Pop Conference 2016

Michaelangelo Matos is the author of The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America. He is at work on a history of the music business in the mid-’80s. He lives in the Twin Cities. “Prisoner of Your Love: How Tina Turner Came Back” | “What can you say about TINA TURNER?” begins Regency Artists’ circa-1982 bio of the R&B star. The Capitol Records biography, dated February 1984, gave... Read More →

A rock critic since 1967, Robert Christgau runs his “Expert Witness” column weekly at Noisey.com. He is a visiting professor in NYU's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music who has published five books based on his journalism as well as the Oprah-certified 2015 memoir Going Into the City. He keynoted the first EMP and has presented at every subsequent edition. “The Great American Popular Singing Critic” | My next-to-last... Read More →

Lara Langer Cohen is Assistant Professor of English at Swarthmore College. The author of The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (2011) and co-editor of Early African American Print Culture (2012), she has also published essays on subjects including 19th century mourning poetry, amateur newspapers, and summer jams. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Before Subculture... Read More →

Eric Weisbard is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, author of Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music, and organizer of the EMP Pop Conference since its inception in 2002.  | | “A Critical Guide to the Literature of American Popular Music—Keyword Voices”  | A Critical Guide to the Literature of American Popular Music, the book I’m starting to work on... Read More →