Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

empty downtown taverns, and he inevitably adores the Moody Blues. But try to imagine if one of those people was so adroit at being singularly obsessive that he actually got paid for it. Imagine if the weirdo who seems to live in your nearest locally owned record store suddenly had a 152 IQ and a degree from Tufts. And now imagine a hundred of those people coming together for four rainy days in Seattle, all of them totally fucking stoked for the opportunity to compare The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society with Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s field theory on radioactive decay.

Prepare to rock and/or roll.

What I have just described was a glimpse of life inside the palatial walls of the Experience Music Project, home for the first annual Pop Music Studies Conference (a summit boldly titled “Crafting Sounds, Creating Meaning: Making Popular Music in the U.S.”) Held in April 2002, the conference brought together a wide array of respected academics and snarky rock critics who were asked to “think about pop music in the abstract.” What this really meant is that one hundred people who like Sigur Ros way too much came together to read self-penned manuscripts that were either too goofy to be classified as scholarship or too pedantic to be seen as commercially viable.

I was one of these people.

Now, let me be completely clear about something: I had a wonderful time at EMP. I’m precisely the kind of supergeek who enjoys forty-minute conversations about side three of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music album. The pencil-necked eggheads at “Crafting Sounds, Creating Meaning” are—sadly—my people. If I was Jewish, EMP would have been my Israel. Yet even I cannot deny that this conference was probably the least rock ’n’ roll experience I’ve ever had.

Thursday, April 11, 5:20 P.M.: I have just arrived outside the EMP building, a monstrosity of postmodern architecture nestled in the shadow of the Space Needle. Frankly, EMP looks ridiculous from the outside (it’s bulbous, multicolored, and possibly made out of aluminum). However, the inside is gorgeous. I can’t believe how clean these bathrooms are, particularly the porcelain urinals. This being a “rock conference,” I wonder if we will later snort cocaine off these fixtures.

It takes me about ten minutes to realize this is not going to happen; most of the people at this conference barely even drink. We’re all mingling upstairs in the EMP bar (I think it’s referred to as the “Liquid Lounge”), and I’m introduced to Douglas Wolk, a writer for the Village Voice and SPIN and the bass player for a meta communicative band called The Media. I can immediately tell that Wolk is interesting, but we’re both struggling with casual conversation, so I offer to buy him a drink. He wants an orange juice. This is fine (I have nothing against orange juice, per se), but it quickly dawns on me that this sensibility will pretty much be the norm for the weekend. At least in the conventional, stereotypical, Nikki Sixxian definition of the term debauchery, EMP is a “no rocking” zone.

I wander about the mixer, trying to mix. A few people are discussing how the Avalanches are over hyped, an odd argument to make about a band that 98 percent of America has never even heard of. There is lots of handshaking, and everyone seems to be saying “I love your work” or “I love your book” to whomever they happen to be standing alongside. Some people are upset that EMP has only provided free cookies for the mixer (there had been a rumor about chicken wings), but the cookies are crisp. A graduate student from Bowling Green University and I talk about the Wu-Tang Clan’s obsession with kung-fu movies; when I tell this guy he looks like the lead singer of Nickelback, he threatens to punch me.

There aren’t many women at this conference. I see one tall female with pigtails who looks mildly attractive, so I saunter up and try to make conversation. It turns out she’s a twenty-four-year old freelance writer from San Francisco, and she’s not even actively involved with the conference; she just wanted to hang out with rock journalists (!) and meet Simon Reynolds, the British author of a drug-friendly rave book called Generation Ecstasy. I try to talk shop with this woman, but her shop appears to exist in Narnia; she tells me her ultimate goal is to publish a fictional biography about Alex Chilton built on the premise that Chilton was actually sired by a sexual tryst between a woman and an alligator. “The research is totally kicking my ass right now,” she tells me. “Basically, I need to learn more about alligators. And about the Delta blues.”

Tonight, Solomon Burke is speaking in a room the EMP staff refers to as their “sky church,” but I elect to go to some dive bar four blocks away from the museum. I meet an amazing blond girl from a local Seattle alternative paper, and we do not drink orange juice; we end up having somewhere between eight and four thousand cocktails, and we play Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone” on the jukebox in order to slow dance without leaving the comfort of our booth. I go to bed around 3:30 A.M., confident that I have rocked more than enough for my juice-drinking brethren.

Friday, April 12, 9:40 A.M.: I just woke up. The conference apparently started at 8:30 A.M. What kind of self-respecting rocker gets up for anything at 8:30? Doesn’t anyone here own Appetite for Destruction? Do these people not realize that even if you wake up around seven, you’re not supposed get out of bed until nine? I wander down to the lobby of the Courtyard Marriott at 10:05, assuming there will be several other panelists feeling exactly like me, which is to say “below average.” But there’s only one guy, and he’s reading the newspaper. It appears that everyone else made it to the 8:30 A.M. welcoming remarks. There’s an upside to being juice drinkers, I guess.

The first three-person panel I sit through is titled “Self-Image.” The initial presenter is New York Times writer Kelefa Sanneh, and his paper is sort of funny. Of course, what’s even funnier is watching the audience when he plays snippets of N.W.A. to illustrate his points; suddenly, the room is filled with old white people bobbing their heads along with Ice Cube, desperately trying to show everyone just how much they love hip- hop. That’s one of the unspoken prerequisites at this conference: You must overtly love whatever music seems the most detached from your own personal experience. Apparently, this proves you’re a genius. As a consequence, all the white people talk about how much they love rap, all the young females insist they love misogynistic cock rock, and all the aging academics praise Pink and the Backstreet Boys. Other sentiments that are essential to publicly express at a rock conference are as follows: All unpopular music should be more popular; all popular music should be less popular (unless it’s aggressively vapid, which thereby makes it transcendent); authenticity is essential; authenticity is ridiculous; music is the sound-scape through which we experience reality; there will never be another Trout Mask Replica. It’s also essential to have a “mentor,” or at least to claim that you do. Former SPIN writer and current EMP program manager Eric Weisbard tells me he’s an “unapologetic Robert Christgau protege.” I meet at least two people who openly describe themselves as Chuck Eddy rip-off artists. A writer from Austin tells me his mentor during college was Rob Sheffield. All the academics give props to older academics no one else has ever heard of. And most peculiarly, an unnamed woman with a tragic hairdo asks me if I’m from “the Greil Marcus school of criticism or the Lester Bangs school of thought.” I say the latter, but only because I like cough syrup.

DePaul sociologist Deena Weinstein follows Sanneh, and she compares the social contract within a working rock band to the fictionalized existence of the jackalope. I must concede that this is a clear example of “thinking about music in the abstract.” Later that morning, I attend a presentation titled “Duran Duran: Video Band?” It turns out the answer to that particular query is, “yes.” This strikes me as significantly less abstract.

Jon Pareles of the New York Times is the “star” of an afternoon symposium mysteriously dubbed “Dos and Don’ts,” and he makes references to the Heisenberg Principle and the formation of Zaire. Pareles follows an affable presentation from University of Iowa’s Thomas Swiss (he discusses Jewel’s poetry) and precedes a boring British academic who drones on about reggae before advocating the death of capitalism ( “I am a socialist,” he said during the Q & A portion of the symposium, “and I think we need to change society”). I’m not exactly sure what any of this has to do with pop music, but I do learn that Jewel moved 432,000 hardcover copies of A Night Without Armor, thereby making her the best-selling American poet of the past fifty years. At least she’s not a socialist.

I eat lunch at Turntable, the Experience Music Project restaurant. Now—if someone wanted to be critical of EMP as an inadvertently “antirock” entity—this meal would have been a perfect metaphor, as it was the epitome of ruining something visceral. I ordered “old fashioned” chicken and dumplings, but I ended up getting the horrific modern incarnation of what some book-smart Seattle hippie imagines the Deep South should taste like. I almost felt like I was being punished for ordering something simple. And I suspect that’s how anti- intellectuals feel about things like the EMP Pop Conference. They would prefer consuming the philosophical equivalent of McDonald’s, which would be asking a fifteen-year-old kid why Hoobastank kicks ass. And it turns out I could have literally done both of these things; EMP is two blocks from a McDonald’s, and Hoobastank was playing