At the opening plenary session of the Experience Music Project's 2006 Pop Conference, I watched 100 people sit quietly and listen very closely to a song called "Shame." Taken from Savage, Eurythmics' 1987 concept album of musical inversions, "Shame" was a nod to this year's theme: "Ain't That a Shame": Loving Music in the Shadow of Doubt. As the song played, some people adopted the "casual" listening pose, smiling weakly and tapping their feet to the rhythm. Others opted for the "serious" listening pose, which involves leaning forward, narrowing your eyes and actually scratching your chin. On stage, the Magnetic Fields' Stephin Merritt bobbed his head and stared into space. Matmos's Drew Daniel took notes.

"Casual" and "serious" fought like Godzilla and Mothra at the conference, whose fascinating and thoroughly entertaining panels inverted the scholar's distanced pose and reexamined the assumptions and pretensions behind critics' roles as guardians and gatekeepers of culture.

The Pop Conference attracts a few very serious music people—the type whose idea of "cutting loose" is listening to remastered Dylan albums. But the event's bread and butter are the country's most dedicated and passionate music critics, people who make their livings "$50 at a time," as the Dean of American Rock Critics Robert Christgau puts it. And they all got up at the very un–rock 'n' roll hour of 9:00 a.m. each day to unpack and analyze the music they're really not supposed to like.

(Full disclosure: Like many attendees, I was also a speaker at the conference, giving a very serious lecture about the musical depth and enduring influence of Koji Kondo's theme from Super Mario Bros.)

Serious music heads will put little asterisks above the artists they're embarrassed to love—Merritt made a point of noting that he liked some of the Dandy Warhols' chord progressions, while his bandmate LD Beghtol used his appreciation of finger cymbals to justify his love of Kelis's "Milkshake." But as the conference wore on, those asterisks disappeared, the critical impulse was turned on critical techniques themselves, and their genuine joy and passion for music shone through.

This vibe reached its peak with Christgau's emotional defense of crunk, trap, and other forms of "politically incorrect" gangster music, delivered with the combination of intensity, frankness, and intellectual honesty that was commonplace in the Village Voice's heyday, yet so rare today.

Critic Randall Roberts eviscerated the concept of critical rating systems and "definitive" record guides, using an obsessive statistical analysis and some choice quotes to poke fun at the 1984 Rolling Stone Record Guide—whose reviewers responded with a collective "meh" to later critical favorites like the Rolling Stones' "Some Girls" and Blondie's "Rapture"—and in turn make light of the critic's tendency to organize and stack-rank records to determine precisely which ones really matter.

The Stranger's own Kurt B. Reighley gave an informed and entertaining talk about the Hi-Los, an obscure Eisenhower-era vocal group whose bizarre harmonies and complicated phrasing influenced sunshine-pop bands like the Free Design, the Association, and the Mamas & the Papas, but have yet to be rediscovered by history. Tom Kipp offered a thorough reexamination of Kim Fowley's Outrageous, the incomprehensible 1968 shock-rock album with the dubious honor of being the only record to ever get an F in the four-decade grading history of Christgau's Consumer Guide. (Sonic Youth, on the other hand, called it "the best album ever made.")

Geeta Dayal, who gave up a career in neuroscience to be a music journalist, explored the scientific basis for guilty pleasures with a survey of current research on music and the brain. It's mostly horseshit. She debunked the theory that "Mozart makes you smarter," as further research showed that white noise was a more effective tool for concentration. She also noted that the link between sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll is now proven by science, as modern imaging techniques have shown that the brain responds to each in remarkably similar ways.

Doubt casts long shadows over music criticism. The notion of "guilty pleasures" implies that not all pleasure is guiltless—I had thought that for serious music people, guiltless pleasure is pretty much limited to listening to Yo La Tengo and reading Pitchfork. Thanks to the Pop Conference, Phil Collins and Dan Fogelberg have finally made the list.

editor@thestranger.com