Rock Music in Performance

Rock Music in Performance

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Rock Music in Performance David Pattie University of Chester

This ebook does not include ancillary media that was packaged with the printed version of the book David Pattie 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-4746-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-52435-8 DOI 10.1057/9780230593305 ISBN 978-0-230-59330-5 (ebook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

Contents Introduction vii Part I: Performance and the Practice of Authenticity 1 1 4Real: Performance and Authenticity 3 2 Performance and Mediation: Performance, Space and Technology 21 3 Performance, Gender and Rock Music 40 Part II: Performance, Authenticity and History 57 4 The 1960s 59 5 The 1970s 81 6 The 1980s 104 7 The 1990s 127 8 The 21st Century 152 Notes 164 Bibliography 172 DVD List 177 Video List 179 Websites 180 Index 181 v

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Introduction This study grew from an article, originally published in 1999 ( 4Real: Rock, Authenticity and Performance, Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 2). The initial article explored a paradox which, it still seems to me, lies at the heart of the live performance of rock music. The rock musician, as commonly imagined, must be real ; he or she must perform in such a way as to convey and confirm a sense of authentic investment in the music played, or in the worldview that the artist embraces. But, as soon as we accept the idea that authenticity is performed in the live event, we open up an area which is, to say the least, ambiguous: how is it possible to perform authenticity? Performance, after all, is commonsensically regarded as a mediation (and perhaps, also, a distortion) of reality; the idea that it is somehow possible to capture a moment of authenticity through the medium of performance seems paradoxical at best. And yet (as demonstrated below) such an idea exists, and conditions both musicians and the fans responses to live performance; and, what is more, this paradox seems to have been largely ignored by those who write about popular music. In fact, the whole idea of popular music as performance is, as noted in Quirk and Toynbee (2005), strangely underrepresented in the field. There are interesting discussions of the performance styles of various genres and bands (cf. Auslander 2006; Fast 2001; Weinstein 2000; Macan 1997). There are relatively few attempts to provide a taxonomy of the nature of the event itself (indeed, I was rather surprised, while researching this book after a few years writing and thinking about other matters, to find my 1999 article cited in Quirk and Toynbee (2005) as one of the few texts available). There are exceptions: Allan Moore has some very insightful things to say about the expression of the self in the performance of music, and his work is used below; Philip Auslander has attempted to analyse the impact of mediation on live performance (although, as Chapter 2 demonstrates, I have severe reservations about the argument he puts forward). Mainly, though, performance is treated as an adjunct to the creation and dissemination of music: Shuker (2001) barely mentions it; The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (2001) is similarly mute; George McKay s detailed and otherwise exemplary Glastonbury: a Very English Fair (2000) is only tangentially concerned with the fact that, somewhere in the complex socio-political matrix he describes, a band on stage are playing. vii

viii Introduction Such a gap cannot be filled by one book alone; and I have not attempted it. This book has a narrower focus. It deals with the paradox outlined in the 1999 article: how do rock musicians negotiate the tension between authenticity and performance when playing live? Chapter 1 establishes the nature of the paradox, and begins to demonstrate it in action. Chapter 2 (which engages in a number of close readings of U2 in performance) looks more specifically at the complex mediations through which the paradox is filtered. Chapter 3 looks at the creation of gender especially maleness in performance. The second part of the book looks at the way in which the paradox has been expressed in various styles and at various times. Although I follow a loose timeline, I have not attempted to include every example; there are omissions simply because a book which listed all the manifestations of the paradox would be too long to publish, and too heavy to pick up. Throughout, I have on purpose focused on the performer, the stage and the technology which drives the event: there are many excellent discussions of the nature of fandom (see, for example, Cavicchi 1998; Schippers 2002) which I utilise, but much remains to be done on the performer s role in the event, and it is here that I have focused my attention. The book finishes with two studies of contemporary performance: the Stones, engaged in yet another massively successful world tour (and, in doing so, breaking a cultural taboo performing age rather than youth), and a trio of bands (Gorillaz, Radiohead and The White Stripes) who have all managed to use the live event to manifest a liberating ambiguity, based firmly on the idea of performance as both mediated and real. If the paradox, established in the late 1960s (when rock, seriously and self-consciously, declared itself as an art form), persists through to the early years of this century, then it is probably fair to say that it has not lost its hold over musicians and audiences. This book is an attempt to deal with the reasons behind the longevity of the paradox, and an attempt to catalogue some of its manifestations in a performance style which remains, stubbornly, 4Real.