Jonathan Lethem Argues With Music Geeks

Another EMP Pop Conference, another debate about racism. Last year, when critics, academics, musicians, and fans gathered to present papers and deconstruct songs at Seattle’s annual music-geek gathering, Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt caused a minor uproar by describing “Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah,” from Disney’s legendarily racist 1946 musical Song of the South, as a “great song.” This year, keynote speaker Jonathan Lethem referred to the jocular personas of African-American performers Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan as “clowns,” prompting an audience member to demand to know why Lethem would call Jordan stupid. (The audience member didn’t care about Calloway: “He couldn’t even spell ‘instrument.’”) The semantic misunderstanding was addressed by several audience members; afterward, Rhapsody.com’s Tim Quirk quipped, “Someone gets called a racist earlier and earlier every year; it’s like breaking a Champagne bottle on a ship’s mast.” Needless to say, the conference was off to a memorable start. For more highlights, read on.

• During the Q&A session after the keynote speech, someone asked, completely earnestly, if Lethem thought Kurt Cobain had been killed and not committed suicide.

• Rock T-shirt historian Erica Easley told a story about Iggy Pop masturbating onto a friend’s homemade Iggy tee: “There,” Iggy said, emerging from the bathroom, “I signed it.”

• The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones recited the No. 1 pop hits of 2004–2005 as poetry: “‘We Belong Together.’ ‘We Belong Together.’ ’We Belong Together.’”

• Responding to a comment that emo kids are goth kids dressed in white, Best Music Writing series editor Daphne Carr, who presented a paper on Hot Topic stores, deadpanned, “That’s like Spy Vs. Spy.”

• City Pages writer Peter S. Scholtes sang an a cappella version of “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love” to begin his presentation on the hymn, which was written by his father.

• Game designer and D.J. Jesse Fuchs, who discussed the history of music-driven video games, said the first time he saw two Asian girls in short skirts jumping up and down on a Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine, he realized, “This thing was going to be fucking huge.”

• Filmmaker Charles Mudede spoke about realism in Good Times: “Trying and failing to get out of the ghetto every week turns into a comedy.”

• Monologist Elena Passarello acted out scenes from Brian Goedde’s interviews with Iowa hip-hoppers: “So we’re gonna take over Iowa … because in Iowa, hip-hop is pure.”

• Cuban music historian Ned Sublette began his talk on colonial New Orleans with an impassioned demand that the current administration be “investigated, impeached, indicted, and incarcerated.”

• University of Iowa’s Kembrew McLeod described what it was like to live outside New Market, Virginia, in 1993, the year Spin magazine dubbed the town the next big music scene — as part of an April Fools’ issue. McLeod remembered setting up a couch in front of a noise band’s speakers so that a major label A&R man who’d been duped by the prank could sit and listen.

• After spending much of his allotted time describing uprock dance moves, Tufts University’s Joe Schloss finally demonstrated them. As a friend said, “That was really helpful.” —Michaelangelo Matos