The Listening Party

AA scholar Karen Tongson was in Seattle over the weekend to present at a pop music conference at the EMP, and made a stop at UW to speak on her research on suburban spaces in Southern California and the 80s British invasion in music. Tongson's talk was one of the most innovative lectures that I have ever been to - crossing disciplines in the way that the most avant garde academics and artists aspire to but don't quite make the cut - (I'm thinking now of a poetry reading at Gallery 1412 in Seattle I saw several months ago where another audience member I talked to actually nodded off in the middle of a "multimedia" presentation). Anyways, Tongson's approach was to embed carefully selected video files of suburban themed music and film into a PowerPoint presentation. She'd talk about suburban dystopia and culture, cue song (i.e. Pet Shop Boys' "Suburbia"), talk about the lyrics, turn the sound down and continue her talk, synchronizing the timing of her talk to the songs - in playing The Smiths' "There is a Light That Will Never Go Out" she talked about the boredom of suburban spaces, driving in cars waiting for something to happen, or to stumble upon something. Like me, Tongson grew up in the suburb of Riverside, and the images, songs, and stories that Tongson shared, had a deep resonance for me. She called her lecture a "listening party" and talked about intimate re-enactments, which led me back to Phil Collin's Dallas show of Smiths karaoke singers from around the world in "The World Won't Listen" and the power of finding innovation and creativity in the repetition of what is a seemingly static zone - i.e. the Inland Empire.