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

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

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

‘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. In each case, the artist’s online persona indicates how he perceives himself in relation to his fan-base and how his understanding of authenticity measures up to the indie habitus. How close artists come to achieving an indie sense of authenticity is also directly related to how they operate offline and in other media.

These artists were chosen because they all value immediacy when they make recorded music. They remain active producers and provide an excellent cross section of how rock recording artists from different eras and of varying degrees of commercial success are approaching questions of artist control and consumer participation online. Hansen’s and Plaskett’s recent projects, Song

Reader and Scrappy Happiness, made them both natural fits for my study as each album, in different ways, exemplifies how recording artists are attempting to include the listener’s creativity in their products. In my research, Bidini became an attractive case study because his profile as an author and columnist made it possible to know his situation as an indie artist in depth through his books and articles. My access to his personal Facebook page as a ‘friend’ gave me further insight into how he was using the site to interact with his fans online: a unique privilege that I did not have when studying other artists. Three of the four artists studied are Canadian, the only exception being the American Hansen. This gives my final chapter a North American focus which is fitting because it was my experiences in Toronto’s music scene as an undergraduate student that drew me to my topic of study in the first place.

Chapter 1: changes in the performer audience relationship

In 2014, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy appeared on the television show Portlandia, a Lorne Michaels’ produced sketch comedy that satirizes hipster life in Portland.

The sketch finds Tweedy in the recording studio where he premiers a new song for actors Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, who play the roles of Tweedy’s producers. Armisen and Brownstein interrupt Tweedy early in the take when they are troubled by his lyrics, specifically: “I’ve got a broken soul and a dusty heart”

(“Bahama Knights” Portlandia). Brownstein challenges Tweedy asking if he comes from a family of Okies that experienced The Dust Bowl. When Tweedy responds that his family is “White Collar” and mostly “upper management”,

Brownstein reminds Jeff that Woody Guthrie had a sister who died in a coal oil fire, a mother who went crazy, and a father who drowned. Brownstein tells

Tweedy: “If your heart is not literally brimming with dust, let’s sing about something else.” In an effort to make the song reflect his suburban life experience, Tweedy tells his producers about the time that his smoke alarm ran out of batteries. Armisen takes it all in, grins, and declares: “I like you.” The finished work is a folk number that recounts Tweedy’s struggles to locate the dying alarm in his house. The song’s chorus is an intermittent beep.

In this sketch, Armisen and Brownstein’s characters attack Tweedy based on their very clear, personal distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ From their shared point of view, Tweedy’s initial lyrics are bad because they do not signify reality, experiences that Tweedy has actually lived. The confidence with which these producers express their opinions suggests that these standards are more

7 than subjective: that they are absolutes. Tweedy’s immediate deferral to their critiques is also telling as it reveals that these ‘truths’ are at least somewhat known to him: that he has heard them before.

What the characters are all after is authenticity, a power in popular culture that legitimizes art and gives it meaning. Although they seem certain that authenticity has very clear parameters, this chapter will show that its boundaries are subjective and ready to serve those who use the term to ascribe value and to sanctify art. The first part of this chapter examines rock’s concept of authenticity from multiple perspectives. It defines a collective understanding of authenticity in rock by showing what these theories all have in common: a value of music products based on how closely they are able facilitate genuine artist/listener communication.

The remainder of this chapter roots rock’s perception of authenticity in the history of popular music performance in North America; and will in future chapters establish how this notion of authenticity is at the heart of the indie-rock aesthetic. Authenticity in rock is connected to the notion of music as a process, where musicians and their audiences realized performances together in a shared physical space.2 These conditions encouraged immediate audience input that contributed to shaping performances as they were happening. Music as a product changed this dynamic. Recorded music in the pre-internet era made the

2 ‘Music as a process’ is a term used throughout this study with this same definition in mind. As Chapter 3 will show, Web 2.0 has the ability to introduce this dynamic into the online world, creating the possibility for ‘music as a product’ to resemble ‘music as a process’ in ways that it was unable to achieve in media other than live performance.

8 listener’s role less immediate and left the representation of the ‘real’ to the artist: an idea that is explored in depth in Chapter 2. The loss of this intimate producer/consumer relationship is important to accentuate because, as Chapter

3 will show, the audience’s desire to participate in music making has never gone away.

What is Authenticity in Popular Music?

To understand how authenticity informs artistic practice, it is necessary to first establish if authenticity is important to the current rock landscape. Making this determination also requires defining what authenticity means in popular music and, by extension, in rock and indie rock culture.3 A consolidation of critical viewpoints shows that, despite perspectives to the contrary, authenticity is still valued.

For Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, the term authenticity is outdated in a postmodern landscape where appropriation is common practice

(30). In a culture that celebrates simulation, a work’s authenticity is no longer a primary source of validation. From this vantage point, Tweedy’s producers were wrong to take issue with the fact that Tweedy’s lyrics borrowed from a life experience that was not his own. Simon Reynolds cites producer Brian Eno as

3 Authenticity is an important aspect of popular music criticism and theory. In this study, the term popular music is used to describe any genre of non-classical music that has been popular at any given time. While Chapter 2 shows that many popular music products attempt to project authentic images, this study is interested in how ideas of authenticity affect rock and indie rock products, subcultures of popular music that highly prize product authentication.

9 another significant voice in the music industry who sees a shift in creativity’s definition. Eno explains that the modern music artist is a “connector of things”

(Reynolds 130) who inhabits creativity by finding new ways to reference and remix the history of recorded sound. Under this model, emphasis on an artist’s individuality is diminished. The importance of a product’s origins becomes irrelevant to the present popular music discourse, and the academic subject of authenticity itself is devalued and consigned “to the intellectual dust-heap” (Born and Hesmondhalgh 30).

Describing the post-modern approach, Retromania references Vampire

Weekend’s Ezra Koenig who sees the idea of an authenticity established through a link to a pure and neatly defined origin as alien: “What is authentic for a guy like me? Fourth-generation Ivy League, deracinated, American Jew… raised in [New

Jersey] to middle-class post-hippie parents with semi-Anglophilic tendencies”

(414). Similar to Eno, Koenig sees the artist as a chef, mixing and matching influences into a master recipe. He concludes that his immigrant, New York based reality involves shopping in a supermarket of musical tradition and cultural influences where no selection is more adequate than any other in terms of expressing roots, origins and personal ties. His aesthetic is one guided by taste in a world where “’We are BOTH disconnected from AND connected to

EVERYTHING’” (414).

Born, Hesmondalgh, Eno and Koenig have a point when they dismiss origins in favour of appropriation. In Portlandia the producers’ concern with the singer’s personal ties to his lyrics completely eclipses their analysis of the

10 singing, guitar playing and quality of the song. Tweedy’s finalized lyrics are not better because they are personal; in fact, they are terrible. Despite the satirical nature of this sketch, it is important to acknowledge that these characters represent a dedication to a certain brand of authenticity that is relevant to them.

For artists, audiences, critics and academics, there are a myriad of forms of authenticity that have the potential power to validate an art form.

The characters in Portlandia value art as personal expression. Paul K.

Saint-Amour explains that this understanding is tied to eighteenth century

Romanticism, where “[the west] still largely imagines authorship particularly of

‘imaginative’ works such as poems, novels, and musical compositions to be a unique expression of a unique self” (7). Reynolds’ Retromania concurs with this vision and shows that great popular music exists in the moment and creates an innovative sound that does not look back. It locates a music’s relevance in discovery, pushing boundaries, and pressing towards an unknown future.

Reynolds’ emphasis on the importance of originality does not stop him from acknowledging voices that veer from his vision. He shows that authenticity debates continue to dominate the popular music landscape and includes multiple outlooks from those in the industry that differ in terms of how a music product’s origins are valued and defined. For example, Reynolds contests hipsters who

“instead of being pioneers and innovators, [have] switched roles to become curators and archivists” (xx). Reynolds’ tenor reveals that, from his perspective, there is a right and a wrong way for an artist to create meaningful art; one approach is authentic; the other is artificial. Contrary to Born and Hesmondhalgh,

Reynolds believes artists who emulate the sounds, styles and traditions of bygone eras create distant products void of immediacy and meaning.

Extending the critical landscape on popular music, Barker and Taylor define authenticity as “primarily in opposition to faking it” (ix) and recognize authenticity as an elastic term potentially meaning different things to different people. They distinguish between ‘representational authenticity’, ‘cultural authenticity’, and ‘personal authenticity’, a list that is not finite or definitive but rather serves to show a myriad of ways that artists, performances and recordings can potentially be legitimized. They explain each loose definition of authenticity as follows:

representational authenticity, [is] music that is exactly what it says it is –

unlike, say, Milli Vanilli posing as singers, which they weren’t… cultural

authenticity, [is] music that reflects a cultural tradition… Mississippi John

Hurt’s version of ‘Stagger Lee,’ an old African American song about an

outlaw, is more culturally authentic than the Grateful Dead’s… personal

authenticity, [is] music that reflects the person or people who are making

it… when Loretta Lynn sings ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ she tells us a lot. (x)

Alan Moore follows a similar three-part definition of authenticity where the secret to demystifying authenticity is understanding “who, rather than what, is being authenticated by a performance” (220). He categorizes the current state of authenticity into three concepts as it relates to rock and contemporary folk:

‘authenticity of expression (first person authenticity)’, ‘authenticity of execution

(third person authenticity)’ and ‘authenticity of experience (second person

12 authenticity)’, all of which are explained later in this chapter. Moore’s concepts can be viewed as being united by one shared ideal: the importance of successful communication between the artist and the audience. Success occurs when the audience legitimizes this communication by accepting the message as one that is genuine.

Consensus of Authenticity

Comparing the theories of Reynolds, Moore, Barker and Taylor, we can say that authenticity is a fluid concept, a subjective ideal with an essence that is vulnerable to individual interpretation. Despite the word’s numerous definitions in the field of popular music, certain meanings have become recognized and established. Bethany Klein describes the construction of consensus amongst popular music critics and explains that the group is an ‘interpretive community’ where “there is a sense that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are defined by collective standards rather than solely the individual critic’s tastes” (7). Stanley Fish adds that such communities are made possible by the learned interpretative strategies that their members share (457). This results in a public that has a specific character, a certain language, and a unique vision of the world (Warner 114).

Applying both Klein and Michael Warner, Reynolds, Moore, Barker and

Taylor are part of a rock public that shares a collective standard and vision. Their common rock habitus means that their understanding of authenticity’s essence, potential value and meaning should in fact be similar. Closer examination reveals

13 that their definitions of authenticity all recognize the importance of communication, where an artist is able to express his work to the audience in an art form that is perceived as being genuine. In different ways, they also acknowledge that authenticity needs to be anchored in a specific place and time.

For Reynolds, this authenticity is communicated when an innovative artist creates an original sound that is unique to the moment; art is ‘now’ and should

“constantly push forward into new territory, reacting against its own immediate predecessors in violent gestures of severance, jettisoning its superseded stages like a rocket shooting into space” (404). This depiction relates to Moore’s ‘first person authenticity’ where a performer “represents an attempt to communicate in an unmediated form with an audience” (214). For Moore, this means that artists achieve a closeness with their listeners by creating the perception that they are actualizing an art that embodies a truth that is specific to their emotions, a definition that is nearly identical to Barker and Taylor’s ‘personal authenticity’. All of these concepts of authenticity connect the artist to the listener through the originality and individuality of the work, each of which is perceived as an extension of the artist, a real person in the physical world.

Moore coins two additional forms of authenticity, ‘second person authenticity’ and ‘third person authenticity,’ to express the various ways in which folk and rock artists attempt to communicate a sense of the real to their audience. For Moore, ‘third person authenticity’ arises when an artist is able to effectively construct his/her performance in the style of an established musical tradition. Moore references the blues as a genre with a style and feel that is

14 directly tied to its social origin in the Mississippi delta. The connection between this art form and the conditions under which it was produced is so strong that from Moore’s vantage point, “the reality [becomes] embodied in the style itself”

(215). Therefore, when blues rock artists appropriated the style in the 1960’s, a form of authenticity was made possible through the execution of the material where a strong sense of reality was embedded in the language of the music. This claim is akin to Barker and Taylor’s ‘cultural authenticity’ wherein the “music… reflects a cultural tradition” (x). On the surface, these categories of authenticity appear at odds with Reynolds’ personal rock habitus; in fact, they potentially exemplify all that Reynolds sees wrong with the current state of popular music, a culture that, from his perspective, spends far too much time looking back instead of forward. The desired effect of these definitions of authenticity however, remains the same: the creation of a close bond between artist and listener through a music that is perceived as having an inherent, genuine identity that represents a tangible reality.

Moore’s ‘second person authenticity’ adds a new layer to this goal where artist/listener closeness is achieved when artists successfully capture the life experiences of their fan base in their music. Simon Frith and Howard Horne also describe this post-modern approach where, instead of looking within, artists express “not their own views of life, but rather the views they think the customer has” (Art Into Pop 25). Faking It contends that authenticity is determined by the entire rock community, meaning “most artists’ motivation is based on the perceptions and approval of the audience” (334). Barker and Taylor characterize

Kurt Cobain in this light, as an image conscious artist who was obsessed with living up to the expectations of his fans. They locate Cobain’s disposition in his own teenage fandom, an experience that, from their vantage point, forever linked the grunge rocker with the identity and the worldview of his followers (21). To compare, the idea of authenticity as a construct, tailored to a specific audience, is seemingly at odds with the individuality that Reynolds prizes because it opposes

“songs as an expression of personal experience” (150). Still, the endgame in both cases is to narrow the gap between the artist and the listener by creating music that speaks to the moment and temporally lives with its fans.

Authenticity’s Origins: music as a collaborative community experience

On March 30th 2007, I attended the Rheostatics’ farewell concert held at

Toronto’s Massey Hall. The group powered through a three hour performance that spanned nearly three decades of material. As an audience member, I appreciated the band’s renditions of their studio masterpieces such as “Claire” and “Dope Fiends and Boozehounds,” but for me, the show’s true pinnacle came at the end of the night. Unplugging their instruments, the band left the stage, walked into the crowd, and invited members of the audience to build a human pyramid. Together, the Rheostatics and their fans closed the show with a performance of one of the band’s earliest songs, “Record Body Count.” The concert was recorded, and as an archived performance, the song does not sound great. What made the performance special was being there, experiencing the artists and audience converging in the same space, where both interpreted the

16 song as a joint force, and the divide between artist and fan was nearly non- existent.

Rock’s concept of authenticity as an immediate and real experience finds its origins in music as a process. An examination of the transition of performance from a social activity to a commodity shows that the listener’s active participation in the live realization of a performance did not translate to pre-internet recorded music. This section lays the groundwork for Chapter 2 by providing a brief history of music as an event: an idea that rock products would later attempt to simulate.

This overview also accounts for how producers became responsible for creating fixed performances for the listener: a role that would later be challenged by the capabilities of Web 2.0.

Before fixed recordings and radio, popular music was actualized as live performances in physical spaces between actual people. Intimate environments spawned performer/audience member interaction, and all involved could potentially play a role in the realization of musical ideas. New Orleans jazz culture in the early twentieth century is a prime example of how audiences were able to influence music. Lawrence Levine describes ‘bucking contests’ that occurred on the streets and were judged by audience reaction. Similar to today’s

‘battle of the bands,’ Jazz players challenged each other to improvisational ‘play- offs.’ It was “the crowds of onlookers that determined when one band had fallen noticeably behind the other in quality” (Levine 233). Levine references jazz saxophonist and composer Sidney Bechet who contends that “the audience was more than an audience, it was also participating: ‘how it was they could tell – that

17 was the music too. It was what they had of the music inside themselves’” (233).

The realization of the piece did not belong solely to the performers; the interpretation was collective. Audience members were coconspirators in actualizing the song.

Collaboration between performers and audience members did not end with radio and recordings; it simply remained a characteristic of live performance, where joint-creativity was made possible by their close proximity in tightly knit communities. Towns packed with performers of various abilities meant that there was no solid divide between performer and audience member; crowds were filled with musicians soaking in the show. Bluesman Johnny Shines described the intimacy of the music scene in his town of Helena, Arkansas during the 1930’s:

“there were no microphones or P.A. setups there; you just sing out loud as you can… People attempt to pour whiskey in your guitar. Beer in your guitar, anything” (Welding 48). Aside from the discomfort that came with being drenched in beer, physical closeness with the audience benefited musicians who were able to meet new players and trade skills.

Musical exchanges were not limited to individuals; they also occurred across cultures in diverse cities. Barker and Taylor show that music in 1920’s

New Orleans “blended African, Cuban and French features. Ragtime had mixed syncopation of African American music with the African rhythms of Cuba and the

German marching band tradition” (37). Barker and Taylor refer to the American

South as the “racially integrated world of traditional pop music” and explain

“blues were widely sung by both blacks and whites, and arose from a

18 combination of African musical modes and white harmonies and structure” (37).

Live music was a jambalaya that incorporated the contributions of diverse players and audience members.

Employing Jurgen Habermas’ concept of a public, we can say that these communities were open to all who wanted to participate in the music-making process (1). Adding theory from Warner, we can describe these live-music settings as self-organized discourses (69) that encouraged the contributions of strangers (75) and were “realized through active uptake” (87). The immediacy of live performance included the audience in the realization of each piece and resembled Barthes’ conviction that “every text is eternally written here and now”

(278). Under these conditions, local performers and their audience were not the recipients of culture; they made their own culture. Every performance “[invented] in texts something different from what [the author] intended” (de Certeau 169).

The performer/audience exchange resembled Michel Foucault’s vision of “culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure” (290).

The physical divide that radio put between performers and audience members removed the listener’s ability to impact a performance as it was happening. The audience’s disappearance as a creative partner was not lost on performers. Singer Dorothy Humphries debuted on a Columbus, Ohio radio station in 1920. Her memoirs recall the alien experience of performing in a room with burlap covered walls. The microphone was so foreign looking that she did

19 not immediately know what it was. For Humphries, singing on the radio was a complete departure from performing in front of an audience. With no facial expressions or eyes staring back at her, she was working without a compass.

She remembers: “we did a half hour program and were quietly ushered out. It was over but did anybody hear it?” (Kraft 64). The absence of immediate feedback left her with no ability to gauge her performance.

Etta James’ sound was also adversely affected by the isolated studio setting. Producer Ralph Bass believed that, without a physical audience James lost the raw energy in her voice. His solution was to record James live, where the captured performance would include the exhilaration that came when James worked with a crowd. Recorded at the New Era Club in Nashville on September

27th, 1963, James’ live record produced a voice much different from the one on her studio albums. Nadine Cohodas shows how the spontaneous nature of live performance reinvigorated James’ recording: “Bass felt the explosion of sound.

The song built phrase after raucous phrase for nine minutes – an eternity in R &

B music – singer and audience feeding off each other” (237).

The described ‘build’ shows that, in live performance, the audience is an active participant in the realization of a musical idea; with each successive moment, they pour their own musical identities into the shaping of the sonic experience. Popular music theorist Richard Middleton believes that “the moment of performance [itself can be] considered as potentially an act of composition”

(53). By bringing the audience back into the ‘moment of creation,’ James and

Bass recognized performance as a process that did not belong solely to the

20 performer; it was shared by everyone. Their inclusion of the audience’s interpretive powers created a recording that resembled the “multidimensional space” envisioned by Roland Barthes, in which “a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (279). This strategy heightened James’ performance and simultaneously reestablished the collaborative status of the audience members present at the club. Still, live recordings such as James’ could not extend participation in the immediate moment to the vinyl listener at home. Once the performance was committed to disc, it was frozen. From their living-room armchairs, purchasers had no ability to contribute to the energy that helped to develop the material.

Music: Transition from Community to Commodity

The popularity of radio and recordings made music something that was increasingly experienced as a product across America. James P. Kraft explains that the rise of radio as a significant challenger to the ‘live-and-in-person’ music experience began in the 1920’s. He cites economics as a contributing factor: “in

1924, a radio cost more than $200, but only three years later Sears, Roebuck was selling Silverstone models for $34.95, and nearly ten million Americans owned radios” (67). For the first time, easy radio access made the home, listening experience a valid alternative to listening in person.

Recalling Dorothy Humphries and Etta James as examples, we can say that the home consumer’s role was different than that of a live audience. The

21 producer/consumer relationship was missing the synergy that came from the two groups sharing the same physical space. Frith shows that, as a product, music was consumed in many different ways. He explains that record sales in the

1930’s were hurt by radio’s popularity and that “when the [record] industry did begin to recover it was due… to jukeboxes – there were 25,000 in 1934, 300,000 in 1939, accounting for the sales of 30 million records” (Music For Pleasure 16).

Frith’s and Kraft’s accounts reveal that by the 1930’s, commodified music, in all its forms, was the means by which the majority of music was heard.

Centralized radio not only removed direct communication between performers and audiences, it also physically removed the performer from the community. Kraft’s research shows that live radio originally featured local performers. As technology progressed, powerful networks absorbed smaller stations and preempted local programing with centralized content. The physical distance that radio created was intensified when “superior players in a few large cities provided better music for listeners across the country than local bands could provide for those in communities” (Kraft 76). This created a lasting effect, where creativity was perceived by the consumer as a product that existed separate from the local social fabric.

American punk-rocker Ian MacKaye explains that during his youth in

1970’s Washington D.C., the idea of making music products seemed unattainable: “When I was a kid, I thought: I’m not going to be a musician. You look at people like Peter Frampton, or Jimmy Page, or Jimi Hendrix… there is just no way” (“Washington D.C.” Sonic Highways). Foo Fighters’ drummer Taylor

Hawkins recalls being young and viewing the music industry as entirely foreign to his own reality:

When I was a kid, I didn’t know that you could put a band together and

print your own records… I didn’t really know that that existed. The only

thing that I thought you could do was play in a wedding band or go to

Hollywood and get the big record deal. (Washington D.C. Sonic Highways)

MacKaye’s and Hawkins’ experiences reveal that even in the late twentieth century, music as a product was viewed as being separate from music as a community activity. In order to regain creative power, consumers such as

Mackaye and Hawkins had to become producers themselves, a topic that is explored in the ensuing chapter.

Recording accentuates the producer/consumer divide

In addition to the physical and geographical distance created by radio, recorded music placed a temporal divide between performer and listener.

Musician Ariel Pink explains that “’The recording medium actually crystallises an event and makes it more than the sum of the score’” (Reynolds xxxv). Different from live shows, where an audience could influence a performance as it was happening, or sheet music, where the consumer was needed to actualize the text, records delivered an inbuilt and inalterable version of a piece wherein the recording artist performed the song for the listener. To clarify, this does not mean that the same recording was experienced by all consumers the same way. My

23 intention here is not to suggest that hearing a recording on a jukebox was the same thing as listening to it on the radio, playing a record at home, listening with a group or listening alone. Furthermore, I am not dismissing the listener as a dynamic figure who could listen to the same recording multiple times and come away with different readings and new ways of listening. Still, as material objects, recordings were fixed variables that did not allow performer/audience collaboration at the moment the music was actualized. While they could be endlessly replayed and opened up to new listener interpretations, these performances remained exactly as they were recorded, regardless of how the consumer audience reacted as their listening experience unfolded.

Despite this separation, the listening audience was still able to participate in a dialogue of which recorded music was a part. Mark Perry’s fanzine Sniffin’

Glue (later discussed in Chapter 3) added the consumer’s voice to Britain’s punk scene. Frith notes that consumers can also appropriate recordings to express their own opinions and cites Bruce Springsteen’s protest song, “Born in the

USA”, being used to promote a feeling of American pride during Ronald Regan’s campaign (Performing Rites 165-166). In addition, the output of commercial artists can also inspire consumers to become recording artists themselves; Frith references Velvet Underground, Neil Young and Joy Division as artists who had such an impact (Performing Rites 15). Consumers always have a means to express how they feel about certain products through their purchasing power. All of these forms of participation however, occur outside of the realization of the recording itself, a fact that distinguishes the live audience’s participatory role in

24 music making from that of the music consumer who does not have an immediate hand in shaping the recorded musical realization of the product.

Beyond cutting out the audience, the recording process also replaced them. Producers and sound engineers stepped inside the listener’s role and determined what the mass market wanted to consume. Richard Middleton describes Antoine Hennion’s view of the recording process as a “’creative collective’… the aim, ‘to introduce the public into the studio’… In particular it is the producer’s task to have ‘the ear of the public,’ thereby representing in the music the feelings and values of a ‘kind of imaginary democracy’” (Middleton 39).

The ‘public’ that Hennion articulates is not a public in the Habermas or Warner sense. Hennion’s account of the studio environment underscores the idea that, without the direct participation of the listener in the process, recorded music left no place for consumers to meaningfully contribute to a recording’s creation. His description accentuates the divide between recorded music and live music, where the audience did not need ‘listening surrogates’ and was part of the give- and-take essential to music’s realization.

Jazz conductor Paul Whiteman’s anxieties about recording further emphasize that, contrary to Foucault’s ideal vision of the writing experience, records were not developing discourses, but rather, closed off, permanent objects. In his description of a recording’s inflexible and uncompromising nature,

Whiteman explained “a slip may pass unnoticed in concert… and even if noticed, it may be forgiven… but a slip on record becomes the most audible thing in it”

(Whiteman and McBride 12). Whiteman’s stress revealed the record’s autonomy;

25 once released, the captured interpretation of a song was irreversible. It did not matter who was listening where and when: in Whiteman’s example, the mistake would always be there. From Whiteman’s angle, the finished record was completely impenetrable: even for the performer. Different from the listener however, Whiteman’s advantage was the ability to alter a recording before it was finalized. The audience would never have that chance.

Contrary to Whiteman, music theorist Simon Frith does not view the record as an end process: “if a musical score is obviously an unfinished object… then so is a pop record. The music it stores… will sound different accordingly, whether as determined by a choice of record company mixes or as the listener shifts volume and tone controls” (Frith 241). Frith’s analysis appears to soften the record’s permanence and restore the listener’s power, but he actually reinforces the idea that the ‘common’ listener is locked out of a record’s production.

Standard volume alteration is an exercise that exhibits no more creative power than the right to listen or not listen. It is a limited form of control that has no impact whatsoever on how a song is realized during recording.

Frith, however, rightly identifies the producer’s power to shape a record.

Access to the means of production gives the producer the meaningful choice needed to shape his own interpretation. Multi-tracking turned the producer into a scientist in a laboratory; if the drums were not right, he could eliminate them; when the singer’s voice sounded thin, he could double-track the vocals. Prior to

Web 2.0, these options were privileges that distinctly belonged to producers and

26 did not extend to the listener. For the home consumer, the record sounded the way it sounded; take it or leave it!

The ‘All Powerful’ Performer

Without the audience in the studio, the actualization of abstract musical texts was no longer a cooperative practice rooted in social interaction. Instead of

“the pleasure of a process, risk… excitement, [and] intoxication” encouraged by live performance, artists pursued “the perfection of a form” (Frith 232). In classical music, Glenn Gould viewed recording as the means to achieve “ideal performances from fragments of real ones” (Frith 228). For Gould, the goal was not to contribute to an ongoing musical conversation – it was to produce perfection.

By the 1960’s, popular music recording artists were starting to follow

Gould’s philosophy. Albums such as Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys) and

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles) were never meant to be realized in a shared time and space between performers and audience members. In a significant departure from early recordings, which attempted to replicate the experience of live sound, these albums employed splicing, overdubbing, double tracking, vocal effects and sophisticated arrangements that incorporated multiple instruments. As complete studio creations, these albums did not encourage live playing between bandmates let alone interaction with the fan-base. During the recording of Sergeant Pepper, The Beatles rarely played

27 together live off the floor. Ringo Starr learned to play chess “because [when he was not needed to record his part, he’d] have so much spare time” (The Beatles

Anthology). Studio production had reached a point where even band members no longer felt part of a cooperative music making process, segments of performances were being actualized independently and assembled artificially.

The extent to which these studio creations kept the listener on the outside was clear to some music critics. Reviewing Sergeant Pepper for The New York

Times on June 18th, 1967, Richard Goldstein declared “we need the Beatles, not as cloistered composers, but as companions. And they need us. In substituting the studio conservatory for an audience, they have ceased being folk artists, and the change is what makes their new album a monologue” (Goldstein 24). The flaws that Goldstein saw in Sergeant Pepper were not new: records had always been one-way conversations. What was different was how transparent studio creations were becoming in their exclusion of the audience as a creative force.

The aforementioned studio achievements distanced the audience by bringing high culture ideology into popular music: “high cultural audiences… assume the value of an art object is contained within it; low cultural audiences assume that the value of an art object lies in what it can do for them” (Frith 18).

The artist’s studio separation changed popular music from a genre that found form through communal exploration to a predetermined object with a locked in meaning. As bottom feeders, the purchasers could only extract the meanings made available for consumption.

The growing technological gap continued to promote producers and performers as the only sources of creativity that mattered. In the 1960’s, record labels even attempted to lecture purchasers about volume control for the optimum listening experience. When Beatles’ albums began being released in stereo, “the sleeves of the LP’s sometimes included bossy diagrams of how to position your speakers and where to sit” (Howlett). Columbia Records’ President,

Goddard Lieberson, took these notions to the extreme:

“I believe the listener should leave his phonograph alone; if he wants to

get into the picture, let him play the piano. I would like to see a standard

set with phonographs whereby even the volume could not be changed.

Then you would finally have what the artist wanted” (Performing Rites

231).

Lieberson’s pompous desires accurately reflect the changing producer/consumer dynamic that radio and the record set into motion. His perspective blatantly champions performers as the sole creators of culture. From

Lieberson’s vantage point, only the artist’s interpretation of the song is important.

Lieberson’s word choice is also very telling. He refers to ‘listeners’ and ‘artists’ instead of ‘performers’ and ‘audience members.’ Lieberson’s language accentuates an understanding that denies the creative convergence of the

‘performer’ and ‘audience member.’ While the aforementioned terms carry connotations that are much more interactive and social, ‘listener’ and ‘artist’ delineate clear and isolated roles where the listener merely receives the experience; the artist on the other hand, is the site of creation.

The recording industry’s disconnect from consumer creativity lends credence to Theodor Adorno’s impression of popular music as a mechanical entity. Admittedly, Adorno’s attack on the genre is multifaceted. The theorist’s critique is built on ideas of ‘standardization’ and ‘passive listening.’ For Adorno,

“the whole [was] pre-given and pre-accepted, even before the actual experience of the music [began]” (2). Through trial and error, the music industry had ‘hits,’ developed formulas and crystalized standards. While ‘pseudo-individualization’ techniques gave songs the illusion of a distinct identity, all recorded pieces were just canned goods on an assembly line. Adorno claims that “pseudo- individualization… [kept consumers] in line by making them forget that what they listened to [was] already listened to for them, or ‘pre-digested’” (6). Showing complete disdain for ‘pop’ consumers, Adorno reasons “one may go so far as to suggest that most listeners of popular music do not understand music as a language in itself. If they did, it would be vastly difficult to explain how they could tolerate the incessant supply of largely undifferentiated material” (9). Adorno’s bemused confusion stems from the fact that he was looking for a conversation in the wrong place. For truly active listening, interaction and meaningful contribution, one still had to turn to the live circuit. Recorded music seemingly had no interest in discovering ways of inviting the audience into the material.

The Author/Performer as ‘author-god’

When popular songwriters began recording their own songs, studio albums became even more definitive. Long gone were the days of New Orleans

30 bucking contests where authors, or composers, were a distant afterthought. Now, the author was at the heart of the recording, performing the text for the listener.

Barthes believed that “to give a text an author [was] to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close writing” (279). Foucault added “the author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (290). For listeners of sound recordings, authors as performers were inescapable figures whose interpretations were part of the document. Inseparable from the work, the author had to be acknowledged; he was actualized as a part of the text whenever a recording was played.

Barker and Taylor point to the Beatles as a watershed band that made the performance of original material the norm: “with the success of the Beatles, it was no longer sufficient for artists to merely interpret a song; now it had to be their own song, their own self-expression, giving the audience a different expectation of the music’s level of intensity and significance” (173). This understanding perpetuated the idea that the song was no longer an interpretation but rather a unique form of expression that found “explanation… in the man or woman who produced it” (Barthes 277).

The advent of the songwriting recording artist gave the author control over the listener’s last remaining freedom; lyrical interpretation. It became commonplace for listeners to uncover meaning through the detection of biographical elements in a song. This process turned the listener into “the disposable machinery of extraction” where the audience was ignored “because the text [was] taken to be self-sufficient – everything [was] in it” (Fish 451).

Carole King’s perception of her work reinforces its deep connection to her and its independence from the listener: “I want my music to speak for me. You can get to know me through my music” (Windeler 283). King’s assertion that ‘her’ music embodies its author leaves listeners with no room to shape the experience; they can merely get to know what is already there.

The author’s dominant place at the centre of recorded music was a foreign concept to Chuck Berry’s piano player, Johnnie Johnson. Noticing that Berry

‘hits’ like “Sweet Little Sixteen” fell in keys more typically played on the piano,

Keith Richards asked Johnson how the songs were created: “And [Johnson] said, well, Chuck would have all these words, and we’d sort of play a blues format and

I would lay out the sequence. [Richards] said, Johnnie, that’s called songwriting… [Johnson] said, I never thought about it that way; I just sort of did what I knew” (Richards and Fox 468). Johnson’s previous background as a live performer meant that he did not see himself as an authorial figure; instead, he viewed his role as a participatory one, wherein he contributed to a process. In the short time from Johnson (1950’s) to King (1960’s and 70’s), the concept of authorial control in popular music went from being non-existent to a dominant force. The proliferation of songwriting recording artists who could claim an intimate connection to lyrical content was yet another way that the music industry usurped the listener’s interpretive power.

Recording Artists become their own audience

Before the radio and record completely changed the nature of their relationship, performers and audience members could respond to each other in the same physical space. In the 1930’s, Johnny Shines’ connection to Robert

Johnson began with Shines as a member of Johnson’s audience. For Shines, meeting Johnson in Helena became an apprenticeship: “I thought [Johnson] was about the greatest guitar player I’d ever heard. The things he was doing was things that I’d never heard nobody else do. And I wanted to learn it, especially a lot of his slide stuff” (Welding 49). The line between performer and audience member was blurred as the two musicians attended each other’s clubs: “we

[began] to swap back and forth – Robert would come over on his break and I’d go over to where he was on my break” (49). The fact that the two groups were not exclusively defined or separated allowed for an exchange where performers and audience members could influence each other. Their interaction was a two- way conversation that benefited both parties.

Recording disenfranchised the audience who lacked both direct access to the artist and the technological means necessary to respond with recordings of their own. In the recording industry, the only audience members capable of responding to artists’ records in the same medium were other recording artists.

Inserting themselves into the audience’s traditional role, artists replied to the work of their peers which created a dialogue between records. Specific examples include The Rolling Stones releasing Their Satanic Majesties Request as a psychedelic response to Sergeant Pepper, and John Lennon recording “Serve

Yourself” as his answer to Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Consumers could purchase these albums, but, much different from the Blues scene in

Helena, they were not an active part of the exchange; they were eavesdropping on the conversation. Rock critic Ellen Willis noted the listener’s discarded place in her 1969 review of Beggar’s Banquet: “I have a feeling that [Mick] Jagger is responding more to the Beatles than to the world, and that the album gets to us only after bouncing off John Lennon” (235). In a 1974 interview with Maclean’s,

Joni Mitchell acknowledged that “The rock and roll industry is very incestuous… we have all interacted and we have all been the source of many songs for one another” (Malka 285). The interviewer asked Mitchell: “isn’t there a certain amount of danger… [when you] create your own special world and are not so open to what’s happening in the rest of the world?” (285). Mitchell responded: “A friend criticized me for that. He said that my work was becoming very ‘inside’”

(285). The songwriter’s friend was referring to Mitchell’s lyrical content, but on a larger scale, the comment accurately reflects how records diminished listeners as both creators and critics. Now, in addition to being originators, artists had turned themselves into the recipients with the loudest voice.

Recording commercialized popular performance and turned songs into objects that eliminated the collaborative performer/audience relationship intrinsic to live concerts. Building on radio’s distinct producer/consumer divide, the recording industry defined the actualization of music as a studio process that was completed by the recording artist alone. Privileged with the responsibility of creating musical culture, artists no longer saw their work as part of the social

34 fabric but rather viewed recordings as ideal forms for the listener to absorb. The emergence of the songwriter/recording artist completed the record’s ascent to high art status; the listener was a spectator; all meaning was stored in the record’s grooves. As a language that spoke solely in vinyl, recording highly favoured voices that had access to the means of production. The final coup came when recording artists became their own audience and dominated both ends of the spectrum, from origin to destination.

Radio and recorded music changed the audience’s role in music making, where the listener was no longer an immediate creative partner in music’s actualization. Frith explains that it “is because of our experience of the immediacy of music-making that its industrial production has always been somehow suspect” (Music for Pleasure 11). He places this mindset in a Marxist framework wherein recorded music has turned the social process of live, human, music making into a product to be exchanged and passively consumed. Marx describes this commercial transformation as ‘commodity fetishism’ where “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour” (Marx, Capital Volume 1). In The

Recording Angel, Evan Eisenberg expresses the alienation of ‘exchange value’ in terms of his own separation as a consumer from the recording artists that he purchases: “When I buy a record, the music is eclipsed by the disk. And I am eclipsed by money – not only from the musician’s view but from my own… later I will play the record, but that will be redundant. My money has already heard it”

(24).

For artists, critics and fans who value authenticity in popular music, the divide between music as a process and music as a product is not accepted; instead, it is viewed as a problem that needs to be overcome. This habitus is rooted in the understanding of popular music’s origins as a social activity that was actualized by communities. For Moore, Reynolds, Barker and Taylor, authenticity in commercial music becomes about simulating closeness, creating the perception of a product that is distinct and genuine, pursuing “an absolute, a goal that can never be fully attained” (Barker and Taylor x). Instead of creating distance, the objective for music products is to find a way to represent a reality that honours the listener’s role in the music making experience.

Chapter 2: the struggle to achieve the ‘real’

Elvis Costello made his first and (nearly) only appearance as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live on December 17th 1977, where he was an emergency replacement for the Sex Pistols. Prior to the show, Costello and his management (Columbia Records) agreed to two musical spots scripted by SNL’s producers: a performance of “Watching The Detectives” to be later followed by

“Less than Zero.” The show went to air where Costello and the Attractions delivered their first segment as planned, but in their second spot and only seconds into the song, the band stopped playing “Less than Zero” when Costello wildly and inexplicably waved off the performance. Acknowledging the audience,

Costello quickly offered: “I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen, there’s no reason to do this song here” (“Season 3, Episode 8” SNL). He then quickly counted in an unvetted, impromptu and intense performance of “Radio Radio,” a stunt that earned Costello a ban from the program that lasted more than a decade.

Pop star Ashlee Simpson debuted as a musical guest on Saturday Night

Live on October 23rd, 2004, where she performed “Pieces of Me” and

“Autobiography.” In her second slot of the night, her band played the second song, “Autobiography,” but strangely, vocals from the first and earlier performed song, “Pieces of Me,” came out of the PA system. Embarrassed by the technical error that exposed her lip synching, Simpson broke into a jig, fled the stage, and left her band to complete an abbreviated, instrumental version of the song which led to an early cut to commercial.

Four decades apart, Costello’s and Simpson’s performances created entirely different consumer perceptions. For Costello, the effect produced was a direct, immediate and real performance, the creation of what appeared to be an actual moment, one that National Post columnist and indie-rock artist Dave Bidini described as “a true spontaneous instance” that temporarily “unclogged the airwaves” and shook the late-night viewer back to life (“The Night Elvis Costello”

Bidini). In Simpson’s case, the effect was the exact opposite; her fraudulence revealed, the show was empty and meaningless, a viewpoint that Simpson seemed to share and validate herself when she left the stage, her own self- acknowledgment that the performance was a sham. In both instances, reactions to Costello and Simpson were fashioned by rock’s habitus and ideology, a tradition with a sense of authenticity that is rooted in music as a social activity, the history of which was explored in the previous chapter.

The Indie-Rock Habitus vs. Mass Produced Culture

In rock ideology, distinctions between real and non-real products are articulated by indie-rock, the present keeper of the genre’s cultural code, which attempts to distinguish its artifacts as real representations, different from other mainstream music commodities, which it views as manufactured and fake. While the parameters that define indie-rock are contentious, here, I use the term to identify a classification of rock music which, for many, creates the possibility for authenticity by operating outside of the corporate conglomerates that dominate the mainstream music industry. Ryan Hibbett describes the collective indie-rock

38 habitus as one that desires “the motivation toward something ‘pure,’ something substantial that might be discovered breathing below the hi-tech manipulations of large-scale production” (60). For Hibbett, these products aim to create the perception of “a ‘pure’ listening experience – an unadulterated exchange between artist and listener” (61).

Michael Coyle and Jon Dolan explain that the indie-rock aesthetic remains the barometer of ‘cool’ in rock ideology even for rock products that cross over and have mainstream success. This results in attempts by commercially successful rock artists to establish and maintain credibility by foregrounding ties to their indie-rock roots. Authenticity is described as a space “somehow free of the star-making machinery, a place where audiences and artists who yearn for what is genuine can commune with an ageless and priceless heritage” (Coyle and Dolan 32). Coyle and Dolan, and Hibbett all echo definitions of rock authenticity from this study’s first chapter that prize artist/listener closeness but with one added point of emphasis: industry. As a product, music must retain value by being a direct, honest, and accurate reflection of the person by whom it was made.

For recording artists seeking authenticity’s coveted seal, the enemy is artifice, the antithesis of genuine artist/listener communication. In rock ideology, artifice signifies the distance that is created between the artist and the listener by the dishonesty of artificial construction. From this perspective, commercial music creates the potential for inauthentic products that do not truly represent the reality that they suggest. Applying Jean Baudrillard’s language, the rock habitus, which

39 values authenticity, is suspicious of “models of a real without origin or reality” or the ‘hyperreal’ (1). Adding theory from Walter Benjamin, the danger of music in its commodified form becomes “the liquidation of [its] traditional value [and its] cultural heritage” (Benjamin 21) and the ease with which an artist’s identity, sincerity and musicianship can be faked.4 The indie-rock mindset’s suspicion of artifice resembles Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry,’ a perspective in which mass entertainment parades as culture, adheres to hegemony, reproduces the controlling ideology and offers consumers the

“freedom to be the same” (136). Under such conditions, products are void of artistry, contain no individuality, and speak for a social hierarchy of “executive powers… which let pass nothing which does not conform to their tables, to their concept of the consumer or, above all, to themselves” (96).

The perceptions created by Costello’s and Simpson’s performances show that, even as a product, music’s value is determined by the extent to which it represents the underlying reality of music as a process that it is taken to signify.

Therefore, for artists who prize the rock habitus, proving that their product is more real than other products is the goal and the challenge. This objective is difficult for numerous reasons. The goal of creating the perception of a natural, connected and real product is also the image that artificial products attempt to achieve. Clear distinctions between the real and the inauthentic are further complicated by the exchange between local and centralized culture, two spheres

4 My research explores rock ideology as understood from the American perspective, where an artist’s authenticity is highly valued. The artists studied in the upcoming chapter are either Canadian or American.

40 that overlap and influence each other. Authenticity claims are also inhibited by the authoritative voice that is needed to project them. By becoming a construct, rock ideology is distanced from the real and becomes a subculture that operates on the same plain as mainstream, mass cultural products. These factors complicate concrete divisions between real and artifice, but nevertheless, it is a distinction that artists, critics and fans try to make.

Attempting to Produce the Real: a shared goal

To create the perception of an authentic product, artists must convince their audience that their recording is representative of what could be a real performance and a genuine perspective. In this sense, the rock habitus is a counter culture that directly opposes the values of “the present age… [which] prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… [where] illusion only is sacred, truth profane” (Debord 1). For example, in 1997, Canadian indie-rock band the

Rheostatics5 recorded a cross-country tour, and selected recordings were turned into the Rheostatics Double Live album. In the liner notes, guitarist Dave Bidini described the essence that the band was looking to capture, and emphasized the

5 Here, I am referring to the Rheostatics as ‘indie’ retroactively. Since the band’s formation in 1980, music outside of the mainstream music industry has been given a number of monikers - ‘college’ and ‘alternative’ to name a few. When the Rheostatics retired in 2007, Toronto Star music writer Ben Rayner described the band as the forefathers of indie (see Chapter 3, 93). In 2009, the Rheostatics were acknowledged as independent artists when they were inducted into the Zunior Independent Music Hall of Fame. Throughout this study, ‘indie’ is not limited to simply meaning independent artists; it also defines a rock ideology that prizes recorded music as a direct and honest form of communication between artist and listener (see Chapter 2, 37-38). According to these sets of criteria, the Rheostatics were indie on both fronts.

41 album’s depiction of music as a process, through its reflection of travel, fan interaction, and live shows:

We hope that this platter6 sounds like the road… In the 27 songs included

here, you can feel all those miles rolled up in there, those timeless purple

evenings spent on the highways of Canada, driving through wilding

snowstorms and blinding sunsets, wheeling from town to town, club to

club, hall to hall, colliding paths with strangers who would become

friends… this band would be dead were it not for them. (Double Live)

A preference for live, off-the-floor7, studio recording is another technique used to deepen the perception of a track’s ties to an actual performance that occurred in a real, physical space. Toronto indie-rock and Latent Recordings artist Jerry Leger has recorded his entire catalogue (seven albums) this way, a practice that he employs as a means of “keeping things as live as possible”

(Leger “10 Years Ago”). In Walter Benjamin’s terms, Leger seeks to secure “the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art [which] has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value” (Benjamin 22). Incorporating Baudrillard,

Leger’s recordings aspire to point to a truth, an origin, a reality, where the album

6 Bidini’s use of the term ‘platter’ indicates his reverence for vinyl, but at the time of its release, Double Live was issued as a compact disc. Since vinyl’s resurgence in the mid-2000s, many artists have returned to releasing vinyl records of their albums, making format another means of expression in an artist’s attempt to represent the ‘real’ based on what format the artist perceives as being the most authentic. In September of 2015, the Rheostatics will be reissuing Music Inspired by the Group of Seven on vinyl in support of their shows at the Art Gallery of Ontario. 7 This term describes a recording method in which the captured performance occurs in one take, where band members play and sing together to actualize the song in a fashion very similar to live, stage performance. This differs from multitrack recording, where vocals and different instruments can be recorded separately and then edited together to create the product.

42 can “be exchanged for meaning” (5). Put differently, Leger recognizes the habitus of the rock audience as one that does not want to experience technologically mediated music as a product that is completely separate from reality, rather, it desires an attachment to the real human beings and performances that created the copy.

Artists’ efforts to distinguish their products as being authentic from other mass market offerings are challenged by the music industry, which has the ability to simulate genuine products. Lars Eckstein explains that the industry recognizes the consumer’s preference for romantic authenticity, for a product with a unique, individual, indie aesthetic. The result is a mainstream landscape where products

“to a large extent [are] carefully calculated postmodern simulations of romantic authenticity which the market demands” (Eckstein 242). For example, in 2003,

Avril Lavigne was marketed as the anti-Britney Spears: a punk girl who wrote her own material. However, Lavigne’s upbringing was anything but punk – she grew up in a religious family that listened to Christian music – and her debut album Let

Go featured songs written by Avril Lavigne and The Matrix, a professional songwriting team that, since the album’s release, claims to have written “the bulk of the three hit singles themselves” (Eliscu “Smells Like teen spirit”). The notion of authenticity as a constructed formula designed to be marketed to a rock fan’s cultural code resembles Adorno’s “On Popular Music” where pseudo- individualization is employed to hide the industry’s machinations: “Unhidden they would provoke resistance” (6). This music marketplace “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the imaginary” (Baudrillard 3) as

43 fabricated products possess the potential to be mistaken for representations of real performances and embodiments of genuine artistic expression.

From a technological standpoint, studio and home recording programs can feign user competence, blurring the lines between skilled musicians such as

Bidini and Leger, and musicians whose abilities are faked through the magic of

Pro Tools. Jay Bolter explains that technology operates according to “the logic of immediacy [which] dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented” (6). Therefore, programs such as Pro

Tools seek to create a product that will be accepted as authentic by the listener,

“an experience without mediation” (23), that does not draw attention to the mechanisms that power its creations. Barker and Taylor identify this issue and explain:

Because the recording of music gives such scope for faking of various

kinds, it has become a real question whether or not the artists we listen to

are really what they claim to be. Are they really playing their instruments?

Can they really sing like that? (23)

Foo Fighters front man Dave Grohl believes that digitization and home recording software have devalued the skill and process involved in professional music making. For Grohl, the ease with which digital recording can edit and manipulate tracks makes music products less temporal and creates a climate whereby lesser musicians can create and replicate greatness. From Grohl’s vantage point, this creates a marketplace where products are no longer an accurate reflection of the real work and musicianship that went into producing the

44 album’s sound (Sound City). Mick Fleetwood adds the full-band sound no longer needs to be made by musicians playing together in a shared space and explains:

“with home computers, everyone can do things alone… it’s lonely… it’ll be a lot happier for the souls of musicians to do it together” (Sound City). Fleetwood’s perspective reveals that, while he prefers the community of music making, the simulation made available by recording software is a valid and often practiced alternative. The closures of famous studios such as Sound City, a space where bands such as Nirvana came together to record pivotal albums such as

Nevermind, further suggests that, from the market’s perspective, the simulation afforded by more portable recording programs is able to successfully mimic the actualization of music that used to take place between musicians in a studio setting.

The contributions of professional studio vocalists and musicians are applied so slickly that, in many instances, they are absorbed by the consumer as a natural piece of the overall presentation. Eckstein states that for popular music consumers, “the precise input of composers, producers, engineers, and back-up musicians is, most of the time, unclear to us” (242). The act of listening feels direct and immediate and creates an experience that the consumer naturally attributes to the artist, regardless of the many contributions that help to actualize the track. Notable examples include The Beatles’ album version of “Love Me Do,” which features session drummer Andy White instead of Ringo Starr on drums and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” that benefits from Eric Clapton in an uncredited guitar-playing role. In both instances, the consumer perceives the

45 tracks as Beatles’ performances, irrespective of the additional musicians who contributed to the recording’s completion. Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page began his career as a session guitarist, where he was invisible to the consumer, filling out the sound of bands such as The Kinks and The Who. Morgan Nelville’s 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom chronicles the talents of backup singers such as Merry Clayton, a vocalist whose most recognized studio performance was her work on “Gimme Shelter,” supporting Rolling Stones’ front man, Mick

Jagger. Clayton, Darlene Love and other significant session singers are portrayed as the critical ingredients behind hit making: the unseen, unheralded muscle behind the brand of the band. These layers of production (which Leger and Bidini avoid) are used so seamlessly and habitually that they become artifice that is accepted by the listener in the moment of consumption: a natural part of the artist’s sound.

Studio techniques even have the ability to shape the most quintessential human element of a song, the human voice. Clifford McCarten believes that an artist’s grain of voice can collapse “the temporal distance between producer and listener” (4) by putting the human body into the sound. Recording tricks however, can still be applied to a voice to create a product that sounds raw, intimate and human. For example, Simon Frith describes John Lennon’s voice as his most distinctive feature, a voice that is direct, “always cut[s] through” (Music For

Pleasure 74) and creates a vulnerability through which fans can know him. What

Frith does not mention is that Lennon double-tracked his vocals on the majority of his recordings. Therefore, it could be argued that the voice fans knew was, to

46 some extent, a studio creation that did not represent Lennon’s real sound.

However, this vocal enhancement is so inconspicuous that, for many, it does nothing to alter the perception of authenticity of Lennon’s voice as a product.

To contrast, Leger loves the rawness of live-off-the-floor vocals and playing, both of which create “this real piss and vinegar sound” (Leger “10 Years

Ago”), that closely resembles the experience of seeing Jerry Leger and the

Situation perform in small venues such as Toronto’s Castro’s Lounge. Canadian indie-rocker, Joel Plaskett, worked in a similar fashion during the recording of

Scrappy Happiness, where he moved quickly, avoided perfect mixes, and kept the occasionally weak, vulnerable vocal on master tracks, all of which served to bring the listener into the experience of music as an inspirational process filled with discovery (Plaskett “Interview”). While Leger’s and Plaskett’s untreated vocals are powerfully human, the evidence suggests that, from the consumer’s perspective, studio embellished vocals can appear naked and emotionally bare too, Lennon’s being a prime example. The consumer’s acclimatization to studio techniques creates the perception of vocal intimacy and sincerity, even in situations where the singer’s voice has been enhanced, altered and changed from his/her unmediated, true sound.

An artist’s emphasis on personal content is also not a guarantee that his/her product will be perceived as separate and superior from more commercial output. Barker and Taylor point to Elvis Presley as a master craftsman who had a

“love for inauthenticity, for artifice” (149). Comfortable in the role of entertainer,

Presley capitalized with songs such as “Heartbreak Hotel” where he channeled

47 the brooding, menacing personas of Marlon Brando and James Dean. For

Presley, delivering pop music was equivalent to an acting role, where being successful meant capturing emotions, images, and associations that did not necessarily reveal anything about himself as a person.

To contrast, in 2012, the Toronto-based indie-rock band Evening Hymns released Spectral Dust, a record that deals with the death of lead singer Jonas

Bonnetta’s father. The band describes the final product as “a study of loss, pain, and hope… [which] spills its guts out on the floor” (Evening Hymns “Bio”). From an authenticity standpoint, the album is intensified by the recording’s direct representation of reality, where, unlike Presley, the guts that Bonnetta spills are his own.

This confessional approach has also been applied by financially successful artists who value the rock habitus. John Lennon and Neil Young are examples of commercial artists who attempted to distinguish their products from corporate music by creating deeply personal content for their albums, material that was unmistakably connected to themselves as real people in the real world.

Simon Frith suggests that these singer-songwriters touched the real by creating

“a struggle between verbal and musical rhetoric, between singer and the song”

(Performing Rights 182). John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band was an album born out of primal therapy that expressed Lennon’s pain stemming from his mother’s death and his father’s absence. Tonight’s the Night channeled Young’s raw emotion in the aftermath of two friends dying: Bruce Berry and Danny

Whitten. Specifically, Lennon and Young seemed interested in self-discovery and expressing individuality at the expense of high sales figures.

According to Frith, meaningful pop contains friction, with the singer attempting to translate feelings of frustration and exhilaration into a verbal form.

When Lennon repeatedly wrenched out the closing lyrics to “Mother”: “Mama don’t go, Daddy come home,” he was reaching for a pain that could never be tangibly realized through language. For Frith, this is personal authenticity:

Lennon’s battle to express an emotion too raw to put into words. Describing how the record was received, Paul du Noyer writes: “Some listeners sensed that

Lennon had made the most powerful record of his life, but it defied you to engage on a superficial level” (“Liner Notes”). Listener appreciation required an understanding of the album’s unquestionable connection to the artist, where each song was a direct representation of the singer’s struggles and pain.

Young’s, “Tonight’s the Night,” defied artifice so plainly that Reprise

Records was reluctant to issue the record. Nothing was conventional about this album including its subject matter, its sound, or the way it was recorded. In his autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, Young described the record as “a wake of sorts,” a eulogy for his dead friends (159). Nothing about this record seemed relatable on a mass market level. Its disastrous commercial potential was not lost on Young in the liner notes: “I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you” (Young “Liner Notes”). Not only did the album fail to meet the industry ideal of songs about romantic love and broken hearts, it also lacked professional gloss. Recorded in a jam-space-turned-studio, Young’s final takes

49 included out-of-tune harmonies and final cuts when the band was still learning the material. For Young, immediacy prevented analysis; “If I can do it without thinking about it, I’m doing great” (Barker and Taylor 214). In his view, songs were “like a wild animal, a living thing. Be careful not to scare it away” (Young

158). Through his creation of Tonight’s the Night, Young was not reciting poetry; he was carrying poetic orders out (Gray 65). By recording at the moment of creation, Young sought a product that, to the greatest extent possible, minimized the distance between his real self and “the self that [was] presented to the world”

(Barker and Taylor 219).

According to Eckstein, the authenticity claims made by overtly personal records such as Bonnetta’s, Lennon’s and Young’s are not necessarily perceived any differently than Presley’s records by the average listener. In Eckstein’s view,

“rock and pop audiences tend to exclusively allocate an organic sense of creation to performances and performers” (241). This means that many listeners take performances at face value regardless of the degrees of construction that are required to produce them. Under such conditions, a song’s emotional depth and meaning is automatically attributed to performers by their audience. Therefore, the listener accepts Presley’s new place of residence, Heartbreak Hotel, with no proof of authenticity required.

Local and Central – two spheres of inseparable exchange

Attempts to authenticate certain products as being more real than others in terms of their connections to real music events coming out of real music scenes are also complicated by the fact that local communities and centralized culture have a history of exchange that make the two inseparable. Simon

Reynolds writes that “Revolutionary movements have often constructed narratives based around ‘paradise lost and paradise regained’ scenarios” (xxvii).

For indie-rock, this restoration is the creation of products that are distinct from centralized culture, products that are profoundly characterized by the people, scenes and localities where they are produced.

This sense of product authenticity is challenged by the mindsets of the very communities that indie-rock seeks to empower. Pierre Bourdieu describes an individual’s development of taste in terms of his/her capacity to understand and appreciate a specific piece of art. For Bourdieu, if a person possesses the cultural code necessary to determine a work’s meaning, then he/she will like it and see it as valuable. Bourdieu contends that the ability to decipher art is a

“product of upbringing and education: … [where] cultural practices… and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level… and secondarily to social origin” (Distinction 1). Barker and Taylor add that, once formed, an individual’s tastes are unlikely to change. Emphasizing the importance of a person’s formative environment, they believe that “The musical morality we adopt at an early age often becomes enshrined, making it hard to change our views later on” (335).

In this context, the prospect of convincing consumers that one product is more authentic than another becomes significantly more daunting. The challenge comes from the fact that commodified music has long been a presence in local music scenes which has created an environment where centralized influence has become a naturalized component of the local habitus. Put differently, most people do not see the commercial products of the music industry as foreign intrusions: they see them as part of their daily lives.

The previous chapter noted radio’s increasingly strong influence throughout the United States as the 1920’s came to a close. Reebee Garofalo explains that, in the decade that followed, radio in the United States was mainly controlled by two corporations, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the two of which owned a combined

“50 of the 52 clear [coast-to-coast network] channels… as well as 75 percent of the most powerful regional stations” (331). Frith adds that during the 1930’s, a star system was well established where major labels “[built] stars from scratch, as recording stars” (Music For Pleasure 18). The industry used the radio and the jukebox as a means of connecting these stars to the localities where they were marketed. Clearly, corporate music had a significant profile in communities across the country.

From the outset, this external, technologically mediated music sought to blend into the communities that it occupied. Bolter states that this is the goal of all technology: “to put the viewer in the same space as the objects viewed” (11).

Technology’s objective is to create the perception of an “experience without

52 mediation” (23) where “the user is no longer aware of confronting a medium, but instead stands in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium” (24).

Radio, phonographs and jukeboxes made industry stars members of the community by bringing their performances into community spaces and homes.

Mediated music’s inconspicuous presence afforded the industry the opportunity to play a signature role in the shaping of regional, cultural identity.

Garofalo notes that radio’s power to influence was known from its inception.

Specifically, he cites Vladimir Lenin’s emphasis on the importance of the medium as a means of galvanizing and unifying the Russian public during the Bolshevik

Revolution of 1917. In Lenin’s view, if every village had a radio, then “our country

[would] lead a life of the highest political awareness, constantly knowing actions of the government and views of the people” (Garofalo 331).

In Britain and North America, governments understood the potential for radio to inform, educate and shape tastes. Upon the formation of the Canadian

Broadcasting Corporation in 1936, CBC executives were acutely aware of radio’s perceived intimacy and its ability to connect listeners who, in many instances, were otherwise physically isolated across the country (Kuffert 303). “Radio people, listeners and critics often thought of radio in terms of a person entering an intimate space – usually denoted as the family fireside” (Kuffert 306). Inside the home, radio was a public medium in a private setting, speaking directly to a variety of consumers: some potentially vulnerable. The Broadcaster shaped the listener’s experience by protecting consumers from material that it deemed

53 intrusive and offensive “without compromising the potential for social and cultural

‘improvement’” (Kuffert 314).

In the United States, broadcast “began with the same lofty rhetoric as the

BBC [and the CBC] regarding education and raising the general level of culture”

(Garofalo 331). Different from Britain and Canada, the American airwaves were commercially dominated and dependent on advertisers. Frith explains that the radio and the jukebox provided recording companies with the vehicles necessary

“to create new tastes, to manipulate demand” (Music For Pleasure 19). In

Benjamin’s terms, the music industry’s technical reproduction substituted “a plurality of copies for a unique existence” (21), an act which “put the original into situations which would be out of reach of the original itself” (20). Traditions such as jazz, for example, were first heard by most Americans on records (“Gumbo”

Jazz). These influences were absorbed by localities and contributed to reshaping and redefining the communities that they reached.

The reactions of regional musicians and audiences to centralized music reveal that the industry’s efforts to naturalize these products were successful.

Mediated music was not treated as a separate entity, but was rather embraced by live music scenes throughout the nation. James Kraft explains that records made learning an instrument incredibly democratic. Instead of requiring the privilege and specialized training provided by institutions, young musicians could learn their trade with records as their tutors (Kraft 61). According to Ken Burns, musician Freddie Keppard passed up an opportunity to record the first ever jazz album because he did not want other musicians to steal his playing style and

54 material (“Gumbo” Jazz), an anecdote that accentuates the interplay between recorded music and local live performance.

The stage repertoires of local, live performers further underscores the relationship that communities had with mediated music. In an interview with historian Pete Welding, blues singer Johnny Shines described the stage show of his friend and famous contemporary, blues legend Robert Johnson: “Robert didn’t just perform his own songs. He did anything that he heard over the radio… popular songs, ballads, blues… It didn’t make him no difference what it was. If he liked it, he did it” (Brackett 50). Barker and Taylor note that even Leadbelly, an artist professed to be an authentic performer of the rural ‘Negro’ tradition by John

Lomax, was impacted by recorded music. Not only did Leadbelly incorporate

Anglo-American music into his performance set-lists, he also acknowledged learning lyrics from sheet music and learning songs from phonographs (Barker and Taylor 21). For these performers, creativity was “not a solitary phenomenon,

[their] great achievements [were] the crest of a wave” (Williams 50), the culmination of the greater, communal, music dialogue which fed them. Recorded music was an active contributor to the local discourse, a fact which makes local and centralized music difficult to disentangle.

The desire of fans to establish meaningful relationships with industry artists shows that from the fans’ view, these artists are personalities that, through the presence of their products, are intertwined with the physical and emotional reality of their audience. Bourdieu explains this connection, where “the people chiefly expect representations and the conventions which govern them to allow

55 them to believe ‘naively’ in the things represented” (Distinction 5). Indie-rock artist and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein remembers writing letters to television and pop music stars as a teenager: “In middle school… I wrote letters to Madonna. My request was simple: Please be my best friend” (“Monitor Mix”

NPR). Before Bob Dylan began his music career, he felt such a connection to

Woody Guthrie’s recordings that, in 1961, he sought out and visited Guthrie, who was dying at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey (Williams “Liner

Notes”). Dylan’s self-titled 1962 debut album included one of Dylan’s first compositions, “Song To Woody,” a song written directly to Guthrie, with conversational, first-person lyrics such as “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song” (“Song To Woody” Dylan Official Web Site), more evidence of the intense relationship that Dylan had developed with Guthrie’s mediated work. For

Canadian indie-rock artist and author, Dave Bidini, Stompin Tom’s Connors’ album, My Stompin’ Grounds, was a revelation during a summer spent in Ireland, where sharing the record with Irish friends “became my way of communicating what Canada was like” (On A Cold Road 190). Listening to Connors’ songs

“anchored [Bidini’s] identity in a culture where nationhood was everything. They taught me who I was and where I came from… that I wasn’t born yesterday, and that I lived somewhere too” (191). Upon his return to Canada, Bidini’s affinity for

Connors led him to track Connors down in Halton Hills Ontario, where Bidini told the retired artist: “the youth of Canada needs you to come back. Our country’s in trouble, save it” (194).

Brownstein’s, Dylan’s and Bidini’s efforts to interact with their heroes also reveals that, in addition to adopting these artists as part of their own lives, they also identified with, and aspired to become, a part of the commodity realm that these artists occupied. These accounts show that, as fans, Brownstein, Dylan and Bidini had a habitus that was informed by what Guy Debord describes as

‘the spectacle’, “a social relation among people, mediated by images” (4). Debord explains that the spectacle is everywhere and “presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as an instrument of unification” (3). In

Bidini’s case, his perception of Canada was the simulacrum created by Connors’ album, images that still mediate what it means to be Canadian. For Debord,

“Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” (1).

Seen in this light, Brownstein’s, Dylan’s, and Bidini’s need to connect with their idols were attempts to see their own selves in the spectacle and to matter as people. Brownstein elaborates on the motivation behind her fan letters, where

“what I really wanted from these musicians – and even from those teenage heartthrobs – was validation; not for them telling me I was cool or special or loved, but that I was here, that I was alive and real and not alone” (“Monitor Mix”

NPR). In Dylan’s case, “Song To Woody” was even “written much in the musical language of his idol” (Williams “Liner Notes”) and was the songwriter’s first attempt to become a part of Guthrie’s world as an artist on a label. When Bidini found Connors, he brought his hero a cassette tape of his own band, the

Rheostatics, proof in Bidini’s mind that he “was a musician too, [part of Connors’ sphere and] not just an interloper” (On A Cold Road 193). The habitus exhibited

57 by these artists shows that, as fans, they were well versed in the language of mediated music, a presence that was so significant in their lives, that it became the very space that determined value.

Authentic Products as a Construct

In order to establish an authoritative voice, ideas of authenticity and the real also had to become constructs that were recognized and accepted. Michael

Pickering explains “’authenticity’ is a relative concept which is generally used in absolutist terms” (213). As subjective opinions, authenticity claims could be easily dismissed. Therefore, the strength of the idea comes from supporting power structures which empower the term as an objective, inherent and truthful qualifier.

Bourdieu’s “The Field of Cultural Production” describes the battle in which power structures take hold, a struggle, where, for individual agents, the goal becomes competing to control the definition of legitimate culture, a coveted status which is difficult to reach and retain. He locates the Field’s complexity in

“the extreme permeability of its frontiers and, consequently, the extreme diversity of the ‘posts’ it offers, which defy any unilinear hierarchization” (101). Therefore, powerful stature is tenuous in a landscape where positions are “relatively uninstitutionalized, never legally guaranteed, [and] therefore open to symbolic challenge” (109). Raymond Williams describes this continuous cultural rewrite as a ‘lived hegemony’ which “is always a process [and] not, except analytically, a

58 system or a structure” (112). For Williams, hegemony is an ongoing struggle that

“has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended and modified, [while] it is also continually resisted, limited, altered, [and] challenged by pressures not at all its own” (112).

Seen in this light, distinctions between the real and inauthentic are not easy to make because authenticity itself is an invention, an idea shaped by gatekeepers, technology and critics. While these platforms gave authority to rock ideology, they also turned the concept into a construction that was distanced from music as a communal activity. As a result, authentic rock products are also artifice, a fact that further burdens their attempts to distinguish themselves from what they perceive to be their more commercial, mainstream counterparts.

Cultural gatekeepers play a significant role in constructing the standard for authentic products. Ron Eyerman and Scott Barretta identify John and Alan

Lomax as two key figures who defined “the culture of the ‘common people’”

(508), rural American music that was unencumbered by centralized influence.

Sponsored by President Franklin Roosevelt’s government, John and Alan Lomax made field recordings which claimed to capture America in its natural state, “self- contained homogenous communities cut off from the corrupting influences of popular culture” (513). This professed expertise gave the Lomax’s significant influence over interpretations of traditional culture, and Alan Lomax was the most powerful “scholar or performer of the 1930’s (in shaping) the popular outlook on folksong… which influenced an entire generation of urban folksingers” (Reuss

161).

Closer examination reveals that the Lomax’s were not conduits to a more traditional and authentic way of American music making; instead, they were the creators of the truths that they projected. Barker and Taylor note that John

Lomax shied away from recording blues performer John Hurt because the singer’s approach was too professional and risked compromising the authentic image of rural music that Lomax wished to portray. Instead, Lomax focused on performers such as Leadbelly who could be presented as primitive, even though

“African Americans were creating much of the most sophisticated (i.e., complex, nonprimitive) music in the country, from blues to rhythm-and-blues to jazz”

(Barker and Taylor 12). Eyerman and Barretta suggest that Leadbelly’s identity, that of a genuine, rural performer, was a manufactured image, where, “Lead

Belly… appears to have been coached by Lomax as to what songs he should play, encouraged to play songs such as his ‘Bourgeois Blues,’ untypical among blues for both its explicit political nature and its use of the term ‘Bourgeois’”

(512). In this way, Leadbelly and other black blues musicians were packaged to fulfill the expectations of “liberal, white northern audiences” (540). Faking It expands that when recording companies started making albums that featured black performers, they were only interested in creating race records that accentuated the ‘real’ black experience that the Lomax’s had institutionalized;

“Black musicians who preferred older or hillbilly styles simply didn’t get recorded unless they could play the blues” (Barker and Taylor 46).

Still, the Lomax’s interpretation of traditional culture was integral to defining American folk’s understanding of real and authentic music. Ray Allen

60 notes that in the 1960’s folk’s values became a part of rock and roll culture through figures such as Bob Dylan, who “was leading a national movement to meld folk and rock styles” (298). For Barker and Taylor, the Lomax’s portrayal of authenticity is still present in the modern music landscape; specifically, they reference Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance in 1993, where the band performed “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” and lead singer, Kurt Cobain, referred to Leadbelly as his “favorite performer” (6). Barker and Taylor underscore Lomax’s significance in shaping Cobain’s obsession with authenticity and contend that, “if John Lomax had not presented Leadbelly as the embodiment of the primitive, savage, black killer who sings age-old songs in the most sensual manner conceivable, Leadbelly would have held far less attraction for Cobain” (22). This example shows that the standards created by cultural gatekeepers such as the Lomax’s still resonate with artists who are intent on establishing their own authenticity, a moniker that they attempt to employ as an absolute truth regardless of its roots in subjectivity and curation.

The notion of music in its purest form, as an activity that is directly connected to specific individuals coming out of unique communities, is also a habitus that, much like commercial music, is reliant on technology to ensure its perpetuation. In Baudrillard’s terms, rock ideology gains authority by “proving the real through the imaginary” (20). Reynolds identifies this contradiction as one where music is an ‘event’ that is dependent on media to become widespread and recognized. For Reynolds, recordings enable “the Event to become permanent, subject to endless repetition [where] the moment becomes a monument” (xxxvi).

This deprives the product of the immediacy, urgency and temporal relevance that it was initially trying to capture.

The Lomax’s were two of the first to sanctify the notion of a ‘real’ music ideal through the art of simulation. Eyerman and Barretta credit Alan Lomax with using his political and social contacts to further popularize folk music through the medium of major record labels, such as Decca, and network radio (516). The field recordings that the Lomax’s made in the American south became archival authorities that established the perception of a rural, traditional music that was thought to be more genuinely American than the machinations of Tin Pan Alley.

Allen notes that these materials were extremely influential for the mid-century

American folk band The New Lost City Ramblers in their pursuit of the real. He explains that as urban musicians the Ramblers aimed, “through careful study of aural sources, [to] emulate rural styles with a high degree of accuracy” (Allen

292). Ironically, the Ramblers attempted to be real by studying fixed, formatted copies of real performances, reproductions described by Benjamin as being “bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality” (22).

Technology was a force that played an important part in introducing the nation to ‘authentic’ American music. Garofalo describes rock and roll as a genre that was conceived and developed by African American artists beyond the control of centralized culture. He emphasizes that rock and roll was a musical tradition “steeped in regional accents, slurred syllables, and urban slang, it foregrounded working-class sensibilities in opposition to elite notions of culture and Tin Pan Alley’s white middle class orientation” (Garofalo 337). However, in

62 order for rock and roll’s vision of real American music to take hold, it had to gain an authoritative voice, a significant platform from which to spread its principles.

Garofalo explains that, in the United States, rock and roll was able to build a powerful mainstream presence due to the decentralization of radio. When network advertising dollars moved to television in the late 1940’s, radio returned to being a medium driven by cheap local programming that was filled by record- playing deejays. Free from corporate demands, radio personalities were able to individualize their shows to reflect their own personas. According to Garofalo, “in most cases, the key to [a deejay’s] musical success turned out to be rhythm and blues – the direct precursor of rock and roll – produced by independent labels”

(335). Rock and roll’s legitimacy was rooted in its identity as the musical lifeblood of communities, but the explosion that warranted rock and roll’s authoritative presence across America was entirely indebted to the genre’s presence in the realm of representation, a development which, if we apply Benjamin, pried rock and roll “from its shell [and potentially] destroyed its aura” (22).

Even punk, a genre which Reynolds describes as “an apocalyptic rupture”

(4) that had “insurrectionary energy” (6) which seemed “hostile to museum- ification” (21), turned to mediation as a means of establishing its countercultural presence. Ideologically, punk’s image was committed to the ‘now’, to exploding in the moment, to creating temporal tremors, situations, an art of immediacy, a truth, which would starkly contrast the artifacts deified by western culture, objects, that punk’s Situationist-inspired habitus viewed as meaningless, empty symbols that were played out and “totally bankrupt” (Gray 1). Reynolds explains

63 that the punk ethos in Britain was partly shaped by pub rock’s emphasis on intimacy, community and live performance.

In the shabby swelter of crowded taverns like the Tally Ho and the Hope

and Anchor, a band was on the same level as the audience, sometimes

literally, and at most performing on a small stage a foot or two above the

floor. If you stood in the front row you’d get splattered with sweat-drops

flicked from the band members and smell the beer on the singer’s breath.

(Reynolds 247)

Punk’s ethic needed to be amplified in order to gain greater traction in the national consciousness. In Britain, the ascendance of the Sex Pistols and The

Clash, both major label artists, preceded the real (Baudrillard 1) and alerted a mass audience to a genre rooted in locality, scene and amateur participation.

Garry Bushell articulates the inauthenticity of the first wave: “Punk sold itself as the voice of the tower blocks. It wasn’t. Most of the fore-runners were middle class art students” (2). Still, Reynolds notes that these first wave artists, though quickly absorbed by the industry, were critical to inspiring the formation of more authentic new wave artists such as the Scritti Politti collective (Rip it Up and Start

Again 182). Greil Marcus reveals that new wave scenes achieved stature through independents such as Rough Trade, a label that started out as a record shop, then began distributing fanzines, and evolved into handling publicity, concerts, pressing and distribution (Marcus 121). In this way, the Do-It-Yourself ethic created its own access to the spectacle by developing an alternative infrastructure that made its artists visible. Reynolds also recognizes the

64 importance of radio to building punk’s authority in the UK. Specifically, former pirate deejay and BBC 1 radio personality John Peel is cited as a consequential figure who empowered the punk and post-punk voice in the mid 1970’s. Before the deregulation of the airwaves, Peel’s program was one of rock’s few sanctioned gateways to a mass audience. Peel’s playlists reflected his regionalist tendencies and opened up the sounds of these subcultures to the nation at large.

This shows that, while punk’s message empowered grassroots, communal action, the foundation that gave it authority was still built on building blocks similar to the ones employed by the cultural hegemony from which it sought distinction.

Indie-rock’s authority as the cultural keeper of rock’s true principles operates much the same way. Hibbett underscores indie-rock’s emphasis on transparent connections between products and the environments that shape them, explaining that “regional identification contributes in indie rock to the formation of meaning and value” (65). In Hibbett’s view, indie-rock products attain the perception of authenticity by explicitly championing their ties to an “artistic

‘elsewhere’” (11), their roots in localities and scenes that are outside of the intense machinations of the centralized mainstream. These connections “make the album something to be appreciated. Because it exists in domestic rather than professional or commercial space, one supposes, it is nearer to the truth” (61).

Yet, to achieve a significant profile and to matter on a greater stage, indie- rock products need to access channels similar to the ones used by all

65 commercial products. Holly Kruse notes that in the 1980’s and 1990’s, indie-rock was bolstered by:

the proliferation of independent record labels and independent distribution,

the emergence of college radio as a medium for breaking bands, and the

focus of musical production in localities like Athens, Georgia, Minneapolis,

and other cities away from the traditional media capitals of New York City

and Los Angeles [which] made independent or ‘college’ music a hot topic.

(Kruse 625)

Kruse further articulates the present music landscape as one where indie- artists enjoy an online presence, which connects them to broader networks of fans and artists within a greater ‘imagined community’ that extends well beyond the limits of their physical scene (630). As virtual representations, these artists share an online space with centralized, industry-produced products, which also network and connect through official websites, social networking sites and online media players. This indicates that the authority given to indie-rock by mediation also contributes to diminish the essence of the cultural code that it attempts to perpetuate.

Traditions such as jazz, rock and roll and punk, genres that claimed a direct relationship to music as a lived, spontaneous, cathartic process, also relied on key publications to build, establish and cement their authority. In his study of the jazz periodical Downbeat, Matt Brennan foregrounds the important role that music critics played in the elevation of jazz to a genre worthy of attention and study. Brennan explains that these critics held a privileged position as primary

66 decoders, where, by sharing a physical and temporal space with their subjects, they became the first to select, interpret, frame and validate events of potential significance (Brennan 559). He notes that initially, music periodicals such as

Metronome played a key role in keeping jazz’s influence in the cultural basement through a negative depiction of the genre that interpreted jazz as food for the masses. The artificial nature of this culturally condemned status, however, was challenged and overcome by another construction, by the aforementioned

Downbeat, which portrayed its subject as a serious art form with an evolutionary and sophisticated trajectory (Brennan 564). Showcasing the critic’s role in the game, Brennan reveals that, in the 1950’s, jazz proponents discredited rock and roll by using arguments that were similar to the ones that had been previously used against their tradition. Now, as the elder statesmen, jazz enthusiasts differentiated themselves from the new challenger, rock and roll, by tagging the new tradition with the all too familiar insults of ‘primitive’ and ‘unworthy.’

Positive reviews of art rock in the 1960’s provide further evidence of how rock culture was legitimized by new narratives that reframed artistic value. David

Brackett employs Bernard Gendron’s term, ‘cultural accreditation’ to explain how artists such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles earned mainstream credibility for popular music and to show how the press, for its part, built this respect by tying these popular artists to the value and sophistication of high art (209). Specifically,

Brackett references William Mann’s 1963 article “What Songs the Beatles Sang” which lauds the intricacies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s arrangements by relating their chord progressions to the work of Romantic composer Gustav

Mahler. He also directs attention to Jack Kroll’s 1967 Newsweek article “It’s

Getting Better” which describes “A Day In The Life” as “the Beatles’ ‘Waste

Land,’ a superb achievement of their brilliant and startlingly effective popular art”

(Brackett 226). Brackett credits Village Voice writer Richard Goldstein as a rock critic who, similar to Downbeat and the jazz proponents before him, recognized art rock as a developing subgenre worthy of attention, critical analysis and artistic distinction. Akin to Downbeat’s influence on the public’s perception of jazz, the writings of Goldstein and other likeminded journalists created a public that

Warner describes as one that is built by “the concatenation of texts through time”

(90): a public that transformed the primitive, banal and infantile image of its subject into its status as an art.

Print culture was also important to the self-realization of punk and alternative communities, where fanzines were a critical step towards achieving subcultural legitimacy. In addition to providing a Do-It-Yourself, alternative means of publicity for bands operating outside of the mainstream, Ryan Moore contends that these zines constructed meaning by “[confirming] for their readers that there

[was] a scene in the first place” (453). In particular, Moore references Maximum- rocknroll and Flipside, two zines that circulated nationally in the United States during the 1980’s, which built the authority of the Do-It-Yourself ethic through features called ‘scene reports.’ Similar to Kruse’s portrayal of artists online,

Moore uses Benedict Anderson’s term, ‘imagined communities,’ to explain how these zines elevated local scenes to transnational heights by creating a forum that connected their activities to a network of alternative scenes around the

68 world. Moore further contends that the values of punk and alternative subcultures were shaped through these publications, which:

had the function of reminding readers that they were participants in a

community, that the meaning and the boundaries of the subculture needed

a definition, and that there was something at stake in the process of

defining those meanings and boundaries. (453)

This emphasizes that, though punk and indie-rock traditions promote an ideology that highlights the importance of a live scene and a real community, the definitions and parameters of these genres were actually determined and constructed in a mediated realm. As a result, live scenes are copies of a code that comes from elsewhere. Therefore, the products that they produce have artifice in their DNA, a fact that makes proving their superiority to more commercial products (along authenticity lines) a difficult challenge.

In popular music culture, the steadfast presence of the indie-rock ideology shows that, despite being enveloped by simulation, many still desire product authentication, where cultural products are clearly tied to a tangible reality, to real people and real communities, where instead of a separate, fixed and closed off document, music is a social activity, an act of the living. For those who are shaped by this habitus, determining a music product’s worth comes down to evaluating its integrity as a representation, the extent to which it is anchored in a real perspective, a genuine communication and a real sound. Efforts to establish, and then defend, certain products as being more real than others is difficult when one considers that all products attempt to achieve the perception of a transparent

69 and direct experience, regardless of the degree of artifice involved. These assertions open themselves to additional scrutiny because they assume that clear distinctions can be made between local and centralized culture and as a result they downplay and ignore the history of exchange that weaves the two together. Finally, the magnification of rock ideology reveals that this habitus achieves its authority through the same media that power and sanctify mainstream culture. The real therefore, is a qualifier that is artifice itself, shaped and powered by the types of constructs from which it seeks distinction.

Chapter 3: artist control and collaboration online

Metallica first became aware of Napster in 2000. Drummer Lars Ulrich explains that, from the band’s perspective, the experience was not a pleasant one. “All of a sudden, one day, I get a call from [manager] Cliff Burnstein saying that they’re playing ‘I Disappear’ on thirty radio stations. I go: ‘how can that be possible? We haven’t even finished it yet” (Downloaded). The band investigated and discovered that the yet to be released song was leaked and circulated by users of Napster, a peer-to-peer file sharing site that was developed by Shawn

Fanning and Sean Parker. Metallica reacted on May 22nd, 2000, when Ulrich hand delivered a printed list of 260,000 Napster user names to Napster headquarters: names that, according to Ulrich and his representation, were guilty of copyright infringement by means of trading and downloading Metallica’s studio work. Ulrich’s actions sent a clear message; Metallica wanted the ‘stealing’ to stop.

In 2007, Radiohead self-released their seventh studio album In Rainbows directly to their fans through the band’s official website. It was the band’s first studio release since they chose to part ways with their major label, EMI, and was described by Time as “easily the most important release in the recent history of the music business – [because of] its record label and its retail price: there is none, and there is none” (Tyrangiel). Fans purchased straight from the source and determined what they wanted to pay for the music. San Francisco based DJ and Radiohead fan, Amp Live, celebrated the album by creating an eight-track remix called Rainydayz Remixes, a project that resulted in a cease and desist

71 letter from Warner/Chappell, Radiohead’s American publishing right’s holder, that stated that the remixes were unauthorized. An internet campaign helped to make

Radiohead aware of the conflict, and “they told Warner to back off” (Rip). The now independent band proceeded to make the raw, isolated tracks for the single

“Nude” available for consumers to download, an experience that documentary filmmaker Brett Gaylor describes as one where “fans could make their own

Radiohead songs” (Rip).

In both situations, Metallica and Radiohead were dealing with a new challenge confronting their authority as artists: an internet medium that gave new representation and voice to their fan base. Metallica and Radiohead responded to challenges and opportunities presented by the internet quite differently. From

Metallica’s vantage point, their products were theirs to manage. The capabilities of Web 2.0 turned their recordings into hostages, unwilling participants in an online community of which Metallica did not consider themselves a part. Ulrich hammered home the band’s position before congress on July 11th of 2000: “Just like a carpenter who crafts a table gets to decide whether he wants to keep it, sell it, give it away, shouldn’t we have the same options? We should decide what happens to our music” (Downloaded). By contrast, not only was In Rainbows a download that could be purchased for free online, but it was put there by the band itself. Then, when Amp Live remixed it, Radiohead acknowledged the listener’s creativity and the “possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded” (Foucault 10) by allowing his remix to circulate.

Metallica’s and Radiohead’s different approaches to the possibilities of

Web 2.0 significantly influenced the way in which each group was perceived.

Metallica thought that they were defending their rights as authors. In their view, language did not perform independent of its creator (Barthes 278). Contrary to

Roland Barthes’ beliefs, they saw themselves as more than the past of their own performances; they were the gods, the science, and the law that sanctioned the circulation, context and use of their recordings (278-279). What seemed reasonable to Metallica however, actually created a negative impression that flew in the face of the indie-rock code. After Ulrich delivered the names of ‘violators’ to

Napster, MTV got sidewalk reaction outside of Napster headquarters. One fan thought that Ulrich’s actions were more characteristic of more artificial artists, such as Celine Dion, while another bystander called the move: “about the most unhip thing that I’ve ever seen a big rock star do” (Downloaded). In an interview for Downloaded, Napster’s Sean Parker directly pointed out Metallica’s hypocrisy: “Metal was supposed to be about being renegade and being anti- establishment and sticking it to the man.” Instead, they had become the ‘man’ themselves, separate from the community of online fans that they were sticking it to.

At the other end of the spectrum, by directly making their music accessible to the internet community, Radiohead presented themselves as participants in a virtual reality in which they cohabitated with their online audience. The impression created resembles Henry Jenkins’ convergence culture, where, instead of seeing “producers and consumers in separate roles, we might now see

73 them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands” (3). Radiohead’s recognition and encouragement of the audience’s creativity further positioned the band in the midst of its fan base, where their songs were “made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue” (Barthes 280).

Unlike Metallica, Radiohead’s indie credit rose through a producer/consumer dissolve that championed “texts-in-process- [which were] less about individual authorship and more about collaboration; less about originality and more about remix” (Fitzpatrick 83). Gaylor defined In Rainbows as a moment where: “just like that, the wall fell down between musicians, re-mixers and fans” (Rip). While

Metallica was holed-up in an ivory tower, Radiohead was one with the people.

Last chapter showed that, even as a commodity, music adhering to the indie code attempts to connect with its listeners by appearing as real and direct as possible. Prior to Web 2.0, the presentation of an artist’s work was controlled by official channels, where the gap between artist and listener was managed by producers – it was theirs to narrow. Web 2.0 changed this. Now, the consumer has virtual representation in the same space as artists and their products. Here, they have the potential to review, circulate and influence works in addition to the power to create works alongside their heroes.

Instead of being excited by the prospect of this new environment, a space that offers the possibility of restoring the collaborative relationship between artist and audience, some artists are threatened by what this medium may do to their privileged status. Despite their fears, this new landscape gives artists multiple

74 ways to import cultural capital and thereby solidify their position online. The internet also offers artists various ways to represent themselves; and how they choose to use the internet tells their audience a great deal about who they are, how they view authenticity and how they want to be perceived. Case studies of

Neil Young, Beck, Joel Plaskett and Dave Bidini provide a spectrum that ranges from artists who desire complete control, to artists who are, to varying degrees, creating a public around their products, where their fans are encouraged to take part. The evidence shows that an artist’s online behavior is anchored and informed by his offline identity. Therefore, the extent to which each artist is able to generate a public around his work is directly tied to that artist’s approach to his fan-base offline.

Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life explains his theory of how individuals manage face-to-face interactions. He describes every personal encounter as a performance, where a person attempts to project a self- image that will contribute to the overall definition of the situation, “a real agreement as to whose claims concerning what issues will be temporarily honored” (Goffman 7). Goffman emphasizes the importance of influencing the accepted perception:

Regardless of the particular objective which the individual has in mind and

of his motive for having this objective, it will be in his interests to control

the conduct of others, especially their responsive treatment of him. This

control is achieved largely by influencing the definition of the situation

which the others come to formulate, and he can influence this definition by

expressing himself 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. (3)

Chapter 2 determined that, for artists chasing the indie aesthetic, the goal and the challenge was to create a product that was perceived as being more real than other ones, where ‘reality’ meant appearing as close to ‘live’ as possible.

Applying Goffman’s framework, through their products, these artists attempted to

‘define the situation’ as one where their works were accepted by the audience as authentic simulacra, representations rooted in reality. In older formats, producers had a distinct advantage in determining how the situation was defined. A producer’s presence in communities came in the form of fixed documents: records, cassette tapes, and later, compact discs. By controlling these products, producers had the authority to select how the real was displayed, a power that, in

Jurgen Habermas’ terms, was represented “not for but ‘before’ the people” (8).

For example, Neil Young’s method of producing the real is to record an idea while it is still in its infancy, a process that documents the discovery of “an accident… a gift” that he never questions (Young “Interview with Howard”). The finished product therefore, is a recording that represents reality through the immediacy that it reflects, and it connects with the audience by allowing them to sonically experience Young’s moment of musical actualization. In this scenario,

Young and his studio collaborators do not exist as the past of the song, as

Barthes suggests (278), but rather, live with it as the governing authorities that shape the product’s expression. This technique delivers a reflection of the

76 creation process to the audience, but it does not ask them to participate in an ongoing realization of the work.

The End of Hierarchy?

In older media, the conversation that surrounded an artist’s work and contributed to its overall perception, was primarily controlled by sanctioned channels. Through reviews, interviews, press releases, video and airplay, media such as print, television and radio influenced and shaped what Goffman refers to as a ‘working consensus,’ a common understanding of how a genre, artist or work is viewed (7). Using Habermas’ framework, this dialogue was not “the transmission and amplification of the rational-critical debate of private people assembled into a public, [instead,] conversely this debate gets shaped by the mass media to begin with” (188). An artist’s representation was publicity, packaged “for the mass culture of assembled consumers” (Habermas 207), where the audience’s role was played out for them.

Reebee Garofalo shows that, as early as the 1940’s, network radio incorporated listeners when determining music programming. Specifically,

Garofalo cites NBC’s Your Hit Parade as “the first show to confer power in determining public taste on the consumer” (333) through the program’s acknowledgement of ‘listener preference’ letters. Still, for listeners to have a say, they had to pass through the filter of the program director, the vehicle needed in order to make their voices matter. Bethany Klein notes that critical reviews are

77 not autonomous and do not solely function to amplify the listener’s perspective.

She explains that, in addition to serving a fan-base, critics are responsible to editors and publishers, as well as a community of artists, publicists and other critics. This means that they need to “balance positions as producers of text, industry cheerleaders, and arbiters of history” (Klein 9). Klein further states that many critics have direct ties to certain publicists and artists, which “can result in corrupt coverage or, at least, the perception of it” (14). Ruth Cage shows that, instead of reflecting public opinion, print publications often create and project discourses of their own. In particular, she cites Variety magazine’s anti-R&B stance in 1955, a position that, from her perspective, was driven by Variety’s loyalty to ASCAP, the rival of R&B’s primary licensor, BMI (Cage 1). Viewed through this lens, the critic “passed through the filter of the culture industry”

(Adorno and Horkheimer 99) and did not contribute the listener’s voice to a definition of the situation where “art [was] an object of free choice… since within a public everyone was entitled to judge” (Habermas 40). Even subcultural music publications, such as punk and indie fanzines, transformed their creators into producers with close ties to labels and bands. Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue captured the immediacy of London’s punk scene from a fan’s perspective, but it also elevated Perry’s cultural profile. Perry remembers covering gigs, where “All of a sudden, I’m a writer! It was really weird. You had people from Melody Maker and

Sounds and Mark Perry from Sniffin’ Glue!” (Perry “Interview with Jason Gross).

As such, these individuals were no longer purely fans, but instead, became promotors of the scenes that they were representing. Their contributions

78 therefore, did not disclose a discourse with universal access; instead, their presence in the spectacle signified the commercialization of the audience’s participation in the conversation (Habermas 169), where the listener’s

‘publicness’ was performed by producers on the inside (Warner 70).

The internet challenged this hierarchy. Specifically, the medium’s greatest promise was encapsulated by ‘Web 2.0,’ a term popularized by Tim O’Reilly and

Dale Dougherty. In 2005, O’Reilly noted that the term’s definition was contentious as “there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means”

(“What Is Web 2.0”). O’Reilly’s own perspective, outlined in his seven ‘Core

Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies,’ described a shift from an internet where content was produced and disseminated by a select few to spaces in which users were ‘co-developers’ who enriched sites by contributing to a ‘collective intelligence’ that was the ever-changing product of user generated content

(“What Is Web 2.0”).

Jenkins dubbed this landscape ‘convergence culture’ and explains:

“freedom is fostered when the means of communication are dispersed, decentralized, and easily available” (11). Employing Habermas, we can say Web

2.0 creates the perception of a public that is “open to all” (Habermas 1) where musicians, critics, promotors and fans meet “on equal footing” (Habermas 33).

David Beer describes Web 2.0’s image as a ‘flattened’ landscape, “a shift in the relations of music culture as people ‘hang with the stars’” (232). This structure suggests that, regardless of a person’s status, all contributions have potential

79 value in a “new media culture [that operates] as an infinite flat surface where individual texts are placed in no particular order” (Manovich 77).

This means that individuals who previously found themselves outside of sanctioned roles, such as that of the recording artist, music executive, broadcaster, promoter or reviewer, have the potential to virtually represent themselves in multiple online spaces, where they can assert their presence as part of the spectacle and test their abilities to create impressions of their own.

User-friendly programs and interfaces afford users the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers and to perform direct and interactive online identities via blogs, virtual communities, sharing and social media sites. Kevin Kelly articulates the democratization of user access as a discourse where “the producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and destination” (“We Are the Web”).

Key to Web 2.0’s sense of democracy is the notion that an individual can speak in his/her own voice (Fraser 69). In previous media such as print, radio and television, the consumer’s presence was included selectively at an expert producer’s discretion. Jay Bolter emphasizes that the goal of a new medium is to

“reform its predecessors by offering a more immediate or authentic experience”

(19). Sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Bandcamp and Kickstarter enhance the representation of popular music as a living culture by providing interactive spaces where musicians, critics, labels and fans can all participate directly in a shared environment where no group visibly controls the space’s framework.

In theory, Web 2.0’s vision fits perfectly with the rock habitus. Chapter 1 explains that various definitions of rock authenticity seek to achieve a close connection between artist and listener. This bond is rooted in the idea of music as a social activity, when music was an experience, a process that was actualized collaboratively by performers and their audience as a community event. Chapter 2 expresses the efforts of indie-informed artists to produce this authenticity. A number of challenges were explored as possible roadblocks to the

‘real,’ obstacles that made it difficult for recording artists to appear more direct and connected to their audience than other products in the industry. The capabilities of Web 2.0 virtually eliminate this gap by providing producers and consumers with representation in the same online space. In addition, this medium has evolved beyond an environment of publication into a setting for participation (Warschauer and Grimes 2). Here, producers and consumers are not separated “in isolated information silos. The new Web’s architecture allows more interactive forms of publishing (of textual and multimedia content), participation, and networking through blogs, wikis, and social networking sites”

(Warschauer and Grimes 2).

The ability for traditional producers and consumers to participate in a shared space that nurtures an ongoing collaboration also provides a new way to represent music as an event. Web 2.0 creates the potential to minimize the temporal distance of a work through its eternal reinvention, a process that keeps the work alive in the cultural conversation. In this sense, the medium shares a mindset with punk and Situationist thought, a position that rejects the completed

81 process as an artifact detached from the reality of the immediate moment. The space offers artists and their works the chance to operate in “the living present, where alone spoken words can exist” (Ong 136). The collective and interactive use of the internet creates the possibility for what the Situationists refer to as

‘realized art,’ ‘realized life’ (Marcus 147), where artificiality is endlessly destroyed by the spontaneity of the present situation, an explosion of the moment that brings the truth to the surface through the rupture of construction. Walter Ong notes this kind of truth has long been the domain of oral tradition, a medium with a perceived natural ability to bring unconscious depths into conscious being (Ong

136). The speed with which the internet allows its users to upload, discuss, alter and circulate products provides the opportunity to achieve a similar kind of honesty, where interactions and developments resemble speech acts performing in the world (Poster 490).

Too Much Equality

Despite Web 2.0’s promise to return musicians and their texts to an ongoing, communal conversation, reaction from artists born out of the rock tradition has not all been positive. Chapter 1 connects rock’s sense of authenticity to popular music’s societal roots, but it also shows that recorded music empowers producers over consumers to independently actualize a text.

Chapter 2 continues this thread, where producers alone have the authority to choose how to represent the real to their audience. With this in mind, Web 2.0’s interactive capabilities offer to restore a collaborative artist/fan partnership, but

82 they also threaten the artist’s privileged position. Kathleen Fitzpatrick describes this struggle, where:

our actual digital authorship practices seem instead to be caught between

two regimes, bound to assumptions about the ownership and originality of

texts that derive from older, Enlightenment-era notions of the self, while

using technologies that lend themselves to the distributed, the collective,

the process-oriented, the anonymous, the remix. (65)

From Andrew Keen’s perspective, Web 2.0’s universal user access creates a “digital forest of mediocrity” (3) where established works are lost in the weeds of amateur voices. Keen describes this attack as ‘the cult of the amateur,’ a philosophy that, “despite its lofty idealization, is undermining the truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience, and talent” (15). He employs

T.H. Huxley’s ‘infinite monkey theorem’ to describe consumers as empowered monkeys who are creating a crisis in which “the very traditional institutions that have helped to foster and create our news, our music, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are under assault…” (7). Simon Reynolds articulates this online oversaturation as a condition where “nothing is too trivial, too insignificant, to be discarded” and everything “is being annotated and auteur- ised” (26). Specifically, Reynolds cites YouTube as a prime example of digital culture without a filter, where twenty-four hours of new video is uploaded every minute, an output that, at the time of his writing, accumulated to 170,000 years of material for the user to view (59).

In addition to the internet’s marginalization of traditional gatekeeping,

Keen is equally troubled by the consumer’s potential ability to participate in the accomplishments of recognized authors. He articulates the position of Web 2.0 enthusiasts as one where “a finished masterpiece like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The

Great Gatsby is not important… Fitzgerald’s masterpiece is just a jumping-off point for what truly matters: the ways each of us annotate and remix, tag, and make it our own work” (116). Standing in staunch opposition to Web 2.0’s stance,

Keen declares: “A finished book is not a box of Legos, to be recombined and reconstructed at whim” (58). Keen’s disgust reveals that, in his view, distinctions between producers and consumers are important and that, contrary to Barthes,

“the reader is [not] the space on which all quotations that make up a writing are inscribed” (Barthes 280). This approach holds the belief that “culture is something created by the few… threatened by the many, and imperiled by democracy; the conviction that culture cannot come from the… inexperienced, the untutored, the marginal” (Levine Highbrow/Lowbrow 252). Simply put, Keen believes in the importance of hierarchy, the author’s privileged status and a producer’s right to control his/her material. From his vantage point, producers are not one with the public: instead, they are special. Unfortunately, their sanctity is not being protected by the online community.

Hierarchy Endures

The evidence indicates that Keen’s portrayal of the internet as a flattened, chaotic and lawless wilderness that swallows producers into the digital abyss is

84 overstated. Keen’s depiction assumes that the internet is a completely separate space that is different from reality and uninformed by other media as well as the offline world. In Bolter’s terms, Keen is viewing the internet and Web 2.0 technology as a “radical break with the past” instead of viewing the medium as a new technology that “will instead function in a constant dialect with earlier media, precisely as each earlier medium functioned when it was introduced” (Bolter 50).

Using this second perspective, the ‘definition of the situation’ projected by a person’s online identity is not just met with agreement by internet users; instead, it requires verification from other sources in order to earn credibility and be accepted as true. Goffman explains that “when an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information already possessed” (1). Katherine Walker adds “many people use the internet to supplement other forms of communication rather than supplant them” (100). As a result, online identities are not baseless holograms but are rather a puzzle piece that works together with other media, affiliations and possible face-to-face interactions to create a rooted identity statement.

Liam Bullingham and Ana C. Vasconcelos confirm that online identities are cemented in some degree of offline reality. Their case studies of bloggers and Second Life participants reveal that, in most instances, a person’s virtual identity is an attempt to achieve a digital presence that reflects the offline self;

“this means that the online self is ‘anchored’ to the offline one, and that disparity between the two selves is minimized” (Bullingham and Vasconcelos 110).

The internet’s ability to coordinate an anchored ‘presentation of self’ is enhanced by its communication structure. Manovich states: “the language of cultural interfaces is largely made up of elements of other, already familiar cultural forms. The first form is cinema. The second is print. The third is a general-purpose human computer interface” (71). These components allow the internet to import, incorporate and refashion materials from other media. Images, recordings, articles and links can all be used to support an individual’s attempts to construct a consistent, networked self that is grounded in the physical world

(Walker 114).

Viewed in this light, artists are at a distinct advantage when constructing their online identities. Contrary to Keen, producers are not at risk of becoming one with consumers on a level playing field of white digital noise. Already established in other media, they can use internet spaces to import their social, economic and cultural capital, which all work to reinforce an artist’s importance and prominent position.

Online, artists are afforded multiple ways to represent themselves. How they interact with the internet and use the capabilities of Web 2.0 reveals how they perceive authenticity as well as how they wish to be viewed: as part of the community, as a dominant textual authority or somewhere in between the two extremes. Case studies of Neil Young, Dave Bidini, Joel Plaskett and Beck

Hansen show different approaches to how rock artists of various levels of commercial success attempt to shape their online public perception. In opposition to Keen, an analysis of their online presence and projects reveals that artists

86 always maintain some degree of authorial control, even in situations where artists share the creation process with their audience. Furthermore, how close an artist comes to achieving an online public that celebrates audience participation is directly tied to how that artist operates in other media as well as the physical world.

Neil Young

In Chapter 2, Neil Young is described as a commercial artist whose work exhibits the indie habitus. Biographer Jimmy McDonough explains that being real

“is what Young constantly strives for… Few other musicians of his stature have gone to such lengths to keep things real… Young has abandoned entire albums, dumped bands and tours in a heartbeat, walked away from massive successes to release drunk, out-of-tune albums guaranteed to sell three copies, all to follow his muse” (Barker and Taylor 207).

Young’s approach to Web 2.0 reveals that, for him, attempts to authentically represent the ‘real’ should be artist controlled. His internet presence is made in the image of Web 1.0, where producers disseminated information and were distinctly different from site users. The artist’s use of the medium shows that his understanding of authenticity is not interested in returning music to a democratized, communal state. Young’s apprehensions about the capabilities of

Web 2.0 reveal that he prefers older media that never put artist’s authority into

87 question. This explains why Young uses the internet, not as a new technology, but rather, as a container for the older media that he prefers.

In his autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, Young laments the loss of artist control created by shared media archiving. For him, the stage is a laboratory where new songs are “our ticket, our vehicle to the future, and without the new songs, we are just reliving the past” (Young 90). Young wrestles with the concept of these experimentations becoming publications, a decision that is being made by fans without his consultation. Young explains: “If you forget what you are doing, it shows up on YouTube. If you remember what you are doing, it shows up on YouTube. If you do something new that isn’t ready or something old that you screw up, it is on YouTube” (90). Young’s dissatisfaction comes from the fact that YouTube is giving outsiders the right to determine what performances should be considered a part of his work.

In older media, Young and his label had greater authority over his creative output. This preference explains why Young uses the internet as “a storehouse of information” instead of as “a place or a community” (Walker 115). Bolter describes this approach as one “where the computer is offered as a new means of gaining access to the old media” (45). As a result, Young ignores the bidirectional, interactive capabilities of spaces such as Facebook and Twitter.

Instead, he uses these social networking sites to reaffirm his artistic authority by communicating his cultural status, products and activities to the listener via a one-way conversation.

Currently, Young’s Facebook homepage and Twitter account are devoted to promoting Young’s soon-to-be-released album The Monsanto Years. Other posts and tweets connect followers to television appearances, merchandise and official music videos. The content of these posts and tweets allows Young to incorporate his sanctioned, producer status from other media into his online identity, an act that helps him to represent his authority ‘before’ his online fans.

Bullingham and Vasconcelos refer to these ‘presentations of self’ as subtle

“identity indicators” that combine to formulate self-expression (102). Shanyang

Zhao et al. adds that these graphic elements are “implicit identity claims” (1824) that “’show’ rather than ‘tell’” an identity (1826). Statistics on social media also contribute to authenticate Young’s identity claims. Young’s Facebook page has three million ‘likes’ and his Twitter account has 267,000 ‘followers.’ These figures demonstrate Young’s influence and reach. They also confirm that the ‘working consensus’ agrees with Young’s ‘presentation of self’ as a distinguished and noteworthy artist. Each ‘like’ and ‘follow’ marks the click of a real person who is

‘honouring’ Young’s ‘definition of the situation’ by representing his cultural authority for him.

Young’s posts and tweets further show that he is not interested in participating with his fan-base in a public built around his work. In a study of

Jarvis Cocker’s MySpace page, Beer explains that Cocker’s “interjections remain essential in giving a sense of ‘livingness’ to the profile” (231). While Young’s posts can be viewed as interjections that spark dialogue between his fans on his page, Young’s Facebook account itself does not respond to fans who attempt to

89 talk to Young in a post’s comment section. Similarly, replies to fans rarely appear in Young’s Twitter feed. This evidence suggests that Young is interested in the capital that these spaces are capable of displaying as opposed to their potential for meaningful interaction.

The ‘Neil Young Times’ tab on Young’s official website confirms Young’s preference for artist-controlled communication. In addition to filtering positive press, this page includes occasional posts from Young himself that range in topic, where notable subjects include a feud with Starbucks, album promotions and notes to dead friends. Visitors are allowed to share these entries through

Facebook and Twitter applications, but there is no space provided where fans can comment on Young’s actual website. These entries closely resemble blogging as they are time stamped, informally written and displayed so that the most recent posts are prominently featured. Warschauer and Grimes state that blogs need to have “a strong authorial voice” in order to be successful (8).

Chesher emphasizes the writer’s important status in this web genre and explains

“the uptake of blogs proves that reports of the death of the author are greatly exaggerated. The author is alive and well, and has a blog” (1). Considering

Young’s approach to social media and his views on YouTube, it makes sense that he communicates directly with his fans through the ‘Neil Young Times,’ a platform that puts him firmly in the driver’s seat where he alone shapes the message.

The impulse behind the Pono Player leaves no doubt that Young believes in the importance of the artist, who, from his perspective, is the sole authority in

90 charge of representing the real for the listener. Designed as an alternative to iTunes and other MP3 players, the Pono Player is advertised as a device that allows the listeners “to play records back just like the artists made them”

(Edwards). For Young, the priority of Pono is inviting the audience into the sound of the master so that they can experience exactly what the artist heard in the studio. He explains that “this is done when the artist makes the best [resolution] available, wanting to share it with you. It happens when the artist lets you hear and feel more than what is on your CD or MP3 of any song” (Pono Website).

Young created a Kickstarter campaign to fund Pono, a strategy that reveals that he recognizes the ability of consumers to act as patrons in a purchasing public.

This financial collaboration is ironic when one considers that Young’s fan-base was funding a project that emphasized the antithesis of community, where the artist alone represented the real for the listener.

Young’s online persona as an artist who covets his privileged, authorial status is a ‘presentation of self’ that is consistent with his identity offline and in other media. He has long been an industry artist with a habitus that views recorded music as a product that is actualized by professionals in a studio setting. While Young values the raw immediacy that is characteristic of the indie aesthetic, he finds Web 2.0’s collaborative capabilities unappealing because they decenter the artist and attempt to create partnerships that do not reflect his offline reality. Therefore, Young employs social media, his website and even crowdfunding spaces such as Kickstarter in ways that reinforce his status as an author who exists separate from the public that makes up his audience.

Dave Bidini

Dave Bidini is an author, columnist, and musician who first gained recognition as a founding member of the Rheostatics, an acclaimed Canadian indie-rock band that was active from 1980-2007. A deal with Sire Records and the hit song “Claire” brought the Rheostatics brushes with mainstream success.

Ultimately, the band’s course remained beyond the scope of commercial radio; instead, they established themselves as a significant presence in the Canadian indie consciousness.

If Dave Bidini’s documented fears about the internet were true, then the medium would be incredibly damaging to his status as a recognized cultural producer. Despite his anxieties, the author and musician is able to effectively use online spaces to coordinate an authoritative identity that is rooted in cultural capital from a variety of sources. Bidini’s use of Facebook creates the impression of an artist who is willing to engage with his fan-base in a space that resembles a public, where artist and audience member are able to converse in a shared time and setting. This contributes to an overall, ‘working consensus’ of Bidini as an indie artist without jeopardizing the cultural capital that he depends on for authentication.

In his Maclean’s piece, “The Internet killed the sports journalism star,”

Bidini describes the online world as a ‘cold vacuum’ that reduces authors and their prose “to zeroes and ones no matter how fine and pretty the writing” (Bidini

“The Internet Killed”). Bidini remembers his own childhood fondly as a time when sports journalists entered his home through the newspaper and television screen,

92 media that in Bidini’s mind, put sports’ scribes such as Vic Rauter on par with

Paul McCartney. Online, the professional and the amateur exist side by side, a concept that, from Bidini’s perspective, belittles the expert’s status. He concludes: “I hope that someday the twitterverse or blogosphere or digi-world will allow us to know the next generation of great writers/reporters… and that sports kids will not only read them and think ‘Anyone can do that’ but ‘I want to be him’”

(Bidini “The Internet Killed’).

It is not difficult to surmise that Bidini’s stance is a response to the possible threat that the internet poses to his own position. The status that he enjoyed as a member of the Rheostatics was built through the support of the

CBC, a National Gallery commission and reviews from traditional newspapers and music zines. Similar to Keen, Bidini feels that the internet is devaluing this capital by creating a landscape where ‘anyone’ can be a producer with a platform.

Despite his reservations, Bidini is able to use identity indicators and graphic elements on social media to reaffirm his standing in the online world. His

Twitter profile consolidates his cultural capital in one brief narrative: “writes saturday column in the nat. post. author of 12 books. plays in bidiniband. played in rheostatics. married to a billie hollie.” His Twitter thumbnail is a picture of himself playing guitar and screaming into a microphone.

Zhao explains that the graphic elements on Facebook “are visual, involving the display of photos and pictures uploaded by the users themselves or pictures along with comments posted to their accounts by others [through wall

93 posts]” (1824). Bidini’s Facebook page reveals that, like the majority of Facebook users, Bidini is employing graphic elements to define the digital situation by transferring his cultural capital online. Bidini’s Facebook photo albums include pictures of himself with The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie, baseball Hall of Famer

Roberto Alomar, and hockey great Brian Trottier: evidence that Bidini’s social circle is a privileged crowd. Applying Bourdieu, we can say that Bidini is legitimizing his position as a ‘worthy’ cultural producer in the Field by showing his online audience his “’high society’ successes and bourgeois consecration” (102).

The structure of Facebook also creates conditions where Bidini’s fans are able to represent his authority for him. For example, on May 18th 2014, Facebook

‘friend’ Darrin C posted a ‘Canadiana Mix’ from Northern Wish Radio to Bidini’s wall. Bidiniband’s inclusion on the playlist reinforced Bidini’s image as a significant purveyor of the Canadian identity. Also, in May of 2014, ‘friend’

Amanda posted a link to her blog on Bidini’s page entitled ‘The Rheostatics Made

Me Do It (Thankfully).’ Her write-up emphasized the ongoing importance of

Rheostatics music in her life, a sentiment that echoed the significance given to the band by journalist Ben Rayner, who claimed that without the Rheostatics,

“Canada’s recent indie boom… would never have happened” (Rheostatics’ swan song). On April 21st, 2015, Bidini posted: “i don’t wanna play this trumpet too loud, but amazing how many people are coming from elsewhere for [Rheostatics

AGO] shows in SEPT.” In the comment section below, fans who plan on making the trip post their places of residence: a list that includes Vancouver, Winnipeg,

Boston, New York State and Ohio. These fan comments contribute to Bidini’s

‘definition of the situation’ by showing the imprint that the Rheostatics have made across the country.

While Bidini uses social media to show his cultural authority, he is also able to use these spaces to participate with his fan-base in a public that discusses his work. Drawing upon Richard Lanham’s theory, we can say Bidini is participating in an economy of ‘fluff’ instead of an economy of ‘stuff.’ In Lanham’s view, products are not as important as the way that people talk about them. Frith makes a similar argument and describes song lyrics as “words in performance”

(Performing Rites 166), that can be used by listeners as forms of expression. By participating in publics organized by his work, Bidini is becoming “part of the cultural conversation” (Lanham 36).

Specifically, Bidini uses a personal Facebook account to create a sense of community with his fans. Recalling Beer, this establishes the perception that

Bidini is ‘hanging’ with his audience (232). The reciprocal nature of Facebook

‘friend’ requests contributes to an overall sense of closeness between artist and listener. Beer acknowledges “the sheer quantity of ‘friends’… suggests that

[Social Network Sites] are seeing a radical reworking of understandings of

'friendship'” (231). In Bidini’s case, his Facebook ‘friend’ list is just shy of 5000.

Though many of these people are not friends with Bidini in the traditional sense, the rhetoric of Facebook suggests this bond, which brings Bidini closer to the community that interacts on his page.

Different from Young, Bidini often participates in the comment sections below his posts. For example, on May 14th, 2015, Bidini posted pictures of a

95 vinyl, test pressing for Music Inspired by the Group of Seven, a reissue that will be available at special Rheostatics AGO shows in September of 2015. When a commenter asked how it sounded, Bidini responded: “gr8!” Asked by another

‘friend’ if the album would receive a proper release, Bidini answered: “not sure!”

Bidini’s responses are not limited to providing basic information about his upcoming projects. Posts linking to his National Post column, books, songs and music blog occasionally generate intense discussions in which Bidini himself is a participant. On November 28th, 2014, Bidini posted a link to his National Post article: “An open letter to Joni Mitchell, from Dave Bidini.” Bidini’s portrayal of

Mitchell as an ungrateful, bitter and out-of-touch artist was met with heavy disagreement on his Facebook page, and this led to heated conversations between Bidini and his ‘friends’ in the comment section. On December 2nd, 2014,

Bidini acknowledged the debate’s ugliness: “it is absolutely amazing to me the harshness and vitriol expressed by friends, acquaintances about my Joni column… i actually am encouraged that writing of any kind has this power. makes me thrilled to be living it.”

Occasionally, Bidini turns to the collective intelligence of his Facebook community as a resource for his projects. In May of 2015, he posted: “I am looking for stories about RUSH and how they have entwined with personal experiences of your life. we’re making a film about this sort of thing, you see.

Please share here or DM me.” These posts give Bidini’s audience the chance to participate in his creative process and the possibility of having their voice represented in his final product. It is important to note however, that Bidini never

96 relinquishes control over his artistic output as all included fan contributions are selected and articulated in his work by Bidini himself.

Bidini’s Facebook page is able to create a feeling of intimacy between artist and audience member because Bidini is an indie artist with a tightly-knit fan-base, who relies heavily on peripheral connections in various music scenes to sustain his career as a musician, journalist and writer. As a social networking site where “individuals typically… articulate and reflect offline relationships”

(Ellison et al. 126), Facebook allows Bidini to articulate an image similar to his offline, networked self: a working musician, who, over the course of his career, has interacted to varying degrees with the majority of his fans in small venues across the country. Put differently, Bidini is able to create a public on his

Facebook page because his career is fueled by his personal relationships with his supporters.

Social media gives Bidini a new means of expressing a close bond with his audience and this contributes to a ‘definition of the situation’ that supports his indie credentials. Similar to Young however, Bidini’s conception of being authentic does not include elevating his listeners to the role of collaborators.

Bidini’s approach to the internet allows him to participate in an artist-controlled public that discusses his work without compromising his cultural authority and authorial status.

Beck Hansen

Beck Hansen, better known as just Beck, is an alternative rock musician best known for his 1993 hit “Loser,” his double platinum album Odelay (1996), and his 2014 album Morning Phase that won the Grammy award for Album of the

Year. Even as a mainstream artist, Beck’s innovative style has always provided him with indie credit that foregrounds Beck the artist instead of Beck the product.

Beck’s internet identity is of particular interest because he attempts to define himself as both an artist and a fan. In addition, his album Song Reader was originally released as sheet music in 2012, a decision that portrayed Beck as a performer who valued what the consumer could potentially bring to his work. This was followed up by a website for the project that allowed fans to participate by uploading their own performances of Beck’s unrecorded songs for others to see.

Beck’s official website attempts to project the image of an artist who is both producer and consumer, artist and audience member. It is able to create this impression through tabs that indicate different pages, a common homepage format feature that allows the site to categorize information for the visitor. Walker explains: “Because home page owners can control the order in which information on their page is encountered, they have the opportunity to present their different roles and identities in order of salience” (105). Beck’s site features eight relational categories that are displayed in the top banner with equal prominence.

Four pages, ‘Record Club’, ‘Mix Compilations,’ ‘Interviews’ and ‘Art Gallery,’ allow

Beck to present himself to the viewer as a fan.

In ‘Record Club,’ Beck posts videos of his own informal gatherings with other musicians who get together to play rough, impromptu versions of entire albums that they like. To date, the page includes their own track-by-track video performances of records originally released by Yanni, INXS, Six Spence,

Leonard Cohen and The Velvet Underground & Nico. ‘Mix Compilations’ contains twenty-three SoundCloud mix-tapes compiled by Beck that share his fandom with the site’s community. ‘Interviews’ presents Beck in the role of casual interviewer and consists of entries that are written as transcripts. Tom Waits, Will Ferrell and comedian Demetri Martin are among those featured as Beck’s interview subjects in the section. Finally, ‘Art Gallery’ operates as an online art exhibition space curated by Beck. Currently, the page features seven visual artists, each of which is given a biography as well as a link to a more comprehensive gallery of their work.

These pages allow Beck to show his visitors that “authors are readers themselves” who are affected “by reading and associating with other readers and writers” (Darnton 11). Beck is able to portray himself as a reader, a ‘traveler,’ who, like his own fan-base, spends a portion of his time making sense of the works of others. These spaces help Beck to suture himself to his audience by displaying the influences that contribute to formulating his habitus. This demystifies Beck and reveals that he is not a separate entity who “conjure[s] works out of thin air” (Saint-Amour 11), but is instead a member of the community, a producer who creates works that share a language with the fabric of cultured society. These pages also give fans the opportunity to share in Beck’s

99 habitus, a development essential to artist/fan collaboration. Herbert Clark and

Susan Brennan explain that individuals “cannot even begin to coordinate on content without assuming a vast amount of information or common ground – that is, mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions… All collective actions are built on common ground and its accumulation” (127).

Specifically, Song Reader portrays Beck as an inclusive artist who openly encourages the participation of his fans. Beck’s own description of his sheet- music album expresses a nostalgia for the ‘home-played music’ of the 1930’s, when families and friends would play and sing from sheet music around parlor pianos. Growing up listening to recorded music, Beck felt “there was an unspoken division between the music you heard on the radio and the music you were able to play with your own hands” (Song Reader “Liner Notes”). Describing the motivation behind Song Reader, Beck explains that he wanted to open his music up to spaces “outside of where my songs normally exist” (McSweeney’s).

Asked where the consumer will take his music, Beck thinks “some of the best covers will reimagine the chord structure, take liberties with the melodies, the phrasing, even the lyrics themselves. There are no rules in interpretation”

(McSweeney’s).

Fan interpretations found agency through songreader.net, a website that encouraged users to upload performances of Beck’s Song Reader compositions via SoundCloud and YouTube. This online collection of consumer creativity contributed to Beck’s image as an industry artist with indie roots: a commercially successful performer who wanted his work to breathe in the public of his fan-

100 base. Recalling Habermas and Warner, the site was accessible to all and “was a relation amongst strangers. This [allowed the site] to expand circulate and unite people through ‘participation alone’ rather than manifest content” (Warner 75).

Beck’s association with the site also defined him as a democratic artist who was the realization of Walter Benjamin’s vision in which “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” (28).

A closer look at songreader.net reveals that the site falls short of recreating an interactive, online public in which the artist and listener are temporally and spatially connected. In a site contest where submissions of the song “Sorry” were entered for the chance to see Beck perform live, Beck was not listed as a judge. There is also no evidence to suggest that Beck has seen any of the videos on the site. In addition, completely unrelated user uploads can be found throughout the site’s content: a clear indication that the site is not being actively maintained.

Aside from user uploads, the site’s pages appear to be static.

Administrative entries do not have time stamps, a feature that creates a

“temporal link between author and reader” (Warschauer and Grimes 8). This inactivity makes songreader.net an abandoned, stale space that is void of any

“sense of virtual public meeting” that includes the author (Lessig 41). Walker explains that “attachments to relationships outside the Internet, rather than affinity for an identity statement, creates more incentive to maintain the home page” (112). Applied to songreader.net, this suggests that the site is unable to

101 solidify the impression of an artist/listener community because it is a perception that is not rooted in an offline reality in which Beck interacts with his fans. Still, the Song Reader project and site both portray Beck as an artist who values the indie ideal of music as an experience shared between people. He is able to use

Web 2.0 to encourage his fans to play his music and to have their performances seen.

Despite the consumer’s empowerment, it is important to note that Beck’s authority as the artist is never in any danger. On songreader.net, users appear to

‘speak in their own voice’ through their video submissions, but this is also the only way that they can contribute in a site controlled by administrators. Nancy

Kaplan describes this unseen, unobtrusive, authorial administrative hand that pre-determines user actions by making “decisions about the boundaries of nodes, the suggestiveness of link cues, and the patterns of the links” (230). The site is a controlled environment where choice is provided by site developers in partnership with Beck.

The Song Reader project also asks consumers to participate at the behest of the artist, the authority figure who facilitated the audience’s inclusion. In this respect, it is Beck who makes the audience act and it is Beck who has the power to take the audience’s platform away. Greil Marcus describes this retention of authorial control in performance art, where “the members of the audience feel as if they have intervened in the spectacle of the artist’s performance, but they have not; they have played by the artist’s rules, where such putative intangibles as chance, risk, and violence were fixed from the very start (Lipstick Traces 100).

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Beck’s online presence is also rich with ‘identity indictors’ that reinforce his privileged authorial status. Official website visitors are greeted by a splash page of Beck’s album Morning Phase that reminds fans of his award for ‘2015 Grammy

Album Of The Year.’ In addition to representing Beck as a fan and community member, home page tabs also import cultural capital to show Beck’s authority to the user. ‘News’ provides updates about television appearances, articles, awards, videos and concerts, all of which project an image of Beck as a successful, industry-acknowledged artist. ‘Albums + Lyrics,’ ‘Videos’ and ‘Store’ anchor the site in Beck’s history, discography and recognition as an established commodity.

Joel Plaskett

Joel Plaskett is a Canadian indie musician from Halifax, Nova Scotia who first garnered significant attention with Thrush Hermit in the 1990’s. In 2012,

Plaskett unveiled his Scrappy Happiness project, an album in the making, where

Plaskett recorded and released a new track every week through CBC Radio 2

Drive.

Through Scrappy Happiness, Plaskett represented the ‘real’ by portraying music as a process that unfolded before the audience’s ears and eyes.

Describing the concept behind the album, Plaskett explained that he wanted to

“demystify [recorded] music” (Sticky Magazine). Designed to create a feeling of immediacy for the listener, the Scrappy Happiness project produced a weekly

103 video blog that accompanied each track’s release. These videos appeared on

CBC Radio 3’s YouTube channel and were also made available through

Plaskett’s website. Through them, the viewer was privy to the making, mastering and distribution of each track. Fans could watch Plaskett come up with song arrangements, collaborate with his band members and experiment with studio techniques.

CBC’s website used Storify to frame Plaskett’s product within the context of his fan’s twitter conversations. Each week, fans reacted to a new track’s release under the hashtag #scrappyhappiness. CBC collected these twitter responses and included select reaction beneath Plaskett’s corresponding video blog. Plaskett acknowledged this page by providing its link on his own website.

The Scrappy Happiness video contest asked fans to create and upload their own YouTube music video for any of the album’s tracks. Videos were judged according to the number of likes that they received, and the winner,

Eddie, was awarded a home concert, where Plaskett performed for his friends and family. All contest participants were mailed an autographed copy of the album, and Plaskett’s five favourite videos were sent an autographed, complete,

Joel Plaskett discography.

Throughout this partnership with his fan-base, Plaskett’s status and control over Scrappy Happiness was never in question. Plaskett’s affiliation with

CBC Radio 2 and 3 reinforced his position online as an indie artist who was recognized by music scenes across the country. His official website linked each

104 track with reviews from publications such as “Exclaim!” that further emphasized his cultural significance.

Revisiting Bolter, Plaskett’s release strategy used the internet and radio in tandem to create the perception of an artist who was trying to include his fan- base in the moment of creation as much as possible. Quick radio releases and video blogs brought the listener into the process and minimized the temporal distance between artist, listener and product. The video blogs defined Plaskett as a regular working musician, a fellow community member, who graciously welcomed his audience into the making of the album. Similar to Young, these techniques emphasized immediacy as the core value of rock authenticity, but they still left the actualization of the music in the hands of the artist.

CBC’s use of Storify incorporated the listener’s voice into the product.

Applying Lanham, Plaskett’s link to the Scrappy Happiness Storify page acknowledged that his songs were part of a cultural conversation that gave his works life. CBC controlled how this conversation was represented as part of the project, but Storify still accentuated Plaskett’s indie identity as an artist who was close to his audience by situating his product in the ongoing dialogue of his fans.

The album’s fan video contest defined Plaskett’s online persona as that of a generous artist who was willing to share elements of the creative process with his audience in a common online space. Different from Bidini, Plaskett did not limit audience inclusion to artist-facilitated discussions about his work. Instead, the contest resembled a public that was open to audience members as collaborators, who were needed to actualize the material with the performer.

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Applying Fraser, participants were able to lend their own voice to the project by contributing their own creativity to the space.

Different from Beck’s songreader.net, the rhetoric of Plaskett’s contest page creates the impression that Plaskett had actually seen his fan’s video submissions. Plaskett wrote: “I’m truly blown away by the time, energy and talent put into all the videos in the contest. Trying to pick a few videos for honourable mention was like trying to pick my top 5 Zeppelin songs. Close to impossible because there are so many great ones” (Plaskett Official Website). Similar to

Bidini, Plaskett is able to achieve the perception of a close, collaborative relationship with his fans online because he is still an indie artist that depends upon regular touring in smaller venues to sustain his livelihood. As a result,

Plaskett has interactive relationships with his fans, a habitus that defines his sense of authenticity, which carries over into the online world.

The capabilities of Web 2.0 create the possibility for musicians to achieve immediate relationships with consumers in ways that were previously the domain of live-and-in-person encounters. As an interactive platform, the internet is able to represent music as a process, where producers and consumers can collaborate and participate in an ongoing discourse that keeps products active and relevant. Specific studies of Young, Bidini, Hansen and Plaskett show that, despite Keen’s reservations, the internet does not disenfranchise an artist’s authority. Instead, an artist’s online presence supplements other modes of expression and affords him new ways to convey his identity and significance.

Each artist’s online ‘definition of the situation’ reveals how he views the roles of

106 artist and audience member. While Young believes in his authority to represent the ‘real’ for the listener, Bidini, Hansen and Plaskett all found ways to include the listener’s voice in their product. This decision turned their websites into publics, where the indie ideal of music as a social activity became a reality.

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Conclusion

In 2010, I decided to record a rock album. It had been years since I had been in the studio, but I was still songwriting. The material was piling up, and the time was right to commit twelve tracks to disc and to put them on the shelf. That

November, I went into my friend’s newly furnished studio space and began my passion project, an effort that took nearly two years to complete.

What made this experience different from past studio attempts was adulthood. As a teenager and an undergraduate student, finding time to get together with collaborators to record did not have to be coordinated around significant life responsibilities. Now, the majority of us had careers and families, and getting together to record as a band was next to impossible. The end result was an album that was recorded track by track, instrument by instrument.

Listening to the master, it bothered me that the final product was not a reflection of performances that had been realized together by bandmates in real time.

Artists I admired such as Neil Young, Jerry Leger, Rheostatics and Joel Plaskett played live off the floor: proof that they could really play. Compared to this standard, my album was clearly lacking.

I did a modest amount of publicity to support the album’s release in

December of 2012. In a conversation with a local music beat writer, I acknowledged my insecurities concerning the way the record was made. To my surprise, my anxieties about aspects of my album that were inauthentic were not problems for him. From his perspective, what made my album suspicious was the fact that I rarely played live anymore in the local community. Applying

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Richard Lanham to his insight, my album was a closed-off document that existed separate from the lifeblood of the live scene. It was outside of the local music conversation and it did not represent a musician who was an active part of the arts community. To compare, my understanding of authenticity revealed a habitus that was comfortable with the artist’s role in older media. In my view, my responsibility was to represent the ‘real’ for the audience: a promise that I was not able to deliver. The journalist’s habitus was rooted in music as a relationship between people in a shared space. In his opinion, since I lived in the area, my absence from the music scene was inexcusable. Representing artist/listener closeness was pointless if it was not authenticated by my actions.

With Web 2.0, industry artists face the same scrutiny. Where radio, television and various recording formats made the representation of the ‘real’ the artist’s domain, the interactive potential of the internet gives the fan-base a presence in the spectacle, where they can participate in the creation, circulation and review of an artist’s work. Chapter 1 explained that rock’s conception of authenticity is rooted in the idea of music as a communal process. Chapter 2 underscored the importance of the ‘real’ to the rock habitus and showed that artists who covet the indie aesthetic challenge themselves to overcome artifice in all ways possible. Following this thread, Web 2.0 provides artists with an opportunity to represent themselves as part of an active community with their fan-base that was not available to them in older media and formats. Chapter 3 showed that, despite Andrew Keen’s reservations, this online landscape is advantageous to established artists, who are afforded a myriad of ways to

109 express their cultural, social and economic capital in the digital realm. How artists use Web 2.0 to express themselves reveals just how close they are willing to become to their audience.

At one end of the spectrum, Neil Young’s approach to the internet shows an artist who values some aspects of the indie narrative such as immediacy, but his disinterest in Web 2.0’s bidirectional power solidifies the impression of an artist who champions the artistic authority indicative of older media. Young’s

‘definition of the situation’ is substantiated by his offline status as an industry artist who has long been iconic and removed from his legions of fans.

Alternatively, Beck is an industry artist who uses his website to define himself as both a musician and a fan. Specifically, his Song Reader project opened up his songs to the creativity of strangers, and songreader.net provided a platform where consumers could become performers who were seen and heard. Beck did not directly participate in this space, a fact that reflects his offline reality as a commercial artist who, similar to Young, is not physically ensconced in his fan- base. Studies of Joel Plaskett and Dave Bidini show that online interaction can come closer to representing genuine discourse when it is rooted in the artist’s practices offline. Still, Beck’s online ‘presentation of self’ discloses an artist who supports the idea of music publics, where songs can continually be renewed in an ongoing creative process by those who encounter and play them.

The idea of audience participation in an online environment raises further questions about the future framework of traditional artist/audience relationships.

Although artists such as Bidini, Plaskett and Beck seem to encourage publics

110 around their works to varying degrees, their motivations may be multifaceted and include the desire to market their products in new ways. In Beck’s case, Song

Reader experienced a staggered release, appearing first as sheet music and then, an album of recorded interpretations that was curated by Beck himself. The songreader.net site gave the album additional legs, and while fans had a voice,

Beck also had a new way to keep his product at the forefront of his audience’s mind. Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein have begun research in this area, investigating the role that social media played in the release of Britney

Spears’ song, “Hold it Against Me.”

The role that an artist’s status plays in shaping the decision to include the audience in the creative process also merits consideration. For example, lesser known artists dependent on crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter may be inclined to allow contributors to participate in certain aspects of their projects out of pure financial necessity. Neil Young’s massively successful commercial career means that he will likely have a significant audience for each new release, regardless of how much he adapts to new producer/consumer relationship expectations. In Beck’s case, his willingness to relinquish a certain degree of creative control to his fans may also be linked to the security and resources that come with his celebrity profile. Guy Morrow’s examination of the release of

Radiohead’s In Rainbows considers how stature can impact the way that artists are able to use Web 2.0 to connect with their fans, release their products and sustain a livelihood.

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The ever-changing producer/consumer dynamic may also call for a reexamination of copyright law to find new ways to govern the challenges presented by the current creative landscape. Adrian Johns’ Piracy: the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates articulates the need for intellectual property law that reflects the 21st century. Paul K. Saint-Amour’s The

Copywrights emphasizes the importance of protecting the public domain so that future innovators have access to the building blocks of culture. Brett Gaylor’s documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto specifically tackles the question of recorded music’s right to stringent copyright protection and declares the present condition as a world of ‘collaborators,’ where, contrary to American copyright law, recordings should be fair to use and share.

These areas of study are ongoing as the full potential of Web 2.0 has yet to be realized. As artists and fans become more familiar with the medium’s capabilities, the implications that Web 2.0 will have on the producer/consumer relationship will become clearer. The internet’s structure allows for the possibility of collaboration and music as a process, but the representations that it provides are also in constant dialogue with other media and the offline world. While this means that the internet is not a space that is free from the controls of hierarchy, it still retains promise as a forum that has the potential to turn authors, audiences and texts into members of the same active public; an indie concept that was much more difficult to achieve in older media.

112

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