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22301

Department of Music Lecture: Varun Chandrasekhar & Bryce Noe

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.

Bryce Noe, PhD student in Musicology

Title

"The 'Death' and Revival of Freestyle Skateboarding"

Abstract

Freestyle—the earliest subdiscipline of skating whereby practitioners perform choreographed routines to self-selected music on open, flat terrain—has become a taboo topic of inquiry in dominant skateboard circles. Dominant skateboarding media represent freestyle as an old-school form of skateboarding that died in the early 1990s and remains dead. Additionally, publications in skateboard studies either overlook freestyle or describe the subdiscipline as constituting an early stage of skateboarding’s evolution (i.e., the 1960s–1980s) (Borden, 2019; O’Connor, 2018). And yet, 2025 was one of the most eventful years in freestyle history with 19 contests happening in seven countries, a World Championships that garnered 108 competitors, and the revival of the World Freestyle Skateboard Association. Freestyle, which experienced a hiatus in the 1990s, is now a thriving pocket of skateboard culture. But why is freestyle misrepresented as “dead” or a topic avoided altogether (i.e., the secret past of skating) within the mainstream skateboard industry? This paper illustrates (1) how the hypermasculinity of street skateboarding and its homophobia in the late 1980s contributed to the “death” and discursive suppression of freestyle and (2) the ways in which the modern-day freestyle scene leverages its mainstream image as “dead” to stay alive. Freestyle’s supposed death-knell can be attributed to Steve Rocco’s efforts to amplify the machismo image of skateboarding through his company World Industries (1987–) and magazine Big Brother (1992–2004). These two business ventures promulgated skateboarding as a gritty and degenerative street culture whereby engaging in dangerous acts on urban structures—street skating—and demonstrating pain tolerance and aggression when falling were markers of an unruly and stoic masculinity that became riders’ currency for magazine coverage and credibility.
 
This shift in skateboarding’s mainstream values not only subordinated freestyle as effeminate or “gay” due to its emphasis on mostly male bodies enacting refined, graceful routines to music for “safe” contest environments; it also catapulted the subdiscipline into its “dark age” (1992–2000) when brands stopped manufacturing freestyle boards and no one organized freestyle contests. Practitioners, fortunately, resuscitated their subpractice in the early 2000s through organizing low-budget and grassroots “reunion” contests as well as creating internet forums that fostered a tight-knit global community. Keeping their scene relatively small and developing an insular subculture that operates in resistance to the hegemonic skateboard industry are also ways freestylers yield their collective friendship. As professional rider Tony Gale (2021) states, “[W]ith freestyle being so marginalized for so long, we became this tight-knit tribe that was very self-policing because we were protecting it.” Freestylers fear that they might lose control over and access to their community if it becomes too widespread. As such, freestyle companies like Moonshine and Decomposed denounce any involvement from the mainstream skateboard world and screenprint “Keeping Freestyle Dead” on their product. Freestylers are abhorrent toward being “revived” and embrace performing within skateboarding’s oft-neglected and feminized subpractice. This paper is not meant to “revive” freestyle but rather revise erroneous discourse on the subdiscipline and shed light on how these practitioners are navigating the margins of skateboarding.
 

Biography

Bryce studies choreography and sound in sport settings. In particular, he examines sporting spaces and events as sites whereby knowledge—both semantic and somatic—is transmitted sonically. Additional research interests include disability studies, popular music, and urban musicology. Prior to graduate study at Washington University in St. Louis, Bryce earned his Master of Music degree in Musicology at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. His master’s thesis, “Freestyle Soundscapes: An Acoustemology of Freestyle Skateboarding Contests,” is an exploration of freestyle skateboarders’ engagement with music and sound during contests as well as the (sub)cultural and gender politics embedded within such sporting spaces.