Call for Papers

… alles hat seine Zeit
(All things have their season)
Age and Ageing in Popular Music

19th Conference of the Arbeitskreis Studium Populärer Musik
(the German Association for the Study of Popular Music ASPM)
31st October – 2nd November 2008 in Akademie Remscheid near Cologne, Germany

Remember ‘Hope I die before I get old’ – that supposed pop consensus in the late sixties? Since then, the ageing process has certainly left its mark on the productive forces and forms of all genres, topics, performers and listeners of so-called popular music. The starting point of the discussion at the nineteenth ASPM conference will be the fact that such processes are not only increasingly having an impact on the production and reception of popular music – but in fact always have had.
Age as a stamp of quality in the blues and jazz, age as a blind spot in pop, or as a simulation of perennial vitality and potency in rock (Mick Jagger) but also as a sign of premature ageing (Ozzy Osbourne, Keith Richards) … Of course we will scarcely be investigating the ageing process in the artists, but rather that of the genre itself. Can we speak of a ‘later style’ in the Stones’ work? Why can pop mainstream products – after a certain safe passage of time – be termed evergreens or (in an inversion of the meaning) oldies? Are sweet sixteens immortal?
If the performers can’t be made responsible for the cliché of popular music as youth music, can we then look to blame the audiences? And what power to define ‘youthfulness’ (as in sex and drugs and rebelliousness) does popular music actually still have, when teenagers go to concerts with their Mamas and Papas?

At the ‘… alles hat seine Zeit’ conference, German-language popular music scholars will be looking at this topic for the first time. We warmly invite scholars of all disciplines interested in the multifarious questions and processes of ageing in popular music to contribute.
Selected contributions on the focus topic of the conference will be published after peer review in the Beiträge zur Popularmusikforschung (Contributions to Popular Music Research) series ( Bielefeld : transcript-Verlag).
The languages of the conference and the publication will be German and English.

Papers should be registered at the ASPM office with title and abstract by 1st April 2008:

Arbeitskreis Studium Populärer Musik e.V.
Ahornweg 154
25469 Halstenbek
Germany

or mailed to Alenka Barber-Kersovan

Further details can be found on our website: Arbeitskreis Studium Populärer Musik