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

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.

For this year’s Pop Conference, we seek presentations that connect music of any style or period to notions of transgression, perversion, and the weird, such as:

  • histories of the strange from minstrelsy to cabaret, rock and roll to black metal, “Tutti Frutti” to “Super Freak”
  • twistings of form–of the song, the voice, the genre, language; versioning and remixes; sonic markers of the polymorphous;
  • queer pop, gender subversion and the perverse diva
  • transgression, social movements, and culture wars; the role of the state; drugs
  • racialized notions of otherness, margins/difference as center, carnival
  • exploitation–marketing “Blurred Lines,” the limits of dissolute star/fan behavior
  • technology and the estrangement of the human in pop
  • comparative cultural ethnographies of outrageousness
  • fetishization of records, the past, the disease of collecting

Proposals are due November 17. Email [email protected]. Individual proposals for 20 minute presentations should be 300 words, with a 75 word bio. For three person (90 minute) or four person (120 minute) panel proposals, include a one paragraph overview and individual statements of 300 words plus 75 word bio. For roundtables, outline the subject in up to 500 words, include a 75 word bio for each panelist, and specify desired panel length. We welcome unorthodox proposals: ask for submission advice. Please include emails for all participants.

The annual EMP Pop Conference, first held in 2002, mixes together ambitious music discourse of every kind, in an attempt to bring academics, critics, musicians, and dedicated fans into a collective conversation. This year’s program committee members are: Will Hermes (Rolling Stone), Jennifer Lena (Columbia University),

Emily Lordi (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) Greil Marcus (The Believer), Rashod Ollison (The Virginian-Pilot), Ann Powers (NPR Music), Shana Redmond (University of Southern California), Julianne Escobedo Shepherd (New York University), and Travis Stimeling (West Virginia University). For more, visit the Pop Conference page at www. EMPMuseum.org.



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