Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:03am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Authenticity and Popular Music Session Chair: Destiny Meadows | |
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Tradition as Moving Target: Neo-Neo-Traditionalism, Digital Infrastructures, and Cultural Labor in 21st-Century Country Music University of Memphis, This paper theorizes “neo-neo-traditionalism” as a distinct formation within twenty-first-century mainstream country music, arguing that contemporary invocations of tradition function not as revival but as a digitally mediated cultural strategy. Building on Richard Peterson’s account of authenticity as fabricated through cycles of legitimation, I position the resurgence of fiddle, pedal steel, narrative lyricism, and honky-tonk imagery as a response to three perceived threats: aesthetic permeability, generative AI and algorithmic production, and anxieties surrounding demographic change and political polarization. Unlike the neo-traditionalism of the 1980s and 1990s, this formation unfolds within a streaming economy in which playlists, metrics, and platform governance displace radio as primary gatekeepers. Methodologically, the paper combines musical analysis, drawing on Allan Moore’s layer-based framework and Megan Lavengood’s theorization of timbre as cultural signification, with media-industrial analysis of authorship, label affiliation, chart performance, and social media circulation. Through case studies of Luke Combs, Cody Johnson, Zach Top, Lainey Wilson, and Ella Langley, I demonstrate how marked vocal timbres and instrumental coloration anchor songs in country’s traditional orthodoxy, even as production and means of dissemination make use of advanced technologies. The paper further argues that neo-neo-traditionalism is structured by the competitive and gendered nature of cultural labor. Building on theories of artistic labor in the digital age advanced by Matt Stahl (2012) and Ellis Jones (2022), alongside scholarship on gendered creative work by Brooke Erin Duffy (2015), Connor, Gill, and Taylor (2015), and Ming Liu et al. (2025), I contend that contemporary country artists operate as entrepreneurial subjects within platform-driven economies that reward visibility, adaptability, and affective authenticity. While male artists often stabilize tradition through moral didacticism and honky-tonk revivalism, women such as Wilson and Langley mobilize within “reputation economies,” leveraging TikTok and Instagram virality to circumvent historically male-dominated radio infrastructures. In this context, tradition becomes both heritage signal and algorithmic cue, enabling artists to perform authenticity while navigating monetized visibility and persistent gendered double binds. By framing traditionalism as participatory nostalgia shaped by institutional strategy and platform capitalism, this study reveals neo-neo-traditionalism not as resistance to modernity, but as one of its most adaptive and profitable cultural products. | |