Abstract
Conflict and contrast may not be officially written into the charter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), but the multi-disciplinary and multi-ideological constituency of the organization ensures that lively and often passionate debate is to be had at its meetings. Indeed, given the diversity of the national, socioeconomic, political, educational, linguistic, occupational, academic and philosophical backgrounds represented in IASPM, it is something of a wonder that the fledgling association is hanging together at all, let alone growing at such a pace. In the four brief years of its existence, IASPM has expanded to embrace a membership of over 450 musicologists, sociologists, other scholars and teachers, librarians, musicians, critics, writers, music industry people, and students and lovers of popular music from thirty-one countries in Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. The rapidity of IASPM's growth must be attributed to the urgency of the need it fills-the need for an institutional framework, on a global scale, for the exchange of viewpoints and information on that ever-expanding realm of music which no one has yet been able satisfactorily or uncontroversially to define, yet which permeates the consciousness of the modern world. Montreal is a completely bilingual city, boasting a visually striking landscape and a varied and vivid musical culture. A local newspaper's schedule of special events had the IASPM conference listed between conventions of Alcoholics Anonymous and the Jehovah's Witnesses-for some attendees of the conference, this was a graphic symbol of the peculiar epistemological position of popular music: poised somewhere between transcendence and oblivion. A bus tour afforded a sweeping glimpse of the Montreal environs, and frequent recourse was made by all attendees to the many sidewalk caf6s and night-spots along the Boulevardes Ste-Catherine and St-Denis in the locale of the Universit6 de Quebec, the gracious host institution for the conference. Among the supporters of the conference were the Ministere des Affaires culturelles du Qu6bec, the Ministere des Communications du Canada, the Departement de musique de l'Universit6 du Qu6bec a Montrdal, the Secr6tariat d'Etat du Canada (Multiculturalisme), the Ministr the topics covered were all extremely worthwhile. The eighteen paper sessions running over the five-day period that formed the bulk of the conference can be categorized as follows: -area studies (Quebecois and Canadian Popular Music; Popular Music and National Cultures; Black Popular Music in the U.S. and Caribbean; Popular Music in Latin America; South African Popular Music; Rock in a National Context) -politics and music (Poltical Interventions: the State and Popular Music; Political Interventions: Interventions into Politics; Rock for Ethiopia) -technology (Music, TV, Video; the Warm Kiss Video Project; Technology) -theoretical issues (Aesthetics & Ideology; Semiology and Popular Music) -assorted topics (Musical Analysis; Folk & the Media; Women, Popular Music, Feminism; Music & Youth Culture). The conference was conducted in English and French, with simultaneous translations of papers and comments from the floor.
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