In Concert

In Concert

Performing Musical Persona

•••

Philip Auslander

University of Michigan Press

Ann Arbor
Copyright 2021 by Philip Auslander
All rights reserved

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Published in the United States of America by

the University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-­free paper

First published January 2021

A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Auslander, Philip, 1956– author.

Title: In concert : performing musical persona / Philip Auslander.
Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020032957 (print) | LCCN 2020032958 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780472074716 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780472054718 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780472128396 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Music—Performance. | Persona (Psychoanalysis) | Music—
Performance—Social aspects. | Concerts—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC ML457 .A96 2021 (print) | LCC ML457 (ebook) |
DDC 780.78--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032957
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032958
For Deanna, the sunshine of my life
 Contents
•••

List of Illustrations ix
Introduction: Genre, Frame, Persona 1

Part I: Preliminaries 17
Chapter One. Performance Analysis and Popular Music:
A Manifesto 21
Chapter Two. Music as Performance:
The Disciplinary Dilemma Revisited 37
Chapter Three. Sound and Vision:
The Audio/Visual Economy of Musical Performance 49
Chapter Four. Lucille Meets GuitarBot:
Agency, Instrumentality, and Technology
in Musical Performance 65

Part II: The Interactionist Turn 83

Chapter Five. Musical Personae 87
Chapter Six. Everybody’s in Showbiz:
Performing Star Identity in Popular Music 129
Chapter Seven. Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement 148
 viii  •   Contents

Part III: Contexts of Performance 165

Chapter Eight. Beatlemania:
The Audience at Shea Stadium, 1965 169
Chapter Nine. Good Old Rock and Roll:
Performing the 1950s in the 1970s 183
Chapter Ten. Barbie in a Meat Dress:
Performance and Mediatization in the Twenty-­First Century 207
Acknowledgments227
Notes231
Bibliography263
Index279

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform
via the following citable URL https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10182371
 Illustrations
•••

Fig. 1. A Model of Popular Music Performance 32

Fig. 2. Video still of Suzi Quatro performing “Can the Can” 35
Fig. 3. Laurie Anderson performing “Drum Dance” 41
Fig. 4. Glenn Gould in a still from the documentary Glenn Gould:
Off the Record (1959) 44
Fig. 5. Patrick K.-­H. and Oleg Makarov,
“Live-­Acousmatic” performance 50
Fig. 6. Video still of Jefferson Airplane performing
“Wooden Ships” 58
Fig. 7. B. B. King singing in a still from Ralph Gleason’s
Jazz Casual70
Fig. 8. B. B. King communing with his guitar, Lucille,
in a still from Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual71
Fig. 9. Mari Kimura and GuitarBot performing Kimura’s
GuitarBotana74
Fig. 10. Mari Kimura and GuitarBot performing Kimura’s
GuitarBotana75
Fig. 11. Michael Jackson performing “Billie Jean” in 1996 89
Fig. 12. Darius Rucker in a still from the music video
for “Wagon Wheel” (2013) 104
Fig. 13. Still from Carole King’s appearance on the
BBC television program In Concert in 1971 108
 x  •   Illustrations

Fig. 14. Miles Davis playing the theme of “So What” in a

still from The Sound of Miles Davis, CBS Television,
April 1959 155
Fig. 15. Miles Davis improvising on the theme of
“So What” in a still from The Sound of Miles Davis156
Fig. 16. Annotated still from The Sound of Miles Davis157
Fig. 17. John Coltrane in a still from The Sound of Miles Davis158
Fig. 18. Beatles fans at Shea Stadium, New York City, 1965 170
Fig. 19. Sha Na Na performing “Tell Laura I Love Her” in 1973 188
Fig. 20. Diagram mapping a continuum between authenticity
and inauthenticity in musical performance 203
Fig. 21. Nicki Minaj in a still from the music video for
“Va Va Voom” (2012) 219
Fig. 22. Lady Gaga in a still from the music video for
“Bad Romance” (2009) 224
 Introduction
Genre, Frame, Persona
•••

The chapters of this book are the fruits of an ongoing research project
that has unfolded over more than a decade. Initially, I used the rubric
“Music as Performance” to define this project and the activities I under-
took in its name (e.g., conference panels, working groups, public lec-
tures, and publications). Over time, however, I came to realize that I am
not so much interested in music as performance as in musicians as performers.
The former direction has been pursued by my esteemed colleague, the
musicologist Nicholas Cook, especially in his authoritative book Beyond
the Score: Music as Performance, in which he defines his mission of chal-
lenging traditional musicology’s subordination of the performance of
music to the score, a written text often understood on the model of a
work of literature, as a way of thinking that “turns performance into a
kind of supplement to the music itself, an optional extra.” Cook goes on
to say that “in order to think of music as performance . . . we need to think
differently about what sort of an object music is, and indeed how far it is
appropriate to think of it as an object at all,” a perspective with which I
am in complete sympathy.1 At the same time, however, since I am not a
musicologist by training, I am less invested in the question of what kind
of a thing music is than in the question of what kind of performers musi-
cians are. Whereas Cook offers a way of looking at music, I offer a way
of looking at the people who perform music. In this sense, this is a book
about performers and performance.
 2  •   in concert

The concept of musical persona I develop here is a theory of musi-

cal identity.2 It is not the only such theory, of course. For example, the
classical pianist and musicologist John Rink has reflected eloquently
on his identity as a musician. He acknowledges the “disconcerting
questions” that enter his mind while waiting to perform: “Where is
the music in my mind? What form does it have? How will I access
it, and where will it come from?”3 These questions lead him to the
proposition that “one’s identity as a performer may be shaped by one’s
sense of identity with the music.”4 He describes becoming “increasingly
immersed in the experiencing of the music to the point that I forgot
I was playing in public. My world was that of the music, my percep-
tions of time and space utterly conforming to it. It was as if I had
become the music.”5 Based on my very limited experience as a musician
and my much more extensive experience as an actor, Rink’s descrip-
tion of the performer’s immersion in the act of performance and the
material performed rings true. In fact, the affective state and sense
of identity with the material he describes are probably experienced
by performers in many different contexts, not just that of music. For
instance, Pauline Koner, an innovative modern dancer and choreog-
rapher, describes dancers as “immersing themselves in the doing, the
being,” terms that resonate sympathetically with Rink’s description of
the musician in performance.6
In approaching the question of musical identity, Rink is primarily
concerned with the musician’s creative process, affective state in perfor-
mance, and relationship to the musical text being performed. Because
of the first two considerations, especially, his work borders on psychol-
ogy. By contrast, I am primarily concerned with the musician’s relation-
ship to the audience and with the musician’s performance persona as
the interface between performer and audience and the primary means
through which the performer communicates with the audience. Perfor-
mances of music, like all performances, are socially defined interactions
between performers and their audiences, and I treat music here more
as a catalyst for such interactions than as a performing art per se. For
these reasons and because I share the contemporary sociological “view of
musical performance as embodied social action,”7 my work borders on
sociology, particularly the interactionist school discussed in the introduc-
tion to Part II of this book. The social dimensions and meanings of musi-
cal personae are of critical importance. As the popular music scholar
Stan Hawkins points out,
 Introduction  •   3

With the persona, the [musician] assumes a stance that is rife with
social and cultural meaning. Engaging with personas involves access-
ing specific social spaces and places; personas revolve around social
politics, directly from the inter(con)textual circumstances of a spe-
cific genre and period. Personas come replete with pleasures, anxiet-
ies, and politics, which are exhibited through temperament. Their
effect is to get us to reflect on the significance of gender, race, class,
sexuality, and many other qualities of identity.8

Although this book may focus more on persona as musical identity than
on the politics of persona, I have addressed the relationship of musi-
cal persona to gender and queer identities in Performing Glam Rock:
Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (2006), and my most recent
work focuses on articulations of persona to genre and race.9 Hawkins’s
statement points the way forward for future work on musical personae:
toward further and deeper explorations of persona as a form of musical
identity in relation to other socially defined categories of identity and
their politics.
Three concepts that are key to my approach are frame, genre, and
persona. Each term represents an idea that is not specific to music and
its performance but, rather, suggests common ground between the per-
formance of music and other kinds of performance. At the same time,
each one is relevant to the performance of music in specific ways.

Frame

This term is probably most familiar from media criticism, where it is used
to denote the way in which the presentation (framing) of a news story,
for instance, influences the content of the story and reflects the per-
spective from which it is told, thus shaping the underlying reality for an
audience that depends on the media for information.10 As Kirk Halla-
han, a media scholar, indicates, news is just one of many things that have
been said to be framed. He identifies six other categories of framing
formulated by theorists. The one that concerns us here is the framing of
situations, associated with the anthropologist Gregory Bateson and the
sociologist Erving Goffman.11 Performances of music are the situations
in question here.
Bateson is credited with having coined the use of the term “frame”
 4  •   in concert

in this context in 1955. He defined frames as consisting of “messages”

or information “intended to order or organize the perception of the
viewer.” Using the analogy of a picture frame on a wall, he states, “The
picture frame tells the viewer that he is not to use the same sort of think-
ing in interpreting the picture that he might use in interpreting the wall-
paper outside the frame.”12 Therefore, “A frame is metacommunicative.
Any message, which either explicitly or implicitly defines a frame, ipso
facto gives the receiver instructions or aids in his attempt to understand
the messages included within the frame.”13
An example that illustrates the role of framing in gaining an under-
standing of a performance as a situation is the New York City–­based
performance group’s Improv Everywhere’s “Frozen Grand Central,” an
event staged in Grand Central Station in 2008.14 The event itself was
simple: at a specific time during a rush hour, over two hundred ordi-
nary looking people suddenly and simultaneously froze in place and
remained frozen for five minutes, then resumed their previous activi-
ties as if nothing had happened. The video of this event documents the
reaction of those witnessing these actions. At first, they are mystified and
ask each other questions about what is going on. Then they start to offer
hypotheses as to the nature of the event, suggesting that it could be a
protest or an acting class. Once the performers start to move again, the
bystanders applaud. The video clearly shows that in order to understand
how to interact with what was happening around them, the bystanders
first had to understand the frame. Eventually, they determined that the
event in question was framed as a performance. They then could con-
clude that the people frozen in position were performers and they, the
bystanders, were in an audience role. Once they understood the frame
and their role within it, they performed the audience role by applaud-
ing. Until they found a frame within which the actions they witnessed
became recognizable and meaningful, they were unable to interpret it
or even perceive it as an event.
Goffman picked up Bateson’s concept and elaborated it at great
length and depth in his book Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of
Experience, published in 1974. Although Goffman avowedly uses the term
in the same way as Bateson, it is significant that whereas Bateson refers
to “psychological frames,” Goffman refers to “social frames.” This differ-
ence is reflected in Goffman’s definition of framing, which focuses on
the social origin of frames of reference. Goffman states, “My aim is to try
to isolate some of the basic frameworks of understanding available in our
 Introduction  •   5

society for making sense out of events.”15 He defines frames themselves

accordingly as “principles of organization which govern events—­at least
social ones—­and our subjective involvement in them.”16 Goffman thus
stipulates that we do not create the frames through which we make sense
of the world as individuals; they are social—­and therefore collective—­in
origin (which implies also that they are culturally specific). Bateson’s
reference to them as psychological suggests the degree to which we inter-
nalize these social frames, how they become part of our basic cognitive
processes as we seek to make sense of the world. Both also posit framing
as that which makes it possible for people to interact with one another.
Unless we share a basic understanding of what is going on (this is a con-
cert, or a class, or a job interview, etc.), we can have no understanding
of the social roles we are to play relative to one another and the kinds of
interactions in which we can engage. It is therefore necessary that frames
be matters of social consensus rather than individual psychology.
I discuss the applicability of frame theory to the performance of
music at many points in this book, most directly in chapters 1, 5, and 7.
The basic points are that sound must be framed as music, according to
commonly held definitions of what this means, in order to be heard as
music. Once we understand that a particular event has been framed as a
performance of music, we know the terms in which we are to perceive,
think about, and interpret the situation, and we know that those terms
are different from the ones that would enable us to understand and
interpret another kind of situation, such as the performance of a play.
It is obvious, however, that simply identifying a situation as a musi-
cal performance is not sufficient to understand the nature of the event
and our relationship to it and to each other as performers and audience
members. A simple experiment I conduct frequently with my students
is to tell them that I’m going to take the class to hear some music, then
ask them what their first question is. The question is always “What kind
of music?” Linguist Deborah Tannen describes frames very usefully as
“structures of expectation.”17 This expression is particularly apt for think-
ing about the experience of going to hear music: everything we know,
from the identity of the artist, to the genre of music, to the venue where
the event is to occur and beyond structures the expectations we have of
the event. These expectations pertain not only to the music we anticipate
hearing but also to every other aspect of the performance as a social
event and how we are to interact with each other within it. It is important
to emphasize that this applies equally to musicians and their audiences:
 6  •   in concert

all participants in an event understand what is happening, their part in

it, and their relationship to other participants from their knowledge of
how the event is framed.
The phrase “structure of expectations” also implies that our expecta-
tions may or may not be fulfilled, an important point, since musicians
can always choose to resist or redefine the conventions of their genres.
In this context, it is necessary to understand that frames create the pos-
sibility for us to interpret and understand our experience—­they do not
determine the meaning or nature of the experience. For instance, I
could attend a performance of music framed as jazz, yet come away from
it muttering to a companion, “That wasn’t really jazz.”

Genre

Performances of music are framed in multiple ways. For example, Chris-

topher Small, who examines the social and cultural ramifications of
music and its performance, has shown how the building within which
the performance takes place encourages certain kinds of social inter-
actions among performers and audience and discourages others.18 The
concert hall is thus a frame in that it creates a different structure of
expectation and different possibilities for interaction than does a small
club, an outdoor amphitheater, and so on. In my view, genre is a crucial
frame for performances of music. Genre simply means kind or type, and
all who speak about music habitually use language that divides music
into different kinds, whether higher-­order categories like rock, classical,
jazz, country, and so on, or more specific, lower-­order categories often
referred to as subgenres (e.g., psychedelic rock, bebop, countrypolitan,
etc.). Franco Fabbri, a preeminent theorist of genre in popular music,
calls the higher-­order categories both “genres” and “systems,” depend-
ing on whether the context concerns relations among genres (e.g., rock
vs. jazz) or among subgenres (e.g., psychedelic rock vs. punk rock).19
Although most of the discussion of musical genre concerns popular
music, I do not limit the term in that way. For my purposes, classical
music is a genre, as are other kinds of art music.
Genre classification serves many interests, including those of musi-
cians, their fans, producers, broadcasters, retailers of recordings, publi-
cists, and so on. In all cases, it provides a shorthand for identifying and
referring to a particular kind of music whether one is trying to describe
one’s own musical taste or the kind of music played on a particular radio
 Introduction  •   7

station or the idea that underlies a playlist on a streaming service. Cur-

rently, musical genre is a somewhat contested concept. There are those
who speak out against genre labels. Bob Boilen, the host of National Pub-
lic Radio’s All Songs Considered, regards genre to be “a curse” because he
feels that genre labels may discourage people from experiencing music
they might like.20 A group of psychologists studying the link between
musical preferences and personality traits claim that previous research
in this area

has been hindered by genre-­based methodologies that rely on prefer-

ence ratings for a list of genres. This presents serious problems for
researchers because genres are broad classifications with illusive defi-
nitions and social connotations. Participants of different ages, geo-
graphic regions, and socioeconomic backgrounds differ in the way
that they conceptualize the genres presented to them.21

These researchers prefer a group of three categories they feel bet-

ter describe the subjective experience of music: “arousal, valence, and
depth.”22 Journalist Megan Evershed declares the death of musical genre
in a generational analysis, arguing that young musicians today resist
genre categories because

Gen Z aren’t interested in labels. The idea that gender and sexuality
are fluid—­if not accepted by all—­has firmly entered public discourse.
But just as we move away from traditional boundaries of gender,
Gen Z are also tearing down musical boundaries, instead embracing
sounds that are fluid and difficult to categorise.23

There is no question but that genre labeling is inevitably frustrating,

messy, inaccurate, and open to dispute, but I argue that for all of its inad-
equacies, it remains a vital component of our experience of music. Look-
ing more closely at Evershed’s article about artists like Lil Nas X and
Billie Eilish, one notes that in addition to claiming that Gen Z musicians
make “songs that defy genre,” she refers to the same artists as “hybridis-
ing genres.” I hasten to point out that defying genre and hybridizing
genre are not at all the same thing, since one has to accept the exis-
tence of genres in order to hybridize them, and that such hybridization
is neither new nor distinctive, since most artists, especially in popular
music, can be seen as overlapping genres. An entertaining illustration of
this point is “The Periodic Table of Musical Genres,”24 in which a wide
 8  •   in concert

array of types of popular music are presented as elements on a chart

that includes their symbols: “Vk,” for instance, is the symbol for Scan-
dinavian Death Metal. At the top of the chart are a few examples of the
“molecular structures” of specific groups that combine atoms of differ-
ent genres. The Irish group The Pogues has a simple structure in which
an atom of Pk (punk) is bonded to an atom of Ct (Celtic). Others are
more complex, involving up to four atoms. In some instances, hybrids of
this kind result in new genres, such as Celtic punk; in fact, new genres
generally arise from mutations in existing ones.25 An article on Eilish
in a section of Billboard, the music industry trade publication, focused
on the business of radio, quotes the president of iHeartMedia as saying,
“She is somebody you can’t even attempt to categorize, and that’s her
appeal. . . . There’s no box that would fit her properly.” The article then
goes on to identify all of the boxes into which Eilish has found her way:
the Billboard Alternative Songs and Rock Airplay charts and, on radio,
the alternative and pop formats.26
I am not arguing that artists like Nas X and Eilish fit comfortably into
genre categories despite the claim that they transcend genre. Like most
musicians, they overlap genre categories. My point is that whatever its
failings, the language of genre enables us to identify music and, there-
fore, to talk about it. Eilish may be neither purely alternative nor purely
pop, but the fact that these are the two categories that are invoked in
talking about her work provides at least a set of rough coordinates to
where she resides in the musical universe (a hint as to her molecular
structure as an artist) and a starting point for thinking about what she
does and her potential audiences.
The question of musical genre is a specific and limited instance of a
much larger and more important matter: the dependence of human cog-
nition on categorization. While it is easy and attractive to speak of musi-
cians as defying or transcending genre, in fact we cannot apprehend any
aspect of our world without the benefit of categories, as is clearly shown
by the fact that even the work of such artists as Eilish and Nas X is inevi-
tably described using genre categories, they very things they are said to
have rendered moot. As the renowned linguist George Lakoff puts it,

There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, per-

ception, action, and speech. Every time we see something as a kind of
thing, for example, a tree, we are categorizing. Whenever we reason
about kinds of things—­chairs, nations, illnesses, emotions, any kind
of thing at all—­we are employing categories.  .  .  . Without the abil-
 Introduction  •   9

ity to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical

world or in our social and intellectual lives. An understanding of how
we categorize is central to any understanding of how we think and
how we function, and therefore central to an understanding of what
makes us human.27

As human beings, we live and die by categories. To suggest that music is

an area of human endeavor that cannot or should not be subjected to
categorization, or that there are artists or generations of artists who can
short-­circuit this process, is therefore untenable.
Fabian Holt, who studies popular music, offers a framework for think-
ing about genre that encompasses the emergence of musical genres in
specific historical circumstances, the social configurations that arise
around genres, the relationship of emergent genres to the mainstream,
the music industry, the media, and cultural practices around music. Of
particular interest here is Holt’s category of genre conventions, which
he breaks down into codes, values, and practices. Codes have to do with
musical sound, the ways in which specific structures (e.g., twelve-­bar
blues) or instruments are associated with particular kinds of music to
the point that they become “genre signifiers”: the strong association of
the pedal steel guitar, an instrument whose sound derives from Hawaiian
musical practices, with country music is one of Holt’s examples. Holt’s
category of values relates music to its audience and communities—­
particular kinds of music come to represent the values of the social
groups and communities with which they are associated.

Country music was associated with the white southern working-­class

experience, rock music with youth rebellion. As these genres have
evolved, they have been associated with a wider range of values and
social types. Mainstream country music, for instance, moved toward
urban middle-­class culture in the late 1950s, but has always experi-
enced tensions between folk and pop aesthetics. Similarly, jazz has
moved closer to the sphere of high art.28

Finally, the category of practices has to do with “how music is created,

performed, and perceived. Ritual and performance aesthetics are part
of the regulatory matrix of a genre. They inform interpretations of aural
and visual materials and negotiations of boundaries.”29
I contend that genre is perhaps the most important frame around
the performance of music as a social interaction. Genre frames establish
 10  •   in concert

expectations concerning what is to happen in a performance, includ-

ing the coding of the music itself, the assumed shared values that bind
audience members to one another and to the performers, what will be
seen and heard in the performance (and what will not be), and how
the audience will receive and interpret the performance. I analyze all
of the examples and case studies I present here in these terms and posit
that a musician’s performance persona is always negotiated in relation
to the boundaries implied by genre conventions. I do not see genre as
determining what musicians can do since it is clear that musicians often
test, resist, or actively contest those boundaries in their music, how they
perform it, and the personae they construct to perform it. Neverthe-
less, genre as a structure of expectation, whether the expectations are
fulfilled or contested, is always a vital frame of reference in the perfor-
mance of music.

Persona

Just as I am not the first to propose a theory of musical identity, so am

I not the first to use the term persona to denote this identity.30 I discuss
others’ use of the term in chapters 4 and 5. Here, I will take note of
music performance scholar Peter Johnson’s employment of persona. My
approach is similar to Johnson’s in one important respect. We both dis-
tinguish the musician’s performance persona from the “real person” (the
musician as private citizen, so to speak). Johnson’s example is “the unas-
suming figure of Alfred Brendel,” who “is transformed into the magiste-
rial pianist as his fingers touch the keys, but the man returns as he quietly
acknowledges the applause.”31 Johnson suggests that Brendel’s persona
as “magisterial pianist” is an identity he assumes specifically for perfor-
mance in the presence of an audience. It is a product of this situation
that does not resemble his otherwise “unassuming” self-­presentation.
Johnson compares the musician to an actor, but he does not suggest that
Brendel’s persona is to be thought of as a fictional role such as an actor
would play. The “magisterial pianist” is just as much a real person as the
“unassuming” man; both are identities Brendel assumes under differing
circumstances.
In other words, musical personae are not simply all-­purpose self-­
presentations. Rather they derive from and are specific to the perfor-
mance context at hand. To take an obvious example, although a sym-
phony conductor’s persona at the podium may reflect some aspects of
 Introduction  •   11

her identity as a person, we would be startled to see her in formal wear

and holding a baton while out for a jog. While at the podium, the for-
mal outfit the conductor wears, the baton she holds, and the authorita-
tive posture she assumes are the costume, prop, and manner associated
with the persona she assumes for the purpose of conducting the orches-
tra, and they derive from the conventions associated with that role and
are expected within that frame. While it may be that the conductor’s
performance persona reflects character traits she also displays in other
contexts, it arises specifically from her interaction with the symphonic
musicians as well as from her engagement with the piece the orchestra
is performing.
I note in passing that the adjective magisterial is not in itself a suffi-
cient description of Brendel’s musical persona. There are a great many
classical pianists who could be described this way; Arthur Rubinstein
comes to mind. In performance, Rubinstein’s and Brendel’s respective
personae are quite different from one another. To take but one point of
difference, whereas Rubinstein typically sat rigidly erect at the keyboard,
Brendel engages in expressive movement of his head and torso, leaning
into the keyboard at certain points in the music. Both are magisterial
pianists, but the ways in which they are so, the differences between them,
and the contexts of those differences, such as differences of personality,
culture, and generation, need to be identified and analyzed to under-
stand fully the persona each presents.
Johnson distinguishes the musician’s “voice” from his or her per-
sona: “Each work . . . makes its own interpretative demands, and like the
actor, the good performer adjusts his or her voice accordingly. I shall
refer to this second level of presence as the performer’s ‘persona.’”32
For Johnson, then, persona is a function of the work being performed,
while voice is a constant aspect of the performer’s musical identity. This
formulation resembles Rink’s idea that “one’s identity as a performer may
be shaped by one’s sense of identity with the music” since musical identity
derives in both cases from the work performed. Whereas Rink is speak-
ing of performers’ private sense of what is happening and their affective
state while performing, Johnson speaks of voice and persona as levels
of performance that are perceptible to the audience. My own use of
this vocabulary is different. I tend not to use the term voice but consider
musical persona to be the entity that persists across different specific
performances. When the persona portrays another entity, as through
song lyrics, I call that entity a character. In such cases, both persona and
character are present simultaneously.33 Brendel’s persona is always that
 12  •   in concert

of the magisterial pianist, regardless of what piece he plays, though the

persona’s specific manner may well reflect the particulars of the piece.
In my analysis, Brendel’s persona is primarily a function of the social role
he assumes by performing within a particular genre frame of classical
music that structures expectations of how he will perform for both his
audience and himself.
Like Johnson, music theorist William Rothstein analogizes playing
music with acting:

Musical performance is, by its very nature, a species of acting. It is

the performer who controls the way in which virtually every aspect
of the work is conveyed to the listener. Which features of the music
are “brought out,” which are concealed, which are allowed to speak
for themselves—­these are only some of the decisions the performer
must make.34

Rothstein makes this comparison in the context of a discussion of analyz-

ing a text in order to perform it, something both musicians and actors
do, and certainly both musicians and actors make interpretive decisions
of the kind he mentions that shape their performances. The key differ-
ence, of course, is that instrumentalists are not generally thought of as
portraying fictional characters, though this is quite common for singers,
whether of opera, chanson, or other forms of popular music, who regu-
larly portray such characters through song lyrics.
The question of whether instrumentalists can be said to portray char-
acters as well as enact personae is a challenging one that hinges on the
question of whether or not a piece of instrumental music can be heard
as a narrative or drama such musical characters could inhabit. Although
the question of whether music can or should be heard as narrative is a
complex one that I cannot pursue fully here, this analogy has been made
frequently. Heinrich Schenker describes the trajectory of a musical com-
position in what can be seen as narrative terms:

In the art of music, as in life, motion toward the goal encounters

obstacles, reverses, disappointments, and involves great distances,
detours, expansions, interpolations, and, in short, retardations of
all kinds. Therein lies the source of all artistic delaying, from which
the creative mind can derive content that is ever new. Thus we hear
in the middleground and foreground an almost dramatic course of
events.35
 Introduction  •   13

As the musicologist Fred Maus comments, Schenker’s statement bears

a strong resemblance to structuralist analyses of narrative: “Schenker’s
remarks suggest the possibility of a generalized plot structure for tonal
music; his list of ‘obstacles, reverses, disappointments,’ and so on enu-
merates, informally, kinds of event in musical plots, just as [Vladimir]
Propp enumerates plot functions in fairy tales.”36 In another essay, Maus
cites Tzvetan Todorov to make a similar point about the narrative struc-
ture of music, then goes on to discuss music in specifically dramatic
terms, pointing out the way language used to describe human actions is
used in the formal analysis of music and suggesting an analogy between
compositional structure and dramatic plot. In the midst of drawing these
comparisons between musical texts and narrative or dramatic texts,
Maus points to an important difference: whereas “a stage play normally
involves a definite number of fictional characters . . . the agents in the
Beethoven passage [the object of his sample analysis] are indetermi-
nate.”37 To the extent that musical compositions can be heard as dra-
matic narratives, instrumentalists can be seen as making the agents who
carry out the actions that constitute the narrative and move it forward
come to life for listeners. In this sense, we can think of them as perform-
ing characters as well as their personae as musicians, even if these musi-
cal characters are necessarily indeterminate, especially when compared
with characters in a play.
Maus is concerned in these essays with textual analysis of music and
narrative. Another possibility for understanding the way instrumentalists
may be seen as narrative agents is through cases in which the narrative is
constructed around and by the instrumentalists’ personae themselves. A
small number of such cases come up in the chapters to follow. Here I will
draw attention to one I discuss for other reasons in chapter 7. Philoso-
pher Lee B. Brown depicts the listener’s engagement with improvising
jazz musicians as follows:

In typical jazz improvisations, players can be heard probing and test-

ing possibilities latent in the music they are making. . . . Correlatively,
we take a special kind of interest in this activity—­in how a performer
is faring, so to say. If things are going well, I wonder if the player
can sustain the level. If he seems to be getting into trouble, I wonder
about how he will address the problem. When he pulls the fat out of
the fire, I applaud—­as when Louis Armstrong rushes too quickly, if
thrillingly, into the first notes of the introduction in his famous Okeh
recording of West End Blues.38
 14  •   in concert

Brown describes improvisation in specifically dramatic terms: players

create existential problems for themselves through their improvisational
choices, and we follow the drama of their negotiating these self-­created
obstacles in an effort to overcome them and reach resolution. Such nar-
ratives are not “extramusical”; they are intrinsic to the way the music is
produced in performance. Brown’s description suggests that, at least in
some cases, we perceive the performance of music as a dramatic narra-
tive in which the instrumentalists’ personae themselves are the agents
carrying out musical actions in a quest to reach an objective.

The Structure of the Book

I wrote the essays collected here as chapters between 2003 and 2015.
I have revised and updated all of them for inclusion, albeit to differ-
ent degrees. The two chapters that are most significantly different from
their original publications are chapter 5, “Musical Personae,” which is
a greatly enlarged and more definitive version of the journal article on
which it is based, and chapter 8, “Beatlemania: The Audience at Shea
Stadium, 1965,” which now shares little more than its basic argument
with its previously published iteration. Because I have opted to introduce
each part of the book separately, here I will discuss the overall structure
of the book and its parts rather than the individual chapters.
Although this book begins with the earliest essay I wrote on the subject
of musical personae, it is organized as a narrative that traces the develop-
ment of this idea rather than chronologically. The first chapter, a revised
version of “Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Manifesto” of
2004, is the starting point for the story, my first attempt to delineate a
concept of musical persona. The other chapters in the first part, titled
“Preliminaries,” put on the table fundamental issues that arise from pos-
iting musical personae as central to the experience of music, including
the importance of the visual dimensions of performing music such as
the musicians’ gestures and facial expressions and the use of spectacle
in performance; the way such visual information allows the audience to
apprehend the music and assess the musicians’ performance; and the
relationship between instrumentalists and their instruments.
The second part, “The Interactionist Turn,” is the climax of the
book’s narrative in that it presents the theory of musical persona in a
fully elaborated form premised on the ideas put forward in Part I. The
basic premise of this theory is that performances by musicians are best
 Introduction  •   15

understood as self-­presentations and as interactional accomplishments

in which the musician’s persona is coproduced by the musician and the
audience through performance. This premise derives largely from the
work of Erving Goffman; in the two chapters that follow, I delve into
some of Goffman’s specific concepts, including the authorization to play
a role, social distance, role distance, and the theatrical frame, to flesh
out the theoretical framework and show how these ideas may be brought
to bear on performances by musicians and the understandings of them
embedded in their social circumstances.
In Part III, “Contexts of Performance,” I present three case studies
that look at how a musical persona reflects specific historical situations.
The first two look at very specific contexts: mid-­1960s Beatlemania in
the United States and the wave of nostalgia for 1950s rock and roll that
occurred in the first half of the 1970s. The third takes a much broader
perspective to look at how two millennial performers, Lady Gaga and
Nicki Minaj, use specific approaches to defining and deploying their
respective personae that allow them to negotiate the flows of our cur-
rent hypermediated cultural environment.
 Part I

Preliminaries

This first part of this book is devoted to questions that are basic to under-
standing musical performance as a distinctive human activity. This part
begins with the first essay in which I identified musical performance as
a lacuna in both musicology and performance studies, originally pub-
lished in 2004, and suggested an approach to discussing musicians as
performers based on the model of performance analysis in theater stud-
ies, a model I sustain throughout the book. I felt strongly enough in the
early years of the new millennium that this was an urgent project to call
my declaration of purpose a manifesto. It was in this essay that I first
brought the concept of persona discussed in the introduction to bear
on musicians, albeit without yet deploying the interactionist framework I
would derive from the work of Erving Goffman, the elaboration of which
is the subject of the essays gathered in Part II.
The argument of “Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Mani-
festo” is directed, on the musicological side, against those who assert that
music is contained in musical works (traditionally manuscript scores)
and that performance of those works is unnecessary, perhaps even det-
rimental, to their appreciation and analysis. On the theater studies side,
I take issue with the exclusion of music-­based forms of performance
from the theatrical realm. In this first foray, I limited my argument to the
claim that performances by musicians should be considered as objects
of analysis in themselves, not as inessential iterations of a composed
work. However, as I developed the argument further in other essays that
appear in this book and moved beyond the realm of popular music, I
gravitated toward a position that places the performer in the center of
17
 18  •   in concert

the musical event and treats the musical work as a means to performance
rather than its end.
This recentering of the relationship between performer and musical
work on the musician opened up other equally fundamental questions
about musical performance having to do with the relationship between
the visual and auditory dimensions of performance. Just as there are
those who take the position that musical works can be fully appreciated
only by means other than performance, such as reading scores, there
are those who argue that while performance is necessary to bring music
to life, the visual dimensions of its performance are insignificant since
music exists as sound. Further, there are those who argue that while it is
important to be able to see musicians as they produce sound so as to be
able to assess their technical ability, their effort on behalf of their audi-
ences, or their creditworthiness, visual dimensions of performance other
than physical gestures that immediately cause the production of sound
are unimportant. I challenge this position and the distinction between
technical and ancillary gestures on which it is based in the second essay
of this part, “Music as Performance: The Disciplinary Dilemma Revis-
ited,” which is also a kind of progress report about the bridging of musi-
cology and performance studies I had called for ten years earlier in my
manifesto. I also critique the residual Cartesianism of much traditional
discourse around music that treats the interpretation of music as an
intellectual process and its performance as a secondary physical process.
Against this divorce of body from mind, I argue that music is inherently
and ineluctably both mental and corporeal.
In the third chapter of this part, “Sound and Vision: The Audio/
Visual Economy of Musical Performance,” I further the consideration of
musicians’ gestures as visual aspects of performance and move beyond
it to discuss the strategic use of spectacle in musical performance as
itself a way of challenging traditional understandings of music and its
cultural positioning. The fourth entry in this part, “Lucille Meets Guitar-
Bot: Agency, Instrumentality, and Technology in Musical Performance,”
looks at another fundamental aspect of musical performance, the rela-
tionship between an instrumentalist and his or her instrument, through
a comparative examination of two case studies of musicians from very
different genres who both personify their instruments and present them
as somewhat autonomous entities possessed of their own agency. They
endow the instruments with personae designed to interact in specific
ways with their own personae as musicians.
As a shorthand, one can express the debates enjoined in this part
 Part I. Preliminaries  •   19

of the book as a series of terms paired in opposition to one another,

including musical work versus performance; mind versus body; audi-
tory versus visual dimensions of performance; technical versus ancillary
gestures used in performance. Whereas historically some commentators
have dismissed the second term in each of these pairs as irrelevant to an
understanding of the nature of music or its performance, I intend my
arguments, examples, analyses, and case studies to assert that in order
to be fully understood, music must be seen as inextricable from perfor-
mance and that the musician’s persona is the entity through which music
is communicated to the listener.
 Ch apt er One

Performance Analysis and Popular Music

A Manifesto
•••

Musicians as Performers: A Disciplinary Dilemma

Theater and performance studies have found surprisingly little to say

about musical performances. At a commonsense level, the absence of
music from the array of subjects considered by performance scholars
seems odd—­musicians are self-­evidently performers, after all, and it
would be eminently reasonable to discuss them as such. In this chap-
ter, I will first examine the general absence of music-­based performance
genres from the purview of theater and performance studies. In the sec-
ond part of the chapter, I propose an approach to performance analysis
that focuses primarily on popular musicians. In the spirit of a manifesto,
I will concentrate more on defining this approach than on applying it to
particular cases; I will present only very brief analytical examples.
I cannot explain fully the neglect of musical performance by perfor-
mance studies, but I suspect that a partial explanation lies in the geneal-
ogy of the field. The dominant paradigm for performance studies in the
United States resulted from a synthesis of theater studies with aspects of
anthropology, sociology, and oral interpretation.1 Theater studies gener-
ally stakes out its territory in such a way as to exclude music, and schol-
ars in performance studies seem unfortunately to have inherited this
unwillingness to deal with musical forms. Even opera, a musical form

21
 22  •   in concert

that obviously avails itself of the same means of expression as the theater,
is traditionally omitted from the theater historical discourse. The late
Vera Mowry Roberts, with whom I studied theater history, argues in her
introductory textbook that the history of opera and the history of theater
are separate narratives because “the predominant force in opera was the
music rather than the words” and “the composer . . . is the focus of atten-
tion in opera.”2 For Roberts, the idea that opera is driven by music rather
than drama, that it is the domain of composers rather than playwrights,
places it outside the realm of theater history.
Scholars whose primary concern is with analyzing performances,
whom one might expect to be more open to the nonliterary aspects of
performance, are no more willing than traditional theater historians
to bring opera into the fold. As sophisticated a performance analyst as
Patrice Pavis more or less throws in the towel when it comes to this form,
arguing that whereas it is possible to analyze theatrical performances by
breaking them down into their component parts, opera demands a radi-
cally different “fusional” approach:

Despite the richness and diversity of opera’s signs and sources, it lends
itself poorly to an enumeration of its materials. Under the influence
of musical and gestural rhythm, these elements have fused, mixing
and melding together what seem to be opposing elements: speech
and music, time and space, the voice and the body, movement and
stasis.3

Although Pavis is not concerned, as Roberts is, with the specifically non-
literary character of music, he does consider music to be a nonmimetic
form whose representations do not refer directly back to the real world.
He therefore feels that music confounds the very categories upon which
successful analysis of theatrical events depends.
It would be grossly unfair, however, to chastise theater and perfor-
mance scholars for being reluctant to engage with musical forms with-
out also pointing out that both academic musicologists and serious fans
of classical music are traditionally uninterested in performance as an
object of analysis. When attending a performance at the Metropolitan
Opera House in New York City, for instance, one can sit at a score desk,
“one of the side seats on the top balcony where the view is obstructed
but you can follow the printed score at a small table with a dim lamp.”4
Granted that the score desk may be a way of deriving income from oth-
erwise uninhabitable realms of the opera house, it nevertheless reifies
 Performance Analysis and Popular Music  •   23

a mode of spectatorship that is unimaginable from the theatrical point

of view. No serious theater scholar or theatergoer would consider the
opportunity to read a play at a desk in the auditorium while listening to
actors perform it to be compensation for not being able to see the per-
formance. (I will address the visual dimensions of musical performance
and its relationship to the music more directly in the next two chapters.)
The score desk is an artifact of the traditional perception of music
described by Christopher Small, a way of thinking that locates “the
essence of music and of whatever meanings it contains . . . in those things
called musical works,” not in performances of those works. This perspec-
tive rests on the premise “that musical performance plays no part in the
creative process, being only the medium through which the isolated,
self-­contained work has to pass in order to reach its goal, the listener.”5
As Gavin Steingo points out, this concept of a work not only is a histori-
cal artifact, it represents an inversion of an earlier conception of what
music is:

Music was understood first and foremost as an act of performance

and the function of notation was to supplement this act, either as a
series of more or less (usually less) specific instructions, or as a form
of memorialization after the fact. The advent of the musical work
marks the point at which this relationship is inverted: now, perfor-
mance is secondary and attests to a primary (or more fundamental)
“work” manifested most precisely in the form of a score. With this
inversion, the basic ontological status of music changes such that indi-
vidual performances are merely (better or worse) instantiations of a
work that exists over and above all of the possible performances that
may ever take place.6

Small attributes the idolatry of musical works understood in this way to

traditional historians of music and musicologists, but one encounters
dismissals of musical performance as an object of primary concern in
other disciplines as well, even with respect to popular music. Philosopher
Theodore Gracyk, for instance, argues that because rock music’s primary
existence is in recordings, it “is not essentially a performing art, how-
ever much time rock musicians spend practicing on their instruments or
playing live.”7 Gracyk challenges traditional musicology by arguing that,
in rock, recordings, not compositions, are the primary musical works,
but his challenge privileges the recording in a way that parallels musi-
cology’s privileging of the score. Lawrence Grossberg, a major figure in
 24  •   in concert

cultural studies, takes a broadly similar position by claiming that live per-
formances of rock are at most secondary iterations of a work contained
in the recording: “The performative side of rock seems to be simply
another occasion, another activity, with no privilege beyond that of a
night on the town, a potentially good time.”8 For Gracyk and Grossberg,
performances of rock may function as social lubricants but are inessen-
tial manifestations of the music with no inherent aesthetic or cultural
value. In this regard, their respective positions are no different from that
of the traditional music historians and musicologists Small cites.
Perhaps because of its roots in sociology and ethnography, the field
of cultural studies generally emphasizes the reception of popular music
and fan participation in music cultures much more than the perfor-
mance behavior of musicians. Although scholars in communications and
cultural studies often make excellent observations concerning specific
genres of rock and pop music, their remarks on performance are gen-
erally impressionistic and synoptic. Most of the work in cultural studies
of popular music that focuses on production examines the sociological,
institutional, and policy contexts in which popular music is made, not
the immediate context of performances in which artists make music for
their audiences. In contrast, my stance in this chapter and throughout
this book is unabashedly performer-­centered: I am interested primarily
in finding ways of discussing what musicians do as performers—­the mean-
ings they create through their performances and the means they use to
create them.
This, then, is what I choose to call the disciplinary dilemma confront-
ing the scholar who wishes to talk seriously about musicians as perform-
ers: those who take music seriously, either as art or culture, often dismiss
performance as irrelevant. Those who take performance seriously are
reluctant to include musical forms among their objects of study. In this
chapter, I hope to contribute to bridging the divide between the study
of music and the study of performance by encouraging close readings
of performances by popular musicians, readings that attend to the par-
ticulars of physical movement, gesture, costume, and facial expression as
much as voice and musical sound.

Performance Analysis and Popular Music

While theater scholars have long described and analyzed performances,

the idea that performance analysis constitutes an identifiable—­though
 Performance Analysis and Popular Music  •   25

not strictly defined—­approach (as distinct from theater criticism, say) is

of relatively recent vintage. Performance analysis differs from the tran-
scription methods of ethnomusicologists and the notation methods of
dance scholars in the sense that it is as much interpretive as descriptive
and is not organized around a specific technical vocabulary. Whereas
dance notation may be of equal value to analysts and performers, per-
formance analysis is understood to be specifically from the spectator’s
point of view. Theater scholars’ flirtation with the technical vocabulary
of semiotics, popular during the 1980s and 1990s, has largely dissipated
in favor of a less “scientific,” more eclectic set of approaches drawn
from reception theory, phenomenology, cultural anthropology, sociol-
ogy, feminist theory, cultural and literary theory, critical race theory, and
other orientations.9
As the title page of Pavis’s L’Analyse des spectacles (Performance Analysis)
makes abundantly clear, the practice of performance analysis is geared
primarily toward genres of performance in the theatrical tradition: the
list of performance genres under the title includes theater, mime, dance,
dance theater, and film but no kind of musical performance, includ-
ing musical theater (I have already noted Pavis’s reasons for excluding
opera). This exclusion notwithstanding, I shall argue here that musical
performances should be seen as legitimate objects of performance analy-
sis. I will limit my comments to popular music, though I will also briefly
indicate ways that much of what I have to say applies to the performance
of jazz, classical music, and other genres from which I will select exam-
ples in the forthcoming chapters. I return in chapter 5 to the project of
constructing a general theory of musical performance.
A discussion of how to analyze popular music as performance must
begin with the question of what will count as a performance in this con-
text. Pavis asserts that only live theatrical performances are appropriate
objects of analysis, that the performance analyst should use photographs
or recordings of performances only as additional documentation of the
original live events.10 If applied to the realm of popular music, this stipu-
lation would bring performance analysis to a grinding halt for, as Gracyk
says of rock music, recordings are the primary form in which the audi-
ence consumes popular music. The media economy of popular music
thus dictates that sound recordings be considered performances, which
is how listeners experience them.
Despite the physical absence of the performer at the time of listen-
ing, listeners do not perceive recorded music as disembodied. “In my
view,” writes Susan Fast, “the performer’s body is very much present, in
 26  •   in concert

the particular sonoric gestures shaped and played in the first instance by
him or her (they are human gestures, after all) through his or her body
in such a way that they connect with the bodies of those listening.”11
Perhaps that is why people often feel compelled to respond to recorded
music by moving or dancing, singing along, or playing air guitar: the
bodily gestures encoded in the recorded sound seem to demand an
embodied response.12 Regardless of the ontological status of recorded
music, its phenomenological status for listeners is that of a performance
that implicates the body of the performer and unfolds at the time and
in the place of listening. Sound recordings of musical performances
should therefore be considered legitimate objects for performance
analysis—­especially in light of the privilege it grants to the spectator’s
experience—­ alongside live musical performances, documentation of
live performances, and music videos.
Although the listener both hears and feels recorded music as embod-
ied, the experience of recorded music is not confined to the auditory
and haptic senses. As Simon Frith points out, it is also a visual experience:

To hear music is to see it performed, on stage, with all the trappings.

I listen to records in the full knowledge that what I hear is something
that never existed, that never could exist, as a “performance,” some-
thing happening in a single time and space; nevertheless, it is now
happening, in a single time and space: it is thus a performance and I
hear it as one [and] imagine the performers performing.13

The experience of recorded music as performance derives not only from

our direct somatic experience of the sound and our sense of the physical
gestures the musicians made to produce it but also from various forms
of cultural knowledge, including knowledge of the performance conven-
tions of particular genres of music and the performance styles of spe-
cific performers. As an audience, we acquire these kinds of knowledge
from our experience of live performances and the visual culture that
surrounds popular music.
Having argued in favor of considering musical performances in these
various media as legitimate objects of analysis, I will offer some sugges-
tions of how to analyze them, beginning with the performers themselves.
We may not usually think of musical performance, apart from opera and
musical theater, as entailing characterization in the conventional dramatic
sense. Nevertheless, we must be suspicious of any supposition that musi-
cians are simply “being themselves” on stage. Frith helpfully identifies
 Performance Analysis and Popular Music  •   27

three different strata in popular musicians’ performances, all of which

may be present simultaneously. Frith proposes that we hear pop sing-
ers as “personally expressive,” that is, as singing in their own persons,
from their own experience. But two other layers are imposed on that one
because popular musicians are “involved in a process of double enactment:
they enact both a star personality (their image) and a song personality,
the role that each lyric requires, and the pop star’s art is to keep both acts
in play at once.”14 In this respect, Frith rightly suggests that pop singers
are more like film actors than stage actors since film actors also perform
both their own star personalities and the characters they portray.
I shall both systematize and expand on Frith’s account. From this
point on, I will refer to the three layers of performance he identifies
as the real person (the performer as human being), the performance
persona (which corresponds to Frith’s star personality or image), and
the character (Frith’s song personality).15 All three layers may be active
simultaneously in a given musical performance. For example, when Kelly
Clarkson, the winner of the 2002 American Idol television singing compe-
tition, sang a duet on television with the well-­established country singer
Reba McEntire, they performed a song in which they played the roles
of women competing for the affection of the same man.16 In addition to
these characters, however, they also portrayed musical personae of the
seasoned veteran singer and her young acolyte (and perhaps future com-
petitor); these personae were delineated through the same performance
as the characters in the song but were independent of those characters—­
the singers could have performed their personae regardless of what song
they chose. The presence of the performers as real people was implied
through Clarkson’s televised announcement that she had always idol-
ized McEntire and had therefore chosen her as her duet partner when
she was in the position to do so by virtue of having won the competition.
Whether true or not, this appeal to personal experience was layered into
the performance alongside the two women’s performance personae
as seasoned veteran and young up-­and-­comer and their characters as
romantic rivals; all three levels of personification contributed to the per-
formance’s meaning for the audience.
That these three signified presences admittedly are often difficult to
distinguish one from another does not diminish their heuristic value.
The demarcation line between real person and persona is ambiguous
in performance for, as Richard Schechner points out, performance is
always a matter of performers’ not being themselves but also not not
being themselves.17 This logic of the double negative is represented in
 28  •   in concert

one way by the professional names sometimes used by pop music per-
formers, names that initially designate their personae but are later gen-
eralized to the real people. David Jones renamed himself David Bowie;
David Bowie is not David Jones, yet he also is not not David Jones, as
suggested by the fact that the name David Bowie belongs now to both the
real person and the performance persona. The real person is the dimen-
sion of performance to which the audience has the least direct access,
since the audience generally infers what performers are like as real peo-
ple from their performance personae and the characters they portray.
Public appearances offstage do not give reliable access to the performer
as a real person since it is quite likely that interviews and even casual
public appearances are manifestations of the performer’s persona rather
than the real person. Some performers are nevertheless quite adept at
creating the impression that their fans have direct access to them as real
people. Lady Gaga’s use of online video and social media, which I discuss
in chapter 7, is a case in point.
Both the line between real person and performance persona and
the line between persona and character may be blurry and indistinct,
especially in the case of pop music performers whose work is meant
to be perceived as autobiographical, such as the participants in the
singer-­songwriter genre I analyze in chapter 5. Even in the absence of
overt autobiography, however, these relationships can be complex and
ambiguous. Bowie constructed a number of other identities for himself
over the course of his career, many of which have names of their own:
Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke, and so on. It is not
entirely clear whether it makes most sense to see these named entities as
characters Bowie plays and the Bowie identity as the persona that remains
constant across these representations, or to see them as transformations
of the Bowie persona itself. Because Ziggy Stardust and the others figure
also as characters in songs, and because the Bowie persona is that of a
performer who can transform himself completely at a moment’s notice,
I would argue for the former analysis, though the other argument is
credible.
I will qualify this schema for popular music performance by indicat-
ing that character is an optional element that comes in primarily when
the musician is a singer performing a song that defines a character
textually. In other cases, the performance may be perceived as a direct
performance of persona unmediated by character. This is particularly
true for nonsinging musicians who do not develop characters through
voice and lyrics but whose personae may play roles in other kinds of
 Performance Analysis and Popular Music  •   29

staged narratives. Fast, in her analysis of Led Zeppelin’s performances,

points out that guitarist Jimmy Page played the role of the inspirational
musical genius, while bassist and keyboard player John Paul Jones por-
trayed the persona of the band’s solid, learned musical technician.18 The
interplay between the two musicians was based partly around this nar-
rative, a narrative that did not derive from a text such as a song and
involved the musicians’ performance personae rather than characters.
In another, more overtly scripted, example from the documentary film
of David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert, guitar-
ist Mick Ronson seems to assault Trevor Bolder, the bass player, during
a lengthy guitar solo performed as part of the song “Width of a Circle.”
In the course of the scuffle, Bolder apparently knocks Ronson onto his
back; after playing in that position for a bit, Ronson gets back up, fends
off the bassist, and raises his arms in triumph in the style of professional
wrestler.19 This melodrama was presumably a choreographed, fictional
battle and not a spontaneous fight between the two musicians; as such,
it did not involve the characters of the song (and was not enacted by the
singer) but was played out between the two men’s performance personae
as instrumentalists.
The idea that instrumentalists enact personae, sometimes in narra-
tive contexts as I discussed in the introduction, suggests how this basic
schema might be extended beyond the realm of rock or popular music,
since musicians and musical groups in all genres can be said to have
performance personae. Jazz musicians often have very distinctive per-
sonalities as instrumentalists and bandleaders, expressed not only in the
way they play, but in their appearance, the way they move, the way they
address the audience, and the way they deal with their fellow musicians.
During a visit to New York City jazz clubs in 2001, I saw performances
by two tenor saxophonists and bandleaders: Pharaoh Sanders, a veteran
of the jazz experimentalism of the 1960s, and Joe Lovano, who came to
prominence in the mid-­1980s. Sanders, dressed in a light-­colored Nehru
suit, presented himself as a beatific elder statesman who drifted in and
out of the performance, seemingly picking up its flow when the mood
seemed right. At the end of the set, he invited the audience to partici-
pate in a sing-­along on a spiritual theme; holding out the microphone
for responses, he seemed completely unfazed when no one in the audi-
ence replied—­he was absorbed in the moment and nothing else mat-
tered. Lovano, like the rest of his group, dressed in a jacket and tie,
conversed and joked with his bandmates and the audience, establishing
a generally upbeat, informal atmosphere that was quite different from
 30  •   in concert

the reverential tone of Sanders’s performance and that also belied the
rigors of the hard bop Lovano and his band were playing. Lovano also
seemed to be more a working member of an ensemble than the relatively
aloof Sanders, who remained to the side or offstage during substantial
portions of the set. The personae these musicians performed may have
some relationship to their offstage personalities and values; audiences
may in fact be eager to believe that they do. But this does not mean,
once again, that Sanders and Lovano were simply “being themselves” on
stage. Other jazz musicians, notably Thelonious Monk, the members of
the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Sun Ra’s Arkestra, have performed
obviously constructed and artificial personae, demonstrating that jazz
performance personae need not be identical with the musicians’ identi-
ties as human beings.
My analytical schema applies as well to the performance of classical
music. Symphony orchestra conductors have performance personae
(e.g., the authoritarian conductor, the dignified, patrician conductor,
the conductor as a passionate, Romantic figure, and so on), as do sing-
ers and instrumental soloists.20 Even a classical music ensemble can have
a collective persona. A particular orchestra may assume a persona so
conservative that its audience’s jaws drop if a twentieth-­century composi-
tion appears on one of its programs, while the members of a string quar-
tet may take on the performance personae of youthful mavericks who
behave more like pop stars than staid classical musicians. Symphonic
musicians rarely portray characters through their playing, but it can hap-
pen, as when the instruments represent various animal and human char-
acters in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf or Saint-­Saëns’s The Carnival of the
Animals.
Other elements of rock and pop musicians’ performances align with
their performance personae more than with their characters. Musicians’
costumes, makeup, and general appearance, along with any sets, lighting,
props (including musical instruments), and visual effects they may use,
usually express their personae, which remain continuous throughout a
performance and across their performances, not the individual charac-
ters they may portray from song to song.21 Fast borrows Eugenio Barba’s
description of the actor as possessing a “fictional body” and applies it to
musicians; it seems to me that the fictional body of a musical performer
is the body of the performance persona, a body whose appearance is
made to conform to the image of that persona.22
Popular musicians do not perform their personae exclusively in live
and recorded performances; they perform them as well through the
 Performance Analysis and Popular Music  •   31

visual images used in the packaging of recordings, publicity materials,

interviews and press coverage, toys and collectibles, and other venues
and media. It is generally the case, of course, that the performers are not
the sole authors of the personae they perform in these many contexts:
producers, managers, agents, publicists, and the entire machinery of
the music industry collaborate with artists, and sometimes coerce them,
in the construction and performance of their personae.23 It does not
follow from this for me, as it does for some commentators, that these
aspects of pop music performance have everything to do with market-
ing and commodification and nothing to do with artistry and musical
aesthetics. Although the commodity critique of popular music is impor-
tant, it de-­emphasizes the practice of doing close readings of particular
performances for which I am advocating here since all popular musical
personae and performances are equivalent commodities.24 Part of the
audience’s pleasure in pop music comes from experiencing and con-
suming the personae of favorite artists in all their many forms, and this
experience is inseparable from the experience of the music itself and
of the artists as musicians, as the analysis of Beatlemania in chapter 8
shows. Pop music audiences are not made up of mere dupes who are
sucked into a maelstrom of mindless consumerism with music as the
lure; rather, pop music listeners are savvy consumers who are well aware
of their role in the industrial production of music and music culture and
able both to enjoy that role and critique it self-­consciously.
There are several sets of constraints on the construction of musical
performance personae; as I suggested in the introduction, the most
immediate of these are genre constraints. This much is obvious: rock
musicians simply do not look or act like classical musicians, who do not
look or act like jazz musicians, and so on. Even within genres, there are
distinctions: psychedelic rockers do not look and act like glam rockers,
who do not look and act like punk rockers, and so on. The ease with
which these facts can be stated belies their importance within musical
cultures: musical genres and subgenres define the most basic and impor-
tant sets of conventions and expectations within which musicians and
their audiences function. As Fabian Holt puts it,

Genre is a fundamental structuring force in musical life. It has impli-

cations for how, where, and with whom people make and experience
music. . . . There is no such thing as “general music,” only particular
musics. Music comes into being when individuals make it happen,
and their concepts of music are deeply social.25
Figure 1. A Model of Popular Music Performance
Note: Character appears in parentheses to indicate that it is an optional part of the process that occurs primarily in performances based on
song narratives. The double-­headed arrow before “Audience” denotes a two-­way relationship; the audience is able to give feedback to the
performers using most (if not quite all) of the same means of expression used by the performers. The feedback may take place through
audience behavior at a live performance or through responses to recorded music and various forms of participation in popular music cul-
ture, including the decision to become a musician.
 Performance Analysis and Popular Music  •   33

Genres can and do overlap, and musicians draw on genres other than
their own in their performances (rocker Mick Jagger, for instance, is
said to have derived much of his movement style from Tina Turner, a
soul music artist);26 genre conventions change over time and never have
the force of absolute dicta. Nevertheless, they are crucially important to
performers in constructing their performance personae, to audiences in
interpreting and responding to them, and to both in creating and main-
taining a sense of musical identity and community.
All of the processes of production, performance, and reception that I
have mentioned take place within the contexts of the sociocultural con-
ventions of the societies in which they occur, conventions that popular
music both reflects and potentially contests. The gender ambiguities of
glam rockers’ personae, for example, challenged the gender norms of
American and European societies in the early 1970s. The performance
of glam was a safe cultural space in which to experiment with versions
of masculinity that flouted those norms.27 Glam rock was in this respect
a liminal phenomenon in Victor Turner’s sense of that term, a perfor-
mance practice through which alternative realities could be enacted and
tested.28 Inasmuch as glam rock was almost completely dominated by
men and took the performance of masculinity as its terrain, however,
it was also entirely in line with the conventions of rock as a tradition-
ally white male-­dominated cultural form that evolved from white male-­
dominated cultural and social contexts. Popular music is not entirely
constrained by dominant ideologies, but neither is it entirely free of
their influence.

Conclusion

I have summarized in figure 1 the schema for analyzing popular music

performance proposed here. The outer frames represent the most
important contexts to be borne in mind when undertaking such analy-
sis: the general context of sociocultural norms and conventions against
which performed musical behavior must be assessed, and the more
immediate framing context of musical genre conventions that govern
the expectations of audience and performer and the ways they commu-
nicate with one another.
The inmost frame represents the realm of popular music perfor-
mance itself, a realm in which performers and their audiences are the
most important agents. The performer combines three signifieds: the
 34  •   in concert

real person, the performance persona, and the character. I present these
entities in what I take to be their order of development. The process
begins with a real person who has some desire to perform as a popular
musician; this may include the desire to participate in a certain musical
genre or the desire to express certain aesthetic or sociopolitical ideas
through popular music. In order to enter into the musical arena, the
person must develop an appropriate performance persona. This per-
sona, which is usually based on existing models and conventions and
may reflect the influence of such music industry types as managers or
producers, becomes the basis for subsequent performances. The per-
former may use all of the available means to define this persona, includ-
ing movement, dance, costume, makeup, and facial expression.
In some performances, the persona enacts a third entity, a character
portrayed in the text of a song. This character may be the implied narrator
of the song or a subject described in the song; it is also possible for the per-
former to embody more than one of the characters in a particular song.
While the performer embodies different characters for each song, the
performance persona remains constant. As I noted earlier, not all musi-
cal performances involve character—­a singer or instrumentalist may well
perform a persona without portraying other characters, and performed
narratives, such as the ritual combat between guitarist Mick Ronson and
bassist Trevor Bolder during Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust concert tour, may be
constructed directly around personae rather than characters.
A very brief example, which I can only sketch here but have elabo-
rated elsewhere,29 will suggest how these frames and signifieds interre-
late in a single performance. In a 1973 television performance of her
hit song “Can the Can,” Suzi Quatro presented her persona as a black
leather-­clad, tough rocker woman, a persona that intentionally chal-
lenged both social conventions of femininity and the more vulnerable
or ethereal feminine images created by earlier women rock musicians,
even such powerful performers as Janis Joplin and Grace Slick (fig. 2).30
(This persona, which Quatro developed with her British management
team, was quite different from Quatro’s first performance persona in the
mid-­1960s as a miniskirted, braless member of an all-­girl Detroit-­based
bar band called Suzi Soul and the Pleasure Seekers. Her second persona
evolved in tandem with the mutation of the Pleasure Seekers into a more
hippie-­oriented group called Cradle.)
Like her costume, Quatro’s voice, an aggressive scream, was not ste-
reotypically feminine. Unlike most female rock performers of the time,
Quatro was an instrumentalist as well as a singer—­she played bass guitar
with all the showy panache of a lead guitarist, wearing the instrument
 Performance Analysis and Popular Music  •   35

Figure 2. Video still of Suzi Quatro performing “Can the Can” on the German tele-
vision program Disco in 1973.

low, down around her hips in a masculine position and sometimes hold-
ing it away from herself to showcase her playing. Her movements were
not dance movements but the characteristic bob and stomp associated
with male rock musicians. Her facial expressions expressed the pleasure
that musicians take in the urgency and hard work of playing rock—­they
were the expressions of her rocker persona, not of the character evoked
in the song. Although the fast tempo and boogie rhythm of “Can the
Can” was consistent with her masculine rocker persona, the character
depicted in the song placed Quatro in a more conventional role for a
female pop artist, since the protagonist is advising an implicitly female
listener—­albeit in very aggressive terms—­to safeguard her male love
interest against the blandishments of other women. This fragment of
analysis suggests that Quatro’s performance can be read in relation to
two sets of conventions for female comportment—­social conventions
and those of her musical genre—­and that the performance persona she
created through such means of expression as costume, movement, facial
expression, and the onstage manipulation of a musical instrument can
be defined explicitly as an entity distinct from the characters she por-
trayed in the song’s narrative.
 36  •   in concert

I place the performance persona at the center of the process outlined

here and nominate it as the single most important aspect of the per-
former’s part in that process. The persona is of key importance because
it is the signified to which the audience has the most direct and sus-
tained access, not only through audio recordings, videos, and live per-
formances, but also through the various other circumstances and media
in which popular musicians present themselves publicly. The persona is
therefore the signified that mediates between the other two: the audi-
ence gains access to both the performer as a real person and the char-
acters the performer portrays through the performer’s elaboration of a
persona. I wish to return in this context to a point I made earlier about
the necessity of considering audio recordings as performances. I will
now extend the same claim to lip-­synched performances on television
(such as Quatro’s) and in music videos. While such representations do
not document live performances of music, they do provide performers
with good opportunities to define and extend their personae. With no
obligation to sing or play, musicians are unencumbered and free to focus
on performing their personae.
Audiences for popular music do not receive performers’ representa-
tions passively but respond to them actively. Conventions for audience
behavior, like those of musical performance itself, are genre specific
(sometimes even performer specific: think of the Deadheads or Jimmy
Buffet’s Parrothead fans). The double-­headed arrow connecting the
audience to the performance in the diagram is meant to suggest that the
audience responds to the performers and that this feedback is crucial
to the cultures of popular music. In live performances, audiences may
respond directly to performers in ways that are not limited to applause
and cheering but may include singing along, direct address to the per-
formers, choice of costume and makeup, dancing, and so on. Outside
the context of live performance, audience response comes in a wide
variety of forms, including the physical responses I mentioned earlier,
collecting audio and video recordings, participating in fan clubs, online
chat rooms, and social media, and incorporating the music into everyday
life. The placement of the double-­headed arrow is meant to suggest that
audiences can avail themselves of most of the same means of expression
as popular musicians themselves in their responses to them, including
playing music. Perhaps the ultimate response to popular music perfor-
mance is when a young person aspires to become a musician him-­or
herself and join the performers he or she has seen onstage.
 Ch apt er T wo

Music as Performance
The Disciplinary Dilemma Revisited
•••

At the start of the previous chapter, I identified the disciplinary dilemma

confronting those who wish to take musical performance seriously. In
the present chapter, I return to this dilemma to examine more closely
the tensions between the disciplines of performance studies and musi-
cology with the ultimate goal of opening a new discursive space in which
to consider musicians as performers, the project of this book. The
discursive space I seek resides “at the crossroads of performance stud-
ies and musicology,”1 as the editor of a special journal issue on music
and performance puts it, but whether it is a bridge between the two
disciplines, a point at which they intersect, or a new field forged from
them remains an open question. Indeed, the nature of the relationship
between these two disciplines is a point of contention within this still rel-
atively uncharted field. The nature of this contention is well expressed
by Derek Miller, who argues in his essay “On Piano Performance: Tech-
nology and Technique” that the performance studies approach to musi-
cal performance neglects the essence of music, which he considers to be
sound. He refers specifically to my claim that the musical persona is the
central phenomenon of musical performance, discussed in the previous
chapter and elaborated further in chapter 5. Here I will summarize this
position in a few sentences:

37
 38  •   in concert

Musical performance may be defined . . . as a person’s representation

of self within a discursive domain of music. I posit that in musical per-
formance, this representation of self is the direct object of the verb to
perform. What musicians perform first and foremost is not music, but
their own identities as musicians, their musical personae.2

Specifying the relationship between musician and musical text, I view

music as an expressive resource musicians use to perform their personae.
Since the audience experiences the music as mediated by the musician’s
persona, it—­not the musical text—­is at the heart of musical perfor-
mance. For Miller, foregrounding musical persona in this way empha-
sizes what he describes as the secondary “epiphenomenal” dimensions
of performance at the expense of its bedrock of sound.3
Miller also accuses performance studies of demanding that musi-
cology “abdicate entirely its formalist attention to sound.”4 Although I
consider Miller’s specific arguments to be flawed, as I shall show, his
concern that the union of performance studies with musicology may cost
the latter its proper object of study is worth addressing. It is a concern
shared in some measure by Richard Pettengill and Nicholas Cook, the
editors of Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance. They write in their
introduction,

Western “art” musicologists have developed sophisticated techniques

of close reading and listening, but have traditionally shied away from
the issues of personal, social, and cultural meaning that emerge from
the act of performance. Performance theorists address the latter,
but  .  .  . the specific ways in which these meanings are conditioned
by sounds and their representations within specific musical cultures
sometimes seem to slip through the net.5

Alejandro Madrid suggests a similar disciplinary dichotomy in his discus-

sion of the different approaches each discipline takes to music:

While music scholarship (including performance practice) asks what

music is and seeks to understand musical texts and musical perfor-
mances in their own terms according to a social and cultural context,
a performance studies approach to the study of music asks what music
does or allows people to do; such an approach understands musics
as processes within larger social and cultural practices and asks how
these musics can help us understand these processes as opposed to
how do these processes help us understand music.6
 Music as Performance  •   39

Cook and Pettengill, Madrid, and Miller all nominate musicology as the
discipline that explicates music per se, while performance studies is the
discipline that can tell us about the social meanings music generates in
performance and the uses to which it can be put. It is remarkable that in
both cases it is music, not musicians, that is granted agency (what music
is versus what music means). Ultimately, I shall argue, a truly produc-
tive approach to music as performance must move beyond formulations
that mark off disciplinary territory, even in the interest of emphasizing
complementarity, in favor of an approach that sees music and its perfor-
mance as inextricably imbricated with one another.
Miller, for his part, defines “musical performance as a dynamic rela-
tionship between a musician and a (sound-­producing) instrument. . . .
Considered in this way, musical performance is a double performance:
a technological performance by an instrument and a technical perfor-
mance by a musician.”7 I hasten to say that in many respects I have no
problem with Miller’s formulation, which seems a reasonable way of
describing the performance of instrumental music (I discuss the nature
of the collaborative relationship between musician and instrument here
in chapter 4).8 However, I take exception to Miller’s valorization of the
instrument as the source of sound, which rests on a claim that whereas
the bodies of actors and dancers are themselves instruments, “the ‘body’
of the music (as a sonic phenomenon) and the body of the musician are
not identical; their relationship is non-­isomorphic.”9 One major gap in
Miller’s argument is that he does not address vocal music sufficiently. He
acknowledges in a footnote that “there are styles of vocal performance
(e.g. operatic singing) in which the singer consciously treats the body as
an instrument (often referring to it as such). To be a trained singer is to
have trained one’s instrument, one’s body to produce a desired sound.”10
It is certainly fair enough to describe the singer’s body as an instrument,
but precisely for that reason, singing is surely a form of musical perfor-
mance in which the body of the music is isomorphic with that of the
performer in the same sense that a dancer’s body is isomorphic with the
dance. In the case of singing, like that of dance, performer and instru-
ment are not separable in the way they are in the case of instrumental
performance. Even if the singing body is an instrument, it is still the
singer’s body. When the pianist exits the stage, the instrument remains.
When the singer exits the stage, the instrument exits as well.
There are other examples in addition to traditional singing in which
musicians use their own bodies as their instruments. Two that come
immediately to mind are Bobby McFerrin’s vocal practice and Lau-
rie Anderson’s “Drum Dance” from her 1986 concert film Home of the
 40  •   in concert

Brave.11 McFerrin is an American jazz singer who employs a range of

unconventional techniques in his solo performances to produce the illu-
sion, and sometimes the reality, of polyphonic singing (one technique
he employs is that of throat singing, which enables a singer to sing two
tones simultaneously). His wide vocal range allows him to oscillate very
rapidly between the bottom of his range and falsetto, from head voice
to chest voice and back again, thus creating the impression of two sing-
ers in dialogue. He generally weaves three such vocal lines together and
supplements these with vocally produced percussive and sound effects,
impressions of musical instruments, and vocal distortions and other per-
cussive sounds made by manipulating his throat or thumping his chest.
McFerrin’s multiple and complex uses not only of his larynx but of the
entirety of his upper body dramatize the inseparability of his body and
his music. One of his songs is titled “I Am My Own Walkman.”12 More to
the point, he is his own instrument.
For “Drum Dance,” Laurie Anderson wore a costume with sensors
built into it at various points on her body, including her shoulders,
chest, sides, and knees. These sensors triggered digital sounds of drums
and other percussion instruments. As Anderson danced, she struck her
hands against these areas of her body to generate a percussion solo
(see fig. 3). Because electronics mediated between Anderson’s gestures
and the sound, she was not her own instrument in the literal sense that
McFerrin (or any singer) is—­she was more a human digital interface.
Nevertheless, the tight connections in this piece between the rhythm of
her movements, the gestures she made that were both dance movements
and means of producing musical sound, and the sound itself make it
impossible to dissociate the music she made from her dancing body.
To fit musical performances such as these to Miller’s definition would
be an exercise in extreme Cartesianism requiring one to distinguish
between the performer as musician and the performer as instrument,
and to anatomize these performers’ bodies to distinguish the parts that
serve as sound-­producing technologies from those that act on them
technically to produce sound. For example, McFerrin’s hand would be
designated as that of the performer executing the technical gesture of
thumping, while his chest would be seen as the instrument acted upon.
For Miller, the way to correct performance studies’ ostensible neglect
of sound and my supposed overemphasis of musical persona as the cen-
tral phenomenon of musical performance is to focus on “technique,”
the technical performance skills that enable musicians to generate musi-
cal sound from instruments (or their own bodies, in the case of sing-
 Music as Performance  •   41

Figure 3. Laurie Anderson performs “Drum Dance.” Film still from Home of the
Brave (1986), directed by Laurie Anderson.

ers). I have nothing but admiration for the technical skills that musicians
display, and there can be no principled objection to including consid-
eration of technique when analyzing musical performances. But “tech-
nique” is a much more slippery concept than Miller allows. In order
to cordon it off from the epiphenomenal, Miller follows Nusseck and
Wanderly in distinguishing between “technical” and “ancillary” gestures
in musical performance.13 Technical gestures are those directly involved
in the production of sound, such as the pressure of a finger on a key-
board, and are considered to be the only gestures necessary for musical
performance, while “ancillary gestures are a means of communicating
the performer’s attitude toward the music.”14 These have no direct rela-
tionship to sound production, and therefore no strictly musical function
from Miller’s point of view. “The lesson here is clear,” he states: “The
only elements that matter in piano performance are ‘practical.’”15 At
best, other elements constitute a secondary iteration of what the musi-
cian communicates in sound: “Ancillary gestures enact visually what the
pianist executes technically.”16
To insist that since musical performance is focused on sound means
that only technical gestures count is to treat performance in a one-­sided
way by attending only to the musicians’ production of sound and not to
the audience’s experience of it. This, in turn, is to imply that the audience
is nonessential to performance, a proposition that is untenable in terms
 42  •   in concert

of any reasonable definition. There is ample empirical evidence that

gestures Miller presumably would classify as ancillary in fact do contrib-
ute significantly to auditors’ perception of musical sound. In a review of
the literature on experimental research into music perception, Michael
Schutz enumerates the ways in which both technical and ancillary ges-
tures influence how audiences hear musical sound.17 Acknowledging that
the visual aspects of musical performance contribute much to its affec-
tive experience, Schutz also summarizes the experimental evidence that
perception of such formal properties of musical sound as pitch, timbre,
dissonance, note duration, and the size of intervals is directly affected by
gesture. For example, the length of a tone sounded on a marimba will
be heard as longer or shorter depending on the percussionist’s gesture
even though the tone is always of the same duration,18 and “different
facial expressions can cause the same musical events to sound more or
less dissonant, the same melodic interval to sound larger or smaller.”19
In describing his experiments with the marimba, Schutz points out that
“percussionists  .  .  . (unlike other instrumentalists), have minimal con-
trol over acoustic note duration independent of other parameters such
as volume.” But notes played on the instrument were perceived by the
test subjects as “significantly longer when a given note was paired with a
long, rather than a short gesture. . . . Therefore, although gestures can-
not change the [physical] sound of a marimba note, they are capable
of changing the way that note sounds within the mind of the listener.”20
Schutz emphasizes the ways visual information can influence what
we hear at both cognitive and purely perceptual levels.21 In other words,
musicians’ gestures, in some cases including so-­called ancillary gestures,
directly influence the audience’s perception of musical sound—­which
would be heard differently when executed with different gestures—­
and not just its understanding of “the performer’s attitude toward the
music,” as Miller would have it. As Schutz points out, the implication
of this research is that music—­especially, I would add, in the context of
performance—­“is less about sound per se than it is about using sound
to create a particular experience within the mind of the listener. To this
end, the strategic use of visual information is no less important than
manipulations of breath control, bow position, striking angle, intona-
tion, etc.”22 This suggests that the concept of instrumental technique
needs to be extended to the musician’s nontechnical gestures that nev-
ertheless shape the listener’s perception of musical sound itself.
When linked to the premise that a musician’s corporeal engagement
in performance is truly “musical” only when it involves actions on an
 Music as Performance  •   43

instrument that directly produce sound, the distinction between techni-

cal and ancillary gestures Miller employs reinforces the prejudice against
the body and the concomitant valorization of interpretation as an essen-
tially intellectual activity that characterize Western discourse on music.
Although Miller seems at first to challenge the mind/body distinction
as it has traditionally played out in this discourse by saying, “The knowl-
edge of a musical work resides in the pianist’s body,” he retreats to the
normative position by describing the physical process of performing as
mediation “between a conceptual soundscape (the work as imagined in a
pianist’s ‘inner ear’) and a physical, perceptual soundscape (sounds pro-
duced by the piano).”23 In this schema, the function of performance is to
communicate the musician’s “conceptual knowledge” of the work to an
audience—­the musician’s physical actions thus serve an intellectual con-
struct. Nicholas Cook describes this conception of how music is made as
“the page-­to-­stage approach [that] transforms such [Cartesian] dualism
into a means of disciplining the performing body, subjecting it to a men-
talistic construal of the musical work.”24 Susan Fast points out that this
approach has had a limiting effect on the discourse around music: “The
desire to maintain the mind/body split in Western culture and to focus
analytical attention on music that seems to have less to do with the body
than the mind has hindered scholars from developing a way of talking
about the somatic qualities of music.”25 As Jairo Moreno puts it, “The
body is clearly seen [in this discourse] as the locus of ultimate exterior-
ity and as a threat for contemplation of a purely musical aesthetic.”26
What Madrid calls performatic actions that oblige us to acknowledge the
musician’s corporeal presence as the material basis of the production of
musical sound are rejected as repellent.27
For example, the normative critical reaction to musicians such as
Glenn Gould and Keith Jarrett, both of them pianists famous for per-
formance personae defined in part by such eccentricities as vocalizing
along with their playing and, at least in the case of Jarrett, assuming
an unusually active and intimate relationship with the instrument, is to
emphasize their conventional skills as pianists and to suggest not only
that their other behaviors are ancillary but also that the audience should
ignore them. In the 1959 documentary film Glenn Gould: Off the Record,
Gould is seen playing piano in his lakeside vacation home, accompanied
only by his collie dog.28 He is wearing a bathrobe; a coffee cup sits atop
the piano. He vocalizes robustly along with his own playing of Bach and
occasionally plunks out a single note with a playful gesture reminiscent
of Chico Marx. At one point, he abandons the keyboard midstream to
 44  •   in concert

Figure 4. Glenn Gould plays the piano at his lakeside home in a still from the
National Film Board of Canada’s documentary Glenn Gould. Off the Record (1959),
directed by Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor.

get up and look out the window, still vocalizing the rhythm of the music,
then returns equally abruptly to the piano. The domestic context of the
documentary encourages the audience to feel it is getting a candid view
of Gould, but since he is being filmed, he is in fact engaged in a public
performance that showcases his eccentricity (see fig. 4).
In the opening sequence of Keith Jarrett: Last Solo, a film of a 1984
concert in Tokyo, the camera faces Jarrett across his piano and captures
his expressions.29 Before he begins to play, a secretive smile plays across
his lips. He lowers his head down into the keyboard as he starts, shaking
it vigorously, then suddenly lifts his head and torso rapidly into an erect
position, his face contorted with ecstatic expression, his eyes clamped
shut, his lips quivering as he seemingly mouths the music he improvises.
The deeper he gets into the music the more active his body becomes: he
shakes and rolls his head more and more vigorously; his facial expres-
sions sometimes appear pained; he stands at the keyboard gyrating his
torso and thrusting his pelvis in ways often perceived as sexual while
simultaneously vocalizing along with his playing.
 Music as Performance  •   45

The critical line on Gould and Jarrett is that they are brilliant musi-
cians in spite of what they do in performance, not because of it.30 But
what if these idiosyncratic performatics are integral to Gould’s and Jar-
rett’s respective means of producing sound, as seems to be the case?
(Why else would they subject themselves to predictable critical disap-
probation for performing as they do?) Summarizing the findings of an
empirical study, Jane W. Davidson states, “Expressive bodily movement
operates to generate in the music an immediate and communicative
purpose for the performer as he/she creates the performance . . . gen-
erating and responding to the musical sounds in an interactive man-
ner between self and music.”31 This suggests that such movements are
not merely illustrative, as Miller suggests, but rather generative—­they
serve a vital function for the performer in the production of sound. If
these performers need to do these things in order to produce the sounds
they wring from their instruments, why should these physical actions not
come under the heading of technique?
Moreno, writing on Jarrett, points to the way the limitation of tech-
nique to the technical reduces the musician’s physicality to that of a
machine (my image, not his): the “conventional belief in the role of the
performer” mandates that “the articulations and gesticulations of the
body are part of the mechanics of reproduction [of the musical com-
position] but not, perversely enough, of the articulation of meaning.”32
Paul Sanden, writing on Gould, argues that listening to the musician’s
body as music, rather than dismissing nontechnical gestures as produc-
ing “noise,” is necessary to a full appreciation of music “as a physically
enacted phenomenon”—­as performance, in short—­and to grasping “the
significance of Gould’s performances and not merely that of his inter-
pretations.”33 From this perspective, there is no distinction between tech-
nical and ancillary gestures: all of the musician’s gestures constitute the
performance of music as embodied expression and shape the music for
the audience sonically, interpretively, and affectively. Further, the musi-
cian’s persona is not epiphenomenal. Jarrett’s ecstatic communion with
the keyboard; Gould’s portrayal of a mad alchemist of Bach; McFerrin’s
treatment of his own body as an acoustic sounding board; and Ander-
son’s use of her own body as a percussive interface: all of these are both
the physical means by which the artists make music and embodiments of
their presence and identities as musicians, their musical personae.
I would like to consider for a moment two sequences from the films
of the two pianists I have discussed. During Jarrett’s encore at the end
of the film, the camera isolates his technical gestures by zooming in on
 46  •   in concert

his hands at the keyboard, shots subsequently juxtaposed with full-­body

shots of him at the piano in the same frame. The initial impression is that
the technical gestures are the most important, since the hands appear
much larger in the frame than Jarrett’s entire body at the keyboard,
seen in long shot. The next sequence fragments Jarrett’s body into his
hands at the keyboard and his feet stomping on the floor, suggesting,
perhaps, that Jarrett’s “ancillary” gestures are worthy of attention, before
settling on his torso in medium shot. This view is immediately intercut
with images of the interior of the piano in close-­up, as if to echo Miller’s
idea of piano performance as a collaboration between the musician as
technical performer and the piano as technological performer and the
source of the sound. Aside from one further shot of Jarrett’s hands, the
remainder of the clip (a bit less than half of its total length) focuses on
Jarrett himself, settling into a tight shot of his face to strongly suggest
that, finally, he is the source of the music. By contrast, the clip of Gould
never fragments him or divides his gestures into the categories of techni-
cal or ancillary. Most often, we see him from the waist up, at the piano.
Although his hands are not always visible, his face always is, suggesting
that he is the source of the sound. If the clip of Jarrett implies a train of
thought that focuses on various aspects of his performance, weighs the
relative values of his technical performance and his dramatic presence
at the keyboard, and finally settles on the idea that the persona he enacts
is the source of the sound, the clip of Gould suggests right from the start
that the music emerges not from the piano but from Gould, not from his
hands but from the whole person.
Paired analytical concepts such as technical and ancillary gestures,
what music is and what it does or, to cite another set of terms Madrid pro-
poses, the performatics and the performativity of music, have descrip-
tive value. I emphasized performance analysis in the previous chapter,
and I am committed to the value of thick description of musical perfor-
mances. But thinking in dichotomies reifies conventional understand-
ings of music and performance by reducing musical performance to
components we are comfortable labeling with one term or the other,
rather than facing the challenge of understanding musical performance
as something other than music plus performance. I see musical perfor-
mance not as an alloy that can be broken down into constituent parts,
but as elemental. Switching metaphors from metallurgy to linguistics, I
suggest that the relationship between music and performance parallels
Roman Jakobson’s description of the relationship between language and
speech.
 Music as Performance  •   47

Jakobson takes issue with linguists who describe emotional expres-

sion carried by speech as “nonlinguistic,” arguing that “if we analyze
language from the standpoint of the information it carries, we cannot
restrict the notion of information to the cognitive aspect of language”
and that attributing emotional expression to “‘the delivery of the mes-
sage and not to the message’ arbitrarily reduces the informational capac-
ity of the message.”34 I hear a similar reduction in some of the discourse
around music as performance, in which music is figured implicitly as the
message, which exists prior to and independently of its performance,
and performance is the delivery system that brings music into the public
sphere. Although music and language are not the same thing and it is
always risky to compare them, they are comparable in at least one respect:
music is no more independent of its expression than is language.35 Just
as the way words are spoken determines the semantic content of the mes-
sage, so the way music is performed determines its musical content. Just
as speech and language are fused in the message, so music and perfor-
mance are fused in musical performance. Miller argues that the specific-
ity of music as sound, and musicologists’ formalist approach to it, must
be respected when looking at it from a performance studies perspective.
In contrast, I argue that what must be respected is the specificity of musi-
cal performance defined not as a relationship between two autonomous
practices (music and performance) or the object of a dialogue between
two autonomous fields (musicology and performance studies) but as an
irreducible fusion of expressive means.
Moreno, too, argues for this way of thinking when he challenges the
position that “music is sound, and only sound is music” in his description
of Keith Jarrett’s performance:

His [oral] sounds and gestures are unquestionably part of the music,
so much so that one could describe these sounds and gestures not as
a translation or mechanisms in service of music, or an addition to the
music, but the music itself. . . . In Jarrett’s pianism, communication is
aural, oral, visual, and kinetic. . . . To center music’s communication
in sound alone is to dehumanize it.36

With this in mind, I return to Madrid’s distinction between what music

“is” and what it “does” to suggest that these two ideas are not as easily dis-
tinguishable as they may appear. Music is not sound disengaged from the
physical being of the person who makes it. Listening to Schutz’s marim-
bist or to Keith Jarrett or Glenn Gould or any musician, the sounds I hear
 48  •   in concert

result directly from all aspects of the person’s physical engagement with
the act of music making—­all of the sounds and gestures that constitute
the performance—­not just the limited range of actions conventionally
included under the word “technique.” Perhaps, then, the solution to the
disciplinary dilemma I identified in the previous chapter is to recognize
that there is no dilemma, no ontological or epistemological gap between
music and performance that needs bridging. Music is what musicians do.
 C h a pter Th ree

Sound and Vision

The Audio/Visual Economy of Musical Performance
•••

In the preceding chapters I argued, contra those who would claim

“music is sound, and only sound is music,”1 that the visual and behav-
ioral dimensions of musical performance—­ the dimensions through
which musical persona is communicated—­are essential to both the pro-
duction and the reception of musical sound. In the present chapter, I
will discuss further the relationship between the auditory and visual ele-
ments of musical performance. A debate in computer music touches on
a fundamental question about the audiovisual economy of musical per-
formance. Audiences at musical performances using traditional instru-
ments are assumed to understand the underlying cause-­and-­effect rela-
tionships between the technical gestures they see and the sounds they
hear (e.g., if I see a musician press a key on a piano or even reach inside
it, I understand the sound that follows to be the result of the action
I witnessed). By contrast, audiences for music that uses relatively unfa-
miliar digital devices such as various MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital
Interface) interfaces (like the ones Laurie Anderson used for the “Drum
Dance” suit mentioned in the previous chapter) or laptop computers as
instruments cannot be assumed to understand the relationships between
the performers’ actions and the resulting sounds (unless, of course, they
are fully conversant with the particular technologies and techniques in
use). As Caleb Stuart points out, “With the laptop, there is no [cause-­
49
 50  •   in concert

Figure 5. Patrick K.-­H. and Oleg Makarov, “Live-­Acousmatic” performance, Love

Live Electronic Festival, November 27, 2009. Camera: Ivan Savchenko, “OK-­films”
studio.

and-­effect] connection. From the point of view of the audience, the

computer is an inanimate object; it sits there while the performer acts
surreptitiously behind the screen. . . . The audience in general does not
know exactly what it is that the performer is doing and most do not know
how the sound is produced or with what”2 (see fig. 5).
This masked production of sound challenges the usual understand-
ing of the relationship between musician and audience endorsed by
commentators who consider the visual aspects of musical performance
to be significant. W. Andrew Schloss outlines aspects of this position:
“This relationship is based on many factors, most significantly on trust,
and also on the audience understanding what the performer is doing on
stage.”3 Those engaged in the debate about computer music agree that
new musical technologies challenge the traditional relationship of audi-
ence to performance, but view this challenge differently. Schloss insists
to computer musicians that “a visual component is essential to the audi-
ence, such that there is a visual display of input parameters/gestures”
that clarifies the nature of causality in the performance.4 Stuart, on the
other hand, argues that “the performativity of the music is to be found in
the act of listening and the performance of the audience in relationship
to the sound they hear. There is no need then for us to see a performer
physically interacting with an instrument to engage in this aural perfor-
mativity: we need only listen and engage in the act of listening.”5 Stuart’s
 Sound and Vision  •   51

perspective aligns with a way of thinking about more traditional kinds of

musical performance that deems its visual aspects to be irrelevant to the
production of sound, as discussed in the previous two chapters.
Although this debate is driven by the accelerating incursion of digi-
tal technologies into the live performance of music, the underlying
issues are not new. The current debate is a chapter in the ongoing
argument over what Pierre Schaeffer, who was central to the develop-
ment of musique concrète beginning in the 1940s, called “acousmatic
sound,” defined by Jonathan Sterne as “sounds that one hears without
seeing their source.”6 The idea that the audial and visual dimensions of
musical performance are distinguishable “tracks,” and the question of
how the relationship between these tracks should be understood and
configured in performance, has come up in many different contexts at
least since recording technology made it possible to experience sound
apart from vision.7
Those who acknowledge the importance of “the visual communi-
cation of musically relevant information” to the experience of musi-
cal performance generally limit this category to the gestures and facial
expressions musicians make while performing.8 For Schloss, musical
performance entails a display of the musician’s effort on the audience’s
behalf, which betokens both an expenditure of physical energy and an
ethical commitment “to what one is doing.”9 Stan Godlovitch includes
in a list of conditions that have to be met for an event to be considered
a musical performance that the event is “the immediate output of some
musical instrument” (which does not include computers), involves “the
exercise of skilled activity,” and is “the outcome of appropriately credit-
worthy physical skill.”10 Both Schloss and Godlovitch locate the essential
aspects of musical performance in things that are not directly apprehen-
sible from sound alone. Godlovitch refutes the idea that listeners who
close their eyes at concerts experience “all that is musically significant,”
because “musical sound alone is not sufficient for performance.”11 One
cannot hear the musician’s effort or skill; one must be able to see the
“bulging veins in the neck of the trumpeter blasting a high C” to fully
appreciate her effort.12
The idea that the display of effort is significant to musical perfor-
mance further problematizes the distinction between technical and
ancillary gestures I challenged in the previous chapter because it is very
difficult to draw the line between displays of effort that might qualify
as technical from those that might be considered to be ancillary. For
example, jazz trumpeters like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie are
 52  •   in concert

famous for puffing out their cheeks while playing. This facial gesture is
technical in the sense that it is directly related to the means each musi-
cian used to supply air to the instrument in order to produce musical
tones, while at the same time being a crucial visual dimension of their
respective musical personae. If one is comfortable describing these facial
manifestations as technical because of their relationship to the produc-
tion of musical sound, what of Armstrong’s habitual dramatic use of a
white handkerchief to wipe away from this face the perspiration that
resulted from the effort of his playing or singing? The perspiration itself
is a direct physiological dimension of technical music-­making, but is that
also true for the gesture Armstrong employed to manage it? How can we
distinguish clearly among technical gestures that are displays of effort
(the puffed cheeks), physiological phenomena that are direct effects of
exerting effort in performing technical gestures (perspiration), and ges-
tures designed in part to manage those physiological phenomena (the
use of the handkerchief)? At what point do we cross the line from purely
technical gestures essential to the production of musical sound and into
the realm of the ostensibly ancillary and epiphenomenal?
Just as effort must be seen because it cannot be heard, one cannot
be certain that the musician’s sound is a direct product of skill unless
one witnesses the musician in the act of producing the sound. It is worth
noting that musical audiences, for the most part, probably do not have
a very fine-­grained sense of instrumental causality. As Michael Schutz
observes about wind instruments, “Changing pitches requires complex
interactions between embouchure and fingertips that are far from trans-
parent to audiences.”13 Therefore, the emphasis on visible causality in
musical performance, which falls in line with the well-­documented West-
ern privileging of the sense of sight over the other senses, is best under-
stood as ideological.14 In most cases the musical audience does not really
understand exactly how the sound is produced, but wants to believe it
does nevertheless.
From this perspective, anything that inhibits the audience’s ability
to perceive the musician as the skilled causal agent of the performance,
including sound recording, distracting spectacle, or the use of digital
technologies that obscure cause-­and-­effect relations, threatens the integ-
rity of musical performance. Godlovitch, for example, argues that “what-
ever we hear on a recording is not itself sufficient to ground judgments
of the player’s real role and true merit,” because the listener cannot
know from the recording itself precisely how it was produced.15 Even
if one believes a performance on a sound recording to reveal virtuos-
 Sound and Vision  •   53

ity or hears things that seem to suggest effort and commitment on the
musician’s part (e.g., pianist Glenn Gould’s famous vocal interjections
discussed in the previous chapter or guitarist Alvin Lee’s yelps and excla-
mations on Ten Years After’s recording of “Boogie On”), one would have
to have witnessed the performance directly to be able to conclude that
the recorded sounds mean what they seem to mean.16
When a new technology or media form, including radio, sound
recording, music video, and the use of computers in performance,
threatens to render this visual verification moot, those who value what
they consider to be the normative relationship between the sonic and
visual aspects of musical performance become anxious. They share this
anxiety with theorists of acousmatics, who, as Sterne points out, “assume
that face-­to-­face communication and bodily presence are the yardsticks
by which to measure all communicative activity” and fear that certain
technologies and performance practices decontextualize “sound from
its ‘proper’ interpersonal context.”17
In Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, I hypothesize that the
category of “liveness” was first used to distinguish some performances
from others (the Oxford English Dictionary dates the earliest usage of this
kind to 1934) in response to such anxiety, brought on at that time by the
dominance of radio. Early sound recording technologies did not prob-
lematize the distinction between live and recorded sound: if you put a
record on your gramophone and listened to it, you knew exactly what
you were doing, and there was no possibility of confusing the activity of
listening to a record with that of attending a concert. But radio is a blind
medium that makes it impossible to verify the source of the sounds being
heard. The resolution of this crisis was to create the labels “live” and
“recorded” with which to discursively distinguish live broadcasts from
recorded material and mandating their use on the radio, thus allowing
listeners to know whether they were hearing the immediate results of
musicians’ skilled activity or a recording.18
More recent manifestations of this anxiety include Godlovitch’s
concern that digital technologies will eventually displace “real” musi-
cal instruments and skills; Schloss’s worry that the illegibility of cause-­
and-­effect relations in musical performances involving interfaces with
which most listeners are unfamiliar will alienate audiences; and the fear
expressed by Thompson, Graham, and Russo that a range of phenom-
ena, including the imagery of music video, spectacular pop music per-
formance, and air guitar, will replace or draw the audience’s attention
away from “musically relevant” visual information.19
 54  •   in concert

A growing body of research on musical perception and cognition in

experimental psychology lends some support to these concerns. Studies
of hearing suggest that sound perception is multimodal, in that both
our visual and auditory senses contribute to it, and that the human
brain seeks always to construct causal links between a heard sound and
a visible source.20 Experimental studies of musical performance show
that its visual dimensions decisively influence what we hear.21 However,
the values attached to the two sensory modalities associated with musi-
cal experience—­ hearing and seeing—­ and hierarchical relationships
between them are not produced by human biology, but rather are cul-
tural in origin.
Although all musical perception is multimodal, it is only in some
cultural contexts that audiences demand that the relationship between
modalities be structured to reveal the musician’s effort and confirm her
agency. Although such transparency is considered to be imperative in
traditional performance contexts, it seems quite clear that the majority
of the audiences for the Black Eyed Peas or Lady Gaga, for example,
are not in the least bit concerned that their uses of digital technology
to produce both instrumental and vocal sounds in performance do not
readily allow for identifiable cause-­and-­effect connections between musi-
cal sound and the means used to produce it. Godlovitch explicitly bases
his model for musical performance on the classical recitalist, and though
Schloss does not identify the genre of music with which he is primarily
concerned, his career as a percussionist and computer musician bridges
jazz, rock, Latin music, and contemporary composition.22 It is just as
plausible that audiences for classical music and contemporary composi-
tion with traditional values would want to see and understand how the
music they are hearing is produced as it is that audiences of pop and
dance music that employs digital technology do not necessarily share
those values.
On the other hand, musicians and their audiences in these latter con-
texts do not necessarily reject traditional values, either. The desire to
maintain the transparent relationship between musician and audience is
not limited to art music; it is also central to the ideologies of most forms
of rock, jazz, blues, country, folk, and other genres of popular music.
In work based on ethnographic study of Berlin club DJs, Mark J. Butler
observes:

To the extent that they are expected to convey liveness in perfor-

mance, musicians must also communicate connections between phys-
 Sound and Vision  •   55

ical gestures and resultant sounds to their audiences. This is espe-

cially important in an electronic dance music context, in which many
of the musician’s interactions with interfaces may be invisible, and
the unfamiliarity of the instruments renders their performance tech-
niques gesturally opaque to most audience members.23

The DJs therefore strive for “legibility” in their uses of technology, pre-
cisely the same quality that Schloss and others wish to see in the perfor-
mance of digitally produced music in the Western art music tradition.24
In Liveness I discuss the way rock’s ideology of authenticity entails the
audience’s accepting that the musicians before them, whether on stage
or on record, are the agents responsible for making the sounds they are
hearing (paralleling Godlovitch’s analysis of classical music). Any doubt
on this score (e.g., over the use of recorded material in concert [e.g.,
lip-­synching] or session players in the studio) can discredit the music in
question as authentic rock. But the authenticity of the sound cannot be
verified in and for itself—­audiences can effect such verification only by
observing the musicians and drawing conclusions from the perceptible
relationship between their actions and the sounds produced.25
Nevertheless, even performers operating within genre contexts in
which traditional values generally hold sway sometimes challenge them
by manipulating the relationship between the auditory and visual aspects
of musical performance in ways that go against the traditional grain. The
remainder of this chapter examines one such performance practice: the
use of light shows in both psychedelic rock and classical music concerts.

Liquid Light

One very direct challenge to traditional beliefs concerning the relation-

ship between the auditory and visual aspects of musical performance
was the practice by a number of prominent psychedelic rock bands of
the 1960s, including the Doors and Jefferson Airplane, of performing
portions of their concerts in darkness, thus replicating one way people
sometimes listened to records and implying that musical sound is self-­
sufficient and requires no visual verification.26 Jefferson Airplane con-
sidered the point important enough to include the track “Turn Out the
Lights” on the album Bless Its Pointed Little Head, a live recording made
at the Fillmore East and Fillmore West in 1968. On it, members of the
group can be heard imploring stage management to dim the stage light-
 56  •   in concert

ing; their pleas become an improvised instrumental number with a corny

country feel. But careful listening reveals that the group does not see
performing in the dark as an end in itself. Rather, they are concerned
that their audience be able to see the accompanying light show.27 The
Airplane’s insistence on the importance of the synesthetic psychedelic
effect of their performance is one way they performed their collective
and individual personae as psychedelic rock musicians.
Light shows were staples of rock concerts during the psychedelic
era. The Airplane engaged the services of the San Francisco–­based art-
ist Glenn McKay; his Headlights, who had performed frequently at the
Fillmore Auditorium, later known as the Fillmore West, became the Air-
plane’s exclusive light show group from 1967 through 1972.28 The Fill-
more East in New York City had a troupe of resident light artists under
the direction of Joshua White, known collectively as the Joshua Light
Show.29 Clearly the Airplane wanted their audience to get the benefit of
their arrangement with Headlights, but their demand for darkness also
had other implications.
As a performance to which two sets of artists contribute in different
media, the rock concert with light show can be analyzed as an instance
of musical multimedia (IMM), for which Nicholas Cook has provided a
theoretical framework. Cook distinguishes types of multimedia events
according to the character of the relationships among the media. These
can be of three types: conformance, complementation, and contest. Con-
formance describes situations in which other media are consistent with
the music (and vice versa); complementation, those cases in which music
and other media complete one another to form a single whole expres-
sion; and contest, those situations in which music and other media are
in conflict or competition with one another.30 As Cook wisely suggests,
these are not best treated as discrete categories: “A more sensitive appli-
cation will distinguish between the different roles played by different
media within any IMM and will categorize the relative preponderance of
conformance, complementation, and contest.”31
Concerts with psychedelic light shows were complex and multi-
faceted instances of musical multimedia. Descriptions often indicate
that the movements of lights, shapes, colors, and images “were based
on the underlying rhythm of the music” and established a “direct link
between the visual and aural effect.”32 On this basis, the concerts could
be described as instances of conformance, where the lights conformed
to the music’s rhythmic or thematic structure. David Snyder, however,
who performed as Revelation Lights, insisted that he did not want the
 Sound and Vision  •   57

audience to think that the lights followed the music, but rather that the
lights and the music constituted simultaneous interpretations of the
composition.33 Thus understood, the concert with light show could be
an instance of what Cook describes as “triadic conformance”: music and
other media are in mutual conformance with a third entity (in this case
the musical composition).34
It is also often suggested that psychedelic rock and light shows sought
to enhance or simulate the experience of an acid trip. McKay states, “Even
if you weren’t tripping, [the light show] gave you another trip.”35 On
“Turn Out the Lights,” a member of Jefferson Airplane jokingly threat-
ens the stage crew to “send Owsley to get you” if the lights are not turned
down, a reference to Owsley Stanley, the preeminent provider of LSD
in San Francisco at the time. Sheila Whiteley describes the London psy-
chedelic music scene: “Long, improvisatory passages and electronically
produced sound effects resonated with stroboscopic lighting to bring
about a feeling of freedom analogous to the effect of acid: the ‘piling
up of new sensations,’ the associations with changed perspectives and
color.”36 In this connection, the concerts could be considered instances
of complementation, in which music replicated or stimulated the aural
portion of the synesthetic LSD experience while light shows provided
the hallucinatory visual dimension of the same experience (and of tri-
adic conformance, since both music and light show referenced the acid
experience). Performances in visual and aural media combined in the
psychedelic rock concert to deliver a full replication of an LSD trip that
neither could produce on its own.37
Psychedelic light shows can be understood as instances of comple-
mentation even apart from the context of psychedelic drug experi-
ence, however. Headlights’ relationship with the Jefferson Airplane was
unusual (at least in the United States).38 Light artists usually worked for
the venue rather than the musicians. As the resident light show at the
Fillmore East, the Joshua Light Show was employed by Bill Graham, the
impresario behind the Fillmores East and West, not by the bands with
whom they worked, and they provided light shows for all the artists Gra-
ham booked into the hall (except for those who refused to work with
them). These concerts were not collaborations between the light artists
and the musicians (although the light artists would cooperate with spe-
cific requests from the musicians), and they did not necessarily rehearse
together. White emphasizes the live, improvisational, and “manual” (as
opposed to automated) aspects of the light shows and suggests that for
the most part there was little effort to achieve close synchronization
 58  •   in concert

Figure 6. Jefferson Airplane performing “Wooden Ships” at the Fillmore East, New
York City, November 28, 1970. Source: wolfgangsvault.com.

between the music and the lights. He describes the light show itself as
“arrhythmic[,] and therefore it was the audience and the musicians
which gave it a rhythm.”39 The assumption underlying these concerts was
that musicians and light artists shared a sensibility, a sense of their coun-
tercultural context, and an awareness of what their audience wanted.
They all worked toward a common goal, but not through any formal
alignment of sound and vision (see fig. 6).
Although Cook presents his schema for musical multimedia as a
quasi-­objective, structuralist vocabulary for identifying relationships
among the elements constituting a given IMM, I argue that the choice
(or emphasis) of one of his categories over another reflects the ideology,
bias, or interests of the analyst more than the inherent properties of the
IMM. As the examples I have cited suggest, it seems likely that the musi-
cians and light artists involved in producing psychedelic concerts and
their audiences would have considered the relationship between music
and light show to entail conformance or complementation, or both.
They probably perceived the lights as following or illustrating the music
or the music and lights as paralleling one another (either of which is
an instance of conformance), or, because the counterculture of which
 Sound and Vision  •   59

psychedelic rock concerts were a part emphasized synesthetic experi-

ence, they may have understood the aural and visual media to be work-
ing together to create a total event, whether the event was understood
as a simulation of an LSD trip or as a celebration of countercultural
aesthetics.
From the perspective I have described here that sees visual informa-
tion about the production of the music as an essential dimension of per-
formance, however, the psychedelic rock show can be understood only
in a quite different way: as an instance of contest between the aural and
visual elements of the concert. This characterization derives not from
the relationship between these elements, but from the nature of the
visual elements themselves. Presumably, there would be no objection
from this perspective to a performance in which the visual and musical
elements conformed to one another or complemented one another; in
either case, they would be working together to communicate musical
information, as long as the visuals in question were “musically relevant.”
In psychedelic light shows, however, musicians’ performing bodies were
interwoven with moving and still images, colors, and patterns, some
abstract and some representational, in ways that often obscured their
gestures and facial expressions.
For the sake of historical accuracy, it is important to distinguish the
early light shows in San Francisco from slightly later East Coast practices.
In mid-­1960s San Francisco, where musical performances by psychedelic
rock bands were staged as dances rather than concerts, the light shows
provided immersive visual environments that suffused musicians and
audience alike. Later East Coast light shows, especially at the Fillmore
East, relied more on rear projection on screens that appeared behind
the musicians and obscured them less.40 In the former case, the light
show erased the musicians’ gestures and facial expressions; in the lat-
ter, the light show provided distracting, spectacular competition for the
musicians. The effect of distraction was intentional. Joshua White attri-
butes his opportunity to create light shows at the Fillmore East to Bill
Graham’s decision “that the audience needed to have something to look
at besides a bunch of musicians in street clothes tuning up.”41 In both
cases, even if the visual effects followed the rhythm or structure of the
music and thus conveyed musical information to the audience, the light
show also inevitably impeded the audience’s ability to see or focus on the
very things valorized in the traditional model of musical performance:
the musicians’ physical actions in producing the sound. Audiences were
thus deprived of what traditionalists believe they need to perceive the
 60  •   in concert

musicians’ effort and skill and to verify the authenticity of their per-
formance. The light show was guilty of the same crime of which some
have accused music videos: “Substituting the gestures of a performer
with other visual content necessarily changes perceptual and affective
co-­regulation, distorting and diluting the communication between per-
formers and listeners through a literal distancing of the performer from
his or her audience.”42
Although I am framing the rock concert with psychedelic light show
as a performance practice that challenged the traditional view of musical
performance and the values inherent in it, it is difficult to determine with
certainty whether psychedelic rock bands like Jefferson Airplane under-
stood their own use of light shows as a statement of defiance against such
a view or were simply adhering to the performance conventions of their
genre, social milieu, and historical moment. There is evidence of some
tension surrounding the recourse to visual spectacle within psychedelic
rock. Chuck Beale, lead guitarist for the Canadian band the Paupers, was
quoted as saying, “We are trying to create a total environment with sound
alone. . . . Sound is enough. We don’t use lights or any gimmicks. When
we record we don’t double track or use any other instruments. What the
four of us can do is the sound we make. That’s all.”43 This remark was
probably directed at the Airplane, whom the Paupers reportedly out-
played when they shared a bill at the Café Au Go Go in New York City
in 1967. It suggests that the community of psychedelic rock musicians
was not monolithic, that there were factions within it, including a fac-
tion that dismissed “musically irrelevant” visuals alongside recording stu-
dio trickery in favor of focusing on the musicians, the sound, and their
unvarnished skill in creating it.
During the psychedelic era, from the mid-­1960s through the early
1970s, light shows were not restricted to rock concerts: both the Joshua
Light Show and Headlights worked with classical musicians as well. The
organist Virgil Fox, a Bach specialist, began a series of what he called
“Heavy Organ” concerts with a performance at the Fillmore East in
1970; the show also featured Joe’s Lights, an offshoot of the Joshua Light
Show. In 1971 Fox toured the Heavy Organ with Pablo Lights and per-
formed with them at Winterland in San Francisco. In 1972 he teamed
up with Revelation Lights. Posters for Fox’s concerts gave the light shows
equal billing, in the manner of contemporaneous posters for rock con-
certs; Fox also brought David Snyder, the “lumierist” (as he called him-
self) behind Revelation Lights, out on stage for a bow at the end of the
 Sound and Vision  •   61

concert (Snyder was also Fox’s business manager and life partner). Fox
made several live Heavy Organ recordings during this period, including
Bach Live at Fillmore East (1971) and Bach Live in San Francisco (1972),
recorded at Winterland. Whereas the sleeves of many of Fox’s earlier
albums (he began recording in 1941) had the staid look associated with
the graphic design for albums of classical music, the sleeves for the Bach
Live albums looked like they were designed for rock albums and partook
of the visual styles and typography associated with the counterculture.
The cover for the album recorded at Winterland even listed Pablo Light
Show as part of its title; the cover for Heavy Organ at Carnegie Hall (1972)
similarly lists Revelation Lights.44
Whatever the precise motivations of the psychedelic rockers who
chose to intertwine their music and bodies with powerful visual effects,
it is clear that Fox’s reconfiguring of the classical organ recital as a rock
concert, including his use of light shows and his embrace of counter-
cultural visual style, was a gesture of rebellion against the performance
conventions of a musical genre in which traditional values held sway that
contributed to the definition of his persona as a maverick classical musi-
cian. The fact that Jefferson Airplane used light shows as a means of
demonstrating fealty to the genre of psychedelic rock, while Fox used
the same device to demonstrate his antagonism toward the conventions
of his genre, speaks to the importance of context or frame. The same
performance technique takes on very different meanings in different
genre contexts. Addressing an audience, Fox declared himself to be
“in open warfare with a gang of creeps who call themselves purists.”45
Although not an advocate of drug use, he regularly used the language
of drug experience to describe his concerts, calling them “trips.” During
a Boston Pops concert in 1974 that was broadcast on PBS, he held up
his experiences at the Fillmore East and Winterland as models of what a
concert should be, saying, “This is the kind of a trip where there is bright
sunlight, magnificent uplift, true inspiration.” He encouraged the Pops
audience to clap along with Bach and dance in the aisles, as had the
“kids” at the Fillmore East and Winterland, and the audience obliged.46
Although Fox’s insertion of rock showmanship into the performance
of classical music is an example of a musician’s intentionally using the
visual dimensions of performance to challenge both traditional tenets
regarding what counts in musical performance and the cultural position
of classical music, it is somewhat ironic that Fox was an organist, because
historically organists had always been at a disadvantage in meeting tradi-
 62  •   in concert

tional criteria for performance. D. C. Somervell describes the organist’s

predicament (with tongue firmly in cheek) in an essay of 1943 entitled
“The Visual Element in Music”: “Here . . . there is nothing to see. The
organist is hidden away in the organ-­loft and even if you could see him
you would not get much idea of what he was doing. The great stacks
of organ pipes stand as impassive as ever. There is a grand imperson-
ality about organ performance.”47 Somervell’s description suggests that
since organists are generally invisible and their playing does not reveal
a clear cause-­and-­effect relationships between visible effort and auditory
output anyway, they cannot provide the kind of performance described
by Schloss and Godlovitch.
Fox’s solution was to perform on a Rodgers Royal V electronic tour-
ing organ (called “Black Beauty” and, at two tons, the “heavy organ” of
the concerts’ collective title) that was specially designed and built for
him.48 This technology enabled him to perform in halls like the Fill-
more East or Winterland, which did not have built-­in pipe organs, and
to place his instrument downstage at an approximately fifty-­five-­degree
angle to the edge of the stage so that his hands were as visible as pos-
sible as he worked the keys and stops. As Richard Dyer notes in a pro-
file of 1974, Fox “sways his torso and swings his hands aloft and makes
great show of changing the stops crosshanded. A spotlight on those
pumps makes sure you don’t forget he’s moving down there too.”49
These highly visible gestures, coupled with his flashy attire (a 1974
article in Time magazine draws attention to the “overblown poppies
bloom[ing] in Oriental splendor in the organist’s iridescent paisley
jacket” and “his rhinestone-­decorated black suede shoes”) and special
effects, such as his disappearing “in a puff of smoke” at the concert’s
end, places Fox alongside Liberace (with whom he once shared billing
on a television program), Jerry Lee Lewis, Keith Emerson, Elton John,
and Lady Gaga, among others, in the lineage of flamboyant keyboard
artists, a category usually restricted to those performing in rock and
pop.50 Embracing the conventions of rock performance, Fox brought
the organist out of the loft and into the spotlight, an act that in itself
aligned performance on that instrument more closely with traditional
values by making the organist’s physical actions and exertions visible
to the audience. However, his use of psychedelic visual effects to chal-
lenge what he saw as overly rigid conventions of interpretation and
performance in classical music decisively distanced his Heavy Organ
performances from those same values.
 Sound and Vision  •   63

Conclusion

It is clear that technological change is the backdrop for the audiovisual

economy of musical performance described here. Technologically driven
developments that have challenged traditional values which empha-
size the importance of maintaining clear cause-­and-­effect relationships
between the visual and auditory aspects of musical performance include
sound recording, radio broadcasting, and the use of computers and digi-
tal instruments in live performance, as well as such recent cultural forms
as music video and air guitar. On balance, the evidence suggests that anx-
iety about these developments is misplaced. However much the aesthet-
ics of current popular music performance seem to be dominated by pure
visual spectacle, the belief that we require visual verification of musical
sound maintains its ideological grip. As new ways of making music arise,
their practitioners more often than not find ways to assimilate them to
traditional values. This is evident on one side of the debate about com-
puter music with which I began. As a further elaboration of that example,
consider an email invitation I received on January 9, 2010, to an evening
of live-­coded music at the Anatomy Museum, King’s College, London.
The invitation explains, “Live coders expose and rewire the innards of
software while it generates improvised music and/or visuals” (live cod-
ing is also called “on-­the-­fly programming”).51 The invitation goes on to
assure us, “All code manipulation is projected for your pleasure,” mak-
ing it clear that even in this rarefied, technologically advanced musical
context, the traditional assumptions hold sway: the audience must be
shown how the sound is made in whatever way possible.
Much the same issue arose about jazz guitarist Pat Metheny’s per-
formances with the orchestrion, an elaborate array of robotic musical
instruments, primarily stringed and percussion, that he developed, con-
trolled by a computer and MIDI interface, which accompanies his gui-
tar playing. (Metheny is the only “human” performer onstage at these
concerts.) Ben Ratliff’s review of Metheny’s 2010 orchestrion concert
at Town Hall in New York City interestingly traces the way the concert
appeared to be structured to clarify what was going on for a tradition-
ally minded audience. Ratliff begins by noting that Metheny played
solo guitar at first, something his audience was used to and in which
the visual cause-­and-­effect relationships between what he was doing and
the sounds produced were clear. Suggesting that the audience would
have “riot[ed]” had Metheny not provided it with some understand-
 64  •   in concert

ing of what was going on, Ratliff notes that he moved into a section of
the concert in which “it seems that the specificity of your attack on the
guitar—­whether and how you strum a chord or pick a note—­determines
the texture of the orchestral sounds that result from it. How it all works
remains unclear, but the audience understands it better.  .  .  . It’s quite
possible that a listener is thinking, for the first time that evening, ‘I could
do that.’”52 Ratliff’s description implies that to make his performance
using an unfamiliar technology palatable to the audience, Metheny fol-
lowed Schloss’s suggestion, quoted previously, that he provide “a visual
display of input parameters/gestures” to clarify the relationship between
gesture and sound and allow the audience to believe it understood what
was going on.
Although there is no reason to suppose that traditional values will
be dethroned in musical performance any time soon, consideration of
the historically uneven relationship between sound and vision in musi-
cal performance shows that the “audiovisual” is not to be understood in
this context as seamlessly unified, but as syncretic, and probably better
rendered as “audio-­visual” or “audio/visual.” In the cultural contexts of
rock, classical, jazz, and computer music to which I have referred here,
the audiovisual is always divided into two tracks, which are treated as dis-
crete and can be placed in various relationships to one another. These
relationships are configured as power relationships, in which one track is
thought to dominate and set the context for the other. The ideologically
dominant view is premised on a complex relationship between these
tracks. On the one hand, the sound is thought to be the more impor-
tant track, because the goal of the performance is precisely to play the
music. On the other hand, sound alone is incapable of providing the
audience with all of the information it needs to assess the musician’s skill
and effort; it is thus dependent on the visual track for verification. In that
sense, the true locus of power is in the visual track, and it is this track that
the musicians I discussed here who sought to challenge traditional val-
ues and performance conventions manipulated by using lighting effects,
including darkness and psychedelic light shows, that both obscured their
own actions as they produced musical sound and allowed spectacular
visual effects to dominate their performances.
 Ch apt er Four

Lucille Meets GuitarBot

Agency, Instrumentality, and Technology
in Musical Performance
•••

Although the relationship between instrumentalist and instrument in

musical performance has been conceived in a number of different ways,
there is a basic distinction between those who posit the instrument as an
extension of the performer and those who see the two entities as sepa-
rate. Edward T. Cone presents a strong version of the former position.
Using primarily the performance of classical music as his point of refer-
ence, Cone argues that whereas a singer is akin to an actor in that the
singer “enacts a role, portrays a character” through the lyrics of the song,
and thus maintains a distinction between the performer’s voice and that
of the thing being performed, the instrumentalist’s voice melds with that
of the instrument to becomes “a compound creature, the musician-­cum-­
instrument.”1 Matthew Gelbart extends Cone’s position into the realm
of rock music by making a parallel argument regarding the conventions
surrounding the performance of rock during its formative era (roughly
1956–­1970) and describing Chuck Berry’s guitar as a phallic “extension
of [his] own physical body.”2
By contrast, Susan Fast describes the performed relationship between
another rock guitarist, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, and his guitar in
terms that suggest they are two separate entities. Fast describes Page as
continually moving his guitar around his body, which “gives the impres-

65
 66  •   in concert

sion that this instrument has life in and of itself—­that it is a force, a pres-
ence. Moving it points up its materiality—­it is not just a static piece of
technology but also a body with which the player has a physical relation-
ship.”3 This characterization suggests that the instrument, as an entity
separate from the musician, enjoys a degree of agency—­it is something
with which the musician must engage in order to produce the music. As
we have already seen in chapter 2, Derek Miller takes this idea of instru-
mental autonomy and agency a step further, albeit in a somewhat differ-
ent direction, by defining “musical performance [as] a double perfor-
mance: a technological performance by an instrument and a technical
performance by a musician.”4 In Miller’s view, it is from the collaborative
relationship of these two ontologically distinct entities, each engaged in
its own kind of performance, that musical sound arises.
In an essay titled “Instrumentalities,” David Burrows pursues the
latter direction of positing instrumentalist and instrument as separate
entities and proposes ventriloquism as a metaphor for understanding
their relationship. Al­though this is not Burrows’s point, this metaphor
suggests that one can see the musician as making the instrument sing
by “throwing” his or her musical voice into it. Burrows actually uses the
figure of ventriloquism to suggest another aspect of the relationship
between player and instrument, describing ventriloquism as “not simply
[an act] of concealment and transformation but [one that] involves split-
ting the performer’s person­ality and displacing part of it onto an alter
ego that acts as a foil, not a clone.”5 With this metaphor, Burrows impor-
tantly posits the musical instrument not as a McLuhanesque, technologi-
cal prosthetic that extends the capacities of the human body, but as an
entity perceived as distinct from, and in tension with, the musician. Like
the ventriloquist’s dummy, this entity is made to appear to have its own
agency with which the musician must negotiate in order to make it sing.
In reality, of course, the instrument is subject to the musician’s agency in
the sense that, like the ventriloquist’s dummy, it is mute without human
intervention, but the illusion of the instrument’s (semi)autonomy is fun-
damental to instrumental performance in most Western musical genres.
A possible reason for the cultivation of this illusion is that conven-
tional Western musical performance is a demonstration of skill under-
taken, as Stan Godlovitch has pointed out, under “accepted artificial
constraints.” Godlovitch means that instrumental performance is not
simply about producing particular sounds, but rather about pro­ducing
them by means that reflect the traditional values of a community of
musicians. These traditional values, which forbid such tactics as rede-
 Lucille Meets GuitarBot  •   67

signing instruments to make them easier to play or playing a violin part

on a synthesizer (Godlovitch’s examples), demand not only that certain
sounds be made, but that they be made under circum­stances that make
them difficult to produce so that musical performance “becomes a ritual
requiring skill”:

In these respects, [musical] performance shares much with explor-

ing and athletics. Specialized gear notwithstanding, ardent mountain
climbers do not typically solve their challenge by blasting and bulldoz-
ing so as to furnish level terrain where once there were cliffs; nor do
they hasten ascent to the peak in helicopters. Being an accomplished
guitarist is in part being able to subdue confidently the treacheries of
the guitar.6

In other words, musical performance is not just about achieving certain

sonic ends—­it is crucially also about perceptibly overcoming challenges
presented by the means used to achieve those ends. The emphasis in this
tradition on the legibility of the musician’s actions on the instrument
and the effort the musician exerts in making those actions, discussed in
the previous chapter, follows from this belief.
Without in any way discounting the real and hard-­earned skill of
musicians, I insist, Godlovitch notwithstanding, that what counts, ulti-
mately, is audience perception, not actual degree of difficulty. Here it is
necessary to make a distinction between audiences. Godlovitch’s argu-
ment pertains, in part, to the idea of skilled musicians as constituting
something like a guild; in order to claim membership in this “exclusive
community,” one has to demonstrate the necessary level of technical
accomplishment.7 Presumably, one’s fellow guild members are in a posi-
tion to judge one’s technical ability in and for itself by assessing one’s
instrumental technique, handling of the conventional repertoire, and
so on. As I pointed out in the previous chapters, most audience mem-
bers, however, are not also guild members and therefore do not possess
the requisite knowledge to make an informed judgment of instrumental
skill. As Theodore Gracyk puts it, “If one does not know the demands of
the particular instrument, one cannot judge the virtuosity displayed. And
this may be the situation more often than not.”8 It becomes necessary,
then, for the musician to perform instrumental skill in a way that will
make it apparent to a more general audience. To be an accomplished
guitarist in the eyes of this audience therefore is to appear to be able to
subdue the guitar, which means that the guitar has to be constructed in
 68  •   in concert

performance as something that presents obstacles for the player to sur-

mount, something that resists the player in some way and is not simply
a tool that yields readily to his or her use or a fully cooperative partner.
Investing the instrument with autonomy, constructing it as an entity with
a will and agency of its own, as the ventriloquist constructs the dummy, is
a way to achieve this effect in performance.
Here I will discuss the questions of instrumentality and agency, and
their relationship to technology, in musical performance using two con-
temporary perform­ers as case studies: blues guitarist and songwriter B.
B. King and classical violinist and composer Mari Kimura. Both may
seem somewhat idiosyncratic in their respective engagements with
instruments: King is famous for having named his guitar Lucille and
treating it as a person unto itself, and GuitarBotana, the composition
and performance of Kimura’s that I will examine, involves a digitally
programmed robotic musical instrument as well as a standard violin. I
will use the trope of ventriloquism as a means of unpacking the layers
of agency, both overt and covert, in their performances to suggest that
both performers, while innovative, do not so much challenge the ways
that agency and instrumentality play out in conventional musical perfor-
mance as dramatize them.

Lucille

As Burrows suggests, musicians can displace their own agency onto the
instruments they play in ways that constitute those instruments as (semi)
autonomous entities to which they relate as performing partners rather
than just tools. I once saw Judd Hughes, a virtuosic country guitarist who
played lead in Patty Loveless’s band, hold and manipulate an acoustic
guitar as if it were an unruly alter ego, like a barely trained Great Dane
over which he had temporary control but that could get away from him
at any moment. A more celebrated example is B. B. King, who in nam-
ing his guitar Lucille encourages his audience to perceive it as a separate
being, and implies that his relationship with it is fraught with the com-
plexities ostensibly attend­ing heterosexual relationships between men
and women.9
King’s relationship with Lucille is indeed complex, and I cannot hope
to do it justice here. The guitar is said to be named for a woman over
whom two men brawled at a juke joint in Arkansas where King played in
the late 1940s, early in his career; the fight led to the immolation of the
 Lucille Meets GuitarBot  •   69

place, a story that itself could have been taken from a blues ballad. King
consistently treats Lucille as an entity separate from himself, both discur-
sively and in the way he performs with her. He frequently gives Lucille
instructions, saying, “One more, Lucille” when he wants to play another
chorus, or “Take it easy” when he plays pianissimo. He confirms his ven-
triloquial relationship with Lucille in the way he seeks to make her sing
in his displaced voice: “The one thing that I’m concerned about today, to
make Lucille sound even more like singing, more in the style of my sing-
ing.”10 King defers to Lucille at moments when he claims to find himself
unable to speak, suggesting that his voice and Lucille’s are expressively
interchangeable. In his recording of the song “Lucille,” one of the places
where he has recounted the story of how the guitar got its name, King
says at one point: “Sometimes I get to a place where I can’t even say noth-
ing.” This remark is followed immediately by guitar playing, to which
King responds appreciatively, “Look out!” as if addressing the actions of
another.11 At a different moment in the same song, he says, “Sorta hard
to talk to you myself. I guess I’ll let Lucille say a few words, and then . . .”
His voice trails off as the guitar takes over; when he resumes speaking at
the end of the instrumental passage, he does not pick up where he left
off—­it is as if Lucille had completed the thought for him.12
He also describes Lucille as a distinct individual, with her own sensi-
bility, from whom he must coax musical sound:

It seems that it loves to be petted and played with. There’s also a cer-
tain way you hold it, the certain noises it makes, the way it excites
me  .  .  . and Lucille don’t want to play any­thing but the blues.  .  .  .
Lucille is real, when I play her it’s almost like hearing words, and of
course, naturally I hear cries. I’d be playing sometimes and as I’d play,
it seems like it almost has a conversation with me.13

King’s rhetoric here is worth attending to. There is ambivalence in the

way he refers to the guitar sometimes as “it” and sometimes as “her,”
alternately personifying the instrument and acknowledging its status
as an object. When he discusses his actions on Lucille (petting, play-
ing, holding), he refers to the instrument as “it.” But when he discusses
Lucille’s own musical contribution, he refers to the guitar either by name
or using feminine pronouns, thus clearly positioning Lucille as an active,
gendered entity separate from himself.14 This entity has human char-
acteristics: she speaks, cries, engages in conversation. He implies that
Lucille is autonomous: she is “real” and has specific ideas about what
 70  •   in concert

Figure 7. B. B. King sings on Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual (National Educational

Television, 1968). Still from video.

music she will perform. However, King does not characterize Lucille as
“treacherous,” the word Godlovitch uses to describe the resistance the
guitar offers its player. Lucille is King’s indispensable creative partner
and alter ego, but it is clear that her cooperation is not guaranteed: she
must be cajoled. King must do what she wants (“it loves to be petted and
played with”) if she is to work willingly with him in playing the blues.
King dramatizes this aspect of his relationship with Lucille in per-
formance. Like many other guitarists who are also vocalists, King often
does not play when he is singing. When he sings, his guitar simply hangs
against his torso on its strap while he uses his arms and hands to gesticu-
late in ways that underline the emotional states expressed in his songs’
lyrics (fig. 7). While singing, he stands erect, his face toward his audience
or directed slightly heavenward, his eyes often closed. When he plays
Lucille, however, his posture changes. He hunches over the fretboard in
his left hand, his head tilted downward toward the instrument. Even if
his eyes are closed, his head is positioned as if he were looking at Lucille,
giving her his full attention (fig. 8). While he is playing, every movement
of his body and every facial expression is a direct response to the sounds
 Lucille Meets GuitarBot  •   71

Figure 8. B. B. King communes with his guitar, Lucille, on Ralph Gleason’s Jazz
Casual (National Educational Television, 1968). Still from video.

emanating from Lucille, often on a note-­by-­note basis. In conjunction

with what he says about Lucille, this way of performing with her suggests
that when King is singing, he is free to express his own feelings as con-
veyed through the lyrics. If he wants Lucille to participate, however, the
focus must be entirely on her and what she has to say.15
In Burrows’s description, quoted earlier, ventriloquism “involves split-
ting the performer’s personality and displacing part of it onto an alter
ego.” In King’s case, it is arguably not just his personality that is split
and displaced, but also the two musical functions he performs: he sings
as himself, but his guitar playing is displaced onto Lucille as his alter
ego. In this respect, King may be said to be dramatizing the relationship
between singer and instrumentalist posited by Cone. Cone describes
the character portrayed by the singer as the music’s “vocal persona” (or
protagonist) and the accompanying music as the “instrumental (or vir-
tual) persona.” Cone treats these two personae as distinct voices in the
performed composition and considers the dialogue between them to
express the composer’s intentions. He also suggests that the relation-
ship between them can take many forms.16 Gelbart proposes that in the
 72  •   in concert

performance of rock music, vocal and instrumental personae are fused

into a single entity. By contrast, King the blues singer performs as the
vocal protagonist, while King the blues guitarist anthropomorphizes the
instrumental persona in the “person” of Lucille.
In a discussion of a series of experiments intended to show the con-
nections between the auditory and the visual in musical perception,
a group of research psychologists describe King’s typical gestures and
facial expressions, noting that

King frequently adopts an introspective demeanor, with eyes closed

and a pained expression, yet stubbornly shaking his head. This affec-
tive display conveys an impression of stoically reflecting upon but not
surrendering to difficult emotions. Periodically he stares open-­eyed at
the audience with an open mouth. The expression appears to convey
a sense of wonder.  .  .  . Judge A [one of the experimental subjects]
observed that King’s facial expressions often functioned to signal that
certain passages were difficult but satisfying to play.17

These authors also observe the direct relationship between King’s behav-
ior and the music he plays:

It is notable that B. B. King’s facial expressions closely track his guitar

sounds. . . . In some cases his rapid head shaking movement mirrors
vibrato on individual notes. This gesture has the effect of drawing
the listeners’ attention to local aspects of music, specifically to B. B.
King’s nuanced treatment of individual notes.18

I suggest that the ventriloquial paradigm for instrumental performance

points toward a different reading of King’s performance, though not
one that excludes the psychologists’ analysis. Whereas the psychologists
take it as given that King’s behaviors express his feelings about his own
playing and the music he is producing, it seems to me that the same ges-
tures and expressions can equally well be read as his reactions to Lucille’s
behavior. Perhaps the sounds Lucille produces arouse difficult emotions
within him, and perhaps it is her ability to move him that stirs his sense
of wonder. Perhaps it is Lucille’s prowess at rendering difficult passages
rather than his own that he signals for the audience, and perhaps he
is following “her” playing with his head movements. Constituting the
guitar as a separate “person” and acting toward it as such allows King
to dramatize the ventriloquial relationship between instrumentalist and
 Lucille Meets GuitarBot  •   73

instrument, a relationship that is always enacted, though not usually

foregrounded, in conventional musical performance.

GuitarBot

Mari Kimura’s GuitarBotana (2004) is a work for violinist and GuitarBot,

a robotic musical instrument designed by Eric Singer (who also worked
with Pat Metheny on his orchestrion, discussed in the previous chapter)
and based on the slide guitar. Gui­tarBot consists of four independently
controlled strings, each of which is “fretted” by a mechanical slide and
plucked by a plectrum. It cannot be played directly by human hands,
but only by using a computer and MIDI device; the computer can be
programmed to play it automatically.19
GuitarBot is a rather large and imposing sculptural object, over five
feet tall, including its base. Each string is stretched over its own vertical
metal strip; metal braces behind them hold the four strips parallel to
one another. Attached to the braces near the bot­tom of the assembly is
a metal rod that curves down to a supporting base. Although the robot
is not humanoid, it is generally anthropomorphic in its size and vertical-
ity. As GuitarBot plays, it bobs and shakes on its vertical axis. In a video
of GuitarBotana shot in an art museum, GuitarBot is perched on a white
gallery pedestal, making it noticeably taller than the diminutive Kimura,
who stands a few feet away from it while playing. She faces GuitarBot
throughout the performance (fig. 9).20
Kimura composed the music and wrote the software for GuitarBotana;
when perform­ing the piece, she both plays from a score and improvises.
GuitarBot’s part is also both scored and improvised. Its software enables
it to respond to the violinist’s playing in various ways. In some cases, it
follows the violinist closely and produces tones to fill out the harmony
of the piece; in others, it is programmed to disregard random pitches
played by the violinist, producing more open-­ended situations in which
its responses are relatively unpredictable. It is therefore possible for the
violinist and the robot to enter into an improvisational dialogue in which
the robot responds to the violinist’s playing and the violinist responds
improvisationally to the robot, and so on, all within the structural con-
straints of Kimura’s composition.
In a careful parsing of different kinds and degrees of interactivity in
performance, David Saltz makes the point that in a piece such as Gui-
tarBotana, the computer func­tions as a musical instrument.21 Given that
 74  •   in concert

Figure 9. Mari Kimura and GuitarBot perform GuitarBotana at the Chelsea Art
Museum, New York City, in 2004. Still from performance video directed by Liubo
Borrisov.

GuitarBot itself is a physical and mechanical object and not a computer,

it is more precise in this case to say that it is the instrument and the com-
puter “playing” it is a musician, but I will offer a slightly refined version
of this analysis below. Although King’s and Kimura’s respective instru-
mental performances are different in obvious and important ways, not
least of which are the differences between the genres of the music they
perform, the audiences for those genres, and the association of the blues
with folk and popular culture and art music with high culture, they both
foreground musicians’ ventriloquial relationships to their instruments.
In GuitarBotana, Kimura is, in effect, playing two instruments at once. As
a violinist she behaves convention­ally, without drawing attention to her
ventriloquial relationship to the instrument. But through her interac-
tion with GuitarBot, which she treats as an entity separate from herself
in a fashion quite comparable with King’s establishment of Lucille as an
autonomous agent, she engages in a metadiscourse around questions of
musical identity and agency similar to those implicitly raised in King’s
performance, but further complicated by her use of digital technology.
 Lucille Meets GuitarBot  •   75

Figure 10. Mari Kimura and GuitarBot perform GuitarBotana at the Chelsea Art
Museum, New York City, in 2004. Still from performance video directed by Liubo
Borrisov.

When Kimura plays GuitarBotana, she interacts physically with Guitar-

Bot very much as she might with a fellow human performer: as Kimura
plays her violin, she faces GuitarBot, leans and gestures toward it, and
watches its movements. Her facial expressions and body language look
as if she were taking and giving the kinds of performance cues that musi-
cians exchange (fig. 10). Her proximity to GuitarBot makes these ges-
tures seem quite intimate. At other times, Kimura does not look directly
at GuitarBot, but closes her eyes or else looks down. She focuses her
gaze on her violin and her own playing of it, looking over at GuitarBot
only every so often, as if to check in with a fellow player. Kimura uses her
gaze within the performance to construct her violin and GuitarBot dif-
ferently: the way Kimura looks at her violin while playing it establishes it
as her instrument, while the ways she looks at GuitarBot suggest that she
perceives it as another musician. The fact that GuitarBot moves as if it
were leaning toward and away from Kimura as its strings sound enhances
this effect by making it seem to move in response to her playing, ges-
tures, and looks. Like King, Kimura separates the two musical functions
 76  •   in concert

she performs: just as King sings in his own voice, Kimura retains the
identity of violinist for herself. And just as King displaces his identity as
guitarist onto Lucille, Kimura displaces her agency as GuitarBot’s pro-
grammer onto the instrument itself. (In saying this, I mean only that
King and Kimura both perform two musical functions simultaneously
and use one to foreground the ventriloquial aspect of the musician’s
relationship to the instrument, though not the other. The fascinating
ques­tion of whether a singer has a similar relationship to the voice as an
instrumentalist does to the instrument lies outside the purview of this
chapter.)
Kimura’s stated goal in this performance is for the audience to per-
ceive GuitarBot as a musical partner akin to another human musician,
not an instrument.22 She furthers this goal by using her own performance
as violinist to ensure that everything that happens in the performance
adheres to her vision of the composition:

My compensating for the robot’s or computer’s lack of musical “integ-

rity” as the performance goes along should be hidden from, or unno-
ticeable to, the audience. In short, my aim is that the performance as
a whole come across to the audience as if the robot or computer is
thinking, feeling, and being sensitive; that it possesses the “rights and
responsibilities” of a true musician.23

The purpose of this benign deception is rhetorical. If King’s dramatic

relationship with Lucille seems to echo the complex gender politics of the
blues, Kimura’s presentation of GuitarBot as a separate entity addresses
cultural issues pertinent to her genre—­that of art music. She wishes to
persuade her audience that contemporary, experimental, and electronic
music belong in the same canon as the classical repertoire: “I consciously
try to convey to the audience the fact that Bach, Brahms, Cage, Berio,
and Robots belong together in the same evening’s program.”24

Lucille Meets GuitarBot

Although I have emphasized up to this point the similar ways King and
Kimura construct Lucille and GuitarBot as autonomous musical agents
through their respective performances, there is an obvious and impor-
tant difference between these performances: Kimura’s use of digital
technology allows her to remain physically independent of her instru-
 Lucille Meets GuitarBot  •   77

ment, enhancing the illusion of GuitarBot’s autonomy. I say “illusion”

because, while it is true that GuitarBot is more autonomous than a con-
ventional instrument, since it produces sound without being manipu-
lated directly by a human being and the programming for GuitarBotana
allows it to make some “decisions” on its own, it is permitted only relative
autonomy. Although Kimura does not touch GuitarBot, she nevertheless
determines what it plays during the scored sections of the piece through
her programming of the computer that controls it. The score contains
special nota­tions that allow the performer to anticipate what GuitarBot
will do during specific passages in the piece. For example, (*ii) means
that “GuitarBot follows and plays the violin pitches in unison,” while
(*iii) means that “GuitarBot follows and plays the violin pitches, add-
ing 4th chords in parallel motion.”25 The sections in which GuitarBot
“improvises”—­ that is, produces relatively unpredictable output—­ are
also determined by Kimura and marked in the score. In other words,
even though Kimura does not know exactly what sounds GuitarBot will
produce during those passages, she knows when those passages will
occur and the basis on which GuitarBot will respond. Fur­thermore, as
the quotation above suggests, she seems to be primarily concerned with
the integrity of her composition, not with the creation of a genuinely
autonomous technological musical agent.
Since GuitarBot cannot think, and therefore cannot actu­ally make
musical decisions, Kimura must make it appear to think by compensat-
ing for what she calls its “lack of musical ‘integrity’” through her own
playing. Writing of the characters in MOOs,26 Michele White observes
that “characters can be programmed to . . . participate in events when
the spectator is not engaged with the host computer. It is difficult to
describe characters as subjects, even though the character ‘acts’ while
outside the spectator’s control because of the continued conflation of
spectator and character.”27
Much the same is true of GuitarBot: even though it acts on its own to
a certain extent and is never physically controlled by Kimura, it does not
qualify as a subject apart from her. Kimura’s programming of GuitarBot
does not grant it true au­tonomy; its apparent autonomy is an effect cre-
ated through the way Kimura performs with it, just as Lucille’s autonomy
is an effect of King’s performance.
Another important difference between King’s instrumental ventrilo-
quism and Kimura’s is also a direct consequence of her use of digital
technology: we can always see King manipulate Lucille, and there is ulti-
mately no ambiguity as to who is truly vested with agency in the per-
 78  •   in concert

formance. In this regard, King’s and Kimura’s respective performances

parallel two different moments in the history of ventriloquism. King’s
performance is akin to the more recent, and most familiar, paradigm of
the vaudeville ventriloquist who has a dummy for an interlocutor, which
originated in the mid-­nineteenth century. As Steven Connor notes, our
ability to make a visual connection between ventriloquist and dummy
is crucial to this kind of theatrical ventriloquism: our delight at the act
derives precisely from knowing, despite appearances, where the voice
comes from.28 Indeed, our delight in King’s facial expressions and physi-
cal gestures derives from the way they can be read as his reactions to the
sounds Lucille produces, as if autonomously, juxtaposed with the self-­
evident fact that it is King who is playing.
As I have noted, the technology Kimura uses enables her to sever the
physical con­nection: GuitarBot is her instrument, her dummy, her alter
ego, her foil; it is controlled by the software she wrote, her violin playing,
and the parameters of her composition. But there is not the evidence of
direct physical control conveyed by the proximity of dummy to ventrilo-
quist, not to mention the presence of the ventriloquist’s hand on the
doll. I suggested earlier that the computer could be seen as a musician
“playing” GuitarBot. I will now refine that characterization by suggest-
ing that the computer is not like a musician in itself; it serves, rather, as
Kimura’s “hand” that controls both GuitarBot’s movements and its musi-
cal actions, in the way the ventriloquist’s hand manipulates the dummy
or King’s hands play Lucille. Kimura’s physical agency as GuitarBot’s
controller has been displaced onto the computer. In her performance,
we see Kimura’s enactment of traditional physical agency on her violin
contrasted with the electronically mediated agency through which she
controls GuitarBot via the computer.
Whereas we see King control Lucille even as we enjoy the (fictional)
idea that he has to negotiate with her, there is greater ambiguity as to
who has agency in Kimura’s performance. This ambiguity stems largely
from the probability that her listeners do not know exactly what is going
on much of the time, even if they are aware of the basic situation unfold-
ing before them. Absent such knowledge, it is not clear just from watch-
ing and listening whether, for example, GuitarBot is a playback device
or is interactive, or, when it is improvising, exactly what it means for
such a device to “improvise.” Even if one knows the technological setup
and how Kimura uses it, what is happening on a moment-­by-­moment
basis is still not necessarily clear unless one happens to be reading the
score. This ambiguity relates directly to an issue around performances
 Lucille Meets GuitarBot  •   79

involving human-­machine interaction discussed in the previous chapter:

how to enable the audience to understand the operation of cause and
effect in such performances. As we saw there, whereas some argue that
performers should do things that allow the audience to un­derstand how
they trigger their technological devices and how those devices respond
to performers’ actions, Kimura, at least in this piece, intentionally obfus-
cates the precise nature of the human-­machine interaction in the inter-
est of promoting the illusion that GuitarBot is her equal partner in the
performance.
If King’s play with Lucille parallels the interaction of the vaudeville
ventriloquist and the dummy, Kimura’s performance relates more closely
to an earlier, less familiar practice of ventriloquism: early nineteenth-­
century acts in which ventriloquists threw their voices into the bodies
of automata that stood apart from them and seemed to move on their
own.29 If King dramatizes the instrument’s status as dummy to the musi-
cian’s ventriloquist, Kimura takes that representation a step further
(ironically by taking a step backward in the history of ventriloquism)
by using, in addition to her violin, an automaton, a robotic instrument
that is physically distinct and seemingly autonomous even as it sings, like
Lucille, in the ventriloquial voices that Kimura “throws” as composer,
coder, and player.
Like a theatrical ventriloquist, King deflects his audience’s attention
from his control over Lucille through his reactions to her, and by inter-
acting with her as if she were a separate entity. Kimura seeks to deflect
her audience’s attention from GuitarBot’s lack of autonomy and musi-
cianly intelligence, but also goes beyond that. The masking of agency is
central to her ventriloquial musical performance in a way that it is not to
King’s. John Deighton, a professor of marketing, provides a taxonomy of
strategies for masking agency in performance, including his concept of
“objectification.” In Deighton’s terminology, objectification means the
masking of human agency and its ­apparent transfer to an object:

The marketer stages a performance, but the consumer perceives it as

merely an objectively good performance by the product. The drama-
tistics are overlooked. . . . [Researchers] describe several examples of
framing events to show the product in its most attrac­tive light while
the marketer stays offstage.30

While it may seem unconventional to describe artists’ work as analogous

to that of marketers, I find Deighton’s account of this kind of objectifica-
 80  •   in concert

tion to be particularly pragmatic and direct. Both King and Kimura are
akin to marketers in one respect: each seeks to sell to an audience the
idea of a musical instrument as an autonomous entity in equally vivid,
though different, ways. King presents his guitar as a separate, named
being that enjoys a degree of independent expression and with which
he is in dialogue. Kimura also interacts with GuitarBot as if it were her
musical partner and engages in both scored and improvisational musical
dialogue with it. But whereas King does not in any way hide his physical
manipulation of Lucille even as he rhetorically constructs her as a sepa-
rate entity, Kimura seeks to mask the “dramatistics” involved in her stag­
ing of GuitarBot by encouraging her audience to perceive her relation-
ship to it as a relationship between equals, and hiding the work she does
to maintain the integrity of her composition in the face of GuitarBot’s
unpredictable behavior.
Deighton’s observation that “the marketer stays offstage” points to
the fact that both King and Kimura wish their audiences to perceive
them as performers engaging with other performers—­Lucille and Gui-
tarBot, respectively—­rather than as manipulators of instruments. King
and Kimura appear as performers in the scenarios they create as “mar-
keters.” While their respective musical personae are on full display, the
“backstage” versions of themselves responsible for setting up the mise-­en-­
scènes that make these scenarios possible and plausible are not exposed
to the audience.
Comparing and contrasting the means that King and Kimura use in
pursuit of the common goal of constructing the instrument as an entity
unto itself with its own volition, we see that while Kimura gains much
through her use of digital technology, as contrasted with King’s use of
more conventional instrumentation, she also loses something. To under-
stand what is lost, we must return to Godlovitch’s characterization of
musical performance, quoted earlier, as a demonstration of skill in which
the musician “subdue[s] confi­dently the treacheries” of the instrument.
Kimura hints at the nature of GuitarBot’s potential treachery when she
describes working with the machine. Referring to the instrument’s four
strings, she states that “I started to imagine GuitarBot as actually four
individuals. . . . I would come in for a rehearsal and ask, ‘So, how is Mr.
Two today?’ because he is the most temperamental of the four strings.”31
(It is noteworthy that Kimura characterizes her technological partner
as male, especially in relation to King’s feminization of his guitar. This
leads to speculation that, within the matrix of heterosexuality, the instru-
 Lucille Meets GuitarBot  •   81

ment that is at once the musician’s creative partner and foil is likely to be
assigned the opposite gender.)
Because Kimura plays two instruments in GuitarBotana, one directly
and one through displaced agency, there is twice the possibility of her
being betrayed by them, as God­lovitch would have it, and therefore twice
the opportunity for her to show her prowess by overcoming the obstacles
they present. Kimura also created another “artificial constraint” (Godlo-
vitch’s term) through her decision to program GuitarBot not just to fol-
low her playing, but also to deviate unpredictably from it at some points,
making the piece that much more difficult to perform, because it forces
her to think and respond, simultaneously and very quickly, as both com-
poser and player, in order to maintain the integrity of the work. But
Kimura’s desire for her audience to perceive GuitarBot as a legitimate
musician actually causes her to forgo full credit for her own skill as a per-
former. She presents herself only as a virtuoso violinist overcoming the
normal technical challenges offered by that instrument; her role as Gui-
tarBot’s ventriloquist remains intentionally offstage. She masks the chal-
lenges presented by GuitarBot as an instrument in favor of constructing
it as a fellow performer and collaborator.
On the other side of the ledger, GuitarBot’s greater apparent auton-
omy in the eyes of the audience makes Kimura’s performance that much
more effective as a staging of the ventriloquial relationship between
musician and instrument. Indeed, GuitarBot’s seeming independence
borders on the uncanny, which

occurs when animate and inanimate objects become confused, when

objects behave in a way which imitate life, and thus blur the cultural,
psychological and material boundaries between life and death, lead-
ing to what [Ernst] Jentsch called “Intellectual Uncertainty”—­that
things appear not to be what they are, and as such our reasoning may
need re-­structuring to make sense of the phenomenon.32

Animate objects like ventriloquists’ dummies and automata evoke the

uncanny, as does GuitarBot. At its best, GuitarBotana induces Jentsch’s
intellectual uncertainty, since GuitarBot, a machine that is not supposed
to be capable of creativity, appears to act as a sentient being making
music. Arguably, the version of the uncanny in performance enacted by
Kimura and GuitarBot differs significantly from the version described
by Matthew Causey in “The Screen Test of the Double.” Discussing “the
 82  •   in concert

simple moment when a live actor confronts her mediated other through
the technologies of reproduc­tion,” Causey posits “that the experience of
the self as other in the space of technology can be read as an uncanny
experience, a making material of split subjectivity.”33 Even though Gui-
tarBot is not literally Kimura’s double (that is, her reproduced and medi-
ated self), it is plausible to suggest that GuitarBot acts as Kimura’s Other
in this performance. Since this Other’s performance is a manifestation
of Kimura’s musical sensibility, one might stretch the point slightly and
claim that GuitarBotana makes split “subjectivity material,” as Causey
describes. But the technological uncanniness of GuitarBot lies in its
alterity—­its difference from, and apparent independence of, Kimura in
the way it serves her “as a foil, not a clone” (to return to Burrows’s char-
acterization of musical ventriloquism). The fact that GuitarBot’s perfor-
mance is actually a displacement of Kimura’s agency is suppressed in
favor of foregrounding the machine’s ostensible autonomy.
On one level, Kimura dramatizes the ventriloquial relationship
between player and instrument in the same way King does, albeit in a
very different musical context, by creating the impression that an instru-
ment possesses an identity and agency; both King and Kimura enact
the fantasy of instrumental autonomy that underlies the ventriloquial
relationship between performer and instrument. But because the digital
technology Kimura employs allows GuitarBot a greater degree of (appar-
ent) autonomy than Lucille, who is always under King’s visible, physi-
cal control, it enables her to push the enactment of this fantasy further
toward the uncanny to show us what it might look like for a performer to
interact with a genuinely autonomous musical instrument.
 Part II

The Interactionist Turn

The last sentence of chapter 2, “Music is what musicians do,” is meant to

emphasize that the primary object of inquiry when thinking about musi-
cal performance is the performer, and that the relevant questions there-
fore revolve around what it is to perform as a musician. In my call for
extending the practice of performance analysis to musical performances
in chapter 1, I suggest that the object of such analysis is the musician’s
specific presence as a performer, which I call the musical persona. I later
elaborated this concept in the essay that served as the basis for the first
chapter in Part II, “Musical Personae.” As a starting point, I posed myself
the question, if musicians are to be thought of as performers, what kind
of performers are they? For me, this question always entails comparing a
given mode of performance with acting, not only because it is the kind
of performing of which I have the deepest knowledge and experience
but also because I believe theater (in the extended sense of any kind
of dramatic representation) to be the default model for performance
in most people’s minds. Initially, the answer to my question was clear:
musicians are not like actors because actors are in the business of por-
traying fictional characters, and musicians usually portray themselves in
performance as what they are—­musicians (a question I addressed from
a different angle in the introduction to this book).
This answer led me to conclude that if acting was not the best para-
digm under which to think about how musicians perform, Erving Goff-
man’s concept of self-­presentation is. Drawing primarily on Goffman’s
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Frame Analysis (1974),
I arrived at a detailed description of the musical persona as the per-

83
 84  •   in concert

formance of a social role. Over time, however, I came to realize two

limitations to my formulation. The first is that it did not account for
those instances in which musicians do perform fictional characters as
their personae. For example, the late Dickram Gobalian (1949–­2019),
a Cypriot musician who emigrated to Canada with his family, created
and assumed the persona of Leon Redbone, a guitarist and singer who
seemed to have emerged from a much earlier time than his own, the
early 1970s. One journalist described his persona as “reminiscent of the
vaudeville era, performing in a Panama hat with a black band and dark
sunglasses, often while sitting at attention on a stool, with a white coat
and trousers with a black string tie.”1 His repertoire consisted of Ameri-
can popular music from the Tin Pan Alley era that spanned the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When performing, Gobalian
did not engage in straightforward presentation of himself as a musician.
Rather, the self he presented, that of Leon Redbone, was a fiction so
elaborate that it eclipsed his other identity.
The other limitation of my initial formulation of musical persona is
closely related to the first. I found that I had placed too much emphasis
on the self/other distinction in differentiating what musicians do from
what actors do, resulting in a too-­easy contrast between actors as pur-
veyors of fiction and musicians as representing aspects of themselves in
performance. I had lost sight of a crucially important point that is cen-
tral to Goffman: actors and musicians are completely alike in the sense
that both groups are engaged in performing a social identity. At one
level, to perform as an actor is to perform the social role of actor, and
the same is true for musicians. The differences in the ways the mem-
bers of each group perform these roles are functions of how each role
is defined socially and the expectations and contexts (frames) that sur-
round the performance of them. In revising this chapter for inclusion
here, I sought to address these shortcomings.2 The present version is also
a much more expansive discussion of the concept of musical persona
than the original essay was and is the theoretical center of this book.
In relying on Goffman for my account of what a musical persona
is and how it functions, I align myself with the symbolic interactionist
branch of sociology with which Goffman was associated.3 Symbolic inter-
actionism is not a social scientific method as much as it is a “perspective,
approach, or framework.”4 The spirit of interactionism is suggested in
an oft-­quoted essay by Herbert Blumer, one of its founding figures. “The
Methodological Position of Symbolic Interactionism” (1968) is the clos-
est thing the field has to a statement of purpose. I will focus on a passage
 Part II. The Interactionist Turn  •   85

in which Blumer talks about different understandings of meaning. After

reviewing a version of philosophical realism that holds that the meaning
of things is inherent in the things themselves and a psychological view
that holds that meaning is created by each individual’s psyche, Blumer
summarizes and responds from the interactionist perspective:

[Symbolic interactionism] does not regard meaning as emanating

from the intrinsic makeup of the thing that has meaning, nor does
it see meaning as arising through a coalescence of psychological ele-
ments in the person. Instead, it sees meaning as arising in the process
of interaction between people.5

In other words, meaning is neither purely objective nor purely subjec-

tive but is intersubjective. From this perspective, all meaningful things
are seen as coming into being through interaction. As Paul Rock puts it,
“[Phenomena] are neither invented nor discovered, but produced. Soci-
ety and its components are ongoing accomplishments, they are in a state
of continual production as their members actively impose order on the
world. They have no reality outside that accomplishment.”6
What is true of society is also true for identity: “A self is a socially-­
accomplished process, produced by the forms and shaped by the
responses of others. It is literally void without those responses.”7 If every
meaningful thing, including one’s identity, is produced through interac-
tion, interaction must be the object of the analyst’s attention. Symbolic
interactionists therefore usually take aspects of everyday life as their
fields of study, and because they engage in close observation and analysis
of such aspects, their work is sometimes referred to as “microsociology.”
Although I make no claim to be engaged in sociology of music, in the
three chapters assembled in this part I have brought the interactionist
perspective to bear on the analysis of musical performance using the
concept of musical persona to describe the roles taken on by musicians
in performance. The first chapter outlines this concept and presents it
in depth, while the two following chapters look at more specific con-
texts. In “Everybody’s in Showbiz: Performing Star Identity in Popular
Music,” I look at the social role of pop music star as a special case of nor-
mative musical persona. I inquire into the circumstances under which
this role may be performed and how it is performed. The third chap-
ter, “Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement,” examines the interac-
tion between musicians and audience to produce improvisation as an
interactive accomplishment. In all cases, I draw on Goffman, whose work
 86  •   in concert

provides a vocabulary not only for identifying social roles and their char-
acteristics, but also for examining the circumstances under which they
are performed and how they may be performed. An important common
thread that runs through all three chapters is the premise that mean-
ing is produced through interaction, whether the meaningful thing is
a musical persona, a star persona, a jazz persona, or the act of improvi-
sation. None of these is something that musicians just make or do for
consumption by an audience or to communicate with an audience. In all
cases, they are interactive accomplishments produced jointly by perform-
ers and audiences through the interactions that constitute performance.
 C h a pter F ive

Musical Personae
•••

Reflecting on the relationship between the musical work and perfor-

mance in Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, Nicholas Cook observes,

One might speak of a grammar of performance that inheres in the

transitive mode. You don’t just perform, you perform something, or
you give a performance of something, and the grammar of perfor-
mance deflects attention from the act of performance to its object.1

For Cook, the inadequacy of this formulation resides in the way “that
this underlying grammar makes it impossible to see performance as
an intrinsically temporal, real-­time activity through which meanings
emerge that are not already deposited in the score.”2 I agree, but for me
Cook’s observation about the dominance of the transitive mode in the
way we reflexively think about performance points in a different direc-
tion. From this vantage point, it does not necessarily follow that simply
because the verb to perform demands a direct object that the object of
performance must be a text such as choreography, a dramatic script, or a
musical work or even a less fully defined text such as a scenario or a lead
sheet. Many other things can be understood to be performed: personal
identity may be seen as something one performs, for instance. One can
speak of performing a self in daily life just as readily as one speaks of
performing a text in a theater or concert hall. In short, the direct object
of the verb to perform need not be something—­it can also be someone, an
identity rather than a work or text.
87
 88  •   in concert

The analysis I propose here entails thinking of musicians as social

beings in the sense that to be a musician is to perform an identity in a
social realm that is defined in relation to the realm. In describing the
various forms an actor’s presence can assume, David Graver differenti-
ates the actor’s presence before the audience as a publicly visible person
from the character portrayed and calls this kind of presence the actor’s
personage. Graver is at pains to stress that “this personage . . . is not the
real person behind . . . the character. Personage status is not a founda-
tional reality but simply another way of representing oneself or, rather,
a way of representing oneself within a particular discursive domain.”3
It is easiest to provide examples from the realm of celebrity actors. For
instance, there are at least three Jack Nicholsons layered into any of his
filmed performances: the real person, the celebrity movie star (Graver’s
personage), and the actor portraying a character. As Graver suggests, the
audience inevitably reads character through personage: we do not just
see the character Nicholson portrays—­we see “Nicholson” portraying a
character. The “Nicholson” personage is not simply equivalent to the
real person; it is the version of self Jack Nicholson performs in the dis-
cursive domain of movie stardom. It is important, however, that Graver
also insists that the concept of personage is not restricted to celebrities:
watching any actor perform, we have the sense of being in the presence
of a liminal phenomenon that mediates between the real person and the
character.4
I argue that when we see a musician perform, we are not simply seeing
the “real person” playing; as with actors, there is an entity that mediates
between musicians and the act of performance. When we hear a musi-
cian play, the source of the sound is a version of that person constructed
for the specific purpose of playing music under particular circumstances.
Musical performance may be defined, using Graver’s terms, as a person’s
representation of musical identity within a specific discursive domain
of music. I posit that in musical performance, this representation is the
direct object of the verb to perform. In the schema I am proposing, both
the musical work and its execution serve the musician’s performance of
a persona. What musicians perform first and foremost is not music, but
their own identities as musicians, their musical personae.
Michael Jackson dramatized the process of persona construction in a
routine he would perform frequently in concert before launching into
the song “Billie Jean.” Jackson, dressed in a billowy white T-­shirt, ath-
letic pants, and tap shoes, would walk on stage—­sometimes meander-
ingly, sometimes purposefully—­carrying an old valise. After placing the
 Musical Personae  •   89

Figure 11. Michael Jackson strikes a pose just before putting on his fedora to
complete the “Michael Jackson” persona before performing “Billie Jean.” Still from
concert video, Brunei, 1996.

valise on a high stool, he opened it and started removing items from it,
beginning with a sequined black shirt, which he put on, followed by a
single sequined white glove, which he wriggled onto his hand. Finally,
he removed from the valise a black Fred Astaire–­style fedora. He would
adjust the brim, dust it off, walk around with it, but not put it on his head
until he had walked across the stage to a microphone on a stand in a sin-
gle spotlight. The moment when he put the hat on his head and struck
the pose that begins the “Billie Jean” choreography was the moment at
which his transformation from Michael Jackson the human being into
“Michael Jackson” the musical persona was complete and the concert
could begin (see fig. 11).5
I wish to emphasize that I intend the concept of a musical persona
to apply in principle not just to pop musicians but to a wide variety of
musicians, perhaps to all musicians. My examples here will be drawn
primarily from contemporary rock, jazz, country, and classical musics,
the practices with which I am most familiar, but I suspect that what I say
here could be extended to other cultural contexts and musical practices.
In some instances, musical personae are closely analogous to movie star
personages: in performances by flamboyant rock stars, opera singers,
 90  •   in concert

and conductors, among others, our perception of the music is mediated

by our conception of the performer as personage. But even self-­effacing
musicians, such as the relatively anonymous members of a symphony
orchestra or the invisible players in a Broadway pit band, perform musi-
cal personae. In these two instances, the musicians’ very obscurity is a
defining characteristic of the personae they perform in those discursive
domains. The audience for whom pit musicians perform their persona
consists of one another rather than the people in the auditorium.
The concept of musical persona I am putting forward here has a kin-
ship with Stan Godlovitch’s idea of “personalism.” In his philosophical
account of musical performance, Godlovitch characterizes a standard
position as “plac[ing] a frame of protocol around the delivery of sound
such that, once we learn to attend strictly to perceptibles bound by the
frame, we are thereby party to all the content pertinent to appropriate
aesthetic judgement and experience.”6 Personalism, by contrast, takes
into account perceptibles that lie outside this frame; it is alive to “the
individualistic in performance, the person-­centred particularities of per-
formance and manner,” including not only musicians’ techniques but
also their facial expressions and gestures, the attitudes they convey, what
the audience knows of their lives outside the performance context, and
so on.7 In sum, “Personalism reminds us that performance is a way of
communicating, not especially a work or a composer’s notions, but a
person, the performer, through music.”8
This last statement cuts very close to the bone as far as I am con-
cerned. The analysis I am suggesting here is, like Godlovitch’s, unabash-
edly performer-­centric and takes the presentation of the performer, not
the music, to be the primary performance. But there are crucial differ-
ences between Godlovitch’s position and mine. Whereas Godlovitch is
interested in musical performance as the expression of a personality, I
am interested in seeing it as the performance of a persona that is defined
through social context and interaction and that is not necessarily a direct
representation of the individual musician’s personality, though it may
be. In fairness, I have to acknowledge that whereas Godlovitch derives
his model for musical performance from a single type—­solo recitals
by classical musicians—­I am striving for a more general approach that
could encompass the self-­effacing kinds of musical performance I men-
tioned earlier, as well as those that encourage the display of personal-
ity. But even concerning the latter, I differ with Godlovitch. Whereas he
posits musical performance as a form of self-­expression, I am suggesting
 Musical Personae  •   91

it is a form of self-­presentation, again with the understanding that some

presentations of self may be perceived as personally expressive while oth-
ers may not.
Finally, Godlovitch seems to suggest that the expression of the per-
former’s personality is the ultimate content of musical performance, as
perhaps it is for the kind of performance on which he focuses. Godlo-
vitch would not count playing in a Broadway pit orchestra, for example,
as musical performance, because it does not meet his condition that the
audience attend exclusively to the music as its primary object of atten-
tion. Nor do musicians who play at weddings or cocktail lounge pianists
engage in musical performance as he understands it.9
In the interest of a more comprehensive approach, I wish to include
in the purview of musical performance all instances in which musicians
play for an audience, including on recordings, though I will not pursue
here the question of how persona is manifest in audio recordings.10 This
broader perspective demands a contextual approach to the question of
content. The personae musicians perform reflect the priorities of the
performance context. In fleshing out my ideas in the remainder of this
chapter, I will draw on the work of Erving Goffman, particularly his micro-­
sociological examinations of everyday behavior. I hasten to add that what
I propose here is not in any sense a sociology of music. It is, rather, a step
toward a performer-­centered theory of musical performance.

Framing Music/Performance

Before turning to the details of my analysis of musical personae, I pro-

pose to address some of the most basic definitional questions concerning
musical performance through Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974). As dis-
cussed in the introduction, for experience to be intelligible it must, for
Goffman, be perceived through a frame. Frames are the socially defined
“principles of organization which govern events” that individuals inter-
nalize as cognitive structures.11 Any experience is likely to be framed by
multiple, layered frames. Building on the schema I suggested in chapter
1, I see musical performance as framed in at least four ways, which could
be labeled the music frame, the performance frame, the genre frame,
and the social frame. The first is the frame through which we perceive
sound as music. The second permits us to understand an event involving
music as a musical performance such as a concert or recital. The genre
 92  •   in concert

frame allows us to experience the music and performance as belonging

to a specific genre category, while the social frame defines the overall
social context in which the performance takes place.
In Goffman’s typology, the most fundamental frames are primary
frames, of which there are two types: natural and social. A natural frame
suggests that the experience under consideration was produced by some-
thing other than human volition; a social frame suggests that the expe-
rience is best understood as a product of human agency.12 I argue that
music is a primary social frame. Goffman describes the actions that take
place within primary frames as “untransformed, instrumental act[s].”13
Manipulating musical instruments or vocalizing is such an act, which is
produced and perceived as music by virtue of its primary framing. To
perceive a sonic event as music is to understand it as intentionally pro-
duced by a human agent operating in relation to a given social group’s
understanding of what music is.14
The actions involved in producing musical sound, and its recognition
as such, are the sum total of what takes place within the primary frame—­
any further refinement of the understanding of what is going on reflects
the imposition of further levels of framing. Goffman refers to two prin-
ciples of framing as “keying” and “transformation.”15 Someone could
produce musical sound in order to entertain herself, to perform for an
audience, to practice the playing of a piece, to demonstrate to a student
how that piece is to be played, and so on. Each of these constitutes a dif-
ferent keying of the primary action, and each established keying can be
nominated as a frame within which the activity takes place: the practice
frame, the rehearsal frame, the public performance frame, the teaching
frame, and so on.16 Transformations are cases in which the framing of
the original event involves its alteration. A recording of a live musical
performance that is mixed or edited in such a way as to be nonidenti-
cal with the performance itself is a transformation of that performance,
necessitated by its insertion into the recorded music frame.17
Like most aesthetic performances, formal musical performances
such as concerts or recitals are bracketed—­they are set apart from the
flow of ordinary life by means of signs that indicate their special status.18
Arguably, however, music is more continuous with ordinary life than the
other performing arts, especially if one accepts the expanded definition
of musical performance proposed by Christopher Small in explaining
his conversion of the noun music into a verb: “To music is to take part, in
any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listen-
ing, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance
 Musical Personae  •   93

(what is called composing), or by dancing.”19 Small’s specific instances

of “musicking” include hearing Muzak in a supermarket, listening to
music on a Walkman, and singing to oneself while doing chores, along-
side more conventional instances of musical performance.20 It is difficult
to imagine versions of theater, opera, or even concert dance that are as
integrated into daily life as music seems to be; and in performance art,
life is often integrated into art rather than the other way around. It may
well be that we experience music across a broader range of bracketed
and unbracketed events than other performed art forms.
The specific means through which music is conveyed constitute fur-
ther levels of keying and framing. As a musician, I may choose to per-
form for an audience by giving a live concert, or by making a record-
ing. The vehicle I select becomes a lamination, a frame imposed on the
already present frames.21 In my analysis, a recording of a live perfor-
mance of music involves the following framings: an activity of human
sound production is perceived (by both its makers and its audience)
within a primary frame ofmusic making. This activity is then keyed as
a performance for an audience other than the musician, rather than
as practice, for instance (first lamination). The recording of the per-
formance constitutes a transformation (second lamination); both the
musician and the listener must understand their respective relation-
ships to the sound in relation to recording (that is, they must know
what it means to produce or listen to a recording of live music rather
than the live performance itself).
To translate into the language of frames, our ability to understand
a sonic experience as a live recording of music involves at least three
frames, two laminations, and one transformation: the music frame, the
performance frame, and the recording frame. Goffman refers to “the
outermost lamination as the rim of the frame . . . which tells us just what
sort of status in the real world the activity has.”22 The final lamination,
then, is decisive in determining the identity of the event. In this case, the
recording frame is the rim, and we understand the reality status of the
event as that attributed to a sound recording.23
It is important to stress that these frames constitute understandings
on which members of a social group can generally agree, rather than
the idiosyncratic perceptions of individuals. As individuals, we usually
operate within the frames provided by our society rather than frames we
create for ourselves. It is the availability of common frames of reference
that makes mutual understanding and, hence, dialogue among human
beings possible. For instance, we have to share an identification of a par-
 94  •   in concert

ticular sonic experience as a live recording of music, and an understand-

ing of what a live recording of music is, before we can talk about it. As
Goffman suggests, the achievement of agreement among individuals on
basic definitions is usually unproblematic because those definitions are
socially determined and built into the frames of reference employed by
members of a social group.
I suggest further that musical genres and subgenres constitute crucial
laminations over the basic experience of music.24 To perceive a particular
sonic event through the jazz frame is quite different from perceiving it
through the classical frame, for example. If I understand a given musical
work to be in the jazz idiom, I hear certain parts of it as improvised. If I
understand a given work to be in the classical idiom, I generally hear it as
fully composed and not open to the kind of improvisation in which jazz
musicians engage. Misidentification (misframing) could lead to serious
misunderstandings and inaccurate evaluations.25 Misframing a through-­
composed piece as jazz could lead me to dismiss it as very poor jazz, for
instance, and that critical act might lead a fellow jazz aficionado to con-
clude that I do not really understand jazz at all.26 Genre identification
has implications for other frames and the limits of what is acceptable
within them. The editing of sound recordings to produce idealized per-
formances is far less controversial in rock than it is in jazz, for instance:
genre-­framing influences the limits of the recording frame.

Musical Persona as Self-­Presentation

Having identified aspects of Goffman’s frame theory that may be brought

to bear on a general understanding of musical performance, I turn now
to an analysis of formal musical events. Goffman suggests that the selec-
tion of a frame through which to perceive and comprehend an emerg-
ing event precedes the “definition of the situation” made by participants
in it; once we have a sense of what kind of thing a particular event is,
we can develop an idea of what we are going to do in relation to it.27 In
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman divides interactants into
two teams—­performers and audience—­and indicates that both teams
enter an interaction with definitions of the situation; successful interac-
tion involves negotiation between the two sides to arrive at a “working
consensus” as to the real terms of the interaction.28 Understood in this
way, musical performance is social in the sense that the musical event
is produced through interaction between two groups, performers and
 Musical Personae  •   95

audience, who must arrive at a mutually satisfactory modus vivendi for

the duration of the interaction.
For the most part, musicians in performance do not portray fictional
entities as do actors: they portray themselves as musicians. Although this
is the normative case, there certainly are instances in which musicians
do portray fictional characters as part of their normal stage routine—­
think of the members of the rock band Kiss, for example. A schema for
the analysis of musicians as performers must be able to account for the
entire range of cases. It therefore seems to make sense to treat the play-
ing of music as one of the routines, to use Goffman’s term, musicians
perform in the course of their lives. As Goffman suggests, we perform
ourselves differently in our different routines (I do not present myself in
the same way to my students in the classroom as I do to my departmental
colleagues at meetings, for instance). Therefore, there is no reason to
suppose that musicians perform the same identity when playing music as
in their other life routines. The version of self that a musician performs
qua musician is what I am calling the musical persona.
Goffman’s theory allows for the possibility that any given self-­
presentation in a social interaction can be a sincere presentation of a
person’s real feelings at the time or partly or wholly fictional. For exam-
ple, if a student greets me on campus and asks how I am, I may respond
that I am fine even when I am not feeling that way. I thus present myself
as a fictional character, at least at this moment of the interaction. Unlike
theories of acting that focus on how a real person may assume the
identity of a fictional character, Goffman’s concept of self-­presentation
applies equally well to fictional and nonfictional representations. From
this perspective, the seemingly sincere demeanor of a singer-­songwriter
like James Taylor and the overtly stylized and artificial lounge lizard
persona of Bryan Ferry with Roxy Music are equally self-­presentations.
Whether real, fictional, or some combination of both, they are identities
designed to create an impression of who the musician is in relation to a
specific audience, identities that both define and adhere to the norms
for a genre of music.
Country music is a particularly good arena in which to look for exam-
ples of musical personae that are simultaneously self-­presentations and fic-
tional characters because many successful country musicians do not actu-
ally possess the attributes required of an authentic country performer. An
authentic country musician is supposed to be from the American South,
preferably a rural area, is supposed to be working class, and is supposed
to look and sound like such a person. However, as Michael Hughes points
 96  •   in concert

out, “Many currently popular country music artists have to put on an

accent when they sing because many have suburban backgrounds and/or
are not from the South, the Southwest, or the lower class.”29
Keith Urban, who was born in New Zealand and grew up in Australia,
is a case in point. When interviewed, he speaks in his native accent, but
when he sings, he sounds like an American from the South. His appear-
ance, usually a dressed-­down look involving blue jeans and T-­shirts, is
consonant with a rural and working-­class identity. He cultivates the image
of “a sincere, down-­to-­earth average person,” which Hughes suggests is
the bedrock of the country music persona.30 In his music videos, Urban
is generally surrounded by iconography that points to southern iden-
tity as it is understood in country music, including rural landscapes, old
farmhouses, pickup trucks, women in cowboy hats, and so on. Although
Urban is primarily a guitarist, he is often seen playing a banjo, one of the
instruments closely associated with authentic country music sound. The
paradox of Urban’s country music persona is that although it is clearly a
benign fabrication, both his audience and the country music establish-
ment in Nashville accept it as authentic.
If Taylor’s and Ferry’s respective musical personae cannot be distin-
guished by the degree to which they correspond to the “real person,”
they can be distinguished by their respective degrees of theatricality,
which is a significant variable in the construction of a musical persona. I
am fully aware that theatricality is a loaded term, a concept that carries
heavy historical baggage and is associated with negative behavioral traits
such as artifice, pomposity, exaggeration, pretense, and so on. Never-
theless, I believe it to be the apt term here. An ordinary definition of
theatricality suffices for my purpose; I intend it as a descriptive, more or
less value-­neutral term along the lines suggested by Thomas Postlewait
and Tracy C. Davis: “Although it obviously derives its meanings from the
world of theatre, theatricality can be abstracted from the theatre itself
and then applied to any and all aspects of human life.  .  .  . So, it is a
mode of representation or a style of behavior characterized by histrionic
actions, manners, and devices, and hence a practice.”31 It should be clear
that as a practice, theatricality is a histrionic mode of communication
that does not determine the material communicated. Even though musi-
cal personae that are low in theatricality, such as Taylor’s, are often per-
ceived as being closer to the real person than those high in theatricality,
such as Ferry’s, in principle a musical persona that is clearly a fictional
character can be enacted with any degree of theatricality, as can a per-
sona that appears not to be a fictional character.
 Musical Personae  •   97

Although this concept of theatricality is a useful heuristic, the dis-

tinction between theatrical and non-­or even antitheatrical musical
personae is not necessarily simple or self-­evident. The personae of jazz
musicians Bill Evans and Miles Davis, who seldom acknowledged their
audiences and seemed entirely absorbed in the activity of music mak-
ing, can be classed as antitheatrical. At the same time, however, one
could easily read their ostentatious disregard for their audiences as his-
trionic (in the dictionary sense of “exaggerated behavior”) and there-
fore theatrical. On the other hand, all such assessments are relative to
other figures within the genre, and Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble of
Chicago were certainly far more theatrical in the conventional sense
than Evans.

Performances of Music

Goffman defines “performance” itself as “all the activity of an individ-

ual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence
before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on
the observers.”32 The fundamental purpose of performance, so under-
stood, is to influence the definition of the situation through what Goff-
man calls “impression management”: the performer seeks to create a
certain impression on an audience, and to have the audience accept that
impression as part of the operative definition of reality for the interac-
tion. “The performer can influence [his observers] by expressing him-
self in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead
them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan. Thus, when an
individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some
reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression
to others that it is in his interests to convey.”33
This scheme is applicable to any musical performance. Consider, for
example, Small’s description of the entrance of a symphony orchestra at
the start of a concert:

As we watch, the musicians file onto the stage. All are wearing black,
the men in tuxedos with white shirts and bow ties and the women in
black ankle-­or floor-­length dresses. . . . Their demeanor is restrained
but casual and they talk together as they enter and move to their
allotted seats. Their entry is understated, quiet; there is none of the
razzmatazz, the explosion of flashpots and the flashing of colored
 98  •   in concert

lights, the expansive gestures, the display of outrageous clothing, that

marks the arrival on stage of many popular artists.34

There are several things to note here. The first is that the concert, as
a social transaction between performers and audience, begins before a
single note is sounded. (To the extent that both performers and audi-
ences are familiar with the social and behavioral conventions contained
within the classical music concert frame, the interaction could be said to
begin well before the two groups even arrive at the concert hall as each
dresses for its part in the interaction, for instance.) The musicians’ eve-
ning wear conveys the message that the concert is a highly formal occa-
sion, and that the audience is to conduct itself accordingly. The musi-
cians present themselves in a low-­key manner, suggesting seriousness
rather than showmanship. They direct attention to what they do, not
who they are, and expect the audience to follow suit. Finally, the musi-
cians present themselves as a group; no player commands the spotlight
as an individual (except the concertmaster or a soloist, of course). Again,
this conveys information to the audience about how to understand the
interaction.
Small’s own interpretation is “that the message of these musicians’
onstage behavior is that of their professional exclusiveness, of their
belonging to a world that the nonmusicians who sit beyond the edge
of the stage cannot enter.”35 It is clear that this message, like the others
I just mentioned, serves the interests of the performers by letting the
audience know what to expect from the interaction, what not to expect,
and how to respond. The combination of a highly formal appearance
with an exclusionary manner indicates, right off the bat, what the rela-
tionship between performers and audience is to be: there will be no
direct communication; the musicians will not speak to the audience; and
it would not be appropriate for audience members to call out to the
musicians by name or to request certain pieces. Overly enthusiastic audi-
ence responses (e.g., singing along, whistling while applauding) would
be at odds with the serious tone of the event, and so on. Further, the
musicians’ presentation of themselves as professionals suggests that they
perform a specialized service for the audience that the audience cannot
perform for itself; this, combined with the elegance and formality of the
musicians’ appearance, makes the case that the price of admission was
money well spent.
Because a symphony concert, like most formal musical performances,
is a highly ritualized and convention-­bound event, it might be tempting
 Musical Personae  •   99

to argue that since symphony audiences know everything I have indi-

cated before they reach the concert hall, there is no real need for the
performers to convey this information at the scene. I would counter
such an argument by suggesting that the conventional nature of musi-
cal events means primarily that performers and audiences alike come
to them with certain expectations; it remains for both teams to indicate
whether or not they intend to fulfill those expectations. (The audience
for the Beatles’ concert at Shea Stadium in 1965 that I discuss in chapter
8 is a case of interactants refusing to honor the traditional expectations
of audience comportment.) As Richard Bauman suggests, “Conventions
may provide precedents and guidelines for the range of alternatives pos-
sible, but the possibility of alternatives, the competencies and goals of
the participants, and the emergent unfolding of the event make for vari-
ability.”36 Just because a particular kind of performance is supposed to
unfold in a particular way does not mean that it will in every instance.
Convention provides a set of expectations, but it does not in any way
determine what will actually happen in a given performance; that reality
unfolds through convention-­bound but unscripted negotiation between
performers and audience in each instance.
Though it may not seem so—­because we have so many dependable
models for different types of musical performance—­the working con-
sensus is inherently fragile. Small’s example is intentionally normative:
the performers give every sign of conforming to the audience’s conven-
tional expectations of a symphony concert, and offer no sign of advanc-
ing an extraordinary definition of the situation. But that need not be
the case. The late Paula Tatarunis, a physician, classical music lover, and
the proprietress of the blog Paula’s House of Toast, recalls a concert at
Boston’s Jordan Hall in the early 1970s by the Dutch recorder virtuoso
Frans Brüggen:

During one of his pieces, likely some baroque sonata, an actor was sta-
tioned in an easy chair beside a floor lamp, and read the newspaper
through the whole piece. As if to say: ho hum. Wallpaper music. Easy
listening. Background music. I seemed to remember that the Boston
Globe had even noted this little gesture of self-­critique on its editorial
page. Had Vietnam been the context of his small protest?37

Brüggen clearly did not conform to his audience’s expectations, but

proposed a rekeying of the event as a sort of metaconcert—­a reflexive
concert-­about-­concerts intended to address the cultural status of classi-
 100  •   in concert

cal music and the social significance of performing it in a world beset by

political upheaval.38 As Tatarunis suggests, he may have been implying
that the meaning of the event did not reside in itself, but in its relation-
ship to events in the larger world.
Any attempt to define (or redefine) the situation depends entirely on
the audience’s cooperation, as Tatarunis hints by referring to the news-
paper’s displeasure at Brüggen’s gesture. Such willingness is not always
forthcoming, as the breakdown of consensus during a (c. 1968) concert
by the rock group the Doors at the Los Angeles Forum shows. Although
the group wanted to play new music that involved horns and strings, they
reluctantly played their big hit, “Light My Fire,” in response to audience
demand:

The song over, and the kids shouting for the band to play it again,
lead singer Jim Morrison  .  .  . came to the edge of the stage. “Hey,
man,” he said, his voice booming from the speakers on the ceiling.
“Cut that shit.”
The crowd giggled.
“What are you all doing here?” he went on. No response.
“You want music?” A rousing Yeah.
“Well, man, we can play music all night, but that’s not what you
really want, you want something more, something greater than you’ve
ever seen, right?”
“We want Mick Jagger!” someone shouted. “‘Light My Fire’!” said
someone else, to laughter.39

Arguably, this performance failed because there was no working con-

sensus, no agreement as to what was supposed to happen and who was
authorized to make crucial decisions. The Doors wanted to present new
material; the audience wanted to hear only their earlier hits. The audi-
ence’s recalcitrance led Morrison to break frame by negotiating directly
with them, but his address to the audience, his attempt to impose his
definition of the situation, generated only a mocking response.

Musical Front: Setting

Goffman calls the means a performer uses to foster an impression the

“social front,” which consists of “the expressive equipment of a standard
kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his
 Musical Personae  •   101

performance.”40 (It is worth emphasizing that performance, in Goff-

man’s sense, may be undertaken either consciously or unconsciously.
That a male symphony player simply dresses in his tux before the con-
cert because that is what he has always done, and gives no thought to the
impression he is creating, does not negate the fact that the tux functions
as expressive equipment. The outfit contributes willy-­nilly to the impres-
sion he makes on his audience.) Goffman divides front into two aspects:
“setting” (the physical context of the performance) and “personal front,”
in which are included the performer’s “‘appearance’ and ‘manner.’”41
The “front” is a point at which performances intersect with larger
social contexts. Settings contribute to the impressions created by musi-
cal performances by drawing upon existing cultural connotations. Clas-
sical music is most often performed today, at least in the United States,
either in purpose-­built concert halls or in churches. As Small indicates,
the monumental architecture of concert halls “convey[s] an impression
of opulence, even sumptuousness. There is wealth here, and the power
that wealth brings. But on the other hand, there is a careful avoidance
of any suggestion of vulgarity. What is to happen here is serious and
important.”42 As settings for musical performances, churches also con-
vey seriousness and importance, with additional connotations of sanctity
and spirituality.
A setting designed for a different kind of music, the Rose Theater,
part of the Frederick P. Rose Hall, is a complex built to house the Jazz
at Lincoln Center program in New York City. Opened in 2004, it was
described in publicity materials on the program’s website both as part of
“the first facility ever created specifically for jazz” and as a “symphony in
the round.”43 This suggests that the design of the theater is intended to
attach the cultural prestige of the symphony orchestra (and perhaps its
access to wealth and power) to jazz, as is its Lincoln Center affiliation.
The theater itself, as a piece of expressive equipment, thus communi-
cates to the audience that it is to understand and respond to jazz as
“America’s classical music,” not as a form of popular music, an implicitly
less “serious” and more “vulgar” category.44 The performance space itself
thus provides a definition of the musical and cultural situation.
Individual musicians can use the cultural associations of a particular
venue or kind of venue to assert their personae. Cellist Matt Haimovitz,
for example, supported his persona as a youthful, experimental, some-
what iconoclastic classical musician by doing on his 2002 tour “what no
classical musician of his stature had done in living memory, navigating
the country not by way of its acoustically precise concert halls but instead
 102  •   in concert

by its coffeehouses and clubrooms. Most radical was his performance at

CBGB’s, the legendary punk room in Manhattan.”45 Virgil Fox’s earlier
choice of rock palaces as venues for his Bach organ recitals, discussed
in chapter 3, contributed similarly to his establishment of an unortho-
dox classical musician’s persona, as did his encouraging his audiences to
dance to the music he played.
There is a great deal more to be said about setting in musical per-
formance, since the physical environment plays such a crucial role in
defining the relationships and interactions among performers and audi-
ences.46 The topic is so broad, however, that I cannot attempt to do it
justice within the confines of a more general discussion, so I will make
just one last observation.
Compared with many other kinds of performers, musicians often
have relatively little personal control over their settings. While they may
enjoy considerable influence over the spaces and equipment they use
directly (e.g., the stage, backstage areas, instruments, or sound equip-
ment), they usually have to settle for whatever atmosphere and relation-
ship to audience a particular venue provides. Although musicians may
exert a shaping influence on the setting—­as when Jimmy Buffet sets up
tiki bars at concert venues, or the Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New
Orleans encourages its listeners to dance in the aisles of the symphony
halls where it sometimes performs on tour—­setting is largely an institu-
tional, rather than individual, aspect of musical performance.

Musical Front: Appearance, Race, and Genre

In his description of personal front, Goffman includes both “relatively

fixed” signs like race and sex and “relatively mobile” signs “such as facial
expression.”47 Although Goffman’s suggesting that such identity markers
are fixed is surely an artifact of the 1950s, when he formulated these
ideas, it is the case that for Goffman the meanings attributed to such
signs are always socially constructed. In his view, signs for attributes such
as race and gender are empty signifiers, distinctions without difference,
except insofar as socially determined meanings and differences are
attributed to them.48 It is also the case that, for better or worse, such signs
are crucially important in music cultures, given the way so many musical
genres are stratified in relation to social identities (e.g., the problematic
status of white jazz musicians, black classical musicians, female conduc-
tors, women in rock and jazz, among others).
 Musical Personae  •   103

The music video for Darius Rucker’s performance of “Wagon Wheel”

(2013) provides an opportunity to examine the performance of a musi-
cal persona in the context of the framing of racial difference in a spe-
cific genre: country music.49As discussed earlier in connection with
Keith Urban, country music strongly emphasizes authenticity, meaning
that its practitioners must appear to possess “appropriate backgrounds
and proper cultural credentials [to be] carriers of a cultural tradition”
rooted in the rural American South.50 Rucker, who was born, raised, and
still lives in South Carolina and experienced poverty in his childhood,
has a biography that includes some of the background of an authen-
tic country musician. However, as an African American, he faces what
Michael Hughes describes as “a significant problem in dramatically real-
izing the role of a country music artist, because country music has been
so strongly identified with whites and white Southern culture from the
beginning.”51 Hughes is slightly mistaken; prior to the intervention of
record companies that created categories of “race” and “hillbilly” music
for marketing purposes, country music was not as closely associated with
white performers and audiences as it would be later. DeFord Bailey, an
African American harmonica player, was present at the inception of the
Grand Ole Opry in 1927 and was a star of the genre throughout the
1930s. A significant number of African American country string bands
played around the South in the 1920s and 30s.52 Between Bailey and
Rucker, however, although other African American musicians have
recorded and performed in the country idiom, only Charley Pride has
been accepted by the country music establishment as a full-­fledged coun-
try musician, an acceptance achieved partly by his backers’ having hid-
den his racial identity when he was first introduced to the country music
audience and industry.53
As Charles Hughes notes, “Country music never had much room for
black artists” even though “since the 1950s heyday of the Nashville sound,
the genre’s studio musicians, songwriters, and producers had included
black-­identified music styles, including soul, as part of country’s musi-
cal mix.”54 This mix has a much longer history—­as John S. Otto and
Augustus M. Burns show, interaction between black and white musicians
in the early part of the twentieth century, and especially in the 1920s
and 1930s, country music’s formative years, is traceable in both “black”
musics such as the blues and “white” musics such as country (the so-­
called hillbilly music).55 Drawing on John Mowitt’s concept of “musical
interpellation,” Geoff Mann argues that historically, formally, and cul-
turally, there is nothing inherently “white” about country music. It has
 104  •   in concert

Figure 12. Darius Rucker assumes the persona of an itinerant country musician. Still
from the music video for “Wagon Wheel” (2013).

taken a great deal of ideological work both to make country music the
sound of American whiteness, and, at least as important, to make it con-
tinue to “call” to white people to make it seem not only to be something
that only white people make, but also something that only white people
“hear,” something that recruits white people to their “whiteness.”56
Given this context, the video for “Wagon Wheel” needed to construct
Rucker’s musical persona in a way that would establish his authentic-
ity as an African American country artist, especially since country music
videos are usually among the discourses that do the ideological work
to which Mann refers. The video opens with several shots that establish
a rural southern setting (it was shot in Watertown, Tennessee) belong-
ing more to the past than the present. These shots depict, among other
things, a railroad crossing, exteriors of small-­town businesses with old-­
fashioned signs, rain on pavement, and a hand turning back a clock.
The first glimpse we have of Rucker in the main part of the video is of
his hand, clutching a black-­and-­white photograph of a blonde woman.
We also see her in intercut shots, applying lipstick and looking at a simi-
lar photograph of Rucker. The character Rucker portrays is an itiner-
ant musician, traveling with guitar case in hand. In the song’s lyrics, the
protagonist tells the story of hitchhiking southward from New England
along the East Coast of the United States to reunite with a loved one in
Raleigh, North Carolina. The primary elements of Rucker’s appearance
 Musical Personae  •   105

are items of clothing that, while contemporary, evoke the Depression

era. His clothes look lived-­in; he wears a vest as well as a gray wool coat
and a fedora, all in subdued colors. The guitar he plays is either a 1930s
model Gibson archtop or resembles one very closely. His preferred
modes of travel, walking railroad tracks and hitchhiking, also evoke the
Depression (fig. 12).
Mann argues that country music asserts its whiteness through nos-
talgia not just “for an era when white supremacy operated more explic-
itly” but more so for a nonspecific “white ‘used to,’” a nostalgia for “an
authentic, stable whiteness” that is always already slipping away as the
present becomes the past (hence the image in the video of literally turn-
ing back the hands of time).57 If so, constructing Rucker’s persona in a
way that links him to the period in which country music as we know it
today was evolving, partly through the contributions of legendary travel-
ing musicians like Woody Guthrie, is a subtly subversive challenge to the
country music imaginary. Rucker’s portrayal of an itinerant Depression-­
era country musician not only implies that he is a legitimate bearer of its
cultural heritage but also that he (or someone like him) was there at the
origins of the genre. The video thus suggests the outline of what Mann
calls an “alternative history” of country music that “trouble[s] the white-­
country coupling.”58
Another strategy of impression management at work in this video
is what might be called “authenticity by association” (the same strategy
the rapper Snoop Dogg employed by including legendary country artist
Willie Nelson in a video for “My Medicine” [2008], a song in which he
flirted with country style). Characters who offer Rucker rides in vintage
pickup trucks are played by members of the Louisiana-­based Robertson
family whose life was chronicled on the reality television program Duck
Dynasty. Their presence as media-­certified, iconic “rednecks” confers
rural, white, southern authenticity on Rucker by association. This effect
is furthered by the appearance of Charles Kelley, a well-­known country
musician and member of Lady Antebellum, winner of Country Music
Association awards and the group that backed Rucker on the track. The
end of Rucker’s journey is a club where he apparently is to perform. His
last ride is from Kelley, driving a vintage Buick convertible with a young
woman at his side. If the Robertsons represent ostensibly ordinary, white,
southern folk in this video, Kelley represents the flashier Nashville coun-
try music establishment placing its stamp of approval on Rucker as it
delivers him to the venue where he is to perform. A sign outside the club
reads, “Appearing Tonight . . . Darius Rucker and Friends.”
 106  •   in concert

At this point, one of the most interesting moments in the video occurs
as a bearded man working the door of the club, played by Jase Robert-
son, tries to prevent Rucker from coming inside. They scuffle slightly
until Rucker is rescued by the female bartender, who assures the door-
man that Rucker is in the right place and ushers him to the stage, where
he joins a band and plays out the rest of the song. Although no explana-
tion for the doorman’s behavior is proffered, it seems probable that he
denies Rucker entry because he cannot imagine that a black man could
be the night’s featured country music artist.59 (It may be coincidence
that in a wide shot in which we see the doorman trying to keep Rucker
from reaching the stage, there is a poster on the wall behind them adver-
tising a bluegrass festival at the White Farmers Market.) This is the only
moment in the video that refers directly to Rucker’s racial identity and
the possibility of its being stigmatized in the context of country music.
Juxtaposed with the earlier image of Rucker as a peripatetic musician
who participated in the origins of country music, this scene suddenly
jolts the video away from an imagined alternative history of the genre
to remind the viewer of the reality of how race works in country music.

Musical Front: Mobile Signs

When addressing mobile rather than fixed signs, Goffman proposes that
routines tend to draw on an existing vocabulary of personal fronts with
established social meanings; the rather quaint examples he provides are
of chimney sweeps and perfume clerks who “wear white lab coats . . . to
provide the client with an understanding that delicate tasks performed
by these persons will be performed in what has become a standardized,
clinical, confidential manner.”60 The white lab coat garnered such mean-
ings in its primary scientific and medical uses, meanings that are then
generalized to the other contexts in which it appears.
Symphony players’ formal wear functions in precisely this way: a piece
of expressive equipment with established connotations of formality, ele-
gance, and class identification is used to bring those connotations into
a particular context. In the 1950s, male jazz musicians (both black and
white) frequently opted for Ivy League–­style suits as their stage wear.
This fashion, exemplified by Brooks Brothers, carried with it culturally
encoded connotations of conservative sophistication as well as upward
mobility.61 Jazz musicians thus presented themselves not as members of a
disreputable subculture, as they often were thought to be, but as respect-
 Musical Personae  •   107

able, middle-­class professional men (regardless of what their actual class

and economic status may have been).62
Some musical genres and performance contexts permit more indi-
vidual variation of personal front than others. While symphony players’
costumes are pretty much fixed,63 jazz or popular musicians are generally
able to express a higher degree of idiosyncrasy in their dress. Psychedelic
rock musicians of the 1960s, for instance, had a much broader range of
possibilities available to them than symphony players. But their choices
were governed nevertheless by a basic definition of the social situation.
If symphony musicians strive to convey an impression of “professional
exclusiveness, of their belonging to a world that the nonmusicians who
sit beyond the edge of the stage cannot enter,” as Small indicates, psyche-
delic rock musicians sought, for ideological reasons, to convey the oppo-
site impression. By wearing clothing that partook of the same fashions as
their audiences, and presenting themselves in a way that seemed to allow
for dialogue between performers and audience (though not of the sort
that occurred in the earlier example of the Doors’ performance), they
presented themselves as continuous with their audience and implied
that, in principle (if not in fact), any member of the audience could
become a musician.
The vocabulary Goffman uses to describe “manner” as an aspect of
personal front might be taken to suggest that he has in mind something
like personality: he contrasts “a haughty, aggressive manner” with a
“meek, apologetic manner.” But Goffman’s formal definition indicates
that manner is not an expression of the performer’s personality but,
rather, a set of “stimuli which function at the time to warn us of the inter-
action role the performer expects to play in the oncoming situation.”64 In
other words, the performer’s manner is specific to a particular, situated
performance rather than an expression of an ongoing set of personality
traits. For example, a symphony musician is likely to exhibit a very dif-
ferent manner when performing a solo recital or giving a master class
than when playing with the orchestra. When the New York Philharmonic
experimented in Avery Fisher Hall with giant video screens on which to
project live images of the orchestra, some musicians objected because
they did want to be so visible. A violinist was quoted as saying, “We’re not
movie stars.”65 That same violinist presumably would not object to being
highly visible to his audience under other performance circumstances
such as a solo recital, but his performance of a rank-­and-­file symphonic
musician’s persona requires relative invisibility.
The singer-­songwriter genre of the early 1970s, provides a good case
 108  •   in concert

Figure 13. Carole King personifies the female version of the normative singer-­
songwriter persona of the 1970s. Still from her appearance on the BBC television
program In Concert in 1971.

study of the relationship of appearance and manner to genre. As Ken

Tucker describes it, “The music produced by such artists as James Taylor,
Joni Mitchell, and Carole King was intimate, confessional, and ‘personal’
music, with precise, semiautobiographical lyrics and moderate amplifica-
tion.”66 The normative persona for this genre at this time revealed the
connection between the singer-­songwriter and the second-­wave urban
folk music movement that had preceded it by a decade, as represented
in the early 1960s by figures such as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. The BBC
television program In Concert frequently presented live studio perfor-
mances by singer-­songwriters in the early 1970s, providing good mate-
rial from which to develop a sense of the genre’s normative persona. In
keeping with the intimate and personal affect of the music, the program
was produced in a club-­like setting with a relatively small, seated audi-
ence that remained very quiet and intently focused on the performers,
applauding at the ends of songs or at the start of well-­known numbers to
express recognition.
Based on observations made from watching concert performances by
James Taylor, Neil Young, Bill Withers, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell,
 Musical Personae  •   109

and Carole King broadcast on BBC in Concert between 1970 and 1974,
I offer the following generalizations concerning the normative persona
in the singer-­ songwriter genre. In terms of appearance, the singer-­
songwriter is informally but neatly dressed, a bit more toward the prep-
pie side than the hippie side (even Neil Young wears a brown sports
jacket on the program). Perhaps coincidentally, both Joni Mitchell and
Carole King wear feminine, pink, floor-­length dresses (fig. 13). For the
most part, the singer-­songwriter appears as a single, seated figure playing
an acoustic instrument (Gordon Lightfoot stands, as does Mitchell when
playing guitar). When other musicians are present, sometimes playing
electric instruments, as is the case for Carole King, Gordon Lightfoot,
and Bill Withers, they remain discretely to the side, even in semidark-
ness, to keep the focus on the individual figure sharing his or her per-
sonal thoughts. In no way are we invited to perceive the figures gathered
on stage as musical groups or bands: they are clearly presented as solo
artists with backup.
The singer-­songwriter is generally modest and self-­effacing in man-
ner; it is a genre characterized by low theatricality in performance. Most
of these performers play their songs while looking down or with closed
eyes; Mitchell occasionally casts a sidelong glance at her audience. They
barely move (though King, who is a bit more ardent in her performance
style than the others, does bounce on her piano bench); they tend to
lean into their vocal microphones, as if whispering in a listener’s ear.
Taylor does not look at his audience even when they are applauding
him, though he does face them when speaking between songs. The
tone of stage talk in the singer-­songwriter genre is conversational and
friendly. The talk itself consists largely of what John Bealle calls “song for-
mulations” designed to guide the listeners’ understanding of the songs
through statements about their meanings and the circumstances of their
composition.67 David Pattie’s description of Joni Mitchell summarizes
the style and personae of most performers in this genre.

Mitchell’s performances for much of the 1970s were almost private

affairs. Rather than a kinetic, outer-­directed stage presence, Mitchell
radiates inwardness—­her eyes are closed more often than not, her
body more or less stationary (at most, swaying to the rhythm of the
music) and her performance directed, not to the audience, but to the
microphone in front of her.68
 110  •   in concert

Musical Persona as a Situated Performance

Although musical persona is largely a function of genre, it also varies

with the performance situation and may reflect the definition of that sit-
uation more than the musicians’ individual personalities. The violinist I
quoted earlier is not necessarily possessed of a retiring personality: those
who know him may characterize him as generally outgoing, gregarious,
even aggressive. But in his persona as symphony musician, he wishes to
blend into the crowd. Goffman himself provides another example that
shows musical persona is not necessarily a function of personality:

Singers [of popular songs] routinely trot out the most alarmingly
emotional expression without the lengthy buildup that a stage play
provides. Thirty seconds and there it is—­instant affect. As a singer, an
individual wears his heart in his throat: as an everyday interactant he
is less likely to expose himself. As one can say that it is only qua singer
that he emotes on call, so one can say that it is only qua conversation-
alist that he doesn’t.69

A highly emotive singer onstage could be guarded and reluctant to

express emotion offstage. His onstage emotionalism, then, would not
be an expression of his personality in general but a manner he employs
to enhance the impression he wishes to create in his pop singer routine.
The performer’s persona as a pop singer has an emotional hair trigger:
the personae he assumes when playing roles in other social contexts do
not necessarily.
In some cases, highly idiosyncratic personae function as something
like frames—­figures like Glenn Gould, Keith Jarrett (as discussed in
chapter 2) and British singer Joe Cocker come to mind in this connec-
tion. Gould’s humming along with his playing, or Cocker’s weird bodily
contortions while singing, cannot be fully accounted for by reference to
the general frames surrounding their performances. Taking Cocker as
an example, it is clear that his performances take place within the rock
music genre frame, which certainly includes the possibility of eccentric
bodily display. Meaning no disrespect to Cocker, I assert that the peculiar,
spasmodic style of movement for which he was famous is nevertheless
not simply conventional, even within the permissive rock frame. It is only
when one becomes aware of Cocker’s own idiosyncratic performance
conventions that it is possible fully to understand what is going on. At
that point, his gestures become conventional for him and one might be
 Musical Personae  •   111

disappointed were he not to perform them on a given occasion. Cocker’s

gestures (which are often highly stylized keyings of the gestures made by
guitarists and keyboard players) are so identifiable that John Belushi’s
keying of them as parody on Saturday Night Live was readily perceivable
as a lamination over what might be called the Cocker frame.
This is a good place to emphasize that musical personae are not nec-
essarily emotionally or personally expressive in the manner of a Gould or
a Cocker. There is, for example, the persona of the “cool” jazz musician
that requires the maintenance of a certain emotional distance from the
music and one’s own performance of it. (I offer an analysis of a perfor-
mance of cool jazz in chapter 7.) The workaday world of professional
musicians includes a great many cases in which musical performance
does not entail emotional expression. The musicians in an invisible
Broadway pit orchestra may enjoy what they do, and may express their
pleasure in the way they perform, but the audience for which they do so
consists of one another. A pit musician’s expression of emotion through
the music is of no interest to the audience for the show. A singer may be
highly emotive when performing as a soloist, yet may perform a relatively
unemotional persona when singing in a chorus or serving as a backup
singer.
In cases where the performance of a musical persona does entail
emotional expression, musicians may be said to engage in what Goffman
calls “dramatization.” This has to do with making visible work which goes
into a particular routine that the audience would not otherwise see, so
that the performer can get credit for it (it is thus related to the displays
of effort discussed in chapter 3), and also with presenting an idealized
image to the audience (in this context, idealized means conforming to
the audience’s existing expectations of a certain kind of person). Goff-
man includes violinists alongside “prizefighters, surgeons . . . and police-
men” as a category of performers whose act is “wonderfully adapted . . .
as means of vividly conveying the qualities and attributes claimed by the
performer.”70 In relation to musical performance, an idealized image of
the musician as emotionally expressive is conveyed through dramatiza-
tions of the process of music making that purport to expose the musi-
cian’s internal state while performing.71
There is no better example of musical dramatization than the phe-
nomenon known as “guitar face.” This phrase refers to the distorted
expressions that appear on the faces of rock guitarists, particularly when
playing a solo. These expressions serve as coded displays that provide
the audience with external evidence of the musician’s ostensible inter-
 112  •   in concert

nal state while playing, such as the expressions of B. B. King analyzed

in the previous chapter. The conventional nature of these expressions
and their relationship to a guitarist’s persona are indicated by one jour-
nalist’s taxonomy, which includes suffering, satanic possession, surprise
at the guitarist’s own virtuosity, swagger, sex god status, spirituality, and
stoicism among the emotions and attitudes frequently portrayed by rock
guitarists and bass guitarists.72 The fact that such a list can be constructed
suggests that idealization is at work here: audiences and musicians alike
are aware of a set of emotions and attitudes (and corresponding facial
expressions) deemed appropriate within the genre frame of rock music,
and musicians generally draw on that vocabulary in their performances.
Although guitar face is specifically associated with rock, the basic idea
behind it (that facial expression, as an aspect of a performer’s manner, is
specific to particular musical genres and performance situations) can be
generalized to other musical forms. Without using the term, Godlovitch
describes the classical guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream’s guitar face,73
and it is no stretch to say that Pavarotti, for instance, exemplifies in his
performances what might be called “tenor face.”

The Multivocality of Musical Personae

By stressing that a musician’s personal front in performance must be

self-­consistent and also have a clear and consistent relationship to genre
conventions, I have presented the musical persona thus far as a univo-
cal entity whose different aspects (setting, appearance, and manner)
are ideally harmonious with one another, rather than as a less stable
compound made up of separable elements that might potentially exist
in relations of tension, or even contradiction, with one another. Other
analysts, including Edward T. Cone, Matthew Gelbart, and Keith Negus
have all posited the musical persona as something made up of multiple
parts or layers whose relationships are variable and complex. Since this
approach is ultimately compatible with my own, I will seek to bring them
together.
An early and highly influential, if somewhat controversial, formula-
tion of the idea of musical persona is to be found in Edward T. Cone’s
The Composer’s Voice (1974). Cone’s concept of persona derives from liter-
ature—­he is seeking a voice for the composer modeled on the authorial
voice of a poet or novelist. For Cone, all literature is inherently dramatic,
and he sees the same kind of drama being played out in musical com-
 Musical Personae  •   113

position and performance. Cone’s approach to persona is entirely dif-

ferent from mine in that he defines musical persona as the persona of
the composer and the composition, and therefore understands it to be
a kind of authorial voice, and I define it as the persona of the performer
and therefore understand it to be a specific iteration of the performer
as a social being. To his credit, Cone argues that performance is not an
ancillary aspect of the communication between composer and audience,
saying, “Sounds are not a means of mediation by which we are enabled
to hear music; they constitute the reality of music, and they effect the
realization of its persona.”74 Even though Cone rejects the idea that “the
performer [is] an imperfect intermediary between composer and lis-
tener,” he nevertheless subordinates the performer to the composer’s
intention: “The performer . . . is a living personification of that spokes-
man [the composition]—­of the mind that experiences the music.”75
From Cone’s perspective, performers are necessary in order to create
the sounds through which the composition is realized, but their job is to
serve as living intermediaries between the composer and the audience
and embodiments of the composition. In my formulation of musical per-
sona, performers enjoy much greater autonomy, albeit always delimited
by the conventions of musical genres, recognized performance practices,
and negotiations with audiences over the definition of the situation.
What Cone brings to the table that is of value to any account of
musical personae, however, is the idea that they are neither unitary nor
monolithic but made up of multiple strands or voices that are not auto-
matically in harmony with one another. He divides the musical persona
of a singer, whether of lieder or opera, into two parts: the vocal persona,
which he identifies as the protagonist of the song, the character whose
thoughts and feelings it expresses, and the “virtual persona,” which he
identifies with the composer’s intentions and the instrumental line. In
Cone’s view, the relationship between these two kinds of personae is
necessarily defined by “the tension between the demands of design [the
composer’s intentions] and of representation [the singer’s portrayal of
the protagonist] . . . that the arts of song and opera share with many oth-
ers.”76 The composer’s task, understood from this perspective, is to find
ways of resolving this tension by structuring compositions as dialogues
between these two voices.
Applying Cone’s concept of persona to rock music, Matthew Gelbart
proposes that the early rock persona (that is, the generic musical persona
associated with rock from the inception of rock and roll in the mid-­1950s
until around 1970) was a highly unified, even monolithic, entity that is
 114  •   in concert

nevertheless made up of identifiable and separable parts. He describes

this persona as the “composer-­ singer-­
instrumentalist-­
protagonist per-
sona.” Following Cone’s suggestion that identification between musical
protagonist and audience is at the heart of the musical experience, Gel-
bart goes on to argue that the audience is also included in this multifac-
eted construct.77 His historical argument is that the bonds of identifica-
tion that held the early rock persona together started to come undone
in the late 1960s, opening up new possibilities for exploring the inter-
relationships among the elements of musical persona in performance
in the 1970s. He credits the Kinks for being the first rock artists in the
mid-­1960s “to create a friction—­a cognitive dissonance—­which forced
a real confrontation with the standard ‘protagonist-­composer’ reception
model of their time” that helped pave the way for subsequent redefini-
tions of this model.78
Working like Cone from literary models, Keith Negus arrives at a
multiplex set of terms to define musical persona: “real author, implied
author, character, and narrator, and (star) persona.”79 While the real
author is the actual person who composed the song, the implied author
is the voice that person assumes for the purpose of writing the song.
The narrator represents the perspective from which the song’s narra-
tive is recounted and, in the case of first-­person narratives, may also be
a character in it. An important aspect of Negus’s formulation lies in his
insistence that the performer’s public image or “star persona” is also
inevitably part of the mix. Although we can hear all the other parts from
listening to the performance itself, we cannot avoid also hearing the per-
formance in relation to what we know (or think we know) about the art-
ist as a public figure.80
Negus argues that musical artists construct different relationships
among the terms he enumerates. Singer-­songwriters in the tradition of
Joni Mitchell, for instance, “have encouraged the listener to hear the col-
lapsing of such categories: to hear the real person exposed, revealed in
the narrator of the song, seemingly with no critical distance between
the real author, implied author, and persona.”81 By contrast, “Steely
Dan (songwriters Donald Fagen and Walter Becker) use music, lyrics,
song structures, and arrangements to disrupt any assumption of a corre-
spondence between real and implied author, character, and persona.”82
Even though Negus uses different terminology than Gelbart, he picks up
where Gelbart leaves off in the sense that he offers an account of how
popular musicians rearrange the parts of their personae shaken loose
by the fragmentation of the unitary early rock persona to achieve spe-
 Musical Personae  •   115

cific performing identities with particular relationships to the music they

perform and to their audiences. Cone, Gelbart, and Negus all divide the
musical persona into multiple voices, and all suggest that these voices
do not necessarily sing in unison: there can be fissures and tensions
between them.
For example, Cook describes Jimi Hendrix’s performance of “Foxy
Lady” at the Isle of Wight in 1970 as a succession of “party tricks”: Hen-
drix kneels, grimaces, plays the guitar with his mouth, and so on. In
appearance and manner, he thus embodied his particular sexualized
and racialized persona as a psychedelic rocker in this performance,
which took place in a setting that mandated such a performance. For
Cook, however, Hendrix seems to be “wheeling out one cliché after
another in rapid succession. To me, the episode seems curiously half-­
hearted, bringing to mind Hendrix’s sense of being boxed in by his fans’
expectations  .  .  . and his having no interest in the tour. It’s almost as
if . . . Hendrix was imitating himself slightly inaccurately.”83 The question
here is not whether or not Hendrix performed his persona—­clearly, he
did. The question is how he performed it: half-­heartedly, grudgingly, in a
manner that betokened a lack of commitment to it, at least according to
Cook.84 One could say that his performance implied a distance between
Hendrix the real person unhappy with his professional situation and the
exuberant, exhibitionistic persona he had developed over many perfor-
mances in the preceding four years. Hendrix communicates to his audi-
ence his lack of enthusiasm for the persona he nevertheless is obligated
to perform for them through the way he performs it. I do not have to
step away from my Goffmanian framework to account for this effect, as it
exemplifies what Goffman calls “role distance”: performing a social role
in such a way as to communicate that one does not wish to be identified
with it (I discuss the concept of role distance in musical performance
further in the next chapter).85
If Hendrix can be said to have opened a gap between real person and
musical persona by performing role distance, there are myriad examples
of complex relationships between persona and character as defined by
the lyrics of a song. I shall discuss one such case here, Randy Newman’s
performance of his 1977 song “Short People” on the BBC television
program The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978. In terms of appearance and
manner, Newman adheres closely to the norm for the singer-­songwriter
genre as I described it earlier. He appears as an isolated figure seated
at the piano, dressed casually but neatly, even wearing the ubiquitous
plaid shirt. He performs with his eyes mostly shut, looking down at the
 116  •   in concert

keyboard, or gazing off into the distance—­he does not look at his audi-
ence, even when he speaks to them in the middle of the song, until he
thanks them for their applause. Like others in the genre, he sings with
his mouth very close to the vocal microphone to enhance the effect of
intimacy. His persona is low in theatricality.
The song Newman performs and his relationship to it are somewhat
more problematic within the singer-­songwriter genre than his persona,
however. After all, in this genre songs are supposed to be “intimate, con-
fessional, personal, and semiautobiographical,” according to Tucker,
and the genre’s characteristically low degree of theatricality enhances
the effect of intimacy. But is Newman actually confessing his personal
dislike of short people to us? Or is he singing in the voice of a charac-
ter who feels this way? Presumably, the latter is the case, or so we want
to believe. Dave Laing argues that there are two channels of communi-
cation in musical performance: “There is an ‘external’ level where the
performer  .  .  . addresses the audience.  .  .  . There is also an ‘internal’
communication taking place within the lyric of the song, between the
protagonist of the lyric and its addressee.”86 In his analysis of a differ-
ent song, Laing claims that Newman creates “an unambiguous a gap
between the external and internal levels of communication” by creating
a distance between his musical persona and the character he portrays.87 I
would argue, however, that in the case of “Short People,” Newman’s per-
formance is considerably more ambiguous than Laing indicates. Laing
seems to be saying that Newman maintains role distance in a perfor-
mance that suggests he should not be identified with the protagonist of
the song and that his audience should not be identified with this pro-
tagonist’s addressee. Yet there is nothing in Newman’s performance that
communicates the idea that he is not to be identified with the character
he represents, and the singer-­songwriter genre that frames his perfor-
mance suggests very strongly that he should be. Newman thus creates a
friction between the confessionalism of the singer-­songwriter genre and
an absurdly antisocial confession his audience understandably does not
want to hear as his real thoughts.
The song’s bridge introduces further complexities. The lyrics to that
section seem to recant completely the anti-­short people rhetoric of the
opening verse:

Short People are just the same

As you and I
(A Fool Such As I)
 Musical Personae  •   117

All men are brothers

Until the day they die
(It’s A Wonderful World).

What are we to make of this? Are these the further, more reflective
thoughts of the same character who a moment ago was reviling short
people and returns to doing so immediately after the bridge? Does this
other perspective possibly come from a second character who is debat-
ing the first? Or are these not the words of a character at all, but those
of the singer-­songwriter persona who is injecting a commentary on what
the character he created and portrays has said? Newman’s spoken obser-
vation just before the bridge, where he says, “This is the nice, friendly
part coming up here” sheds little light on these questions because it is
difficult to identify the position from which Newman speaks: is he speak-
ing as the character, as the singer-­songwriter, or possibly even as the real
Randy Newman who is remarking on what he has wrought in his identity
as singer-­songwriter? It is completely unclear which entity the “nice and
friendly” passage of the song represents and who is announcing it.
I do not intend to attempt to resolve the tensions between the three
aspects of the musician as performer I have identified in Newman’s song
and performance. It may well be that both derive their power from the
tensions and ambiguities Newman creates not only around exactly what
and whose perspective the song represents but also his own relationship
to the singer-­songwriter genre whose normative persona he otherwise
performs. I simply want to indicate first, that the schema for analyzing
musical performances I propose here provides a useful framework for
discussing such a performance and, second, that it is entirely plausible
within this framework to posit the musical persona as a multivocal entity
whose many voices can contest one another through different channels
of communication.

The Audience

I have used Goffman’s vocabulary of social front as a means of breaking

down the musical persona into its constituent parts. The presentation of
a front is not an end in itself, of course: it is the first step in the execution
of a routine, a step that constitutes an implicit claim to be taken seri-
ously in a particular social role. Goffman: “When an individual projects
a definition of the situation and thereby makes an implicit or explicit
 118  •   in concert

claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral

demand upon [his audience], obliging them to value and treat him in
the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect.”88 Following
the performer’s staking of this claim, the actual performance of the rou-
tine either bolsters the audience’s willingness to accept the performer’s
claim to a certain identity, or provides the audience with reasons to dis-
credit it. (It may have been that the Doors’ audience felt that the new,
string-­and horn-­laden music they proposed to play was not consistent
with the expectations the group had otherwise created.)
In relation to musical performance, this means that performers
use their fronts to claim musical identities that are ultimately either
secured or problematized by the relationship of their actual playing
of music to the initial definition of the situation they projected. This
relationship is enacted along several vectors. One of the most basic is
that of musical genre. Suppose a concert of mine is advertised as a clas-
sical piano recital and booked into the Carnegie Recital Hall. When
I appear before the audience, I am dressed appropriately in a black
tailcoat and white shirt with bow tie and exhibit a manner appropriate
to a classical soloist. I sit down at an impressive Steinway grand piano
and proceed to pick out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” awkwardly with one
finger. Clearly, my execution of the routine (the actual work of making
music) would discredit (to use Goffman’s term) the claim I advanced
through the framing of the event and my presentation of a front; it
would throw my claim to a classical musician’s identity seriously into
question. Indeed, such a performance would probably lead my audi-
ence to impute to me the persona of a prankster rather than that of a
serious musician, and prevent them from treating me in the manner
they would an accomplished classical pianist.
The foregoing hypothetical is intentionally silly, but the question
of whether and how a performer justifies the claims made through the
presentation of a front is a serious one that impinges on matters of rep-
ertoire, style, and persona. If all of these aspects of a musician’s perfor-
mance are not perceived as consistent in one way or another with the
claims the musician has advanced by presenting a front, the performer
risks being discredited. If I claim an identity as a virtuoso in any field of
musical performance, for instance, the repertoire I select, the technical
skill I display in playing it, the sophistication of my interpretation, and
my own manner all must be in keeping with that identity, or it will be
thrown into question. Another case in point is that of Phil Ochs, who,
in the 1960s, developed a following as a politically and socially engaged
 Musical Personae  •   119

“folk troubadour.”89 In 1970, however, following a period of stylistic

change and political disenchantment, Ochs tried something different
during a concert at Carnegie Hall, described here in a review:

Instead of presenting only his customary protest songs, he offered

also rock songs of the 1950s associated with Elvis Presley, Conway
Twitty and Buddy Holly. Mr. Ochs appeared in a glittering golden
suit, patterned on one worn by Mr. Presley. His audience’s reaction to
this was a rising barrage of boos and hisses.90

In terms of repertoire and personal front, Ochs’s musical performance

did not match his established persona, and his audience was not ame-
nable to his attempt to redefine the situation.
As the examples of the Doors and Ochs show, audiences expect per-
formers whose work they experience more than once to maintain rela-
tively consistent personae. As Goffman puts it, “When an individual or
performer plays the same part to the same audience on different occa-
sions, a social relationship is likely to arise.”91 In order for that relation-
ship to be maintained, both parties (performer and audience) need
to be able to count on a high degree of continuity from occasion to
occasion.
I do not mean to suggest that musical personae are necessarily rigid
and static, though they certainly can be. Performers in any genre of
music may find that audiences expect them to continue to do some ver-
sion of what they seemingly have always done. When and how quickly a
performer’s persona may evolve, if at all, and in what directions, are sub-
ject to delicate negotiations with the audience. Miscalculation can result
in anything from a temporary setback to the end of a performing career,
though the performer’s only alternative often is to freeze a popular per-
sona in the hope of retaining the loyalty of its original audience (this is
what performers on the oldies concert circuits must do). This can also
come about unintentionally, as Andrew Lindridge and Toni Eagar argue
happened with David Bowie: ultimately, control over Bowie’s persona
was subsumed by the audience and the market; he became so identified
with Ziggy Stardust that he became a prisoner of the image he himself
had created.92
But some musical performers find ways of letting their personae
change successfully over time. Compare the Beatles in 1963, when
they were essentially a very talented boy band, with the Beatles in 1968,
when they were recognized as countercultural avatars. During the era
 120  •   in concert

of Beatlemania in the mid-­1960s, the Beatles had a collective identity

of a cheerful, user-­friendly, slightly irreverent boy band. Each Beatle
had his own individual persona, but all of their personae had to harmo-
nize with this group affect. By 1967, however, the Beatles’ group per-
sona had morphed into that of a psychedelic rock band plugged into
the countercultural ethos of the time. At both moments, each individual
Beatle’s persona was articulated to the group persona. Whereas in the
mid-­1960s, fans dubbed Paul McCartney the Cute Beatle, John Lennon
the Smart Beatle, George Harrison the Quiet Beatle, and Ringo Starr the
Funny Beatle, their individual identities shifted in relation to the group’s
overall persona. In Richard Avedon’s canonical portrait photographs of
1967, originally published in Look magazine in the United States and
other magazines in the United Kingdom and Europe then disseminated
widely as posters, Ringo is shown with a dove on his hand, suggesting his
commitment to the “Peace and Love” dimension of the counterculture,
while John Lennon is presented with spirals for eyes, perhaps indicating
his engagement with psychedelia and the drug culture. Paul appears as
a flower child in pastel blues, surrounded by blooms, and the portrait of
George emphasizes his mysticism.93
A parallel development in another musical realm might be the
career of John Coltrane, who emerged as a highly respected, hard-­
working postbop tenor saxophonist in the 1950s, but later transformed
himself into a spiritual seeker exploring the psyche and the cosmos
through demanding, dissonant music. In both cases, the changes of
personae were dramatic, yet there was an audience prepared to accept
the performers in each guise. The Beach Boys, by contrast, attempted
the same transformation—­ from teen heartthrobs to countercultural
eminences—­as the Beatles, but were unable to achieve credibility within
the counterculture in the second half of the 1960s. It wasn’t until the
early 1970s that the Beach Boys achieved credibility with the hippie audi-
ence. They did this by using the strategy of authenticity-­by-­association I
mentioned earlier in connection with Darius Rucker. In 1971, the Beach
Boys shared a bill with the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore East in New
York City, and the two groups performed together on stage. Thereafter,
the Beach Boys would mention their association with the Dead to their
audiences whenever possible, finally giving them an in with an audience
they had cultivated unsuccessfully for a number of years.94
Clearly, there is no simple answer as to why some musicians are able
to pull off transformations of persona while others are not—­one would
have to look very closely at all the personal, industrial, and cultural
 Musical Personae  •   121

factors involved. But I hypothesize that such transformations can only

occur in relation to genre framing. Goffman notes that frames are not
static: what is possible and permissible within any given social frame may
change over time,95 and this is equally true for musical genres and the
performance personae associated with them. I have proposed here that
at any point in time, there is a normative persona for a given musical
genre that serves as a point of reference for the musicians who perform
in that genre, which can be different from the normative persona for
the same genre at a different point in time. For example, in the 1920s,
the archetype on which most country music performers based their
personae was the hillbilly (in fact, country music was called “hillbilly
music” at this time). Between 1935 and 1940, the model for the country
music persona transitioned gradually from the hillbilly to the cowboy,
due in large part to Gene Autry’s popularity as a singing cowboy in Hol-
lywood films, an image taken up by country artists ready to move away
from the hillbilly image to something more dignified and respectable.96
The existence of a normative persona does not mean that all musicians
necessarily have to adhere to it—­they may choose to adopt it or resist
it or critique it or challenge it or change it through their own perfor-
mances, as did Roy Acuff, a key figure in country music in the 1930s and
1940s, when he refused to portray a cowboy, saying, “There is nothing
cowboy about me.”97
There are therefore at least three distinguishable kinds of altera-
tions of persona: lateral moves, so to speak, in which a performer shifts
between two identity positions available within a given frame at a given
moment (John Mellencamp’s evolution out of Johnny Cougar is an
example of an artist who changed personae while maintaining general
stylistic continuity); movements from one frame to another (as when a
rock artist like Darius Rucker becomes a country artist); and changes
over time within a single frame (the cases of the Beatles and Coltrane
fall into this category). As socially defined genre frames change, what
counts as rock or jazz (or any other kind of music) changes, and fresh
opportunities for artists to (re)define their personae in relation to the
music open up.
There are also many performers whose personae allow their audi-
ences to accept performances that might be perceived as anomalous
when executed by other artists operating in the same genre frame.
Haimovitz is one example: performing Bach at a recital hall is just as con-
sistent with his persona as a maverick classical cellist as performing his
arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” at
 122  •   in concert

CBGB’s. In fact, I will go a step further and say that Haimovitz’s implicit
claim to be a maverick classical musician actually requires him both to
demonstrate his mastery of the classical repertoire in traditional settings,
thus gaining credibility in this context that he can leverage, and to do
things conventional classical musicians do not, like play rock or perform
at a punk club. Another example is that of the late Frank Zappa, whose
persona of a learned, technically accomplished, outspoken musical cur-
mudgeon permitted him to work, simultaneously and sequentially, as a
rock musician, a jazz musician, and a symphonic composer. In such cases,
the performer’s flexible persona serves as a bridge among institutionally
and culturally distinct musical genres, audiences, and repertoires—­and
that very flexibility is part of the performer’s appeal to audiences.
There is a continuum from types of musical performance in which
the musicians’ personae are strongly mandated because they are built
into the framing conventions of a particular genre (symphony play-
ers or members of marching bands would be examples), to types in
which musicians have a great deal of freedom to construct personae.
In no case, however, is the musician in a position to construct a persona
autonomously—­personae are always negotiated between musicians and
their audiences within the constraints of genre framing. For Goffman, all
human identities, all selves, are produced by such negotiations and do
not exist apart from them:

A correctly staged and performed scene leads the audience to impute

a self to a performed character, but this imputation—­this self—­is a
product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it. The self,
then . . . is a dramatic effect arising from a scene that is presented.98

This suggests that the audience, not the performer, plays the most deci-
sive role in the process of identity formation, since it is the audience
that produces the final construction of an identity from the impressions
created by the performer. In some cases, this audience role can go well
beyond the acceptance or rejection of the performer’s claim to a par-
ticular musical identity: an audience can actually impose an identity on
the performer. The identity of virtuoso to which I alluded earlier is such
a case: one generally does not nominate oneself as a virtuoso. Other
people—­initially one’s teachers, perhaps, then audiences, critics, and
peers—­assign that title to those deserving of it, according to the canons
of virtuosity for any particular musical genre (technical and interpretive
 Musical Personae  •   123

skills in classical music, technical, interpretive, and improvisational skills

in jazz, etc.). Once a musician is designated as a virtuoso, all of his or
her subsequent performances will be understood and assessed in light of
that aspect of persona.
Bob Dylan represents a different instance in which the audi-
ence imposed a persona on a performer that went well beyond the
definition of the situation as he perceived it—­and beyond what he
intended. Largely because of the social and political engagement he
expressed in the songs he wrote in the early 1960s, and his embrace
of a rock style after working in a folk vein, Dylan was designated “The
Voice of His Generation.” Many of his subsequent performances,
especially in the 1980s and 1990s, could be seen as efforts to under-
mine that persona by taking unexpected personal and ideological
turns, producing erratic performances in which he would mumble or
distort the lyrics to his famous songs, and so on. Dylan’s is a complex
case because the feisty, retiring, obscurantist persona he developed
to counter the prophetic one his audience sought to impose on him
in some ways only made the prophetic persona all the more auratic
and credible.
Examples of audiences imposing personae on performers, or refus-
ing to accept a performer’s definition (or redefinition) of the situation,
should not be taken to mean merely that audiences are fickle or capri-
cious, that music is locked into a cycle of commercialism in which artists
are repeatedly called upon simply to produce fresh versions of their last
salable commodity. Rather, they point toward two very important things.
The first, which I have already discussed, is the fact that the performer’s
persona is precipitated by interaction with an audience and is, in that
sense, a social construct, not just an individual or industrial one. The
other is the way these episodes indicate the investment audiences have
in the performance personae they help to create. This investment is not
purely economic; it is also cultural, emotional, ritual, sometimes political
or even spiritual. Audiences try to make performers into who they need
them to be, to fulfill a social function. A successful working consensus
means that such a relationship has been achieved. If one thinks of audi-
ences not just as consumers, but also as the cocreators of the musicians’
personae, and as having a substantial investment in those personae and
the functions they serve, it is easy to understand why audiences often
respond very conservatively (in the literal sense) to musicians’ desire to
retool their personae.99
 124  •   in concert

Multiple Personae

Having examined issues surrounding the possibility of change and evo-

lution of musical personae, I turn now to the special case of musicians
who enact multiple personae because they perform in multiple musical
genres. One case in point is David Amram, who is a composer and con-
ductor of symphonic music and also a jazz musician. Another is Perry
Farrell, known by that name as the leader of hard rock groups Jane’s
Addiction and Porno for Pyros, and as DJ Peretz when he performs as a
turntablist specializing in electronica.100 Lady Gaga is the quintessential
example of a musician who transforms her persona relative to the differ-
ent genre frames in which she performs.
As is to be expected, these musicians present different fronts and
personae in different genre frames. Images of Amram conducting show
him in white bow tie and tails, while in pictures in which he is playing
jazz (his instrument is the French horn), he appears in a black turtle-
neck. In his hard rock incarnation, Perry Farrell often wore flamboyant,
spangled outfits and played aggressively to the audience; DJ Peretz, by
contrast, dresses down in relatively modest T-­shirts and casual slacks,
and focuses his attention primarily on his equipment. When performing
pop music in massive arenas, Lady Gaga wears extravagant, glittery glam
rock costumes and performs in a highly theatrical, outer-­directed man-
ner. When performing jazz standards with Tony Bennett, however, Gaga
wears dresses that would be at home on a stage in Las Vegas and is far
more deferential to Bennett than she is to anyone with whom she shares
the stage at her arena shows. If I see any of these artists in any one of
their personae, I might reasonably suppose that I had experienced that
artist’s sole presentation of self. But if I gain the knowledge that these are
all musicians who assume different personae in different genre-­inflected
circumstances, my perception of them changes.
Although I hold that Amram’s personae as symphonic composer/
conductor and as jazz musician are largely separate entities that emerge
in different kinds of performance situations—­as are Farrell’s personae as
rock singer and turntablist and Gaga’s personae as pop diva and supper
club jazz singer—­it is clear that the informed audience’s sense of who
each of these people is as a musician (and a human being) derives in part
from the knowledge that they assume multiple personae. At that level,
their disparate personae are not completely separate: our understanding
of what kind of classical musician Amram is cannot be separated from
our knowledge that he is also a jazz musician, and vice versa. Musicians
 Musical Personae  •   125

like Amram, Farrell, and Gaga possess what I shall call metapersonae,
which constitute the umbrella over the individual personae that emerge
under different performative circumstances.
These metapersonae are primarily virtual entities, by which I mean
that it is hard to imagine them being performed directly, for several rea-
sons. For one thing, each persona exists in relation to a different musi-
cal genre, culture, and audience. The audience for one persona may
not share values and interests with the audience for another. A jazz fan
might have no interest in Amram’s classical music career, for instance.
It is also the case that audiences emerging from different music cultures
do not necessarily mix well. Farrell considers this issue as he reflects on
his own desire to bring together the audiences for rock and electronica:
“I do assume that straight rock people are going to see what this is about.
‘What the heck is going on here? You know they’re not going to mosh. I
don’t think I dress like them. I hope they don’t think I am a loser.’ Then
they start to get uptight.”101
The anonymous author of the article in which Farrell is quoted notes,
“When he shows up to clubs to drop wax, he’s often swarmed by hordes
of Jane’s Addiction fans hoping to catch a glimpse of their teenage
hero. The electronica freaks aren’t familiar with his past and are only
there to dance.”102 Whereas it is clear that Farrell can maintain different
personae for different audiences, it would seem impossible for him to
inhabit simultaneously the two different personae being called up by
these different audiences. This is a general problem: How exactly would
Amram perform simultaneously as a classical musician and a jazz musi-
cian? Although Farrell’s or Amram’s metapersona may exist conceptu-
ally for audiences who appreciate the diversity of their interests, and
whose perception of their performances is informed by an awareness of
the metapersona, the metapersona itself cannot actually be presented
in performance (except in interviews, where musicians can talk about
their multiple genre commitments). In fact, the informed audience has
to suppress aspects of its knowledge of the performer in order to achieve
a successful working consensus. Even though Amram is both a classical
musician and a jazz musician, and my understanding of him as a musi-
cian is enhanced by my knowledge of both aspects of his work, it would
not be appropriate for me to attend one of his performances as a sym-
phony conductor and applaud after a brilliantly conducted movement,
as one would after a virtuosic jazz riff.
One finds that even musicians such as Farrell and Amram, who
express serious interest in bringing together disparate musical forms
 126  •   in concert

and their corresponding audiences, actually engage in forms of bracket-

ing designed to keep their personae discrete. One form of bracketing
is achieved through setting: whereas Farrell and Jane’s Addiction play
at rock venues, DJ Peretz spins records at electronica and house music
clubs. In 1971, Amram issued a recording entitled No More Walls, a two-­
disc LP set.103 The first disc features his symphonic compositions, which
he conducted. The second disc contains pieces he wrote in jazz, Brazil-
ian, folk, and what would now be called world music idioms, on which
he performs as an instrumentalist. The stated intention of the recording
was to allow Amram a virtual space in which to perform his metapersona
as a restless spirit whose diverse musical tastes and eagerness to experi-
ment have led him to master a number of very different musical idioms,
a space he would be unlikely to encounter in his usual live performance
contexts. The illustration on the record jacket is divided between an
image of Amram, the world musician wearing a colorful shirt on the left,
and Amram the symphonic conductor wearing tails and holding a baton.
The album is a compelling portrait of a performer with multiple musical
personae, but it is noteworthy that the orchestral pieces and the other
material were segregated onto separate discs rather than intermingled,
physically marking the main line of division between Amram’s personae.
When the album was rereleased on CD, only the material from the
second (nonsymphonic) disc was included, thus further materializing
the bracketing of musical personae implicit in the organization of the
original LP. (The first CD reissue was on Flying Fish Records, a Chicago
label devoted primarily to blues, for which an album of symphonic music
would be an anomaly—­this constitutes yet another form of bracketing.)
In sum, musical personae are so closely associated with particular frames
and audiences that even musicians who perform multiple personae with
an eye toward challenging cultural distinctions are constrained to keep
their personae separate.
Amram is a particularly interesting figure to consider in this context,
in part because of the eclecticism of his compositions and the multi-
ple roles he plays as composer, player, and conductor. His Triple Con-
certo for Woodwinds, Brass, Jazz Quintets and Orchestra (premiered by
the American Symphony Orchestra in 1971) is an example. The 1978
recording of it with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra was con-
ducted by David Zinman; Amram’s role in the recording was as leader of
the David Amram Jazz Quintet. The image on the cover of the original
LP shows Amram blowing passionately on his French horn wearing a pat-
 Musical Personae  •   127

terned open-­collar shirt and a beaded necklace. Clearly, this is an image

of Amram the 1970s jazz musician, not Amram the symphonic composer
and conductor, that defines his participation in the recording as that of
a jazz player rather than a composer.104 By contrast, an undated video of
Amram conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the third move-
ment of the piece shows him standing on a podium in front of the musi-
cians wearing the formal evening outfit of a conductor.105 He comports
himself in a manner fitting for an orchestral conductor, except for one
thing: he also serves as an instrumentalist, playing folk-­ish melodies on
a penny whistle from the podium. This is obviously not consistent with
the normal comportment of a symphonic conductor. With this gesture,
Amram comes as close as perhaps anyone has to performing two differ-
ent musical personae simultaneously, albeit within an event unambigu-
ously framed as a concert of art music by a symphony orchestra.

Conclusion

I have argued here that to think of music as performance is to fore-

ground performers and their concrete relationships to audiences and
that the best model for analyzing performances by musicians is Goff-
man’s concept of self-­presentation. Although musicians usually initiate
musical identities by presenting specific fronts, these identities are not
simply created by musicians and consumed by audiences. Rather, such
identities are social in a number of crucial ways. Although a musician’s
persona is expected to be more or less continuous from performance to
performance, it is also produced at any given performance through the
negotiation of a working consensus with the audience. The audience
is thus the cocreator of the persona and has an investment in it that
extends beyond mere consumption.
The production of musical identities takes place within social frames
that provide musicians and audiences alike with sets of conventions and
expectations that govern, but do not determine, their definitions of the
situation and corresponding behavior. I have suggested that each musi-
cal genre constitutes a social frame that carries its own particular set of
musical and performance conventions as well as particular ideologies
(e.g., the interpellation of “whiteness” in country music discussed ear-
lier). Both musicians and audiences draw on these conventions in their
presentations of fronts, interactions, and so on. Seen this way, the object
 128  •   in concert

of musical performance is the successful presentation of an identity, a

musical persona, in a defined social context, rather than the execution
of a text. Musical works, then, are part of the expressive equipment musi-
cians employ in the production of personae. As much as setting, appear-
ance, and manner, the music performed and the style of performance
must cohere with the identity claim the musician stakes.
 Ch apt er Six

Everybody’s in Showbiz
Performing Star Identity in Popular Music
•••

The screaming crowds, security guards, groupies and motor-

cade at a Lincoln elementary school Wednesday were for an
11-­year-­old Lincoln boy battling a brain tumor and dreaming of
pop stardom. . . . Dozens of photographers, volunteers and fam-
ily members surrounded him as he walked the red carpet . . . into
a black stretch . . . limousine, past hundreds of sign-­holding and
screaming schoolmates.1

The nature of popular music stardom can be understood in a number

of different ways. David Shumway, for example, defines rock-­and-­roll
stars as “a select group of performers who, like movie stars, have had the
means, ambition, and imagination to take full advantage of their spot in
the limelight.”2 Lee Marshall proposes that

a popular music performer becomes a star once his or her cultural

meaning becomes relatively stable (it is never fixed). There is no set
amount of time that this takes; it could be after two singles, or one
album, or five albums, but, once this situation is achieved, the star-­as-­
cultural-­text has some kind of meaning independent of the music he
or she has produced.3

Both suggest that stardom does not inhere in the music. Fame and popu-
larity as a musician are means to achieve stardom; they do not constitute
129
 130  •   in concert

stardom in themselves. Once achieved, popular music stardom becomes

a platform for broader cultural meaning and action. At this level, star-
dom is a characteristic of the person, not the musician. If Mick Jagger
or Lady Gaga were never to perform music again, their status as stars
and celebrities, if not as recording artists, would remain intact. In this
respect, star status achieved through popular music is no different from
star or celebrity status achieved by other means—­in all cases star iden-
tity is somewhat detached from the particular activity through which it
was achieved. Nevertheless, the way popular musicians embody their star
identities is not the same as the way stars emanating from other cultural
realms do so because popular musicians’ star identities must remain con-
gruent with the personae they perform within their respective musical
genre worlds. Jagger, for example, must maintain as a celebrity both the
mischievous bad-­boy attitude and the distinctive physical presence that
have been his stock in trade as a rock singer since the early 1960s.
The question of stardom brings a new variable into the discussion of
musical persona. As I have already suggested, popular musicians who
achieve star status must perform that status in ways that remain congru-
ent with their musical personae or risk alienating their original audi-
ences. In this sense, there is actually no such thing as a popular music
star; there are only rock stars, pop stars, country stars, hip-­hop stars, and
so on, and the audience—­even the broader audience the performer
reaches by virtue of becoming a star—­expects each type of popular
music star to perform star identity differently. Star identity is therefore
subject to the same constraints of genre and other factors as any musi-
cal persona. There are normative models for what a popular music star
looks and acts like within every musical genre frame. Any individual per-
forming this role, including those who wish to perform it in an uncon-
ventional way, must negotiate a relationship to the existing norms as well
as to the audience that is invested in them. Nevertheless, to perform star
identity in a particular genre context is not the same thing as simply per-
forming a genre-­inflected musical persona. For example, I was once on
the same flight as the members of a southern rock band that had been
quite famous and successful in the second half of the 1970s. Although it
was not difficult to discern from their appearance that these men were
rock musicians, they did not behave with the aura of privilege and the
expectation of attention one might associate with public performances
of rock star identity but were largely indistinguishable from the other
passengers. Their appearance suggested that they were rock musicians,
but their manner did not suggest they were performing a star identity
 Everybody’s in Showbiz  •   131

within their genre context. Popular music star identity is thus a particu-
lar inflection of a genre-­specific musical persona.
The news story from which I took my epigraph tells how Cayden
Hubbard got his chance “to be a pop star” and sheds light on what this
means.4 Being a pop star meant Cayden was given the opportunity to
behave like one. These behaviors are well known and highly codified;
they include receiving the tribute of adoring fans, the protection of secu-
rity guards, and the attention of paparazzi; signing autographs; riding
in a well-­stocked limousine; doing radio interviews; and flying out to LA
(or Nashville, or elsewhere) for a recording session. Cayden’s experi-
ence shows that pop music stardom is performative. It is not an identity
that inheres passively in individuals but is constituted through action: a
person is a pop star insofar as he or she performs the social role of pop star.
Cayden’s experience also shows that pop star identity is not some-
thing simply enacted by an individual to be consumed by an audience,
as I discussed in the previous chapter with respect to musical personae
generally. Although audiences are sometimes characterized as passive,
even by performance theorists,5 I argue, with Richard Bauman, that
audiences are never mere consumers of performances: “The collab-
orative participation of an audience  .  .  . is an integral component of
performance as an interactional accomplishment.”6 As Erving Goffman
emphasizes, to be part of an audience is to play a role defined by the way
the particular performance is framed. In his discussion of the theatri-
cal frame, Goffman argues that the theater audience performs a dual
role, as “theatergoer” (the person who bought the ticket for the perfor-
mance) and “onlooker” (the same person as participant in the fictional
world of the play).7 (I will return to this and other aspects of Goffman’s
theatrical frame in the next chapter.) For Cayden’s performance of pop
star identity to take place, his classmates had to assume the spectatorial
role defined by the pop music frame, that of his fans; interviewers and
photographers had to treat him as a worthy subject, record producers as
a professional musician, and so on. Popular music star identity is thus an
interactional accomplishment; it is, as Goffman says of the self, “some-
thing of collaborative manufacture”—­a joint performance by stars and
their audiences.8
I propose in this chapter to treat “popular music star” as I treated
musical persona in the preceding chapter: as a social role in Goffman’s
sense, a situated role or routine. Goffman focused primarily on face-­
to-­face interaction, and live concert performances still afford the most
direct contact between popular music stars and their audiences, though
 132  •   in concert

the Internet and social media have recently changed this somewhat. It
is clear, however, that communication between popular musicians and
their fans is more often than not indirect and mediated through sound
recordings, television, video, and social media. Sound recordings in par-
ticular present interesting difficulties for the theory of musical persona
or star persona because performers cannot avail themselves of most of
the communicative resources afforded by performance. In many cases,
the voice of a song’s protagonist, while literally belonging to the singer,
may express the perspective of a character that may or may not repre-
sent the singer’s attitudes, experience, or biography (Randy Newman’s
“Short People,” discussed in the previous chapter, is an example). Using
two contrasting songs by Ray Davies of the Kinks as his examples (“The
Village Green Preservation Society” and “Lola”) Keith Negus points out
that

the [songs’ respective] narrators are equally contrasting characters,

framed by sharply sketched lyrical and musical personae in the songs.
Depending on our prior knowledge, we may also hear the star per-
sona: we may comprehend these two songs as part of a body of work
containing many other characters and narrators. We may also hear
them as expressions or constructions of a star identity: a persona
adopted by Ray Davies as a means of publicly commenting on mores,
behaviors, habits, and routines.9

Negus suggests here that artists do not perform star identity directly in
their recordings as they do on stage—­rather, the star persona is implied
to be “behind” what we hear in the recording, which is understood to
be a product of the star persona rather than a manifestation or perfor-
mance of it. Therefore, prior knowledge gained from exposure to the
star persona in other arenas may be necessary to hear that persona in
the recording.

Make It Real: Performing Star Identity

Although the Make-­A-­Wish Foundation enabled Cayden Hubbard to act

and feel like a pop star, it could not make him into a “real” pop star. Goff-
man distinguishes playing a social role from playing at one, and clearly
Cayden’s experience exemplifies the latter rather than the former: he
played at being a pop star while his classmates played at being his fans.10
 Everybody’s in Showbiz  •   133

Cayden’s performance of pop music star identity was theatrical in that

both he and his classmates agreed to act as if he were a pop star much
in the way theater audiences agree to act as if the actors are actually the
characters and the spectators are onlookers in the world of the play for
the sake of sustaining a successful representation.11 (I will return to the
question of the “as if” in the next chapter.) The difference between play-
ing a role and playing at the same role does not reside in what the per-
former does but, rather, in the frame within which the performer does it.
A real pop star, Cayden Hubbard, an actor playing a pop star, and some-
one fraudulently claiming to be one all do the same things, perform the
same “strips” of behavior or activity, to use Goffman’s term.12 But these
actions are framed differently in each case: as real, as “playing at,” as fic-
tion, and as “real” (but deceptively so) respectively. His story shows, how-
ever, that the line between playing and playing at can prove to be quite
thin. A follow-­up story about Cayden’s time in Los Angeles, where he met
the members of the band Maroon Five as well as making his own record-
ing, describes him as a “fifth-­grader turned celebrity.”13 Even if Cayden
was only playing at being a pop star, the publicity he received from doing
so turned him into a real celebrity. And if the recordings Cayden made
as part of his Make-­A-­Wish turn out to be hits, his playing at the role of
pop star will have enabled him to become one.
Musical competition reality shows on television such as American Idol
work much the same way. These programs allow contestants, who are
largely amateur or unsuccessful professional musicians at the time they
appear, to experience stardom once they are selected as finalists. Not
only do they get to perform in major venues with professional backup
musicians, they also have hordes of fans who populate the audience hold-
ing up signs, are treated as local celebrities when they return to their
hometowns on breaks during the show, appear at red-­carpet events, are
pursued by paparazzi, and so on. If all of this is clearly artificial, chiefly
because the contestants are not fully authorized to perform star identity
(a point I discuss below), the exposure they gain is very real. While some
American Idol winners, like pop singer Kelly Clarkson and country art-
ist Carrie Underwood have gone on to very successful careers in music,
other performers who did not win (who were, in some cases, eliminated
from the final round quite early on) have also built successful careers on
the exposure the show afforded them. The actress and singer Jennifer
Hudson and Chris Daughtry, leader of the rock band that bears his last
name, are examples.
Both the story of Cayden Hubbard and American Idol show that under
 134  •   in concert

certain circumstances, people who are not really pop music stars will nev-
ertheless play the social role, the normative characteristics of which are
well known. Goffman observes, “Sometimes, when we ask whether a fos-
tered impression is true or false [i.e., whether someone actually is what
they appear to be] we really mean to ask whether or not the performer
is authorized to give the performance in question.”14 Only some of the
people who act like pop stars are authorized to give the performance;
the rest are pretending, playing, deceiving, or posing. Many of Goff-
man’s examples are taken from walks of life for which the mechanism of
authorization is quite clear: in my state of residence, for instance, doc-
tors, cosmetologists, and people who breed dogs all require licenses to
be authorized performers of these roles. Since there are no boards that
license popular music stars, however, how one becomes authorized to
perform the role is less obvious.
Nevertheless, it is fairly clear who the licensing authorities in ques-
tion are, even if the process is informal. They include fans, the music
industry, the media (including music journalists and critics), and the
star-­candidate’s peer musicians.15 The precise mix of assent from these
sources that constitutes authorization to perform the role of pop star is
difficult to specify in advance—­there are instances in which musicians
become pop stars despite a lack of critical approval, for example. It is
also the case that there is a certain objective quality to pop stardom, as
there is to movie stardom. Everyone knows who the stars are, and can
agree that they are stars, without necessarily appreciating their music
or believing that they deserve star status. I have to acknowledge, for
instance, that Ed Sheeran is just as much a star as Lady Gaga, meaning
that he is authorized to perform the role of popular music star within
his genre context just as she is within hers, regardless of how I feel about
the situation.
Performance serves as a means by which popular musicians may
achieve authorization to perform the role of star in two different ways.
Some analyses of pop stardom suggest that the star-­candidate must pos-
sess certain identity characteristics and experience to be worthy of autho-
rization. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Goffman distinguishes
between sign vehicles “such as racial characteristics [that] are relatively
fixed and over a span of time do not vary for the individual from one
situation to another” and other “sign vehicles [that] are relatively mobile
or transitory, such as facial expression, and can vary; during a perfor-
mance from one moment to the next.”16 In popular music, the authority
to perform legitimately within a genre, let alone become a star, is some-
 Everybody’s in Showbiz  •   135

times defined at least in part in terms of fixed sign vehicles: rappers are
supposed to be black and urban, country musicians are supposed to be
white southerners, the members of Riot Grrrl bands are supposed to be
women, klezmorim are supposed to be Jewish, zydeco musicians are sup-
posed to be Louisiana Creoles, while conjunto musicians are supposed
to be from Texas, and so on. It is generally easier for musicians appar-
ently possessed of these identity traits to achieve legitimacy and stardom
within the relevant genres than for those who do not.
It is very obvious, however, that any given genre may contain musi-
cians whose relatively fixed sign vehicles suggest an inappropriate iden-
tity and that sometimes such musicians can even become stars within the
genre. I noted in the previous chapter that whereas country musicians
are expected to be from the American South, Keith Urban is Australian,
to which we can add that Shania Twain is Canadian and that Taylor Swift,
who emerged initially as a young star in Nashville, grew up near Read-
ing, Pennsylvania. They cannot change their origins, but they can and do
claim and perform authentic country music identities.
Arguably more important than the fixed sign vehicles that define the
country artist’s origins is the artist’s willingness to act as if he or she is the
right kind of person to perform the identity appropriate to the genre.
Michael Hughes rightly suggests that the authenticity of such a perfor-
mance resides in artists’ willingness to become what the audience needs
them to be. “The fostered reality is that of being a person who engages
in impression management as a country music star, and this constitutes,
for them, the ‘real reality.’ In this way, audiences can see the obviously
manipulative act of wearing a cowboy hat in country music videos in the
year 2000 as the act of a sincere performer.”17 Authorization to perform
legitimately within a genre and, perhaps, to rise to stardom, arguably
results not as much from the artist’s identity as from how the artist per-
forms identity in relation to genre conventions. As Hughes implies, the
authenticity of a country musician like Urban resides not in a match
between his biography and what a country musician is supposed to be
but, rather, in his willingness to perform an identity different from his
own in order to conform to the conventions of country music and thus
meet his audience’s expectations.18 Shumway extends this observation
beyond the realm of country music to pop music stardom generally, say-
ing, “The authenticity of the star inheres primarily in the star image or
persona, and not in its relation to the biographical subject who inhabits
that image.”19 What matters is not who the performer is but the identity
he or she is willing to perform for the audience. Commitment to the
 136  •   in concert

performance of an identity appropriate to the genre counts as authen-

ticity. In this sense, even the ostensibly “fixed” signs may prove to be
performative.
The second way performance provides a means by which artists may
achieve stardom is well known: performance, both live and recorded,
enables the artist to gain exposure and develop an audience. Simon Frith
outlines the traditional model of a pop music career that developed in
the 1960s in a diagram he calls “The Rock,” a pyramid with “musicians”
at the base and “superstars” at the pinnacle. The path upward is from
local to regional to national to international recognition and stardom,
punctuated with ever improving record contracts and media opportuni-
ties along the way. Live performance (in the conventional sense of play-
ing at clubs and giving concerts) plays a key role in the musician’s prog-
ress. Lady Gaga, for example, consistently emphasizes the importance of
the years she spent playing in New York’s downtown clubs before rising
to star status. “The superstars’ position at the top of the pyramid is jus-
tified because they have paid their dues on their way up it,” largely by
continuously performing for increasingly larger and more widespread
audiences and thus making their way past gatekeepers at each career
stage.20 From this perspective, the musician’s experience, the paying
of dues, evaluated by both industry gatekeepers and audiences, as well
as the acquisition of ever larger audiences are requisites for ultimately
being authorized to perform the role of star.
Although American Idol and other music competitions short-­circuit
this established pattern somewhat by condensing an entire career’s
worth of live performances, television appearances, and recording into
the span of a television season, Idol in particular also exposes the work-
ings of the traditional process by making it very clear that ultimately what
matters is how the contestants are perceived by the music industry, rep-
resented on the show itself by the judges. As Jake Austen suggests, the
show is structured to encourage the viewing audience to identify with
the judges rather than the contestants, thus aligning viewer perception
of the competition with the idea that a few key players actually create
stardom in the music industry.21 In light of this, and the fact, already
discussed, that a number of artists who did not win the competition were
offered recording contracts on the strength of the talent they demon-
strated on the show, it is apparent that Idol and other shows like it are
not alternatives to the established means by which popular musicians
become authorized to play the role of star but only new arenas in which
industry gatekeepers perform their traditional tasks.
 Everybody’s in Showbiz  •   137

Much the same is true of YouTube and other online sites that are some-
times said to provide such an alternative. One musicians’ blog declares,
“YouTube Is More Important Than Anything Else in Your Music Career”
and goes on to describe YouTube “as the new radio, the new MTV, the
new record store, the new music magazine, the new everything.” It also
advances the claim, “Many artists have built their careers strictly through
YouTube.”22 Although the former claims are at least somewhat credible,
this last statement requires closer examination. A poll among working
musicians in the United States conducted as part of the Pew Internet
& American Life Project found that very large percentages felt that the
Internet helps them to conduct their careers. Seventy-­two percent said
that the Internet enables them to make more money from their music,
while 65 percent said the Internet makes it easier to book appearances
and 88 percent felt that the Internet enables them to reach a wider audi-
ence.23 (The poll was taken in 2004; one imagines that the numbers
would be at least as high today.)
This poll suggests that the Internet does provide musicians with valu-
able tools, including YouTube, for creating professional opportunities,
increasing sales, and building an audience. But can one become a popu-
lar music star “strictly through YouTube”? The Canadian teen idol Justin
Bieber is frequently cited as an Internet success story, the first music
superstar created by YouTube. It is the case that he first came to notice
via videos he posted on YouTube in which he is seen playing multiple
instruments, singing, and moving emotively. Bieber’s manager, Scooter
Braun, discovered him through these videos and set about to make him
a star, first by using YouTube:

Instead of hawking his new talent to record companies, Braun set

about building a bigger following for Bieber on YouTube, where his
videos had already attracted tens of thousands of views.  .  .  . When
Bieber’s videos had attracted around fifty-­four million eyeballs, Braun
arranged meetings with fifteen music executives in New York and
L.A.24

What Braun realized when these executives did not sign Bieber is “that
a YouTube following wasn’t enough.”25 He then took the more conven-
tional route by pitching Bieber directly to record labels and the people
running them and found success with Island Def Jam Records. From this
point on, “Traditional marketing mechanisms fell into place.”26
It seems clear, then, that YouTube is a tool that musicians can use to
 138  •   in concert

market themselves, not a platform on which an entire career as a popu-

lar music star can be built. In the case of Justin Bieber, YouTube was the
Schwab’s Pharmacy of the Internet, the place where the new star was dis-
covered. It is important that it was a manager, a traditional music indus-
try gatekeeper, who discovered and ultimately marketed him to other
gatekeepers at record labels and thus launched him into stardom. Like
American Idol, YouTube substitutes for the performances at local venues
that traditionally provided the foundation on which the star’s career was
built, as Frith’s model suggests. But the rest of the model remains intact,
as star candidates must attract through their performances—­whether in
traditional venues or on YouTube or American Idol—­the industry play-
ers who will assist them in gaining authorization to perform the role of
popular music star.

Get Back: Intimacy and Social Distance

As a performer ascends to the pinnacle of Frith’s pyramid, his or her

relationship to the audience changes. Whereas musicians may initially
be very close with their audiences, perhaps because they first encoun-
tered one another on a local music scene, there is “an increase in social
distance as the star becomes removed from the community from which
he or she is initially located,”27 for a number of reasons. One is simply
that stars appeal to a much larger and more dispersed audience than
that of a local scene and cannot readily be socially available to such an
audience. Goffman also stresses that the maintenance of social distance
is crucial to retaining control over one’s image and persona.28 Far more
is at stake for a star in this regard than for a local performer; large parts
of the “starmaker machinery behind the popular song” are devoted to
the cultivation and maintenance of a particular image, and the conse-
quences of that image’s being sullied can be dire.
As Goffman also points out, “Restrictions placed upon contact, the
maintenance of social distance, provide a way in which awe can be gener-
ated and sustained in the audience.”29 The audience’s reverence for the
star is partly an effect of the star’s unattainability. Audience members can
fantasize about having a personal relationship with a music star, some-
times described as a “para-­social” relationship30 because it is conducted
by the fan alone with only mediatized representations of the star as the
other participant, but the fantasy is inevitably undergirded by the idea
that such a relationship is impossible. Social distance is not simply cre-
 Everybody’s in Showbiz  •   139

ated by the performer, however. Like star identity itself, social distance
is produced conjointly by performers and fans. “In the matter of keep-
ing social distance, the audience itself will often co-­operate by acting
in a respectful fashion, in awed regard for the sacred integrity imputed
to the performer.”31 In a different version of cooperation, the audience
may do the opposite. By seeking to get too close to the star, the audience
gives the star good reason to maintain social distance. In either case, per-
former and audience each play a role in the creation and maintenance
of social distance.
Although the pursuit of a star is pleasurable for fans, groupies, auto-
graph collectors, and the like in part because of the star’s inaccessibil-
ity, the maintenance of social distance is not necessarily something stars
relish, especially if they enjoyed the intimacy they shared with their
audiences while playing smaller venues as they climbed Frith’s career
pyramid. It is observable that popular music stars seek ways of at least
appearing to maintain a close connection with their audiences while
also sustaining the necessary social distance from them. From 1963
through 1969, the Beatles made Christmas records that they distributed
only to the members of their official fan clubs. On the records made for
their British fans in 1963 and 1964, each Beatle speaks individually and
directly to the listening fan, recounting the Beatles’ activities for the year,
expressing gratitude for their fans’ support, and answering perennial fan
questions, such as whether they still like jelly babies (no) and whether
they prefer concerts, television performances, or making records (on
the recording for 1963, Paul McCartney expresses a strong preference
for the recording studio over the other two venues). Interspersed with
these greetings are parodic versions of Christmas carols and other bits
of jokey, informal behavior on the part of the Beatles.32 Through direct
address and planned informality (both of these recordings were scripted
by the Beatles’ press officer Tony Barrow) these records create an effect
of intimacy with the listener. At the same time, the fact that the Beatles
are communicating only through the mediation of recording, also the
primary way their fans experienced their music from 1963 on, sustains
social distance, as does the fact that the Beatles address their audience
specifically as fans rather than as peers.
This strategy of offering fans simulations of intimacy while simultane-
ously maintaining social distance persists today in the realm of popu-
lar music, where it is enabled by social media. Lady Gaga, for instance,
created a series of weekly videos called Transmission Gagavision, distrib-
uted on a number of websites from late June 2008 through the end of
 140  •   in concert

March 2009; four additional episodes appeared in 2011. Described on

Gagapedia.com as a “web series documenting Gaga’s journey into pop
superstardom,” this series served to help build Gaga’s fan base while
also offering very informal, “behind the scenes” views of Gaga touring,
rehearsing, hanging out with her entourage, and so on, most shot with a
handheld camera to create the impression that Gagavision consists basi-
cally of home videos and that the viewer is getting the same access to
Gaga as a member of her inner circle. (I discuss these videos further in
chapter 10.) The intimacy of these videos is in stark contrast with Gaga’s
practice of appearing in public heavily disguised, often wearing designer
fashions that distort her body and hide her face. When her face is visible,
she looks so different from one time to another that it is often difficult
to believe that you are seeing the same person. Gaga thus combines an
extreme form of social distance (since she cites Andy Warhol, who is
known to sometimes have used doubles for public appearances, as an
influence, it is even possible that sometimes Gaga is not Gaga at all) with
an equally extreme version of simulated backstage intimacy.
As Alice Marwick and danah boyd show in their analysis of celebrities’
uses of Twitter, Lady Gaga is not alone in her use of social media to cre-
ate the same effects of intimacy and backstage access as the Beatles did
with their Christmas recordings. By tweeting (or seeming to tweet, since
not all celebrities’ tweets are actually composed by the celebrity) on a
continuing basis, stars can keep fans apprised of the moment-­by-­moment
details of their lives. By retweeting messages sent by fans, celebrities can
create the effect of dialogue with them. By mentioning the people they
are with in tweets, they can also create the effect of backstage access.33
Marwick and boyd suggest, however, that whereas the kind of mediated
communication in which the Beatles engaged with their fans constitutes
para-­social interaction that “exists primarily in the fan’s mind” and is
therefore often suspected to be inauthentic, social media such as Twitter
offer at least the possibility of genuine, albeit mediated, social interac-
tion between stars and fans.34
Twitter conversations between fans and famous people are public
and visible, and involve direct engagement between the famous person
and the follower. The fan’s ability to engage in discussion with a famous
person depathologizes the para-­social and recontextualizes it within a
medium that the follower may use to talk to real-­life acquaintances.35
In the current context of more interactive communication between star
and fans, social distance is maintained largely through fans’ willingness
to play their role:
 Everybody’s in Showbiz  •   141

Celebrity practice reinforces unequal power differentials. While Twit-

ter users who do not use the site instrumentally may think of their fol-
lowers as friends or family . . . celebrity practice necessitates viewing
followers as fans. Performing celebrity requires that this asymmetrical
status is recognized by others. Fans show deference, creating mutual
recognition of the status imbalance between practitioner and fan.36

If My Friends Could See Me Now: Role Distance

The last issue I will entertain here is Goffman’s concept of role dis-
tance in its relation to the performance of popular music star iden-
tity. For Goffman, role distance is a particular way of performing a
social role. He contrasts role distance with role embracement, which
he defines by saying, “To embrace a role is to disappear completely
into the virtual self available in the situation, to be fully seen in terms
of the image, and to confirm expressively one’s acceptance of it. To
embrace a role is to be embraced by it.”37 “Role distance, on the other
hand, involves ‘effectively’ expressed pointed separateness between
the individual and his putative role.” Goffman goes on to say, how-
ever, that in distancing oneself from the role one is playing, “the
individual is actually denying not the role but the virtual self that is
implied in the role for all accepting performers.”38 In other words, to
engage in role distancing is not to refuse to perform a given role but,
rather, to perform it in a way that clearly communicates that one does
not embrace the role and does not wish to be identified in terms of
the virtual self it implies (I pointed out in the previous chapter that
Jimi Hendrix’s seemingly lackluster performance at the Isle of Wight
Festival can be understood in this way). Robert Cohen offers a clear
illustration: “The Manhattan waitress smirks to show that beneath her
apron is ‘really’ a yet-­unsung poet or stage performer. ‘Know that I
am not who I appear to be’ is the message such ‘distancy’ (as Goffman
sometimes calls it) telegraphs.”39
Popular musicians perform many social roles, which can include
those of artist, craftsperson, businessperson, social commentator,
political advocate, celebrity, star, commodity, and many others. The
question of which roles a particular artist embraces and from which
she distances herself is partly driven by genre and historical context.
For example, the Grateful Dead were very conscious of their role as
businesspeople:
 142  •   in concert

The musicians who constituted the Dead were anything but naive
about their business. They incorporated early on, and established
a board of directors (with a rotating CEO position) consisting of
the band, road crew, and other members of the Dead organization.
They founded a profitable merchandising division and, peace and
love notwithstanding, did not hesitate to sue those who violated their
copyrights.40

This was not, however, a role the band foregrounded to its fans, prefer-
ring to focus on its role as a public face of the antimaterialist hippie
scene in San Francisco. The members of the group lived collectively in
a house in the Haight-­Ashbury district, played free concerts in parks,
allowed their fans to record their shows, and so on, all of which were
actions consistent with the hippie persona they embraced as psychedelic
rock musicians.
By contrast, hip-­hop artists often foreground their success as busi-
nesspeople in order to present themselves as having come up from the
streets and beaten the music industry at its own game.

From Scarface’s “Money and the Power” (1995) to 50 Cent’s “Get

Rich or Die Tryin’” (2003), making money is a legitimate goal for rap-
pers, and one that is stated outright in lyrics. This motivation to make
money separates hip hop music culture from other forms like punk
or indie rock, where monetary success is equated with selling out.
In hip hop, money equals power, and making money is celebrated
as long as it happens on the artist’s own terms. Mike Jones and Slim
Thug brag about selling hundreds of thousands of records before
they ever signed with a major label. Wu-­Tang Clan and Jay-­Z boast
about maintaining control of their music even as they sign with corpo-
rate record companies. Hip hop is big business, and these rappers are
entrepreneurs who seek to maintain control of their product, both in
financial and artistic terms, using street smarts to negotiate contracts
that allow them more control than was granted to earlier black rock
and roll and blues musicians.41

As Mickey Hess suggests here, hip-­hop artists’ embrace of the roles of

businessperson and entrepreneur relates directly to the way the hip-­hop
persona is rooted in an underclass identity. Hip-­hop thus becomes a
means of social mobility that does not compromise the artist’s original
identity as “street” and an arena in which the same skills and tactics that
 Everybody’s in Showbiz  •   143

ensure survival in tough neighborhoods can be used to bend the music

industry to the artist’s will.
While it is true that rock stars often distance themselves from the roles
of businessperson, entrepreneur, and rich person that they nevertheless
play—­the very roles embraced by hip-­hop artists—­this distinction is not
absolute in rock but depends on context. Even as the Grateful Dead were
implicitly distancing themselves from their roles as businesspeople and
wealthy rock stars in the countercultural 1960s, the Beatles indulged in
conspicuous consumption on the other side of the Atlantic. Steven Stark
explains the difference in the two contexts:

London’s counterculture scene  .  .  . had a strikingly different

attitude to money than its American counterpart. American
counterculturalists—­perhaps because they took the nation’s abun-
dance for granted—­often made antimaterialism a key part of their
ethos as they set up food coops, shared property, and advised their
fellow citizens, in Abbie Hoffman’s words, to “steal this book.” In con-
trast, the English never stopped celebrating the acquisition of wealth
because, if nothing else, it upset a class system where inheritance had
previously been almost the sole avenue to riches. “To have money was
the ‘Revolution,’” wrote Jon Savage. “To make it was a public service
and if you were young, heroic.”42

In the Beatles’ social context, the material success they achieved as ava-
tars of the counterculture was valorized as a form of “sticking it to the
man.” In much the same way, hip-­hop culture celebrates wealthy rappers
as ghetto entrepreneurs who made it big on their own terms rather than
by capitulating to the man in the form of the music industry.
The choices popular musicians make concerning which roles to
embrace and which to distance themselves from can be seen to be partly
functions of genre and cultural context. But role distancing can also be
used as a means of establishing distinctions within genre communities.
Writing on country music, Richard Peterson famously applied the terms
“hard-­core” and “soft-­shell” to describe two tendencies within the music
and its performance.43 Hard-­core refers to country musicians who iden-
tify themselves as traditionalists belonging to the hard-­livin’, ramblin’-­
man lineage of Hank Williams, while soft-­shell country artists lean more
toward the pop music current at their time. There is a long-­term, ongo-
ing conflict within country music between these two factions that is cycli-
cal in nature: when traditionalists feel that the genre as a whole is veering
 144  •   in concert

too much toward pop music, they reassert hard-­core values that much
more strongly. As Barbara Ching suggests, the assertion of what she calls
a “hard” country identity frequently takes the form of foregrounding an
abject “loser” identity opposed to the glossy sheen many successful main-
stream Nashville artists acquire.

Celebrating their own success would poison its source.  .  .  . Unlike

gilded Trumps and yuppies in tasteful suits, hard country stars rise
and shine due to the darkness of the background they create. Since
their success lies in a formulaic articulation of failure, it can only be
given plain and disdainful stage names like “the Possum” [George
Jones] and “the Hag” [Merle Haggard].44

In other words, the assertion of a hard country identity entails embrac-

ing the persona of an abject loser and singing songs written from that
perspective while simultaneously distancing oneself from the role of suc-
cessful Nashville artist even when the musician’s level of success may war-
rant the performance of that role.
Hard country artists who distance themselves from their own success
and stature in Nashville exemplify the phenomenon of popular music
stars who distance themselves from the very role of popular music star.
This is also the case in a different way for the Grateful Dead, whose
refusal to embrace the star role was ideologically driven and meant to
maintain the impression that they were members in good standing of the
hippie community and had not sold out, despite the fact that they made
records for Warner Bros. By contrast, the British context allowed the
Beatles to embrace their star identities and attempt to leverage those to
draw attention to their respective aesthetic, cultural, religious, and politi-
cal concerns. Hip-­hop is a context in which stars are expected to embrace
and celebrate the material success and celebrity that comes with stardom
without distancing themselves from the role of ghetto striver and losing
touch with the street and the block.
Among rock groups, perhaps none have distanced themselves so fre-
quently from their role as rock stars than the British group the Kinks,
from whom the title of both this chapter and this section are taken,
particularly on two albums: Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part
One (1970) and Everybody’s in Show-­Biz (1972). The former features four
songs that are explicitly about the music industry and portray the record-
ing artist, even an artist of the stature the Kinks had achieved by 1970,
as essentially powerless in the face of the machinations of music publish-
 Everybody’s in Showbiz  •   145

ers, record companies, agents, and managers. A fifth song, “Get Back in
Line,” powerfully defines the economic plight of the working class and
also implies in the context of the album that the situation of the rock
star from whose labor many other people profit is similar to that of the
unionized worker whose ability to work on a given day and make a liv-
ing is entirely in the hands of the union boss. The album is bracketed
by two different versions of the song “Got to Be Free,” which expresses
both the desire for artistic freedom and a more general wish simply to
escape from oppressive circumstances, an idea also underpinning the
song “Apeman.” On this album, the Kinks distance themselves from
their own star identities by airing the dirty laundry of the music industry
and presenting themselves as toilers in the field whose livelihood is in
the hands of others rather than privileged rock musicians or artists in
control of their work.
On Everybody’s in Show-­Biz, the Kinks develop these ideas further. The
album was originally structured as two discs, the first a set of new songs
recorded in the studio, the second a live recording of earlier work taken
from the group’s performances at Carnegie Hall only five months before
the album’s release. Three songs on the studio portion dismantle the
star image by exposing the realities of life on the road: the tedium of
playing the same show night after night, the dissipation attendant on
drinking oneself to sleep in a succession of hotel rooms, bad nutrition,
and an overall sense of alienation. The protagonist of “Sitting in My
Hotel” thinks out loud about how distant he has become from his social
origins, and how his friends from earlier in his life would find him unrec-
ognizable in his rock star guise, which they would also consider to be a
ridiculous pose. “Celluloid Heroes” complements these other songs by
underlining the artificiality, contingency, and fleetingness of stardom,
while “Supersonic Rocket Ship,” like “Apeman,” once again playfully
suggests the desire for escape from present reality at any cost, albeit by
disappearing into outer space rather than the primordial jungle.
Taken together, these songs create an ironic context for the perfor-
mances on the concert disc, which are heard consequently as products
of the labor and conditions described in the studio songs. We first hear
Davies distancing himself from the role of rock star in songs on the stu-
dio disc, then hear him performing that role full bore on the live disc,
raising questions about the sincerity of Davies’s portrayal of his star per-
sona on the concert stage. Although Ray Davies and the Kinks certainly
embraced star identity and celebrity, they also frequently questioned
and undermined this very identity in the music they performed. This
 146  •   in concert

ambivalence and the role distancing through which it was performed

reflect the malaise that characterized the rock scene of the early 1970s.
No longer able to marshal the sense of community with their audiences
that had characterized rock in the previous decade, the music’s stars
became more aware of themselves as commodities, of rock concerts as
shows rather than gatherings of the tribe, and of the possibility—­despite
the rejection of showbiz that characterized rock in the 1960s—­that the
role of rock star was not so different, after all, from that of any other kind
of celebrity.

Conclusion

I argue in this chapter that it is productive to think of the performance

of star identity in popular music as a social role and a variety of what
Goffman called presentation of self. As such, it is a situated identity per-
formed in contexts over which musical genre has a powerful framing
influence. The expressive equipment available to the musician perform-
ing star identity is drawn largely from what is available within specific
genre contexts, and stars are obliged to continue to perform a musical
persona that is consonant with the genre context in which they achieved
success even if their stardom and celebrity ultimately transcend that
context. Star identity is performative in the sense that it is not simply a
characteristic of a person but, rather, a set of behaviors through which
a person enacts an identity. It is also an interactional accomplishment
undertaken jointly by musicians and their audiences, each of which has
a role to play in its realization.
A number of Goffman’s analytical concepts can be brought to bear
fruitfully on the analysis of the performance of popular music star iden-
tity, beginning with the idea that “popular music star” is a social role
that entails the manipulation of social front and can be performed in
many keys. Only some of the people performing this role are authorized
to do so, and the mechanisms of authorization are embedded within
the music industry, including the artists’ relationships with their fans.
Although the advent of digital culture and social media have seen the
development of new means for artists to gain exposure, they have not
fundamentally altered the way musicians rise to star status. Social media
have had a more substantive impact on the way in which music stars
maintain the necessary social distance from their audiences while also
promoting an effect of intimacy. Whereas in the past the relationships
 Everybody’s in Showbiz  •   147

between stars and fans were primarily para-­social, now there is at least
the potential for genuine exchange between them that does not entail
excessive sacrifice of social distance. Finally, the Goffmanian concept of
role distance provides a valuable heuristic for thinking about the roles
music stars embrace and those they distance themselves from in specific
genre, ideological, and historical contexts.
 C h a pter S even

Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement

•••

My starting point is an essay by the philosopher Lee B. Brown entitled

“Phonography, Repetition and Spontaneity” in which he argues that the
repetition of musical performances made possible by recording is “the
enemy of improvised music,” for which jazz is his point of reference.1 He
argues (as others also have) that recording turns improvised jazz per-
formances into fixed compositions by “transform[ing] an improvisatory
process into a depersonalized, structured musical tissue.”2 He further
claims that those who listen seriously to jazz are interested not only in
the music’s sound and structure but also in “a performer’s on-­the-­spot
decisions and actions that generate the sonic trail. . . . But this interest is
at odds with one of phonography’s chief ‘virtues,’ namely its capacity for
repetition.”3 Subjected to repeated listening, recordings of jazz impro-
visation become wholly predictable, rather than spontaneous, and, ulti-
mately, boring.
Although I sympathize with Brown’s desire to assert and preserve jazz
improvisation’s identity as performance rather than composition, I do
not agree with his argument that one can experience jazz as improvisa-
tional performance exclusively in live settings because recordings reify
improvisation in a way that eventually robs it of interest. Brown’s general
arguments are vulnerable on several grounds. For one thing, they take
for granted a clear distinction between improvisation, on the one hand,
and composition and playing from score, on the other, a distinction that
is in fact highly problematic. Carol S. Gould and Kenneth Keaton argue,

148
 Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement  •   149

for example, that inasmuch as even the performers of scored music have
to make choices not specified by the score, all performed music is impro-
vised to some extent, and, therefore, “jazz and classical performances
differ more in degree than in kind.”4 Whereas Philip Alperson argues,
like Brown, that improvisation is different from scored playing because
it draws our aesthetic attention primarily to actions rather than works,
other writers (e.g., Ed Sarath) agree with Brown for different reasons,
seeing improvisation and composition as two distinct, perhaps even
opposed, practices.5 Still others, by contrast, see jazz improvisations as
appropriate subjects of formal analysis and, therefore, as comparable
to compositions (e.g., Frank Tirro, Lewis Porter).6 One can only agree
with the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl when he writes, “Obviously the
relationship of improvisation to composition and notation is a complex
one, on which there is no general agreement.”7
Another difficulty with Brown’s argument is that the kind of listen-
ing he attributes to consumers of recorded music bears a strong resem-
blance to “structural listening,” a concept derived from the work of The-
odor Adorno and Arnold Schoenberg “intended to describe a process
wherein the listener follows and comprehends the unfolding realization,
with all of its detailed inner relationships, of a generating musical con-
ception.”8 The idea that structural listening is the ideal mode of listen-
ing has been roundly criticized within musicology, particularly by Rose
Subotnik, and seems out of touch with a world in which “ubiquitous lis-
tening,” a mode of listening that “blends into the environment, taking
place without calling conscious attention to itself as an activity in itself,”
is “perhaps the dominant mode of listening in contemporary life.”9
Yet another problem with Brown’s account of the baleful effects of
phonography is his assumption that the listener experiences the same
recording so many times, and remembers it so well, that at some point it
becomes predictable and dull. While this may be true in principle, Jacques
Attali notes that the stockpiling of potential musical experiences made
possible by recording means that most listeners own far more recordings
than they have time to listen to, let alone grow overly familiar with!10
For the sake of argument, however, I will accept Brown’s premises—­
including the clear distinction between improvised and nonimprovised
music, and the implicit characterization of the analytical listener who has
the time and strength of memory to listen to the same recording until it
becomes overly familiar—­and offer a counterargument that addresses a
differently problematic dimension of Brown’s position.
In another essay, Brown describes the jazz musician’s activity and the
 150  •   in concert

listener’s experience in the following terms, which I have already quoted

in the introduction.

In typical jazz improvisations, players can be heard probing and test-

ing possibilities latent in the music they are making. . . . Correlatively,
we take a special kind of interest in this activity—­in how a performer
is faring, so to say. If things are going well, I wonder if the player
can sustain the level. If he seems to be getting into trouble, I wonder
about how he will address the problem. When he pulls the fat out of
the fire, I applaud—­as when Louis Armstrong rushes too quickly, if
thrillingly, into the first notes of the introduction in his famous Okeh
recording of West End Blues.11

This account of listening to jazz exemplifies the central problem inher-

ent in Brown’s analysis. I agree with Brown’s characterization of jazz
improvisation as entailing musical exploration and problem-­solving, and
I am not saying Brown has misunderstood the way listeners think about
the performance of jazz. The problem, rather, is that Brown assumes
that listeners respond the way they do because they can hear that the
music is improvised (clearly one would not have the same concerns
when listening to music heard as composed because one would assume
that the composer took the time to solve any problems created by par-
ticular compositional choices rather than forcing the musician to solve
them in performance). In reality, however, the audience cannot possibly
hear improvisation: the fact that music is improvised is not accessible or
verifiable through the act of listening.12 Sitting in a jazz club listening to
a brilliant solo, there is no way for me to know whether the musician is
actually improvising it on the spot or playing something from memory
that was originally improvised on another occasion or composed in the
hotel room the night before.13
There are, of course, circumstances that arise in jazz performance in
which the fact of improvisation seems self-­evident and irrefutable. Every
jazz fan will have a favorite example; here, I will mention Ella Fitzgerald’s
performance of “The Cricket Song” at the 1964 Festival Mondial du Jazz
Antibes in Juan-­Les-­Pins, France, in response to the ubiquity of the titu-
lar insect’s audible chirping during her two-­night stand there. Near the
end of her set on the second night, expressing something like affection-
ate exasperation, Fitzgerald, after calling on the band to provide her
with a vamp, improvised a song about the crickets whose lyrics allude not
 Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement  •   151

only to their presence as uninvited musical partners but also to the fact
that she was inventing the song’s melody and lyrics on the spot.
I will make two points in reference to examples of this kind. First:
despite all evidence to the contrary, it was not possible for Fitzgerald’s
audience to verify that she was improvising. Keep in mind that she per-
formed “The Cricket Song” on the second night of the gig. Perhaps she
had become aware of the crickets’ presence on the first night and had
cooked up an informal response with her band to be presented as a
spontaneous improvisation on the second night. I am not saying this is
what happened—­it is no part of my purpose here to debunk the idea that
jazz musicians improvise or to question Fitzgerald’s integrity. All I am say-
ing is that, in principle, there would have been no way for the audience
to know the difference between the prearranged “Cricket Song” I have
hypothesized and the spontaneous improvisation it undoubtedly was.
Second, and more important: incidents of this kind, while anecdotally
entertaining, cannot be treated as normative cases of jazz performance.
If jazz audiences had to depend on this kind of evidence to behave as
if improvisation is taking place before them, there would be very few
instances of improvisation in jazz!
In his discussion of the performance of classical music, Stan Godlo-
vitch makes a useful, if ultimately troubling, distinction between agent
performance (what the performer does) and phenomenal perfor-
mance (what the audience hears). Improvisation is an aspect of agent
performance—­indeed, a very important aspect, considering how long
and hard jazz musicians work both to master the vocabulary of their
idiom and to develop an original voice. Improvisation is thus a defin-
ing ontological characteristic of jazz. However, Godlovitch’s claim that
“because, for centuries, phenomenal and agent performances have been
directly and uniformly linked, judgements about the phenomenal per-
formance have been taken comfortably to be transferable to those about
agent performance” does not apply to improvised music because only
the musicians can know for sure whether or not they are improvising.14
Since listeners cannot deduce with certainty from the phenomenal per-
formance that the agent is improvising, they are never in a position to
forge that link.
I find Godlovitch’s distinction between agent performance and phe-
nomenal performance troubling as well as useful because he seems to
suggest that performers are the only active parties in the musical pro-
cess: they are the agents who make music, while the audience’s job is to
 152  •   in concert

experience what the performer does. Erving Goffman, writing on theater

in Frame Analysis, offers a more balanced perception of the performer-­
audience relationship. Goffman’s account is symmetrical: what is true for
performers is also true for the audience. For example, Goffman points
out that actors on stage have a dual existence: they are there as both
actors (that is, real people functioning in a professional capacity) and
characters (that is, fictional entities that exist in the world of the play’s
narrative).15 This is a fairly unremarkable observation, of course, but
things get more interesting when Goffman suggests that spectators, too,
are present in a similar dual capacity: as theatergoers (that is, the people
who paid for the tickets, are sitting in the seats, etc.) and onlookers (that
is, people absorbed into the fictional world of the play as observers).16
Actors and theatergoers occupy the same plane of reality, while charac-
ters and onlookers interact on a different common plane. A straightfor-
ward example, from Goffman, illustrates this distinction: if we, as audi-
ence, laugh “with” a character who has said something funny, we do so
in the status of onlooker, and our laughter is contained within the world
of the play. If, on the other hand, an actor makes an embarrassing error
and we laugh “at” her, we do so in the status of theatergoer, and the
laughter is contained within the “real” world.17
This schema is readily adaptable to musical performance. Although
the modes of performance involved in playing music are not equivalent
to acting, as discussed in the introduction and elsewhere, it is neverthe-
less true that musicians also appear before us in a dual identity: as real
people functioning (like actors) in a professional capacity, and in their
personae as musicians, whether the persona requires the flamboyant the-
atricality of a glam rocker or the decorum of a symphony player. (I shall
call the first entity the musician, the second the player.) The listener, too,
takes on a dual identity: first, as concertgoer or clubgoer, let us say, an
entity congruent to Goffman’s theatergoer. I shall use the term listener to
denote the audience role that parallels Goffman’s theatrical onlooker.
The listener is the version of the audience member that is absorbed into
the world of the music and its performance. Even if that world is not fic-
tional (though it can be if we include opera, program music, and highly
theatricalized rock performance), it is structured around narratives and,
therefore, implicitly dramatic, as discussed in the introduction. Brown’s
description of the jazz listener points in this direction: the listener is
absorbed into the player’s dramatic struggle with her materials and her
ability to improvise successfully. The listener worries about the player’s
success, cheers her on, evaluates her effort, and expresses appreciation
 Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement  •   153

of it. This unfolding drama, and the roles of player and listener within
it, take place within a reality that is distinct from that of the professional
musician who almost didn’t make it to the club because of traffic, and
the clubgoer who is still feeling stung by the high cover charge and two-­
drink minimum.
Goffman pushes his analysis further to suggest that, in the theater,
playing the role of either character or onlooker equally requires the
active and intentional assumption of a specific information state. The
character, for example, has to act as if she does not know how the play
ends, even though the actor playing her does know.18 Similarly, “Being
part of the audience in a theatre obliges us to act as if our own knowl-
edge, as well as that of some of the characters, is partial. As onlookers we
are good sports and act as if we are ignorant of outcomes—­which we may
be. But this is not ordinary ignorance, since we do not make an ordinary
effort to dispel it.” In fact, “We actively collaborate in sustaining this play-
ful unknowingness.”19
Even though these particular differential information states are spe-
cific to theater, Goffman’s basic concepts provide a workable matrix for
thinking about other kinds of performance. Every kind of performance
involves an act of collaboration between performers and audience
the terms of which are known to all even when they are not expressed
overtly. In other words, there is tacit agreement among performers and
audiences, and between them, on the “as ifs” that govern behavior on
each side and enable performers and audience to collaborate on main-
taining the performance. One important “as if” central to jazz perfor-
mance is that both players and listeners will act as if every solo was a
successful improvisation even when they have reason to think otherwise.
It is almost unimaginable, for example, that after completing a solo a
player might address the audience to say, “Sorry, that really didn’t work.
Stay for the next set, on me, and I promise to do better.” Similarly, it is
extremely rare that jazz listeners fail to applaud at the end of a solo, and
even rarer that they boo, though there surely are cases in which a par-
ticular solo does not warrant applause. In other words, part of the social
contract between jazz musicians and their audiences is that everyone will
behave as if virtually every solo is a worthy achievement, thus exemplify-
ing what Howard Becker calls the “etiquette of improvisation”: “The rule
in conventional [jazz] improvisation is to treat everyone’s contribution
as ‘equally good.’”20
But the most important “as if” of jazz performance is the status of
improvisation itself.21 I am suggesting that the audience experiences jazz
 154  •   in concert

improvisation first and foremost as a social characteristic of jazz perfor-

mance rather than an ontological characteristic of the music. Since the
listeners cannot ascertain that the musician is actually improvising, they
must act “as if” that is the case when witnessing the performance. In this
respect, jazz performance is no different from any other social interac-
tion. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman quotes William L.
Thomas to the effect that “we live by inference”—­we are continually in
the position of having to base our understanding of, and actions toward,
others on incomplete information and are therefore inclined to take
things at face value unless there is a compelling reason not to do so.22
The framing of a jazz performance encourages the audience to act
as if improvisation is taking place: the word jazz, associated with both
the venue and the performer, suggests that conventionally designated
portions of the performance are to be understood as improvisational
(e.g., choruses in the case of conventionally structured jazz and almost
the whole thing in free jazz). In the spirit of Goffmanian symmetry, I
further suggest that the musicians, too, must act “as if” they are improvis-
ing. What I mean is that they must engage in the conventional behav-
iors through which players frame portions of their performances as
improvisations to which listeners are to attend in a different way from
those moments at which they are playing the composed portions of the
music. These may include moving away from other players or a music
stand, stepping up to a microphone, displaying effort and concentration
through physical posture and facial expression, marking the end of the
solo and acknowledging audience response, and so forth. Paul Berliner,
in his monumental study of jazz improvisation, points out that improvisa-
tion may be accompanied by specific physical gestures, noting “the sub-
tle dance moves with which artists support improvisations, the gestures
imbuing their creations with rhythmic swing and sometimes dramatizing
features of performance.”23
Improvising jazz soloists are generally aided in this framing by their
fellow players, who may act differently toward their peer when she is solo-
ing than when they are playing ensemble passages. They may act, in fact,
as if they are caught up in the same dramatic perspective on the soloist
that Brown attributes to the listener.
In order to provide specific examples of the way jazz musicians frame
their activity as improvisation, I will analyze briefly a portion of a spe-
cific performance of “So What” by Miles Davis, with John Coltrane in
his group, joined by members of the Gil Evans Orchestra, from a CBS
 Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement  •   155

Figure 14. When playing the theme of “So What,” Miles Davis looks off to the right
as if to suggest that doing so requires little effort or concentration. Still from The
Sound of Miles Davis, CBS Television, April 1959.

television program entitled The Sound of Miles Davis that aired in April
1959.24 The musicians in this clip mark moments meant to be perceived
as improvisational and distinguish them from moments when they are
playing composed music in several ways. For example, Miles Davis under-
lines the transition from playing the theme to improvising a solo by low-
ering his trumpet, then bringing it back up to his lips, moistening them,
and checking his mouthpiece. Apart from this one instance, he never
moves the instrument away from his lips, even between phrases when
he might have time to do so. Moving the trumpet down, then back up,
clearly reads as a way of segmenting the performance, of emphasizing
the transition from playing composed music to improvising.
When playing the theme, Davis looks off to his right, as if he doesn’t
need to give this task his full attention (fig. 14). When he solos, how-
ever, he gazes ahead and somewhat downward, his eyes either closed or
fixed in a stare that is not focused on anything, suggesting concentration
and inward attention (fig. 15). He leans backward, arching his back and
bending his knees in the pose that became an iconic sign for Miles Davis,
 156  •   in concert

Figure 15. When improvising, Davis looks off into infinity, suggesting deep concen-
tration on his solo. Still from The Sound of Miles Davis, CBS Television, April 1959.

as seen, for example, in the cover image for the 1970 album A Tribute to
Jack Johnson. Both his facial expressions and physical demeanor thus dif-
ferentiate playing composed passages from improvising.
When Davis is finished, he steps aside, allowing Coltrane to take
his place on stage. This suggests that stage position contributes to the
impression of improvisation. There are, in fact, three regions in this per-
formance, which I will describe on the analogy of areas of a baseball
diamond. There is the batter’s box, the area in which the mobile soloists
(i.e., the horn players, as opposed to the pianist, who also solos in this
performance, though he is positioned quite close to the batter’s box)
stand while improvising; the on-­deck circle, where Coltrane stands while
waiting to solo; and the dugout, where Davis retires after soloing and
where other musicians stand while waiting to play (fig. 16).25
The actions of other musicians also reinforce the status of the solo-
ist as improviser. When Coltrane is in the on-­deck circle, he respectfully
focuses his attention on Davis, though not necessarily by looking at him.
Coltrane’s movements of head and body, even his turning away from
Davis, denote that he is giving Davis’s solo his full, appreciative attention
 Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement  •   157

Figure 16. The different areas of the stage. the “dugout,” the “offstage” area where
musicians withdraw from playing; the “on-­deck circle,” where they stand while wait-
ing to take a solo; and the “batter’s box,” where the soloist is positioned. Annotated
still from The Sound of Miles Davis, CBS Television, April 1959.

by following its unfolding (fig. 17). (Frank Rehak, the trombone player
seen a bit later, also bobs his head to show his enjoyment and under-
standing of Davis’s solo.) Coltrane, when soloing, behaves very similarly
to Davis. Though he mostly keeps his eyes closed in an expression of
deep concentration, he too arches his back away from the microphone
as he plays. As he completes his solo, he bends forward, as if bowing, and
starts to move backward, out of the soloist’s space, thus relinquishing
that status and passing it on to the pianist. It is worth mentioning that
when performing with his own groups, Coltrane would often stand com-
pletely still when playing the theme, with only his shoulders rising and
falling with his breaths. When improvising, however, he became much
more animated, bending backward and far forward with facial expres-
sions depicting profound effort and immersion in the moment.
The “dugout” area is a region of the kind Goffman calls “offstage,”
even though it’s in full view. The behavior of the musicians in this area
is noteworthy, since it combines the respectful attention to the soloist
apparently expected of a musician in the on-­deck circle with such seem-
 158  •   in concert

Figure 17. John Coltrane concentrates on Miles Davis’s improvised solo. Still from
The Sound of Miles Davis, CBS Television, April 1959.

ingly opposite behaviors as smoking and chatting. This combination of

engagement and detachment may be at least somewhat specific to the
subgenre of jazz being played, since “cool” jazz musicians were some-
times thought to be “emotionally detached from their creation” while
simultaneously recognized as virtuosic.26 The behaviors I have described
are both individuated and conventional. They signal the audience to
attend to certain passages of music as if they were improvised but provide
no guarantee of the actual spontaneity of the music played.
An important feature of Goffman’s notion of the “as if” is that it does
not depend on belief. The audience does not have to believe that the
performer is improvising; it only has to agree to act as if it believes this.
Likewise, the performers do not need to persuade the audience that they
are improvising; rather, they must persuade the audience to enter into a
social interaction in which the definition of the situation is an agreement
on all sides to act as if improvisation is taking place. An example from
another genre of music may further clarify this point.

I remember an aging and justly famous star of country music sitting

on the edge of the stage with his feet dangling over, thus symbolically
 Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement  •   159

breaking through the barrier between himself and the audience, and
announcing, “We’re gonna be here all night!” We all cheered, even
though we knew no such thing was gonna happen; neither the the-
atre management nor the star’s own handlers would allow the perfor-
mance to run much over its allotted two hours or so.27

With jazz improvisation, the audience agrees to act as if something it

cannot verify is taking place. In the case of the country singer, the audi-
ence agrees to alter its information state and act as if something it knows
to be false is true. As an audience, we recognize the claim “We’re gonna
be here all night” as a convention of a certain kind of performance and
realize that, as a statement, it is false on its face. Nevertheless, we maxi-
mize our pleasure in the event by agreeing to act as if it were true.
I have to insist that I am not accusing anyone of cynicism here. In no
way am I suggesting that improvisation is all a matter of pretense. Pre-
sumably, jazz musicians are improvising when listeners think they are the
vast majority of the time. As Goffman puts it:

When an individual . . . makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a

person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand
upon the others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner
that persons of this kind have a right to expect. . . . The others find,
then, that the individual has informed them as to what is and as to
what they ought to see as the “is.”28

Therefore, when a musician stakes a claim to the identity of jazz player,

we, as listeners, respect the claim and treat the person as a legitimate
bearer of this identity unless and until something happens to discredit
the claim (for example, if I discover that a musician is actually read-
ing notation when supposedly improvising). Improvisation is not simply
something musicians do (as Godlovitch’s notion of agent performance
may suggest). It is, rather, a Goffmanian interactional accomplishment,
a collaboration between the musicians and their audiences. It derives
primarily from a social arrangement between listeners and musicians in
which the appropriate response to a musician’s claim to be a jazz player
is to agree to act as if she is improvising when she is supposed to be
even though that fact cannot readily be verified. The musician, in turn,
presents a jazz player’s persona that is identifiable by the audience and
frames the improvisational moments of the performance differently
from the nonimprovisational ones.29
One virtue of this way of thinking about jazz improvisation is that it
 160  •   in concert

precludes the need for the kind of hairsplitting toward which at least
some other approaches tend, particularly those emphasizing the unique-
ness and spontaneity of improvisation. It is well known that “the jazz
improviser reuses and reworks material from previous performances” of
the same material and sometimes transfers ideas from one improvisa-
tional context to another.30 This begs the question of spontaneity, since
to reuse material developed earlier is not to act fully and exclusively
in the present moment of performance. Insisting that uniqueness and
spontaneity are necessary conditions for jazz improvisation leads inev-
itably to threshold questions: How much repetition is possible before
something played ceases to qualify as improvisation? If I play essentially
the same solo tonight on “I Got Rhythm” as I played last night, perhaps
because I want to explore certain musical ideas, but spontaneously alter
one note, is that enough to constitute my solo as a unique improvisa-
tion? Two notes? And so on. Gould and Keaton have challenged this
concept of jazz by insisting that “improvisation is conceptually indepen-
dent of spontaneity.”31 Whereas Brown and Alperson each emphasize the
temporality of improvisation, its occurrence and existence only in the
spontaneous present moment, Gould and Keaton define improvisation
in terms of its textuality: “One must view improvisation not in terms of
the degree of spontaneity of a performance, but rather in terms of how
closely a given performance conforms to the score,” understood broadly
as any musical model that informs the performer.32 My argument, by
contrast, foregrounds the social dimensions of jazz improvisation. As
long as both performers and listeners agree to act as if improvisation is
taking place, this agreement obviates both the ontological question of
spontaneity and the philological question of the relationship between
musical text and performance. The pertinent questions are not those
concerning spontaneity and uniqueness, nor those concerning the rela-
tionship between text and performance, but rather those concerning
how musicians and audiences arrive at the necessary working consensus
on any given occasion.
With this analysis in mind, I return now to the question of recorded
jazz. In at least one respect, live and recorded jazz are identical: one can
no more determine whether or not the musician is actually improvising
by listening to one than the other. But Brown’s concern stems specifically
from the ability phonography gives us to repeat, ad infinitum, music that
is, in his view, meaningful qua improvisation only in the present moment
of its creation. When reduced to a repeatable form, whether a transcrip-
 Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement  •   161

tion or a recording, it loses its ontological specificity as performance and

becomes composition.
My argument that the fact of improvisation is phenomenally inac-
cessible from live performance and, therefore, that the perception of
improvisation arises from the social relationship between performers
and audience rather than the formal, ontological, or experiential char-
acteristics of the music, invites the further supposition that our relation-
ship as listeners to recorded performances works in a similar fashion.
In other words, if live jazz performance obliges the audience to act as
if the performers are improvising, perhaps recorded jazz imposes the
further social obligation to act not only as if the music is the product of
improvisation but also as if one is hearing it for the first time each time
one plays the recording.
In fact, Goffman specifically addresses the issue of repetition in his
discussion of theater. In his comments on our willingness as theater spec-
tators to operate as if we were in the information state required by the
event, he notes that “those who have already read or seen the play carry
this cooperativeness one step further; they put themselves as much as
possible back into a state of ignorance, the ultimate triumph of onlooker
over theater-­goer.”33 If theater spectators who are already familiar with
the material being performed can act as if they are not, for the sake of
the integrity of the event, why could not listeners to jazz recordings do
something similar? It is possible to view someone listening to a record-
ing as a double entity like the theatergoer/onlooker or concertgoer/
listener: in this case, the two roles might be called the disc jockey (the
one who chooses which recording to listen to, sets up the playback, and
so on) and the listener, which means the same thing in this context as
it does in that of live performance. In parallel with Goffman’s account
of theater, acting as if one is hearing an improvisation for the first time
every time would represent the triumph of listener over disc jockey.
Brown entertains similar possibilities but rejects them. Discussing the
work of the psychologist David Swinney, he examines aspects of memory
that may enable listeners to experience afresh things they have experi-
enced before.

Even though we may know at a higher cognitive level what’s coming

in the music, at a lower cognitive level we can still experience musical
options as open ones. Obviously, these options will be ruled out by the
direction the music actually takes as we listen. For an instant, however,
 162  •   in concert

we will be kept guessing—­at the lower cognitive level, that is. We are
able to savor quasi-­suspense, so to say. . . . But the theory doesn’t rule
out the likelihood of boredom setting in for any music subjected to
long-­term repetition. The problem is that by the nth time around,
the mechanism that kicks in to help make familiar music sound fresh
would finally become stale. One would have learned the drill.34

Brown identifies another issue specific to recorded improvisation.

The problem is that the Swinney response only has application to our
experience of preformed structures to which we have been previously
exposed. But improvised music possesses no preformed structure
that we could have learned and anticipated. With such music, we’re
not content with the quasi-­suspense described earlier. Rather, we are
always on the alert for real surprises.  .  .  . With the repetition that
phonography makes possible, we can clearly anticipate the choices a
performer is going to make.35

Even though Brown provides a good description of the listener’s active

engagement with the unfolding drama of jazz improvisation, it is clear
that he conceives of listeners as fundamentally passive entities whose
experience is driven by forces over which they have no control, such as
the workings of memory and the inevitability of boredom. These listen-
ers yearn for authentic experience—­“real surprise” rather than “quasi-­
suspense”—­but have no power to bring it about.36
Goffman, by contrast, describes the audience as an active collabora-
tor with the performers in the construction of the event according to a
mutually agreed-­upon set of subjunctive behaviors—­the “as ifs” embed-
ded in their interaction. Summarizing this view, he states, “In the the-
ater, if the cast, the critics, and the audience all play according to the
rules, real suspense and real disclosure can result” even when the mate-
rial performed constitutes an experience of sheer repetition for some of
those involved, including members of the audience.37 Real suspense or
surprise, therefore, is not something performers create for audiences to
experience; rather, it results from the collaboration between performers
and audience, each of whom plays multiple roles within mutually recog-
nized social frames. I extend this argument not only to musical perfor-
mances but also to recorded music, for which we assume a listener’s role
that entails, in the case of jazz, acting as if we are hearing a recorded
improvisation for the first time each and every time we listen to it.
 Jazz Improvisation as a Social Arrangement  •   163

This model of listening differs significantly from Alperson’s account

of the relationship between improvisation and recording. Alperson
argues elegantly that, with improvisation, “the object of our attention is
not an artifact but the creation of one” and points out that any artifact
left behind by an improvisation is “a record of a (unique) action . . . from
which we read off, as it were, the original action.”38 Drawing on Goff-
man’s idea that successful participation in a performance as an audience
requires acting as if we are in a specific information state even when it
differs from our actual one, I am suggesting that listening to recorded
jazz requires the assumption of an information state that makes it pos-
sible to hear the recording as an improvisation taking place in the pres-
ent moment of listening, not as a document that refers us to an original
(past) action. The relationship between listener and recording I have in
mind is implied in Walter Benjamin’s analysis in “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:

Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situa-
tions which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it
enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of
a photograph or phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale
to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production,
performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the living
room.39

In other words, the recording allows us to restage the performance

where we are, so to speak, rather than to travel imaginatively back to
its original circumstances.40 This reactivation results not just from the
accessibility of the performance in a reproduced form but also from the
audience’s willingness to play a socially defined role in relation to it.
From my perspective, the crucial point that Brown overlooks is that it is
not just the musicians who are performing: the audience, too, performs,
and its performance is crucial to the constitution of music—­whether live
or recorded—­as improvised.
 Pa rt III

Contexts of Performance

The performance of musical persona does not occur in a vacuum—­there

are always frames around any performance that both influence and con-
textualize it. The frames provided by musical genres and conventions of
social interaction are crucial examples, but there can also be specific his-
torical phenomena that create contexts that have a critical impact on the
definition and performance of musical personae. This part is concerned
with such phenomena.
The first, which sets the context for the first chapter in the part, is
Beatlemania, the term for an array of intense behaviors through which
Beatles fans, especially young female fans, dramatized their love of the
group in both the United Kingdom and the United States, especially
between 1963 and 1965. While is its probably fair to say that the Beatles’
management encouraged the fans’ strong reactions, these reactions had
a decisive effect on the Beatles’ live performances between 1963 and
1966. Returning to the example of the Doors’ concert discussed in chap-
ter 5 in which the audience refused to allow the band to perform new
music, one might suggest that the Beatles’ concerts similarly exemplified
a failure of the performers and audience to arrive at a mutual under-
standing of the definition of the situation, a working consensus. While
the Beatles’ fans expressed no objection to their repertoire and did not
bring the performances to a halt the way the Doors’ audience did, their
deafening screams made it almost impossible for the Beatles to give a
satisfactory performance.
A more nuanced view of these performances would see them not
so much as examples of the failure to reach a working consensus but,
165
 166  •   in concert

rather, as cases in which the audience, instead of the performers, set

the terms of that consensus. In the penultimate section of chapter 5, I
pointed out that Goffman’s schema for self-­presentation puts consider-
able power in the hands of the audience, which is in the position to
determine whether or not to credit the claims advanced by the per-
formers. In the case of the Beatles’ concerts, the audience exercised its
power to turn them into events that satisfied the fans’ needs but bore
little resemblance to a conventional concert. “Beatlemania: The Audi-
ence at Shea Stadium, 1965” offers an interpretation of those needs in
terms of the relationships fans had already constructed with the Beatles’
personae prior to seeing them live.
Although the second essay in this part includes discussion of one
Beatle, John Lennon, it looks at a cultural context other than Beatle-
mania that arrived just a few years later: the underexamined wave of
enthusiasm for the rock-­and-­roll era (the mid-­1950s) that enveloped
both the United Kingdom and the United States beginning in the late
1960s (Richard Nader produced the first in a long series of “Rock and
Roll Revival” concerts at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1969)
through the mid-­1970s. This phenomenon was not limited to music
but had manifestations on television, in the theater, and in film as well.
Established musicians on both sides of the Atlantic such as Lennon,
Frank Zappa, and Roy Wood participated in this development, which
also gave rise to new groups who embodied the spirit of revival, such as
Sha Na Na and Showaddy Waddy. In chapter 9, “Good Old Rock and
Roll: Performing the 1950s in the 1970s,” I examine the stances a range
of artists took toward the 1950s and rock-­and-­roll music and how those
stances were reflected in their personae using concepts of autobiogra-
phy, authenticity, and auteurship mapped onto ideas of modernism and
postmodernism.
This consideration of larger cultural-­historical configurations and
their relationship to musical identity continues in the final chapter, “Bar-
bie in a Meat Dress: Performance and Mediatization in the Twenty-­First
Century.” Whereas in the previous chapter I use the rock-­and-­roll reviv-
alism of the early 1970s as a means of contrasting modernism and post-
modernism in popular music performance, here I take both Lady Gaga
and the rapper/singer Nicki Minaj as examples of performers who have
developed strategies focusing on personae to negotiate the demands
of contemporary digital culture (in all senses of the phrase) and the
cultural transition from postmodernity to hypermodernity. I argue that
Gaga and Minaj share a strategy of continually shifting, ungrounded
 Part III. Contexts of Performance  •   167

identities that is both symptomatic and expressive of a world in which we

all have to play multiple, often incommensurate roles and switch among
them at a moment’s notice. Whereas Gaga addresses this cultural land-
scape through the deployment of ever shifting and uncertain musical
personae, Minaj retains a more traditional approach by maintaining a
continuously recognizable and consistent persona while simultaneously
portraying a dizzying array of characters. Both Gaga and Minaj are exem-
plary twenty-­first-­century figures whose ways of navigating a volatile cul-
tural landscape are specific both to their moment in history and to their
respective interpretations of that moment.
 C h a pter Eigh t

Beatlemania
The Audience at Shea Stadium, 1965
•••

Sometime in the early 1970s, I partook of what fairly could be called an

evening of stoner cinema (sometimes known as “midnight movies”) at
the Orson Welles Cinema, an art house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I
don’t remember if that was the night I saw a bill that included a Firesign
Theater concert film and Bambi Meets Godzilla, but I do remember seeing
a Beatles double feature consisting of Magical Mystery Tour (1967) and
The Beatles at Shea Stadium, a 1966 television documentary of the Bea-
tles’ 1965 concert at a baseball park in New York City.1 Although I had
lived through Beatlemania in the mid-­1960s as a young Beatles fan, had
watched them on Ed Sullivan’s television program the year before the
concert, and was well aware of what happened during and around their
live appearances, I had not had the opportunity to attend one myself.
The Shea Stadium concert film is extraordinary, not least because
it is nearly impossible to hear the Beatles play even though the music
was significantly “sweetened” and overdubbed in postproduction:2 the
soundtrack is completely dominated by a barrage of nonstop screaming
from the audience. Shots of the Beatles themselves show them looking
quizzically at one another and attempting to play even though no one
was listening and they could barely hear each other over the din. (You
can get a sense of the effect by listening to the recordings of the Beatles’
concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. Although engineered to be audible, the
169
 170  •   in concert

Figure 18. Beatles fans attending their concert at Shea Stadium, New York City, in
1965. Still from the documentary film The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1966), directed
by Bob Precht.

music is accompanied by a constant, undifferentiated stream of noise

emanating from the audience.) Close-­ups of the screaming fans showed
faces (mostly young and female) with wide-­open mouths and tightly
closed eyes (see fig. 18).
This image of the self-­blinded and deafened fan has stayed with me
as a phenomenon in need of some kind of analysis, for the more I think
about it, the harder it becomes to account for it. Writing about the
performance of classical music, Stan Godlovitch has proposed a list of
“integrity conditions” that have to be met before the playing of a piece
constitutes a performance of it. He describes one of those conditions
as “continuity of public calm,” which he views as necessary to maintain
the “ritual continuity” and mood of classical music performance.3 God-
lovitch considers concerts to be ritual events and acknowledges that dif-
ferent kinds of rituals engender different moods. One would not expect
the mood at a Beatles concert to be the same as the mood for a classical
recital, and there is no reason why an audience for pop music should
display the same decorum expected of a classical music audience. Never-
theless, every kind of concert has standards of behavior designed to pro-
tect the integrity of the event. As Godlovitch puts it, “Though each ritual
category sports its own disruption threshold, all operate on the need for
procedural and experiential continuity and the absence of procedural,
experiential, and external disruption.”4 The behavior of the Beatles’
 Beatlemania  •   171

1965 audience at Shea Stadium (and of most of their audiences during

their visits to the United States in 1964, 1965, and 1966) surely sur-
passed the disruption threshold for this kind of event, and thus vitiated
the Beatles’ performances every bit as much as would rowdy behavior at
a symphony concert. We usually assume that an audience attends a per-
formance in both senses: that of being present at it, and that of devoting
attention to it. The fans at Shea Stadium were physically present, but
certainly not devoting their attention to the performance.
How does one account, then, for an audience that attends a concert
but behaves in such a way as not only to deprive itself of the experience
it has sought out but also to make it uncomfortable for the musicians
to perform? One possible response would be to say that identifying the
fans as the audience in this case is a misconstruction of the situation. In
fact, the fans were there to perform for the Beatles, not to listen to them,
and the Beatles’ mistake was in thinking that they were the performers
rather than the audience.5 This seems to have been the case, at least in
part. As one fan said, “The louder you screamed, the less likely anyone
would forget the power of the fans. When the screams drowned out the
music, as they invariably did, then it was the fans, and not the band,
who were the show.”6 It is clear from this that the screaming fans were
there to perform their fan identity for the Beatles. Since, as the gonzo
rock theorist Richard Meltzer, who attended the Shea Stadium concert,
reports, the audience began screaming well before the Beatles ever came
into view, it is equally clear that they were performing for each other in
a celebration of a collective identity, just as they did when they screamed
at the Beatles on television or the movie screen.7 From this perspective,
the relevant mood is not the one conventionally appropriate to a con-
cert but, rather, the mood the fans created for their own performance
through their infectious behavior. A number of fans reported screaming
despite themselves even though they specifically resisted (or hoped to
resist) this kind of behavior:

Well—­I leapt out of my seat, I don’t know how many feet up in the
air, and screamed my head off. I mean, screamed like a banshee. I
just totally forgot everything I had just been saying the minute before
about “I certainly hope people act responsibly and maturely.” I just
screamed, I could not help it. It was like I had no control over myself
whatsoever. I really and truly had been genuinely sincere just a minute
before. Well, forget it. The minute they came out, you lost all sense
of—­anything, all control. You were just given over to the experience.8
 172  •   in concert

Before proceeding further down this path, I wish to acknowledge that

my characterization of the Beatles’ audience as made up primarily of
young teen girls is a potentially reductive oversimplification. An early
report from the UK published in the New York Times in 1963 noted that
“their appeal is strongest to females between 10 and 30, but Beatlemania,
as it is called, affects all social classes and all levels of intelligence,”9 and
in an academic article of 1969, Evan Davies observes that the Beatles’
“public is a diverse one, composed not only of teenagers, but also of peo-
ple who are within the older age groups. This is particularly noticeable
in the kinds of audience that appear at their public appearances and
their films.”10 Nevertheless, the screaming, teenaged female Beatlema-
niac fan is the main object of any analysis of Beatlemania, including not
only accounts from the mid-­1960s that fomented moral panic around
the threat the Beatles ostensibly represented to order and decency but
also much more recent feminist analyses of the phenomenon that con-
struct Beatlemania as a form of female empowerment available to young
women just prior to the upsurge of second-­wave feminism. Open to mul-
tiple and widely divergent readings, the female Beatlemaniac’s powerful
iconicity remains unchallenged, even to the degree that the names for
subsequent waves of enthusiasm that have engulfed pop music perform-
ers either echo or play on Beatlemania: T. Rexstasy (T. Rex), Rollerma-
nia (the Bay City Rollers), and Spice Mania (the Spice Girls) are but
three examples. While recognizing that to focus on the Beatlemaniac
girl is not to tell the whole story, I will nevertheless continue this tradi-
tion of inquiry here.
One of the questions that has animated discussion of Beatlemania
since the mid-­1960s is simply, why? It was not without precedent: flap-
pers had swooned for Rudy Vallee in the 1920s; bobbysoxers went nuts
for Frank Sinatra in the 1940s, and teen-­aged girls nearly rioted over
Elvis in the 1950s.11 Even so, there is a general consensus that Beatlema-
nia was a bigger and more intense phenomenon than any of these prece-
dents without its being clear why it turned out that way. What was it about
the cultural moment of the early 1960s or the Beatles themselves that
provoked such a feverish response? A widely held, oft-­repeated notion
is that the Beatles provided a much-­needed antidote to the atmosphere
of gloom that pervaded the United States following the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, bringing joy to the young people of a nation
sorely in need of it.12 (The perspective from the other side of the Atlantic
was similar, though not related to a specific event. Sheila Whiteley notes
“the paralyzing grayness that had characterized British society during
 Beatlemania  •   173

the postwar period was replaced, almost overnight, by Carnaby Street

color, youth culture, and the Beatles.”)13 Further, as Geoffrey O’Brien
points out, the Beatles enjoyed an exceptionally strong presence in the
minds and daily lives of Americans in the 1960s.

An illusion of intimacy, of companionship, made the Beatles charac-

ters in everyone’s private drama. . . . It is hard to remember how famil-
iarly people came to speak of the Beatles toward the end of the’60s,
as if they were close associates whose reactions and shifts of thought
could be gauged intuitively. . . . That presumption of intimacy owed
everything to a close knowledge of every record they made, every
facial variation gleaned from movies and countless photographs. The
knowledge was not necessarily sought; it was merely unavoidable.14

Perhaps this feeling of intimacy with the Beatles, a feeling not confined
to Beatlemaniacs, gave them a particularly strong affective charge that
made them seem fit objects for such a passionate response.
Other theories have been advanced, of course, both then and more
recently, to account for Beatlemania. One approach is to look at Beatle-
mania as commercial exploitation, a “financially advantageous collision
between a growing international fan base’s need for a facile mythology
and the willingness of the Beatles’ relentlessly regenerating marketing
engine to sustain the Fab Four’s media-­friendly story.”15 This is surely
accurate as far as it goes, but it does not provide a basis for understand-
ing the fans’ affective experience. Many contemporary interpretations
invoked shibboleths familiar from earlier demonizations of rock and roll.
Dr. Bernard Saibel notoriously wrote in the Seattle Times: “The music is
loud, primitive, insistent—­strongly rhythmic and releases in a disguised
way . . . the all too tenuously controlled, newly acquired physical impulses
of the teen-­ager.”16 But for every commentator who pointed to the poten-
tially baleful influence of primitive rhythm on nascent sexuality, there
was at least one who saw the Beatles as sexually unthreatening. Early in
a brief New York Times review of the Beatles’ appearance on Ed Sullivan’s
television program in February 1964, Jack Gould dismissively claims that
“the boys hardly did for daughter what Elvis Presley did for her sister
or Frank Sinatra for mother.”17 The Beatles’ ostensibly unthreatening
demeanor was often linked to their being feminine, especially as com-
pared with American rock-­and-­rollers. The ubiquitous pop psychologist
Dr. Joyce Brothers commented that “the Beatles’ display a few manner-
isms which seem almost a shade on the feminine side, such as the tossing
 174  •   in concert

of their long manes of hair. . . . These are exactly the mannerisms which
very young female fans (in the 10–­14 age group) seem to go wildest
over.”18 Glossing this commentary, Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess,
and Gloria Jacobs suggest that the Beatles’ play with, and redefinition of,
masculinity did not desexualize them but was precisely what “made them
wildly sexy” to young women living in a world of restrictively defined
gender roles.19 Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs are not alone in suggesting
that the Beatles’ “faintly androgynous effect” paved the way for the much
more direct questioning of sex and gender roles enacted by David Bowie
and others in the 1970s and 1980s.20
It is important that the Beatles’ appeal to their young female fans is
generally understood in relation to sexuality, for this provides a power-
ful explanation of their behavior at Shea Stadium whether one takes
up the position that they were female hysterics bordering on enacting a
Dionysian scenario, as does Dr. Saibel, or that they were proto-­feminists
celebrating female power in a world that had little room for such expres-
sion, as do Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs, for whom Beatlemania was

a genuinely political movement for women’s liberation. The scream-

ing ten-­to-­fourteen-­year-­old fans of 1964 did not riot for anything,
except the chance to remain in the proximity of their idols and hence
to remain screaming. But they did have plenty to riot against, or at
least to overcome through the act of rioting.  .  .  . To abandon con-
trol—­to scream, faint, dash about in mobs—­was, in form if not in con-
scious intent, to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double
standard of female teen culture. It was the first and most dramatic
uprising of women’s sexual revolution.21

I want to move in a different direction in discussing the Beatlemani-

acs’ behavior as an audience to produce an analysis that is different in
emphasis, but nevertheless complementary to a discussion like that of
Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs. My analysis will focus on the role of Beatle-
maniacs in constructing the Beatles’ musical personae.
In his book Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America, Jona-
than Gould suggests that the British Beatlemania that emerged in 1963
derived from the way the Beatles afforded young women a means of
articulating a social life of their own, initially in private.

What the British nation witnessed with growing amazement during

the fall of 1963 was the expressive world of adolescent girls, which
 Beatlemania  •   175

had formerly been confined to the privacy of small groups and the
solitude of individual imaginations, spilling out into the spaces of
public life. “Bedroom culture” had embraced an active principle and
taken noisily to the streets. Having reached critical mass, the response
to the Beatles and their music provided a socially and emotionally
secure environment for the expression of female assertiveness, female
aggression, female sexuality, and female solidarity. Because the initial
sense of connection was indeed mediated by records, radio, televi-
sion, and the press, it became vitally important for the serious fan to
experience the Beatles firsthand.22

This last statement requires examination, as it is evident that the Beatles’

audience at Shea stadium could hardly be said to have “experience[ed]
the Beatles,” at least not in the conventional sense and did not even
appear to be there for that purpose, a point to which I shall return.
However, by positing Beatlemania as a set of private, often individual
behaviors made public and collective on a large scale, Gould sheds light
on what happened at Shea Stadium about two years later. In particular, I
wish to consider what the fans were doing in their bedrooms.
In a book-­length study of the evolution of the Beatles’ image, Michael
Frontani, citing Richard Dyer on film stardom, offers a definition of
what he calls image (and I call persona): “I understand image . . . to be
the product of four categories of media text: promotion, publicity, work
product, and commentaries/criticism.” For Frontani, “Promotion refers
to materials created specifically to shape the Beatles’ image, including
items appearing in or derived from pressbooks and fan club magazines,
fashion pictures, television appearances, and product endorsements,”
while “Publicity [is] information gathered by the media through inter-
views and other journalistic practices.” Work product includes “their
recorded music, live performances, and film and video,” which gener-
ates commentary and criticism.23 In Goffman’s terms, Frontani catalogs
the various kinds of expressive equipment and opportunities for self-­
presentation the Beatles and their management deployed in order to
create the impression they sought to make on their audiences, not only
through their music and film performances but in all of their public
manifestations.
Goffman suggests that the use of the elements of front to create an
impression should be coherent.24 As Kenneth Womack and Todd F.
Davis point out, this was the case for the Beatles’ impression manage-
ment. Their film and television appearances sought to further articulate
 176  •   in concert

personae also performed in other venues: “A Hard Day’s Night capitalizes

on each band member’s image as it had been established by the adeptly
choreographed news conferences and appearances on such popular fare
as Thank Your Lucky Stars (in Great Britain) and the Ed Sullivan Show.”25
In her bedroom, the young Beatlemaniac, familiar with all of the sign
vehicles through which the Beatles made themselves known, surrounded
herself with as many of their tangible manifestations as she could get her
hands on. From these, she derived an idea of the Beatles’ individual and
collective personae.
The fact that Beatles’ fans’ relationships with the group were con-
structed through materials of these kinds make them the one-­sided rela-
tionships Donald Horton and Richard Wohl designated as “para-­social”
(already touched on in chapter 6), which they define as simulated “face-­
to-­
face relationship[s] between spectator and performer” that come
about through interaction with mass media. Horton and Wohl argue that
this kind of interaction between media spectators and media representa-
tions indicates that the spectators are not merely passive consumers. On
the other hand, however, they also argue that the activity in which the
spectators engage is limited to responding to cues offered by figures on
the air or the screen, and that it is these figures who are ultimately in
control of the relationship.26
Although I find Horton and Wohl’s critique of the notion of the pas-
sive mass media spectator to be salutary, especially for an essay written in
1956, my discussion of the concept of musical persona in chapter 5 sug-
gests that the audience takes on a more active role than simply respond-
ing to cues. The musician’s persona ultimately is an interactive accom-
plishment achieved by performers and audience together; in that sense,
the audience is the persona’s cocreator not just its addressee. Without
disputing that the relationship a hypothetical (and stereotypical) Beatle-
maniac constructed with the group in the confines of her bedroom can
be legitimately called para-­social, I argue that it is nevertheless the prod-
uct of an active process of engagement with the group and the individu-
als within it that produces a version of the interactive accomplishment
Goffman analyzed in face-­to-­face encounters.
In a relatively neglected passage of “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction” that I also mentioned in the previous chap-
ter, Walter Benjamin speaks of the ways the technical reproduction of
artworks provides access to the original work: “In permitting the repro-
duction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation,
[the technique of reproduction] reactivates the object reproduced.”27
 Beatlemania  •   177

Reproduction of a performance does not allow me to experience the

performance in its original circumstances; it does not transport me to
the time and place in which it occurred. Rather, it brings the perfor-
mance to me, to be experienced in my temporal and spatial context.
I posit that reactivation of the Beatles in something like Benjamin’s
sense of making them present from the materials Frontani categorizes
was a central feature of the “bedroom culture” to which Gould refers.
Whereas in this passage Benjamin only addresses the reactivation of a
performance or artifact from its reproductions, in a section of his “Little
History of Photography,” he describes a similar effect through which we
sense the presence of the subject of the photograph.28 The Beatlemaniac
in her bedroom reactivated not only the Beatles’ performances from
their recordings, but also the Beatles themselves from her records, mag-
azines, dolls, and other paraphernalia, and the movies and television
shows in which she had seen them. It was through this process of reacti-
vation that the Beatlemaniac played her part in producing the Beatle’s
personae as interactive accomplishments.
I have argued elsewhere29 that while reactivation is primarily a mental
activity, it can be enacted physically as well, and so it was for the Bea-
tles’ fans in the mid-­1960s. Not only did the fans reactivate the Beatles’
personae from the multitude of cultural artifacts that surrounded them,
in some cases they also sought to reactivate the Beatles personae by
embodying them. Meltzer identifies these options in relation to recorded
music. He describes the experience of “listening to a standard guitarist
on record” by saying that what is “required is a mental picture of the
guy facing you and occasionally moving around; in conjunction with this
you visually change the situation and sit behind him or turn the stage
around, or you put yourself right in his shoes.”30 As Meltzer suggests, the
listener is free to construct her relationship to the performer from vari-
ous spectatorial vantage points or by identifying with the performer and
placing herself in that position. Such identification can lead to physical
enactments of performances and performers derived from recordings
and other mediations that should also be understood as reactivations:
embodied reactivations that respond to our desire not just to see and
hear the performances and personae we have reactivated, but to inhabit
them physically.
In a memoir titled Growing Up with the Beatles, Ron Schaumburg’s
descriptions of the ways he, his siblings, and friends quite literally per-
formed their relationships to the Beatles and their music exemplify
these possibilities:
 178  •   in concert

A friend of mine, Mary Lee Wilson, “played pretend” and imagined

she and her friends were Beatle wives. . . . As Beatle wives, they pre-
tended their husbands were away doing a concert somewhere. If
there were too many girls at a slumber party, some pretended to be
the Beatles themselves and the others gave them “haircuts.” . . .
While the girls were indulging their dreams, I was enacting my
own as a “Basement Beatle.” Ricky and I took my sister’s record player
downstairs. With Kevin joining us, we banged away on my mother’s
flour canisters and twanged away on invisible guitars, mouthing the
words to [various Beatles songs]. We performed without an audience,
but we took great care to be accurate.  .  .  . My brother Robert had
formed a similar group, but they were a little more imaginative. They
used tennis rackets as guitars and wore Beatle wigs when they per-
formed for the second-­grade music class.31

At first glance, there may seem to be a clear gendered difference

between the girls’ “bedroom culture” and the boys’ “basement culture.”
However, young women could identify with the Beatles as much as young
men; as one female fan who was perhaps not content to play the role of
“Beatle wife,” put it, “I think I identified with them, rather than as an
object of them. I mean I liked their independence and sexuality and
wanted those things for myself.”32 Another fan, Penny Wagner, recalls:
“We dressed like them—­I had a clique in Catholic grade school, and we
got in so much trouble. We were called the Big Four; three other girls
and me dressed like the Beatles. We got the hats, just like the hats they
wore when they first came over from England.”33 While many female fans
played at being Beatle wives or girlfriends (or at being the Beatles only
when the numbers dictated they must be), there were also those who
identified directly with the Beatles and played at being them. In some
cases, they became the female equivalent of the “Basement Beatles,” as
fan Maggie Welch recalls:

I had three girlfriends, and of course each of us had a different favor-

ite Beatle. And, as luck might have it, we each resembled our favorite
Beatle at least close enough to be more or less convincing, and we’d
go around and do free little gigs. And we were even invited to per-
form on this local teen show, and we performed there, and we’d be
called in for all sorts of little church events, teen dances, that kind
of thing. And we just had a blast, because when we were doing that,
we believed one hundred percent, you know, “I was John Lennon!”34
 Beatlemania  •   179

These fan practices do not conform neatly to the conventional gender

roles of the time, the very roles that Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs see
teenaged girls resisting through Beatlemanic noise. That the boys played
at being men often said to be sexually ambiguous and androgynous sug-
gests another possible avenue of resistance to conventional gender roles
inherent in the bedroom and basement practices of Beatlemania.
Although Benjamin’s image of the lover of art or music who reacti-
vates works from mechanical reproductions is of a solitary figure, reacti-
vation of musical performances from recordings has an inherently social
dimension. William Howland Kenney observes:

Recorded music’s power to resound musical patterns does much to

fortify circles of shared popular experience. . . . Not simply solitaries,
phonograph record lovers listened “alone together,” discovering in
mediated engravings of past musical expressiveness parallel avenues
to shared social and cultural circles of resonance.35

In other words, Beatlemanic “bedroom culture” was always already a col-

lective experience even if girls (and sometimes boys) frequently enacted
it alone or in small groups, and it was this implicit collective that became
publicly explicit when the bedroom culture took to the streets, as Gould
describes.
Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge just how intensely personal
and private the Beatlemaniac’s para-­social relationship with the Beatles,
individually or collectively, could be. It is critical to the present discus-
sion that some Beatles fans refused to participate in the implicit collec-
tive structured through the consumption of recorded music and did not
want to see the band perform live, even when they had the opportunity,
because they wanted to maintain the intimacy of the relationships they
had constructed with the group as individuals. For example, the essayist
Verlyn Klinkenborg notes that he “always tried to listen to the Beatles by
myself.” He expands on his lack of interest in joining the Beatlemaniac
community, saying: “I was never going to be part of that squealing, smell-
ing salts crowd, sharing publicly what I felt for the Beatles. There was
no need to see the Beatles live.”36 Klinkenborg problematizes Jonathan
Gould’s assertion that “it became vitally important for the serious fan
[already immersed in representations of the Beatles] to experience the
Beatles firsthand” by implying that the only reason to see the Beatles
firsthand had nothing to do with seeing or appreciating the Beatles and
everything to do with engaging in a public performance of fan identity.
 180  •   in concert

Author Noelle Oxenhandler recounts a similar experience:

When the Beatles came to the Hollywood Bowl, I didn’t go with the
rest of my Girl Scout troop. I didn’t agonize over the decision. When
our scout leader first proposed the idea, I looked down at the ground
as the other girls jumped in the air, giggling with excitement and
clapping their hands. I knew in every fiber of my being that it would
not be possible for me to carry the passionate intensity of my love into
such a public place—­much less to see it mirrored in the faces of a
thousand screaming teenage girls.37

Klinkenborg and Oxenhandler both assert the importance of keeping

their respective personal relationships with the Beatles (in Oxenhan-
dler’s case, specifically with John Lennon) private. They had no desire
to expose these relationships either to the multitude of fans who shared
in them or to the Beatles themselves and, it is important to observe, no
need or desire to experience at first hand the people with whom they
had constructed these relationships.
As I have suggested, the young women in the audience at Shea
Stadium, those who did go to the concert, already constituted a
community—­structured through their common consumption of Beatles
recordings and other artifacts—­before they arrived at the concert. What
happened at the stadium was the materialization of that implicit com-
munity as a huge gathering of young women. For a moment, they were
no longer “alone together,” the phrase Kenney uses to describe phono-
graph record lovers, but simply together.
I have also suggested that one of this community’s defining practices
was the reactivation of the Beatles’ personae from recordings and other
artifacts and the assumption of various imaginative relations to the reac-
tivated figures. Meltzer’s description of the event is suggestive concern-
ing the relationship between the reactivated Beatles and the ones who
were physically present when he notes that the fans “created an uproar
that was unending and in fact prevented all participating in the audience
from hearing a single word actually sung by the Beatles. Only memory
of past aural experience of the Beatles was needed to sustain this new
outburst with the group now present.”38 As one fan reported, “Every-
body kept saying, ‘Well, we don’t have to listen to them because we have
the records—­we just want to see them!’”39 Both statements point to the
primacy of the Beatles’ recorded sound in the fans’ ideations of their
personae.
 Beatlemania  •   181

By screaming and closing their eyes, the fans obliterated the sound
and sight of the Beatles and thus made certain that their experience
of the Beatles’ corporeal presence would be identical with their previ-
ous experience of the Beatles’ personae they had reactivated for them-
selves. In an essay on Sir Paul McCartney’s 1999 webcast concert at the
Cavern Club in Liverpool, Mark Duffett quotes Ray Connolly, a journal-
ist, to the effect that the reconstructed club “evokes memories, whether
real or imagined,” and points to “the whole, impossible idea of ‘imag-
ined memories.’”40 My analysis here indicates, however, that something
very much like imagined memory (remembered imaginings, perhaps)
underpinned the audience’s experience at Shea Stadium, since the audi-
ence was drawing on its memory of its own constructions of the Beatles’
personae even while in their physical presence. The spectators’ memo-
ries of the concert, therefore, would be memories (perhaps imagined)
of remembered imaginings.
To borrow Godlovitch’s terminology once again, the Beatles’ concert
at Shea Stadium was characterized by a complete disassociation of the
agent performance (what the Beatles were doing) from the phenomenal
performance (what the audience experienced).41 While the Beatles as
agents were physically present in their own persons doing their best to
play under difficult conditions, the audience obliterated their phenom-
enal presence and chose (at least in the story I am telling) to perceive
a performance by the Beatles they had constructed for themselves by
engaging in para-­social interactions with them through the consump-
tion of the artifacts of material culture.
I propose that the fans’ behavior at the Beatles’ 1965 concert at Shea
Stadium functioned to ensure that their own reactivations of the Bea-
tles’ personae remained their primary experience of these performers.
Inasmuch as the audience rendered the Beatles inaudible, a concert-
goer could hear them only by recourse to the memory of their recorded
performances, as Meltzer suggests. The soundtrack for the concert
thus became the recordings with which the fans were familiar; by clos-
ing their eyes, the fans ensured that the personae they had already con-
structed for John, Paul, George, and Ringo and with which they had
already formed relationships were the images that they saw during the
concert, not those of the four harried men attempting to play for them.
This behavior reflects a profound ambivalence at the heart of the fans’
para-­social relationships with the Beatles. Writing about the day of the
concert she chose not to attend, Oxenhandler describes her restlessness
and listlessness, saying, “Although I knew that I absolutely could not be
 182  •   in concert

at the concert, it felt impossible to be anywhere else.”42 Even though her

unwillingness to share her relationship with John with other fans made
it impossible for her to go to the concert, as a fan she knew she belonged
there. This ambivalence can also be seen as the root of the behavior of
those who did go to Shea Stadium. On the one hand, they needed to be
at the concert to breathe “the same air that the Beatles are breathing!”
as one fan said.43 On the other hand, they knew at some level that going
to the concert would mean confronting the personae they had con-
structed in their bedrooms with the reality of the actual Beatles. These
fans therefore did everything they could to ensure that the live perfor-
mance they witnessed would not differ from or challenge the reactivated
performances and personae with which they were already familiar. The
live performance thus served primarily as an occasion on which to enjoy
a particularly intense experience of reactivating the Beatles rather than
an encounter with the actual Beatles.
By obliterating the Beatles’ sound, the Beatlemaniacs at Shea Stadium
enabled themselves to experience the music only as memories of record-
ings and thus to celebrate the experiential basis of their communal iden-
tity. The value of the concert as an experience of psychosexual libera-
tion and female solidarity suggested by Ehrenreich and others depended
equally on the fans’ maintaining the Beatles’ reactivated personae in the
face of their corporeal presence and on the real corporeal presence of a
mass audience assembled in the same place at the same time. For those
effects to occur the real Beatles had to be suppressed, so to speak, in
favor of the personae the fans had constructed for themselves, and the
audience had to be fully, and loudly, present.
 C h a pter Nine

Good Old Rock and Roll

Performing the 1950s in the 1970s
•••

Although one might expect otherwise, Sha Na Na’s performance at

Woodstock had much in common with John Lennon’s performance
with the Plastic Ono Band at the Toronto Rock Revival. Both events
took place in 1969, less than a month apart—­Sha Na Na performed at
Woodstock on August 18, while Lennon appeared in Toronto on Sep-
tember 13. Both groups were quite new at the time of their respective
performances. Sha Na Na was formed in 1969. Their performance at
Woodstock was only their seventh gig. Lennon had not played live in the
three years before his Toronto appearance, and the Plastic Ono Band
had never performed in public. Both groups focused their repertoire on
rock-­and-­roll songs from the 1950s: Sha Na Na was captured for poster-
ity in the documentary film Woodstock (1970) performing Danny and the
Juniors’ “At the Hop,” while the Plastic Ono Band opened its set with
Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes.”
Despite these similarities, the two performances in question stand at
opposite ends of a continuum that charts the relationships rock groups
of the 1960s and 1970s assumed to the rock and roll of the 1950s. This
continuum is not a timeline: it traces the development of a tendency
in rock along an ideological axis rather than a chronological one.
The poles of this continuum are the ideologically charged concepts of
authenticity and inauthenticity central to rock music and rock culture.1

183
 184  •   in concert

Sha Na Na and Lennon, whom I have selected to represent the extreme

positions on this continuum, were scarcely the only rock musicians of
the late 1960s and 1970s to exploit the music of the 1950s.2 Although
a complete study of this renewed interest in rock and roll has yet to be
undertaken, I shall limit my discussion here to musicians who not only
played music styled on the rock and roll of the 1950s but also created
performance personae that express their respective relationships to that
earlier music. In addition to Sha Na Na and Lennon, I will look at the
Mothers of Invention and Roy Wood’s Wizzard from this perspective and
place them along my proposed continuum. In the second half of the
chapter, I suggest that the poles of the continuum may be defined not
only in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity but also in relation to
two other critical dichotomies: auteurship versus stylistic pastiche and
modernism versus postmodernism.

Rock-­and-­Roll Revival: John Lennon and Sha Na Na

From about 1968 until at least 1974, there was a large-­scale resurgence
of interest in rock’s prehistory in both the United States and the United
Kingdom. Rock music per se—­as distinct from rock and roll—­had existed
for only about five years by 1968, but it had developed very quickly.3 Con-
sider the distance traveled from, say, the Beach Boys, circa 1962, to Jimi
Hendrix, circa 1967, or the Beatles in 1963 to the same group in 1967.
As soon as rock music could be distinguished sufficiently from blues,
rhythm and blues, and rock and roll to be considered a separate genre
with its own development, rock culture became self-­consciously histori-
cal and sought to recuperate earlier genres as precedents.4 As Ed Naha
has pointed out:

During the late 1960s, the children of psychedelia suddenly rediscov-

ered the rock and roll antics of the fifties. These were called “roots.”
Rock revival shows [such as the one the Plastic Ono Band played in
Toronto], spotlighting the “rootsy” sounds of Chuck Berry, Dion,
Little Richard, and Fats Domino (as well as dozens of their peer per-
formers) made their way across the country, drawing both the old
fans of the fifties . . . and young nostalgia buffs who enjoyed seeing
where the Rolling Stones came from.5
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   185

The renewed interest in 1950s music within the rock culture of the
late 1960s predates, and may have helped spur, the 1950s revival that
surfaced in American popular culture a few years later, exemplified by
Happy Days (premiered 1974) on television, Grease (1972) on the Broad-
way stage, and American Graffiti (1973) in the movies.6 Although it often
idealized and distorted the music and culture of the 1950s, the rock-­and-­
roll revival that began in the late 1960s was nevertheless a genuine explo-
ration of rock’s history by its creators and fans. The generation of rock
musicians who came to prominence in the 1960s and early 1970s began
mostly as rock-­and-­roll musicians, learning their craft by emulating the
sounds they heard on records, before contributing to the development
of rock music. For them, the rock-­and-­roll revival entailed a return to
their earliest musical experiences as both listeners and players.
Lennon, in particular, conveyed a strong sense that by playing rock-­
and-­roll songs, he was digging down to the bedrock of his own artis-
tic identity. On the recording of the Plastic Ono Band’s set at Toronto,
Lennon introduces the group by saying, “We’re just gonna do numbers
that we know, you know, ’cause we’ve never played together before.”7
The implication is that rock-­and-­roll songs like “Blue Suede Shoes,”
“Money,” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie” are so basic to the vocabulary of rock
that any randomly assembled group of rock musicians should be able to
play them without rehearsal. On his album Rock ’n’ Roll, a collection of
cover versions of well-­known songs from the 1950s, recorded in 1973–­
1974 and released in 1975, Lennon reiterates this point in explicitly
autobiographical terms by associating the songs with his own youth and
formation as a musician. Among the many credits listed on the album’s
back cover is the statement: “Relived by: JL.”8 The front cover repro-
duces a photograph of Lennon in Hamburg, Germany, taken when
he was twenty-­two years old. Lennon is seen leaning against the side of
an arched entryway, looking at passers-­by through hooded eyes. He is
dressed in the uniform associated with the British working-­class subcul-
ture of rockers: black leather jacket, black jeans, and leather boots. This
photograph evokes the historical moment in the very early 1960s when
many British groups, including the Beatles, found work as cover bands,
churning out versions of rock-­and-­roll songs in the disreputable clubs on
Hamburg’s Reeperbahn.
Jon Wiener, one of Lennon’s biographers, describes the significance
of the song selection on Rock ’n’ Roll in detail:
 186  •   in concert

The songs John decided to cover on Rock ’n’ Roll were not just any
old oldies. They represented his own personal musical history. John
sang Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” on Rock ’n’ Roll. The name “Beatles”
had been inspired by Buddy Holly’s Crickets and “That’ll Be the Day”
was the first song John learned to play on the guitar in 1957. He had
sung many other Buddy Holly songs: “It’s So Easy” as Johnny and the
Moondogs in his first TV appearance in 1959, and “Words of Love,”
which the Beatles recorded in 1964.9

Wiener continues in this vein, explaining the specific associations of

songs by Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Larry Williams
in terms of Lennon’s history before and with the Beatles. As if to ham-
mer home the importance of these biographical associations, Lennon
himself provides a disc jockey-­like spoken introduction to “Just Because,”
the last song on the album. He waxes nostalgic, saying, “Ah, remember
this?” and tries to recall how old he was when the song was first recorded.
Lennon thus performs his relationship to rock and roll as a relation-
ship of authenticity grounded in a deep biographical connection to the
music of the 1950s. As Deena Weinstein points out, cover versions of
older songs can serve to authenticate a performer by asserting “a rela-
tionship, through creative repetition, to an authentic source.”10 In this
passage, Weinstein describes the practice of rock artists associated with
the British Invasion of the mid-­1960s, who often recorded American
blues and rhythm and blues. The Beatles, themselves a British Invasion
group, certainly participated in this practice. Lennon’s case as a solo
artist is complex because his performances of rock-­and-­roll songs at
Toronto and on his 1975 album draw not only on the authenticity of
the songs themselves and their original performers but also on his own
history as a young rock-­and-­roll musician in the late 1950s. In a sense,
the John Lennon of Johnny and the Moondogs becomes an “authentic
source” for Lennon, the post-­Beatles solo artist.11
If Lennon’s performance of an authentic relationship to the rock
and roll of the 1950s rooted in history and biography is at one end of
my proposed continuum, Sha Na Na’s performed relationship to the
same music is at the opposite end. Whether or not rock and roll played
a formative role in the lives of the members of Sha Na Na, they do not
assert such a connection through their performances.12 On the contrary,
whereas Lennon presented himself as having lived and absorbed the
music of the 1950s in the 1950s, the performers in Sha Na Na construct
themselves as entities without biographies. Whereas Lennon presented
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   187

his performances of rock and roll as artifacts of his own history, Sha Na
Na perform rock and roll as history without claiming it as their own, per-
sonal history. We are meant to take the picture of the twenty-­two-­year-­old
rocker on the cover of the Rock ‘n’ Roll album as a point of reference for
understanding the older Lennon’s relationship to rock-­and-­roll music.
Sha Na Na advances no such claim about the greaser personae they
present.13 There is no implied biographical relationship, for instance,
between the preening, spitting, obnoxious Bowser, the popular persona
of Sha Na Na’s bass singer from 1970 to 1983, and Jon Bauman, the
performer who portrayed him.
Although Lennon’s rocker image and the greaser image portrayed by
Sha Na Na are sartorially similar, there are significant differences between
their respective performances of these subcultural icons. By presenting
himself as a rocker, Lennon aligned himself with a specific, historically
class-­based social experience in the United Kingdom of which rock and
roll had been a part. As Stanley Cohen has shown, to be a rocker in early
1960s Britain was to adopt a particular social identity. Whereas the mods,
another working-­class youth subculture of the same period, were con-
sidered exciting and newsworthy, “The rockers were left out of the race:
they were unfashionable and unglamorous just because they appeared to
be more class bound” than the seemingly more upwardly mobile mods.14
Insofar as Cohen suggests that the early British pop groups also repre-
sented upward mobility through “success stories of being discovered and
making it”15 (as I discussed briefly in chapter 6), Lennon’s assertion of
his rocker past was an act of symbolic downward mobility, as if he were
undoing the Beatles’ phenomenal rise to assert solidarity with his former
working-­class self.
Sha Na Na also enacts personae based on subcultural identities with
overtones of class and, in their case, race and ethnicity, but in a spirit very
different from Lennon’s. Although Sha Na Na plays the music of such
African American rhythm-­and-­blues artists as the Coasters, and there was
an African American performer (Denny Greene) in the group’s original
line-­up (he remained with the group from 1969 to 1984), its perfor-
mances revolve primarily around two stylistic reference points: the rock
and roll purveyed by white southerners such as Elvis Presley and Jerry
Lee Lewis, and New York doo-­wop as practiced largely by working-­class
Italian American singers.16 Although several members of Sha Na Na typi-
cally wear gold lamé suits associated with Elvis onstage, their visual image
otherwise does not correspond to that of the earlier performers they
emulate (see fig. 19). The other main costume Sha Na Na uses is a black
 188  •   in concert

Figure 19. The members of Sha Na Na form a human “chapel” while performing
the teen tragedy song “Tell Laura I Love Her.” The singer at the center is Johnny
Contardo. Still from video of the group’s appearance on the German television
program Musikladen in 1973.

leather jacket, jeans, and T-­shirt outfit comparable to British rocker attire
but associated in the United States primarily with the greaser. (Sha Na
Na emphasizes that association by referring to the “grease” they use to
maintain 1950-­style hairdos, which they comb continuously during their
performances.) Neither the greaser outfit nor the gold lamé suit has any
specific relationship to the doo-­wop that makes up the largest part of
Sha Na Na’s repertoire, because doo-­wop singers, both black and white,
generally wore evening wear when performing. Unlike Lennon’s rocker
image, Sha Na Na’s greaser look refers neither to the performance prac-
tices associated with the music it performs nor to the typical appearance
of its audiences but, rather, to a stereotypical “Italian Americanicity” that
has no basis in lived experience.17 Members of the group whose own
names suggest a variety of ethnic heritages, including Irish and Jewish,
adopted such Italianate stage names as Tony Santini, Gino, and Ronzoni.
Unlike Lennon, Sha Na Na never suggests that they chose these images
because they correspond in some way to their own social or cultural
identities. In a 1972 interview, group member Rich Joffe defined Sha
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   189

Na Na’s performance style by saying, “We try to create a reality on stage

but also to indicate that we’re not in it really. It’s definitely a theatrical
thing.”18 This conception of theatricality flies in the face of the ideology
of rock authenticity. Fundamentally, the difference between Lennon’s
performance of rock and roll and Sha Na Na’s is the difference between
inhabiting an identity and playing a role or, in Goffman’s terms as discussed
in chapter 6, playing a social role and playing at a social role.
Whereas Lennon’s representation of himself as a rocker is a recre-
ation of his own past that locates him socially in a very specific way, Sha
Na Na’s representation of the 1950s is a pastiche of that era that brings
together a variety of historically appropriate styles of music and male
performance personae in combinations that have no direct historical
referents. The rocker persona also carries with it an implication of strati-
fication and conflict within the British working class that regularly over-
flowed into physical violence between mods and rockers.19 Sha Na Na’s
performances, too, referred to such subcultural conflict. In the 1970s,
Sha Na Na was frequently introduced at concerts by an announcer
declaiming, “Greased and ready to kick ass—­Sha Na Na!” as if to empha-
size the violence implicit in the greaser image. Similarly, the group often
taunted audiences with such lines as, “We gots just one thing to say to you
fuckin’ hippies and that is that rock and roll is here to stay!”20 This staged
antagonism between the greasers on stage and the presumed “hippies”
in the audience mimed real subcultural conflicts among such groups,
down to the question of which one had a more genuine claim on rock
and roll. The hippies in the audience, however, knew that they were not
really going to get their asses kicked, in large part because Sha Na Na’s
theatrical performance of the greaser provided no reason to suppose
that the people onstage really belonged to that subculture. I mentioned
earlier that, in Goffman’s terms, Sha Na Na could be seen as playing at
this persona rather than embodying it. Equally, they could be seen as
employing role distance to communicate with their audience that they
should not be identified with the figures they portrayed on stage. Early
in its career, Sha Na Na performed regularly at such countercultural
venues as the Fillmore East, Woodstock, university campuses (the group
originated at Columbia University), and, serendipitously, the 1972 char-
ity concert Lennon organized at Madison Square Garden in New York
City. It is quite clear that the audiences for these events understood that
Sha Na Na’s performance of the greaser was an affectionate parody of
that image implying no real threat of subcultural conflict and no genu-
ine antagonism toward the counterculture. Indeed, Sha Na Na eventu-
 190  •   in concert

ally asserted its sympathy for the cultural politics of the counterculture
by adopting the slogan “Grease for Peace.”
The Plastic Ono Band’s performance in Toronto on a rock revival
bill that also featured Chuck Berry, Little Richard (whose song “Dizzy
Miss Lizzie” it performed), and other rock-­and-­roll giants suggested
historical continuity. Lennon and the band—­including guitarist Eric
Clapton—­implicitly positioned themselves as the heirs apparent to rock
and roll, as rock musicians who remember the past, acknowledge their
debt to it, and are able to carry the tradition into the present. In a way,
Yoko Ono’s wailing, avant-­garde, very un-­rock-­and-­roll-­like piece “Don’t
Worry Kyoko” was the band’s strongest statement of historical continuity,
for the instrumental accompaniment to Ono’s unconventional keening
and ululating vocal was based on the opening chord sequence from the
Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” (1958). This gesture suggested
that even Ono’s highly experimental approach to music making was ulti-
mately grounded in and continuous with the rock-­and-­roll tradition.
Although it would be reasonable to suppose that Sha Na Na’s appear-
ance at Woodstock also represented historical continuity by reminding
the audience there of rock’s precedents, this performance has been
interpreted, correctly I think, not as a sign of continuity between past
and present—­between rock and roll and rock—­but as an anticipation
of historical discontinuity between countercultural rock and what came
after it. Geoff Stokes sees Sha Na Na’s appearance at Woodstock and
subsequent popularity as marking the beginning of the end of the rock
counterculture of the 1960s: “Their success was real, but . . . nonmusi-
cal. Theirs was, deliberately, a music of nonsignificance, a break from
the moral and political freight that rock was bearing. Though it took
nearly a decade for them to translate their live popularity to the real
stardom that came when they began a syndicated TV show, they planted
the seeds of rock’s rejection at the site of its greatest triumph.”21 Stokes
deftly marks the historical irony of Sha Na Na’s presence at Woodstock,
but it is important to recognize that his comment is itself a product of
the ideology of countercultural rock. As Lawrence Grossberg observes,
rock ideology “draws an absolute distinction between rock and mere
‘entertainment’”—­clearly, Stokes positions Sha Na Na on the wrong side
of that divide.22 The rock-­and-­roll music Sha Na Na performed could be
seen as “nonmusical” and unserious and as morally and politically disen-
gaged only from the point of view of a rock culture that perceived itself
as having moved beyond its predecessors in progressive directions. Simi-
larly, Stokes’s reference to Sha Na Na’s success on television serves to
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   191

place the group outside the boundaries of legitimate rock. In the 1960s,
television was seen as a central agent of the putatively repressive main-
stream culture against which rock positioned itself. Although most suc-
cessful rock groups appeared regularly on television variety shows, they
were careful to distance themselves from the medium and to maintain
that LPs and concert halls were their true venues. Serious association
with television was the death blow to any claim to being taken seriously
within the counterculture, as the Monkees, a made-­for-­television group
that aspired to rock authenticity, discovered.23 By suggesting that Sha Na
Na found its true medium in television, Stokes implies that the group
never really belonged in rock culture. (It is presumably this perception
of Sha Na Na that has kept the group out of most histories of rock and
rock reference books.)
Alain Dister also sees Sha Na Na’s appearance at Woodstock as a har-
binger of crucial changes in popular music culture, though he presents
the moment in more positive terms by describing its relationship to sub-
sequent developments:

The tone [of postrock music culture] was established at Woodstock

with the unexpected appearance of Sha Na Na. Exhausted, rock
returned to its origins while making fun of itself. At first parodic, this
attitude became more serious with the Flamin’ Groovies, who  .  .  .
established the connection between the popular music of the 1960s
and the minimalism of the 1980s for legions of punk groups. The
decadent New York Dolls provoked surprise in 1973. An archetypal
garage band, like the later Ramones, they emphasized look and atti-
tude without worrying too much about musical precision—­a remark-
able theatricalization of rock that others, such as Alice Cooper and
David Bowie, exploited with much greater care and technique.24

Dister sees Sha Na Na as anticipating two distinct, though related, trends

in rock in the 1970s: glam and punk. Sha Na Na’s emphasis on showbi-
zzy performance techniques that were anathema to the counterculture
(they were surely the only group at Woodstock to feature two members
who performed solely as dancers!) anticipated glam rock, as did their
construction of an obviously artificial—­ and, incidentally, somewhat
homoerotic—­image. Joffe, the member of Sha Na Na I quoted earlier,
noted this similarity in 1972, citing Bowie and Alice Cooper as other
performers who were “definitely back into the show biz thing” and argu-
ing that Sha Na Na was “just another facet of the modern rock scene.”25
 192  •   in concert

Sha Na Na’s overtly artificial personae also foreshadowed the theatri-

cal aspects of punk rock exemplified by the Ramones’ synthetic group
identity and adopted Italian Americanistic surname, and Johnny Rot-
ten’s sneering actorly presence significantly inspired by Sir Laurence
Olivier’s film performance of Richard III.26 (I am not proposing that Sha
Na Na directly influenced glam or punk, only that they anticipated these
developments in certain respects. But the fact that Sha Na Na was well
known in New York and had performed in London in 1971 makes it pos-
sible that the early avatars of glam and punk took notice.) The elaborate
staging and choreography of their concerts pointed additionally toward
music video, as did their own success on television in the late 1970s.
Although Stokes and Dister each insert Sha Na Na into a somewhat dif-
ferent historical narrative, both point to the aspects of Sha Na Na that
made it crucially different from every other group at Woodstock, from
Lennon, and from the values emphasized by rock ideology: the overtly
theatrical and constructed nature of their performance personae and
the related fact that they did not perform an authentic personal and
historical connection to rock and roll.

Authenticity and Auteurship: Frank Zappa and Roy Wood

The contrast between the poles of the axis of authenticity along which I
am plotting rock musicians’ relationship to rock and roll is sharp. At one
end are musicians like Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band and the many
other rockers whose articulation of historical consciousness through the
performance of rock and roll was grounded in an assertion of authen-
tic, personal experience.27 At the other end are Sha Na Na and many
performers of the 1970s, including glam rockers like Bowie and Bryan
Ferry, whose performances of earlier music were mediated through the-
atrical and overtly inauthentic personae and made no claim to being
grounded in the performers’ personal histories.28 In between these two
poles, I place instances in which rock musicians of the 1960s and 1970s
created not just personae but entire fictional groups specifically for the
performance of 1950s-­style music: the Mothers of Invention’s masquer-
ade as Ruben and the Jets for a 1968 album is one example; the creation
by the British group Roy Wood’s Wizzard of Eddy and the Falcons in
1973 is another.29 (Even the Beach Boys renamed themselves Carl and
the Passions for one album in 1972. Although the music on the record-
ing has little to do with the 1950s, their creation of a fictional group
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   193

with a 1950s-­style name is significant here.)30 These cases belong in the

middle section of the continuum because they combine, to different
degrees, the defining features of the two extreme positions: the claim of
authenticity based on biographical experience as a rock-­and-­roller and
the construction of overtly fictional performance personae. By creating
personae that refer to their own histories but are also fictional entities
distinct from themselves, both Frank Zappa of the Mothers of Inven-
tion and Roy Wood performed their relationships to rock and roll as
an ambivalent oscillation between role embracement and role distance.
Unlike Lennon and Sha Na Na, the Mothers did not perform well-­
known songs from the 1950s on Cruising with Ruben and the Jets; rather, they
performed doo-­wop-­style songs and ballads written by Zappa himself—­
sometimes with Ray Collins.31 Ostensibly, the album was recorded by a
group called Ruben and the Jets, though it is readily apparent that it
is the work of the Mothers of Invention. The front cover of the album
features a cartoon drawing of doglike musicians. The guitar player’s
speech balloon reads: “Is this the Mothers of Invention recording under
a different name in a last ditch attempt to get their cruddy music on
the radio?”32 The fiction of Ruben and the Jets, though transparent, is
fairly elaborate. The record jacket features a biographical account enti-
tled “The Story of Ruben and the Jets.” From this source, we learn that
“Ruben Sano was 19 when he quit the group to work on his car,” that the
other central members of the group were named Natcho, Louie, Pana,
and Chuy, and sundry other facts. The back cover features a sepia-­toned
photograph of Zappa, made to look as much as possible like a Chicano
teenager of the 1950s. That Ruben and the Jets were ostensibly Mexican
American reflects Zappa’s experiences growing up in Southern Califor-
nia and his association of doo-­wop with the local pachuco subculture.
Many of Zappa’s albums bear his oft-­repeated credo, a 1921 quotation
from the composer Edgard Varèse: “The present-­day composer refuses
to die!” On Ruben and the Jets, this credo appears as “The present-­day
Pachuco refuses to die!” and is attributed to Sano in 1955. The substitu-
tion of pachuco for composer clearly suggests that Zappa saw the Chicano
subculture as a generative force in West Coast rock and roll. (Although
the Chicano contribution to rock and roll would be more broadly recog-
nized later on, Zappa’s highly visible acknowledgment in the late 1960s
was unique.)33
Although Zappa often evoked the 1950s in his compositions, he fre-
quently seemed to be parodying doo-­wop and sometimes made dispar-
aging comments about rock and roll’s musical simplicity and its roman-
 194  •   in concert

tic sentimentality. Zappa also used his interest in rock and roll as a way
of asserting his own musical catholicity and sophistication. In the liner
notes to Freak Out! (1966), the Mothers’ first album, Zappa provides a
long list of influences that includes composers ranging from Ravel to
Mauricio Kagel, progressive jazz figures like Eric Dolphy and Cecil Tay-
lor, a number of blues musicians, and radio disc jockeys famous for hav-
ing helped publicize rhythm and blues, such as Hunter Hancock and
Wolfman Jack.34 Zappa thus represented 1950s music as the guilty plea-
sure of an otherwise highly refined musical sensibility. Zappa neverthe-
less seems to have been genuinely fond of doo-­wop, saying in 1974: “It’s
always been my contention that the music that was happening during the
Fifties has been one of the finest things that ever happened to American
music, and I loved it.”35 He asserted both his enthusiasm for doo-­wop
and his understanding of its significance to the Mexican American com-
munity at several points in his career. One of Zappa’s early efforts was
the song “Memories of El Monte,” which he wrote and produced for the
Penguins, a West Coast doo-­wop group from the 1950s that reunited in
1963. The song celebrates the West Coast rhythm-­and-­blues scene of the
1950s, with particular reference to the El Monte Legion Hall, a legend-
ary venue for vocal groups frequented by a largely Mexican American
audience.36 In 1969, Zappa signed the Persuasions, an a cappella doo-­
wop group, to his Straight Records imprint, giving the group their first
record deal. A few years after recording Ruben and the Jets, Zappa worked
with singer Rubén Guevara to create a group called Ruben and the Jets
that was different from the Mothers of Invention. Zappa produced an
album for the group, appropriately entitled Ruben and the Jets—­for Real!
(1973). The album contains songs in 1950s styles, including one written
by Zappa and others by group members, alongside versions of such old-
ies as “Dedicated to the One I Love” and “Almost Grown.” The group,
made up largely of Chicano musicians, opened for the Mothers of Inven-
tion on several occasions and performed at what Guevara called “kind of
a Chicano/Mexican American Woodstock” at San Diego State University
in 1973.37 Their work also appears on some recorded anthologies of Chi-
cano rock and is considered an important step in the evolution of the
Mexican American rock scene in Los Angeles.
Even though Cruising with Ruben and the Jets showcases a fictional
group, it refers, like Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll album, to Zappa’s and the
Mothers’ actual history. Whereas the songs on Rock ’n’ Roll evoke Len-
non’s youth as a member of cover bands, the songs on Ruben and the Jets
refer to Zappa having started his career as a songwriter, producer, and
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   195

performer in the last moments of the doo-­wop era. Several of the songs
on the album were first recorded by Zappa in 1963—­some were eventu-
ally released on Frank Zappa: The Lost Episodes (1996)—­and may have
been written before that. The Mothers of Invention evolved from a bar
band called the Soul Giants that became the Mothers after Zappa joined
as a guitarist in 1964. The Soul Giants, and an earlier group Zappa was in
called the Blackouts, were to Zappa’s history what Johnny and the Moon-
dogs were to Lennon’s. The earliest lineup of the Mothers of Invention
was ethnically diverse, including an Italian American (Zappa), a Mexican
American (Roy Estrada), a Jewish American (Elliot Ingber), and a Native
American (Jimmy Carl Black), among others. Although only one mem-
ber was of Mexican heritage, the obviously non-­WASP ethnicity of the
group and its career as a bar band made the Mothers stand out on the
Los Angeles music scene of the mid-­1960s and caused them to be identi-
fied with the Chicano subculture. As one observer put it: “The Mothers
were considered weird. They were almost like pachuco guys, a low-­rider
greaser band, rather than Sunset Strip types.”38 The Soul Giants and the
early Mothers of Invention were Ruben and the Jets, at least in the sense
that they were perceived as outsiders and, therefore, as not “white.” And
because, in the Southern California of the early 1960s, not white meant
Mexican, the group was seen as pachuco-­like.
If Ruben and the Jets thus represent the Mothers’ immediate past at
the time of the album, they also metaphorically represent the group’s
future. In his liner notes, Zappa imagines the Mothers/Jets as “just a
bunch of old men with rock & roll clothes on sitting around the studio,
mumbling about the good old days.” This image suggests imaginatively
how a 1950s group such as Ruben and the Jets might have felt in 1968,
but it also anticipates how the Mothers might feel a decade or more after
their own heyday. Zappa expresses a sense of historical continuity similar
to Lennon’s by suggesting that rock musicians have a desire to perform
rock and roll and identify with older musicians. But Zappa’s version of
historical continuity has a melancholic undertone, in that he seems to be
warning the rock musicians of the 1960s that they are merely the golden
oldies of the near future. Whereas Lennon posits historical continuity in
terms of the persistence of rock and roll in rock, Zappa’s version of his-
torical continuity rests on the inevitability of obsolescence. In this view,
to dismiss the artists of the past as old hat is merely to anticipate one’s
own eventual dismissal.
Zappa’s liner notes express an ambivalence that is congruent with
his decision both to embrace the 1950s by performing doo-­wop and to
 196  •   in concert

keep the era at a distance by attributing his own album of 1950s-­style

music to a fictional group. He describes Ruben and the Jets as “an album
of greasy love songs & cretin simplicity,” but goes on to say, “We made it
because we really like this kind of music.” The way the Mothers perform
the music on the album is in keeping with their acknowledged fondness
for an outmoded and seemingly unsophisticated style: they exaggerate
the characteristics of doo-­wop enough to constitute parody but do not
rob the music of its genre-­based appeal. The biography of the fictional
group includes a comparative assessment of the music of the 1950s and
1960s:

All the guys in the band hope that you are sick & tired like they are
of all this crazy far out music some of the bands of today are playing.
They hope you are so sick & tired of it that you are ready for their real
sharp style of music. They are good socially acceptable young men
who only want to sing about their girl friends. They want everybody to
start dancing close back together again like 1955 because they know
that people need to love & also want to hold on to each other.39

As this text hints, part of Zappa’s ambivalence toward doo-­wop may stem
from a suspicion that although the Mothers liked doo-­wop, the earlier
practitioners of that style would not appreciate the Mothers’ other, more
“crazy far out music”—­leading one to wonder whether the Everly Broth-
ers appreciated Ono’s musical style. The link that Zappa implies in his
liner notes between singing only about romance and “cretin simplicity”
suggests that Zappa sees rock and roll as unserious by comparison with
the rock of the 1960s. But Zappa’s proposition in the band biography
that the function of doo-­wop is to promote love suggests, in turn, that
Zappa’s embrace of rock ideology is as ambivalent as his relationship to
doo-­wop. Zappa implies a parallel between the 1950s ethos of romance
and the 1960s proclamation that “All You Need Is Love” and thus sug-
gests that the counterculture may not have been that different at heart
from the supposedly conformist teen culture of the 1950s, against which
the counterculture defined itself.40 Because Zappa was famous through-
out his life for mocking the very counterculture that embraced his music
and persona, it may be that he was implying that the 1960s ethos of free
love was just as simplistic as the 1950s ethos of romance.
I place the Ruben and the Jets album in the midsection of my con-
tinuum of performed authenticity because it possesses qualities that
align it in different ways with each pole. Whereas both the cultural iden-
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   197

tity attributed to Ruben and the Jets and the music they perform have
important biographical connections to Zappa and the Mothers, the
fictionality and ethnic stereotyping of Ruben and the Jets align them
with the simulationist Sha Na Na. Like Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll, Zappa’s
album of 1950s-­style music is rooted in his own authentic, biographi-
cally grounded relationship to the earlier music. Lennon reflects on
his own past as a member of rock-­and-­roll cover bands by performing
famous rock-­and-­roll songs. Zappa revisits his own history as a writer and
producer of 1950s-­style music in the early 1960s. In Goffman’s terms,
Lennon embraces the role of 1950s rock-­and-­roller, while Sha Na Na dis-
tances itself from that role in the sense that it makes no demand that the
audience take it seriously in that guise. The Mothers’ invention of a fic-
tional group to perform 1950s music suggests an unwillingness to fully
embrace the earlier era and a concomitant desire to keep it at a certain
distance. Lennon, who straightforwardly celebrates rock and roll, does
not share Zappa’s ambivalence toward the 1950s but claims to relive the
era nostalgically and uncritically.
Wizzard’s Introducing Eddy and the Falcons has much in common with
the Mothers’ Cruising with Ruben and the Jets. Both are albums of neo-­
1950s music written by rock musicians associated with the 1960s and
1970s and attributed to a metafictional group. The album cover for Eddy
and the Falcons is designed as the surface of a red-­and-­white checked
tablecloth covering a table in a cheap diner. Laid on the table are an
ornate business card, an ID bracelet, a greasy comb, and a number of
photographs. The business card indicates that Eddy and the Falcons are
a group native to Birmingham, England, where they are available to play
at social functions, dances, and weddings. (Roy Wood, the creator and
leader of Wizzard, is from Birmingham. In the early 1960s, he played
there with a local group, Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders, perhaps the
prototype for Eddy and the Falcons. In the mid-­1960s, he was a found-
ing member of the Move, one of the most nationally successful groups
to emerge from the Birmingham music scene. He later helped found
the Electric Light Orchestra as an offshoot of the Move.) The opening
moments of the recording are a dialogue in which two fans see Eddy in
the street and marvel at how good he looks. This moment is followed by
the sounds of a live performance and thunderous applause greeting the
introduction of Eddy and the Falcons, perhaps indicating that the entire
episode is set in the 1950s, during Eddy and the Falcons’ presumed peak
of popularity—­as the album title, which suggests a group’s first record-
ing, implies. On the other hand, it may be set in the revivalist moment of
 198  •   in concert

the 1970s and suggest that Eddy is a superannuated rock-­and-­roller still

around during the rock era.
The ID bracelet next to the card has “Wizzard” engraved on it, reveal-
ing the true identity of the group that made the album—­though this
identity is itself problematic, an issue I take up later. The gatefold pho-
tographs recount a narrative in which Eddy and the Falcons, dressed
as teddy boys and rockers, enter the diner. A conflict develops and the
members of the group assault one of their own number. Although the
movie posters on the wall of the diner—­for The Buccaneer (1958) and
Rebel without a Cause (1955)—­and the group’s attire suggest a 1950s
setting, the members of Eddy and the Falcons have the long hair and
beards of 1960s rock musicians. The idea of rock musicians revisiting
the rock-­and-­roll past and its attendant subcultural identities is thus put
into play once again.
Although Introducing Eddy and the Falcons is in many ways a northern
English counterpart to the Southern Californian Cruising with Ruben and
the Jets, it is sufficiently different to necessitate a separate analysis and its
own position on my proposed continuum. To make the discriminations
necessary to explain how Eddy and the Falcons differ from Ruben and
the Jets, I contrast them in terms of rock auteurship. As William Straw
indicates, the rock criticism of the 1970s emphasized “the importance
of performer biography and personal vision . . . [and] explicitly adopted
many of the concerns of auteurist film criticism.”41 (My own approach
here echoes this trend, as I have identified the work of rock groups for
the most part as reflecting the respective personal visions of particular
individuals.) The premise of auteurist rock criticism was articulated by
the American critic Jon Landau, who said, “The criterion of art in rock is
the capacity of the musician to create a personal, almost private, universe
and to express it fully.”42 As Simon Frith has wisely suggested, rock auteur-
ship is not limited to any one function in the music production pro-
cess. A rock auteur “may be writer, singer, instrumentalist, band, record
producer, or even engineer.”43 Brian Wilson, the composer, arranger,
instrumentalist, singer, and producer responsible for the most acclaimed
Beach Boys records, is certainly considered a rock auteur. Nonperform-
ing producers whose recordings have notable stylistic signatures, such as
Phil Spector, are also labeled as rock auteurs. Arguably, even singers like
Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin, who mostly interpreted other people’s songs
but articulated them through distinctive and identifiable vocal styles and
personae, could be ranked among rock auteurs.
Rock auteurship and rock authenticity are closely related concepts.
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   199

Auteurship can be said to be a necessary condition for authenticity in

the sense that rock music, to be considered authentic, must be perceived
as the work of an identifiable auteur. Spector, for example, produced
records by the girl group the Crystals using two different sets of singers.
The Crystals, at least as a recording entity, therefore cannot be an authen-
tic group by the standards of rock ideology, but a measure of authenticity
can be recuperated by designating Spector as the auteur of those record-
ings, by suggesting, in other words, that the Crystals’ records give the
listener access to Spector’s personal vision, if not the singers’ or song-
writers’. If the concept of auteurship is mapped onto the continuum
of authenticity I have extrapolated from rock artists’ relationships to
rock-­and-­roll music, the poles of the continuum correspond directly to
auteur status. At one extreme, a figure such as Lennon has impeccable
credentials in both areas—­his music is considered highly authentic and
expressive of his personal universe. At the opposite extreme, Sha Na Na
can claim neither authenticity nor auteurship. As purveyors of borrowed
music, styles, and performance personae unmoored by autobiographical
reference, there is no sense in which their performances are expressive
of an individualized vision.
The concept of auteurship can help us to make finer-­grained distinc-
tions among the groups positioned between the continuum’s two poles.
Although the fictional group Ruben and the Jets is clearly anchored
in Zappa’s own biography and musical history, Zappa situates himself
and the Mothers at one remove from a direct engagement with rock
and roll in a way that Lennon, for instance, does not. Zappa thus places
the authenticity of his performances of rock-­and-­roll music somewhat
into question—­though not to the degree that Sha Na Na’s authenticity
is in question. If the relationship of Ruben and the Jets to authentic-
ity is ambivalent, Zappa’s auteur status is unambiguous. Zappa is widely
regarded as one of rock’s most ambitious and sophisticated compos-
ers, as well as one of its greatest iconoclasts, and his entire recorded
output—­including records made with various editions of the Mothers
of Invention, with Captain Beefheart, with symphony orchestras or jazz
musicians, and under his own name—­are all seen as expressing a single,
albeit complex, sensibility. Cruising with Ruben and the Jets is readily assimi-
lable to Zappa’s auteurship. His decision to make a doo-­wop album at
the height of the psychedelic era can easily be seen as an example of
his characteristic refusal to conform to the expectations of rock culture.
The simple fact that four of the songs on Ruben and the Jets had already
appeared—­performed quite differently—­on Freak Out! indicates the
 200  •   in concert

degree of continuity between Ruben and the Jets and the Mothers’ oeu-
vre. Freak Out! also includes other songs in a doo-­wop style, including “Go
Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder,” which Zappa describes in the liner
notes to that album as “very greasy,” the same adjective he later applied
to Ruben and the Jets. From the start, then, the Mothers of Invention
staked out doo-­wop—­treated as parody—­as part of their stylistic terri-
tory. Ruben and the Jets represent that part of Zappa’s vision, spun off
from the group’s primary identity but with the Mothers clearly standing
behind them. (Sha Na Na can be understood as Ruben and the Jets with-
out the Mothers—­an inauthentic group that cannot be recuperated as
authentic by reference to auteurship.) Despite Zappa’s ambivalent rela-
tionship to rock and roll, the fact that Ruben and the Jets readily can be
seen as a product of his auteurship trumps the group’s fictionality and
positions the album in the middle of the continuum but toward the pole
of authenticity.
Despite its many similarities to Cruising with Ruben and the Jets, Wiz-
zard’s Introducing Eddy and the Falcons is a somewhat different case. Wood,
the leader of Wizzard, is a figure not entirely dissimilar to Zappa, in that
he is a remarkably talented multi-­instrumentalist and songwriter with
a satirical bent, a keen ear for the particulars of musical styles, and an
ability to play in a variety of musical idioms, ranging from rock and roll
to free jazz. But the construction of Eddy and the Falcons is different from
that of Ruben and the Jets in several significant ways. For one thing, Wood
does not create a discursive context for the fictional group—­there is no
biography or information about Eddy and the Falcons, only the artifacts
depicted on the record cover and a hint in the recorded introduction
on the album itself. Wood does not provide direct links between Eddy
and the Falcons and his own early career in the way that both Lennon
and Zappa do. In addition, the music on the recording covers a variety
of styles, from rock and roll to rockabilly to teen ballads to an evocation
of Spector’s “wall of sound” production style. The variety of styles is not
significant in itself—­Lennon, too, covers a variety of early rock-­and-­roll
styles on his album. What is important, however, is that whereas Lennon
is the key presence in his renditions of the songs—­it is crucial to the
aura of authenticity that we be continuously conscious of the fact that it
is John Lennon singing this material—­Wood disappears into the mate-
rial itself. Wood’s voice—­perhaps a rock musician’s most identifiable
trait—­is very different on each track. Wood alters the range, timbre, and
accent of his voice—­all of the various accents he uses are American—­in
keeping with the conventions of each musical genre he emulates. He
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   201

shapes his voice to the particular style of each song, rather than inter-
preting the songs in a manner that stamps them with his personality as a
performer as Lennon does.44
Whereas Zappa’s doo-­wop songs are faithful to that style but not
directly reminiscent of other songs, Wood’s songs are frequently pas-
tiches that sound very similar to other, well-­known songs. “Everyday I
Wonder,” for example, borrows the well-­ known organ riff from Del
Shannon’s “Runaway” and bears a strong resemblance to the earlier
song—­the famous organ solo from Shannon’s recording reappears in an
arrangement for double reeds. Similarly, “Come Back Karen” strongly
resembles Neil Sedaka’s “Oh Carol.” Wood’s use of pastiche has the curi-
ous effect of robbing Eddy and the Falcons of authenticity, even though
their music accurately reflects styles of the 1950s and early 1960s. The
fact that the Falcons’ songs clearly borrow from other songs makes them
referential in a way that Zappa’s doo-­wop songs are not. Because Wood’s
songs sound like other songs but are not those other songs, they seem
inauthentic even in comparison with Sha Na Na’s repertoire, which does
consist, after all, of real 1950s music.
Wood’s use of pastiche and his chameleon-­like disappearance into
the sonic environments of his songs present interesting problems for
assessing Wood’s auteurship. The existence of a recorded compilation
entitled Roy Wood: The Definite Album (1989) that includes material from
his work with the Move, the Electric Light Orchestra, Wizzard, and under
his own name suggests that there are continuities in his work since the
mid-­1960s that might qualify him as an auteur. Indeed there are: the
eccentric use of such orchestral instruments as the cello and the bassoon
in a rock context characterizes much of Wood’s work since at least 1966,
for example. But one of the central traits that unifies Wood’s work is pre-
cisely the referentiality of his songs, his use of pastiche. One of the Move’s
UK hits, “Blackberry Way” (1969), for instance, clearly derives from the
Beatles’ “Penny Lane.” Another example of pastiche in Wood’s oeuvre is
“1st Movement” from the first Electric Light Orchestra album, No Answer
(1972), which strongly resembles an earlier popular example of classi-
cal/pop fusion, Mason Williams’s “Classical Gas” (1968). On Wood’s hit
single “Forever” (1973), his singing, musical arrangement, and record-
ing technique alternate between a style similar to that of the Beach Boys
and another that mimics Neil Sedaka’s teen ballads. Although Wood is
certainly a rock auteur, the “personal, almost private universe” his work
expresses seems not to consist of elements that provide access to his
biography, experiences, emotions, vision, or psyche. Rather, his private
 202  •   in concert

universe would seem to be largely made up of stylistic elements derived

from the history of rock and pop music. Paradoxically, what makes Wood
distinctive as a creator of rock music is his recombinant approach to
composition, the way he makes his own work by cannibalizing existing
songs and styles. He is an auteur whose signature is his very lack of signa-
ture or his appropriation of the signatures of others.
I indicated earlier that the ID bracelet bearing the name Wizzard
depicted on the cover of Introducing Eddy and the Falcons reveals the true
authorship of the album and exposes Eddy and the Falcons as a fictional
guise assumed by another group. But whereas the Mothers of Invention
provide a grounding identity for Ruben and the Jets, Wizzard does not
perform the same function for Eddy and the Falcons. This is because
Wizzard, like Eddy and the Falcons, is itself a group of questionable
authenticity. After disbanding the Move and leaving the Electric Light
Orchestra, Wood created Wizzard—­also called, significantly, Roy Wood’s
Wizzard—­in 1972 as a vehicle for his musical concerns. The group qua
group has no specific identity beyond that—­although the names of its
other members are known, they are of little importance. Wood wrote
all of Wizzard’s songs, produced their recordings, provided their lead
vocals, and played most of the instruments on the recordings, using the
group primarily as a way of performing the same material in live set-
tings. Behind Eddy and the Falcons, then, is another cipher, Wizzard.
Behind Wizzard is Wood, an enigmatic figure whose elusive presence
seems designed to maneuver around the ideologies of authenticity and
auteurship so important to rock, without allowing himself to be pinned
down. An assessment of all factors related to authenticity and auteur-
ship thus suggests that Eddy and the Falcons’ position on the continuum
should be in the middle ground but toward the pole of inauthenticity.

(In)authenticity/(Post)modernism

My identification of the pole of inauthenticity with such practices as

simulation and pastiche suggests that rock artists whose work lies close
to that pole have an affinity with what is often called postmodernism.
At a coarse analytical level, the terms modernism and postmodernism seem
to map efficiently onto the others I have used here, with authenticity,
auteurship, and modernism at one pole of the continuum and inauthen-
ticity, pastiche, and postmodernism at the other (see fig. 20). Although
the various relationships among these critical terms and the musicians I
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   203

Authenticity Inauthenticity
Auteurship Pastiche
Modernism Postmodernism

---|----------------------------|---------------------------------------------- |------------------------------ |---

J. Lennon and the F. Zappa and R. Wood and Sha Na Na
Plastic Ono Band the Mothers Wizzard

Figure 20. The continuum on which I have mapped the four artists discussed here
to illustrate and differentiate their respective performed relationships to rock and
roll of the 1950s.

have discussed here could be represented by a more complex graphical

metaphor, the linear model of a continuum provides a clear rendering.
I would hardly be the first analyst of rock to suggest that the emphasis
on authenticity and auteurship in the rock counterculture of the 1960s
constitutes a modernist outlook. Both Grossberg and Straw suggest that
the diminished importance of authenticity and auteurship in the rock
culture of the 1980s indicates a major historical shift to postmodernism.
In general, I find this to be the most productive way of thinking about
postmodernism in rock. Any attempt to identify postmodernist tenden-
cies solely by looking at the textual features of rock music seems unlikely
to produce satisfactory results because there simply are not consistent
criteria one can apply.45 To focus on authenticity and auteurship is to
focus not just on what music is performed and how it is performed but
centrally on the ways in which musicians perform their relationships to
the music—­their identities as musicians—­and the degree to which those
performances conform to ideologically determined expectations. These
performances of musical identity are manifest not only in compositions
and sound recordings but also in the kinds of texts and images I have
discussed here: record covers, liner notes, incidental sounds on record-
ings, all objects not usually subjected to close analysis by historians and
critics of rock.
The story I have told here could be seen as the prehistory of the shift
to postmodernism in the 1980s identified by Straw and Grossberg. In
Grossberg’s view, there have always been practices within rock that con-
test the ideology of authenticity, and it has been part of my project here
to suggest an approach to writing the history of rock that places those
practices alongside the ideologically dominant ones rather than sup-
pressing them, which is what usually happens.46 As I noted earlier, Sha
 204  •   in concert

Na Na is commonly omitted from the history of rock—­Stokes and Dis-

ter are very rare exceptions. Figures such as Zappa and Wood are often
seen as ingenious tricksters and iconoclasts whose work has interest but
is finally marginal to the central concerns of rock culture. Through my
admittedly artificial conceptual device of a continuum on which to place
the performances of a variety of musicians, I am suggesting that we may
better understand what is at stake in the enactment of rock’s ideology of
authenticity by looking at the full range of artistic practices around it,
perhaps especially at those complex cases I have placed in the middle
range of the continuum.
Despite the postmodernist leanings suggested by the simulationist prac-
tices I have identified here, especially in the work of Sha Na Na and Wood,
there is one important way in which all the artists I have discussed may be
best described as modernists or even traditionalists. The context in which
I have examined their work has to do specifically with how they perform
their musical identities in relation to the history of rock and the devel-
opment of historical consciousness within rock culture. Grossberg refers
to the counterideological tendency in rock as “authentic inauthenticity,”
which “says that authenticity itself is a construction, an image, which is no
better or worse than any other. Authenticity is, in fact, no more authentic
than any other self-­consciously created identity. This logic foregrounds an
ironic nihilism which refuses to valorize any single image, identity, action
or value as somehow intrinsically better than any other.”47
Whether or not this characterization is an accurate description of
some popular music in the 1980s, it provides only a partial description
of the performances I have discussed here. It would certainly be fair to
say that Sha Na Na, Zappa, and Wood all foreground, to varying degrees,
the idea that rock authenticity is a construct no more authentic, in an
absolute sense, than any other constructed identity. But none of the
artists I have discussed here implies that all images and identities are
of equal value. As artificial and parodic as Sha Na Na’s performance
personae are, the music they perform credibly has historical importance
in the context of rock culture, and that is one reason they perform it.
The same is true for Zappa’s doo-­wop and the many styles performed by
Wizzard. Because each of these groups performs musical styles that are
historically meaningful in rock culture, albeit through the mediation of
fictional entities, I will reverse Grossberg’s formulation to describe their
stance as one of inauthentic authenticity: the music itself finally retains
the authenticity of historical reference regardless of the self-­conscious
and sometimes parodic fictions framing its performance.
 Good Old Rock and Roll  •   205

Lennon, Sha Na Na, and Wizzard all legitimately can be accused of

homogenizing a wide variety of disparate musical styles with different
historical and cultural origins for the sake of performing a uniform con-
ception of “the 1950s.” As Jim Smethurst suggests, however, such homog-
enization was a historically accurate reflection “of the experience of
early rock ’n’ roll audiences who listened to radio stations and attended
package shows in which a wide range of musical styles and genres were
presented by a racially, ethnically, and regionally diverse group of per-
formers.”48 Indeed, Sha Na Na’s first album, Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay
(1969), is framed in such a way through the inclusion of the voice of
the legendary disc jockey Alan Freed (who died in 1965) as if the album
were one of his radio broadcasts or one of the live shows he emceed,
either of which would have reflected the diversity Smethurst mentions.49
The approach to history of the 1950s revivalists did not constitute the
“bad” postmodern historicism Jameson describes as an “indiscriminate
appetite for dead styles and fashion” because they did not abstract the
styles from their historical significance to rock culture, especially in the
context of the renewed interest in rock and roll that began in the late
1960s.50 While Zappa, Sha Na Na, and Wizzard all ironically distance
themselves from the music they perform—­again, to varying degrees—­
through the creation of artificial personae, their choices of “dead”
musical styles to perform and pastiche are hardly indiscriminate: all are
clearly significant to rock’s sense of its own history.
All musical styles and performed identities are not equal in this con-
text, and it is not coincidental that certain signs reappear across all of
the work I have discussed. These are the signs of affiliation to various
working-­class subcultures (greasers, rockers, teddy boys, and pachucos)
and to music scenes (northern England, Southern California, New York,
Hamburg—­and, implicitly, Liverpool) considered to have played impor-
tant roles in the evolution of rock from rock and roll. It is worth noting
that all the groups I have discussed contextualize their performances of
rock and roll sociogeographically. The cover of Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll
album both represents him as belonging to a specific British youth sub-
culture and refers to the frequency with which British bands of the early
1960s worked in Germany. As I have discussed, Ruben and the Jets con-
structs the Mothers of Invention as the pachuco group they were taken
to be in mid-­1960s Los Angeles. Eddy and the Falcons are identified
specifically as a local phenomenon belonging to the working-­class milieu
of the UK’s industrial north. Even Sha Na Na was frequently introduced
with the phrase “from the streets of New York.” This association of rock
 206  •   in concert

and roll with specific cities, class identities, ethnicities, and music scenes
is open to several interpretations. In part, it may be that the groups and
individuals who made these recordings retained a sentimental attach-
ment to their origins. Their emphasis on specific geographies may also
reflect nostalgia for a popular music industry that once operated on the
scale of a local cottage industry but had swelled to the proportions of a
multinational corporate enterprise by the late 1960s. By that time, the
likelihood of seeing Eddy on the streets of the hometown he shares with
his fans had diminished considerably.
Mark J. V. Olson discusses the connection between the concept of
belonging to a particular, localized music scene and authenticity. He
argues that “place-­ based scenes produce places where one can pre-
sumably live an ‘authentic’ relation to rock in one’s daily life.”51 This
comment suggests that there is a connection between geography and
biography in the relationship of rock musicians to authenticity. To one
extent or another, Lennon, Zappa, and Wood all assert their respective
biographical relationships to rock and roll in terms of particular geog-
raphies, music scenes, and ethnic, class, and subcultural identities. Even
Sha Na Na evokes such identities, albeit without asserting a biographi-
cal connection to them. If insisting that some identities are more worth
performing than others is a modernist gesture, then the various degrees
of acceptance and contestation of rock’s ideology of authenticity I have
identified in the music of the rock-­and-­roll revival period are firmly
inscribed within modernism.52
 C h a pter Ten

Barbie in a Meat Dress

Performance and Mediatization in the Twenty-­First Century
•••

In the late 1980s, I took up the question of how performers were nego-
tiating a postmodern cultural environment in which a number of previ-
ously established givens, such as the dichotomies between art and com-
merce, high and low culture, artist and entertainer, live and recorded
performance, artistic integrity and “selling out” could no longer be
taken for granted. I focused on two performers, Spalding Gray and Lau-
rie Anderson, each of whom could be described as a performance artist
while also having clear ties to other forms (Gray to theater and literature,
Anderson to music and visual art). I defined postmodern culture primar-
ily as mediatized culture, by which I meant a cultural formation completely
saturated by media information, imagery, and epistemologies. Following
Dana Polan, I argued that postmodern culture could be understood on
a model derived from Raymond Williams’s concept of flow.1
The ur-­narrative of flow is Williams’s experience of American tele-
vision in 1973 while in a somewhat altered state of consciousness, as
described in his 1973 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form.

One night in Miami, still dazed from a week on an Atlantic liner, I

began watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a
much greater frequency of commercial “breaks.” Yet this was a minor
problem compared to what eventually happened. Two other films,

207
 208  •   in concert

which were due to be shown on the same channel on other nights,

began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject
of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counter-
point not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with
a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who
laid waste New York. . . . [T]he transitions from film to commercial
and from film A to films B and C were in effect unmarked. There
is in any case enough similarity between certain kinds of films, and
between several kinds of film and the “situation” commercials which
often consciously imitate them, to make a sequence of this kind a very
difficult experience to interpret. I can still not be sure what I took
from that whole flow. I believe I registered some incidents as hap-
pening in the wrong film, and some characters in the commercials
as involved in the film episodes, in what came to seem—­for all the
occasional bizarre disparities—­a single irresponsible flow of images
and feelings.2

I took Williams’s description of the “single, irresponsible flow of images

and feelings” produced by television as both a model for understanding
the cultural flows of postmodernism and an index of the degree to which
postmodern culture was mediatized by the televisual. In this cultural
condition, no single expression, work, or text stands on its own: any-
thing can show up at any point in the flow, everything is always already in
relation to (overlapping, repeating, interrupting) other things, and the
meaning of each thing emerges relationally rather than autonomously.
In the 1980s, performers like Anderson and Gray consciously or
unconsciously developed a strategy to traverse the flow of postmodern
culture by developing highly mobile performance personae that could
function in multiple contexts and discourses both simultaneously and
sequentially. These personae were not characters in that they were not
anchored in specific narratives or fictions but appeared across multiple
scenarios. In Gray’s case, his persona emerged from the autobiographi-
cal monologues he performed first on stage, then on film and television,
but served also as an actor (Gray’s conventional film and theater per-
formances seemed as if they were undertaken by his persona), a fiction
writer (the main character of Gray’s novel Impossible Vacation is his per-
sona, who is also the author of the first-­person narrative), a critic (Gray
wrote for the New York Times Book Review in the voice of his persona), and
so on.
 Barbie in a Meat Dress  •   209

The Spalding persona, which began as the [semi]fictional conceit

of his performances, has become “real” by virtue of its continual
reappearance in the cultural arena.  .  .  . The blending of real and
fabricated personae and situations that occurs when performance
personae assume the same functions as “real” people in the media
has much the same effect as the flowing together of various levels and
types of meanings on television, but on a larger scale.3

By developing personae that could take up positions in multiple cultural

discourses, performers could engage productively with the information
flow of postmodern culture without being wholly absorbed into it and
equally without pretending it was possible to step outside of it to more
stable and traditionally defined positions.
My analysis of the use these performers made of personae harmo-
nizes with Stig Hjarvard’s somewhat later work on mediatization. Hjar-
vard defines the mediatization of society as “the process whereby culture
and society to an increasing degree become dependent on the media
and their logic.”4 He distinguishes two kinds of mediatization: direct and
indirect. Direct mediatization refers to situations where formerly nonme-
diated activity converts to a mediated form; that is, the activity is per-
formed through interaction with a medium. A simple example of direct
mediatization is “the successive transformation of chess from physical
chessboard to computer game.”5 As a further example, music has been
mediatized in this sense since the late nineteenth century as first sound
recordings, then radio broadcasts, then television and music video
replaced live performances as the primary forms in which audiences
consume music. The work of performers like Anderson and Gray, which
originated in live performance but was translated into media forms,
underwent a parallel mediatization.
Hjarvard defines indirect mediatization as occurring “when a given
activity is increasingly influenced with respect to its form, content, orga-
nization, or context by media symbols or mechanisms.”6 If the appear-
ance of performances by Anderson, Gray, or any performer not only
as live performances but also on audio recordings, video, film, and so
on exemplifies direct mediatization, the ways in which media influence
and have infiltrated not just the means by which audiences access per-
formances but also the form of the performances and the nature of the perform-
ing in them exemplifies indirect mediatization. One example concerning
form comes directly from Williams’s discussion of television, where he
 210  •   in concert

notes that commercial television programs are not autonomous texts

that are artificially segmented and interrupted by commercial breaks.
Rather, the programs are designed to accommodate segmentation and
interruption; they are designed to accommodate these characteristics of
the broadcast flow.7 The construction of personae designed to function
within a particular media environment epitomizes indirect mediatiza-
tion at the level of performing. To the extent that performing itself can
reflect the internalization of mediatization, one may be watching media-
tization at work even in a live performance that involves no use of media
technology.
Recent examples of both the use of personae as a way of navigating
mediatized culture and the indirect mediatization of performance can
be found in the work of Nicki Minaj. Minaj is an American popular musi-
cian, both a rapper and a singer, noted for spectacular, highly theatrical,
often provocative performances and for portraying multiple characters
in her recordings, onstage, and in other public appearances. Some of her
songs are understood to be in the voices of the characters she embodies
in performance through costume, wigs, physical comportment, voice,
accent, and even language, such as Roman Zolanski and Harajuku Bar-
bie, while others are sung by the persona Nicki Minaj (not the artist’s
name at birth). Some of Minaj’s characters, such as the Spanish-­speaking
Rosa, do not perform music but appear in other parts of Minaj’s life
as a celebrity: Rosa, for example, has given interviews in Minaj’s place.8
It is nothing new for a popular music performer to employ persona as
a performance tool and a means of constructing dramatic narratives;
Simon Reynolds has suggested that Minaj is connected, genealogically if
not by direct lines of influence, to such other performers who exploited
the possibilities of persona as David Bowie and Madonna.9 But Minaj has
pushed this possibility to extremes, almost to the point of implying that
she is driven by a dissociative identity disorder.
When Minaj appeared in person at a Macy’s department store in New
York City as Barbie for the launch of her signature perfume, Pink Friday,
in 2012, she was available to a live audience in the way that is traditional
for events of this kind.10 Nevertheless, Minaj’s presence as Barbie reflects
the impact of mediatization on her performing, even in live appear-
ances, and reflects the continuing influence of television. Minaj’s Barbie
is, after all, a character based on a mass-­produced doll created in 1959,
at the end of the golden age of television during which the medium
established itself as an indispensable part of American culture. Barbie
herself is mediatized in ways that go beyond her immediate life as an
 Barbie in a Meat Dress  •   211

object. Her ever-­evolving identity derives as much from the television

commercials in which she appears as from the changing appearance of
the dolls themselves,11 and the fact that there are numerous Barbies at
any given time (at the time of writing, Barbie is available in multiple fash-
ionista versions, an African American version (named Nikki, interest-
ingly enough), versions made to reflect the work of artists such as Keith
Haring and Andy Warhol, dolls made in the images of famous women,
and many others). Minaj identifies closely with Barbie—­she encourages
her fans to call themselves Barbies (or Barbs), and she has reenacted
scenes from the life of Barbie as both an object (Minaj has appeared as
a doll in a life-­size box of the kind Barbies are sold in and a character
in a series of lifestyle narratives.12 The story of Barbie in television com-
mercials frequently leads up her marriage, which Minaj’s Barbie has also
performed.13 Even when Minaj appears live as Barbie, her performance
is mediatized by all of the televisual, advertising, and commercial refer-
ents that are intrinsic to the character. Mattel, the manufacturer of the
Barbie doll, produced one in Minaj’s likeness to raise money for char-
ity,14 thus closing the circle: Minaj modeled her character on the Barbie
doll, which in turn is now modeled on her character.
Minaj’s apparent identification with Barbie is provocative, not least
because the Barbie doll is often seen as politically and socially regressive,
particularly with respect to issues of gender and race. From the perspec-
tive of second-­wave feminist cultural critics, summarized here by Kim
Toffoletti, “Barbie signifies fixed gender roles, heterosexual norms and
consumerist values to which women must strive.”15 Despite the efforts of
Mattel, the company that manufactures Barbie, to produce more inclu-
sive models,

As the exotic Other, these dolls can never displace the primacy of Bar-
bie. They will always signal a deviation from the original and authen-
tic blonde doll. When interpreted as the epitome of racial and gender
commodification, Barbie can offer little more than a harmful and
exploitative image of femininity.16

For a black Caribbean American female musician to embrace Barbie as

one of the characters she portrays is therefore problematic.
However, as Erica Rand has documented amply in her book Barbie’s
Queer Accessories, Barbie is also a cultural site ripe for critical discourse and
subversion, especially, though not exclusively, from a queer perspective.
Rand argues, in fact, that Barbie is an ideal vehicle for critique because
 212  •   in concert

of her familiarity and the ideologies associated with her: “We know Bar-
bie is supposed to stand for a female ideal just as we know the U.S. flag
is supposed to stand for a U.S. commitment to freedom, democracy, and
justice. As a result, Barbie is user friendly for the critic-­producer, who can
begin on covered ground and move on from there.”17 Arguably, Minaj
could be counted among the “Barbie subvertors” Rand identifies.
Minaj’s strategies of subversion include the parodic performance of
hyperfemininity, which Stan Hawkins identifies in his discussion of her
song “Anaconda” and its accompanying music video as a queer approach:

Within an African American context  .  .  . the kitsch structures of

hyperembodiment on show are highly political. In this sense, she pro-
vocatively reclaims the territory that has traditionally been part of the
male rapper’s vanguard, but at the same time shakes her finger at
white females who denigrate women of color for their different physi-
cal features. Ever so queerly, “Anaconda” becomes the platform for
subverting a range of norms in the guise of a tough female rapper.18

As Hawkins suggests, Minaj uses her excessive performance of femininity

and race as means of addressing the gender politics of the musical genre
in which she is situated and the gendered racial politics of the society at
large. Hyperfemininity is accompanied by “hyperblackness” in Minaj’s
arsenal of performance stratagems and does similar work. As against
the black Barbies marketed by Mattel, “Blackness is not marginalized
in this case,” but is at the center of Minaj’s representation of herself as
a Barbie. Examining Minaj’s portrayal of “a long-­time antifeminist sym-
bol, while she simultaneously pushes back against the regime of white
beauty,” Margaret Hunter and Alhelí Cuenca conclude that “her work
challenges mainstream ideologies of blackness.”19 They concur with
Hawkins that Minaj engages in role distance (though neither he nor
they use the term) by impersonating highly stylized theatrical and clearly
fictional characters in a genre context that emphasizes “keepin’ it real”
and asserts that there is “no distinction between the rapper’s perfor-
mance and the rapper him or herself.”20 Somewhat like Randy Newman
as discussed in chapter 5, who performs a song that parodically addresses
social prejudice from an ambiguous point of view, Minaj’s complication
of the relationship between persona and character allows “her to poke
fun at whiteness, and be sexually explicit, while distancing herself from
both of these practices.”21
It is also important that Harajuku Barbie is just one of the many char-
 Barbie in a Meat Dress  •   213

acters the Minaj persona portrays. Minaj is different from Spalding Gray
in that she enacts multiple characters rather than a single persona, but
each of her characters functions culturally the way Gray’s persona did.
For example, when Minaj is interviewed, it is distinctly possible that the
entity responding to the interviewer’s questions will be a character like
Rosa, functioning for the occasion as a stand-­in for Minaj herself. In addi-
tion to appearing at the store in her Barbie character to launch Pink Fri-
day, she portrayed the same character in the online commercial for the
perfume in a more benign version of Attack of the 50-­Foot Woman.22 Not
confined to any particular song or performance text, Minaj’s characters
are free to roam the earth, showing up in commercials and music videos,
on the concert stage, as the subject of interviews, at product launches,
and so on, and the Minaj persona is free to embody characters of differ-
ent genders, races, sexualities, and nationalities without anchoring her
identity in any of them. In this respect, she not only critiques social and
cultural constructions of femininity and blackness but the very notion of
singular or coherent identity itself.23
I believe my perception of postmodern culture as mediatized culture
made sense in 1989 and is still valid. It is evident that our society and
culture have continued to move ever more rapidly in the direction of
mediatization since then. Although mediatization is a permanent condi-
tion of contemporary societies, the particular forms it takes on are his-
torically contingent. Mediatization is not an abstraction but the concrete
social and cultural impact media have on other discourses and activities.
The processes of mediatization derive from the workings of the cultur-
ally dominant media forms of a particular time, and it is quite clear that
in the quarter century since I first started formulating these ideas there
has been a significant shift. Television is no longer what it was and no lon-
ger occupies a position of uncontested cultural dominance. Although it
remains commercially important as an advertising medium and a source
of news, information, and entertainment, it has largely ceded its posi-
tion as the dominant medium in the cultural imaginary (at least from a
US perspective) to the far more ubiquitous digital media that are now
intimately woven into the fabric of our daily lives. The question is, what
difference does this difference make?
In 1973, Williams envisioned broadcast technologies—­first radio,
then television—­as windows on the world situated in the private home
through which inhabitants could receive “news from ‘outside.’”24 This
news came in the form of flow, a figure that connotes a system William
Uricchio describes as “a temporally sequenced stream of program units
 214  •   in concert

[that] constantly issues forth from the programmer, and audiences may
dip in and out as they choose.”25 Turn off the television and you are no
longer connected to the outside, though you can reconnect at any time
since the flow is continuous. As Uricchio points out, the stream Williams
experienced in 1973 and which formed the basis of this theorization of
televisual flow probably consisted of programming generated by at most
six channels, a mere trickle when compared with the amount of material
made available today by television in its various forms (broadcast, cable,
satellite, streaming, online) alongside of and interlaced with the mate-
rial available through such other devices as computers (both desktop
and portable) and smartphones.
Whereas broadcast technologies originally offered experiences that
were largely confined to a single location (usually, though not necessar-
ily, the private home) and a fairly limited flow, the technologies we use
for information, entertainment, and productivity today are with us all
the time and offer many times the amount of material anyone can actu-
ally handle. Television itself participates in this ubiquity—­no longer con-
fined to the home or places of leisure activity, television is now regularly
present in bars and restaurants, medical waiting rooms, airports, subway
stations (I have seen giant screens on the platforms of the Milan Metro,
for instance) and many other places.26 Obviously, other technologies are
even more ubiquitous: the smartphone in your pocket or purse is poten-
tially a communications center from which to make calls, do email, send
faxes, and surf the web; an entertainment center that incorporates the
functions of television, radio, cinema, stereo system, and game console;
an office where you can write, run numbers, maintain contacts, and so
on; a navigator; a personal assistant, and too many other things to enu-
merate. Rather than a discrete flow, the information made available and
the functions performed by these technologies constitutes “an immer-
sive sea,” in Lynn Spigel’s well-­chosen phrase, from which it is far more
difficult to extricate yourself.27
The changes that have come about through the growth of digital
technologies are both quantitative and qualitative. The translation of
every cultural form and function into digital information makes it pos-
sible for us to own, do, and experience more of everything more easily
than ever before. The qualitative dimensions of these changes pertain
both to our uses of these technologies and our sense of our relation-
ship to them. The degree to which we feel ourselves to be in control of
the media we use is one of the primary vectors of change over the last
twenty-­five years. Williams’s experience represents an initial moment in
 Barbie in a Meat Dress  •   215

which broadcasters structured televisual flow, and viewers experienced

it as something with which they could choose to engage or not, but over
which they had very little direct control. But this picture changed with
the arrival of the remote control and the videocassette recorder, both
of which became standard equipment in the US television home in the
course of the 1980s. By zipping, zapping, and moving between broadcast
and recorded materials, viewers constructed their own flows, even if they
were limited to the materials offered by broadcasters.28
Although television itself remains essentially in this situation today,
albeit with a far larger menu of offerings from which viewers can put
together their own flows, the Internet and social media offer us ways
of being present in the flow that television never did. In 1936, Walter
Benjamin observed,

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many

thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last cen-
tury. With the increasing extension of the press  .  .  . an increasing
number of readers became writers—­at first, occasional ones. It began
with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the edi-
tor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who
could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or
other. . . . Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to
lose its basic character. . . . At any moment the reader is ready to turn
into a writer. . . . All this can easily be applied to the film, where transi-
tions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade.
In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-­over has par-
tially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet
in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray
themselves and primarily in their own work process.29

I don’t know if Benjamin could have anticipated the opportunities

afforded by the internet and social media, but they certainly justify his
claims. Now more than ever, anyone can publish by starting a blog, by
posting comments on any of the seemingly infinite number of websites
that provide space for such feedback, by tweeting, or by posting on
Facebook or any number of other social media sites and feeds. If you
want to appear in a film, you can make one yourself (you don’t even
need a camera—­use your phone!) and post it on YouTube, Vimeo, or
other similar sites. Readers and viewers are no longer just consumers
but potentially writers, producers, and critics as well, as expressed by the
 216  •   in concert

term prosumer.30 The blurring of the distinction between production and

consumption this term implies is something we enact every day in the
multiple uses we make of our devices. As Spigel and Dawson point out,
“Mobile technologies conflate activities of leisure and labour so that, for
example, the cell phone watcher may at any moment receive a business
call or the PC user can switch between watching a Buffy rerun and figur-
ing out earnings on the latest stock reports.”31
Kathleen Oswald and Jeremy Packer have proposed to extend the
concept of flow to the trajectories we construct among the many screens
we use, arguing “the traditional accounts of what television did continue,
but across more devices.”32

In our conception, flow is the process by which subjects and attendant

data move seamlessly through the world in unison. Numerous and
varied screens (television, computer, tablets, mobile phones) work in
concert to network and extend the self in whatever ways are necessary
to link and guide the constant flow of the self’s social, governmen-
tal, economic, and biopolitical data in ever-­present and in ever-­useful
means.33

While Oswald and Packer’s rehabilitation of Williams’s concept for the

digital age is salutary, it raises the question of whether our ongoing
negotiations with various devices for varied uses that often conflate work
and leisure, production and consumption actually extend the self in vari-
ous directions to accommodate it to this environment as they suggest.
Oswald and Packer seem to assume that while our screens have multi-
plied, the self remains singular as it traverses the flow it negotiates across
many screens. But Spigel and Dawson’s description of the multitasker
who must switch between roles and activities at a moment’s notice implies
a different analysis. The multitasker they describe is a television viewer
until the business call comes in, at which point he or she must become
a businessperson. Perhaps, then, the environment created by digital
media does not so much extend the self as demand that the self morph
continuously to assume the different social roles necessary to respond to
the different demands negotiated between us and our screens.
Employing Goffman’s notion of self-­ presentation as performance
(discussed here especially in chapter 5), Corinne Weisgerber points out
that we present ourselves differently, perform different roles, in different
digital contexts:
 Barbie in a Meat Dress  •   217

Facebook Corinne and Twitter Corinne are not the same persona.
And they’re also slightly different from Corinne, the blogger. I’m a
lot pickier about who I let join my Facebook network and I rarely let
mere acquaintances in. If you want to connect with me on Facebook,
I have to know you fairly well. As a result, you’d probably get to see a
much more unfiltered version of Corinne than you would on Twitter.
Twitter Corinne is an engaged professor and researcher, tweets in a
number of languages and aside from the occasional (but justified)
rant about AT& T’s dismal phone service, tries to present a very pro-
fessional image.34

It is historically appropriate that the concept of flow suggests analog

systems in which bits of information succeed one another smoothly. By
contrast, Weisgerber’s description suggests digital systems in which the
switching of identities according to platform (Facebook Corinne versus
Twitter Corinne) does not represent the extension of the self envisioned
by Oswald and Packer so much as the necessity of enacting a series of
different, perhaps even mutually exclusive selves that evoke the on/off
logic of the digital. The multitasker does not move from Buffy to busi-
ness and back again in a smooth flow but is pulled from one task and
one identity to another (and sometimes from one screen to another) in
series of discrete engagements that require not just multitasking but mul-
tiselfing: morphing and switching among identities to fulfill the multiple
social roles demanded of us by our screens. Multiselfing is nothing new;
fundamental to Goffman’s analysis of self-­presentation is that we always
present ourselves in different guises in different contexts.35 What is per-
haps new is the frequency and velocity of the changes we are called upon
to make in order to navigate the “immersive sea” of digital information
that surrounds us without drowning in it.
Oswald and Packer nominate the “on demand model” as the best
description of our current mediatized situation “and a new model of
flow” to update Williams’s.36 I agree, as long as it’s understood that
demand flows in both directions: the world is available to the prosumer
on demand, but we as subjects must also be available—­on demand and
in a suitable identity—­to the myriad of opportunities for communication
and interaction that hail us through our screens. Direct mediatization is
basic to this on-­demand culture: online shopping, e-­books, and digital
library research are but three examples of activities and artifacts with
which we now engage by means of technologies that have replaced, or
 218  •   in concert

nearly so, traditional means and that often make things available more
rapidly than before. Indirect mediatization is manifest at one level in
the assumptions that govern our behavior. We now tend to assume, for
example, that everyone is available to everyone else pretty much all the
time, whether by cell phone or text or email or instant messaging, and
we become impatient when we can’t get in touch with someone instantly
or an email goes unanswered for several days. Not only is our commu-
nicative behavior mediatized, but the social expectations surrounding
interpersonal communication are as well.
For Williams, one of the primary functions of television was to serve
as a window on the outside world. Now, we carry such windows with us as
we move through the world. The small windows of our cell phones can
show us what’s going on in the places we’re not; relative to any position
we assume, there are still a “here” and an “elsewhere,” but there are
no longer an inside and an outside in the sense Williams had in mind.
Similarly, there is no longer a limited and controlled flow of information
emanating from a small number of sources into which we can tap or
from which we can withdraw at will. Rather, we are now immersed in an
overwhelming sea of data originating from an astronomical number of
points known and unknown from which it is far more difficult to with-
draw. Communication within this flow is no longer primarily one-­way,
from the media and cultural workers to their audiences. Now, anyone
can participate in the media and in the making of culture and respond
directly to those in dominant positions. Whereas it seemed twenty-­five
years ago that performers could engage productively with a culture
understood in terms of flow by creating mobile but essentially stable
personae that could take up multiple positions and perform multiple
functions within the flow, performers today must address the terms of an
on-­demand culture that requires all of us to morph ourselves continually
(and discontinuously) to respond to the demands we wish to make and
those that are made of us.
In the music video for the song “Va Va Voom” (2012) Minaj enacts
this kind of morphing on demand by portraying four distinct charac-
ters all based on Disneyesque female archetypes found in fairy tales or
fantasy novels, including a blonde coquette who cavorts with unicorns,
a red-­haired Snow White (who still sings while asleep; there is also a
second red-­haired but masked character who may or may not be differ-
ent from Snow White), an Evil Queen dressed in a high-­collared black
dress and adorned with a black pageboy haircut, and a figure who may
be the Evil Queen’s opposite number who appears in white (fig. 21). It
 Barbie in a Meat Dress  •   219

Figure 21. Nicki Minaj portraying one of many fairy-­tale-­related characters in a still
from the music video for “Va Va Voom” (2012), directed by Hype Williams.

is important, however, that for all of Minaj’s destabilizing of identity and

the social critique it entails, her characters ultimately are visually assimi-
lated to a single persona. Although each has a different color and style
of hair, is costumed in a different extravagant outfit, and appears in a
different setting and scenario, they all conspicuously have the same face,
adorned with the exaggerated false eyelashes and the Pink Friday lipstick
Minaj favors. Different as they are, all are readily recognizable as vari-
ants on Minaj’s primary performance persona, and it is that persona’s
appearance that provides Minaj’s parade of characters with continuity,
as does the fact that they all come from fairy tales or similar stories. The
song itself reinforces this continuity since it is a continuous narrative,
rapped and sung in a consistent voice, of the protagonist’s attempt to
seduce a man. The relationship between the song’s structure and that
of the video also suggests a pattern underlying Minaj’s multiple guises
in that each character appears as the protagonist of a particular verse
and, until the end, the same character (the white-­clad figure) appears to
articulate the chorus.37
By contrast, Lady Gaga, another pop music artist to emerge late in
the first decade of the century who is noteworthy for her constantly shift-
ing appearance, lavish performances, and connections to the world of
fashion, seems to disappear behind her costumes and makeup, in large
part because her face—­her eyes in particular—­is often at least partially
hidden. So different from one another are the multiple visual manifes-
tations of Lady Gaga in performance and the media it is possible, until
quite recently, to imagine that many of her fans did not know what she
 220  •   in concert

really looks like. Both Minaj and Gaga are adept at navigating our media-
tized cultural landscape in ways that go beyond simply producing and
performing music. For example, Minaj’s characters are defined as much
by statements she makes through her Twitter feed as by her music, stage
performances, and videos. Gaga, too, is often cited as an example of an
artist who uses the web and social media very cannily in building her
fan following and brand, as discussed in chapter 6.38 But whereas Minaj
arguably follows an established approach in carving out a presence in
mediatized culture by constructing a versatile persona as a base from
which to morph into different identities, Gaga seems to be charting new
territory by constructing a chameleonlike presence that never resolves
into a stable image or identity.
Gaga acknowledges and encourages her fans’ prosumerism (as does
Minaj through her manipulation of imagery connected to Barbie). Rich-
ard Hanna, Andrew Rohm, and Victoria Crittenden write, “Consum-
ers are no longer merely passive recipients in the marketing exchange
process. Today, they are taking an increasingly active role in co-­creating
everything from product design to promotional messages.”39 As an
example, a small, inexpensive-­looking toy plastic unicorn with an illu-
minated horn given to Gaga by a fan appears in Gagavision no. 44 (April
28, 2011), one of the home videos Gaga makes for her fans, where she
claims to seek inspiration from it and names it Gagacorn.40 According
to Gagapedia, “Lady Gaga also has a tattoo of a unicorn on her left outer
thigh with a banner reading ‘Born This Way,’ a tribute to her album.
Gagacorn is known to be the mascot of Gaga’s third studio album,
titled Born This Way.”41 Four different versions of Gagacorn appear on
key chains for sale on Lady Gaga’s official website. Each reflects one of
Gaga’s many guises by sporting different blond hair styles and, in one
case, what appears to be a steak on its head, a reference to the notori-
ous “meat dress” designed by Franc Fernandez that Gaga wore to the
2010 MTV Video Music Awards ceremony. Gaga creates a feedback loop
whereby her fans are treated not just as passive consumers of her music
and product lines but as potential cocreators of her mythology (in which
Gagacorn is now totemic), her merchandise, her music (inasmuch as
Gagacorn was Gaga’s mascot during the making of an album), and even,
possibly, her body (depending on when she got her unicorn tattoo).
Lady Gaga is often accused of lacking originality. In a virulently anti-­
Gaga screed, Camille Paglia describes her as “a ruthless recycler of other
people’s work. She is the diva of déjà vu. Gaga has glibly appropriated
from performers like Cher, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, Gwen Stefani and
 Barbie in a Meat Dress  •   221

Pink, as well as from fashion muses like Isabella Blow and Daphne Guin-
ness.”42 Even pro-­Gaga commentators agree. Nicole Sia, writing for an
MTV.com blog, states that while she is “definitely an innovator, Lady
Gaga is maybe not always the most original.”43 Alexander Cavaluzzo, writ-
ing in the online journal Gaga Stigmata, a publication described by its
founders as “the first mover in Gaga studies,” calls her an “editrix” whose
art consists in selecting and combining things that already exist rather
than original creation.44 This is observable in her music, which draws
extensively both on today’s electronic dance music and the dance music
of the 1980s and 1990s exemplified by Madonna and Britney Spears, as
well as big-­voiced pop divas as various as Cher and Carly Simon. It has
also been noted that the infamous “meat dress” revisits Canadian artist
Jana Sterbak’s Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic of 1987.
I suggest that Gaga’s practice of appropriation and recombination
positions her as a cultural prosumer, a knowledgeable consumer of con-
temporary popular music, art, and fashion whose production as an art-
ist derives largely from her ability to cull from what has gone before
and recombine the things that interest her. One of the chief cultural
strategies and forms that has emerged in recent years is the mash-­up,
both an artistic practice and a way of thinking about culture as “con-
figurable.”45 The term mash-­up is used primarily in reference to either
music, in which case it denotes the practice of combining two or more
recordings, usually quite different stylistically, into a new work, or web
pages, in which case it refers to a page that juxtaposes material from sev-
eral sources of different kinds (e.g. a Google map and a YouTube video).
Lady Gaga’s fans are creators of mash-­ups; one, for example, combined
Blondie’s “Call Me” with Gaga’s “Electric Chapel” to make Call Me to the
Electric Chapel.46 Arguably, the song “Electric Chapel” is a kind of mash-­up
to begin with, since it must be a reference to Jimi Hendrix’s description
of his music as being an “electric church.” The music video for Gaga’s
song “Bad Romance,” discussed further below, is a different sort of mash-
­up since it re-­presented all of the outfits seen on the catwalk during Alex-
ander McQueen’s runway show for Paris Fashion Week in 2010; it is thus
a mash-­up of a music video and a fashion show. Gaga’s aesthetic as bri-
coleuse or editrix is perhaps better described as a mash-­up aesthetic in
which she appropriates materials from a broad range of cultural contexts
and combines them into new expression.
As discussed in chapter 6, since 2008, Gaga has made a spate of
web videos, first under the rubric Transmission Gagavision and later
called Monstervision. The Gagavision/Monstervision videos are circulated
 222  •   in concert

through the Littlemonsters.com website Gaga maintains as a fan com-

munity site (through which she offers lengthier messages to her fans
than is possible on Twitter) and through YouTube and other video sites.
They purport to provide a “backstage” view of Gaga as she rehearses,
travels, plays with her dog, talks with various people, engages with her
fans, works on recording her music, cavorts with her entourage, and so
on. The backstage quality of these videos is emphasized by their com-
mon title sequence. It shows Lady Gaga being made up; only fragments
of her face appear. This sequence suggests that the construction of Lady
Gaga, the persona, is taking place before our eyes while the rest of the
video will show us what lies behind this construction. The videos typi-
cally appear to be shot with a somewhat shaky handheld camera (Gaga
is sometimes seen holding a camera and shooting members of her staff)
and are informal, grainy, and low resolution. They contrast sharply with
Gaga’s music videos, which are immaculate state-­of-­the-­art productions.
This bifurcation of the slick and the amateurish in Gaga’s use of media
points first of all to the way she adjusts her identity to the setting and
audience. There is no singular Lady Gaga whose presence is extended
across these many platforms; indeed, the only continuity between Gaga,
the young, hard working woman presented on Gagavision, who seems
accessible if sometimes a bit overwrought, and the carefully constructed
versions of Lady Gaga that appear in her music videos is that they are dif-
ferent manifestations of the same human being. Gaga thus manages the
trick of presenting herself in some contexts as not that different from her
fans—­she, like so many others, seemingly makes low quality, somewhat
disjointed, overly chatty home videos of her everyday life and posts them
on YouTube—­and in other contexts as an otherworldly being whom the
same fans admire for her audacity, outrageousness, and alterity.
Like Minaj, Gaga pushes the idea of discontinuous identity to
extremes in the visual manifestations of her identities as musician and
celebrity. When offstage but in public, her appearance can vary so
much that she does not appear to be the same person from one time to
another. The color and style of her hair change continuously, and she
frequently wears hats, make-­up, sunglasses, or prosthetics that occlude
her eyes, sometimes her entire face. Even the shape of her head appears
to change, sometimes seeming vertical and ovoid while at other times
appearing to be round. In one of her most dramatic transformations,
she appeared at the MTV Video Music Awards ceremony for 2011 in
male drag as a character called Jo Calderone who claimed to be Gaga’s
lover.47 At the awards ceremony, Gaga created a moment of self-­reflexive
 Barbie in a Meat Dress  •   223

meta-­theatricality through this portrayal as Calderone applauded Gaga

for having achieved stardom while simultaneously accusing her of never
being out of the spotlight and never acting “real.”48 In short, a clearly
artificial entity created and enacted by Gaga accused her of being an
artificial entity created by fame. He also revealed that she refuses to look
at him when she’s having an orgasm; perhaps this was a covert way for
Gaga to suggest that her tendency to hide or radically alter her face and
features symbolically marks the limits of the intimacy she is willing to
offer her public, a way of maintaining social distance. Even in the Gaga-
vision videos, she often (though not always) appears in dark glasses or
shrouded in shadow.
One of Gaga’s logos is an image of a headless female body. When she
appeared on the cover of V Magazine’s issue for the summer of 2011, she
portrayed a kind of three-­headed human Cerberus. These images would
seem to be two sides of the same coin: three heads are the same as none.
The proliferation of identities in which Gaga is engaged is tantamount
to having no identity at all—­curator Francesco Bonami describes Gaga’s
body as “a stage on which you can set up a new scenography each time.”49
Troy Carter, Gaga’s manager, discusses their strategy for partnering
with other businesses by saying that she will not engage in traditional
endorsement deals: “You won’t see her face plastered on any packaging
or anything.”50 Of course not: which face would it be? That Gaga’s strat-
egy in this area contrasts strongly with Minaj’s is apparent from the way
each markets her signature scent. Pink Friday, Minaj’s perfume, comes
in a bottle modeled as a bust of Minaj in full Barbie regalia. The box
also features a stylized illustration of Minaj. Lady Gaga’s perfume, The
Fame, comes in an elegant egg-­shaped bottle with a designer cap that
recalls Art Deco. The box is black and bears only an image of the bottle.
Whereas Minaj follows a more traditional strategy of marketing an image
based on her own in which her fans can participate through consump-
tion, Gaga serves much more as an éminence grise for her brand than
as its cover girl.
Gaga has emerged as a champion of LGBTQ causes and the rights
of the disenfranchised generally, especially through her Born This Way
Foundation. The song for which the foundation is named is a rousing
anthemic declaration that it’s perfectly all right to be whoever you are
regardless of what anyone else thinks—­the line “I was born this way”
is the key line of the chorus. Ironically, Gaga’s whole approach to self-­
presentation seems at odds with the essentialism she embraces in the
song. Whatever way she was born (there is no mystery surrounding this
 224  •   in concert

Figure 22. One of the many versions of Lady Gaga to appear in the music video for
“Bad Romance” (2009), directed by Francis Lawrence, from which this image is a
still.

since one can trace Gaga’s entire life from when she was a little Italian
­American girl in New York named Stefani Germanotta who exhibited a
talent for playing the piano up to the present day via photos and videos
readily accessible on the Internet) has no bearing on the multiple, shift-
ing identities she assumes at an ever-­more frenetic pace.
Gaga’s music video for her song “Bad Romance” from 2009 offers a
striking dramatization of her strategy of shifting appearances and identi-
ties.51 In the first minute of a video that runs slightly less than four min-
utes, Gaga appears in four different guises, each keyed to a particular
setting. In the first scene, which corresponds with the song’s harpsichord-­
like introduction, she is seated at the center of a tableau of eerie masked
and otherwise disguised figures in a blonde wig, gold dress, and opaque
eyeglasses with lenses that suggest bullet holes. In the second scene, a
group of mysterious figures dressed in skintight white latex emerges
from clamshell coffins. All but one have their faces hidden but their legs
exposed; the remaining one’s legs are covered but the lower part of her
face, including very red lips, is visible. The figure that is singled out may
be Lady Gaga—­it’s actually impossible to tell. Two other figures placed
in other settings are intercut with these: a wide-­eyed naïf with dishev-
eled light orange hair in a white bathtub and a black-­clad evil queen-­like
figure in a darkened room who is gazing at herself in a mirror with a
 Barbie in a Meat Dress  •   225

heavy ornate frame. As attendants torment the woman in the bathtub, a

blonde woman with very pale skin shot in tight close-­up who looks like a
glamorous movie star playing a woman in distress appears (fig. 22). As if
to emphasize the fragmentary nature of these identities, normal rules of
cinematic continuity are ignored. In one shot, for example, the orange-­
haired innocent is conspicuously wearing ear buds. The next time we see
her, they have disappeared only to return in a subsequent shot.
In the remainder of the video, nine more versions of Gaga appear
and two of the earlier ones reappear. Although specific images (a twisted
hand, a pair of bizarre shoes, a distinctively shaped bottle) are repeated
in different scenes and settings these repetitions do not create narrative
links between them. Each action, setting, and the version of Lady Gaga
that goes with them is discrete—­each exists in its own context that does
not overlap or connect to the others. They are unified solely by the song,
as the characters move and dance to its rhythm, which also defines the
rhythm of the video’s editing, and lip-­synch its lines.
Ronnie Lippens describes our “hypermodern everyday life” as “JIT-­
life,” where JIT stands for Just In Time.52 In JIT-­life, everything is imme-
diate and provisional, constantly in flux, and incoherent, including our
JIT-­identities: “Individual selves are being splintered and are splintering
themselves reflexively, looking for fitting identities/differences, trying
them out, abandoning them in dissatisfaction, reaching out for alterna-
tive identities, ever rhizomatically.”53 Lippens’s concept of JIT harmo-
nizes with other terms I have nominated here as key descriptors of our
present cultural condition, including “on demand,” “multiselfing,” and
mash-­up. Together, they suggest the urgency and frequency with which
we must adjust our self-­presentations to the multiple platforms on which
we continuously perform them. JIT alludes to both the immediacy with
which we must respond to the demands made upon us (the instant switch
from leisure to business demanded of the cell phone multitasker, for
instance) and the temporary quality of the resulting self-­presentations
whose utility is completely limited to their contexts.
It is well known that Gaga’s enterprise is conducted with the help of
the creative team known collectively as The Haus of Gaga, which has
included choreographer Laurie-­Ann Gibson; several fashion designers,
including Hussein Chalayan and the late Alexander McQueen; high
fashion milliners Philip Treacy and Nasir Nazhar; eyewear designer
Kerin Rose; and photographer Nick Knight, Gaga’s co-­conspirator in
the creation of Jo Calderone.54 It is crucial in the present context that
the key figure in the Haus of Gaga is Nicola Formichetti, who is a stylist
 226  •   in concert

and fashion director, not a designer (working for Gaga is but one of his
many positions—­he is also fashion director of both Vogue Hommes Japan
and Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing line, and artistic director for the DIE-
SEL brand). As described by Jennifer Anyan and Philip Clarke, stylists
don’t design: they stage the designs of others, “construct[ing] a fictitious
scene using available resources,” “sourcing, collecting and combining
predesigned objects,” a process that often involves “making fast-­paced,
often spontaneous, last-­minute” decisions.55 In other words, the stylist is
a mash-­up artist who brings together the work of fashion designers and
photographers: the perfect associate for a performer noted for her own
commitment to bricolage and who is taking the JIT world by the horns.
The density, velocity, and incoherence of Gaga’s abrupt changes of
identity in the Bad Romance video are both products and an image of
this cultural condition. Commenting on the way “Gaga is always clad
in apparel usually seen only on Fashion Week runways,” Victor Corona
notes that her “aesthetic challenges the potency of [vestimentary]
regimes” that tell us what we should wear when “and affirms the hyper-
modern imperative of individual self-­expression. . . .”56 Pace Corona, I
argue that Gaga’s aesthetic challenges the very notion that there is an
individual self to express by distributing multiple selves across a field of
infinite and unpredictable variations.
In this respect, Gaga complicates the schema for analyzing musical
performance I have outlined in this book: how can one sustain an ana-
lytical distinction between persona and character when an artist’s per-
sona is manifest only as a seemingly infinite proliferation of characters?
To quote Gilliam Schutte, “Gaga, it seems, is indefinable.” Schutte goes
on to pose the provocative question, “Could it be then, that Lady Gaga
is an avatar and not a human being—­at least in the collective imaginary
of her huge fan-­base?”57 Schutte is referring to the way Gaga seems to
function as a projection screen for her fans to whom she can mean what
they want her to mean and “allowing many to believe that they have
some hand in her creation.” This is a valid point. In fact, “Lady Gaga” is
not a human being, though she is played by one. Lady Gaga is every bit
as much a product of the Haus of Gaga as her perfume, The Fame, is a
product of Gaga Laboratories, Paris. But Lady Gaga is neither a persona
nor an avatar. Gaga asks her fans to identify not with an identity but with
the ability to produce ever-­changing identities in response to different
settings and circumstances. Lady Gaga is a randomized algorithm that
continuously generates, on demand and just in time, the personae Ste-
fani Germanotta portrays.58
 Acknowledgments
•••

I would like to thank LeAnn Fields and the University of Michigan Press
for their staunch support of my work in several fields for well over a
quarter century.
I am grateful to Dr. Jacqueline Royster, the former Dean of the Ivan
Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech, whose office awarded me
a summer stipend to do the bulk of the work on the manuscript for this
book.
Parts of this book were presented as papers and invited addresses at
numerous conferences, symposia, and institutions over a period of more
than a decade. I thank all of the organizers of these events and all those
who invited me to present for opportunities to give my ideas public hear-
ings, as well as those who engaged me in discussion around these ideas.
Our conversations and your interventions have been invaluable.
I would also like to extend thanks to a number of fellow scholars
and artists who helped me shape the material in this book by providing
valuable feedback, responding graciously to my queries, and providing
access to needed materials: Liubo Borrisov, Kevin Brown, Barbara Ching,
Nicholas Cook, Mickey Hess, Mari Kimura, Mark Marrington, Lee Mar-
shal, Elizabeth Patterson, and John Richardson.
I would also like to thank particular editors of journals and edited
volumes who extended opportunities for publication that led to my
developing significant parts of this book. They include Lori Burns, Maria
Delgado, Jody Enders, Sarah-­ Indriyati Hardjowirogo, Stan Hawkins,
227
 228  •   Acknowledgments

Knut Lundby, Ken McLeod, Richard Pettengill, David Saltz, Catherine

Schuler, Derek B. Scott, and Steve Waksman.
Chapter 1 appeared originally in Contemporary Theatre Review 14, no.
1 (2004).
The first version of chapter 2 appeared as the afterword to Taking It to
the Bridge: Music as Performance, ed. Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). The present chapter is
based on the revised version published in Sound und Performance, Thur-
nauer Schriften zum Musiktheater, Bd. 24, ed. Wolf-­Dieter Ernst (Würz-
burg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2015).
Chapter 3 was first published in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovi-
sual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson et al. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
Chapter 4 began life as a journal article published in Theatre Jour-
nal 61, no. 4 (December 2009). The revised version that served as the
basis for the chapter appeared in Musical Instruments in the 21st Century:
Identities, Configurations, Practices, ed. Till Boverman et al. (Singapore:
Springer Nature, 2017).
The origin of chapter 5 lies in an article published in TDR: The Jour-
nal of Performance Studies 50, no. 1 (Spring 2006). A subsequent version
appeared as “Musical Persona: The Physical Performance of Popu-
lar Music,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed.
Derek B. Scott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). The present version, sub-
stantially revised and expanded from these texts, incorporates materials
that appeared originally in “Framing Personae in Music Video,” in The
Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis, ed. Lori Burns and
Stan Hawkins (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) and “Musical Persona Revis-
ited,” in Investigating Musical Performance: Theoretical Models and Intersec-
tions, ed. Gianmario Borio et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
Chapter 6 was first published in The Sage Handbook of Popular Music,
ed. Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman (London: Sage, 2015).
Chapter 7 appeared originally in Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Perfor-
mance, ed. Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2013).
The kernel of chapter 8 appeared as “Music as Performance: Living
in the Immaterial World,” Theatre Survey 47, no. 2 (Fall 2006). I sub-
sequently revisited the topic in a presentation titled “Reactivation Acti-
vated: The Beatles’ Stadium Audiences” for the symposium “Sound and
Music in Mass Performance” at the Jackman Humanities Institute, Uni-
 Acknowledgments  •   229

versity of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, April 2011. Chapter 8 draws on

both sources as well as much fresh research.
Chapter 9 was published as an article in the Journal of Popular Music
Studies 15, no. 2 (2003).
Chapter 10 first appeared in Mediatization of Communication, Hand-
books of Communication Science, ed. Knut Lundby (Berlin: de Gruyter
Mouton, 2014).
I thank all the editors and organizers for including me in their proj-
ects, and the publishers for permission to reprint these materials here.
 Notes
•••

Introduction
1. Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2014), 1.
2. David J. Hargreaves, Raymond Macdonald, and Dorothy Miell, “The Chang-
ing Identity of Musical Identities,” in Handbook of Musical Identities, ed. David J. Har-
greaves, Raymond Macdonald, and Dorothy Miell (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017), 3–­19.
3. John Rink, “Impersonating the Music in Performance,” in Hargreaves, Mac-
donald, and Miell, Handbook of Musical Identities, 346.
4. Ibid., 345.
5. Ibid., 347.
6. Pauline Koner, Elements of Performance: A Guide for Performers in Dance, Theatre
and Opera (London: Routledge, 1993), 2.
7. Lisa McCormick, “Performance Perspectives,” in The Routledge Reader on the
Sociology of Music, ed. John Shepherd and Kyle Devine (New York: Routledge, 2015),
119.
8. Stan Hawkins, “Personas in Rock: ‘We Will, We Will Rock You,’” in The Blooms-
bury Handbook of Rock Music Research, ed. Allan Moore and Paul Carr (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2020), 250.
9. Philip Auslander, “Analyzing Persona in Music Videos,” in The Bloomsbury
Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis, ed. Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2019), 91–­108.
10. Bob Franklin, Martin Hamer, Mark Hanna, et al., Key Concepts in Journalism
Studies (London: Sage, 2005), 85–­6.
11. Kirk Hallahan, “Seven Models of Framing: Implications for Public Relations,”
Journal of Public Relations Research 11, no. 3 (1999): 209–­11.
12. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology,
Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1987), 144.
13. Ibid., 145.

231
 232  •   Notes to Pages 4–11

14. Improv Everywhere, “Frozen Grand Central,” 2008, https://improvevery-

where.com/2008/01/31/frozen-grand-central/
15. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 10.
16. Ibid., 10–­11.
17. Deborah Tannen, “What’s in a Frame? Surface Evidence for Underlying
Expectations,” in New Directions in Discourse Processing, ed. Roy Freedle (Norwood, NJ:
Ablex, 1979), 144.
18. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Mid-
dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 19–­29.
19. Franco Fabbri, “A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications,” in Popular
Music Perspectives, ed. David Horn and Philip Tagg (Göteborg: International Associa-
tion for the Study of Popular Music, 1981), 53.
20. Bob Boilen, “Question of the Week: Can You Imagine a World without
Music Genres?,” All Songs Considered, NPR.org, January 13, 2014, https://www.npr.
org/sections/allsongs/2014/01/13/262181289/question-of-the-week-can-you-
imagine-a-world-without-music-genres
21. David M. Greenberg, Michal Kosinski, David J. Stillwell, et al., “The Song Is
You: Preferences for Musical Attribute Dimensions Reflect Personality,” Social Psycho-
logical and Personality Science 7, no. 6 (2016): 597.
22. Ibid., 602.
23. Megan Evershed, “The Musical Genre Is Dead, Gen Z Killed It,” i-­D, April 17, 2019,
https://id.vice.com/en_us/article/597z88/gen-z-music-genre-lil-nas-x-billie-eilish-
sofia-reyes
24. DJ Glass, “Periodic Table of Musical Genres,” Frequency Fusion, June 2, 2015,
https://rayamusic9blog.wordpress.com/2015/06/02/the-periodic-table-of-music-
genres/
25. Fabbri, “Theory of Musical Genres,” 60.
26. Lyndsey Havens, “Billie Eilish Doesn’t Fit Any Genre, but May End Up
Dominating Radio Anyway,” Billboard, March 13, 2019, https://www.billboard.com/
articles/business/radio/8502247/billie-eilish-radio-genre-airplay
27. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about
the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 5–­6.
28. Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007), 23.
29. Ibid., 24.
30. For an overview of the use of the concept of persona in relation to music, see
Charles Fairchild and P. David Marshall, “Music and Persona: An Introduction,” Per-
sona Studies 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–­16.
31. Peter Johnson, “The Legacy of Recordings,” in Musical Performance: A Guide to
Understanding, ed. John Rink (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 198.
32. Ibid., 197–­8.
33. I disagree with Allan F. Moore when he says that when Robert Plant “sings the
Jimi Hendrix classic ‘Hey Joe,’ the individual who is addressing ‘Joe’ is neither the
actual Robert Plant (the individual who used to sing with Led Zeppelin and would go
on to sing with Alison Krauss), nor is he ‘Robert Plant,’ the persona associated with
the powerful voice in those two particular situations. He is instead a figure inside the
song, who has no identity outside it—­he is a protagonist within the song.” Song Means:
Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 181. I have
no issue with Moore’s definition of protagonist, a concept similar to my concept of
character. My disagreement is with the notion that Plant does not portray his familiar
 Notes to Pages 12–26  •   233

persona during this song, that we perceive the entity addressing “Joe” solely as the
character defined by the song. From my perspective, as audience, we are always aware
of the simultaneous presence of both persona and character (or protagonist). It is
this awareness that allows for the possibility of multiple relationships between per-
sona and character, as I discuss in chapter 5.
34. William Rothstein, “Analysis and the Act of Performance,” in The Practice of
Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, ed. John Rink (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 237.
35. Heinrich Schenker, Free Composition, trans. and ed. Ernst Oster (New York:
Longman, 1979), 5.
36. Fred Everett Maus, “Music as Narrative,” Indiana Theory Review 12 (1991): 4.
37. Fred Everett Maus, “Music as Drama,” Music Theory Spectrum 10 (1988): 72.
38. Lee B. Brown, “Musical Works, Improvisation, and the Principle of Continu-
ity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 4 (1996): 364–­5.

Chapter One
1. For a thorough and critical discussion of the evolution of performance stud-
ies, see Simon Shepherd, The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), 151–­89.
2. Vera Mowry Roberts, On Stage: A History of Theatre, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper
and Row, 1974), 108.
3. Patrice Pavis, L’Analyse des spectacles (Paris: Editions Nathan, 1996), 121. My
translation.
4. Anthony Tommasini, “Bravos at Opera Are Expected, but Booing?,” New York
Times, February 1, 2003, A19, A24.
5. Small, Musicking, 4–­5.
6. Gavin Steingo, “The Musical Work Reconsidered, in Hindsight,” Current Musi-
cology 97 (Spring 2014): 82–­3.
7. Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1996), 75.
8. Lawrence Grossberg, “Reflections of a Disappointed Popular Music Scholar,”
in Rock over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture, ed. Roger Beebe, Denise
Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 49.
9. Pavis charts the rise and fall of theatrical semiotics as well as the current eclec-
ticism in performance analysis (L’Analyse des spectacles, 13–­30). This list of contribut-
ing disciplines draws on Pavis and the authors represented in Performance Analysis:
An Introductory Coursebook, ed. Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf (London: Routledge,
2001).
10. Pavis, L’Analyse des spectacles, 39–­42.
11. Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114.
12. I make a similar argument concerning the relationship between the audience
that experiences performance art in documented forms in Reactivations: Essays on Per-
formance and Its Documentation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018): “Just
as a documented performance may provoke within the beholder the ‘unruly desire’
to know more about the performance . . . it also may well give rise to an equally unruly
desire to know how it feels to perform it oneself” (98).
13. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1996), 211. Frith’s suggestion that listeners mentally pro-
duce the aspects of performance not present in sound recordings is comparable to
 234  •   Notes to Pages 27–38

Wolfgang Iser’s notion that because literary texts are radically incomplete in them-
selves, the act of reading consists of filling in the gaps of the text. See the excerpt from
Iser’s The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, in Counsell and Wolf, Performance
Analysis, 179–­85.
14. Frith, Performing Rites, 186, 212.
15. Frith uses the term persona but only in reference to performance artists who
“took themselves and their bodies as the objects or sites of narrative and feeling”
(Frith, Performing Rites, 205) not in reference to popular musicians.
16. “Reba McEntire & Kelly Clarkson—­ Does He Love You,” YouTube video,
5:48, from American Idol Season 1 Finale broadcast on the Fox Network, September
4, 2002, posted by “CaitlinB8494Fan,” June 11, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=kJ2ZrnkXsYo
17. Richard Schechner, “Performers and Spectators Transported and Trans-
formed,” Kenyon Review, n.s. 3, no. 4 (Fall 1981): 88.
18. Fast, In the Houses, 149.
19. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture, dir. D. A. Pennebaker
(1983; London: Parlophone, 2003), DVD.
20. For a discussion of the conductor as performer, see Small, Musicking, 78–­86.
21. Although a musician’s persona is continuous throughout a performance, it
may take on different guises at different moments in the performance. Costume
changes exemplify this possibility. In the case of David Bowie, frequent alterations of
appearance through costume changes were one of the hallmarks of the Ziggy Star-
dust persona.
22. Fast, In the Houses, 146.
23. For a detailed analysis of the processes of persona formation and mobilization
that attends to issues of the relative power of the artist and industry functionaries and
how such relationships may change over time, see Andrew Lindridge and Toni Eager,
“‘And Ziggy Played Guitar’: Bowie, the Market, and the Emancipation and Resurrec-
tion of Ziggy Stardust,” Journal of Marketing Management 31, nos. 5–­6 (2015): 546–­76.
24. See Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, “Rock and Sexuality,” in On Record:
Rock, Pop & the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (London: Rout-
ledge, 1990), 318.
25. Holt, Genre in Popular Music, 2.
26. Sheila Whiteley, “Little Red Rooster v. the Honky Tonk Woman: Mick Jagger,
Sexuality, Style and Image,” in Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila
Whiteley (London: Routledge, 1997), 76, 97.
27. Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular
Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
28. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York:
PAJ Publications, 1982), 85.
29. See “Suzi Quatro Wants to Be Your Man: Female Masculinity in Glam Rock,”
in Performing Glam Rock, 193–­226.
30. “Suzi Quatro—­ Can the Can (1973),” YouTube video, 3:30, posted by
“kiilakas777,” May 13, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYoogY-UGio

Chapter Two
1. Todd J. Coulter, “Music as Performance—­the State of the Field,” Contemporary
Theatre Review 21, no. 3 (2011): 259.
2. Philip Auslander, “Musical Personae,” Drama Review 50, no. 1 (2006): 102.
 Notes to Pages 38–43  •   235

3. Derek Miller, “On Piano Performance—­Technology and Technique,” Contem-

porary Theatre Review 21, no. 3 (2011): 262.
4. Ibid., 275.
5. Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance, ed. Nicholas Cook and Richard
Pettengill (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 6.
6. Alejandro L. Madrid, “Why Music and Performance Studies? Why Now? An
Introduction to the Special Issue,” Revista Transcultural de Música / Transcultural Music
Review 13 (2009), http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans13/art01eng.html
7. Miller, “On Piano Performance,” 265.
8. As someone who has argued a number of times that technologies can be
considered to be performers, I am not troubled by Miller’s assertion that the piano
counts as a technological performer in the genre of performance he analyzes.
9. Miller, “On Piano Performance,” 262.
10. Ibid., 267–­8.
11. Home of the Brave, directed by Laurie Anderson, 1986; Los Angeles: Warner
Brothers, 1991, VHS.
12. Bobby McFerrin, “I Am My Own Walkman,” The Voice, Elektra/Musician 1984.
13. Manfred Nusseck and Marcelo M. Wanderley, “Music and Motion: How Music-­
Related Ancillary Body Movements Contribute to the Experience of Music,” Music
Perception 26, no. 4 (2009): 335–­53.
14. Miller, “On Piano Performance,” 269.
15. Ibid., 270.
16. Ibid., 269.
17. Michael Schutz, “Seeing Music? What Musicians Need to Know about Vision,”
Empirical Musicology Review 3, no. 3 (2008): 83–­108.
18. Ibid., 88.
19. William Forde Thompson, Phil Graham, and Frank A. Russo, “Seeing Music
Performance: Visual Influences on Perception and Experience,” Semiotica 156, nos.
1–­4 (2005): 220.
20. Schutz, “Seeing Music,” 88.
21. Ibid., 91.
22. Ibid., 102.
23. Miller, “On Piano Performance,” 268–­9. I am not denying that musicians,
and really most performers, employ mental representations of the material they are
performing to guide them. However, such representations need not be understood as
prior to performance, and performance need not be understood simply as a means
of communicating the performer’s existing understanding of the material to an audi-
ence. Pianist John Rink, for example, writes of having a sense of the piece he is play-
ing as a whole that provides a point of reference for the moment-­to-­moment “online
decision-­making” in which he engages while performing. He describes this sense as a
“gut feeling” rather than a conceptual or intellectual construct. “Impersonating the
Music in Performance,” 355.
24. Cook, Beyond the Score, 41.
25. Fast, In the Houses, 129.
26. Jairo Moreno, “Body ’n’ Soul? Voice and Movement in Keith Jarrett’s Pia-
nism,” Musical Quarterly 83, no. 1 (1999): 83.
27. Following Diana Taylor, Madrid endorses using the term performatic to describe
the visual and physical enactments that constitute performance. This eschews confu-
sion over the term performative, which has been pressed into service as an adjectival form
of the word performance despite its origin as a technical term in speech act theory.
 236  •   Notes to Pages 43–52

28. Glenn Gould: Off the Record, dir. Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig, National Film
Board of Canada, 1959, 23:00, available at http://www.nfb.ca/film/ glenn_gould_
off_record. Glenn Gould: On the Record, its twin, also directed by Roman Kroitor and
Wolf Koenig for the National Film Board of Canada in 1959, documents Gould at
work in a recording studio in New York City. Available at https://www.nfb.ca/film/
glenn_gould_on_record/
29. Keith Jarrett: Last Solo, 1974, Los Angeles: Image Entertainment, 2002, DVD.
30. Graham Carr, “Visualizing ‘The Sound of Genius’: Glenn Gould and the
Culture of Celebrity in the 1950s,” Journal of Canadian Studies 40, no. 3 (2006): 34;
Moreno, “Body ’n’ Soul,” 75.
31. Jane W. Davidson, “Bodily Movement and Facial Actions in Expressive Musical
Performance by Solo and Duo Instrumentalists: Two Distinctive Case Studies,” Psychol-
ogy of Music 40, no. 5 (2012): 624.
32. Moreno, “Body ’n’ Soul,” 81.
33. Paul Sanden, “Hearing Glenn Gould’s Body: Corporeal Liveness in Recorded
Music,” Current Musicology 88 (2009): 9, 20.
34. Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen
Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 67.
35. In a considered historical discussion of the grounds on which music has been
considered to be a language, Peter Kivy states, “Music is language-­like in having some-
thing like a syntax. On the other hand, it is surely far from language-­like in its total
lack of a semantic component. And that lack alone is sufficient for concluding that
music is not language, a language, part of a language, or however you want to put it.”
Music, Language, and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 218.
36. Moreno, “Body ’n’ Soul,” 88–­9.

Chapter Three
1. Moreno, “Body ’n’ Soul,” 88.
2. Caleb Stuart, “The Object of Performance: Aural Performativity in Contem-
porary Laptop Music,” Contemporary Music Review 22 (2003): 61.
3. W. Andrew Schloss, “Using Contemporary Technology in Live Performance:
The Dilemma of the Performer,” Journal of New Music Research 32 (2003): 239.
4. Ibid., 242.
5. Stuart, “Object of Performance,” 64.
6. Sterne summarizes the discussion about this concept and its implications
briefly in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003), 20–­2.
7. See Dave Laing, “A Voice without a Face: Popular Music and the Phonograph
in the 1890s,” Popular Music 10 (1991): 1–­9.
8. Schutz, “Seeing Music,” 86. Although I have borrowed the phrase “musically
relevant information” from Schutz, I do not consider him to represent those who
consider so-­called ancillary gestures to be irrelevant to the production of musical
meaning, as discussed in the previous chapter.
9. Schloss, “Using Contemporary Technology,” 240.
10. Stan Godlovitch, Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1998), 49. Godlovitch explicitly excludes computers from the realm of musical
instruments (101).
11. Ibid., 14–­5.
12. Schloss, “Using Contemporary Technology,” 240.
13. Schutz, “Seeing Music,” 101. Theodore Gracyk makes a related point when
 Notes to Pages 52–56  •   237

critiquing Godlovitch in “Listening to Music: Performances and Recordings,” Journal

of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 2 (1997): 145.
14. The literature on the ocularcentrism of Western culture is vast. One classic
study of both ocularcentrism and its critiques is Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigra-
tion of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994).
15. Godlovitch, Musical Performance, 26.
16. Gould is a problematic figure from this perspective since it is well known that
he edited his recordings of classical piano works to correct errors or combine his best
takes. Gould put considerable effort into both his playing and the editing of these
recordings and perhaps his commitment can be measured by “the obsessive lengths
he took to ensure that the inserts to be recorded would match in volume and tempo
the selected basic take.” Andy Hamilton, “The Art of Recording and the Aesthetics of
Perfection,” British Journal of Aesthetics 43, no. 4 (2003): 355.
17. Sterne, Audible Past, 20–­1.
18. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2008), 59–­60.
19. Thompson et al., “Seeing Musical Performance,” 221–­4.
20. Schutz, “Seeing Music,” 85.
21. For an overview of this work, see Schutz, “Seeing Music.” For a more detailed
account of several experiments, see Thompson et al., “Seeing Musical Performance.”
22. “W. Andrew Schloss,” University of Victoria School of Music, accessed July
28, 2019, https://www.uvic.ca/finearts/music/people/faculty/profiles/schloss-w.-
andrew.php
23. Mark J. Butler, Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and
Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 99.
24. Ibid., 99–­100.
25. Auslander, Liveness, 91.
26. Auslander, Performing Glam Rock, 18.
27. Jefferson Airplane, “Turn Out the Lights,” Bless Its Pointed Little Head, RCA
Records 4133-­2-­R, CD.
28. Jeff Tamarkin, Got a Revolution: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane (New
York: Atria Books, 2003), 146.
29. See Gregory Zinman, “The Joshua Light Show: Concrete Practices and
Ephemeral Effects,” American Art 22 (2008): 17–­21; and Edwin Pouncey, “Labora-
tories of Light: Psychedelic Light Shows” and “I Never Stopped Loving the Light:
Joshua White and the Joshua Light Show” in Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis
and Counterculture in the 1960s, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liv-
erpool: Liverpool University Press and Tate Liverpool, 2005), 155–­62 and 163–­78
respectively. For accounts that place the Joshua Light Show and related phenomena
into cultural context, see Chrissie Iles, “Liquid Dreams,” in Summer of Love: Art of the
Psychedelic Era, ed. Christoph Grunenberg (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2005), 67–­83;
and Christoph Grunenberg, “The Politics of Ecstasy: Art for the Mind and Body,” in
Grunenberg, Summer of Love, especially 21–­35.
30. In “Music Video and Synaesthetic Possibility,” Kay Dickinson critiques analy-
ses that treat audiovisual formats “as a parade with one leader [rather than] a thor-
oughfare with two-­way traffic,” in Medium Cool, ed. Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 15. It is worth noting in this context
that whereas Cook’s notion of multimedia does depend on clear distinctions among
media and the senses to which they appeal, only the category of conformance entails
“leader” and “follower” media. Contest is a condition of tension among the media
 238  •   Notes to Pages 56–61

making up an IMM rather than the dominance of one by another, and complementa-
tion does not imply any hierarchical relationship among media.
31. Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 106.
32. Sheila Whiteley, The Space between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-­culture (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 28–­9.
33. “Virgil Fox Heavy Organ,” YouTube video, 9:42, posted by “ShandyHall,” May
3, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIPCx3Te-BA
34. Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 101.
35. Quoted in Jesse Hamlin, “Painting Live with Light and Music,” San
Francisco Chronicle, January 31, 1999, http://articles.sfgate.com/1999-01-31/
entertainment/17677751_1_mckay-s- work-paintings-mckay-s-head-lights
36. Whiteley, Space between the Notes, 33.
37. It is worth noting in the present context that Whiteley takes up the ques-
tion of whether Pink Floyd’s trippy “Astronomy Dominé” was psychedelic in itself
or depended on the presence of the light show to create a psychedelic effect. After
weighing the evidence, Whiteley concludes that the song is psychedelic in purely
musical terms. Whiteley, Space between the Notes, 31–­3.
38. Barry Miles indicates that “the psychedelic light show developed differently in
Britain than in the States. In America, the light-­show teams operated independently,
as if they were groups themselves, and would be hired to provide a show for all the
groups playing that evening, whereas in Britain any band wanting a light show tended
to develop their own.” Hippie (New York: Sterling Publishing, 2004), 170. Although
this is not entirely the case, because there were British light shows that worked inde-
pendently for multiple bands (see Iles, “Liquid Dreams,” 79), this tendency may
partly account for why Sheila Whiteley, writing on the London psychedelic scene,
states that the light shows followed the rhythm of the music, while Joshua White,
speaking of his work in New York, says that the light shows were “arrhythmic” (both
are quoted in the main text).
39. Quoted in Pouncey, “I Never Stopped,” 175.
40. Joshua White ascribes the origins of the East Coast light show to a weeklong
event at Massey Hall in Toronto in 1967 for which Bill Graham wished to recreate the
San Francisco scene. The venue, however, was a traditional proscenium theater rather
than an open ballroom like the Fillmore Auditorium. Graham approached White and
his company about devising a way to recreate the ballroom atmosphere in a conven-
tional theatrical space, which White accomplished through the use of rear projection
on the stage and atmospheric lighting in the auditorium. Although White did not
provide the actual light shows for this event, he became immersed in their imagery
through his involvement. Ultimately it was from the adaptation of the techniques
and imagery of the San Francisco light show to a theater space primarily through the
use of rear projection that the East Coast light show was born. See Pouncey, “I Never
Stopped,” 167–­9; and John Del Signore, “Joshua White, the Joshua Light Show,” The
Gothamist, April 2, 2007, http:// gothamist.com/2007/04/02/interview_joshu.php
41. Quoted in Del Signore, “Joshua White.”
42. Thompson et al., “Seeing Musical Performance,” 222.
43. Quoted in Michael Lydon, Flashbacks: Eyewitness Accounts of the Rock Revolution,
1964–­1974 (New York: Routledge, 2003), 26.
44. The information in this paragraph derives from several sections of the Virgil
Fox Legacy website, including “Biography,” “Chronology,” “Discography,” and “Virgil
Fox Promotional Materials,” accessed June 26, 2010, http:// www.virgilfoxlegacy.com
45. “Virgil Fox Heavy Organ.”
 Notes to Pages 61–69  •   239

46. “Virgil Fox Legacy |Bach| Gigue Fugue,” YouTube video, 4:51, posted by
NEO Press, August 20, 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gRBCAdC7wI
&feature=related
47. D. C. Somervell, “The Visual Element in Music,” Music & Letters 24 (1943):
47.
48. The Rodgers Royal V was the first of Fox’s two bespoke touring organs. In
1977, Fox commissioned a second organ of his own design from the Allen Organ
Company, which he used until his death in 1980. For details of Fox’s work with the
company and the organ that resulted from it, see the Allen Organ Company, “The
Virgil Fox Touring Organ,” 2013, https://www.allenorgan.com/www/special/Vir-
gilFox/index.html
49. Richard Dyer, “Who Is the World’s Best Organist? Ask Virgil Fox,” New York
Times, September 29, 1974, https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/29/archives/who-is-
the-worlds-best-organist-ask-virgil-fox-who-is-the-worlds.html
50. “Music: Heavy Organ,” Time, January 7, 1974, http://www.time.com/time/
magazine/article/0,9171,910977-1,00.html
51. Ge Wang and Perry Cook, “On-­ the-­Fly Programming: Using Code as an
Expressive Musical Instrument,” Princeton University Computer Science, 2002,
http://on-the-fly.cs.princeton.edu/
52. Ben Ratliff, “If Not 76 Trombones, Everything Else a One-­Man Band Can
Handle,” New York Times, May 23, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/arts/
music/24metheny.html

Chapter Four
1. Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1974), 105–­6.
2. Matthew Gelbart, “Persona and Voice in the Kinks’ Songs of the Late 1960s,”
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128, no. 2 (2003): 208.
3. Fast, In the Houses, 151–­2.
4. Miller, “On Piano Performance,” 262.
5. David Burrows, “Instrumentalities,” Journal of Musicology 5, no. 1 (1987): 123.
6. Godlovitch, Musical Performance, 71.
7. Ibid.
8. Gracyk, “Listening to Music,” 145.
9. A number of celebrated guitarists in the blues/rock tradition have named
their guitars: Eric Clapton had a guitar called Blackie; Roy Buchanan had one
called Nancy; Keith Richards has called a guitar “Micawber”; George Harrison
played Rocky and Lucy; Steve Vai has guitars named Evo and Flo; and the list goes
on. The “Bad Dog Café” section of the Telecaster Guitar Forum, the online bulletin
board that is my source for this information, also features entries by many lesser-­
known musicians listing the names they have given their instruments. This thread,
“Clapton Had ‘Blackie’, Roy Buchanan Had ‘Nancy’, BB King Has ‘Lucille,’” started
by “Blazer” on March 27, 2009, is available at http://www.tdpri.com/forum/bad-
dog-cafe/155962-clapton-had-blackie-roy-buchanan-had-nancy­bb-king-has-lucille.
html
10. B. B. King, quoted by Jim Kerekes and Dennis O’Neill, “Lucille Speaks,” The
King of the Blues, 1996, http://www.worldblues.com/bbking/prairie/lucille.html
11. In a discussion of a similar moment on a recording by the folk and blues artist
Leadbelly, Allan F. Moore suggests that the guitar in such cases can be understood as
a second protagonist within the song (Song Means, 182). My position is that the guitar
 240  •   Notes to Pages 69–77

is constructed as a second performer, an entity that exists outside the song, with its
own persona.
12. B. B. King, “Lucille,” Lucille, Bluesway BLs-­6016, 1968, LP.
13. King, quoted by Kerekes and O’Neill, “Lucille Speaks.”
14. It is important to stipulate, however, that Lucille is not a specific instrument;
there have been many Lucilles over the course of King’s career, though they have all
been of the same model, the Gibson ES-­355. But the fact that Lucille is not a par-
ticular guitar reinforces the distinction between object (it) and persona (she) that
King implies in talking about her: Lucille’s identity persists across multiple physical
incarnations.
15. These observations are based on King’s performance of several songs on Ralph
Gleason’s Jazz Casual television show in May 1968 on the National Educational Tele-
vision network. Clips of this program are available online: “BB King on Ralph Glea-
son’s Jazz Casual 1968 Part 1,” YouTube video, 9:23, posted by “matuto2007,” July 21,
2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgTWSEfGwEU and “BB King on Ralph
Gleason’s Jazz Casual 1968 Part 2,” YouTube video, 10:45, posted by “matuto2007,”
July 21, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqkWH4G1SRA. It was also pub-
lished as a DVD by Rhino/WEA in 2002.
16. Cone, The Composer’s Voice, 18, 29.
17. Thompson et al., “Seeing Music Performance,” 207–­8.
18. Ibid., 208.
19. Some of my description of GuitarBotana here repeats material that appeared
originally in “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2008), 107–­9, where I discuss Kimura and her performance in a different
context.
20. These and subsequent observations about Kimura’s performance with Guitar-
Bot are based on Mari Kimura, “Mari Kimura: Guitarbotana,” YouTube video, 6:23,
directed by Liubo Borrisov, posted by “Mari Kimura,” September 21, 2007, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNzL75a_dD8
21. David Z. Saltz, “The Art of Interaction: Interactivity, Performativity, and Com-
puters,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 2 (1997): 123–­4.
22. In his article “Live Media: Interactive Technology and Theatre,” David Z. Saltz
makes a useful taxonomic distinction between instrumental media, in which “inter-
active technology is used to cre­ate new kinds of instruments,” and virtual puppetry:
“The difference is that while an instrument is an extension of the performer, a kind of
expressive prosthesis, a virtual puppet functions as the performer’s double. In other
words, instruments are something performers use to express themselves . . . ; a puppet
is a virtual performer in its own right.” Theatre Topics 11, no. 2 (2001): 126. Kimura
uses GuitarBot as a virtual puppet that is ultimately under her control, but appears to
the audience as a “performer in its own right.”
23. Quoted in Auslander, “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance,”
114.
24. Quoted in Auslander, “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance,”
116. An index to the differences between the cultural contexts in which Kimura
and King operate is that whereas it is possible that the more experimentally inclined
part of the audience for art music might be open to the idea of a robotic musician,
it is unimaginable that the blues audience, which subscribes to an ideology of folk
authenticity, would be equally accepting.
25. Mari Kimura, GuitarBotana, 2005. The score was provided to me by the
composer.
 Notes to Pages 77–87  •   241

26. MOO is defined as “a system that has been developed from the early text-­
based multiuser adventure games, and offers a purely text-­based environment allow-
ing multiple users to  .  .  . interact with other users and with end-­user systems.” A
Dictionary of Computer Science, 7th ed., ed. Andrew Butterfield and Gerard Ekembe
Ngondi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 352.
27. Michele White, The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 43.
28. Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 20.
29. Ibid., 335–­7.
30. John Deighton, “The Consumption of Performance,” Journal of Consumer
Research 19, no. 3 (1992): 365.
31. Quoted in Ben Popper, “Robot Rock,” Brooklyn Paper, November 10, 2007,
http://www.brooklyn­paper.com/stories/30/44/30_44robotrock.html
32. Simon Hollington and Kypros Kyprianou, “Technology and the
Uncanny,”(paper presented at the EVA London Conference, July 2007, http://www.
eva-conferences.com/eva_london/2007/papers
33. Matthew Causey, “The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in
the Space of Technology,” Theatre Journal 51, no. 4 (1999): 385.

Part Two
1. Felice Rubin, “Leon Redbone Brings Eclectic, Irreverent Music to Colonial
Theatre,” Montgomery Media, November 13, 2009, http://www.montgomerynews.
com/entertainment/leon-redbone-brings-eclectic-irreverent-music-to-colonial-the-
atre/article_d2ba5b8b-1d15-5f71-b7ee-a5d630f3cfcd.html
2. I discuss my reasons for altering aspects of my original argument in much
greater detail in “’Musical Personae’ Revisited,” in Investigating Musical Performance:
Theoretical Models and Intersections, ed. Gianmario Borio et al. (Abingdon: Routledge,
2020), 41-­55.
3. Goffman’s precise relationship to symbolic interactionism is open to discus-
sion. Although Goffman himself resisted the label, he was a product of the Chicago
school of sociology, of which symbolic interactionism was a major component, and
his work generally has been classified in that way. See Michael Hviid Jacobsen, “Erving
Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order through Everyday Observations and Imag-
inative Metaphors,” in The Interactionist Imagination: Studying Meaning, Situation and
Micro-­Social Order, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),
208–­13.
4. Michael Hviid Jacobsen, “Introduction: Instigators of Interactionism—­a Short
Introduction to Interactionism in Sociology,” in Jacobsen, The Interactionist Imagina-
tion, 16.
5. Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1986), 4.
6. Paul Rock, The Making of Symbolic Interactionism (London: Macmillan, 1979),
37.
7. Ibid., 129.

Chapter Five
1. Cook, Beyond the Score, 23.
2. Ibid.
 242  •   Notes to Pages 88–93

3. David Graver, “The Actor’s Bodies,” in Critical Concepts: Performance, vol. 2, ed.
Philip Auslander (London: Routledge, 2003), 164.
4. The similarity between Graver’s tripartite schema for the actor and Frith’s
tripartite schema for the pop musician discussed in chapter 1 is evident.
5. “Michael Jackson—­Billie Jean—­Brunei 1996,” YouTube video, 9:49, posted by
“Chief Mouse,” October 1, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxRY7HCAMo
6. Godlovitch, Musical Performance, 139.
7. Ibid., 140.
8. Ibid., 144.
9. Ibid., 44–­9.
10. Peter Johnson argues that recordings provide access to a performer’s persona
in the context of classical music (I discuss his concept of persona in the introduction)
in “The Legacy of Recordings,” in Rink, Musical Performance, 197–­8. Allan F. Moore
devotes a chapter to how persona is manifest in recordings of popular songs in Song
Means, 179–­214.
11. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 10.
12. Ibid., 22.
13. Ibid., 157.
14. It is, of course, possible to frame any action or sound as music; this is a favorite
gesture of experimental and avant-­garde musicians (e.g., the bruitisme, of the Italian
Futurists, musique concrète, John Cage, Fluxus, Frank Zappa, and so on).
15. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 41–­4.
16. Cook characterizes the conventional view of the text/performance rela-
tionship in music as holding that “the role of performance is in some more or less
straightforward manner to express, project, or ‘bring out’ compositional structure,”
a view he critiques as excessively narrow. “Between Process and Product: Music and/
as Performance,” Music Theory Online 7, no. 2 (April 2001): par. 22, http://www.soci-
etymusictheory.org/mto/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook_frames.html. The con-
cept of keying provides a partial alternative to talking about musical performances in
this way, as Cook implies (without using Goffman’s vocabulary) when he suggests that
words like “quotation, commentary, critique, parody, irony, or travesty” could be used
to describe how a musician treats a composition (“Between Process and Product,”
par. 23). In considering a performance such as John Coltrane’s 1960 recording of
“My Favorite Things,” for instance, one could say that he keyed as jazz a song previ-
ously known as a show tune from a very popular Broadway musical rather than saying
that he brought out its compositional structure or even that he interpreted it. The
significance of Coltrane’s act of keying such a song as jazz, and the manner in which
he did so, would become objects of analysis rather than the relationship of his perfor-
mance to the composition’s formal characteristics.
17. This concept of transformation raises an interesting question about the use
of sound-­mixing in live concerts. In a sense, the mix, even when performed live, is a
transformation of the actual performance produced by the musicians. In such a case,
the audience has no practical access to the “real” event, but only to its transformed
version.
18. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 251.
19. Small, Musicking, 9.
20. Ibid., 1–­2.
21. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 82.
22. Ibid.
23. The reality status of recorded music is not a simple matter, however. Whereas
some commentators insist that a musical recording must be perceived as a document
 Notes to Pages 94–100  •   243

of a performance that took place at another time, others experience such recordings
as performances taking place at the moment of listening, as I discussed in chapter 1.
24. One way of understanding the relationship between genres and subgenres is
that subgenres are keyings of basic genres, each of which operates somewhat like a
primary frame. So psychedelic rock, glam rock, punk rock, and so on can be seen as
different keyings of the activities that take place within the basic rock frame.
25. Goffman distinguishes misframings from other categories of error (such as
mistaking a kite for a bird [misperception] or adding a column of figures incorrectly)
on the grounds that misframings lead to “systematically sustained, generative error,
the breeding of wrongly oriented behavior” (Frame Analysis, 308). Misframings are
not specific misunderstandings or errors but misconstruals of the underlying struc-
ture of what is going on that make it impossible for the interactant to participate suc-
cessfully in the unfolding event.
26. Musicians frequently play with and challenge the limits of genre frames. The
maverick jazz clarinetist Don Byron, for example, issued an album in 1996 entitled
Bug Music (Nonesuch 7559-­79438-­2, CD) on which he included music associated
with John Kirby’s band of the 1930s and compositions by Raymond Scott, alongside
pieces by Duke Ellington. Kirby’s band often played arrangements derived from light
classical music and emphasized scored parts over improvisation. Raymond Scott was
a musician and technological bricoleur who wrote music for his quintet, also in the
1930s, which was subsequently used in Warner Brothers cartoons. By insisting on
continuities between jazz and music that shares some characteristics with jazz, but is
not normally included in the jazz canon, Byron questioned and tested the limits of
the jazz frame.
27. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 10.
28. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor
Books, 1959), 10, 92.
29. Michael Hughes, “Country Music as Impression Management: A Meditation
on Fabricating Authenticity,” Poetics 28, nos. 2–­3 (2000): 196.
30. Ibid.
31. Thomas Postlewait and Tracy C. Davis, “Theatricality: An Introduction,” in
Theatricality, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 1.
32. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 22.
33. Ibid., 4.
34. Small, Musicking, 64.
35. Ibid., 64–­5.
36. Richard Bauman, Story, Performance, and Event (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1986), 4.
37. Paula Tatarunis, “Ordnance Music,” Paula’s House of Toast, June 25, 2004,
http://paulashouseoftoast.blogspot.com/archives/2004_06_01_paulashouseof
toast_archive.html. It may be that Tatarunis somewhat misremembered this event.
Another account of it states that it was Brüggen himself who “wandered onto the
Jordan Hall stage, donned a pair of dark sunglasses, stretched himself out on a chaise
longue, and nonchalantly began reading a copy of the daily newspaper” while other
musicians played Telemann duos. Joel Cohen, “An Appreciation: Frans Brüggen
(1934–­2014),” Boston Musical Intelligencer, August 14, 2014, https://www.classical-
scene.com/2014/08/14/brueggen-1934-2014/
38. Kailin R. Rubinoff places Brüggen in the context of the Dutch branch of the
“historically informed performance” movement in early music which was seen as con-
nected to the counterculture and protest movements of the late 1960s in “A Revolu-
 244  •   Notes to Pages 100–103

tion in Sheep’s Wool Stockings: Early Music and ‘1968,’” in Music and Protest in 1968,
ed. Beate Kutschka and Barley Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 237–­54.
39. Lydon, Flashbacks, 73.
40. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 22.
41. Ibid., 22–­4.
42. Small, Musicking, 25.
43. Jazz at Lincoln Center, “The Architecture,” accessed September 23, 2005;
page no longer accessible, http://www.jalc.org/fprh/architecture.html
44. The phrase “America’s classical music” is attributable to William “Billy” Taylor,
the well-­known jazz pianist and educator, who published an article titled “Jazz: Ameri-
ca’s Classical Music” in 1986 in The Black Perspective in Music 14, no. 1 (Winter 1986):
21–­5. The Rose Theater institutionalizes both an analogy between jazz and classical
music and the practice of staging jazz concerts at halls devoted to classical music
that began in the 1930s with Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concerts (of course,
Goodman also performed classical music on occasion) and continued in the 1940s
with Norman Grantz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic series. Since the 1960s, it has been
fairly common for regional classical music venues in the United States to program at
least some jazz artists, often those like Dave Brubeck, who studied composition with
Darius Milhaud and whose music has affinities with classical or contemporary “seri-
ous” music.
45. Daniel Oppenheimer, “Gladiator: Matt Haimovitz Fights the War on Terror
with an Unlikely Weapon,” Valley Advocate, March 25, 2004, http://www.valleyadvo-
cate.com/gbase/Arts/content.html?oid=oid:59415
46. See Small for a discussion of how symphony halls condition the social dimen-
sions of concerts (Musicking, 19–­29). For an analysis of how the space of indie rock
clubs is used by listeners to position themselves in relation to the music and its cul-
ture, see Wendy Fonarow, “The Spatial Organization of the Indie Music Gig,” in The
Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (London: Routledge, 1997),
360–­9.
47. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 24.
48. Goffman rarely addressed questions of race directly in his work. The work
of his that touched most directly on this area is Stigma: Notes on the Management of
Spoiled Identity, which has provided inspiration for scholars working on racial issues.
However, Goffman explicitly states there that because he is interested in what a broad
array of stigmatized identities have in common, he does not treat each in its individu-
ality (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1963), 147. Goffman addressed questions
of gender more directly, if infrequently. For a discussion of Goffman’s view of the way
“natural” gender differences are enlisted to support social and cultural distinctions
and power structures, see Candace West, “Goffman in Feminist Perspective,” Sociologi-
cal Perspectives 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 353–­69.
49. Darius Rucker, “Wagon Wheel,” YouTube video, 5:46, March 21, 2013,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvKyBcCDOB4
50. Hughes, “Country Music,” 197.
51. Ibid.
52. Chris Durman, “African American Old-­Time String Band Music: A Selective
Discography,” Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 64, no. 4 (2008):
797-­808. Because African-­American string bands were not as widely recorded as white
ones, the fact that African American musicians regularly performed hillbilly music
early in its history has been largely ignored.
53. The Atlanta-­based African American rapper Lil Nas X saw his song “Old Town
 Notes to Pages 103–7  •   245

Road” debut at number 19 on the Billboard country chart in March 2019 only to have
Billboard unceremoniously remove it on the grounds that it did not exhibit enough
characteristics of the country genre to qualify for the chart. Billboard issued a state-
ment claiming the “decision to take the song off of the country chart had absolutely
nothing to do with the race of the artist.” Kristin M. Hall, “Billboard Removes Rapper
Lil Nas X from Country Chart,” AP News, March 28, 2019, https://www.apnews.com/
6045fec139204644b616afb63622c2d9
54. Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 133–­4.
55. John S. Otto and Augustus M. Burns, “Black and White Cultural Interaction
in the Early Twentieth Century South: Race and Hillbilly Music,” Phylon 35, no. 4
(1974): 407–­17. The song “Wagon Wheel” is itself a product of black and white
cultural interaction in a modest and somewhat indirect way. The song originated
as a work Bob Dylan recorded in an unfinished form during the sessions for the
soundtrack to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid in 1973. Ketch Secor of the Old Crow Medi-
cine Show heard “Wagon Wheel” on a Dylan bootleg and wrote his own verses for it.
The song became a staple of the group’s repertoire long before they recorded it in
2003. Dylan has acknowledged that key phrases in the chorus derive from older blues
songs by black artists, particularly “Rock Me, Mama” by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup,
inspired by Big Bill Broonzy’s “Rock Me Baby.” As Edward Mack points out, other
blues songs by Curtis Jones and Melvin “Lil Son” Jackson have related lyrics that may
also have found their way into “Wagon Wheel.” “The Surprising Origins of ‘Wagon
Wheel,’ One of the Most Popular Country Songs Ever,” wideopencountry.com, 2015,
https://www.wideopencountry.com/song-day-wagon-wheel/. The interaction among
musicians of different colors that ultimately produced the song took place across at
least three generations, across the genres of blues, country, and rock, and was medi-
ated by the technology of sound recording.
56. Geoff Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of
Nostalgia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 3, no. 1 (2008): 83.
57. Ibid., 88, 91.
58. Ibid., 82.
59. There is a very similar moment in the film Cadillac Records (2008), a fictional-
ized account of the legendary Chicago blues label Chess Records, in which Chuck
Berry (played by Mos Def) is denied entry to a club where he is to perform because
the club doorman and manager believe Chuck Berry to be a country music artist and
cannot fathom that the black man before them could be Chuck Berry. Berry seeks to
demonstrate his identity by playing a Johnny Cash–­like country rhythm on his guitar.
60. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 26.
61. Paul Gorman, The Look: Adventures in Pop and Rock Fashion (London: Sanctuary
Publishing, 2001), 29.
62. It may or may not be coincidental that modern jazz musicians started dressing
in this very respectable way just around the time that American sociologists began
to characterize their professional milieu as a deviant subculture. See, for example,
Howard Becker’s classic ethnographic study, “The Professional Dance Musician and
His Audience,” American Journal of Sociology 57, no. 2 (1951): 146–­54.
63. Daniel J. Wakin offers an interesting and entertaining discussion of some of
the social conventions of the classical music concert frame. Here is Wakin’s account
of symphonic costuming conventions:

For main subscription concerts in the evening, men must wear formal black
tails, formal black trousers, long-­sleeved white shirts, white bow ties, white
 246  •   Notes to Pages 107–14

vests and black shoes. Black, floor-­length, long-­sleeved gowns or black skirts
with long-­sleeved black blouses are prescribed for women. No pants allowed.
During matinees, men substitute black or midnight blue suits and long dark
ties for the tails. Dresses for women can rise to midcalf; wide-­leg “palazzo-­
style” pants are permitted. The formality diminishes for summer concerts.
The code is white jacket and white short-­sleeved shirt for men, black bow tie
and black pants. When it is too hot for jackets, white long-­sleeved shirts are
allowed. Women must stay with the floor-­length black skirt and long-­sleeved
white blouse. Still no pants.
The dress code is the same for the men for the parks concerts, although
women may wear short-­ sleeved white blouses, midcalf black skirts—­ and,
finally, pants if they want.

“Cracking the Secret Orchestral Codes,” New York Times, February 13, 2005, https://
www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/arts/music/cracking-the-secret-orchestral-codes.
html
64. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 24.
65. Robin Pogrebin, “For Symphony Fans, the Touch of MTV,” New York
Times, February 23, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/arts/
for-symphony-fans-the-touch-of-mtv
66. Ken Tucker, “The Invasion of the Singer-­ Songwriters,” in Ed Ward, Ken
Tucker, and Geoffrey Stokes, Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll
(New York: Summit Books, 1986), 471.
67. John Bealle, “Self-­Involvement in Musical Performance: Stage Talk and Inter-
pretive Control at a Bluegrass Festival,” Ethnomusicology 37, no. 1 (1993): 74.
68. David Pattie, Rock Music in Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
93.
69. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 572.
70. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 31.
71. I use the word “purport” here (and “ostensible” in the next paragraph) advis-
edly. What is important, after all, is that the performer appear to be feeling and
expressing certain emotions, not that she really feels them at the time of perfor-
mance. Although sincerity and authenticity are ideologically important in many musi-
cal genres, the audience can only assess the presence or absence of such qualities in
a given performance by attending to the signs the performer displays. As Simon Frith
puts it in Performing Rites, 215, “‘Sincerity’ . . . cannot be measured by searching for
what lies behind the performance; if we are moved by a performer we are moved by
what we immediately hear and see.”
72. Isaac Guzman, “Face the Music,” New York Daily News, November 15, 2004,
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/story/253119p-216716c.html
73. Godlovitch, Musical Performance, 141.
74. Cone, The Composer’s Voice, 106.
75. Ibid., 5.
76. Ibid., 29.
77. Gelbart, “Persona and Voice,” 204.
78. Ibid., 213–­4.
79. Keith Negus, “Authorship and the Popular Song,” Music & Letters 92, no. 4
(2011): 623.
80. Stan Hawkins also stresses the importance of what he calls “personal narra-
tives” to our understanding of a musician’s persona. Hawkins’s approach suggest a
hermeneutic in which our knowledge of biographical information colors our under-
 Notes to Pages 114–20  •   247

standing of an artist’s songs while, at the same time, the information we believe we
obtain from the songs colors our understanding of the biography. Hawkins proposes
this concept in the context of rock music, but it clearly is applicable to musicians
more generally. “Personas in Rock,” 241-­3.
81. Negus, “Authorship,” 623–­4.
82. Ibid., 625.
83. Cook, Beyond the Score, 298.
84. I do not entirely agree with Cook’s reading of Hendrix’s performance. The
Isle of Wight concert came at a transitional moment for Hendrix. Arguably, he was
trying to come to terms with his identity as an African American musician. This is
apparent from his appearance: his hair is no longer a hippie bouffant held back by
a headband but a short Afro. His stage clothing remains colorful, but the cut of his
tunic suggests a dashiki. Additionally, Hendrix assumes a different relationship to
his band than previously. At the Isle of Wight, the default stage position for the trio
was with Hendrix and bassist Billy Cox flanking drummer Mitch Mitchell on either
side. Hendrix certainly takes on the position of a front man at some moments, but
he also moves behind the other musicians and is more deferential toward them than
at any earlier point in his career. He even gives Mitchell substantial opportunity to
solo. Hendrix thus presents himself more as a member of a group than as a leader
with sidemen. His performance of “Foxy Lady” is noticeably a departure from the
more subdued self-­presentation in which he engages throughout the majority of the
concert. As Cook notes, he brings out all the flashy moves of Jimi Hendrix, c. 1967.
Where I disagree with Cook is that I do not see evidence that Hendrix is unhappy to
be performing in this way. Having established a new, lower-­key, and seemingly more
serious musical persona, he reverts to full-­on showmanship for one song. This brings
an element of “before and after” into the concert as a whole and shows that Hendrix
is consciously aware of the transition he is attempting. There is role distance involved,
as I suggest in the main text. Hendrix gives his fans a taste of the showman he once
was, but also suggests through his demeanor in the rest of the concert that this is no
longer who he wishes to be without necessarily expressing displeasure at performing
that way.
85. Erving Goffman, Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin University Books, 1972), 93–­102.
86. Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Oakland, CA:
PM Press, 2015), 80.
87. Ibid., 81.
88. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 13.
89. Richie Unterberger, “Phil Ochs,” in All Music Guide to Rock, 2nd ed., ed.
Michael Erlewine et al. (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1997), 669.
90. John S. Wilson, “Phil Ochs Fans Are Won Over by Rock,” New York Times, April
3, 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/03/archives/phil-ochs-fans-are-won-
over-by-rock.html
91. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 16.
92. Lindridge and Eagar, “And Ziggy Played Guitar.”
93. Avedon’s photographs are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art,
New York City, https://www.moma.org/artists/248?locale=en
94. Ian Inglis has suggested that Edwin P. Hollander’s concept of “idiosyncrasy
credits,” introduced in 1958, works well to explain the Beatles’ ability to maintain
their audience even after deviating sharply from the audience’s expectations by turn-
ing toward psychedelia and the counterculture. Hollander summarizes the concept:
“An individual who is perceived to be behaving in keeping with group expectancies
 248  •   Notes to Pages 121–29

and making contributions to the group’s activities will likely move upward in the per-
ception of others, possibly toward a leadership role. Conceived of as credits, this sta-
tus then permits latitude for innovative behaviors, if seen by the group as helping to
achieve its goals. Thus, displays of living up to norms and showing competence allow
greater latitude for later innovation.” Inclusive Leadership: The Essential Leader-­Follower
Relationship (New York: Routledge, 2009), 163. Inglis makes a convincing case that in
the early 1960s, the Beatles, under the tutelage of their manager, Brian Epstein, both
conformed to the expectations of the popular music audience and made noteworthy
contributions, thus accumulating the idiosyncrasy credits that allowed them to move
in a very different direction starting around 1966. “Ideology, Trajectory & Stardom:
Elvis Presley & the Beatles,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music
27, no. 1 (June 1996): 64–­72. This model works well for the Beatles, and possibly
other groups, but it cannot account for the Beach Boys’ initial failure to make the
same transition smoothly. The Beach Boys were enormously successful in the popular
music world of the early 1960s but, for reasons that are not at all clear, apparently did
not accumulate the idiosyncrasy credits they needed to move in new and innovative
directions.
95. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 50–­2.
96. Don Cusic, The Cowboy in Country Music: An Historical Survey with Artist Profiles
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 15–­6.
97. Quoted in Hughes, “Country Music,” 194.
98. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 252–­3.
99. Although I have restricted the scope of my discussion to the contemporary,
secular, Western musical forms I feel competent to discuss, I would guess that the
audience’s investment in the musician’s persona is even deeper in cases where musi-
cal performance serves ritual functions.
100. Both of these personae are detached from the “real” person who embodies
them, whose birth name is Perry Bernstein.
101. “Jane Says: Do You Want to See Perry Farrell or DJ Peretz?,” Chartattack, July
9, 2001, http://www.chartattack.com/damn/2001/07/0905.cfm. A possible scenario
is one in which a musician participates in two different musical cultures that are so
antithetical to one another that the knowledge that she works in one context would
be discrediting in the other. As a purely hypothetical example, consider the plight
of a musician who plays Jewish music at weddings and bar mitzvahs on the weekends
and neo-­Nazi hardcore at clubs during the week. In such a case, the musician would
be obligated to maintain strict audience segregation (Goffman, Presentation of Self, 49)
and make sure that neither audience ever became aware of the persona intended for
the other one.
102. “Jane Says.”
103. David Amram, No More Walls, RCA Records VCS-­7089, 1971, LP.
104. David Amram, Triple Concerto for Woodwind, Brass, Jazz Quintets, and
Orchestra (plus Elegy for Violin and Orchestra), RCA Records ARL1-­0459, 1978, LP.
105. “David Amram’s Triple Concerto,” YouTube video, 9:19,
posted by “Ky Hote,” December 22, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=vSOv-La5lk4&list=RDvSOv-La5lk4&start_radio=1

Chapter Six
1. Riley Johnson, “Boy’s Dream of Pop Stardom Granted,” Omaha World Herald,
April 25, 2012.
2. David R. Shumway, “Authenticity: Modernity, Stardom, and Rock & Roll,”
Modernism/Modernity 14, no. 3 (2007): 530.
 Notes to Pages 129–39  •   249

3. Lee Marshall, “The Structural Functions of Stardom in the Recording Indus-

try,” Popular Music and Society 36, no. 5 (2013): 580.
4. For a documentary overview of Cayden Hubbard’s pop star experience, see
Make-­a-­Wish America, “Wish Granted: Cayden Becomes a Popstar,” YouTube video,
6:59, October 26, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq2_h6KU4aw
5. For example, Ronald J. Pelias and James VanOosting famously constructed a
scale of audience participation the lowest degree of which is described as “inactive”
in “A Paradigm for Performance Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987):
226.
6. Richard Bauman, A World of Others’ Words: Cross-­Cultural Perspectives on Intertex-
tuality (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 9.
7. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 129–­31.
8. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 253.
9. Negus, “Authorship,” 622.
10. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 45.
11. Ibid., 129–­31.
12. Ibid., 10.
13. Margaret Reist, “Maxey’s Make-­A-­Wish Celebrity Meets Maroon 5 Singers,”
Lincoln Journal Star, April 30, 2012, https://journalstar.com/news/local/maxey-
s-make-a-wish-celebrity-meets-maroon-singers/article_6ddd9519-1c8d-5d67-9c9e-
aebebd1520b3.html
14. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 59.
15. Inglis, “Ideology, Trajectory & Stardom,” 69.
16. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 24.
17. Hughes, “Country Music,” 194–­5.
18. Ibid., 193–­4.
19. Shumway, “Authenticity,” 528.
20. Simon Frith, “Video Pop: Picking Up the Pieces,” in Facing the Music: Essays on
Pop, Rock and Culture, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 112.
21. Jake Austen, TV A-­Go-­Go: Rock on TV from American Bandstand to American
Idol (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005), 228–­9.
22. Chris Robley, “Why YouTube Is More Important Than Anything Else in Your
Music Career,” CDbaby: The DIY Musician, May 5, 2013, https://diymusician.cdbaby.com/
youtube/why-youtube-is-more-important-than-anything-else-in-your-music-career/
23. Mary Madden, “Artists, Musicians & the Internet,” Pew Internet & Ameri-
can Life Project, December 5, 2004, https://www.pewinternet.org/2004/12/05/
artists-musicians-and-the-internet/
24. Lizzie Widdicombe, “Teen Titan: The Man Who Made Justin Bieber,” New
Yorker, August 27, 2012, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/03/
teen-titan
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of
Performance and Imagination (London: Sage, 1998), 50.
28. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 67.
29. Ibid.
30. The concept of para-­social interaction was first suggested by Donald Horton
and R. Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-­Social Interaction,” Psychiatry
19 (1956): 215–­29. I discuss this idea further in chapter 8.
31. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 69.
32. Hunter Davies describes the typical content of the Beatles’ fan club Christmas
records as “little sketches and  .  .  . a few corny songs.” The Beatles (London: Ebury
 250  •   Notes to Pages 140–50

Press, 2009), 317–­8. Both he and Steven D. Stark (Meet the Beatles: A Cultural History of
the Band That Shook Youth, Gender, and the World [Pymble, NSW: HarperCollins, 2005],
101) suggest that the Christmas records convey something of the spirit of the Beatles’
antic live shows at the Cavern Club in Liverpool and on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg
before they refined their act to court a mainstream audience beginning in 1962.
33. Alice Marwick and danah boyd, “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on
Twitter,” Convergence 17, no. 2 (2011): 145.
34. Ibid., 148.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 144.
37. Goffman, Encounters, 94.
38. Ibid., 95.
39. Robert Cohen, “Role Distance: On Stage and on the Merry Go Round,” Jour-
nal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 19, no. 1 (2004): 117.
40. Joshua Green, “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead,” The Atlantic,
March 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/manage
ment-secrets-of-the-grateful-dead/307918/
41. Mickey Hess, Is Hip Hop Dead? The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Most
Wanted Music (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007), 14.
42. Stark, Meet the Beatles, 202–­3.
43. Richard A. Peterson, “The Dialectic of  Hard-­Core  and  Soft-­Shell  Country
Music,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (1995): 273–­300.
44. Barbara Ching, Wrong’s What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 29.

Chapter Seven
1. Lee B. Brown, “Phonography, Repetition, and Spontaneity,” Philosophy and Lit-
erature 24, no. 1 (2000): 119.
2. Ibid., 120.
3. Ibid.
4. Carol S. Gould and Kenneth Keaton, “The Essential Role of Improvisation in
Musical Performance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 2 (2000): 143.
5. Philip Alperson, “On Musical Improvisation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti-
cism 43, no. 1 (1984): 17–­29; Ed Sarath, “A New Look at Improvisation,” Journal of
Music Theory 40, no. 1 (1996): 1–­38.
6. Frank Tirro, “Constructive Elements in Jazz Improvisation,” Journal of the Amer-
ican Musicological Society 27, no. 2 (1974): 285–­305; Lewis Porter, “John Coltrane’s ‘A
Love Supreme’: Jazz Improvisation as Composition,” Journal of the American Musicologi-
cal Society 38, no. 3 (1985): 593–­621.
7. Bruno Nettl, “Thoughts on Improvisation: A Comparative Approach,” Musical
Quarterly 60, no. 1 (1974): 3.
8. Rose Rosengarden Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western
Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 150.
9. Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjec-
tivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 10.
10. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 30.
11. Brown, “Musical Works,” 364–­5.
12. Through experimental work, Andreas C. Lehmann and Reinhard Kopiez have
shown that “expert listeners cannot easily discern one generative process [composi-
 Notes to Pages 150–55  •   251

tion] from the other [improvisation].” “The Difficulty of Discerning between Com-
posed and Improvised Music,” Musicæ Scientiæ 14, no. 2, special issue (2010): 123.
13. In fact, there clearly are instances in which the solos are composed, even
among jazz legends. Björn Heile documents the fact that the solos played during
tours by the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1969 and 1971 were generally note-­for-­note
recreations of solos performed on earlier recordings. He argues that the orchestra
was catering to “audience members[who] have paid to hear just that solo” and wanted
“to hear the music they know and love from records in arrangements that they recog-
nize.” “Play It Again, Duke: Jazz Performance, Improvisation, and the Construction
of Spontaneity,” in Watching Jazz: Encounters with Jazz Performance on Screen, ed. Björn
Heile, Peter Elsdon, and Jenny Doctor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 255.
14. Godlovitch, Musical Performance, 27.
15. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 129.
16. Ibid., 129–­30.
17. Ibid., 130–­1.
18. Ibid., 134.
19. Ibid., 135–­6.
20. It is worth noting that, for Becker, respecting the “occupational myth of equal-
ity” (172) built into jazz does not yield creative music. It is only when “performers
do not interact in a way that respects the conservative etiquette” of improvisation but
“agree, implicitly and collectively, to give priority to what, in their collective judg-
ment, works and to give short shrift to what doesn’t, and not to be polite about it”
(175) that true creativity and innovation can emerge. Howard S. Becker, “The Eti-
quette of Improvisation,” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7, no. 3 (2000): 171–­6.
21. Ingrid Monson draws on Goffman in her analysis of jazz improvisation, lik-
ening it to conversation. Inasmuch as she treats improvisation as something that
emerges only in performance and through interaction, her approach is compatible
with symbolic interactionism: “At the moment of performance, jazz improvisation
quite simply has nothing in common with a text (or its musical equivalent, the score)
for it is music composed through face-­to-­face interaction.” Although she ultimately
suggests that the audience participates in the conversation as well, her focus is primar-
ily on the means by which the musicians themselves interact to produce improvisa-
tion. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation as Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 80. The same is true for Paul Berliner, who observes, “Performers and
listeners form a communication loop in which the actions of each continuously affect
the other,” a point that resonates with Goffman’s notion of impression management.
Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 459. My approach is compatible with both Monson’s and Berliner’s in the
sense that I am concerned primarily with something that is prior to their respective
comments: the means by which musicians achieve a working consensus with an audi-
ence about the definition of the situation (i.e., that jazz entails improvisation) to
govern the event, a consensus that must be in place for portions of the performance
to be recognized as improvisation at all.
22. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 3.
23. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, 460.
24. The full lineup for this performance: Miles Davis (trumpet); John Coltrane
(tenor sax); Wynton Kelly (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Jimmy Cobb (drums);
Frank Rehak, Jimmy Cleveland, and Bill Elton (trombones). This performance is
available on DVD (Miles Davis, The Cool Jazz Sound, MBD Video, 2005); numerous
clips of it have also been posted to YouTube.com. A shorter version of the perfor-
mance analysis to follow appeared originally in Philip Auslander, “Musical Persona:
 252  •   Notes to Pages 156–69

The Physical Performance of Popular Music,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to

Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 303–15.
25. Because it was performed for the camera in a television studio, this perfor-
mance was staged in an “in-­the-­round” fashion not at all typical for jazz, in which musi-
cians are usually arranged more linearly and frontally with respect to the audience.
26. Mark C. Gridley, “Cool Jazz,” Grove Music Online, https://doi.org/10.1093/
gmo/9781561592630.article.J100900, accessed March 15, 2008.
27. Small, Musicking, 48.
28. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 13.
29. Heile argues that jazz audiences seek “expressive intensity and presence” in
jazz performance and that these depend more on the performance of a jazz musi-
cian’s persona as I have described it here than they do on the fact of improvisation.
He describes the Duke Ellington Orchestra “as dramatiz[ing] ideas of spontaneity
and expressive intensity, with or without improvisation.” “Play It Again, Duke,” 258–­9.
30. Tirro, “Constructive Elements,” 286.
31. Gould and Keaton, “Essential Role of Improvisation,” 145.
32. Ibid., 147.
33. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 136.
34. Brown, “Phonography, Repetition, and Spontaneity,” 116.
35. Ibid., 117.
36. Although Brown is not alone in suggesting that surprise is an important ele-
ment of improvisation (Debra Cash agrees, for instance), I am not completely per-
suaded of its essentiality. Tirro describes jazz solos by saying, “The series of notes may
be thought of as a stochastic process, a sequence of notes that occur according to a
certain probability system called a style. At any point in time, the present event can be
seen to have proceeded from past events. . . . Because both the listener and the impro-
viser are oriented to the schema which limits the probabilities allowable for a solo in a
particular style, and since the initial statements in the solo carry implications for what
is to follow, prediction and, hence, musical meaning are possible. Listener expecta-
tion, analysis, and criticism go hand in hand” (“Constructive Elements,” 288–­9). It
is my sense as a listener that having one’s expectations fulfilled can be just as satisfy-
ing as being surprised: there is something very gratifying about predicting where an
improvising performer is going to go, only to have that performer go exactly where
one predicted! I grant that too high a quotient of predictability in an improvisation
may ultimately lead to a negative evaluation; perhaps the ideal lies in striking a bal-
ance between the predictable and the surprising. The balance may vary according
to specific style: some kinds of jazz conventionally seem to entail a higher degree of
improvisational predictability than others. Debra Cash, “Response to Becker’s ‘The
Etiquette of Improvisation,’” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7, no. 3 (2000): 177–­9.
37. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 136.
38. Alperson, “On Musical Improvisation,” 26.
39. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968),
220–­1.
40. I develop this argument in much greater detail in relation to a different cul-
tural realm in Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2018).

Chapter Eight
1. The Beatles at Shea Stadium, directed by Bob Precht (New York: Sullivan Produc-
tions, 1966).
 Notes to Pages 169–73  •   253

2. Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle (New York: Harmony Books,
1992), 215.
3. Godlovitch, Musical Performance, 39.
4. Ibid., 41.
5. As Laurel Sercombe shows in an essay on the group’s appearance on Ed Sul-
livan’s television program on February 9, 1964, the critical response to that show
and to Beatlemania in general often held that the audience should be understood as
performing, and that the audience’s performance, not the musicians’, was the most
distinctive aspect of the phenomenon. See “‘Ladies and Gentlemen . . .’ the Beatles:
The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS TV, February 9, 1964,” in Performance and Popular Music:
History, Place and Time, ed. Ian Inglis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 1–­15.
6. Quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, “Beatle-
mania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” in The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular
Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1992), 103.
7. Richard Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock (New York: Da Capo, 1987), 27.
8. Mary Ann Collins in Garry Berman, “We’re Going to See the Beatles”: An Oral His-
tory as Told by the Fans Who Were There (Santa Monica, CA: Santa Monica Press, 2008),
138–­9.
9. Frederick Lewis, “Britons Succumb to ‘Beatlemania,’” New York Times, Decem-
ber 1, 1963, https://www.nytimes.com/1963/12/01/archives/britons-succumb-to-
beatlemania.html
10. Evan Davies, “Psychological Characteristics of Beatle Mania,” Journal of the His-
tory of Ideas 30, no. 2 (1969): 273.
11. I am interested in the mechanisms of cultural reproduction at work here: How
does each generation learn this behavior and its appropriate cultural contexts? For
that matter, how is audience behavior generally transmitted as cultural reproduction?
Who was the first person to flick a lighter at a rock concert, and how do the genera-
tions of rock concertgoers that have appeared on the scene since know to do that and
in what contexts it should be done? Sercombe identifies such a mechanism in the case
of the Beatles: she argues that “American teenagers learned Beatlemania from local
media coverage of their British counterparts” (“Ladies and Gentlemen,” 11).
12. Ian Inglis approaches the Kennedy connection with some skepticism, argu-
ing that while the assassination certainly marked a social and cultural change in the
United States, it was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for American Bea-
tlemania. He points to a host of other factors that contributed to the group’s enor-
mous popularity stateside. “‘The Beatles Are Coming!’: Conjecture and Conviction
in the Myth of Kennedy, America, and the Beatles,” Popular Music & Society 24, no. 2
(2000): 93–­108.
13. Sheila Whiteley, “The Beatles as Zeitgeist,” in The Cambridge Companion to the
Beatles, ed. Kenneth Womack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 205.
14. Geoffrey O’Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life
(New York: Counterpoint, 2004), 150–­1.
15. Kenneth Womack and Todd F. Davis, “Mythology, Remythology, and Demy-
thology: The Beatles on Film,” in Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism,
and the Fab Four, ed. Kenneth Womack and Todd F. Davis (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2006), 100.
16. Dr. Bernard Saibel, “Beatlemania Frightens Child Expert,” Seattle Daily Times,
August 22, 1964, in The Rock History Reader, ed. Theo Cateforis (New York: Routledge,
2007), 56.
17. Jack Gould, “Quartet Continues to Agitate the Faithful,” New York Times, Febru-
ary 10, 1964, in The Times of the Sixties: The Culture, Politics and Personalities That Shaped
the Decade, ed. John Rockwell (New York: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2014), 869.
 254  •   Notes to Pages 174–84

18. Quoted in Ehrenreich et al., “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” 102.
19. Ibid.
20. Richard Smith points to a specific aspect of this phenomenon in a discussion
of female audiences’ apparent attraction to “unmanly men,” a tradition he traces
from Valentino to Liberace, Johnnie Ray, and Barry Manilow. Although he does not
discuss the Beatles, they were perceived in the mid-­1960s to be soft and androgynous
rather than manly. See Smith, “Housewives’ Choice: Female Fans and Unmanly Men,”
in The Popular Music Studies Reader, ed. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee
(New York: Routledge, 2006), 377–­81.
21. Ehrenreich et al., “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” 85.
22. Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (New York:
Harmony Books, 2007), 184.
23. Michael R. Frontani, The Beatles: Image and the Media (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2007), 3–­4.
24. Goffman, Presentation of Self, 24.
25. Womack and Davis, “Mythology, Remythology, and Demythology,” 100.
26. Horton and Wohl, “Mass Communication.”
27. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 221.
28. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” trans. Edmund Jephcott
and Kingsley Shorter, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–­1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings,
Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 510.
29. Philip Auslander, Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 98–­9.
30. Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, 229.
31. Ron Schaumburg, Growing Up with the Beatles (New York: Pyramid / Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 19.
32. Quoted in Ehrenreich et al., “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” 103.
33. Berman, We’re Going to See, 92.
34. Ibid., 149.
35. William Howell Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and
Popular Memory, 1890–­1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4, 22.
36. Verlyn Klinkenborg, “‘Good Bye, Mitzi Gaynor,’” in The Beatles Are Here! 50
Years after the Band Arrived in America, Writers, Musicians, and Other Fans Remember, ed.
Penelope Rowlands (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2014), 98–­9.
37. Noelle Oxenhandler, “Swimming to John,” in Rowlands, The Beatles Are Here,
126.
38. Meltzer, The Aesthetics of Rock, 27.
39. Kathy Albinder in Berman, We’re Going to See, 171.
40. Mark Duffett, “Imagined Memories: Webcasting as a ‘Live’ Technology and
the Case of Little Big Gig,” Information, Communication & Society 6, no. 3 (2003): 319.
41. Godlovitch, Musical Performance, 27.
42. Oxenhandler, “Swimming to John,” 127.
43. Claire Krusch in Berman, We’re Going to See, 125.

Chapter Nine
1. Auslander, Liveness, 74–­85.
2. A few random reference points: Cat Mother and the All-­Night Newsboys, then
based in Greenwich Village, had a minor hit in 1969 with “Good Old Rock ’n’ Roll,” a
medley of songs from the 1950s from which I have taken my title. In the early 1970s,
 Notes to Pages 184–87  •   255

T. Rex and other British glam rockers derived a new genre of pop music from a fresh
engagement with the sounds of the 1950s and sometimes covered rock-­and-­roll songs
from that era. Even Steeleye Span, a British group whose repertoire consists almost
entirely of traditional and folk music performed on rock instruments, recorded an
a cappella version of Buddy Holly’s “Rave On” in 1971 and renditions of the Teddy
Bears’ “To Know Him Is to Love Him” (featuring David Bowie on saxophone) and the
Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll” in 1974 and 1978, respectively.
3. I use the word rock to denote a kind of popular music played mostly by white
musicians that emerged around 1963, as opposed to rock and roll, many of whose
earliest performers were African American and which belongs to the 1950s. For a
more detailed discussion, see Auslander, Liveness, 78–­9.
4. As Daniel Marcus points out, the revival of interest in rock and roll from the
1950s in the late 1960s was sometimes characterized as an escapist response to the
political and social exhaustion that had set in following the turbulent second half
of the 1960s. The countercultural view, however, was that “rock and roll disrupted a
crushing conformity of the time and led the way into the Sixties revolt against a wide
variety of social norms. Late-­Sixties interest in rock’s roots is thereby consistent with
social rebellion current at the time.” Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the
Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2004), 12.
5. Ed Naha, Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia, rev. ed. (New York: Grosset and
Dunlap, 1978), 424.
6. Although American Graffiti takes place in 1962, its cultural setting strongly
evokes the 1950s, and much of the music on the soundtrack dates to the 1950s.
7. The Plastic Ono Band, Live Peace in Toronto, Apple Records X 43362, 1969, LP.
8. John Lennon, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Apple Records SK-­3419, 1975, LP.
9. Jon Wiener, John Lennon in His Time (New York: Random, 1984), 268–­9.
10. Deena Weinstein, “The History of Rock’s Pasts through Rock Covers,” in Map-
ping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, ed. Thomas Swiss, John Sloop,
and Andrew Herman (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 142.
11. I am omitting Lennon’s participation in the Beatles as a point of reference
here because the performance of the Plastic Ono Band at Toronto apparently
cemented Lennon’s desire to leave the group. For Lennon himself, the performance
of rock and roll there and on his Rock ’n’ Roll album seems to have had to do with
returning to his pre-­Beatles self to establish a musical identity apart from the group.
12. I refer to Sha Na Na in the present tense because the group is still active as of
this writing. See their website at http://www. shanana.com
13. Examples cited in the Oxford English Dictionary suggest that in the United
Kingdom, rocker and greaser can be used interchangeably to designate the same
working-­class subculture. In the United States, however, the term greaser most often
has specific ethnic, as well as class, implications. It seems to have originated around
the middle of the nineteenth century in California, where it was used as a highly
derogatory slang epithet to describe a person of Mexican or Spanish heritage. On
the East Coast of the United States, the term was applied to Italian and Puerto Rican
immigrants. By the mid-­1960s in California, the term lost some of its ethnic specificity
when it was applied to motorcycle enthusiasts: in subcultural terms, greasers (bikers)
were distinguished from surfers. A few years later, during the rock-­and-­roll revival
period under consideration here, the term greaser was used in the United States to
evoke an image that combined the biker reference with Italian American identity:
Henry Winkler’s character on Happy Days, Arthur (the Fonz) Fonzarelli, exemplifies
this image. (Suzi Quatro, discussed in chapter 1, appeared on this show as the Fonz’s
 256  •   Notes to Pages 187–93

cousin, Leather Tuscadero, a sort of female version of the greaser.) This is the version
of the greaser image taken up by Sha Na Na, a version that evokes an ethnic stereo-
type in more benign terms than its exclusively derogatory application to Mexican
Americans on the West Coast.
14. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge,
2002), 156.
15. Ibid., 152.
16. Robert Albrecht, “Doo-­Wop Italiano: Towards an Understanding and Appre-
ciation of Italian-­American Vocal Groups of the Late 1950s and Early 1960s,” Popular
Music and Society 42, no. 2 (2019): 150–­66.
17. I refer here to Roland Barthes’s 1964 famous semiotic analysis of a French
advertisement for a brand of Italian foods that he sees as evoking “Italianicity,” an
identity “based on a familiarity with certain tourist stereotypes” rather than direct cul-
tural experience. “The Rhetoric of the Image,” trans. Stephen Heath, in Image Music
Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 34.
18. Quoted in Steve Turner, “Moving History with Sha Na Na,” Beat Instrumen-
tal (November 1972), Rock’s Back Pages, http://www.rocksbackpages.com/print.
html?articleid=1916
19. Cohen, Folk Devils, 127–­8.
20. Sha Na Na, Sha Na Na, LP, Kama Sutra, 1971.
21. Geoff Stokes, “The Sixties,” in Ward et al., Rock of Ages, 433.
22. Lawrence Grossberg, “The Media Economy of Rock Culture: Cinema, Postmo-
dernity and Authenticity,” in Sound & Vision: The Music Video Reader, ed. Simon Frith,
Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Routledge, 1993), 201.
23. Auslander, Liveness, 87–­8.
24. Alain Dister, L’Âge du rock (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 111–­2. My translation.
25. Quoted in Turner, “Moving History.”
26. Greg Colón Semenza, “God Save the Queene: Sex Pistols, Shakespeare, and
Punk [Anti-­]History,” in The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time,
ed. Greg Colón Semenza (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 143–­64.
27. The Band, for example, whose history includes stints as the Canadian backing
band for rockabilly Ronnie Hawkins, then for Bob Dylan after he “went electric” in
the mid-­1960s, recorded Moondog Matinee in 1973, an album whose title refers to the
pioneering disc jockey Alan Freed. It consists of covers of rock and roll, soul, rhythm
and blues, and doo-­wop numbers. The Band could be said to be part of a larger move-
ment toward “roots rock” that emerged in the late 1960s and included Creedence
Clearwater Revival and the later Byrds, among others.
28. Bowie and Ferry each released an album of cover versions of earlier songs in
1973—­Bowie’s Pin Ups and Ferry’s These Foolish Things. On these albums, Bowie and
Ferry recorded music by other groups from the 1960s in styles that stress the artifice
of rock musicians’ performance personae.
29. The most likely ur-­text for these instances, of course, is the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), which is framed by the conceit that the Beatles are
a brass band of that name. Neither the brass band image nor the music on Sgt. Pep-
per evokes the 1950s, but the premise of one group’s pretending to be another may
originate with that enormously influential album.
30. It is interesting that there was a wholesale return to 1950s-­style names during
the 1970s and 1980s, typically by postpunk and New Wave groups. Elvis Costello and
the Attractions, Siouxie and the Banshees, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Katrina
and the Waves, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and Martha and the Muffins are but a
few examples.
 Notes to Pages 193–201  •   257

31. The Mothers of Invention did sometimes cover earlier doo-­wop songs. The album
Burnt Weeny Sandwich (1970), for example, both begins and ends with such a cover.
32. The Mothers of Invention, Cruising with Ruben and the Jets, Verve Records, V6-­
5055x, 1968, LP.
33. For a useful, brief historical overview of the development of Chicano rock
from the 1940s until the 1980s, including the genesis of the pachuco, see Rubén
Guevara, “The History of Chicano Rock,” in Cateforis, The Rock History Reader, 37–­42.
(The author, Rubén Guevara, was at one time the lead singer for the “real” Ruben
and the Jets.) Chicano groups that had national hits in the 1960s but were not gener-
ally acknowledged to be of Mexican heritage include ? and the Mysterians, Cannibal
and the Headhunters, the Premiers, and Thee Midniters.
34. The Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, Verve Records, V6-­5005-­2, 1966, LP.
35. Rip Rense, liner notes for Frank Zappa, The Lost Episodes, CD, Rykodisc, 1996.
36. Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes and the Sound of
Los Angeles (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 34.
37. Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara, Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-­Wop Singer
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 100.
38. Quoted in Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun, 109–­10.
39. Zappa appeared on radio station KPPC on November 27, 1968, to publicize
Cruising with Ruben and the Jets on Les Carter’s show. He delivered “The Story of Ruben
and the Jets,” the band biography that serves as the album’s liner notes, over Big Jay
McNeeley’s 1949 saxophone instrumental “Benson’s Groove.” At some points in his
recitation, Zappa speaks the text in a Mexican American accent. An aircheck of this
appearance is available as “Secret Greasing” (a phrase Zappa uses when speaking with
Carter) on Greasy Love Songs, Zappa Records ZR20010, 2010, CD.
40. A live segment on the Mothers of Invention’s album Burnt Weeny Sandwich,
apparently made in the United Kingdom, includes the sounds of police officers dis-
ciplining the audience. A heckler in the audience shouts unintelligibly, presumably
in reference to the presence of the uniformed officers. Zappa is heard to respond:
“Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform and don’t kid yourself.”
41. Will Straw, “Popular Music and Postmodernism in the 1980s,” in Frith et al.,
Sound & Vision, 11.
42. Quoted in Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ’n’
Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 53.
43. Ibid.
44. Much the same point can be made about Wood’s earlier solo album Boulders
(1973). In the context of rock ideology, the solo album is considered an opportunity
for a musician primarily identified as a member of a particular group to present a
truly authentic, personal expression not possible in the group context (solo perform-
ers cannot make solo albums!). Boulders has the earmarks of a very personal project.
Wood wrote all the songs and played all the instruments on the recording. Although
it partakes of a few musical gestures one might consider experimental—­such as using
a bucket of water as an instrument and playing the instrumental solos of a hard-­
rocking tune on cello and bassoon—­the album is musically conventional and very
accessible. But it gives no access to a consistently defined identity one could call Roy
Wood. As on Eddy and the Falcons, the songs are stylistically very different from one
another and Wood sings in different accents, employs different parts of his range,
and alters his voice electronically. While the trappings of the solo album encourage
the listener to perceive Boulders as Wood’s personal expression—­it certainly provides
ample testimony to his skills as a multi-­instrumentalist and musical conceptualist—­
the recording itself produces Wood as more of an absence than a presence.
 258  •   Notes to Pages 203–7

45. Andrew Goodwin, “Popular Music and Postmodern Theory,” in Postmodern

Arts, ed. Nigel Wheale (London: Routledge, 1995), 82–­5.
46. Grossberg, “Media Economy,” 205.
47. Ibid., 206.
48. Jim Smethurst, email to the author, May 14, 2003.
49. Sha Na Na, Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay, Kama Sutra, KSBS 2010, 1969, LP.
50. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, 286.
51. Mark J. V. Olson, “‘Everybody Loves Our Town’: Scenes, Spatiality, Migrancy,”
in Swiss et al., Mapping the Beat, 282. Olson argues that identification with a particu-
lar place-­based scene has replaced identification with a particular musical genre as
a measure of authenticity, now that popular music audiences no longer seem con-
cerned with distinctions among styles of music (I take issue with this position in the
introduction to this book). I would suggest that his argument, in its general form, is
valid as well for earlier popular music cultures in which stylistic and genre distinctions
did matter. Commitment to a particular style of music can be consistent with commit-
ment to a local scene.
52. Another case in point is that of Todd Rundgren’s album Faithful (1976),
the second side of which consists of Rundgren’s near-­perfect recreations of famous
recordings by the Beatles, Hendrix, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, and others. On a
later recording, Deface the Music (1980), Rundgren and his group, Utopia, perform
a whole album of songs written in various styles associated with the Beatles. The
album as a whole traces the Beatles’ stylistic development chronologically. In both
instances, Rundgren makes a number of gestures that can be seen as postmodern-
ist. The blankness of the motivation behind making recordings whose purpose is to
sound like other recordings is one, as is the way those recordings throw into question
the authenticity of Rundgren’s own songs on the first side of Faithful. Where are we
to locate his artistic identity—­in his overt stylistic appropriations or his supposedly
“original” songs, which inevitably also reflect other people’s musical ideas? Rundgren
also voids his own identity and that of his group, Utopia, by indiscriminately labeling
some records as his own solo albums and others as the group’s, even though all are
made by the same personnel and there is no apparent reason why the recreations of
1960s music on Faithful should be identified with Rundgren and the Beatles pastiches
on Deface the Music should be identified as the work of Utopia. On the other hand,
Rundgren’s approach to the history of rock is stolidly modernist. All of the songs on
the first side of Faithful were originally released in 1967. Rundgren’s remaking them
in 1976, year one of the punk revolution, reads in retrospect as an homage to the
rock predecessors being trashed by punk. In this context, the word “faithful” comes
to stand for Rundgren’s ongoing fidelity to the rock counterculture. It is not at all
insignificant that the works and styles he chooses to recreate on both the albums I
have mentioned belong to historically important rock artists. To recreate the style of
Hendrix or the Beatles has very different implications within rock culture from recre-
ating the style of Pat Boone.

Chapter Ten
1. Philip Auslander, “Going with the Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture,”
TDR 33, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 119–­36, and Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and
Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992), 53–­81. The reference is to Dana Polan, “Brief Encounters: Mass Culture
 Notes to Pages 208–14  •   259

and the Evacuation of Sense,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Cul-
ture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 167–­87.
2. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, ed. Ederyn Wil-
liams (New York: Routledge, 2003), 92.
3. Auslander, Presence and Resistance, 77–­8.
4. Stig Hjarvard, The Mediatization of Culture and Society (Abingdon: Routledge,
2013), 153.
5. Ibid., 20.
6. Ibid.
7. Williams, Television, 92–­3.
8. “Rosa,” Wiki Minaj: The Free Nicki Minaj Encyclopedia, accessed April 13, 2013,
http://nickiminaj.wikia.com/wiki/Rosa
9. Simon Reynolds, “The Singer Who Fell to Earth,” New York Times, March 6, 2013,
http://nytimes.com/2013/03/10/arts/music/the-singer-who-fell-to-earth.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=0
10. Nicki Minaj, “Nicki Minaj–­Pink Friday Fragrance Commercial (Internet),”
YouTube video, 0:30, posted by “RomanEmpireTM,” October 28, 2012, http://you
tube.com/watch?v=5rhApUAZD84
11. “A Brief History of Barbie Commercials by Amy Tennery,” YouTube video,
4:46, posted by “BarbieVideoWorld,” August 23, 2013, http://slatev.com/video/
history-of-the-barbie-tv-ad/
12. Mariah Carey, “Get Up Out My Face Ft. Niki Minaj (Official Video),” You-
Tube video, 5:28, January 25, 2010, http://vevo.com/watch/mariah-carey-1/
up-out-my- face/USUV71000091
13. “The Harajuku Barbie,” Wiki Minaj: The Free Nicki Minaj Encyclopedia, accessed
April 12, 2013, http://nickiminaj.wikia.com/wiki/The_Harajuku_Barbie
14. Kathryn Kattalia, “Nicki Minaj Barbie Doll to Be Auctioned
Off for Charity, Bidding Starts at $1,000,” New York Daily News, Decem-
ber 2, 2011, http://nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/
nicki-minaj-barbie-doll-auctioned-charity- bidding-starts-1-000-article-1.986037/
15. Kim Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body
(London: I. B. Taurus, 2007), 60.
16. Ibid., 61.
17. Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1995), 153.
18. Stan Hawkins, Queerness in Pop Music: Aesthetics, Gender Norms, and Temporality
(New York: Routledge, 2016), 118.
19. Margaret Hunter and Alhelí Cuenca, “Nicki Minaj and the Changing Politics
of Hip-­Hop: Real Blackness, Real Bodies, Real Feminism?,” Feminist Formations 29, no.
2 (Summer 2017): 33, 31.
20. Ibid., 31.
21. Ibid., 32.
22. Nicki Minaj, “Nicki Minaj–­Pink Friday Fragrance Commercial (Internet),”
YouTube video, October 28, 2012, http://youtube.com/watch?v=5arhApUAZD84
23. Jennifer Dawn Whitney, “Some Assembly Required: Black Barbie and the Fab-
rication of Nicki Minaj,” Girlhood Studies 5, no. 1 (2012): 154–­6.
24. Williams, Television, 21.
25. William Uricchio, “The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television,” in
The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National
Library of Sweden, 2009), 32.
 260  •   Notes to Pages 214–22

26. Anna McCarthy, “The Rhythms of the Reception Area: Crisis, Capitalism, and
the Waiting Room TV,” in Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition, ed. Lynn
Spigel and Jan Olsson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 183–­4.
27. Lynn Spigel, introduction, in Spigel and Olsson, Television after TV, 11.
28. Uricchio, “Future of a Medium,” 168–­70.
29. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 231–­2.
30. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 265–­88.
31. Lynn Spigel and Max Dawson, “Television and Digital Media,” in American
Thought and Culture in the Twenty-­First Century, ed. Catherine Morley and Martin Hal-
liwell (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 283.
32. Kathleen Oswald and Jeremy Packer, “Flow and Mobile Media: Broadcast Fix-
ity to Digital Fluidity,” in Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility
and Networks, ed. Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley (New York: Routledge,
2011), 282.
33. Ibid., 277.
34. Corinne Weisgerber, “Negotiating Multiple Identities on the Social Web: Goff-
man, Fragmentation and the Multiverse,” Keynote Address at webCom Montréal
2011, St. Edwards Social Media Class, blog, http://academic.stedwards.edu/socialme
dia/blog/2011/11/16/negotiating-multiple-identities-on-the-social-web-goffman-
fragmentation-and-the-multiverse/
35. Lars Meier, “Multiple Selfing,” in The Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, ed.
Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, and Elden Wieb (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
2010), 584–­5.
36. Oswald and Packer, “Flow and Mobile Media,” 283.
37. Nicki Minaj, “Va Va Voom,” YouTube video, 3:20, October 27, 2012, http://
vevo.com/watch/nicki-minaj/va-va-voom-explicit/USCMV1100089
38. Andrew Hampp, “Gaga Ooh La La: Why the Lady Is the Ultimate Social
Climber,” Advertising Age, February 22, 2010, http://adage.com/digitalalist10/
article?article_id=142210
39. Richard Hanna, Andrew Rohm, and Victoria L. Crittenden, “We Are All Con-
nected: The Power of the Social Media Ecosystem,” Business Horizons 54 (2011): 265.
40. Lady Gaga, Gagavision no. 44, YouTube video, 3:23, April 28, 2011, http://
youtube.com/watch?v=hHbEMgYXH0U
41. “Gagacorn,” Gagapedia, accessed May 11, 2013, http://ladygaga.wikia.com/
wiki/Gagacorn
42. Camille Paglia, “Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex,” Sunday Times [of London]
Magazine, September 12, 2010, http://thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/
article389697.ece
43. Nicole Sia, “The Real Inspiration for Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ Unicorn
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Zappa, Frank. “Secret Greasing.” Greasy Love Songs. Zappa Records ZR20010, 2010.
CD.
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: The Motion Picture. Directed by D. A. Pennebak-
er. 1983; London: Parlophone, 2003. DVD.
Zinman, Gregory. “The Joshua Light Show: Concrete Practices and Ephemeral
Effects.” American Art 22 (2008): 17–­21.
 Index
•••
Page numbers in italic refer to figures.
acousmatic sound, 50, 51, 53
actors, 83–­84, 88, 152
Acuff, Roy, 120
Adorno, Theodor, 149
affective experience, 2, 42. See also emo-
tional expression
African American musicians, 187,
247n84, 255n3; country music and,
103–­6, 244nn52–­53, 245n55, 245n59
agency: effort and, 54; instrumental,
18, 65–­82; of music, 39; social frame
and, 92
agent performance, 151–­52, 159, 181
air guitar, 26, 53, 63
Alperson, Philip, 149, 160, 163
American Graffiti (1973), 185, 255n6
American Idol (musical competition real-
ity show), 133–­34, 136, 138
Amram, David, 124–­27
ancillary gestures. See gestures
Anderson, Laurie, 39–­40, 41, 45, 49,
207–­9
anthropomorphic instruments, 72–­73
Anyan, Jennifer, 226
appearance, 30, 109, 128; musical front
and, 102–­06. See also costumes; facial
expressions; flamboyance; gestures;
makeup; movements
279
Arkestra (Sun Ra), 30
Armstrong, Louis, 51–­52
Art Ensemble of Chicago, 30, 97
art music, 74
“as if,” concept of, 133, 135, 151, 153–­
54, 158–­63
Attali, Jacques, 149
“At the Hop” (Danny and the Juniors),
183
audience: consumerism and, 31 (see
also consumerism); expectations
of (see expectations); frame and, 4;
genre conventions and, 36, 245n63;
identity and, 122–­23 (see also iden-
tity); jazz improvisation and, 148–­
63; in listener role, 149, 152–­54,
161–­63, 185; musical persona and,
117–­23 (see also musical persona);
perception of sound and musi-
cians’ gestures, 41–­42; performance
persona and, 36; popular music
performance analysis and, 26–­33,
32, 36; traditional relationship to
performance, 49–­51, 54–­55, 59–­64;
working consensus with, 94, 99–­100,
123, 125, 127, 160, 165, 251n21. See
also communication between audi-
ence and performers
 280  •   Index
audio recordings, 36, 91, 209. See also
recordings; sound recordings
auditory dimensions of performance,
18–­19, 49, 54–­55, 62–­63, 72; visual
dimension and (see visual dimensions
of performance). See also sound
Austen, Jake, 136
auteurship, 184, 198–­203
authenticity: by association, 105–­6, 120;
auteurship and, 198–­99; clothing
and, 105, 185, 187–­88; continuum
of, 183–­202, 203; country music and,
95–­96, 103–­6, 135; cover versions
and, 258n52; expectations and, 135;
folk, 240n24; modernism and, 202–­6;
music scenes and, 258n51; parody
and, 189, 191, 193, 196, 200, 204–­5;
rock culture and, 183–­206; of sound,
55; styles and, 204; television and,
191; theatricality and, 189
authorial voice, 112–­13
autobiography, 28, 108, 116, 166, 185,
208. See also biography
autonomy, instrumental, 65–­82; digital
technologies and, 76–­82; facial
expressions and, 70–­72
Autry, Gene, 120
avant-­garde musicians, 190, 242n14
Avedon, Richard, 120
Avery Fisher Hall, 107
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 43, 45, 60–­61,
76, 102, 121
backstage access, simulated, 140, 222
Baez, Joan, 108
Bailey, DeFord, 103
The Band, 256n27
Barba, Eugenio, 30
Barbie (doll), 210–­13
Barrow, Tony, 139
Barthes, Roland, 256n17
Bateson, Gregory, 3–­5
Bauman, Jon, 187
Bauman, Richard, 99, 131
Bay City Rollers, 172
BBC In Concert, 108–­9
Beach Boys, 120, 184, 192, 198, 201,
248n94
Beale, Chuck, 60
Bealle, John, 109
Beatlemania, 15, 165–­66, 169–­82,
253n5; consumerism and, 31, 173,
176, 181; cultural reproduction of,
253n11; para-­social interactions and,
176, 179, 181; reasons for, 172–­75,
253n12; young female fans and, 165,
170, 172–­82
Beatles: change in musical persona,
119–­20, 121, 184, 247n94; Ed Sulli-
van Show performance, 169, 173, 176,
253n5; fan club Christmas records,
139, 140, 249n32; fans of (see Beatle-
mania); gender norms and, 178,
254n20; Hollywood Bowl concerts,
169–­70; intimacy with, 173, 179;
musical persona, 175–­82; Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band, 256n29; Shea
Stadium concert (1965), 99, 169–­70;
social roles of, 143–­44; star identities,
144; styles of, 258n52
The Beatles at Shea Stadium (1969), 169,
170
Becker, Howard, 153, 251n20
Becker, Walter, 114
Benjamin, Walter, 163, 176–­77, 179,
215
Bennett, Tony, 124
Berliner, Paul, 154, 251n21
Berry, Chuck, 65, 186, 190, 245n59
Bieber, Justin, 137–­38
biography: authenticity and, 186–­206;
autobiography, 28, 166; geography
and, 205–­206; role distance and, 197;
understanding of artists’ songs and,
246n80. See also autobiography
Birmingham music scene, 197
Black, Jimmy Carl, 195
blackness, 212–­13. See also African
American musicians
Blackouts, 195. See also Zappa, Frank
blues, 74, 184, 186
“Blue Suede Shoes” (Perkins), 183, 185
Blumer, Herbert, 84–­85
bodies: Cartesian mind/body dualism,
18, 40, 43; engagement in perfor-
mance, 39–­48; as instruments, 39–­40.
See also appearance; instrument-­
instrumentalist relationship; move-
ments; visual dimensions of perfor-
mance
Boilen, Bob, 7
Bolder, Trevor, 29, 34
 Index  •   281
Bonami, Francesco, 223
Born This Way Foundation, 223
Boston Pops, 61
Bowie, David, 174, 255n2, 256n28;
characters portrayed by, 28–­29, 34,
119, 234n21; costume changes,
234n21; glam rock and, 191–­92;
persona of, 28, 210
Bowser, 187. See also Jon Bauman
boy bands, 119–­20
boyd, danah, 140
bracketing, 126
Braun, Scooter, 137
Bream, Julian, 112
Brendel, Alfred, 10–­12
bricolage, 221, 243n26
British Invasion, 186, 205. See also
Beatles; United Kingdom
Broonzy, Big Bill, 245n55
Brothers, Joyce, 173–­74
Brown, Lee B., 13–­14, 148–­50, 152,
154, 160–­63
Brubeck, Dave, 244n44
Brüggen, Frans, 99–­100, 243nn37–­38
Buchanan, Roy, 239n9
Buffet, Jimmy, 36, 102
Burns, Augustus M., 103
Burrows, David, 66, 68, 71
Butler, Mark J., 54–­55
Byron, Don, 243n26
Captain Beefheart, 199. See also Zappa,
Frank
Carnegie Hall, 118–­19, 145, 244n44
Carter, Troy, 223
Cartesian dualism, 18, 40, 43. See also
bodies
Cash, Debra, 252n36
categorization, 8–­9. See also genre
Cat Mother and the All-­Night Newsboys,
254n2
Causey, Matthew, 81–­82
Cavaluzzo, Alexander, 221
CBGB’s, 102
celebrity, 88, 130, 133, 140–­41, 144–­
46, 210, 222. See also star identity in
popular music
Chalayan, Hussein, 225
characters: awareness of persona and,
232n33; instrumentalists and, 12–­14;
musical persona and, 11–­14, 84, 95–­
97, 167; popular music performance
analysis and, 26–­28, 32; portrayed by
David Bowie, 28–­29, 34, 119, 234n21;
portrayed by Lady Gaga, 222–­23, 225;
portrayed by Nicki Minaj, 210–­213,
218–­220; song lyrics and, 115–­17. See
also fictional groups
Chess Records, 245n59
Chicano subculture, 193–­95, 257n33
Ching, Barbara, 144
Clapton, Eric, 190, 239n9
Clarke, Philip, 226
Clarkson, Kelly, 27, 133
classical music concerts: light shows at,
55, 60–­62; maverick performers, 61,
101–­2, 122; multimodal musical per-
ception and, 54; performance analysis
and, 22; performance personae and,
30; venues, 101, 244n44. See also
symphony orchestra concerts
class identities, 185, 187, 189, 205–­206,
255n13; upward mobility and, 106,
187
classification, 6–­7. See also genre
clothing: authenticity and, 105, 185,
187–­88; worn at symphony orchestra
concerts, 11, 97–­98, 107, 245n63;
worn by jazz musicians, 106–­7. See also
appearance; costumes; makeup
Coasters, 187
Cocker, Joe, 110–­11, 198
Cohen, Robert, 141
Cohen, Stanley, 187
Collins, Ray, 193
Coltrane, John, 120, 121, 154–­58, 158,
242n16
Columbia University, 189
commercialism, 123, 211. See also con-
sumerism
commodification, 31, 146. See also con-
sumerism; marketing
communication between audience and
performers, 2, 19, 33, 60; clothing as,
107 (see also clothing); conventions
and, 97–­100; indirect and mediated,
132, 138–­41; personalism and, 90–­91;
star identity and, 131–­32; theatricality
as, 96 (see also theatricality). See also
appearance; audience; fans; intimacy
and social distance; mediatization
communications studies, 24
 282  •   Index
complementation, 56–­58, 238n30
composers, persona of, 112–­13
composition, 242n16; jazz improvisa-
tion and, 148–­49, 251n13; persona
of, 113
computer music, 49–­50, 63; instrumen-
tal autonomy and, 73–­76. See also
digital technologies
concerts: as ritual events, 170–­71. See
also classical music concerts; jazz;
musical performance; organ concerts;
psychedelic rock shows; symphony
orchestra concerts; venues
conductors, 10–­11, 30, 90, 102, 127
Cone, Edward T., 65, 71, 112–­15
conformance, 56–­58, 237n30
Connolly, Ray, 181
Connor, Steven, 78
consumerism, 31, 123, 143, 173, 176,
181, 211, 220, 223. See also market-
ing; prosumerism
Contardo, Johnny, 188
contest (multimedia events as), 56, 59,
237n30
contexts, historical, 165–­67
Cook, Nicholas, 1, 38–­39, 43, 56–­58,
87, 115, 237n30, 242n16, 247n84
Cooper, Alice, 191
Corona, Victor, 226
costumes: changes in, 234n21; musical
persona and, 30, 34–­35, 107; shifting
identities and, 219, 224–­225; sound
and, 40. See also appearance; clothing;
makeup
Cougar, Johnny, 121
counterculture, 143, 189–­91, 196,
255n4, 258n52
country music: acting “as if” and, 158–­
59; authenticity and, 95–­96, 103–­6,
135; hard-­core, 143–­44; as “hillbilly
music,” 103, 120, 244n52; race and,
103–­6, 127, 244nn52–­53, 245n55,
245n59; soft-­shell, 143–­44
cover versions, 185–­86, 256n28, 258n52
Cox, Billy, 247n84
Crittenden, Victoria, 220
Crudup, Arthur “Big Boy,” 245n55
Crystals, 199
Cuenca, Alhelí, 212
cultural reproduction, 253n11
cultural studies, 23
dance: by audiences, 59, 61, 102; daily
life and, 93; immersion and, 2; musi-
cal persona and, 34–­35, 39–­40, 41,
154, 191, 225
dance music, 54–­55, 221
dance notation, 25
darkness, in concerts, 55–­56, 64, 109
Daughtry, Chris, 133
David Amram Jazz Quintet, 126
Davidson, Jane W., 45
Davies, Evan, 172
Davies, Hunter, 249n32
Davies, Ray, 132, 145
Davis, Miles, 97, 154–­58, 155–­58
Davis, Todd F., 175
Davis, Tracy C., 96
Dawson, Max, 216
Deadheads, 36
Deighton, John, 79–­80
digital technologies, 49–­50, 63; instru-
mental autonomy and agency, 76–­82;
postmodern mediatized culture and,
213–­218. See also computer music;
Internet; social media
direct mediatization, 209. See also media-
tization
Dister, Alain, 191–­92, 204
“Dizzy Miss Lizzie” (Little Richard), 185,
190
DJ Peretz, 124, 126
DJs, 54–­55
Dolphy, Eric, 194
Doors, 55, 100, 107, 118–­19, 165
doo-­wop, 187–­88, 193–­96, 199–­201,
204, 256n27, 257n31
downward mobility, 187
dramatic texts, 13
Duck Dynasty (television program), 105
Duffett, Mark, 181
Duke Ellington Orchestra, 251n13,
252n29
Dyer, Richard, 62, 175
Dylan, Bob, 108, 123, 245n55, 256n27
Eagar, Toni, 119
Eddy and the Falcons. See Wood, Roy
effort: agency and, 54; display of, 51–­52,
67, 111
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 174, 179, 182
Eilish, Billie, 7–­8
Electric Light Orchestra, 197, 201, 202
 Index  •   283
Ellington, Duke, 243n26
El Monte Legion Hall, 194
Emerson, Keith, 62
emotional expression: Beatlemania and,
175 (see also Beatlemania); “cool”
jazz and, 158; in language, 47; in
musical performance, 70, 72, 110–­12,
246n71; self-­presentation and, 90–­91
Epstein, Brian, 248n94
essentialism, 223
Estrada, Roy, 195
ethnicities: Chicano subculture, 193–­95,
257n33; Italian American singers,
187–­88, 192, 195, 255n13; rock
music and, 187, 193–­95, 205–­206,
257n33; working-­class and, 255n13
(see also working-­class youth subcul-
tures). See also race
ethnomusicology, 25
Evans, Bill, 97
Evershed, Megan, 7
expectations: authenticity and, 135;
conventions and, 98–­100; frame and,
5–­6; idiosyncrasy credits and, 247n94;
“structures of expectation,” 5–­6
experimental music, 29, 76, 101, 126,
190, 240n24, 242n14, 257n44
Fabbri, Franco, 6
facial expressions: audience perception
of sound and, 42, 44; “guitar face,”
111–­12; instrumental autonomy and,
70–­72; musical persona and, 34–­35;
as technical or ancillary gestures, 52.
See also appearance; gestures; move-
ments
Fagen, Donald, 114
fame, 129–­30. See also celebrity; star
identity
fans, 36; consumption and, 223 (see
also consumerism); mash-­ups created
by, 221; para-­social interactions and,
138–­40, 147, 176, 179, 181, 249n30
(see also intimacy and social distance);
performance of fan identity, 171–­72,
179; performer identities and, 120,
226; prosumerism, 220; social media
and, 220, 222; young female, 165,
170, 172–­82. See also Beatlemania
Farrell, Perry, 124–­26
Fast, Susan, 25–­26, 29, 30, 43, 65–­66
femininity: hyperfemininity, 212; per-
formance of, 34–­35. See also gender
norms and roles
Fernandez, Franc, 220
Ferry, Bryan, 95–­96, 192, 256n28
fictional characters. See characters
fictional groups, 192–­202, 256n29
Fillmore East (New York), 56–­61, 58,
120, 189
Fillmore West (San Francisco), 56,
238n40
Fitzgerald, Ella, 150–­51
flamboyance, 62, 89, 124, 152
flow, 207–­208, 213–­218
Flying Fish Records, 126
Formichetti, Nicola, 225–­226
Four Seasons, 255n2
Fox, Virgil, 60–­62, 102, 239n48
frame: audience and, 4; concept of, 3–­6;
expectations and, 5–­6; keying and,
92–­93; lamination and, 93; misfram-
ing, 94, 243n25; multiple personae
and, 126; musical persona and, 3–­6,
91–­94; music frame, 91, 93; natural,
92; performance frame, 91, 93; rebel-
lion against genre conventions and,
61; recording frame, 93. See also genre
frame; social frame; theatrical frame
Freed, Alan, 205, 256n27
Frith, Simon, 26–­27, 136, 139, 198,
233n13, 234n15, 242n3, 246n71
front: defined, 101; musical, 100–­109;
personal, 102, 106–­7; social, 100–­
101, 117–­18, 175
Frontani, Michael, 175, 177
Gagavision/Monstervision, 220–­223. See
also Lady Gaga
Gelbart, Matthew, 65, 71–­72, 112–­15
gender norms and roles: Barbie doll
and, 211; Beatles and, 178, 254n20;
“bedroom culture” and “basement
culture,” 176–­79; challenges to,
33–­35, 173–­74; femininity, 34–­35;
genre and, 102; Goffman on, 244n48;
hyperfemininity, 212; instruments
and, 80–­81; masculinity, 33–­35. See
also women
genre: concept of, 3, 6–­10; conventions
of (see genre conventions); frames
and (see genre frame); higher-­order
 284  •   Index
genre (continued)
categories, 6; hybridization, 7–­8; iden-
tification of, 94; laminations and, 94;
lower-­order categories or subgenres,
6, 31, 243n24; race and (see race);
social identities and, 102; star iden-
tity and, 146 (see also star identity in
popular music). See also specific genres
and subgenres
genre conventions, 9; audience
response and, 36, 118; as constraints
on performance persona, 31–­34,
130; rebellion against, 61; traditional
values and, 54–­55, 61–­62
genre frame, 9, 12, 91–­92, 110, 112,
121–­24, 130, 243n26
Gen Z musicians, 7–­8
geography, 205–­206
Germanotta, Stefani, 224, 226. See also
Lady Gaga
Germany, 205
gestures: ancillary, 41–­48, 51–­52,
236n8; cause-­and-­effect relationship
between sounds and, 49, 52–­54, 62–­
64, 79; in jazz improvisation, 154–­58;
technical, 40–­49, 52–­54, 62–­64, 79.
See also appearance; facial expressions;
movements
Gibson, Laurie-­Ann, 225
Gil Evans Orchestra, 154
Gillespie, Dizzy, 51–­52
glam rock, 33, 191–­92, 255n2
Glenn Gould (1959), 43–­44, 44
Gobalian, Dickram, 84. See also Leon
Redbone
Godlovitch, Stan: on agent perfor-
mance, 151, 159, 181; on computers,
236n10; on concerts as ritual events,
170; on facial expressions, 112; on
instruments, 66–­67, 70; on musical
performance, 51–­55, 62, 80–­81; on
personalism, 90–­91
Goffman, Erving, 3–­5, 15; “as if,” concept
of, 153–­54, 158–­59; on dramatiza-
tion, 111; on emotional expression,
110; on identities, 122; on impression
management, 97, 251n21; interac-
tionist framework and, 17, 176; on
manner, 107; on misframings, 243n25;
on “offstage” areas, 157; on personal
front, 102, 106; on playing a social
role vs. playing at a social role, 132–­34,
189; on race and gender, 244n48; on
role distance, 115, 141, 147, 197; on
self-­presentation, 83–­85, 94–­95, 127,
166, 175, 216–­217; on sign vehicles,
134; on social distance, 138; on social
front, 100–­101, 117–­19, 146; symbolic
interactionism and, 241n3 (see also
symbolic interactionism); on theatrical
frame, 131, 152–­54, 161–­63; on trans-
formations, 120; works: Frame Analysis,
4, 83, 91–­94, 152; The Presentation of
Self in Everyday Life, 83, 94–­95, 154
Goodman, Benny, 244n44
Gould, Carol S., 148–­49, 160
Gould, Glenn, 43–­47, 44, 53, 110,
237n16
Gould, Jack, 173
Gould, Jonathan, 174–­75, 177, 179
Gracyk, Theodore, 23–­25, 67
Graham, Bill, 57, 59, 238n40
Graham, Phil, 53
Grand Ole Opry, 103
Grantz, Norman, 244n44
Grateful Dead, 36, 120, 141–­44
Graver, David, 88, 242n3
Gray, Spalding, 207–­209
Grease (1972), 185
greaser image, 187–­89, 205, 255n13
Greene, Denny, 187
Grossberg, Lawrence, 23–­24, 190, 203–­
204
Guevara, Rubén, 194, 257n33
GuitarBot (robotic musical instrument),
68, 73–­86, 240n22
“guitar face,” 111–­12
guitars, names for, 68–­82, 239n9,
240n14
Guthrie, Woody, 105
Haimovitz, Matt, 101–­2, 121–­22
Hallahan, Kirk, 3
Hamburg music scene, 185, 205,
250n32
Hancock, Hunter, 194
Hanna, Richard, 220
Happy Days (television show), 185,
255n13
Haring, Keith, 211
Harrison, George, 120, 239n9. See also
Beatles
 Index  •   285
The Haus of Gaga, 225–­226
Hawkins, Ronnie, 256n27
Hawkins, Stan, 2–­3, 212, 246n80
Headlights, 56–­57, 60
Heavy Organ concerts (Fox), 60–­62,
102, 239n48
Heile, Björn, 251n13, 252n29
Hendrix, Jimi, 115, 121–­22, 141, 184,
221, 232n33, 247n84
Hess, Elizabeth, 174, 179
Hess, Mickey, 142
heterosexuality, 68, 80–­81. See also
sexuality
hillbilly music, 103, 120, 244n52
hip-­hop artists, 142–­44
hippies, 109, 120, 142, 144, 189,
238n38
historical contexts, 165–­67
Hjarvard, Stig, 209
Hollander, Edwin P., 247n94
Holly, Buddy, 255n2
Holt, Fabian, 9, 31
Horton, Donald, 176
Hubbard, Cayden, 131, 132–­34
Hudson, Jennifer, 133
Hughes, Charley, 103
Hughes, Judd, 68
Hughes, Michael, 95–­96, 103, 135
human-­machine interaction, 79. See also
instrument-­instrumentalist relation-
ship
Hunter, Margaret, 212
hypermodernity, 166–­67. See also mod-
ernism; postmodernism
iconoclasts, 101, 199, 204
idealization, 111–­12
identity: audiences and, 122–­23; mod-
ernism and, 206; postmodern culture
and shifting identities, 166–­67, 203,
207–­226; singular/coherent, 213;
social, 127; stardom and, 134–­35 (see
also star identity); theory of musi-
cal identity, 2–­3, 14, 87–­88, 203 (see
also musical persona). See also social
identities
idiosyncrasy credits, 247n94
imagined memory, 181
impression management, 97, 105,
251n21. See also marketing; self-­
presentation
Improv Everywhere, 4
improvisation: audience identification
of, 4, 150–­51; computer music and,
73. See also jazz improvisation
inauthenticity: rock culture and, 183–­
84, 192, 200–­204. See also authenticity
indirect mediatization, 209–­210, 218.
See also mediatization
Ingber, Elliot, 195
Inglis, Ian, 247n94, 253n12
instance of musical multimedia (IMM),
56–­64
instrumentalists: computers as instru-
ments and, 73–­76; dramatic narrative
and, 12–­14; performance personae,
29–­30
instrumental technique, 40–­42. See also
technical gestures
instrument-­instrumentalist relationship:
bodies as instruments, 39–­40; instru-
mental autonomy and agency, 65–­82;
onstage manipulation of instruments,
18, 35, 43, 80; virtual puppetry and,
240n22; visible causality and, 52
interactionist framework, 2, 15, 17,
83–­86, 94–­95; symbolic interaction-
ism, 84–­86, 241n3, 251n21. See also
audience; communication between
audience and performers; fans; para-­
social interactions
Internet: postmodern mediatization
and, 215–­218 (see also mediatization);
star identity and, 132, 137 (see also
star identity in popular music). See
also digital technologies; social media
intimacy and social distance, 138–­41,
146, 173, 179, 223. See also com-
munication between audience and
performers; fans
Iser, Wolfgang, 234n13
Island Def Jam Records, 137
Italian American singers, 187–­88, 192,
195, 255n13
Jackson, Melvin “Lil Son,” 245n55
Jackson, Michael, 88–­89, 89
Jacobs, Gloria, 174, 179
Jagger, Mick, 33, 130
Jakobson, Roman, 46–­47
Jameson, Fredric, 205
Jane’s Addiction, 124–­26
 286  •   Index
Jarrett, Keith, 43–­47, 110
jazz: as deviant subculture, 245n62;
frames and, 94, 243n26; intensity
and, 252n29; settings for, 101. See also
jazz improvisation; jazz musicians
Jazz at Lincoln Center, 101
Jazz at the Philharmonic, 244n44
jazz improvisation: composition of
solos, 148–­49, 251n13; creativity and,
251n20; as dramatic narrative, 13–­14;
recordings and, 148–­50, 160–­63; as
social arrangement, 148–­63; sponta-
neity and uniqueness, 160; surprise
and, 252n36; symbolic interactionism
and, 251n21; theatrical frame and,
152–­54, 161–­63
jazz musicians: clothing, 106–­7, 245n62;
“cool,” 111, 158; facial expressions,
51–­52; multiple personae, 124–­26;
performance personae, 29–­30
Jefferson Airplane, 55–­57, 58, 60–­61
Jentsch, Ernst, 81
JIT-­life (Just In Time), 225
Jo Calderone (character), 222–­23, 225
Joe’s Lights, 60
Joffe, Rich, 188, 191
John, Elton, 62
Johnny and the Moondogs, 186
Johnson, Peter, 10–­12, 242n10
Jones, Curtis, 245n55
Jones, John Paul, 29
Joplin, Janis, 34, 198
Joshua Light Show, 57, 60, 238n40
Kagel, Mauricio, 194
Keaton, Kenneth, 148–­49, 160
Keith Jarrett (1984), 44
Kelley, Charles, 105
Kenney, William Howland, 179–­80
keying, 111, 242n16; frame and, 92–­93
K.-­H., Patrick, 50
Kimura, Mari, 68, 73–­86, 240n22,
240n24
King, B. B., 68–­82, 70–­71, 112, 240n14,
240n24
King, Carole, 108, 108–­9
Kinks, 114, 132, 144–­45
Kirby, John, 243n26
Kiss, 95
Kivy, Peter, 236n35
Klinkenborg, Verlyn, 179–­80
Knight, Nick, 225
Koner, Pauline, 2
Kopiez, Reinhard, 250n12
Lady Antebellum, 105
Lady Gaga, 15; audience, 54; characters
portrayed by, 222–­23, 225; creative
team, 225–­226; fans of, 139–­40, 220–­
223, 226; flamboyance of, 62, 219;
mash-­up aesthetic, 221; “meat dress”
worn by, 220–­221; multiple musical
personae of, 124–­25; as pop star, 130,
134, 136; as real person, 28; shifting
identities, 166–­67, 219–­226
Laing, Dave, 116
Lakoff, George, 8–­9
lamination, 93–­94, 111
Landau, Jon, 198
Leadbelly, 239n11
Led Zeppelin, 29, 65–­66, 232n33
Lee, Alvin, 53
Lehmann, Andreas C., 250n12
Lennon, John: authenticity and biogra-
phy, 186–­92, 199–­201, 203, 205–­206;
fans of, 120, 180–­82; and Plastic Ono
Band, 183, 185, 190, 192, 255n11;
rock-­and-­roll era and, 166, 183–­92,
194, 205, 255n11; rocker image, 185,
187. See also Beatles
Lewis, Jerry Lee, 62, 187
LGBTQ causes, 223
Liberace, 62, 254n20
Lightfoot, Gordon, 108–­9
lighting effects, 30, 55–­64, 109, 238n40,
238nn37–­38
light shows, 55–­64, 238n40,
238nn37–­38
Lil Nas X, 7–­8, 244n53
Lincoln Center (New York), 101
Lindridge, Andrew, 119
Lippens, Ronnie, 225
lip-­synched performances, 36, 55
listener (audience role), 149, 152–­54,
161–­63, 185
Little Richard, 185, 186, 190
“Live-­Acousmatic” performance, 50
live-­coded music, 63
liveness, 53
Liverpool music scene, 205, 250n32. See
also Beatles
Los Angeles Forum, 100
 Index  •   287

Los Angeles music scene, 100, 205; 257n33

Mexican American/Chicano, 193–­95 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Inter-
Lovano, Joe, 29–­30 face), 49, 63
Loveless, Patty, 68 Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders, 197
LSD trips, 57, 59 Miles, Barry, 238n38
Lucille (B. B. King’s guitar), 68–­82, Milhaud, Darius, 244n44
240n14 Miller, Derek, 37–­45, 66, 235n8
Minaj, Nicki, 15; characters portrayed
Mack, Edward, 245n55 by, 210–­213, 218–­220, 219; musical
Madison Square Garden, 189 persona, 166–­67, 219
Madonna, 210 mind/body distinction. See Cartesian
Madrid, Alejandro, 38–­39, 46, 47, dualism
235n27 misframing, 94, 243n25
mainstream culture, 190–­91, 196 Mitchell, Joni, 108–­9, 114
Makarov, Oleg, 50 Mitchell, Mitch, 247n84
makeup, 30, 34, 219 modernism, 166–­67, 184; authenticity
Mann, Geoff, 103–­5 and auteurship, 202–­6
manner, 107, 128 mods, 187, 189
Marcus, Daniel, 255n4 “Money” (song), 185
marketing, 31, 79, 103, 137–­38, 173, Monk, Thelonious, 30
220, 223. See also consumerism; Monkees, 191
impression management Monson, Ingrid, 251n21
Maroon Five, 133 Monstervision. See Gagavision/Monstervi-
Marshall, Lee, 129 sion
Marwick, Alice, 140 Moore, Allan F., 232n33, 239n11,
masculinity, 33–­35. See also gender 242n10
norms and roles MOOs, 77, 241n26
mash-­up, 221, 225, 226 Moreno, Jairo, 43, 45, 47
mass media spectators, 176 Morrison, Jim, 100
Maus, Fred, 13 Mos Def, 245n59
maverick performers, 61, 101–­2, 122, Mothers of Invention. See Zappa, Frank
243n26 Move, 197, 201–­202
McCartney, Paul, 120, 139, 181. See also movements: instrumental autonomy
Beatles and, 70–­72; musical persona and,
McEntire, Reba, 27 33–­35; musical sound and, 40, 45. See
McFerrin, Bobby, 39–­40, 45 also gestures
McKay, Glenn, 56–­57 movie stars, 89, 129. See also celebrity
McQueen, Alexander, 221, 225 Mowitt, John, 103
meaning as intersubjective, 85 MTV Video Music Awards, 220, 222
mediatization, 207–­226; digital tech- multimedia events, 56–­64, 237n30
nologies and, 213–­218; direct, 209, multiselfing, 217, 225
217–­218; flow and, 207–­208, 213–­ multitaskers, 216–­217, 225
218; indirect, 209–­210, 218 multivocality, 112–­17
Mellencamp, John, 121 music: agency of, 39; compared to
Meltzer, Richard, 171, 177, 180–­81 language, 47, 236n35; as narrative,
memories, imagined, 181 12–­14; as sound, 5, 18, 47–­49; as a
metapersonae, 125–­26 verb, 92–­93
Metheny, Pat, 63–­64, 73 musical competition reality shows, 133–­
Metropolitan Opera House (New York 34, 136
City), 22 musical front, 100–­109; setting and,
Mexican American rock scene, 193–­95, 100–­102
 288  •   Index
musical performance: contexts of,
165–­67; disciplinary dilemma and,
21–­24, 37–­48; as distinctive human
activity, 17–­19; overview of, 97–­100;
as performance of social role, 83–­84
(see also social role); ritual functions
and, 170–­71, 248n99; technique and,
40–­48; traditional, 49–­51, 54–­55,
59–­64; as working consensus with
audience, 94, 99–­100, 123, 125, 127,
160, 165, 251n21. See also instrumen-
talists; instrument-­instrumentalist
relationship
musical persona: analysis of, 87–­128;
appearance and, 102–­6; audience
and, 117–­23; as central phenomenon
of musical performance, 37–­38;
changes in (see transformation); fixed
sign vehicles, 134–­36; frame and, 3–­6,
91–­94; genre and, 6–­10; mobile signs,
106–­9; multiple, 124–­27, 248n101;
multivocality of, 112–­17; musical
front, 100–­109; normative, 108–­9,
117, 120–­21; overview of, 1–­15;
persona and, 10–­14; race and, 102–­6;
as self-­presentation, 91, 94–­97, 127;
setting and, 100–­102; as situated per-
formance, 110–­12; star identity and,
129–­47; as theory of musical identity,
2–­3, 14, 87–­91, 127–­28
music frame, 91, 93
music industry gatekeepers, 136, 138
musicology, 1, 37–­48; formalist atten-
tion to sound, 37–­38, 47–­48; on musi-
cal performance, 17–­18
music scenes, 205–­206; authenticity
and, 258n51; New York, 205–­206;
West Coast, 193–­95, 205. See also
venues
music videos, 60, 63
Nader, Richard, 166
Naha, Ed, 184
names, professional, 28
narrative, music as, 12–­14
natural frame, 92
Nazhar, Nasir, 225
Negus, Keith, 112, 114, 132
Nelson, Willie, 105
Nettl, Bruno, 149
Newman, Randy, 115–­17, 132, 212
New York music scene, 205–­206. See also
Fillmore East
New York Philharmonic, 107
Nicholson, Jack, 88
normative persona, 108–­9, 117, 120–­21
Nusseck, Manfred, 41
objectification, 79–­80
O’Brien, Geoffrey, 173
Ochs, Phil, 118–­19
ocularcentrism, 237n14
Olivier, Laurence, 192
Olson, Mark J. V., 206, 258n51
“on demand” culture, 225
Ono, Yoko, 190. See also Plastic Ono
Band
opera, 12, 21–­24, 26, 89, 93, 113, 152
orchestra conductors. See symphony
orchestra concerts
organ concerts, 61–­62, 102, 239n48
Oswald, Kathleen, 216–­217
Otto, John S., 103
Oxenhandler, Noelle, 180–­82
Pablo Light Show, 60–­61
pachuco subculture, 193, 195, 205
Packer, Jeremy, 216–­217
Page, Jimmy, 29, 65–­66
Paglia, Camille, 220–­221
para-­social interactions, 138–­40, 147,
176, 179, 181, 249n30. See also
audience; communication between
audience and performers; fans; inter-
actionist framework
parody, 111, 139, 212, 242n16; authen-
ticity and, 189, 191, 193, 196, 200,
204–­205
Parrothead fans, 36
pastiche, 184, 201, 202, 205
Pattie, David, 109
Paupers, 60
Pavarotti, Luciano, 112
Pavis, Patrice, 22, 25
Pelias, Ronald J., 249n5
Penguins, 194
performance: definitions of, 97; gram-
mar of, 87; of identity, 87–­88; integ-
rity of event, 170–­71; layers of, 27–­28
(see also character; performance
persona; real person); live, 136;
music as, 1 (see also musical persona);
 Index  •   289
stardom and, 136 (see also star identity
in popular music). See also musical
performance
performance analysis of popular music,
24–­36
performance frame, 91, 93
performance persona: constraints on
construction of, 31–­33; popular music
performance analysis and, 27–­36, 32
performance studies, 17–­18, 21–­24,
37–­48
performatics, 43, 45–­46; use of term,
235n27
performers: audience and (see com-
munication between audience and
performers); demonstrations of skill,
66–­67, 80–­81; immersion in perfor-
mance, 2; maverick, 61, 101–­2, 122,
243n26; musicians as, 1–­2 (see also
musical persona); as private citizens
(see real person). See also musical
persona
Performing Glam Rock (Auslander), 3
“The Periodic Table of Musical Genres”,
7–­8
persona, concept of, 3, 10–­14. See also
musical persona
personal front, 102, 106–­7
personalism, 90–­91
personality, 107; emotional expression
and, 110; expression of, 90–­91
Persuasions, 194
Peterson, Richard, 143
Pettengill, Richard, 38–­39
Pew Internet & American Life Project,
137–­38
phenomenal performance, 151–­52, 181
Pink Floyd, 238n37
Plant, Robert, 232n33
Plastic Ono Band, 183, 185, 190, 192,
255n11. See also Lennon, John; Ono,
Yoko
players (musician role), 152–­54, 185
The Pogues, 8
Polan, Dana, 207
pop stars. See star identity in popular
music
popularity, 129–­30. See also celebrity;
star identity
popular music: musicology and, 23–­24;
performance analysis and, 24–­36, 32;
recordings as primary for, 23–­24. See
also star identity in popular music;
individual performers
Porno for Pyros, 124
Porter, Lewis, 149
Postlewait, Thomas, 96
postmodernism, 166–­67; inauthentic-
ity and stylistic pastiche, 184, 202–­4;
mediatized culture and, 207–­210,
213–­218 (see also mediatization)
Preservation Hall Jazz Band, 102
Presley, Elvis, 172, 173, 187
Pride, Charley, 103
primary frame, 92
Prokofiev, Sergei, Peter and the Wolf, 30
props, 30
prosumerism, 216, 220. See also consum-
erism
psychedelic rock culture, 120
psychedelic rock shows: costumes
and, 107; light shows at, 55–­64,
238nn37–­38
punk, 191–­92, 258n52
Quatro, Suzi, 34–­36, 35, 255n13
queer discourse, 211–­212
race: genre and, 102–­6, 127,
244nn52–­53, 245n55, 245n59;
Goffman on, 244n48; Minaj and,
211–­213. See also African American
musicians; ethnicities; whiteness
radio, 53, 63
Ramones, 192
Rand, Erica, 211–­212
Ratliff, Ben, 63–­64
Ravel, Maurice, 194
reactivation, 176–­77, 179–­82, 233n12
“real person” (performer as private
citizen), 10; actors and, 88; fictional
characters and, 96 (see also character);
popular music performance analysis
and, 27–­28, 32, 33–­34; role distance
and, 115 (see also role distance)
recording frame, 93
recordings: audio, 36, 91, 209 (see also
sound recordings); jazz improvisation
and, 148–­50, 160–­63; musical per-
sona and, 91, 242n10; as primary for
popular music, 23–­24; radio and, 53;
reactivation and, 176–­77, 179–­82;
 290  •   Index
recordings (continued)
reality status of, 243n23; social dimen-
sion of, 179–­80; viewer control over
flow and, 215
Redbone, Leon, 84
Rehak, Frank, 157
repertoire, 118–­19
Revelation Lights, 56–­57, 60–­61
Reynolds, Simon, 210
rhythm and blues, 184, 186, 187
Richards, Keith, 239n9
Rink, John, 2, 11, 235n23
ritual, 170–­71, 248n99
Roberts, Vera Mowry, 22
Robertson family (Duck Dynasty), 105
Rock, Paul, 85
rock-­and-­roll era (mid-­1950s): 1970s
revivalism, 166, 183–­202, 255n4,
256n30; musical persona and, 113–­
14; nostalgia for, 15, 166, 206
rocker image, 185, 187, 189, 205,
255n13
rock music genre: auteurship and,
166, 184, 198–­203; authentic-
ity and, 183–­206; emotions and
attitudes, 110–­12; frames and, 94;
historical consciousness in, 184–­
85, 195, 198, 204–­206 (see also
rock-­and-­roll era); musical persona,
113–­15; use of term, 255n3. See also
individual performers
rock stars, 146. See also star identity in
popular music
Rohm, Andrew, 220
role distance, 15; biography and, 197;
characters and, 212; in musical per-
formances, 189, 247n84; social roles
and, 115–­17, 141–­46; star identity
and, 141–­46. See also intimacy and
social distance
Rollermania (Bay City Rollers), 172
Ronson, Mick, 29, 34
roots rock, 256n27
Rose, Kerin, 225
Rose Theater, 101, 244n44
Rothstein, William, 12
Rotten, Johnny, 192
Roxy Music, 95–­96
Roy Wood’s Wizzard. See Wood, Roy
Ruben and the Jets (Guevara), 194,
257n33
Ruben and the Jets (Mothers of Inven-
tion). See Zappa, Frank
Rubinoff, Kailin R., 243n38
Rubinstein, Arthur, 11
Rucker, Darius, 103–­6, 104, 121,
245n55
Rundgren, Todd, 258n52
Russo, Frank A., 53
Saibel, Bernard, 173–­74
Saint-­Saëns, Camille, 30
Saltz, David Z., 73, 240n22
Sanden, Paul, 45
Sanders, Pharaoh, 29–­30
San Francisco, 59. See also Fillmore West
Sarath, Ed, 149
Schaeffer, Pierre, 51
Schaumburg, Ron, 177–­78
Schechner, Richard, 27
Schenker, Heinrich, 12–­13
Schloss, W. Andrew, 50–­51, 53–­55, 62,
64
Schoenberg, Arnold, 149
Schutte, Gilliam, 226
Schutz, Michael, 42, 47, 52, 236n8
score desk, 22–­23
Scott, Raymond, 243n26
Secor, Ketch, 245n55
Sedaka, Neil, 201
self-­expression, 90–­91
self-­presentation: audience and, 146,
166, 251n21 (see also audience);
authenticity-­by-­association and,
105–­6, 120 (see also authenticity);
authorization and, 134–­35; in digital
contexts, 216–­217; emotion and,
110; identity construction and, 122;
musical persona and, 10, 15, 83–­85,
127; personal front and, 107; self-­
expression and, 90–­91; social front
and, 100–­101, 117–­18, 175. See also
impression management; persona
semiotics, 25
Sercombe, Laurel, 253n5, 253n11
sets, 30
setting, 100–­102, 126, 128. See also
venues
sexuality, 7, 44, 115, 173–­75, 178–­79,
182. See also heterosexuality
Sha Na Na, 166, 188; authenticity
and biography, 186–­93, 197, 199–­
 Index  •   291
201, 203, 204–­206; greaser image,
256n13; Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay,
205; television show, 190–­91; at
Woodstock, 183, 189–­92
Shannon, Del, 201
Shea Stadium, Beatles concert at, 99,
169–­70. See also Beatlemania; Beatles
Sheeran, Ed, 134
Showaddy Waddy, 166
Shumway, David, 129, 135
Sia, Nicole, 221
sign vehicles, 106–­9, 134–­36
simulation, 202
Sinatra, Frank, 172, 173
sincerity, 246n71
Singer, Eric, 73
singer-­songwriter genre, 107–­9; multi-
vocality and, 114; role distance and,
115–­17
skill, demonstrations of, 66–­67, 80–­81.
See also effort; technical gestures
Slick, Grace, 34
Small, Christopher, 6, 23–­24, 92–­93,
97–­98, 101, 107
smartphones, 214, 218, 225
Smethurst, Jim, 205
Smith, Richard, 254n20
Snoop Dogg, 105
Snyder, David, 56–­57, 60–­61
social arrangement, jazz improvisation
as, 148–­63
social distance. See intimacy and social
distance
social frame, 91–­92; agency and, 92;
musical identities and, 127–­28
social front, 100–­101, 117–­18, 175
social identities: genres and, 102;
musical persona and, 127–­28 (see
also musical persona); stardom and,
134–­35; subcultural, 185, 187. See also
identity
social media: fans and, 220, 222;
intimacy and, 139–­41, 146 (see also
intimacy and social distance); post-
modern mediatization and, 215–­218;
star identity and, 132. See also digital
technologies; Internet
social roles: frames and, 5; musical
performance as performance of social
role, 83–­84; role distance and, 115–­
17, 141–­46 (see also role distance)
sociocultural norms and conventions,
32, 33
sociology, 2; symbolic interactionism,
84–­86, 241n3, 251n21. See also inter-
actionist framework
solo albums, 257n44
Somervell, D. C., 62
Soul Giants, 195. See also Zappa, Frank
sound: authenticity of, 55; music as,
5, 18, 47–­49; musicology’s formalist
attention to, 37–­38, 47–­48; vision
and, 49–­64. See also auditory dimen-
sions of performance
The Sound of Miles Davis (1959), 155–­
58
sound recordings: frame and, 93–­94;
as mediated communication with
audiences, 132; performance analysis
and, 25–­26; of popular music, 23–­24;
technologies of, 53–­54, 63–­64. See also
audio recordings; recordings
spectacle, 18
Spector, Phil, 198–­200
Spice Mania (Spice Girls), 172
Spigel, Lynn, 214, 216
Stanley, Owsley, 57
star identity in popular music, 129–­
47; authorization for, 134–­36, 138;
as interactional (audience role in
creation of), 131, 146; para-­social
interaction and, 138, 140, 147,
176, 179, 181, 249n30; as perfor-
mative, 131–­38, 146; role distance
and, 141–­46; social distance from
audience and, 138–­41 (see also
intimacy and social distance); as
social role, 131–­34, 141, 146. See
also celebrity
Stark, Steven D., 143, 250n32
Starr, Ringo, 120. See also Beatles
Steeleye Span, 255n2
Steely Dan, 114
Steingo, Gavin, 23
Sterne, Jonathan, 51, 53
Stokes, Geoff, 190–­92, 204
Straight Records imprint, 194
Straw, William, 198, 203
string quartets, 30
structural listening, 149
“structures of expectation,” 5–­6
Stuart, Caleb, 49–­50
 292  •   Index
style: authenticity and, 204; musical
persona and, 118–­19; pastiche, 184,
201, 202, 205
stylists, 225–­226
subcultural conflicts, 189
subcultural identities, 185, 187
subgenres, 6, 31, 243n24. See also specific
subgenres
subjectivity, 82
Subotnik, Rose, 149
Sun Ra, 30, 97
Swift, Taylor, 135
Swinney, David, 161–­62
symbolic interactionism, 84–­86, 241n3,
251n21
symphony orchestra concerts: conduc-
tor persona, 10–­11, 30, 90, 102, 127;
conventions of, 97–­99, 245n63; per-
formance personae and, 30; players’
clothing, 107. See also classical music
concerts
Tannen, Deborah, 5
Tatarunis, Paula, 99–­100, 243n37
Taylor, Cecil, 194
Taylor, Diana, 235n27
Taylor, James, 95–­96, 108–­9
Taylor, William “Billy,” 244n44
technical gestures, 40–­49, 52–­54, 62–­
64, 79. See also gestures
technologies, 63–­64; as performers,
235n8. See also computer music;
digital technologies; Internet; social
media
Teddy Bears, 255n2
teddy boys, 198, 205
teen culture, 196. See also Beatlemania;
fans; working-­class youth subcultures
television, 190–­91; cultural dominance
of, 213–­215; flow and, 210
“Tell Laura I Love Her” (Sha Na Na),
188
Ten Years After, 53
theater studies, 21–­24
theatrical frame, 15, 131; jazz improvisa-
tion and, 152–­54, 161–­63
theatricality: characters and, 212;
degrees of, 96–­97, 116; rock authen-
ticity and, 189
Thin White Duke (character), 28
Thomas, William L., 154
Thompson, William Forde, 53
Tirro, Frank, 149, 252n36
Todorov, Tzvetan, 13
Toffoletti, Kim, 211
Toronto Rock Revival, 183, 185, 255n11
Town Hall (New York), 63
traditional values: genre conventions
and, 54–­55, 61–­62; in musical perfor-
mance, 64, 66–­67
transformation: audience responses to,
119–­23; frame and, 92–­93; kinds of,
121; sound-­mixing and, 242n17
Transmission Gagavision. See Gagavision/
Monstervision
Treacy, Philip, 225
T. Rex, 255n2
T. Rexstasy (T. Rex fans), 172
A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1970), 156
tricksters, 204
Tucker, Ken, 108, 116
Turner, Tina, 33
Turner, Victor, 33
Twain, Shania, 135
Twitter, 140–­41
ubiquitous listening, 149
uncanny, 81–­82
Underwood, Carrie, 133
United Kingdom: Liverpool music
scene, 205, 250n32; northern Eng-
land, music scene in, 205; working-­
class youth subculture, 185, 187, 189,
205, 255n13. See also British Invasion
upward mobility, 106, 187
Urban, Keith, 96, 103, 135
Uricchio, William, 213–­214
Utopia, 258n52
Vai, Steve, 239n9
Vallee, Rudy, 172
values. See traditional values
VanOosting, James, 249n5
Varèse, Edgard, 193
ventriloquism trope, 66, 68–­69, 71–­72,
74, 76–­79, 81–­82
venues: classical music, 101, 244n44;
counterculture, 189; Mexican Ameri-
can rock scene, 194. See also Carnegie
Hall; Fillmore East; Fillmore West;
setting; individual venues and festivals
Vincent, Gene, 186
 Index  •   293
virtual persona, 113
virtual puppetry, 240n22
virtuoso identity, 122–­23
visual dimensions of performance, 18;
affective experience and, 42 (see also
emotional expression); cause-­and-­
effect relationship between sound
and, 41–­42, 49, 52–­54, 62–­64, 79;
instrumental agency and, 70–­72;
lighting effects, 30, 55–­64, 109,
238n40, 238nn37–­38; as locus
of power, 64; opera and, 22–­23;
recorded music and, 26
vocal performance, 39
vocal persona, 113
voice, 11
Wagner, Penny, 178
“Wake Up Little Susie” (Everly Broth-
ers), 190
Wakin, Daniel J., 245n63
Wanderley, Marcelo M., 41
Warhol, Andy, 140, 211
Weinstein, Deena, 186
Weisgerber, Corinne, 216–­217
Welch, Maggie, 178
West Coast rock and roll, 193–­95, 205
White, Joshua, 59, 238n38, 238n40
White, Michele, 77
Whiteley, Sheila, 57, 172–­73,
238nn37–­38
whiteness, 104–­5, 127, 212. See also race
Wiener, Jon, 185–­86
Williams, Hank, 143
Williams, Hype, 219
Williams, Larry, 186
Williams, Mason, 201
Williams, Raymond, 207–­210, 213–­218
Wilson, Brian, 198
Winkler, Henry, 255n13
Winterland, 60–­62
Withers, Bill, 108–­9
Wizzard. See Wood, Roy
Wohl, Richard, 176
Wolfman Jack, 194
Womack, Kenneth, 175
women: Beatlemania and, 165, 170,
172–­75; sexuality and, 173–­75, 178,
182; social life and, 174–­75. See also
gender norms and roles
Wood, Roy, 166, 184, 257n44; auteur-
ship, 200–­202; authenticity and
biography, 192–­93, 197–­98, 200–­202,
203, 204–­206, 257n44; as iconoclast,
204; Wizzard as Eddy and the Falcons,
192, 197–­98, 200–­202, 205. See also
Electric Light Orchestra; Move
Woodstock festival (1969), 183, 187,
189–­92
working-­class youth subcultures, 185,
187, 189, 205, 255n13
Young, Neil, 108–­9
YouTube, 137–­38
Zappa, Frank: auteur status, 122, 199–­
200; authenticity and biography,
184, 192–­97, 203, 204–­206; doo-­wop
songs and, 193–­96, 199–­201, 204,
257n31; as iconoclast, 204; on Les
Carter’s radio show, 257n39; Mothers
of Invention as Ruben and the Jets,
192–­99, 202, 205; pachuco subcul-
ture and, 193, 195, 205; rock-­and-­roll
revivalism and, 166; on uniforms,
257n40
Ziggy Stardust (character), 28–­29, 34,
119, 234n21