2005 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Fred Maus
University of Virginia

Fred Everett Maus teaches music at the University of Virginia; he was a Visiting Fellow in Music and Popular Music, University of Liverpool, 2002. His research interests include music theory and analysis, gender and sexuality, popular music, aesthetics, and dramatic and narrative aspects of classical instrumental music. The present proposal is part of an ongoing project on sexuality in 1980s pop; "Glamour and Evasion: The Fabulous Ambivalence of the Pet Shop Boys," appeared in _Popular Music_ 20/3 (2001), and an essay on REM and closeted sexuality is forthcoming. Other publications have appeared in a range of books and musicology journals and in the _New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians_. He has had administrative roles in several conferences in the series "Feminist Theory and Music" and was in charge of local arrangements for IASPM-US, 2004 in Charlottesville. He is a member of the editorial board of _Women and Music_ and is co-chair of the Queer Resource Group of the Society for Music Theory. Panel(s):
Dance and Resistance
Friday, April 15, 2005, 2:00 - 3:30Abstract:

"Mourning and Identity in a B-52''s Song"
The B-52''s have a reputation for party music and campy fun, exemplified in their biggest hit, "Love Shack." But their music can also be understood as serious and politically engaged, for instance in the gorgeous autobiographical song "Deadbeat Club" (1989), a collective act of remembering and a project of self-definition, depicting their early years together in Athens.

The song remembers in order to rearticulate an identity that the B-52''s once had. Bringing the past ambiguously into the present, particularly through its over-emphatic climaxes on a present-tense assertion of past identity, the song raises the question whether a past identity still obtains - even while the subdued musical style, free of the campy stylistic allusions and danceable rock rhythms that characterize the early style of the B-52''s, marks the distance from the depicted past.

Less overt in the text of the song is the role of mourning. "Deadbeat Club" was the first song created by the B-52''s as they recovered from the loss of band member Ricky Wilson. It is a song of mourning for him, one of the most moving songs about AIDS. Like the music of the B-52''s generally, it exemplifies and implicitly praises the warmth and effervescence of friendship between women and gay men. And its memory of hedonism can be heard as ambivalently mourning and hoping to maintain the hard-won pleasures and defiant freedoms of the years before AIDS. In responding to AIDS through affirmation of the importance of pleasure, it anticipates the superb album _Good Stuff_ (1992).