Pop life.

I really wish I could attend the Experience Music Project's annual Project Pop Conference. It's held every year at the EMP museum in Seattle and looking over this year's itinerary, I see that it's as delightfully obtuse and esoteric as ever.

Dig: critic Julianne Sheppard presents The Bad Sister Does Self-Defense: How Courtney Love Turned Her Yellow Wallpaper into a Room of Her Own. ("By owning the public's failure wish for her and morphing it into a grotesque pictorial of the LA Woman – and desecrating 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' the song that symbolically held her hostage—Courtney Love has turned the tables on her detractors, using their weapon as her own.")
Yes.

Better yet, Duke University's Jessica Wood presents Poop As Hard As Rock: Putting the ‘Anal’ in Analysis. ("Taking 'Hairspray Queen' and 'Mexican Seafood' as case studies, I suggest ways that urination can sound lyrical, dry heaves rhythmic and nausea like a stagnant diminished seventh chord within [Kurt] Cobain’s aesthetic.")
Best.

And check out these other lecture titles:

• “Accidentally, Like A Mensch: The 'Good' Death of Warren Zevon”
  
• “Air Guitar: There’s No 'There' There. Or Is There?”
  
• “Beautiful World: The Cultural Politics of Devo in Television Advertising”
  
• “Faux-'mo Crooners and the Straight Girls Who Love Them”
  
• “Girl on Girl: Bio-Queens, Fat Femmes, and Re-radicalizing the Gender-Fuck”
  
• “Pimp My Bach: The Strange Case of Classical Samples in Hip-Hop”
  
• “Un(w)rapping the Faggotry in Hip-Hop”

And that's just the first day! (In case you were wondering, my favorite day two lecture is entitled “I Walked With a Juggalo: The music, the Message, the Makeup.” Yes indeed, Insane Clown Posse is gettin' some mad intellectual love.)
If only, if only...