In 2012, the National Football League (NFL) hired pop superstar Madonna to headline its Super Bowl Halftime Show. Her spectacle of hits and guest artists attracted the most viewers ever recorded. But because the annual event catered to disparate audiences-football fans and those more interested in its musical performances and commercials-viewers disagreed about the quality and purpose of Madonna's show: some criticized it as bland and confusing while others called it bold and revolutionary. As this paper discusses, the ensuing debate suggested implications beyond Madonna's own reception: it signaled the extent to which the event's pop programming confronted and challenged the hegemonic norms that govern the NFL game and the sanctity of its "turf."   
In this talk I historicize why Super Bowl programmers have, since the mid-1990s, strived to attract new audiences with pop performances, and use the reception of Madonna's show to theorize how the game and its musical interludes operate within what I have termed their own "circuits of spectacle" to communicate specific and often polarized values. By combining studies of media and cultural theory (Hall 1996, 1997; Kellner 2003; and James 2010) and music in sports (cf. McLeod, 2011), with musical and visual analysis, I show that the overlapping of these circuits causes their opposing ideological frameworks to become incendiary: the program thus becomes most provocative when the game's displays of violent, masculine athleticism, and nationalism occur in the same space as the politics of musical performances featuring marginalized bodies otherwise unwelcome into the sport. I therefore argue that the criticism received by Madonna and other Super Bowl acts-artists of color, LGBTQIA, women, disabled, black, and aging-boils down debates about whose bodies are permitted on the field and what politics they (should) endorse, mirroring larger problems that "play out" in US society.

"A Night-Club Map of Harlem" (E. Simms Campbell, 1932) shows a network of about two dozen venues (including the Savoy Ballroom and Cotton Club), noting in one section, "there are clubs opening and closing at all times-There's too many to put them all on this map." It is a vibrant mapping of one of the most important times and places for jazz. Mapping music community networks like this has recently received attention, including Sara Cohen's Popular Musicscapes (Liverpool) and John O'Flynn's Mapping Popular Music in Dublin projects. In this paper I map out how rock first arrived and then flourished in downtown New York City. Focusing on venues and social contexts, including low rents, bohemianism, political radicalism, and alternative newspapers, I examine the terrain as a landscape with historically dynamic, socially constructed places, each a unique phenomenological space. I contrast Greenwich Village with the newly christened East Village citing two homegrown bands beginning in the summer of 1965: the Lovin' Spoonful, and the Fugs. Their musical differences clearly reflect their home turfs: the Night Owl (Spoonful) in the West; and the Bridge Theater (Fugs) in the East. The Lower East Side also provided the home and staging ground (the Dom) for the Velvet Underground in 1966 (and the rise of CBGB almost a decade later). Jimi Hendrix straddled the geocultural divide, struggling in Greenwich Village clubs (1966) and producing Band of Gypsys (1970) at the East Village Fillmore East. The Café Au Go Go (capacity 375) shifting from jazz to rock in 1965 was key, laying the groundwork for the Fillmore (capacity 2,650) in 1968. The scene declined when Bill Graham closed the Fillmore in 1971 as rock had momentarily outgrown downtown sensibilities. This paper is part of a larger project mapping downtown New York music culture.

The "British Invasion" of the 1960s and "Second British Invasion" of the late-1970s/early-1980s are both celebrated moments in the history of American popular music. Both came about through the influence of Black musical aesthetic priorities, from the Western hemisphere, on white British youth. This paper explores the impacts of British identity on the reception of popular music performed by Black British artists (specifically working at the juncture of R&B and Pop) during the 1980s. While the influence of American R&B/Soul on white British acts has been well documented-David Brackett (2016), for example, shows how the chart successes of these artists destabilized categories used to index African American popular music-far less attention has been given to Black British artists. I am interested in examining how the intersections of racial and national identity shaped not only stylistic decisions but also their reception in the American music market. In particular, I consider how this mixing of race and place disrupts notions of performative authenticity that center R&B's Blackness in the American South or urban Midwest-resulting in skewed standards for musical evaluation. This paper focuses specifically on the Black British R&B/Pop group, Five Star, and their inability to break into the American market despite astounding success in the U.K. In spotlighting Five Star as a Black British R&B/Pop group that intentionally chose to downplay their Caribbean connections-aiming instead for a more mainstream (Black American) R&B legibility-I argue that the group represent a particularly illuminating case study for unraveling the connections between race, place, musical authenticity, and genre formulation.

In 1951, the jazz musician Herman Blount co-founded the Thmei Research group, a secret society that studied a variety of esoteric literature, including classic Theosophical writings, lost continent narratives, and UFO testimonials. In 1952, Blount began performing as Sun Ra, an Egyptian space god returning to earth to offer musical salvation to black Americans suffering from racial injustice. This paper takes a closer look at how the imaginary landscapes proposed by Theosophy shaped Ra's performing persona and his construction of a secret spiritual trajectory for black Americans.
Theosophy identified Egypt and India as the sources of a universal ancient wisdom-religion, displacing Christian Euro-American claims to superior spiritual enlightenment. Theosophy's anthropogenesis across imaginary locations such as Lemuria and Atlantis provided a compelling alternative to mainstream scientific race theories used to justify social inequality and colonialism. Theosophists aimed to create a "universal brotherhood" involving all humanity, and their anti-colonial activity in India and Ghana had already established a link between esotericism and political action in the early twentieth century.
Ra's notes from his esoteric preaching in Chicago's Washington Park and his album Atlantis (1967-9) reveal his engagement with Theosophical texts. Ra believed American blacks had not come from West Africa, but rather had descended from the Atlanteans, a lost civilization of giants who used advanced technology to build pyramids in Egypt and the Yucatan. Ra believed his music could bring about an "altered destiny" for black Americans, fulfilling Theosophy's prophecy of the World Teacher. Ra's film Space is the Place (1974) concludes with a performance of his Intergalactic Arkestra that dematerializes human bodies and transports them to another planet, where they form an Edenic colony free from earth's racial oppression. Ra's creative reception of Theosophy illustrates its generative potential, but his rejection of "universal brotherhood" reveals its limitations.

Through oral history, I document in this paper how Texas-Mexican popular musical practices-
or música tejana, after Manuel Peña-created a space through which Tejana/o migrant laborers
in Michigan and the Midwest could maintain a cultural connection to their Tejana/o roots.
Initially performed and enjoyed in Michigan by Tejana/o migrants as a respite from the toils of
farm labor or factory work, as these workers settled out of the migrant stream a network of
Texas-Mexican musical communities emerged in Michigan. Local bands formed and
enterprising migrants established radio programs, record labels, and a circuit of dancehalls and
cantinas. Though still connected closely to the evolution of música tejana back in Texas through
continued migration, tours of the Midwest by Texas-based musicians, and distribution of records
from Texas, by the late-1960s to early-1970s a distinct industry for Texas-Mexican music had
manifested in Michigan, which I call música michicana. Employing Josh Kun's (2005) notion of
"audiotopias," or "small, momentary, lived utopias built, imagined, and sustained through sound,
noise, and music" (p. 21), I argue that música michicana functioned and continues to function as
a means by which Texas-Mexican migrants and their descendants in Michigan maintain ties to
Texas and reinforce a shared sense of Tejana/o identity.

Tin Pan Alley. Bluegrass. Paisley Park. The Ryman. Popular musics play a significant role in shaping people's concepts of place, whether a place becomes a marker of a particular sound or a musical genre becomes a stand-in for an entire region. Popular musics additionally create spaces for the listener, and factors connected to a performance space can radically alter the meaning of a song.
This panel welcomes presentations that use geography, local oral history, genre formation, and media studies to uncover the interactions between music, place, and space. Together, the presenters explore how popular music has constructed a number of place-based identities––ranging from regional to national, and even intergalactic––and how the sites of popular music performance become spaces where issues of race, ethnicity, and gender are contested and reinforced.
Richard Cruz Davila (Michigan State University), "Música Michicana: A Texas-Mexican Audiotopia in the Midwest"
Anna Gawboy (The Ohio State University), "Place, Race, and Space: Sun Ra's Esoteric Geographies"
Joanna Love (University of Richmond), "Turf Wars: Hearing Resistant Bodies at the Super Bowl"
Anthony Kwame Harrison (Virginia Tech), "I Didn't Know They Were British: The Impacts of British Identity on Black R&B Success"
Eric Charry (Wesleyan University), "Mapping Rock History in Downtown New York, 1965-1975"