EMPirical Observations: Day One

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EMPirical Observations: Day One

POSTED: Friday, April 17, 2009, 5:39 PM

Filed Under: Music EMP Pop Conference!

Live from Seattle!

Nona Hendryx

Each April, scores of music critics, journalists, academics of various stripes, and assorted nerdy sorts descend upon the Frank Gehry-wrought undulating chrome of the Experience Music Project in downtown Seattle for the EMP Pop Conference, a vaguely academic-styled weekend of papers, panels, and presentations about all things pop. That's "pop" in the broadest sense, mind, which might mean anything from techno, T-Pain, and reggaet'n (the subject of a panel this year) to honky-tonk country, big band swing, and pre-war minstrelsy. For this year's 8th annual event, the theme is "Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop and the Body Politic." (That's a Prince ref, in case ya missed it.) I'm thrilled to be here and should be a fun weekend!

The conference kicked off this evening with an intriguing keynote conversation with veteran musician Nona Hendryx, conducted by Daphne Brooks of Princeton and Sonnet Retman of the University of Washington. Hendryx makes an entirely fascinating figure, especially in this context, not so much because she's a legend, per se, but simply because she's lived such an incredible amount and variety of popular music's history: from the girl group era of the early '60s, as part of Philly's own Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles (an experience she described as "a large pajama party"), to swinging London in the heyday of Carnaby Street, to New York in the groovily liberated disco '70s (by which time the group had morphed into glam-funk fantasists Labelle) and the arty, AIDS-plagued eighties (when she collaborated with Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, and Prince, among others, and launched her own Afro-futurist, avant-rock solo career.) And that's not even mentioning the "audio tutu" she's been experimenting with recently (an attempt, as she explains it, to become more of a cyborg.)

Add all that to the fact that she's black, female, and queer, and you could easily devote the whole weekend of intellectual discourse to dissecting just her life and work.

A generous hour and half proved hardly enough time to delve into that wealth of experience. The interviewers, fumbling with the powerpoint and fawning, at considerable length, over the current Labelle reunion, only managed to bring the discussion up through the mid-seventies before cutting to Q&A mode. Brooks' questions, while insightful and well-informed, sometimes tended toward overly academic cult-crit pontification ' that's only customary for this conference, of course, but it didn't always seem fair to the mildly bewildered Hendryx, who offered up a few responses along the lines of "well, we just made music because that was what you did in those days." Still, she had plenty of perspective to offer, on the changing cultural and social currents of her times, and the education she picked up through collaborations and encounters with innumerable legendary musicians and producers.

It was a joy just to watch her relive some of those memories, even when (doubtless unlike any of the presenters who will follow her this weekend) she couldn't quite summon up the words to describe them.

Tammy Barker

Posted 2009-04-17 15:09:13

uhhh...what does this have to do with Philadelphia?

Posted by K. Ross Hoffman @ 5:39 PM Permalink | Post a comment

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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