GEEK LOVE!

I’ve been in Seattle the past week for the EMP’s Pop Studies Conference, a yearly event that brings together music critics and academic types to geek out about music. It’s a lovely, amazing thing, far better than you might ever expect it could be. This year’s theme centered on sex, and the body, and music. There was naturally a lot of excellent discussion about dance and hip-hop, and… Wow. I learned about a learned so much — even about a collaboration between Johnny Mathis and Chic from about thirty years ago…

Jason King’s discussion of Maxwell, his general strangeness, the ways he views the female form and relationships in his music and videos, and the possible reasons for his lengthy hiatus — that was great. Carl Wilson’s look at the history of autotune and what it means that it’s used by male hip-hop artists as a stand-in for the female role in songs (among many other things) was phenomenal (don’t know if you caught carl on Colbert, but James Franco’s a fan). Kurt Reighley elucidated beautifully a dance craze phenomenon I’d never heard about before. And Douglas Wolk’s entirely powerpoint-and-youtube-and-multimedia presentation essentially on how weird it is to be a dance music DJ and not move, not be very much inside your body, while other people around you are dancing which is very much in the body was nothing short of epic.

My friends who write about music have never had it easy; even at its heyday in the ’70s/’80s, no one made much of a living as a music critic. These days it’s getting really bad, what with magazines and newspapers dying off at an alarming rate, the music industry itself in a freefall, bloggers stealing all the thunder and more and more kids willing to work for basically free. Unsurprisingly, many fo the best and smartest music journos have become or are in the process of turning into academics. Past years have included much fretting about the state of things. This year felt like a very necessary group hug, the chance to put the emphasis back on why we do what we do — because we totally love music, and are obsessed with it, and think about it way too much.

—DJ Yeti