Assistant Professors Elena Romero and Emil Wilbekin, both Marketing Communications, both presented at the 2025 PopCon Conference held at Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.
PopCon, a premier music-writing and popular music studies conference, was organized by the USC Thornton School of Music with the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) and Critical Minded. This year’s theme, “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge,” emphasized how fashion and music serve as powerful forms of expression, critique, and rebellion.
Romero, who is also assistant chair of the Marketing Communications department, presented “Hip Hop and Pink: How the Color Transcended Gender, Sexuality, and Multiple Generations One Hue at a Time.” Romero’s presentation explored the evolving relationship between hip hop and pink, examining how its adoption by artists and moguls have challenged tradition notions of masculinity, femininity, identity and aesthetics in urban culture. Her presentation was part of the “Remixing Bodies, Getting into Gender Trouble: Music, Style and Genre” panel.
Professor Wilbekin was part of the “Vibe Revived: Reflections from VIBE Magazine’s Trailblazing Writers and Editors” closing ceremony as part of the USC Thornton School of Music’s yearlong series “Quincy Jones: Beyond Category.” In 1992, Jones launched VIBE magazine out of Time Warner’s Time Publishing Ventures—which also published Martha Stewart Living. VIBE became an influential magazine that forever changed the landscape of Black popular culture. Under Wilbekin’s leadership as editor-in-chief, VIBE won the National Magazine Award, beating out such titles as The New Yorker.
The panel was moderated by Jason King, dean of the Thornton School of Music at USC, and also featured journalists and professors Scott Poulson Bryant of Michigan State University, Joan Morgan of New York University (NYU), and Rob Kenner from the Clive Davis School at NYU, who all were founding editors and writers at VIBE.