Welcome to The International Association for the Study of Popular Music UK and Ireland Branch

This is My City: Popular Music in Australasian Cities

Posted: August 28th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Co-Editors: Shelley Brunt and Geoff Stahl

“Well I’m back in the land of second chances, And rock’n’roll shows where nobody dances
Back in the land of chicken and chips, Mars bars and roadside tips
And if you don’t like it, Then that’s too bad, Cos it’s the only city that we’ve ever had
This is my city…This is your city…This is our city now”
(“This is My City” Skyhooks – Melbourne, 1976)

Cities are indelibly connected with the production and consumption of popular music. This can take many forms: bands draw inspiration from living, working, and playing in urban centres; songs give emotional shape to cities via sonic and lyrical signifiers; fans and audiences sustain local scenes; rehearsal spaces offer contexts for musical collaboration and performance; large-scale festivals impart a sense of spectacle to cities; and gigs at small venues provide opportunities for moments of shared intimacy. In these and other important respects, popular music gives unique shape to the sociomusical experience of urban life.

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Frames of Listening: Popular Music and Visual Culture

Posted: August 26th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers, IASPM Conferences | No Comments »

IASPM-Canada 32nd Annual Conference
University of Ottawa – Carleton University, May 27/28 – 30, 2015

“Frames of Listening: Popular Music and Visual Culture” aims at exploring the intersections of sound and images across a range of popular music genres and cultural forms. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, musical-visual culture in a variety of forms has become readily accessible to millions worldwide. Even before the digital revolution, musical artists collaborated with visual artists to develop iconic images that had the power to shape identities, to communicate social messages, to strengthen genre affiliations, and to sell records. How do we receive and interpret the intersections of music and moving images in popular music? How do these multi-sensorial artistic expressions do cultural work and shape the world?

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Get Ur Freak On: Music, Weirdness, and Transgression

Posted: August 17th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

2015 EMP Pop Conference
April 16-19, 2015, EMP Museum, Seattle, Washington

Exploding conventions has long put the bomp in pop: the uncontainable desire of those deemed sexually unnatural, racial impostors, gender outlaws, obsessed fans, willful bohemians, or just plain weird. “We feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in “The Imp of the Perverse.” Music often sanctions transgression, challenges or corrupts the status quo depending on your perspective, gives us Prince in one era (called Imp of the Perverse by a biographer), Miley Cyrus in another, an Iggy Pop then and an Iggy Azalea now.

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