Over the weekend of April 12-20, I attended the EMP Pop Conference at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and recapped the event for The GRAMMYs blog. You can read it in entirety below or on GRAMMY.com {here}.

Curating The Pop Soundscape: EMP Conference Examines The Role Of Music In Cleveland

(Launched by the Experience Music Project in Seattle in 2002, the EMP Pop Conference is designed to convene academics, critics, artists, and fans in a collective discussion. This year's EMP Pop Conference took place April 17-21 in Seattle, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York.)

The very opinionated public notions about how we should preserve and honor the roots of pop culture are a reality the staff of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame faces every day. In the museum's inaugural hosting of the Cleveland installment of the EMP Pop Conference April 19–20, scholars and fans gathered to discuss, debate and sometimes dismantle how we curate the popular music standard and its potential to shape a city.

It was a weekend spent tracing the way we retell the stories of songs that have transcended generations and the uncertain future of the digital age. That means deconstructing the use of Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" to teach social force or tracking the evolution of blues from Muddy Waters to Adele, explained Rock Hall education instructor Kathryn Metz, and examining how Pandora recommendations, dueling online blogs and YouTube comments influence our tastes. And with the advent of a digital age, the floodgates of information have been opened to both rock archivists and casual consumers.

"We're not just going to preserve things in a dark room forever," said newly appointed Rock Hall President/CEO Greg Harris. "We want to make things accessible so you can take it further, beyond what we're doing."

Within the walls of the Rock Hall's recently established Library & Archives where the conference began with a tour, boxes of documents from the files of eminent punk label Kill Rock Stars share shelf space with those of Elvis Presley and indie 'zines sit snugly near vintage issues of Rolling Stone.

"The garage where people play music — the fan 'zine, the club, the street corner — those spaces of subculture have always existed in relationship to official institutions," said Northwestern University faculty member Michael J. Kramer, "and I think we can continue in our teaching to help our students think about those relationships without posing them against each other."

 

Over the past year, I’ve had the incredible opportunity to help tell the stories of a number of equally incredible people through Cellar Door Cleveland, Ingenuity Cleveland, Weapons of Mass Creation conference, and Brite Winter.

To say the Midwest has a nation trying to tell our story for us is an understatement. This is a small selection of Clevelanders rewriting those narratives and redefining what it means to be from our city. Like all interviews, these started as local artists explaining their work but ended up teaching me about technology, race, feminism, comic books, punk rock landmarks, Cleveland counterculture, and the past, present, and future of where we live.

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short form q&a posts for WMC Fest 2012 can be found here.

(Endless gratitude for letting me be a part – Justin and Allie at Cellar Door, James and Jamie at Ingenuity, Jeff and Jesse at WMC Fest, Tom at Brite.) All Cellar Door graphics by Justin Markert, all others by me.

AllGoSigns: How the Underground Art Event is Redefining Public Space at Arts in August

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Now approaching ten years of operating primarily below the radar, the experimental art warehouse in Near West Cleveland has spent the last decade producing some of the city’s most visually astounding projects. “When I first started, I was just trying to do that memorable event,” Karnak explains, “and the first people that I found that supported what I was doing was the DIY artist community. I wanted something that was positive and social, and the artists just came to me because I think they recognized that I was going to respect what they did.”

TurnStyle Films

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“I love Dag House because it’s so tucked away,” explains Nix on both filming and countless times bringing friends to the Cleveland landmark. “You get down this hill and it’s magical. Like Narnia.”

“The Narnia of punk rock,” Andrego cuts in.

Rob Sherwood

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If the Kokoon Arts Club that Bal Ingenieux is inspired by marked a turn-of-the-century bohemian art community, Sherwood may have been their reincarnated hero of the new wave underground. “But the people who came to support me on a funky Tuesday night were ten times as cool as the people who came to the Saturday night party that was the big thing.”

Red, White, and Blueprints: A Rust Belt Documentary

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“I think having these people in a room shifts how we talk. The vocabulary we use is designed to alienate people that actually live in a city — acronyms, giant weird words, you can’t just call something a street. That’s an incredible misstep because we’re not simplifying this,” says Storey. “And how can you anticipate solving an actual problem that includes people without bringing people to the table? We can complain all day long that they’re not there, but we’re having meetings about meetings about meetings about meetings using code names and we’re so secretive about what we’re doing. It’s really problematic.”

I was so honored and thrilled to be asked to contribute a series of artist and musician interviews for this year's Brite Winter Festival, an outdoor festival hosted throughout Ohio City every February. You can keep up with the entire series {HERE}.

I'm also now on Tumblr! Follow me {HERE}.

Music Spotlight: Matt Hectorne & the Family Tree // Read the entire interview {HERE}.

Hanging around the green room below the Beachland Ballroom, Matt Hectorne seems at his most content talking church music and his Mississippi upbringings when the conversation comes to a halt and a smile breaks behind a grizzly beard. “‘I’ll Fly Away,’” he points upstairs in approval to the Womack Family Band’s psychedelic rendition of the spiritual standard taking place on stage that’s echoing through the floor. In 20 minutes he’ll take the stage himself for the last time with Humble Home. In five months he’ll move to Nashville.

Music Spotlight: Thaddeus Anna Greene // Read the entire interview {HERE}.

On the night Thaddeus Anna Greene released Directory of Thieves, he stood in front of the American flag backdrop of Bad Racket Recording Studios and, with a brash grin and gleam in his eyes, chanted the modernized Gary Clark Jr. line in Jimmy Reed’s classic, “You gonna know my name by the end of the night”. Today, the 22-year-old gives a likely response when asked if he’s worn thin on Hendrix comparisons over the past year but, between all the steamy, mid-summer swagger, in that moment I couldn’t have helped but to expect Greene to light his Fender on fire with the velocity of infamous Monterey Pop Festival “Wild Thing” grandeur.

Music + Art Spotlight: Melissa Olson (icatchfoxes) // Read the entire interview {HERE}.

Sitting in a busy coffee shop nestled below Coventry Village in Cleveland Heights, Melissa Olson is tall and bright-eyed with blonde hair that falls past her shoulders. Even three months after returning to Ohio, she is in essence everything the Beach Boys meant when they said they wish they all could be California girls. Because that’s how we perceive the sun-streaked coastlines personified. And we’ve become so accustomed to the American tales of our own coordinates on the map that sometimes we have to leave first to learn how to truly tell them.

Music Spotlight: Meridian // Read the entire interview {HERE}.

Max Stern is sitting in a buddy’s apartment somewhere around Brooklyn, New York and in less than 24 hours he’ll board a plane to Israel. It only seems appropriate for someone who penned an entire album themed around deconstructing the trials and constraints of distance that before he returns to Cleveland to record the follow-up to Signals Midwest’s acclaimed 2011 album, Latitudes and Longitudes, he’ll spend the next three weeks wandering around territory transatlantic.