St. Louis fans will get to hear, celebrate and learn about all things emo in a totally not-emo way thanks to a new conference on the genre in April.
“A Conference … but it’s Midwest Emo,” will be held at Washington University School of Music. The conference will include free academic talks that will cover the genre’s history and evolution. The event will be the first academic conference on the genre, co-organizer and Washington University Ph.D. candidate Varun Chandrasekhar said.
“There's a certain amount of gatekeeping and misunderstanding, and there's not necessarily a scholarly appetite for these things we're saying,” Chandrasekhar said. “We really need a place to talk about this because this music is important not only to us personally, but speaks to a plethora of cultural issues and touchstones as they exist in the 21st century.”
Chandrasekhar organized the conference with Patrick Mitchell, a University of Cincinnati graduate student. Chandrasekhar said there’s a small but growing library of writings and studies on the genre. A lot of conversations on the genre focus on its gender politics — the conference will expound on those conversations and include perspectives that aren’t always at the forefront of genre conversations, including abstracts on LGBTQ perspectives, he added. The conference will also include conversations on the genre's decades-long cultural impact.
Emo emerged out of the Washington hardcore rock scene of the mid-1980s. Since then, it’s evolved into different eras and styles including Midwest Emo, a subgenre with roots in middle America that includes groups like American Football, based in Urbana, and the recently dissolved St. Louis-based band Foxing. The subgenre experiments with guitar rifts and fuses indie rock styles
The conference will feature keynotes from American Football drummer and University of Colorado-Boulder associate professor Steve Lamos and music journalist and author Dan Ozzi.
Ozzi has followed the genre’s evolution over the past few decades.
“It was a very dismissed subgenre of music that probably wouldn't even get covered in, like an alternative magazine or paper or something like that,” Ozzi said. “Now the genre is such a big business with festivals built around it that finally, we are breaching into academic territory as well.”
Universities have offered courses on the Beatles, Beyonce and Taylor Swift. Now Chandrasekhar said he’s happy to bring a similar, more academic lens to emo.
“Whether or not it's good or bad, that emo scholarship is always a little bit behind is one thing, but I think it's important to then clarify what do these things mean as the world evolves,” Chandrasekhar said.
The conference will conclude at Platypus in the Grove with performances by Mitchell's band Girl Gordon and Chandrasekhar's group Silly Little Emo Band.
The conference will run April 10-11 at Washington University School of Music and Platypus.
