Contact: Maridith Geuder
An assistant professor of English at Mississippi State offers sound evidence that American popular music is a mirror of the nation's life and history.
George Evans Light, a Shakespearean scholar also specializing in contemporary culture and music, recently assembled a compact disc collection of eclectic 20th century music. His efforts will be featured next week at the Experience Music Project conference in Seattle, Wash., which he will attend.
Founded by philanthropist Paul G. Allen, EMP is a 140,000-square-foot interactive music museum of more than 80,000 artifacts, interpretive exhibits and educational programming. Its Thursday-Sunday [April 11-14] conference at the Seattle Center will include presentations by more than 100 academic, journalistic and music industry representatives on topics ranging from digital and punk music to jazz and blues.
"This is the first conference EMP has convened to highlight pop music studies," Light said. The invitation to curate the musical selections developed from his long involvement with pop music, he added.
Light said his musical collection is titled "The Nick Hornsby Sessions." Named for the author of the novel "High Fidelity," the CD selections are inspired by conference participants and include both famous and relatively unknown tunes from alternative, rock, country, and urban music, as well as selections from local bands.
Interspersed with personal commentary, a Eudora Welty short story and outtakes from radio personalities, the audio collage is designed to reflect the personal and professional diversities of conference topics, Light explained.
EMP education program director Eric Weisbard said he was intrigued by the fact that Light--an academic--has extensive experience as a disc jockey. "I thought it would be a great way to bring him into the mix of the conference," he added.
Weisbard's decision is equally significant because of his other title: music critic of The Village Voice, the Pulitzer Prize-winning alternative publication founded in 1955 in New York City. Now America's largest weekly newspaper, the Voice has established an international reputation for groundbreaking reporting on music, art, culture, and politics, among other areas.
Weisbard said Light's approximately one-hour CD "will be played during lunch meetings, with additional notes in the program booklet and information about the songs on the EMP Web site." (Visit http://www.emplive.com/visit/education/pop_music.asp)
Light began developing a professional interest in pop music studies while completing graduate studies at Stanford University in the late 1980s and early '90s. When not in class or the library at the Palo Alto, Calif., school, he was host for a variety of music and news programs on campus station KZSU-FM.
California was not his first experience behind the mike, however. During earlier study at Great Britain's University of York, Light said he was the single on-air American personality at the island nation's oldest independent radio station.
Light continues his hands-on involvement at MSU by serving as a volunteer disc jockey for campus station WMSV-FM. The 14,000-watt, 24-hour station broadcasts an Alternative/Triple A music format and special weekend musical programming to a 60-mile radius of Starkville.
When discussing popular music, Light clearly is not a person of lightweight opinions. A good example is a commentary posted with the CD on the EMP site in which he observes that the rock-and-roll genre that characterized the 20th century is being replaced in the new century by what he dubs "noise rock." He defines "noise rock" as sound transformed by electronics, non-traditional instrumentation and post-production editing.
In addition to a master's degree from York and a doctorate from Stanford, Light holds a bachelor's from Harvard University. When not focused on pop music, he writes about early modern English culture from alehouses and theater to naming practices, memory and identity.
Light's literary research has been published in such professional journals as The Explicator, Albion, Renaissance Quarterly, and Social History of Alcohol Review.