JPMS - CALL FOR PODCAST PRODUCER

JPMS seeks a Podcast Producer to lead our new section, "The Booth"!

The Booth is a new, non-peer-reviewed, public-facing section of JPMS that consists of audio interviews with authors, artists, producers, and other industry practitioners on issues animating popular music culture.

Applicants for this unpaid position must have a PhD in a field related to musical or cultural studies, broadly defined, in addition to expertise in popular music and some audio production skills. (Prior experience in podcast production is preferred, but not required.) Responsibilities will include working with the JPMS Editorial Team on pitching content, solidifying episode direction, and identifying interviewees—and, principally, setting up, conducting, and producing audio interview podcast episodes. Episodes will be roughly twenty minutes each, hosted by JPMS, and distributed as producer and editors deem appropriate; edited episode transcripts will run as print pieces in JPMS issues. 

The Booth works in concert with the existing sections of JPMS to explore and enrich our understandings of popular music cultures, extending the spirit of the journal into the audio medium. Its goal is to make scholarly, artistic, and historical research on popular music accessible, personal, and immediate, as well as to celebrate the increasing capaciousness of contemporary presentational forms. Ideal applicants for this position will embrace these new directions in creative research and demonstrate an interest in how public humanities work interfaces with print scholarship.

The editorial term for this position is 2023–2026. To apply, please send a letter of interest and CV to ehpowell@umn.edu by December 5, taking special care to note relevant audio production skills and experiences. 

JPMS and IASPM-US Statement of Solidarity with Survivors of Sexual Assault and Harassment

2022 IASPM-US Guthrie Book Award Winners

Last year’s 2021 Guthrie Committee, faced with an abundance of excellent popular music scholarship, made the decision to split the book award into two - one award for an author’s first book, and one for a book beyond the author’s first.

This year, committee members Alex Blue V, Kate Galloway, Paula Harper, and Kathy Meizel read over 80 nominated books - again, a testament to the excitingly widening field of popular music writing.

The winner of the 2022 Guthrie First Book Award is Elliott H. Powell, Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music. (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 

Sounds from the Other Side is a revelatory study of crucial but under-recognized Afro-South Asian cultural interactions in U.S. popular music - a history of connection that has been hiding in plain sight. Dr. Powell provides richly detailed background and deeply nuanced analysis for beloved works from Coltrane to Timbaland, Truth Hurts, and Rajé Shwarmi, exploring them through frameworks of race and gender and politics—different frameworks, it is important to note, than those typically found in discussions of the cross-cultural, appropriative efforts of white musicians, and Powell’s central analytical framework of performance “from the other side” offers suggestive portability for theorizing other artists and repertoire. The book is researched with literary and ethnographic rigor and written with stunning, convincing clarity, despite its nuance. It should surely be included as required reading in future course on U.S. or global popular musics. 

For the first book award the committee would like to recognize the following finalists: 

A.D. Carson, i used to love to dream

Christi Jay Wells, Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance

Kaleb Goldschmitt, Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries

Celeste Day Moore, Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France

Kimberly Mack, Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White

The winner of the 2022 Guthrie Book Award Past the First Book is Daphne Brooks, Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Harvard University Press, 2021.

Liner Notes is an exhaustive study that doesn't feel remotely exhausting. Daphne Brooks has literally written the book on the endless and still unfolding contributions of Black women in sound, music, and everything in between. This book is a watershed moment in the field - a magisterial work that provides a consummate reorientation of the history of popular music and criticism, through the centering of Black women performers, philosophers, and critics - categories which Brooks explicitly demonstrates as overlapping ones, in the presentation of her historical interlocutors and their works.

Finalists for the award this year were:

Tyler Bickford, Tween Pop: Children’s Music and Public Culture

Andrew Jones, Circuit Listening: Chinese Popular Music in the Global 1960s

Maureen Mahon, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll

Travis Stimeling, Nashville Cats: Record Production in Music City

Congratulations to our winners and finalists. Thank you to our judges for their hard work and commitment to IASPM-US.

IASPM-US / Pop Conference 

Popular Music Books in Process Series

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