Writing the noise: the politics and history of subcultural music

The 2nd International Conference of the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change
University of Reading
6–7 September 2018

Confirmed keynote speakers and events:

Simon Reynolds, author of Shock and Awe, Retromania, Energy Flash and Rip It Up and Start Again
Professor Lucy Robinson, University of Sussex, ‘Less History of Zines, More Zines as History’

Plenary panel of music journalists: from the mainstream to the pop press to fanzines, featuring Simon Reynolds, David Stubbs and Cathi Unsworth
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What Difference Does It Make? Music and Gender

2018 MoPOP Pop Conference
April 26-29, 2018, Seattle WA

Popular media in the 21st century is rife with radical differences around gender. Even as audiences cheer on shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, viewers and voters reward toxic masculinity at the box office and the ballot box. Popular music voices and reinforces, or challenges and explodes, assumptions about gender, which itself intersects race, ethnicity, sex, the family, labor, religion and morality. The artists we select in canons, historiography, and the musical moment represent an intimate referendum on the subject. Gender performance has a long history: crooners of the 1930s “pansy craze,” the bull daggers of classic blues, pop stars exploiting the feminine ideal from Doris Day to Britney Spears and workingman heroes like Muddy Waters and Bruce Springsteen. Today’s gender-fluid groundbreakers, like Anohni and Syd, follow on vaudeville’s Annie Hindle and rocker Little Richard. Musical virtuosity and technique, too, are gendered, from the hypermasculinity of hip hop’s “wheels of steel” or rock’s technophallic guitar heroics to disco’s feminized vocal soarings. And gender frames genre: distinctions of salsa dura and salsa romántica or monga (flaccid) echo in country’s “hardcore” honkytonk and “soft shell” crossover divide.

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‘Ladies and Gentlemen: Miss Grace Jones’

Symposium registration now open!

Delegate registration for ‘Ladies and Gentlemen: Miss Grace Jones’, a two-day symposium on the career of Ms Jones taking place at Edinburgh College of Art on Thursday October 5th and Friday October 6th 2017 is now open at the following link: http://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/conferences-events/college-of-humanities-and-social-science/edinburgh-college-of-art/edinburgh-college-of-art/grace-jones-symposium

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Jazz Voices

12^th International Jazz Research Conference Graz
17 – 20 May 2018
Institute for Jazz Research, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (Austria)
International Society for Jazz Research

Conference Chairs

André Doehring and Christa Bruckner-Haring

Conference Outline

Although singing has been integral to jazz from its beginnings, comparatively little research has been conducted on vocal jazz and the sounds and expressions of jazz voices. The 12^th International Jazz Research Conference, entitled Jazz Voices, will focus on exactly this theme. The conference will take place from 17 – 20 May 2018 at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz and will be hosted by the University’s Institute for Jazz Research, in cooperation with the International Society for Jazz Research.

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Gender Politics in the Music Industry

IASPM Journal 8/1 (2018)
Special Issue Editors: Catherine Strong and Sarah Raine

Gender in music has been considered in terms of performance, genre, and audience cultures, yet gender politics within the music industry itself remains under-researched. Offering an opportunity to engage at the intersection between musical production, the creative industries and gender politics, this call for papers aims to bring together research that considers the gender politics of the music industry itself: of work relationships; the spaces of production; the processes of decision making; the creation of musical experiences in festivals and tours.

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Serge G. An International Conference on Serge Gainsbourg

Paris-Sorbonne University
IReMus
Collegium Musicae
9–10 April 2018

In 1989, a survey of French cultural taste revealed that Serge Gainsbourg was both one of the most popular singers and yet a near outcast in his native country. When he died, two years later, President Mitterrand called him “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire”, claiming he had “elevated chanson to the level of art”. But he might just as well have acknowledged Gainsbourg as the first artist to top the British charts with a single in a foreign language. With the hindsight of almost thirty years, one thing is, in any case, certain: sampled by Beck, De La Soul, Massive Attack and Fatboy Slim, remixed by Howie B. and David Holmes, translated by Mick Harvey and covered by Iggy Pop, Donna Summer, Portishead, Madeleine Peyroux, the Pet Shop Boys and Franz Ferdinand, “the man with the cabbage head” remains the Francophone songwriter whose contribution to the international appeal of French popular music has been the most significant in the post-war era. To celebrate the 90th anniversary of his birth, the IReMus’s CRMP (Centre de Recherche sur les Musiques Populaires) is organising the first international conference on this protean creator standing at the crossroads of pop music and chanson. We welcome papers on topics including (but not restricted to):

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Cool Retro Camp Trash. Aesthetic Concepts in Popular Culture

University of Freiburg, 3–5 May 2018
https://www.zpkm.uni-freiburg.de/coolretrocamptrash

The aesthetic quality of the popular is now undisputed. In fact, it can be argued that popular culture has become the dominant cultural paradigm of our days, which takes shape in music, film, literature, social media, fashion etc. In order to meet this cultural transformation with due attention, the aesthetic concepts of popular culture are to be scrutinized for the first time from a broad academic perspective.
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HardWired. Discussion about Heavy Metal-Research VI: So far, so good…so what? Approaching the Metal Realities

University of Siegen (Germany)
May 03-05, 2018

Organisers: Florian Heesch, Reinhard Kopanski, Laura Patrizia Fleischer and Aleksandar Golovin (University of Siegen; Faculty II; Department of Arts and Music; Popular Music and Gender Studies)

Deadline for submitting proposals: 31^th October 2017

Confirmed speakers: Anna-Katharina Höpflinger (LMU Munich, Germany / University of Lucerne, Switzerland); Holger Hübner (Promoter of Wacken Open Air, Germany); Susanne Sackl-Sharif (FH Johanneum – University of Applied Sciences Graz, Austria); Karl Spracklen (Leeds Beckett University, UK); Holger Stratmann (Publisher of Rock Hard Magazine, Germany);

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