by Chris Estey

This week in literature-friendly, music-loving Seattle we have two legendary rock writers, Gillian G. Gaar and Richie Unterberger, making public appearances for their brand new tomes: The Rough Guide to Nirvana and White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day, respectively.

Gillian Gaar has informed and entertained local and national rock fans for years by freelancing for The Rocket tabloid (among many other publications), and has had a huge influence on national women writers in the music scene with books such as She’s A Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll. She wrote the 33 1/3 volume on Nirvana’s In Utero (one of the most well researched and balanced of the Continuum series) and knows enough about the band to have been consultant on their With The Lights Out box set.

When a record company brings in a critic to help put together an in-depth, luxurious anthology for an artist/group, they’re usually the kind of people that can tell you EVERYTHING about them. I think Everett True’s and Charles R. Cross’s books on Nirvana are both fantastic in their own ways, but The Rough Guide to Nirvana (Rough Guide/Penguin) is both the clearest gateway book for a history of the band’s music, social significance, and private struggles — and perhaps the most necessary. Kurt Cobain is only part of the story here (albeit a big part), and the insider’s care with which she describes what excitement and changes Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl went through as well with the band seems far more tied to the collective nature of Nirvana than on a specific speculation on the destructive nature of celebrity.

Garr is a tenaciously coherent reporter with a fan’s desire to scurry together every wild and weird detail about what she loves, and tends to report multiple viewpoints on any topic or situation. Here, for example, you will find the tightest and funniest anecdote on the Cobain Vs. Axl Rose incident at the MTV Music Awards; richly focused sidebars on “Grunge hype,” “Nirvana’s UK TV shows,” “The lost videos,” and the very appreciated “Unreleased tracks”; and a killer assessment of all the musicians’ releases, before and after and in and out of Nirvana. It is the best Nirvana (and related) record guide there is, and simply adds to the exact reporting and disturbing revelations of True’s and Cross’s books, without repeating the information from either.

Do we really need another Nirvana book? Yes, if it’s in this “Rough Guide” format, which through maddening editorial skill on the part of the author condenses everything meaningful about the band into one sweet, dense study. But a similar question could easily be asked about the Velvet Underground, a band I’m even more personally fond of, but just as bored with reading about.

I have been a fan of Richie Unterberger’s for many years, relishing his must-have volumes on marginal pop music artists Urban Spacemen & Wayfaring Strangers: Overlooked Innovators & Eccentric Visionaries of 60s Rock, and Unknown Legends of Rock ‘n’ Roll. But I wasn’t so thrilled with the idea of an immense and intense chronology of everything related to the band, since it seemed that previous works like All Yesterday’s Parties (an anthology of contemporaneous rock write on the Velvet Underground) seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel a little. Now comes (here it comes, yeah yeah, here it comes) White Light/White Heat (Genuine Jawbone) and it is fucking beautiful and just wipes out most of the other books about the band in terms of depth and relevance.

A ginormous, elegant, exhaustive extrapolation of intimate moments and many years in the lives of Reed, Cale, Tucker, Nico, and the others, it is like a “Extreme Expanded Rough Guide,” hitting VU significance day by day for years on end, in the 60s till just recent times. It draws on all the books you may know of and/or read, and tons of fanzines, long forgotten record reviews in regional press, and very rare quotes you’ll be amazed to encounter for the first time. There are new interviews too, and every barnstorming show and b-side decision is put under the microscope. The photos of the band alone in this coffee table extravaganza are many most have never seen before (Moe Tucker in particular comes more into visual focus, and I want to frame several shots of her from here), but along with the cherished recording trivia we now we have years of barbed wire assessments and tender losses to gorge our passion for the VU with. This is THE Velvet Underground book, kids, bar none.

Seattle-based Gillian Gaar will be doing two public appearances promoting The Rough Guide to Nirvana — today, Tuesday, June 23, at Capitol Hill’s Bailey/Coy Books (7 to 9 PM, 414 Broadway E.), and then a signing party at Feedback Lounge, in West Seattle on June 25, from 7 to 9 pm. From the PR: “Books will be for sale (courtesy of Bailey/Coy), and this establishment comes equipped with a full bar and pinball machines. Feedback is located at 6451 California Ave SW, 206 453 3259. This event is 21-and-over!” Gaar is very charming and knows how to party, so don’t expect any academic standoffishness. Come hang out with the local scribes and their friends!

Unterberger is making a rare Pacific NW appearance on Wednesday, June 24, to talk about the mammoth Day-By-Day. It’s slated for 6:30 PM at the downtown Central Library (located on 1000 Fourth Avenue). This would be a good time to bring your coveted editions of Turn! Turn! Turn! or Eight Miles High to get signed — and he might have a copy of his VU masterpiece to show off too.

Sounds Like Teen Spirit: A Popumentary (Sparkle Motion Saves The World!!)
review by Chris Estey

For a director who claims the caustic satire of Spinal Tap and Best In Show as inspirations for doing this documentary about the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, Jamie J. Johnson gives a surprisingly affectionate and empathetic view of the very young performers competing in the gauche affair. His crew captured rehearsals by kids in countries like Cyprus, Belgium, and in the Ukraine; and don’t forget Belarus.

Sounds Like begins with clips from the archived 70s success of ABBA — when most Americans ever became aware of such a thing as a Eurovision pop performer competition, which launched artists for decades the same way American Idol does here. It concludes with that band’s pretty corny but still damned poignant “Winner Takes It All” as the sad and happy faces of the tweens winning and losing are displayed during the announcement of the contest’s results.

As silly as this might seem to most American rock fans, this is pretty big stuff for a large part of the European continent, and Johnson really tries hard to show how it all comes together throughout the performers’ intimate struggles (Bulgaria contestant’s run-off father, who she hopes will be watching her perform on TV that night) and during national conflicts (Russia’s chaos when they returned after the event).

The bright eyed and bushy tailed ten to 15 year olds giving it their all for the top prize seem mostly pretty self-aware, and don’t hesitate to discuss how, say, projected homophobia from peers has actually made them achieve more (and say they are actually thankful for it). There isn’t much historical background on the annual contest, though, and no focus on the judges — it’s the story of the performers, their hopes and dreams and the darkness and banality they come from.

It’s no surprise that the best part of the documentary is the humor, which it could have used more of. But every time the camera took in the absolute zaniness of the Russian group’s leader’s ambition, I was glad I stayed through the whole thing. You’ve got to catch this just to see this young girl completely go over the top in every routine; and of course when the results are given, her response is absolutely visually operatic.

by Chris Estey

Nightmare tours, tearful reunions, bad music played passionately, and rock and roll character made through adversity, Anvil! The Story of Anvil thrilled audiences at last year’s Seattle International Film Festival. I was very fortunate enough to review the movie, which I have to admit made one of the most lasting impressions of a particularly great year of indie cinema. As I wrote then:

“People have talked about how funny Anvil! is, and how horrible the band is, but while I think that first part is true, I do think the band was no worse than any other metal band from the period that they first thrived in. There is a timeless quality to the two leaders’ artistic struggle — as if they could be leftovers from vaudeville days or sons of Beat poets. Their art may be banal, but it is straight from the heart. And it’s that darkly beautiful relationship between (band leaders) Lips and Reiner, never giving up on each other’s vision even when surly or stoned, that makes the somewhat triumphant ending something that pleases most anyone who watches this miraculous, fucked up testament to rock and roll.”

Get yourself ready for this year’s SIFF with Anvil! You still have two days left to catch it at the Varsity Theatre, through April 23.

or “How ‘Let’s Make Love to Death From Above’ Will Save The World”

review by Chris Estey
photos by Brady Harvey

THE ROUND-UP. Late Saturday night, after the awesome Sunset Tavern show where so many presenters actually proved they are as musically good and often better than what they discuss. I could hardly sleep. Questions kept rattling around my head, as the Scotch wore off and Sunday morning settled in:

“If it isn’t ‘tricking,’ then is the women meant to be flattered by a male’s advances?”

“Swag: Hundred dollar bills you blow snot in, or an attitude that makes your worm wiggle?”

“Words — murder! Yeah! Punk! — what the hell do they have to do with sex?”

“What does it mean when a lot of white people are talking about what black people are doing when they’re thinking it, or thinking while they’re doing it?” (Poor Larry, what the hell is HE thinking, now that I took him to all those panels?)

“Who’s albums do I want to go to a desert island with and masturbate to — Pere Ubu’s or Britney Spears?”

So I was very late to the panels, and had some tough choices to make. Not at first though — by the time I crawled into the Experience Music Project around 10 AM on Sunday morning, Bob Christgau was already delivering a very emotional, searingly honest, adorably intimate ode to listening to duet songs anent his wife. “The Old Folks Wish Them Well: Romantic Marriage in Rock and Roll” centered on more recent partnering musical expressions, especially the oddly distanced but still connected marriage of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon in Sonic Youth (especially on “Thousand Leaves”), contrasted with the similarly dissonant but much softer and sweeter songs of Yo La Tango. Bob and his beloved want to listen to the Jackie Wilson box set, and though the Christgaus don’t plan for an afterlife, they can imagine no better heaven than that. A very romantic way to start wrapping up a weekend of many visceral and emotional twists and turns. And a fabulous paper expertly presented (big surprise).

The to-die-for writing and presentation skills of Oliver Wang on Betty Davis’s lost albums were an irresistible draw in the “Liminial Grooves” panel, yet even though I heard he killed it, I had to resist them. The four presenters over at the Learning Labs had stacked up an irresistible session of ideas and advocacy on power and place for women in music (”Argh!” I hear Dave Thomas and a thousand integrationist feminists roar), led by Sara Marcus. She had been at the Pop Con a few years back with a paper about the media and young women in the 90s, and now was continuing with a sample of her upcoming book on riot grrrl, due out from Harper Perennial in 2010. This was another high point of the long, Wust-weekend, the sort of climax that induces rare clarity, as Marcus showed a teenage girl on a CD with “incest” written across her chest, gave props to the early 90s femme rage movement for writing words all over themselves (most historically, Kathleen Hannah scrawling ‘Slut’ across her belly, later given homage by the male guitar player in the Thermals), and kissing each other as an act of revolution. Sara did the dance gals learned at the time to both bash into their friends and keep the creepy guys at bay, sort of a happy mosh, and you can tell she was experienced at it. On a more serious note, she described how teenage girl sexuality being a threat to the establishment caused AIDS information to be filled with misogynist assumptions, using the disease to get parents and other authorities to become even more territorial with young women’s bodies. “It’s an emergency crisis with girls!” the propaganda early in the decade claimed, though they weren’t really the ones getting infected.

The writing on their own bodies defined the battle lines, in a way that only Sharpie could profit from other than empowering women themselves. If this paper had been presented before Sean Nelson’s, the feeling of sexual repression at the time in the indie rock scene would seem to make more sense. In Seattle, walking around downtown and either writing or seeing “Dead Men Don’t Rape” scribbled in scurmy venues helped keep us in check: Call it “Little Sister” and I was very thankful for it. It made the milieu safe enough that an adorable sprite like my wife could feel safe(r) in, and that’s how we met.

As sexual panic gripped the uptight white male nation, multi-generational women musicans like Yoko Ono and many up and coming performance artists did things like have the clothes cut from their bodies on-stage or painted with their vaginas. “In her kiss I taste the revolution” was the only way to swing the pendulum back the other way, Marcus asserts, though “often not with the tongue.” Yes, the young women holding each other’s hands and sitting on each other’s laps weren’t simply joining the cause of queer culture with punk culture — though there was certainly no separation from that either. These hips made for walking and not fucking, and women learned through a thousand seven inch singles and in many different regions that “if you wanted so bad to be my best friend — honey, it’s yours.” Can’t wait to read the book.

Tracy McMullen gave one of my favorite papers next, called “‘Are We Not Men?’: Punk, Women, and the Disintegrating Body.” I was worried at first at the concept of a feminist paper on Devo. Those guys’ imagery is actually intentionally a bit sexist and this could have been a lot of line-walking and frustrated accusation. Instead, McMullen, a lecturer in the Music and in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at Berkeley, went back to some of the most shocking and more visceral music and performance ever made, The Bags and The Germs. I never tire of seeing those “Decline of Western Civilization” era clips, and though Darby’s closeted gayness made him a bit of a dick, there was so much meaning in how they “negotiated the lines between artist and audience” as McMullen put it, that street level art never seemed so powerful. Seeing Alice Bag stand up to a pit dude jumping forward is so beautiful; the bouncers clobbering others at the same show not so much, but that’s how it goes.

As levels of trangression increased by truly violent punks getting into the scene, shown my McMullen in a clip of Fear from Penelope Spheeris’ landmark documentary, from the stage and out into the audience, the subversion of using food as abject elements in stage performance, or avoiding the microphone to let the spectacle do the talking became fag-baiting and virulent misogyny. I won’t dispute this; I was there and got my ass kicked too. The only problems I have with condemning this growing machismo in early hardcore is that when Aimee Cooper worked at Lee Ving (of Fear)’s label, she said how genuinely cool he was to the workers there, and even more troubling is that I would rather hear Fear “The Record” a hundred times in a row than ever hear The Bags or The Germs again. But that may be a whole other paper, right? In any case, McMullen thrilled us with the revenge of The Bags’ “Babylon Gorgon” as a concept — the vagina kicking ass in the middle of male violence.

Kim Kattari probably gave the presentation with the most irresistible topic, “Bettie Page Fetishism in Psychobilly: Re-inventing Sexual Values.” Although Kim looks like a sweet-natured neutral academic she apparently knows her stuff about the supposedly ultraviolence-loving current psychobilly scene. She showed clips from bands like Necromatix and their abusive song “S/M” and discussed the line bands walk between the homosocial and the uber-hetero. Band names like Dick Wiggler? That video she showed where a guy is led by dominatrixes into a “Hostel” kind of environment to be physically tortured? Hey, I was a Cramps fan, this shit shouldn’t throw me. But we were a bit classier back then, yadda yadda.

Anyways, apparently the dominatrix image inspired by Bettie Page keeps the boys in this scene horny, but also the girls empowered in that Pop Con-loving dynamic tension kind of way. And the gals don’t just swoon over each other’s new tats and shoes (um, just like the dudes do, I hasten to add), but they all love the REBELLIOUSNESS of the 50s, not the power images of the 50s in themselves. Not only are they subverting it, they are actually puffing it up into outlandish outlaw extremes. (That’s an important distinction from this paper — 50s fetishism is rarely about conformity.) And the all the kids are in it for the music, music, music.

In “The New Girl Disorder” San Francisco Bay Guardian music editor Kimberly Chun ended this panel and the final paper of the Pop Con for me with her delightful rooting for “The New Exotica.” Bands and artists like CSS and MIA and others who blend American junk rock with European party-mojo and Third World groove, ground out by cheap machines on good beats and more vulnerable vocals than “you usually hear coming from the aggressive male-made music in New York.” As MIA raged, “Where the hell has all the rebellion gone?” but she answers that herself with her own music and videos. This is a pop singer who announces, “PLO - don’t surrendo!” She’s sort of the Elvis of our time, but right, not right wing.

This was an appropriate futuristic end note for an EMP Pop Con that also featured nice extras like a Friday night after-con showing of science fiction animation at the Henry Art Gallery — yes, one cartoon was based on the work of the now deceased but always immortal J.G. Ballard. He and his name was psychogeography for this event, not only because of the concert held in that section of town with his name on Saturday night (an observing Steve Fisk, dropping in with HATE Comics creator/bandmate Peter Bagge: “Someone should be making a video of this for prosperity; this is great!”), but in memory of the movie “Crash” in the 90s, when your average horror fan found out that people have sex with cars (actually ABOUT car crashes). I didn’t see people fleeing the EMP l Science Fiction Museum Pop Con 2009 as quickly as I saw them running out of the Guild 45th for the first matinee of that SF film — in fact, there seemed to be far more people attending the event than ever. Shows how far we’ve come in just ten years time.

And yes, I missed John Roderick of the Long Winters at the Groupie panel, hosted by Ben Is Dead zine supertar Mikki Halpen (who is writing a book on fanbases, I type as I drool thinking about it). RODERICK! Just before he had reminded people at the “Sex Machines” panel about BODIES. That’s what that guy does, talks about bodies to the academics, then makes sexy-like upstairs with his throng. Come back next year, I promise I won’t fuck up and miss you this time!

or “This Is Not A Fuck Tape”

by Chris Estey
photos by Brady Harvey

All apologies for this being posted a day later than it should have been — between the second and third (this past Saturday and Sunday) of the Con was fit in a late evening of beautiful music at the Sunset Tavern. This was actually the Pop Conference Concert, which started at 10 PM after the day of panels and presentations and a buffet at one of Seattle’s best music venues in Ballard, and featured sinewy power pop folk-rock sets by dually taelnted working authors/musicians Franklin Bruno and Sean Nelson, along with laptop madness from the beloved sample terrorists Matmos (featuring Drew Daniel, more about him later) and the bewitching Sarah Dougher (more on her, too).

Speaking of Ballard, J.G. Ballard just passed away, and this weekend of body celebration at the EMP Pop Con (again, “Dance Music Sex Romance”) touched a lot on science fiction scenarios, not unlike Pere Ubu’s songs from the mid-70s. And though I missed the final set of that night in the space of Ballard, by Pere Ubu co-founder/continuing frontman David Thomas, having seen him ferociously, forcefully, and spitfully chew through the crap of celebrity culture in his early Saturday morning panel on Keane (?) (”Out Of The Closet Shock! David Thomas Reveals That he Is Keane!”) I experienced plenty of creative proto-punk conspiracy theory.

Again, as he had at the PC a few years before, Thomas roiled on about the word “punk” — how “punk rock” was a corporate/possibly government twisting of more amorphous and less categorizable rebellious youth impulses for making art and spectacle, which in the mid-70s had to be named and claimed or we’d all go up in flames. Thomas hilariously invented a market-driven inventor to throw his mental daggers at, someone who could adeptly balance androgyny and angst with people’s joy of talking shit about sexy famous people, “because he’s got to make a living, like the people who make automobiles.” From the “Rebel Without A Cause” 50s” past the “Rebel With A Cause” 60s, rock and roll was melted and formed into a landscape of “vulva divas” and mob rule . The mystery religion that was once rock and roll, that has always been young and alienated people creating magic in secret, in a world of absolute reality that can only be faced by being “purged by fire” to become something real, “intuition must be forced to wear a hair shirt before it can be trusted.” Thomas was crippled by his own love for The Raincoats as journalists could only fit them into “women in rock” angles. “The music they made is weird, that’s why they were important,” he emphasized. Shaking his fists, ranting “fuck identity politics!” in a Conference that often seems utterly devoted to it, full in that knowledge. Then he went off on Robert Fink’s paper on Marvin Gaye’s male masochist persona I reviewed in the previous installment of this weekend’s odyssey, for basically the same reason he doesn’t want to hear another thing about Britney Spears (”Who wants to know?”). Bob Christgau, from the audience, retorted, “But in the past ten years Britney Spears has made better music than yours, Dave.” Thomas did not try to dispute this, wiping away his tears and much likely going his way and the rest of the world going theirs (golden quote as he was skipping ahead in the draft before him: ” … thing about Dylan …”).

Before all this, I had walked into a very well thought out paper presented by Barry Shank, “The Naive Pop Body Politic: The Scandal of Innocence, the Power of Scandal.” Though its touchstones were on fascinating ideas about “the intimate public” (the vague notions we all share created by our love for 19th century novels and carried into the pop music world) and Miley Cyrus’ ambiguous anthem “Everybody Gets That Way” (”what way?”), it’s plain to see why Thomas may have been a little worked up. This was a lot to do about a lot of shit people like Thomas and I — and I’m guessing most KEXP listeners and staff — avoid pretty extremely.

The next panel “Sexual Healing?” (note question mark before you guffaw, like I did at first, from its perceived inevitability here) was moderated by author Charles R. Cross, who cracked many of the best and well-timed jokes of the weekend between the writer’s presentations, and brought an aura of smooth Seattle cool to four papers on passionate lesbian separatist music, Adult Contemporary radio, Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out Of Hell,” and “How George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ Made Me A Man.” This was either an incredibly random or brilliantly designed or bizarrely fated collection series of dialogues bouncing off each other, and Cross kept it lively but civilized. Folk-singing Dougher teaches about women’s music history at Portland State University and the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls, as well as working with homeless teenagers. She just put out an album based on the “Orestes” tragic myth, which seemed appropriate, when discussing how the wonderful energy of early feminist indie pop (”women’s music” from the early 70s) went out of style. I was excited by all the old photos of strong women with cropped hair and warm smiles, staring down the patriarchy. One of the bands on the Olivia label almost seemed like a female Clash, visually at least, with their devoted connection to their fanbase and stubborn non-conformacy. Tragically, most of the music from that period doesn’t “hold up very well,” Dougher suggested (and compared to her own sweet songs, she has a right to criticize), but it was a thrill to see the vitality of that community. “And then there was Phranc,” she ended with.

Which did need some explaining, as audience member Mr. Matos pointed out. “What about Phranc?” he asked. Phranc was a scene supporter, a musician (Catholic Discipline and Nervous Gender), and one of the early 80s hardcore scene kids to take the music back to an early 60s protest vibe with her “Jewish lesbian folksinger” “persona” — changing the punk world for riot grrrl in the early 90s. What went unmentioned was how much Phranc obviously loved the pre-rock folk style of the early women’s movement music; she’s never really cut an out and out (no pun intended) rock album.

This was something I found often with the assertions at the Pop Con — there is an assumption of synthesis going on, but often there is more attention paid to the conflicts of music history than how a once marginalized or out of time (”corny”) music form becomes the inspiration for the next avant-garde. Those connections are not always made; but maybe I am asking for an overstatement of obvious dialectics.

Pop Conference organizer Eric Weisbard presented on what I cared about the least of probably the whole festival of music analysis, “Is This Women’s Music? The Strange Case of the Format Adult Contemporary (Middle Of The Road).” I wasn’t into the topic because I once worked in the Christian music industry and already knew the statistics about how much radio programming is devoted to women (he didn’t bring up CCM, but it’s very comparable to AC, in that middle-aged women are a significant majority of listeners). But as with Weisbard’s book on Guns N’ Roses, which I put off reading due to not being particularly fascinated with the specific album he chose to write about, he showed why his editing of “This Is Pop” and “Listen Again” (the HIGHLY recommended Pop Con anthologies) is inarguably compelling. Weisbard is a master of making you care about stuff you never gave a second thought to, and more than that, learning to laugh with and love it at the same time. He chose a wonderful video of Vicki Carr from the 60s that showed good songwriting and soulful performance lacking in the squealing and loop-play of today’s hits. “Rock critics needs to consider AC radio,” he said, and he’s right: Just from my experience, I know that people’s frustrations with the lameness of most Christian rock has to do with them not understanding who that part of the music business is actually trying to reach.

“Like most great rock and roll it was about wanting to fuck someone.” That’s Tim Quirk (VP of Rhapsody programming, who was in Too Much Joy and now Wonderlick) on Meat Loaf; but what went wrong with the heavyweight’s classic rock kidney stone? Quirk is a presenter who always makes a crowd crow with laughter and share in his often self-depreciative revelations about the enjoyment of mass-marketed music. I have never not seen him make everyone relate to his observations on the silliness and the best parts of rock. “Endlessly Horny for Wonder and Magic: How Jim Steinman’s ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ Perfectly Captured the Pre-Pubescent American Id (and Nearly Ruined Me For Life)” — wow. Meat Loaf and his mentor Jim Steinman felt like they had more in common with punk rock than the meathead post-glam pseudo-prog metal most people think of when thinking about this obscenely over-popular over-the-top chart dominating extravaganza. Due to the Rocky Horror overtones and Meat’s role in that film, that POV is not as whacked out as this might seem, though Quirk didn’t mention that connection. ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ was just too much of everything — Rich Corben’s underground art warped into an LP cover of ghastly uber-phallic Lovecraftian horror-sex miasma; Springsteen 70s piano brambles, overplayed much too quickly. To separate themselves from Springsteen at the time, though, they admitted that Bruce was “too smart, singing about Harlem and the names of streets and things.”

‘Bat Out Of Hell’ was originally conceived by composer/arranger Steinman as theatre, a proposed production called “Neverland,” which contributed three songs to Meat Loaf’s multi-million selling debut. It was then as science fictional as the album cover (Corben was the star American artist on the then popular Heavy Metal magazine) — about young men mutated into eternal teenage boys by chemicals — but though those trappings were foresaken as the musical kept getting rejected and Todd Rungren stepped into actually make the thing work as rock music, the alienation towards growing up and into a world of women persisted in the songwriting. Thus, its level of sexism is sort of metaphysical, tapping into pre-adolescent ideas of fear towards commitment, and the adult women body itself. Quirk didn’t hesitate to lash his own adolescent struggles with these issues as he made it clear why this album, as catchy and nostalgic as it is, remains one of rock’s guiltiest pleasures (at a conference which often tends to resist the idea of any sort of ‘guilty’ pleasure). Great quote near the end, regarding his older brother’s misunderstanding of male-female intercourse (you pee inside the girl): “Sometimes guys who sound like they know what they’re talking about are horrible liars.”

Tim Grierson’s heartfelt confessional about a girl named Kathleen, his rejected teenage pining for her, and how George Michael’s multi-generational ode to seduction made him possibly better understand the needs of women, did an admirable job standing up to all the talent that came before. He centered the audience back to focusing on real attraction, and carried the maturation theme further. The sadness in longing can be sung about, Michael suggested, without moping. This is one of the few papers that dealt with real romance, not a whole lot about guilt or transgression, and had a happy ending. For a Pop Con about sex, this aspect would have been missed.

Kurt B. Reighley: The best in the business and I missed it somehow? At least you can check out the post below to watch the man who can get a whole crowd of music critics and academics dancing in the daytime

One of the high points of the Conference was after lunch on Saturday, when MSN Music editor, Stranger writer, and Harvey Danger/solo artist Sean Nelson presented “Let’s (Not) Get It On — Or, Fucking To ‘Songs About Fucking’ and Other Uncomfortable Developments in the Awkward Relationship Between What We’re Going To Have to Just Agree to Call Indie Rock and Sexuality in the 1990s.” Young men making mix cassettes for girls that certainly did not imply they wanted to fornicate with them; the generation of VERY “shirted” singers in bands who evinced “decreased sexual energy” every chance they got. On Sunday morning Sara Marcus in her exploration of riot grrrl’s self-empowerment would actually answer some of the questions Sean’s paper brought up — where did this weird repression come from? Well, the women needed a safe place. But I felt those strange feelings too then, in an oasis of romantic hope created by having to make rock and roll safer for female energy. The Social Darwinism of hard and/or alternative rock needed a counter, besides just the punk hardcore of Bikini Girl and female protest. After Motley Crue and Ratt, what we now know of as early 90s “indie rock” is where the women and men could come to meet and actually get to know one another in an admittedly uncomfortable nook of Pavement and other bands’ soundtrack of self-denial. I’m not sure everyone agreed with Nelson that “the 90s sucked” — Franklin Bruno offered up his collection of Sebadoh for Sean to check out, and reminded him that “now balding, chubby, short guys could find romance in the scene after these changes too.” But as was quoted in the really well presented paper, Bikini Kill’s single sides of the two songs “I Like Fucking” and “I Hate Danger” was a necessary response to Big Black’s “Songs About Fucking,” which was ubiquitous in indie rock houses and most certainly wasn’t.

“On Gushing: Relocating Desire in Pop Criticism” by EMP Pop Con coordinator Ann Powers was actually mostly over my head. That’s a good thing, though — you want your teachers to be a lot smarter than you and sometimes remind you of that. Just like the Dave Marsh-written chapter in masturbation in the seminal (um) rock anthology “Stranded,” this was a rule-breaker that had to be performed to put everything into context. Noting that Li’l Wayne is a psychology major who adroitly manipulates his audience with pleasure and shock, and how Frank Kogan was quoted on Twitter as an altered state of being, the chief pop critic for the LA Times reminded the ambivalent in her crowd that “taking pleasurable pop seriously upsets people.” As she closed with the image that not only is fannish love considered masturbation, but the recorded simulation of it could be a “blow up doll” for the act. Loving pop music is scary because to desire someone is to be sent back into ourselves, something pop music may or may not do.

Theology teacher and author and “ultrajogger” Seth L. Sanders ended the early afternoon “Relocating Desire” panel with “Fanatical Doubt” which traced the Seattle-originated National Prayer Breakfast to religious totalitarianism and how our government has been used and uses belief in the Bible to control and infuse media and society with submission and compliance. Playing tracks by the Middle Class, who helped invent hardcore and then when the jocks took that over slowed it down and made it more communal-funk punk like The Minutemen, and current punk demi-gods Fucked Up, he fed into the audience’s anger of being told what to do by mystic do-gooders IN POWER and then read Scripture from St. Paul as the music helped spin everything Sufi-like into ontological nothingness. One of the most emotionally powerful and politically charged papers the Pop Con has presented.

At 3:15 PM my dude Larry from They Live! and I took in the “Sex Machines” panel, where Carl Wilson (the author of the 33 1/3 “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste,” and who was recently interviewed by America’s favorite talk show host on The Colbert Report) constructed a wonderful extrapolation on “T-Pain & The Real Girl: The Autoerotics of Autotune, Falsetto & Other (Un)Manly Modes of Oral Self-Gratification.” Larry’s presence has to be noted, as he comes from a family of musicians who worked heavily in soul music, where the falsetto is cherished, and his own hip-hop pairing with B-Boy MC/DJ blesOne loves to electronically tweak the vocals in more rattling and street level noise/rhythm than T-Pain. But the pleasure is still there — and it’s still all about the uncanny, the sense of other in the altered electronic voice. A 1939 video of swing music performer Alvino Rey was shown using a primitive steel guitar voice-altering device and predated the vocoder and the Autotune, and seemed creepily like a cyberpunk hoax (which later over drinks at the Sunset Wilson agreed with). Showing an interview with T-Pain on Jimmy Kimmel, in which it was perceived (by me at least) his abject loss of virginity might explain his desire for vocal disguise, the “trickster” element of the electronically-altered voice has reasons based in menace, amusement, pathos, and sometimes like sex, no reason at all other than itself.

We then became Da Capo Best Music series book editor Daphne Carr’s orchestra for the ode to the warm component on our lap-tops in “Computer Love.” This was engaging and thought-provoking and amazingly timely considering roof construction is presently forcing me to take my “tool, work-place, lover” to a nearby cafe to get this finished. Carr mentioned Stranger writer/freelancer Matos’ “slow listening movement” about actually absorbing the music we write on much longer than the market insists, and how we all share You Tube to ridiculous levels. Very few music critics seem to listen to music when they write about it… many laptop owners don’t want to take their “precious babies” out of the house… people without cars and homes (like Daphne and myself) put the biggest payment into their portable computers. She’s still pissed about the amount of space her PC used to take up. She drew her pink pullover from her waist to the screen of her laptop to show how she prefers to work, four or five hours a day, earbuds in her ear (not headphones, but linked extensions), like the time tube in “Donnie Darko.” Anonymous answers to her pre-Pop Con survey (sent out over Facebook) shown on the screen above her had a lot of opinions most of us can agree or identify with, even something as extreme as “It’s changed my relationship to everything and I hate it.” But as much as I enjoy my time off the grid, and impulsively use my laptop to evade the work I must do on it, Carr rang true when she said, “we need to provide our own self-control for connecting, as if the Internet invented procrastination.”

“How Low Can A Punk Get?” was the final panel for me on this day, and somehow I missed the first part of Matmos and 33 1/3 (Throbbing Gristle edition) Drew Daniel’s extremely cohesive and arresting to challenge to never take the “punk” (as in sexual punk, as in perverted social bottom negotiating his own power as an agent and an object) out of punk rock. I wouldn’t have much to add anyways, and it should by all rights be published when this year’s presentations are (hopefully) anthologized by Weisbard. “Punk is not a safe place,” Daniel said, but I never got to ask him whether he would want to confront all the jocks who kicked my art-fag ass back in the first wave hardcore days. I doubt he would call me a pussy for asking it, but I have the feeling he would relish the confrontation.

Tavia Nyong’o, an assistant professor of Performance Studies, actually fucked shit up by bringing up submission, scat, and cultural shit-talk itself in “Brown Punk,” a study of the viral videos of Kalup Linzy’s masochistic soul parodies and harmonizing, orgasmic phone “sex” duets with psychic hotline advisers. Guess you had to be there, and after a long anal-ysis (pun intended) of the punk aesthetic turned into soul-terrorism, my mind was so weary, I’m still not sure I was.

But I was at the Sunset later that night… and saw that a lot of these people who can dance about architecture so well also build some many damned fine buildings.

by Chris Estey

If I were Paul Allen or had the dude’s money I would throw bunches of it at the Pop Con, to pay all the participants very handsomely, and to stretch the damned thing out a full week so that it needn’t start so early with such great presentations I’ve never been properly awake for. And once there on the first morning of the Con I wouldn’t be frantically trying to figure out how to choose between listening to masterly poetic king scribe Greil Marcus work his phenomenal magic around the same time underground emperor of insightful self-publishing Mike McGonical do the same — and oh yeah, fitting in the intensely interactive and incredibly inspiring feminist workshop led by incredibly wise and talented women like Ann Powers and Daphne Carr and Sarah Dougher which was, I remind you, All Happening At Pretty Much The Same Time.

I blame no one for this; too much of a good thing is something you can’t bitch about, and it was also the theme behind a lot of the paper’s at this year’s presentation Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic.

I walked in as Franklin Bruno kicked off the JBL Theater’s space for the event (the Mid-Century Moderns panel) with a dependably whip-smart analysis of how calypso created a tame exoticism in post-WW2 American culture. “Homecoming is everyone’s fondest wish,” he said, while describing a hit at the time in which a soldier comes back and turns his woman black and blue. And it was meant to be sort of, you know, funny. “Murder!” as a word became a big band shout-out, though its origins in a song about killing weren’t so innocent. Is murder ever an innocent song topic? Bruno suggested.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro focused on taming and exoticism as well, focusing on how a black left-wing actor named Harry Belafonte became a sexy icon in the 50s, which really made no sense at all, or every kind of sense. “Jamaica Farewell” took us through the roots of a Harlem-born, young, gifted, and poor black bohemian running a burger joint in proto-beatnik New York, absorbing Jewish and other kinds of folk songs, and getting a lot of attention for his looks and unique skills as a performer. His work on “Islands In The Sun” inspired Chris Blackwell to form Island Records, bringing reggae to the world, and the 9/11 release of a 5 CD set featuring elegant recreations of his hot-era Cold War hits that had been shelved during Vietnam said a lot about his staying power. The comparison of a progressive minority who ruled entertainment with a black President whose own mother swooned over him was thought-rattling.

One of the great uses of multi-media at the PC was during the third presentation on this panel when Rod Hernandez backed up his love for Nat King Cole’s oddly-accented Spanish language records, which he enjoyed growing up in his own childhood home. he showed a clip of the great Japanese art house film made in this century, “In The Mood For Love,” and how Cole’s achingly elegant “Green Eyes” played as a man and a woman cleverly discover that their spouses have been cheating with each other. It was a perfect use of a film clip during the playing of an entire song. Gene Stout and I sitting up in the back of the JBL were thrilled as well to hear other Cole songs from this period, especially a cowbell-blessed one he adroitly commented should be “used in a hip-hop song immediately” (Saturday Knights, we’re looking at you).

Holly George-Warren was as vivacious as her subject Wanda Jackson, the rockabilly queen who brought all of her personality to the stage. From the moment the esteemed author of the long-awaited Gene Autry biography “Public Cowboy No. 1” played Jackson’s late 60s hit “Big Iron Skillet” (from where I pulled the title of this segment of PC coverage) we were all transfixed. We got to hear extensively about the personality behind that bold single, everything from being the only child of a fiddle player and the wife he met at a dance, to her standing near the stage of wild crossover country swing artists like Spade Cooley as a babe, to her hosting her own radio show at fifteen, and still just tearing it up at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Along the way she used a mixed race band and never apologized for rocking as hard as any man (and let’s just admit it, better than most). George-Warren backed her joyful and deeply researched biographical advocacy up with a saucy, still-outrageous clip of an utterly luscious Jackson in a fringe dress ripping out “Hard Headed Woman” that has made me forget all the versions pretty much for good.

“Different Strokes” was the next series of papers/performances I attended and that title was appropriate. Robert Fink, a Professor at UCLA known for really good academic readings of fun music with serious political subtexts, joined in on the theme of this year’s Con with an exploration of how Marvin Gaye cultivated a masochistic persona to great commercial success in the 60s. If he seemed to be fixing a bit too Freud into the significance of handclaps in hardcore gospel (which seemed to inspire the cracking — as in whip-cracking — drum tracks of Gaye’s golden era Motown hits like “Ain’t That Peculiar?”), the reading of the lyrics used and how they changed over time worked to his theme. As did the idea that the masochist wishes to stop time, and recreate it for himself, which shows a deep level of psychosexual understanding. Fink took no cheap shots at Gaye’s self-absuing sex addiction, and though commented that the male masochistic urge is often an attempt to wrestle control away from the father and define life’s desires on one’s own (less male dominant terms), he avoided the easy horror of Gaye’s own extremely unfortunate end.

It’s probably no surprise that Greil Marus gave a heart-kneading, spine-bending ode to something marginal and yet universal that he loved again. Last year it was a performance by The Roots, and this year it was a delightfully considered commentary on a psychically challenging series of photographs based on giving into the “love, heroin, chocolate” brain behind our impulses, “The Songs Left Out of ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.’” The unflinching realism of these images, turned surreal in how closely they show our most hard-wired urges for pleasure (including pleasure in pain), sparked Marcus to sweetly ruminate on what our hearts feel matter in this life, in spite of what other people say constitutes reality (your burdened responsibilities in it, for example). A splattering work of 700 no-boundaries and often uncomfortably intimate images in 40 minutes, I now desperately need to see this. Marcus then built his coherent passion for this work into a more emotional plea for us to consider an early 60s album track by Lonnie Mack (“Why?”) — its grinding blues build-up and sense of perhaps delighted yet hopeless exhaustion and pain similar to Elvis Costello’s “I Want You” — played for an audience eager to feel what Marcus is feeling. Favorite line: “This is a criticism of art only art can make.”

I came in on “Dance This Mess Around: A Feminist Working Group Discussion” seemingly at an apex of hope and anguish, the Learning Labs filled with circles of women and men sincerely groping with issues both particularly gender and field based. For example, how can women keep writing when men still get most of those jobs especially in this economy, and how can queer theory survive when there are so many cut-backs at the universities? How does one be a female forthright self-exploiter? How can a 47 year old virgin change the pop world overnight? Performers in the spectrum from MIA to Hannah Montana were discussed, positively and negatively; the vibrant fluid world of being a “Poptimist” versus the needling, peculiar attitude of old boy school rockism described; and the energy was both inspiring and convicting. I hope this happen every year and if so next time I’ll be there from the beginning of it.

“Dance Off The Beaten Track” had a seriously awesome one-two punch of Michaelangelo Matos explaining the use of spoken voice as a “tool” in house music in “‘House Is A Feeling’: Chuck Roberts and Dance Music’s National Anthem.” The ubiquitous spoken word track (you know it, and Matos played it recurrently in various houses mixes over the years, each one a different flavor of emotion), a sex-positive preacher-style rant about the unity and commonality (“Jew and gentile alike, black and white alike”) of the “house that Jack built” being a multi-generational and cultural encouragement to recreate spirit in alternate forms of music and body worship. As Matos said, for people who know of it or don’t know of it, “It’s either huge or it doesn’t exist.”

Matos’ own near-minimalism in presentation (using his DJ knowledge and experience to lead us to our own assessment of the sample) fed directly into the first (but not last) panel I’ve seen at th EMP Pop Con where the presenter never spoke (during the presenation). Douglas Wolk expertly edited and then shared a well-constructed oral history of body self-awareness with individuals’ experience with dance music in “My Other Body Was A Temple.” He let the personal histories and confessions about alienation, dance, sexuality, record collecting, and communal identity speak for themselves, and it sounded a thousand times more interesting than how I am describing it here. What it made me realize is how for most of my life (until just a few years ago) records spoke for me in ways I never could. I actually lived through my favorite albums, imaging they were my voice to other people, a voice that was “more me” than mine could ever be. It actually made me realize why I loved music so intensely in the first place, in a very unsettling way. Observations from those who were speaking on disco’s glorious, repetitive excesses entertained the crowd, culminating in a then-period campy film clip about a man seduded by the black female Muse of the disco milieu, which ends in a body as machine/temple Busby Berkeley hallucination as fucked up as “Triumph Of The Will.” (But maybe its opposite? Or not.) Nervous laughter exploded in the room, appropriately, at the climax. This was after photos of 70s album covers with women handcuffed to fridges and open-shirted men with coke spread around them on the ground (someone’s definition of “paradise”); a woman’s voice saying, “incoherent disco account of the passion of Christ ..” with the garbled sound of Judas hanging and thirty pieces of silver hitting the round in a sixteen minute robot romp. Wolk’s paper was one of the few that was as academic as it was sexy, as creepy as it was seductive, as artful as it was pornographic. And arguably like they say about great sex, he didn’t necessary have to mechanically perform it himself to do it. He let The Other — his subjects, the audience — have the spotlight, more the director than a participant with his own needs.

At “Shades of Gay” on Level 3 (in the SF Museum) Fred Maus talked about Fred Schneider’s weird view of women’s bodies and how “genitals are both creepy and wonderful” and I could tell not everyone was appreciating the B-52s odd take on the alienation/strange attraction of the gay man toward women’s bodies (but was glad Maus didn’t back down about how this view was unique and not meant to harm). Graham Raulerson’s “The Jocker and the Hoosier Boy” revealed the original homoerotic exploitation of the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” covered up by hobo historical revisionism and cultural changes to the “children’s song” in the meantime. Once a twisted-end ode to young people saying no, not allowing people to push them around and being told to work (a punk self-empowerment tale tied to old utopian dreams of indulging every sensual whim to excess), it degraded over time and ended up indulging nostalgic later period capitalistic overdrive when Ruckus of Hootie yarled it as a Burger King melody. But that commercial WAS funny; what isn’t is how corporations love for us to idealize what it’s about, even as we have less.

Every now and then on Friday a single word carried tons of meaning for a paper — “Murder!” in Bruno’s paper, for example — but at “Rap Memes” the word “trick” was heavy in a panel anent “the booty and the shaking of the booty” (thank you, modrator Professor Fink). “Trick” as in “It ain’t tricking if you got it,” and DAMN! for the next couple of hours we analyzed every possible way that common rap phrase can be interpreted but it never became academic or less exciting than listening to a lot of the music we heard to figure out what it signifies.

Tamara Palmer wasn’t happy about “tricking” at all, asserting it to be the traditional way women are paid off (or not paid off, by a braggart taking it) for sexual favors. With the help of a DJ friend she presented a mad mix using the phrase in various song contexts, and it was often hilarious. Palmer didn’t come on too strong with her criticism, and admitted she felt it was more like “an inside joke” between MCs.

The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica and VIBE editor Sean Fennessey, tag-teaming on You Tube cum Fruity Loops recording minimalist pseudo-prank star Soulja Boy, seemed as mystified by their subject as Palmer was about hers. But this did not stop them from being fiercely creative and howlingly entertaining in describing the rise and fall and rise and etc. of the utterly obnoxious and somehow endearing Soulja Boy, who went from being the hip-hop version of outsider artists like Daniel Johnston out of his simple musical charms and idiotic, arguably parodic behavior, to using the word “You!” in a wrong tone and losing lots of fans. Which he gained back by getting all stupid even again and then mocking Ice T. There’s more to the story, but pictures speak louder than words from this point on.

This panel was about dance (that’s why it was in this year’s theme), but Soulja Boy is carrying on his possibly faux-moronic performance art as a recording and other type of artist, but it all started with the Soulja Boy dance, which has inspired all kinds of other forms (“Niger Boy” for instance, Nigerian students doing a more African-based version of the simple bust out.)

Journalist and hip-hop theatre perfomer Holly Bass ended the day at the EMP Pop Con for me by actually turning me into a trick — she had an audience member request we give dollars to a sparkly top hat passed around while she did bursts of erotic dance from behind curtains that would off and on close like a peepshow booth. We had to keep paying, and I did, throwing in several bucks. The objectification of the female body was the main message, but Holly’s performance was so great I didn’t mind almost “making it rain” — showering her with dollars. She wore two humungous balls on her butt that exaggerated the target of many men’s infatuation with the female form. Once I didn’t pay after she didn’t wave the parodic butt balls around, but the next time she did, I paid twice. (I kept bending over poor Carl Wilson, who eventually just had to get the hell out of there — maybe he was later for something, I’m not going to assume anything.) People commenting afterwards confessed feeling very uncomfortable. I said I enjoyed “joyfully experiencing a transgressive act in a safe environment.” Fink said, “That’s a good place to end this!” Afterwards, Saturday’s Keynote speaker Asha Puthli (who has collaborated with Ornette Coleman) came up to me and sincerely asked, “So you like the ass, huh?” I told her she was right.

I stayed a bit for the Diane Warren Keynote, but not being a kaoroke kind of guy, so not much into the big anthemic vamp of her sonorous Top 40 hits (enough to fill several CDs!), I will defer to David Schmaeder at The Stranger’s Line Out for those more interested.

I will say though that interviewing Warren seems pretty wide screen for an event often thought to be merely the domain of indie and academic snobs, and when Pop Con coordinator Powers asked her what she thought of working with once-songwriter Michael Bolton, she didn’t hesitate to call him an asshole.

review by Chris Estey

Last night the 2009 Pop Conference at EMP|SFM started off with a minimalist sense of space and place (no chairs, or anywhere to sit) but well-served buffet outside the Sky Church, moved from the EMP l SFM bar which has sadly been closed. The Pop Con organizers and attendees’ abilities to adapt and thrive no matter what section we’re squeezed into was evident, as was the absolutely hearty greetings and wonderful spirit of adventure in kicking off “Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic.”

Legendary scribes like Greil Marcus, Bob Christgau, Jon Caramanica, Daphne Brooks, and hosts Eric Weisbard and Ann Powers said hello to old-timers and newcomers alike and chatted excitedly with anyone, while local and locally based national luminaries Michaelangelo Matos, Mark Baumgarten, Eric Grandy, and others dove straight into excellent exchanges as if we had just stopped having conversation minutes ago, plunging passionately back into the fray.

That sense of extended conversation was of the same energy in the Keynote dialogue Brooks and Sonnet Retman had with multi-talented (vocals, instruments, lead woman, session player), multi-genre (and still alarmingly progressive), and multi-generational (but still amazingly hot) Nona Hendryx. The first hour was a casual walk through the post-60s beginnings for the legend, and her roots in the science fiction soul-pop band Labelle.

Beneath a screen jumbling recurrent images of her hippie-funk-disco-new wave history and inspirations (like the Rolling Stones and Dusty Springfield), Hendryx talked about how things were different back then, “it wasn’t all about the music industry … just a little music business.” She and her sisters in Labelle jammed with Laura Nyro, and toured with The Who.

As party funk turned into club disco, Labelle followed, picking up new influences along the way. Much like the origin of the punk aesthetic, the space theme in funk was an organic integration with fashion from the geek love of Hendryx’s fascination with the future. As the conversation turned more towards the juxtaposition of working with instinctual R&B geniuses like Philadelphia International’s Gamble & Huff (”it was all about feeling with them”) and then Brian Eno and the Talking Heads (”it wasn’t just about the playing, everything was much more thought about and planned”), Hendryx’s own unique views came forward. She has been balancing her love for creating new music with new and self-reliant forms of instrumentation and production — such as an actual skirt she wears she can make music with. There was a sense of the post-human (a philosophy taking post-modernism to more intimate and DIY extremes) in her was of expressing joy with music-making without being dependent on other musicians.

It was a heady, history-heavy introduction, and probably the best choice (besides a more public Prince or a less agoraphobic Betty Davis) to begin the theme of the multi-everything music dialogue known as the EMP Pop Con 2009.

Yes, this is the twentieth installment in the series where we give love and thought to those little books of single album appreciation, the 33 1/3 series, appropriately spotlighting an album with “twenty” in its title. This was not intentional, as I actually just figured that out, because I was going to be writing up this book this week anyways, due to its author being scheduled to present at the 2009 Pop Conference at EMP|SFM.

Part 20: 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

Drew Daniel is one of a handful of arguably well-known working musicians who contribute to line of the pocket-sized fetish tomes of the rock write jones, his work in Matmos (on Matador) being praised and secretly envied by noisy boys and girls in the press and at dim dark shows. He participates at the EMP Pop Con both in the “Copyright Criminals” panel (Saturday, April 17, 10:45-12:15 PM), which is actually a “sneak peak” about a movie that heavily endorses the kind of sampling that Daniel’s own band does; and the same day he gives his own specific presentation on “Why Be Something You’re Not? The Afterlives of Queer Minstrelsy” during the Con’s “How Low Can A Punk Get?” panel theme (5 PM-6:30 PM).

Both these topics seem very much tied in to Daniel’s own life, and the lives of the band Throbbing Gristle as well, around which the release of this post-punk classic was a certain apex. This is the gateway release for most “industrial” fans back in the day, as the soul-mocking title and the LP cover cleverly co-opted lounge music culture while the music itself castrated rock of any macho libido and replaced it with an ebony dildo of sonic subversion. Released in 1979, weird, repetitive, and resisting any attempts to be categorized or to please the listener in any simple way, as a punk kid you didn’t fuck with “20 Jazz Funk Greats.” It was essential to the collection of Fuck Shit Up records, like Black Flag’s “Jealous Again” EP, The Fall’s “Live At The Witch Trials,” Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music,” or early Poison Girls hardcore.

But people did try to bring TG down for it, as contemporaneous critical responses delineated at the back of the book attest. “The album is entirely devoid of personality or glamour,” one reviewer wrote. “Steve Morley in NME decried its ‘dreary indulgence’ and found it ‘deliberately listless and loveless,’” Daniel’s describes. The album’s creators, Genesis P. Orridge, Chris Carter, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, and Cosey Fanny Tutti, had been creating crunching noise and alarming live spectacles built around it for several years already. Seeing their early performances is somewhat like seeing what Chris Ott said about Joy Division, “the end of pop.” But it was more than that; it was post-rock before its time, post-consumer culture of any kind. To buy and not steal a Throbbing Gristle album seemed sort of an insult to the band (unless you were one of those extreme anarcho-libertarians sprouting up in the music scene).

Daniel’s is a fanboy of the band, which is easy to be if you were a kid from the Canadian sticks like he was and heard the sort of audio that could sweetly terrify the jocks who kicked your ass daily. Fortunately, he is also an expert interviewer, and the band members join with his love to reveal chaotic, clashing, but earnestly honest assessments of how the record came together. (This reason alone makes it one of the top five 33 1/3 books published so far; it’s not “just the facts” but even the extrapolation is ruggedly informed and uniquely coherent to the series.) The details themselves, of shared lyric writing and the lifestyles that went into them, is electrified journalism even if you’re not a fan of the band, genre, or this particular record.

For example, the author himself once worked as a stripper and identifies with Cosey in that she brought a love for the milieu of disco into the band’s work, misperceived by aggressive hardcore punks like me as mere abusive irony. TG is credited with being the first “industrial” band but was also the first to evolve the form — attempting to craft a sonic accidental novel on “20 Jazz Funk Greats” by making it be about not only life and death, but all the mundane, crappy, weird shit that happens in a single day in the life of an alienated human being (all of them) as well.

Daniel’s is surprisingly young for a guy who seems to have absorbed the UK zine culture, New York and British brutal art movements spawned after TG, and many dimensions of “transgressive politics” that shape a work of this sort. He is easily one of the best recurrent presenters at the Pop Con, one year showing off his permanent Germs cigarette burn (taking us deeply into the very private and possibly dangerous, music-worshiping place the panels often only hint at), using his negative energy as a sound terrorist but arguing his cases clearly there — and in this extremely well-researched analysis of a much-feared bastard of a rock album.

interview by Chris Estey

Douglas Wolk is a Portland, OR, resident, a longtime magazine freelancer, author, and a steady contributor to the 2009 Pop Conference at EMP|SFM. I have read his work in cyberpunk magazines of the 90s, and in the best literary criticism magazine for the past few years, The Believer. Mr. Wolk was kind enough to respond to some questions about what to expect from him in a couple of days at the Pop Con, and gives insight into the international but Seattle-only event in general.

You are always a highlight of the EMP Pop Conference, Douglas. This year your presentation is “My Other Body Is A Temple,” and it sounds like it’s about what goes through the minds of DJs, playing music for people but made to stand away from the action in booths or behind machinery — is that correct?

Sort of. It’s more broadly about being a fifth wheel in the performer-audience relationship, and more specifically about a couple of songs from around 1980 by General Strike and George Clinton — but not THAT George Clinton.

Have you yourself been a DJ?

I have! I spent many years DJing on WHRB and WFMU, and have DJed for a live audience many times.

I have felt the most (and best) feedback from an audience as a DJ. I rarely feel as loved or taken seriously otherwise. Why are DJs so special?

Really! I kind of think actual performance is a lot more rewarding, both in terms of the action itself and in terms of the reception I get from the audience. But the presentation will go into that some.

How did you come up with this presentation idea?

I’d had a few phrases and images and sounds stuck in my head for ages, and one night I realized there was a way they sort of all fit together. Also, after I saw Daphne Carr’s astonishing paper last year, I decided that there was no point in doing a presentation that didn’t matter to me personally, and that I’d rather risk doing something that falls on its nose than do something easy and not particularly significant to me.

You’ve been involved with the Pop Con how long? How many papers have you given? And why are you into it?

I’ve been attending and speaking at the Pop Conference since the first year, although I didn’t come to the second one — I think this will be my seventh paper. Writing about pop music is a wonderful job, but there’s a social element that’s usually missing from doing criticism, and a performative aspect that’s almost totally absent from the way it’s generally practiced. Which is weird, because we all spend our time paying very close attention to performance, and a lot of my peers are really good at it. The Pop Conference is the closest thing to an annual convention of the critical community: a social ritual, a place for cross-fertilization of thought, a chance to do karaoke with friends I never see.

Were there other presentations you considered for the theme this year? Can you tell us what they were, or are you going to save them for upcoming Pop Cons?

Not really — I more or less tailored this one to the theme.

It seems pretty brave to have a Pop Conference about “Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic” when a lot of people are freaking out about the economy falling apart, the printed music press dying, etc. How do you feel about the PC’s theme as a choice this year?

I love it. “Politic” is still in there for people who want it (and, really, every year the theme is broad enough that pretty much anything can be shoehorned in with a little bit of effort), but just because the economy sucks doesn’t mean people stop having bodies, or non-economic uses for music.

You have written one of the best 33 1/3 books, about James Brown’s Live At The Apollo — as well as my favorite collection of comic book criticism, Reading Comics. How do you feel about writing about music compared with writing about comics? Is it a similar critical voice you use, or are the methods of observation, description, and analysis completely different for you?

I’m never sure if I think about writing about music and writing about comics as the same discipline or not — I think the difference is more between venues than between types of subjects, if you see what I mean. For me, figuring out an appropriate voice mostly has to do with working out who my audience is and what I can offer them. But there’s also a lot more writing about music out there; when I write about comics, there are relatively few people working the same beat as I am, which makes it easier in some ways.

We ran into each other at Seattle’s Emerald City Comic Convention last weekend, where I asked to do this interview. I never left the place where you buy things, but at the Pop Con they don’t even have presenting author’s books for sale. Do you think the Pop Con is okay being so academic and above the marketplace, or should it be a little more consumer-oriented?

There are enough opportunities in the world for people to consume stuff; I wouldn’t mind having the chance to buy speakers’ books on site, but I also don’t mind not having it, and I’m guessing it’s more of a hassle to set up than it’s worth.

You are the only person I know to ever hand out your own CD-Rs of favorite mixes (James Brown) at the Pop Con, even to a marginal like me. Do you wish more people brought stuff to share with music friends?

I never object to people sharing favorite music with me — that “make a CD of 150 MP3s that define you as a listener” exercise some friends and I did a few years ago prompted some interesting self-examination and led me to a bunch of revelations — but nobody’s REQUIRED to give anybody presents. I just like doing it myself.

What mix CD would you hand out this year, assuming you’re not already (and if you are, what it is it)?

I don’t think I’m going to be able to make one in time, sadly! Although if a wormhole in time opens up between now and Thursday, who knows?

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DJs I know who enjoy Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” mixes from a couple years back often don’t seem to know what genre the manic, kind of menacing, multi-layered song is. Like that matters, right? This is the Spanish language-rich stew of reggaeton, a percolating concoction that developed in dancehall (late period reggae) and developed its 3 + 3 + 2 groove into a downbeat that makes it arguably more a subgenre of hip-hop. (Find the song “Gasolina” on one of the various Latin music comps, or on YouTube, and go from there — and there are some massive, tripping mixes out there to find.)

In an early 2006 edition of the Village Voice, Jon Caramanica, who will be at the 2009 Pop Conference at EMP|SFM with his own paper on ‘Rap Memes’ titled “Crank That? Yahhh! Soulja Boy Wants You To Dance Forever” (on Friday, April 17, 2009, 4:00 - 5:45 PM), raised the bloody pirate gauntlet for a Caribbean-style racial-musical civil war when he announced that he didn’t care about Eminem, the real conflict was between reggaeton and the rest of the hip-hop world. This got the often slandered genre written up in American magazines, and though sales of the artists are surprisingly good compared to the rest of the music business, its use of Spanish to deliver the lyrics and Third World economic factors have kept reggaeton from truly dominating the rest of the globe from its sources.

It’s those sources that cause a lot of controversy, at least in terms of who claims they “own” the music’s origin. As “junk culture” despised as the harshly textural, poetic, often scatological and violent music of some really fucking poor lower working class fans, Panama, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico in particular love to slug out who the hell brought the noise in the first place.

This are among the topics extrapolated in the book Reggaeton. Just out in April 2009, the thick anthology from Duke University Press seems to be the best place so far to find out about this music, and the EMP Pop Con will be part of the discussion where we can hear two of its editors and essay contributors, Raquel Z. Rivera and Wayne Marshall, carry it into the oral realm.

On Friday, April 17, Rivera will be part of the four-writer presentation “¡Reggeatón! Perreo and Beyond.” Rivera is a researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College and previously authored New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). She is a frequent freelancer and writes about reggaeton on the blog Reggaetonica. Her contribution to Reggaeton is one of the best, describing the hard times for creators and distributors of the music brought by meddling, oppressive authorities abusively enforcing “community standards.”

According to the Pop Con synopsis, Rivera will focus on how the music “has been accused of aiding and abetting the dirtiest of dancing, providing the default soundtrack for sex work, and facilitating the corruption and deflowering of young people on dance floors worldwide.”

Marshall kicks the book off with a great general overview and history of how black music from Jamaica and America became something called underground in the 90s, giving a glimpse at the proto-reggaeton artists who were webbing its DNA even a decade before that. Marshall is the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Ethnomusicology at Brandeis University, offering courses in Music and African and Afro-American Studies. “¡Reggeatón! Perreo and Beyond” will feature Marshall as well.

I am also excited to see that the Pop Con is also bringing Alexandra T. Vazquez to this part of the conference, as this author’s contribution, “Salon Philosophers” (focusing on African artist Ivy Queen) to the anthology is some of the most revealing regarding cultural clash and philosophical paradox in Reggaeton.

This sounds like an excellent opportunity to get to know this music better, as intimidating as it has been for many people who have responded to it the way others had towards jazz, punk, salsa, and other musical forms created out of utilitarian means and transgressive methods of joy. From there, the Reggaeton book couldn’t be a better printed guide.