2009 Pop Conference:
The EMP-ire Strokes Back (Part 2)

Labelle with Nona Hendryx (centre) singing “Come with Me”/”Come into My Life.”

It’s tricky to explain the annual Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle to people who’ve not attended. They tend to picture either a stuffy scholarly forum or a pasty-white-guy trivia fair akin to baseball-card collectors’ meeting or a science-fiction convention. The Popcon isn’t innocent of those aspects, but at its best it takes the brains of one and the passion of the other and gets a more robust hybrid.

It’s a kind of weekend retreat where journalists, authors, historians, musicologists, DJs, theorists and, yes, musicians experiment with ways to talk about popular music that might do justice to its value as human experience, its often troubled and troubling place in cultural exchange, and its never-ceasing novelty, invention and frequent blatant absurdity as a kind of moving-parts plasticene model for how to mobilize feeling usefully in a painfully pleasurable world.

This quixotic spirit has bred its own sub-genres of presentations: They’re performative, even competitively so, in the way presenters talk and their use of multimedia; they feature a lot of jokes and a good deal of show-and-tell of finds from crate-digging or data-mining exercises; swearing, personal storytelling and even an occasional tear (as Robert Christgau shed in discussing marriage) are not untoward; you might also encounter experiments in audience participation (such as Daphne Carr’s laptop-along talk on laptops); and while dense, knotty thinking is fine (at least by most of us), mere deconstructive games seldom get traction — there’s a collective conscience that’s listening for a socially productive reassessment or challenging ethical core.

And it was all more effective at EMP this year than the past couple, I felt, in part because the theme “Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic” drew out the lust and love and, sometimes, ungainly awkwardness of our relationships to music. Take the two keynote talks. (I’ll stick with those tonight and talk about the rest of the presentations I saw, I hope, tomorrow.)

Nona Hendryx, of girl-group-turned-funkabellic-band Labelle but also a technologically innovative solo artist and sometime collaborator with Laura Nyro, Talking Heads, Prince and Peter Gabriel, looking more hot and fabulous than pretty much any 65-year-old this side of Tina Turner, dished on her past (discreetly) and subtly resisted any attempts to reduce it to a transformation or liberation story. Not to fault interviewers Daphne Brooks and Sonnet Retman (though I’d hazard that two interviewers was too much of a good thing) - Hendryx certainly made some sidesteps and wasn’t always expansive. But she also seemed to be making the point that what get told by pop’s chroniclers as major shifts of direction are often not conscious, programmatic “moves” but more spontaneous and gradual responses by artists to their environments, audiences and circumstances - just being young, successful, creative African-American women in sixties London and seventies New York, for instance.

She also made memorable points about the dynamics of a group that got together since they were teenagers, living out of each others’ pockets, and the challenges of reuniting as Labelle recently did - picking back up after a quarter-century and learning to sing as an ensemble again rather than as soloists, for instance. She talked about the shock of encountering Laura Nyro’s hushed audiences after years of singing to screaming crowds at soul revues. (Many of us critics would be prone to vilify that as a rock audience’s less involved bodily response, but she sure didn’t put it that way.) And she came out as a “huge science-fiction freak” and aspiring cyborg - “I want to have an ear in my elbow!” she joked - viz. the “audio tutu” that she’s been wearing in recent performances, a wired-up Plexiglas skirt that lets her trigger and shape electronics while dancing (why not build a laptop into your lap-top?).

The next night, we met Diane Warren, who’s surprisingly tough-talking and sarcastic considering that she’s the queen of the power ballad and writer of hits for everyone from Cher to Aerosmith to (of course) Celine Dion. I was happy that the confab of critics at the Popcon gave such a respectful hearing to a woman our ilk has been prone to pin as a purveyor of schlock, in part thanks to the unimpeachable job done by interviewer Ann Powers, who conscientiously did several advance interviews with Warren to prepare. (Although she struggled with her audio-visual gear, just as happened the night before - there should be a tech person handling this stuff.)

Warren wanted to be a songwriter - and never a performer! - from the age of 12 (!) and, as an L.A. kid, actually managed to get into the business in her mid-teens. I’ve lost my notes unfortunately but I won’t soon forget her account of literally grabbing Cher around the knees insisting that she give “If I Could Turn Back Time” a chance - Ann noted that it was probably the subtheme of aging that made the diva so resistant to recording the soon-to-be smash hit. But it was more the overall ethos of Warren’s way of discussing her craft that impressed - here’s a writer of hugely populist love songs who claims she’s never been in love, yet any tendency to read that, through an expressionist filter, as a confession of mere manipulation was countered by Warren’s incredibly fierce attachment to her own work, really talking about her songs as if they were her children, and her comment that when she is writing a song she absolutely believes and feels it, even though she’s not sentimental in “real” life.

And yet, like the old-fashioned songwriters she most admires such as Irving Berlin or the Brill Building teams, Warren clearly measures success in commercial terms - if it ain’t a hit, then it don’t count - though in her case she seems to feel that they’d all be hits if they were done right. (She’s sure that Whitney Houston’s upcoming comeback Warren-penned single “I Didn’t Know My Own Strength” will be one of those, by the way.) Her talk really gave a feel for what it’s like to be in the hit business, with its joys and frustrations, that’s far removed from the soulless caricature. And listening to the snippets of her songs that Ann played, you couldn’t deny their musical deftness - and finding myself unexpectedly moved by some that touched on certain emotions I was feeling that week, I remembered having the same reaction when Celine sang Warren’s “Because You Loved Me” in the Vegas show I described in my book. (I gave her a copy, which was a thrill.)

Warren’s vague lyrics aim at broad targets, and while that’s not a literary technique I would generally recommend, it’s hard to resist it when you stumble into its sights. It makes me wonder if some of us resist this kind of songwriting because it implies that we’re not unique, that our feelings and experiences aren’t as individual and particular as we want (or are told) to believe. Which is also, of course, what many people find comforting about such songs - the sense of recognition and connection, which can be another way of saying “love.”

Both talks, of course, put women in the forefront, both as subjects and interlocutors, which was a good counterweight to any pasty-guy Popcon tendencies. I thought they tiptoed around some very evident and pressing questions about sexuality (beginning but not ending with orientation), but that was a probably inevitable matter of politeness - Warren and Hendryx both having reputations to safeguard and being of generations in which that’s not such an acceptable subject for public discussion.

Both also tweaked us with reminders of the gulf between practice and interpretation, but also something that would arise frequently in the conference, which is the way that context and the machinery of music - whether the business or literally the machines, including instruments, computers or means of reproduction - enable and shape its reveries on love and loss: By the very nature of popular music, it’s more cybernetic than “organic,” a word that should (at best) be confined to agriculture, and not used to mist up our lenses when we talk about pop culture.

More to come.