A Postcard from PopCon

City of Angels, be all you can be! Be movies, be a-list, be seen just to see your part—repeat, the heartbeat in L.A.!¹

As I rode the Los Angeles Metro to the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music for Pop Conference, an annual conference of journalists and music scholars across academic disciplines, the voice of the late, great Brian Wilson comforted me. I’m from New York, you see, a terrific metropolis if there ever was one, but Gotham, to me, has always felt like reality. Los Angeles is a city of dreams, the capital of American film and music, and visiting there to present my work, I figured I’d dream a little. I threw on my headphones to Brian Wilson’s 2008 album That Lucky Old Sun, the star-studded soundtrack of La La Land, and the endless summer discography of the Beach Boys. I drew the line at Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” I agree with the sentiment, sure, but did he really have to start the song with “Hate New York City” (emphasis, unfortunately, mine)?²

Let me start from the beginning. I’m a History Ph.D. candidate studying the history of American popular culture at the University of South Carolina, also known as the first “USC.”³ As I’ve written about previously for Contingent, I am writing my dissertation on the history of punk rock in New York City from the 1970s to the 1990s.⁴

PopCon, which this year was based around the theme of “Mayhem: Pop Music and Writing in Perilous Times,” called for presentations about “what pop music and music writing can do in times of instability.”⁵ This sounded like a great opportunity to present one of my dissertation chapters-in-progress, specifically on ABC No Rio, a tenement building–turned artists’ squat–turned D.I.Y. punk venue, the central case study of one of my chapters.

As conferences are highly open spaces—you’re presenting your work in a setting where it’s expected that your audience give you feedback and criticism —it’s a good academic habit to present your works-in-progress at them.⁶ Applying to a conference in the first place forces you to write up an abstract, detailing, often in just one paragraph, your argument, evidence, theoretical foundations, and the case for your work’s significance. And, once (hopefully) accepted, presenting at a conference requires that you not only actually write out your project, but do so in the format of a (typically) 20 minute talk that practically requires you to render your ideas into language intelligible to other humans. At the time of my application I was really struggling with writer’s block and low motivation, so the deadlines set by the practicalities of pitching and then presenting my work helped force me to pen my ideas to paper. (In reality, I depressingly typed my ideas out onto a cold, clinical Microsoft Word document.)

Of course, the life of the mind requires that one physically move to settings where they can think, present, and mingle with other scholars. So, to actually get to PopCon, I applied for conference funding through the University of South Carolina’s Graduate School. As with any kind of institutional support, your mileage may vary. In the case of USC, one may apply for funding for conference travel twice over the course of their graduate career for a maximum of $500 each time.

I’m grateful for the funding, but it probably wouldn’t have been enough for a less fortunate student. Flights and hotels are usually the biggest upfront conferencing expenses; my relatively cheap $233.80 New York to L.A. round trip was almost half of my $500 grant, and I was also lucky enough to have family in the area I could stay with for free. There’s also other expenses to consider, including food, daily transportation, and in many cases, a conference registration fee (PopCon was free to register for). Thankfully, I also have access to a separate research account through the Department of History, but I wanted to save that money for traveling to archives over the summer.⁷ Getting funding through the Graduate School, which involved filling out a form detailing my projected expenses—to be reimbursed upon my submission of receipts later—was a good way for me to make the most of my limited funding. Of course, within the small world of academia, conferencing is practically mandatory whether it’s affordable or not: aside from getting feedback on your work, you’re also getting a sense of the kinds of questions and methods your field is currently invested in, and, as is the case for any field, you need to network!

This was a three-day conference, spanning an evening reception and opening on March 12 and two full days of panels and roundtables peopled by scholars and journalists. The attendance of journalists—mostly music critics and reporters—is a defining feature of PopCon that isn’t common for academic conferences. Their attendance, as well as PopCon’s existence as an interdisciplinary popular music studies conference, is super valuable as this makes its panels very intellectually diverse and its discussions particularly rich and engaging. It was a real honor, joy, and privilege to mingle with thinkers across disciplines, whether they were a pop critic who’s written for The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Spin (Michelangelo Matos), a scholarly historian of Kolkata “war metal” (Dr. Michael S. Dodson) or a musicologist figuring out how misogynistic dudes programmed music for women listeners on American radio stations in the 1980s (Dr. Amy Coddington).

The kicker is that all these folks were on my panel (chaired by Chris Molanphy, a chart analyst and pop critic at Slate), and, together, we spoke from each of our disciplinary perspectives on (according to the panel’s official description) “how music scenes wrestle with power, exclusion, and liberation across radio waves and underground networks,” “reveal[ing] noise as both oppression and resistance: a site where gender, race, politics, and community collide in the struggle over cultural authority.”⁸ It was a terrific time, obviously not just for the insightful, constructive feedback I received from a whole conference room of professional music freaks, but also for meeting and connecting with such interesting, intelligent people.

Kudos to the excellent staff at the University of Southern California! Academic conferences are typically barebones affairs, but PopCon 2026 had excellent support staff who ensured all of our tech—HDMI plugs, audio playback, microphones, the works—ran smoothly throughout.

As much as I love talking shop with fellow historians, learning from other folks about how they research popular music expanded my horizons, encouraging me to think more broadly about my own work as well as work from other fields. For instance, I spoke with folks working in English, American Studies, and musicology who asked me questions I’ve rarely been asked my colleagues in History, like: “What kinds of sounds are you studying? What’s their relationship to the spaces they’re created in?” And with one of those “fields” being journalism, I also considered how my scholarship could be more responsive to the everyday public discourse surrounding popular music. For instance, how could I make my work on punk accessible and interesting for a Taylor Swift fan, a rock critic, or an indie producer? The conversations I had with music critics were also a healthy reminder that scholars working in university departments have no monopoly on popular music discourse, to say nothing of intellectual conversation more generally. Writing good history—and good music journalism, for that matter—demands that we engage with a wide variety of writers and audiences.

Flying back home out of a disorienting, anxiety-inducing, congested mess of weary travelers at L.A.X., I thought to myself: “next year, let’s make like the Beach Boys and do it again!”

1. Brian Wilson, “Narrative: Cinco de Mayo”, track 9 on That Lucky Old Sun, Capitol Records, 2008, https://youtu.be/uncwPMYa3bU?si=W01KKgbfwfGBKTpJ.
2. Randy Newman, “ I Love L.A.,” track 1 on Trouble in Paradise, Warner Bros., 1983, https://youtu.be/KcADqxnQA_4?si=vsqgyBnjhQbzW78_.
3. The University of South Carolina was founded in 1801; the University of Southern California was founded nearly seventy-nine years later, in 1880.
4. Grant Wong, “You Can Study That?” Contingent Magazine, October 7, 2025, accessed May 4, 2026, https://contingentmagazine.org/2025/10/07/you-can-study-that/.
5. “About the Conference,” Pop Conference, accessed May 4, 2026, https://www.popconference.org/.
6. Marc Reyes, “Why Do Historians Go To Conferences?” Contingent Magazine, January 11, 2020, accessed May 4, 2026, https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/01/11/why-do-historians-go-to-conferences/.
7. “Travel Grants,” University of South Carolina, accessed May 4, 2026, , https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/graduate_school/tuition-funding/travel_grants/.
8. “Panel: Signal and Noise,” Pop Conference, accessed May 4, 2026, https://popcon2026.sched.com/event/2HjaG/panel-signal-noise.