EMP Pop Conference grabs the hearts and minds of music fans

By ROSS SIMONINI
SPECIAL TO THE P-I

The annual Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project is a global junction for academia and rock 'n' roll. What may have seemed an unlikely combination of disciplines 50 years ago has become an entire subculture of graduate students, rock critics and high-minded industry types. For seven years now, every mid-April, this culture has found its voice under EMP's Frank Gehry's roof.

The four-day event cannot, however, be mistaken for a music festival; there are almost no performers and very few actual musicians. Instead, there are computer-screen-tanned writers stationed behind podiums, giving presentations with names like "Trauma and Cine-Musical Image: Music, Moving Image and Moral Universality" or "The Future of Thinking About Music for a Living," which could probably serve as a subtitle for most of the lectures.

Yet for those truly addicted to thinking about music, for those whose primary mode of interior decoration consists of CD towers, the Pop Conference is one of the only venues in the world for unabashed shoptalk.

EMP-speak, as it could be called, is filled with the sort of dialogue that would be considered nonsense by any casual music listener. Only at the Pop Conference can someone unapologetically compare hip-hop to the French Resistance or analyze the bizarre subculture of Latino Morrissey Fanaticos -- both of which will be discussed this year. Instead of referring to the latest Radiohead album as simply electro-pop or math-rock, people can spout phrases such as "dance music as a response to cultural trauma" or "Radiohead's Amnesiac as a Failed 'Directed Forgetting' of Trauma," which, from the sound of it, could be one of the highlights of this year's conference.

For avid fans, the event can be looked at as an interactive music magazine. The speakers are the same writers who have defined Rolling Stone and Spin. This year, the pop conference will include presentations by EMPPC regulars Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus, journalists who have shaped the way we think about music. Last year's highlight was novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose keynote address was titled "Collapsing Distance: The Love-Song of the Wanna-Be, or, Fannish Auteur."

Based on the list of events at the EMP Web site, this year's conference should be even more diverse than previous years, with everything from a history of Dancehall to Mexican Regional Music to "the Afro-Latin(o) divide."

The new voice of music journalism also will be heard. Douglas Wolk and Daphne Carr, two established music writers who investigate the outskirts of music culture, will moderate discussions on the American ballad and feminism. Seattle's own Michaelangelo Matos will follow up last year's presentation about Bob Marley posters in college dorm rooms with a presentation placing Marley in the context of slavery and the postcolonial world.

The EMP environment has been compared, more than once, to a town meeting.

Despite the highfalutin, specialized subject matter, panelists and writers at EMP are known for encouraging the kind of casual, unpretentious atmosphere where debates and criticisms are actually helpful. And with four sessions at any one time, the audiences are typically spread thin and small, despite the free admission.

The conference's detractors -- ironically music writers themselves -- have often balked at the event's low attendance, but the small size is what gives the event that comfortable intimacy. As long as the hordes of advertising executives keep staying away, the opportunists and industry climbers will continue to have no reason to attend, and EMP will remain a refuge for a pure, earnest exploration of the international language.