Two upcoming livestreamed talks by me

One on the vibes project, one on Wax Trax!

I’m giving a number of talks this November, and two of them are going to be streamed over the internet.

The first one is this coming Friday November 8. It’s part of the Biopower at 50 conference at Rowan University organized by Ed Kazarian. You can register for free here, and find a copy of the program there too. My talk is a quick overview of the theory of legitimating biopower I develop in Good Vibes Only. If you want a quick summary of how vibes and the math behind algorithms and LLMs work together to constitute a new form of biopower where “life” isn’t meat but vibes, tune in!

The second one is Wednesday November 13 as part of the American Musicological Society’s Popular Music Study Group pre-conference on Chicago Music: Histories. All sessions are streamed, and you can register for free here.

Here’s the abstract for this second talk:

The Queer Art of Side-Projects and Remixes: Excessive Force’s “Violent Peace (Bitchmix),” WaxTrax! Records, and Rivethead Poptimism

There’s a consensus among rivetheads that Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation is an industrial album. Why have industrial fans been so welcoming and non-gatekeepy to a pop album by a Black woman? The answer to this question lies a few steps up N. Lincoln Ave from the conference site at Wax Trax! Records. Building on Elliot Powell’s work on the queer potentiality of the unmastered track, I argue that the 1993 EP Gentle Death by Wax Trax! supergroup Excessive Force demonstrates an ethos that privileges side-projects and remixes over (rockist) notions of purity and official versions.

“Violent Peace” is an industrial-dance track featuring vocals from Chicago house vocalist Liz Torres. Not only is this hard evidence of the connection between Wax Trax! artists and Chicago’s early house scene, the group’s choice to put the “Bitchmix,” where Torres’s vocals are higher in the mix than the guitars, over the original, more guitar-forward one on the the EP shows a very different approach to industrial dance than the more famous Nine Inch Nails took. Whereas Reznor bro-ified synths and made them rock, Excessive Force sidelined the guitars and literally elevated the voice of a woman of color. The sound of this remix by a sideproject would come to be one of KMFDM’s signature formulas, and the ethos that motivated it evolved into something like industrial music’s own version of poptimism. Tracing this sound and ethos forward to tracks like Lady Gaga’s “Stupid Love” shows Chicago’s ongoing influence on pop music generally.

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