Pop Conference 2025

Part of the yearlong event series Quincy Jones: Beyond Category
LOCATION: Bovard Administration Building, 3551 Trousdale Pkwy, Los Angeles, CA 90089
Doors open at 7:00 pm

Use this PopCon-specific link to access your free PopCon ticket, or use code “popcon” at checkout. PopCon seating at this event is limited and will be available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Quincy Jones Symphonic is the first full-length concert dedicated to honoring the legendary Quincy Jones since his passing in November 2024. Held on what would have been his 92nd birthday, this unforgettable evening will feature the USC Thornton Symphony in a celebration of Jones’s extraordinary compositional legacy and his profound impact on film, television, music, and culture across the 20th and 21st centuries. The program will include selections from his legendary scores for television programs like Roots and award-winning films like The Color Purple, orchestral renditions of his iconic pop and jazz hits for artists like Lesley Gore and Michael Jackson, and lesser-known gems from his remarkable seven-decade catalog. Anthony Parnther, Music Director of California’s San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra and conductor of film scores including Oppenheimer and Encanto, will be guest conductor for the evening. Produced and hosted by USC Thornton School of Music Dean Jason King, the event will feature musical oversight by USC Thornton’s Chair of Conducting Larry J. Livingston and original arrangements by Jazz Studies doctoral candidate Ennis Harris.

Special guest performers will include:

Ledisi, Grammy-winning recording artist
Stevie Mackey, renowned artist, singer and celebrity vocal coach
Greg Phillinganes, legendary keyboardist and famed Quincy Jones collaborator
Derrick Lawrence, prize-winning baritone and USC Thornton faculty
Seth Parker Woods, multiple Grammy–nominated cellist and USC Thornton faculty

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)

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.