https://music.wustl.edu/xml/events/16952/rss.xml
22301

Department of Music Lecture: Varun Chandrasekhar

Varun Chandrasekhar, PhD student in Music Theory

(Conference: International Association for the Study of Popular Music-U.S. Chapter)

Title

“CAN I STILL GET INTO HEAVEN IF I KILL MYSELF”:
La Dispute and Emo’s Suburban Whiteness

Abstract

Michigan-based emo band La Dispute “King Park” chronicles the death of an unintended teenage victim of a drive-by shooting. The song, narrated by a ghost who follows the shooter as he attempts to flee the police, climaxes with the murderer screaming, “Can I still get into Heaven if I kill myself” as a way to avoid his oncoming punishment. Shockingly, the song ends abruptly, offering no resolution to the story’s tragedy. Although the song does not explicitly state that the shooter was Black, the lyrical reference to endemic gang violence in a city with a relatively large Black population signals Blackness, which contrasts against La Dispute’s generally white performance style (Kajikawa 2023).
 
I argue that the song should be read as an exemplar of emo’s complex relationship to its own whiteness. I argue that emo reflects the contradictions that emerge out of white flight to the suburbs. La Dispute’s treatment of the narrator, a literal ghost, symbolizes the white desire to be aware of, but safely distanced from, Black culture. If the suburbs used whiteness to implicitly confirm their “homogeneity, containment, and predictability” (Avila 2006, 6), then La Dispute, through making their whiteness hypervisible (Dyer 1997, Yancy 2012), notes how such suburban flight (which gave birth to emo) constructs an urban Other. I provide a hermeneutic reading of the song’s incomplete ending, noting how the song ends without a clear conclusion, arguing the incompleteness expresses a racialized understanding of Carillo-Vincent’s (2013, 38) claim that emo is a “normative critique of normativity.”
 

Biography

Varun's research reframes discussions of "freedom" in jazz cultures through a lens of Sartrean existentialism. Building upon Sartre's claim that freedom is the anxious reality of being forced to take action in an objectively meaningless world, Varun argues that jazz represents the freedom of enduring the absurdities of the racialized existence of its musicians. Varun then applies these insights to explicate the life and music of the jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, arguing that Mingus's eccentric, exaggerated, and enigmatic actions demonstrate the anxious existence of the jazz musician.

In addition to his work on jazz, Varun also studies pop-punk and emo music, highlighting the ways the genres respond to the depressing state of neoliberal decay. In the Spring of 2026, Varun will host "A Conference...But It's Midwestern Emo," the first conference dedicated to the study of emo music.

Varun has had articles published in the journals Jazz and Culture, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Musicology Now, and reviews published in The Journal for the Society of American Music, The Journal of Jazz Studies, and The Journal of Musicological Research. Varun has presented his research at a litany of national and international conferences, including all three major music conferences (AMS, SMT, SEM), Cultural Studies Conferences, Jazz Studies Conferences, and Popular Music Studies Conferences. Varun's research has been supported by WashU's Center for the Humanities Graduate Student Fellowship and WashU's American Cultural Studies Department's Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellow. He is also an affiliate of WashU's Center for the Study of Race, Equity, and Ethnicity.