How Rock Artists Are Responding to the Possibility of Collaborative Music Publics Online
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AUTHENTICITY, AUTHORITY AND CONTROL: HOW ROCK ARTISTS ARE RESPONDING TO THE POSSIBILITY OF COLLABORATIVE MUSIC PUBLICS ONLINE A Thesis Submitted to the Committee of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada Copyright by David Alexander Headley 2015 English (Public Texts) M.A. Graduate Program September 2015 ABSTRACT Authenticity, Authority and Control: How rock artists are responding to the possibility of collaborative music publics online David Alexander Headley This three-part history explores Web 2.0’s ability to make music products a collaborative, ongoing creative process that is reflective of early twentieth century live-music publics, where the realization of a performance was actualized by performers together with their audience in a shared physical space. By extension, I follow the changing dynamic of the producer/consumer relationship as they transitioned through different media and formats that altered their respective roles in music making. This study considers the role that rock ideology, specifically that of the ‘indie-rock’ habitus, plays in shaping both a rock artist’s desired image and a fan-base’s expectations. How rock musicians use the internet reveals their own views on authenticity in recorded music and the extent to which they are willing to participate in a public with their audience. Primary case studies used are: Neil Young, Dave Bidini, Beck Hansen and Joel Plaskett. Keywords: popular music; indie-rock; Web 2.0; rock music collaboration; fan participation; publics; authenticity; habitus; Neil Young; Dave Bidini; Beck Hansen; Joel Plaskett; Song Reader; Scrappy Happiness; Canadian music ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: changes in the performer audience relationship 6 What is Authenticity in Popular Music? 8 Authenticity’s Origins: music as a community experience 15 Music: Transition from Community to Commodity 20 Recording accentuates the producer/consumer divide 22 The ‘All Powerful’ Performer 26 The Author/Performer as ‘author-god’ 29 Recording Artists become their own audience 32 Chapter 2: the struggle to achieve the ‘real’ 36 The Indie-Rock Habitus vs. Mass Produced Culture 37 Attempting to Produce the Real: a shared goal 40 Local and Central – two spheres of inseparable exchange 50 Authentic Products as a Construct 57 Chapter 3: artist control and collaboration online 70 The End of Hierarchy? 76 Too Much Equality 81 Hierarchy Endures 83 Case Studies Neil Young 86 Dave Bidini 91 Beck Hansen 97 Joel Plaskett 102 Conclusion 107 Works Cited 112 iii 1 Introduction Britpop guitarist, songwriter and singer Noel Gallagher often makes a practice of working on unfinished songs during concert sound-checks. Unknown to Gallagher, a stagehand recorded one of his sound-check performances during Oasis’ tour of South America in 2008: a rendition of the incomplete and yet to be released song, “If I had a Gun.” In an interview with Spin, Gallagher recalls: I was out one night in London and somebody asked me, ‘Have you got a song called ‘If I Had a Gun?’ I said, ‘You couldn’t possibly fucking know that.’ He said, ‘I was just listening to it on the internet.’ So I went to YouTube and there it was… And while it didn’t have any of the finished words, the basic structure was there, so people started writing their own words and finishing off the song and posting it to YouTube. Those cheeky fuckers. Before I’d even finished writing the song they’re covering it. But it’s flattering, too — a quarter million people watched it. (Gallagher Interview) Gallagher’s surprised reaction suggests that this was his first encounter with the capabilities of Web 2.0, a version of the internet that empowers its users as content creators. In older media and formats such as radio, television, vinyl and the compact disc, fixed products were disseminated to consumers by artists and their labels. Online, internet users have the ability to publish, circulate and review an artist’s material. In addition, users can become collaborators, a fact that Gallagher discovered when his fans altered and completed his unfinished composition. While Gallagher’s response to this fan involvement was mixed, the 2 ‘If I Had A Gun’ YouTube videos show that his fans desire more than a closed- off, finished product – they desperately want to participate in Gallagher’s work. My research combines academic theory, music journalism and specific case studies of mainstream and ‘indie’ musicians to examine where the audience’s desire to participate in recorded music finds its origins. This study considers the role that rock’s conception of authenticity and the representation of the ‘real’ plays in shaping a fan-base’s expectations. I explore Web 2.0’s ability to return music to a process, an idea that should appeal to the indie habitus1 but potentially challenges the artist’s authority and cultural status. Examinations of select artists are used to show different responses to these challenges. How artists use the internet reveals their own views on authenticity and the extent to which they are willing to participate in a public with their audience. This study was conceived to address how rock artists are negotiating their own authority with rock’s expectations of authenticity in the online environment. While much has been written about what it means for a rock artist to be authentic, research into the new challenges posed to an artist’s authenticity by Web 2.0 has been limited. Steve Collins and Sherman Young explore the degree 1 Here and throughout this study, I am taking ‘habitus’ from Pierre Bourdieu, who uses the term to show how the internal cognitive structures behind an individual’s disposition and actions are formed. Bourdieu explains that “social agents are endowed with habitus, inscribed in their bodies by past experiences” (Pascalian Meditations 138). This process happens “gradually, progressively and imperceptibly” (11) and naturalizes external frameworks such as art classifications within a person’s consciousness (141). The individual’s perception of the world around him then informs his strategies and actions, which are performed and executed with designs on becoming successful in a particular field (138). Bourdieu’s “The Field of Cultural Production” (see page 57 of this project) provides a detailed explanation of how agents attempt to inculcate their habitus in the Field. The concept of habitus is important to this study as each artist’s understanding of the producer/consumer relationship is informed by their past experiences: an idea that is critical to the case studies of Neil Young, Dave Bidini, Beck Hansen and Joel Plaskett in Chapter 3. 3 to which the internet allows musicians to connect directly with audiences in order to market their products. David Beer shows that a musician’s social networking page can become a space that facilitates and creates relationships between fans who visit the site. These and similar studies examine specific aspects of the producer/consumer online relationship; but in this project, the emphasis is on how artists are resolving the tension between their authorial control and the audience’s desire to participate in music as a process. In Chapter 1, Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, Alan Moore and Simon Reynolds are employed to define a rock consensus of authenticity in which recording artists attempt to minimize the distance between themselves and their listeners. Rock’s understanding of authenticity is tied to the idea of music as a process, where, prior to becoming a product, performances were actualized by musicians and audiences together as a shared community activity. Technology altered the collaborative producer/consumer relationship and turned music into a fixed document that was disseminated by the producer to the consumer. Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault provide the theoretical framework to explain how the actualization of music was transformed from a lived experience into a product that gave its creator privilege, prestige and control. Chapter 2 explains that, as a product, rock music still derives authority and authenticity from its roots in community. The theories of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Jay Bolter and Guy Debord are applied to show that commodified music tries to resemble, represent and reflect an act as much as possible. Artists that attempt to differentiate their 4 products from artifice and create the perception of an experience that is immediate and real face a number of obstacles. Clear-cut divisions between the real and the artificial are difficult to make, but for artists who are driven by the indie habitus, proving that their product is more real than other products is the means by which their work achieves its value. Chapter 3 shows that Web 2.0 creates an interactive online landscape that resembles the immediacy of live performance as described in Chapter 1, where music is an event that is shaped by both the performer and the audience. As such, it has the potential to fulfill Jurgen Habermas’ and Michael Warner’s notions of a public, where the audience’s voice is restored to the creative process. While Web 2.0 contributes to the representation of the ‘real’ by making products ongoing events, some, such as Andrew Keen, are concerned about how this medium will affect the platform and status of producers who have gained recognition through industry-controlled media. Erving Goffman, Katherine Walker, and Liam Bullingham and Ana C. Vasconcelos are used to show that, contrary to Keen, artists are not at a disadvantage online. Instead, the internet affords artists multiple ways to ‘define the situation’ and reinforce their significance. Case studies of Neil Young, Dave Bidini, Beck Hansen and Joel Plaskett are used to show how various artists approach Web 2.0.