The 2006 Experience Music Project Pop Conference April 27, 2006

?Ain?t That a Shame?: Loving Music in the Shadow of Doubt

What forces are at work when we like something we ?shouldn't?? What role does shame, either shame succumbed to or shame resisted, play in the pleasure that those who make it and consume it take from music? This year?s Pop Conference offers an all-points-tour through the realms of music at its most dubious. Among the more than 100 presentations will be talks on the truly cringeworthy (Dan Fogelberg, Phil Collins, Leonard Nimoy, the Numa Numa dance), and on lounge, muzak, whiteness, and Streisand, but also on how greats from Sly Stone to John Cage reckoned with their own insecurities, the problematics of hip-hop listening and adolescent coming out music, and truly unexpected topics such as the neural science of guilty pleasures and a Balkan rocker named Rambo Amadeus. It all begins with a keynote conversation with Stephin Merritt, whose Magnetic Fields triple CD 69 Love Songs arguably stands as our era?s ultimate revisionist pop statement.

The EMP Pop Conference first convened in Spring 2002 and is now entering its fifth year. The goal has always been to bring academics, writers, performers, and other music lovers into an all-too-rare common discussion. Previous year?s conferences have resulted in the 2004 anthology This is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project, a special issue of Popular Music (?These Magic Moments?), and a second anthology to be released by Duke University Press in 2007. The conference is sponsored by the Seattle Partnership for American Popular Music (EMP, KEXP 90.7 FM, and the University of Washington School of Music), with the help of a gift from the Allen Foundation for Music.