business – opening Nudie’s for the Ladies, where Times
Square burlesque queens ordered their rhinestone G-strings. In 1949, Nudie established a North
Hollywood shop where singing cowboys and country & western stars congregated and ordered
custom finery. Nudie’s designs reflected the American melting pot, including elements from
Eastern European/Slavic, Mexican, North African, and Native American traditions, combined to
create unique folk-art masterpieces. One of three eastern European immigrants who helped shape
our notion of fancy western attire, Nudie took the trend for elaborately decorated western
garments to new heights, utilizing the rhinestones he first encountered in burlesque. From 1949
to 1983, Nudie designed hundreds of eye-catching suits, including Elvis Presley’s gold lamé
tuxedo with rhinestone-studded lapels. Embellished with figurative embroidery, gems, and
metallic threads, Nudie’s flamboyant costumes became de rigueur among Grand Ole Opry stars
and celluloid cowboys like Gene Autry. Nudie’s head designer in the late ‘50s, Manuel Cuevas,
was followed by fellow Mexican immigrant Jaime Castaneda. Behind the scenes, women such as

Rose Clements and Nudie’s wife Bobbie were also responsible for much of the imaginative
embroidery.

In effect, Nudie Suits were the precursor of the music video, with clever embroidery illustrating
a hit song - like Webb Pierce’s “In the Jailhouse Now” outfit, decorated with a buckaroo behind
bars - or a performer’s personal symbols - such as Opry star Porter Wagoner’s embroidered
wagon wheels - or Gram Parsons’ provocative sex, drugs & rock & roll imagery. Parsons’ “Sin
City” suit, embroidered with cannabis leaves and pharmaceuticals, as well as outfits made for
Elton John, the Byrds’ Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn, Janis Joplin, and members of the
Rolling Stones, ZZ Top, and Grateful Dead took the suits to a new audience. “A Nudie Suit was
a walking canvas,” says Chris Hillman. Janis wrote to a friend, “I’m getting a pants and vest
outfit. Purple w/flowers & scroll work, encrusted w/all sorts of colored rhinestones. Real flashy
colored rhinestones!” Though the suits fell out of fashion in Nashville, they were brought back in
the ‘80s by upstarts Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakam, and Chris Hillman and his Desert Rose Band,
who began ordering custom gear from Manuel and Jaime. Yet another generation’s embrace was
hinted at in 2018, when Grammy-nominated Kesha wore a vintage Nudie suit on the Red Carpet
and in 2019 when Gillian Welch and David Rawlings performed at the Oscars in matching
vintage Nudies. Today artists like Beyonce, Post Malone and Orville Peck have embraced their
own Nudie suit style.

Our lively roundtable discussion will include appropriately attired experts on Nudie suits and
those who wear them. We’ll hear behind-the-scenes stories about the evolution of the Nudie suit
and how it’s been used to convey diverse messaging from performers. We will present dazzling
images of Nudie suits from the 1950s to today.

Heavy metal and punk music fans share something in common: they wear their fandom on their
proverbial sleeves. Through their band t-shirts, leather jackets, tattoos and hairstyles,
metalheads and punks are often recognizable by choice. While rules and regulations are often
unspoken, there is a common understanding among these music fans that they will often be
judged, not just for their chosen appearance, but in how they make their fandom public.
This roundtable discussion will consider what happens when metal fandom is shared within
cultural communities that are not perceived as being “metal.” With the growing ethnic, gender
and sexual diversity within these scenes, metal and punk fans are no longer just intimidating
straight white men with an appearance that would make you cross to the other side of the street.
How do Muslim women metalheads dress? Do black punk fans wear mohawks? This panel will
look at growing metal and punk scenes from across the globe to explore how their visual
aesthetics reflect the growing diversity within these scenes and how these fans negotiate space,
identity, and present visual narratives.

In this roundtable, four past Woody Guthrie Book Award winners discuss their writing processes, methodological approaches, and reflect on their past and future work.

Francesca Royster (Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions)
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher (Queer Country)
Áine Mangaoang (Dangerous Mediations: Pop Music in a Philippine Prison Video)
Daphne Brooks (Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound)

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

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.

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.

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.