Experience Music Project Pop Conference tunes in to issues of music, money
MC Geologic of the Blue Scholars performed at the 2008 Experience Music Project Pop Conference. This year, the conference will be held for the first time at UCLA beginning today in Schoenberg and continuing in Royce Hall on Saturday and Sunday. Guests include Moby and author Chuck Klosterman.
Credit: EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT
Experience Music Project Pop Conference
Today, 1 p.m., through Sunday
Schoenberg Music Building and Royce Hall, FREE
By Dan Peel
Feb. 25, 2011 1:20 a.m.
Music is a prevalent aspect of the college lifestyle. The question, then, is whether students think deeply on their music, or rock out mindlessly.
The 2011 Experience Music Project Pop Conference, dubbed “Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Music and Money,” will bring 135 speakers, including Moby, TV on the Radio’s David Sitek and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman to UCLA.
This year’s conference is focused on shifting and broadening the ways students think about music and its relationship to money. It will begin today at 1 p.m. in Schoenberg and will continue in Royce Hall Saturday and Sunday.
Klosterman, best known for “Eating the Dinosaur,” “Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story” and “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs,” will discuss the band KISS’ hyperproductive ability to make money in his discussion, “The Street Giveth and the Street Taketh away,” according to Klosterman. Klosterman has written more on KISS than anyone in the U.S.
“The way culture has moved over the last five to 10 years has eroded the idea of thinking deeply about music,” Klosterman said. “Basically, the Internet and things like Twitter have created a culture with an emphasis on speed with a rapid-fire, superficial process of analysis. This conference will take us in the opposite direction. … We can take a band or a song or even one line from one song and talk about it for 40 minutes.”
Eric Weisbard, professor of American studies at the University of Alabama and head organizer of the Pop Conference, has coordinated authors, professors, artists, lecturers, musicians, soundtrack supervisors and leading music critics to speak on the conference’s 48 different panels.
UCLA will be the first venue to host the conference outside of Seattle, where it has taken place since 2002.
“(Los Angeles) is one of the big centers of music journalism, criticism and the music business,” said Robert Fink, co-coordinator and UCLA musicology chair. “It is where you go as a musician … to get paid.”
According to Fink, UCLA is an ideal location for the conference because of its short distance from Laurel Canyon, which has become the residential choice of rock stars such as Alice Cooper, David Crosby, Danny Carey (drummer for the band Tool) and Canned Heat.
“(Past themes) have tended to be big ideas about music like history or sex,” Fink said. “It was fascinating how many times … the subtexts of the papers were about money.”
Panels will include “Reality Bites,” which will include a conversation about Disney’s success with The Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus, and “The Rich Rapper’s Burden,” where panelists will discuss the particular guilt associated with the pursuit of financial gain.
The conference will cover topics from political activism to “American Idol.”
According to Weisbard, panels will capture how people study music all over the world, from funk to hip-hop to the music industry itself.
“If you’re wondering what (is) … happening to the music industry, there’s a whole panel on that. I’ve called it a tribute to music and an intellectual food fight,” Weisbard said.
Fink will moderate the panel “Funk and Commerce” on Saturday, when panelists will discuss the direction of ’70s funk, Stevie Wonder, Capitol Records’ label shift and Sound of Los Angeles Records.
“Fink has become one of many people’s favorite presenters,” Weisbard said. “He’d give these cool presentations about how James Brown came up with the song “˜Soul Power,’ or how classical music was lurking in the shadows of Afrika Bambaataa’s song “˜Planet Rock.'”
According to Fink, this year’s theme is very powerful and has dredged up the subjects that Experience Music Project had hoped for.
“This is an absolute new thing for people in Los Angeles,” Weisbard said. “We’re really trying to represent how many different types of music there are and how many different ways there are to write about music. The craziness of it is how many different ways we slice the pie.”
