First thing to notice about the Experience Music Project's Pop Conference 2007, April 1922: the bar is back. There was none for the 2006 installment. To paraphrase Donovan (no Pop Conference presentation for him, so far): "First there is bar back, then there is no bar back, then there is." With that bar, back comes the squeezed commingling of panelists, academic and journalistic, representing most of the conceivable skin colors and many points of the globe - all sliding sideways past one another on the way to get another drink, back from getting another drink, to the restroom and toward fresh conversation.
I run into Steven Shaviro, formerly a University of Washington professor, now with Michigan's Wayne State University, here presenting a paper on Staten Island's Wu-Tang Clan. He mentions he hasn't been going out to shows lately. I mention that Daniel Levitin's recent book "This Is Your Brain on Music" brings up, but does not seem to address, the question of why many people listen to less music, or less new music, as they age. Shaviro's quick to respond that he listens to a lot of new music - he simply doesn't leave the house to do so nearly as much.
Novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem gives the keynote address: "Collapsing Distance: The Love Song of the Wanna-Be, or the Fannish Auteur." I can't say I follow Mr. Lethem's reasonings beyond an expressed urgency for people to project personas, to insist on, and perhaps through insistence eventually become, what they are not. He mentions that he almost became a rock critic as a younger person, but avoided that fate; this produces an ominous, dubious hum from around the EMP's Sky Church.
At the beginning of the Q&A following the speech, an angry young black man takes exception to Lethem's characterization of R&B fireball Louis Jordan as "clown." A reeling Lethem responds that he never meant clown as pejorative. This triggers a round-the-Sky-Church debate about the essence of a clown and clowning, as representative of as a trickster in various cultural myths. Quoth Robert Christgau, the dean of American rock critics, recently given the boot from his decades-long tenure at the Village Voice: "I thought he was a clown, because he was funny."
Opening night's after-party begins, at the Edgewater Inn. The Edgewater's come up in the world since those days when the Beatles fished from their windows, and Led Zeppelin took legendary liberties with some young women they caught. Ann Powers, a longtime Seattle resident and EMP staffer before her move to Los Angeles, recalls interviewing the Psychedelic Furs' singer Richard Butler at the Edgewater, and how smitten she was with him. Off-grid festivities continue at the Marriott, where Ned Sublette regales his table with tales of touring with modern classical composer Glenn Branca, for whom he tuned all the guitars to the note E, in various octaves.
The theme for this year, the conference's seventh, is "Waking Up From History: Music, Time and Place." It includes the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and a band called Jesus Jones, whose song "Right Here, Right Now" ("watching the world wake up from history") became an unofficial anthem of the times. Watching Joshua Clover's Friday-morning presentation of that song and others from the era, I'm struck by the band's flagrantly askew painter's caps, and how the keyboard player manhandles his instrument from one end of the stage to the other without ever missing a mimed note. Prof. Clover's assessment of this exhilarating material seems unclear. He does, however, wear a green shirt reading, "Who the ---- Is Mick Jagger?"
Eric Weisbard, Pop Conference organizer, mentions before Lethem's speech that The Stranger is helping out this year. Six years ago on the eve of the first Pop Conference, The Stranger ran a half-page article saying that the Conference shouldn't exist, and that thinking intellectually about rock and roll couldn't possibly benefit anyone. Times change, although sometimes they curl back rather than push forward. Six years ago, blogs and Web-only commentary didn't exist in such globs. This year brings Seattle Times critics Patrick MacDonald and Paul de Barros commenting on the Times' Web site about the Conference's low attendance and "lacking passion."
One questioner asks Lethem on his thoughts about whether Kurt Cobain was murdered - and Lethem responds that he's sorry, but he has no opinion whatsoever on the subject. This question constitutes the only sign I can find that the Conference is free this year, where in earlier years any non-presenter had to pay a nominal fee.
Hearing a gaggle of rock critics roar, squeak and skew over karaoke tracks makes the entire weekend worthwhile, and such goes down Saturday night at Ozzie's upstairs room. Michelangelo Matos, newly moved back to Seattle, pipes highly through "Germ-Free Adolescents," originally sung by Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, then effortlessly climbs into the first person of Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Girlfriend." "Oh Mike, if only you were a woman," clucks the karaoke host at the end of that.
The Pop Conference might well show nothing much to the casual wanderer. The journalists can't help but be slightly behind the times, thanks to the rigors of formulating and codifying a presentation; and the academics continue to speak academese, despite occasional calls for them to stop. For people bred in the bone to think and talk about their obsessions, it shall continue to call like a Mecca. "I feel like I have a peer group here," offers a critic from Toronto, at the end of a long night. And though I live "here" every day of the year, I know exactly how he means.
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