Steve Connor the FLAG on the ROAD
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new formations NUMBER 3 WINTER 1987 Steve Connor THE FLAG ON THE ROAD BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE LIVE Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live/1975-1985, CBS 450227 4 (1986) The release of this monumental five-album live compilation confirms Bruce Springsteen as 'the Boss', the dominating voice of US rock through the 1970s and 1980s. The small-town male American experience detailed in his songs has achieved the status of a new American mythology and, amazingly, this cultural self-image has been accepted all over the world - sales of the album already amount to more than five million. The representative element in this mythological transformation is the song 'Born in the USA', which counterposes sourly the brazen affirmativeness of its chorus-title with the disillusionment of its speaker, a Vietnam veteran. But the song has been processed by Springsteen's promotion machine into a phallic anthem of America, with all irony purged. The album of the same title is marketed with the Stars and Stripes emblazoned across its cover, a motif repeated in the publicity for Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' world tour of 1985-6. Doubt and disaffection are effaced; the song has become a bullying motto for the cultural imperialism of American rock music. Song, album and tour are collapsed into the image of the American flag, which stands over and runs through all three. In the process, Springsteen's ideological dissonance is ironed out and naturalized, his criticism of Americanism transformed into a symptom of a natural and healthy Americanism. This is a familiar enough symptom in rock music, of course, and one that often takes less than subtle forms. But there is one element of the Springsteen myth which focuses the process of naturalization in a particularly powerful and complex manner, and connects with more general issues of cultural representation. This is the element of the 'live'. THE LIVE The most important part of the Springsteen mythology has always been his reputation as a live performer, one who works hard to give himself with energy and enthusiasm to his enormous audiences. To see Springsteen live is to be in the 'presence' of a mythical figure, to enjoy a certain erotic closeness. Springsteen is most authentically 'himself on stage, and the ecstasy generated by the sudden shrinking of distance between the fan and the star is at its most extreme in live performance. This ecstasy of desired identification is a 129 comparatively recent phenomenon in mass culture and one that turns out to depend oddly upon the technology of mass communication and reproduction; for it is only when the means exist to provide audiences with various kinds of substitute, or reproduction, be they films, pictures, tapes, or records, that this ecstatic yield of pleasure can be obtained from being in the 'actual presence' of the star. The reproduction is enough to stimulate the sense of closeness, without satisfying it. In fact, the success of the rock industry depends in large part upon the kinds of desire that increasingly high fidelity reproduction stimulates, the itch for more, for closer reproductions, and the yearning to move ever closer to the 'original'. There is a drama of possession and control acted out through this. To own an album is, in a limited sense, to be able to control the music it encodes, for with certain exclusions, one purchases with the album the freedom to reproduce and replay it wherever and whenever one wishes, at home, in the street, in the car. This repeatability is what seems to guarantee the consumer's possession and control of the commodity; but it also encloses a hidden deficiency. If the recorded music is infinitely repeatable, then this is because it is a form of copy, and, as a copy, must always be at a tantalizing remove from its original. Paradoxically, at the moment of its greatest yielding, the commodity holds something back; it can only ever be a copy, and never the real thing, no matter how often the album is reproduced and replayed. What guarantees the consumer's control is an intrinsic shortfall in the commodity, the fact that it can never be the original of itself. These factors connect with the more general issues of expression and representation which have been the subject of intensified debate within philosophy and cultural studies in recent years. As Deleuze, Derrida and others have argued, we continue to depend upon an opposition between things which 130 NEW FORMATIONS are sensed as immediate, original, and 'real' on the one hand, and the representation of those things, which we conceive of as secondary, derived, and therefore 'false', on the other. Repetition plays a crucial part in sustaining our sense of the real since repetition is always, as Deleuze argues, tied to the conception of the return of the Same, and the threat posed by repetition and replication to the authority of original or universal ideas is only ever a temporary threat and one that customarily reverts to the service of origins. The metaphysical opposition between being and appearance, essence and accidence, original and copy, continues to dominate, especially in the forms of mass culture. This might seem unlikely at first, given the fantastic proliferation in this century of processes of replication for products, texts, and information. Many cultural theorists, from Benjamin to Baudrillard, have seen a diminution of the authority of originality resulting from this - Benjamin arguing that the 'aura' of the original work of art is lost with the predominance of mechanical reproduction, and Baudrillard proclaiming that the very opposition between original and copy has been dissolved in an age of simulacra, or repetitions without originals. Such proclamations are premature, for they fail to appreciate how the proliferation of reproductions actually intensifies the desire for origin, even if origin is now constructed as an erotic lack rather than a tangible presence. The collector of Bruce Springsteen's albums can never be satisfied with these forms of reproduction, for they bring about a thirst for more authentic contact with their original. And it is above all the 'live show' which seems to offer this unfalsifiably real, corporeal presence, for here - apparently - are to be found life, music, the body themselves, naked and intense, with no barrier of reproduction or representation. This does not mean that the experience of a live show actually does surrender this sense of radiant Being. What is a Springsteen concert like, after all? More than any other performer in the world, Springsteen is at home in large spaces and with vast audiences. Springsteen's live shows conflate the intensity of closeness with the advantage of mass participation. In the live performance, Springsteen does not address the individual consumer, but establishes an intimacy with a mass audience, breaking down the barriers between physical presence and mass participation. But what results from the ostensible breaking down of these barriers is a reaffirmation of the duality of the live and the represented. Whereas audiences at the great pop festivals of the '70s had to make do with the sight of tiny figures performing inconsequentially on a stage nearly half a mile away ('Is that Dylan in the hat?'), and a sound system that worked efficiently only with a following wind, Springsteen's appearances at Wembley stadium in 1985 made sure that no member of the audience could escape the tiniest nuance of music or voice. Behind him, an enormous video screen projected claustrophobically every detail of his agonized expressions. The guarantee of intimacy, Springsteen's face, was made available in a close-up which at one and the same time abolished and re-emphasized the actual distance between him and his audience. Intimacy and immediacy on this scale can therefore only be achieved by a BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE LIVE massively conspicuous act of representation. Enormous amplification, hugely expanded images; these are the forms which reproduction takes in the context of the live. Sound and image are simultaneous with the 'real' music that is being performed (though, of course, in the case of most electronic music, the 'original' sound is anyway always an amplified derivation from the initiating signal) but they point nevertheless to the ineradicable split between the live and the represented. For there is no other way to experience Springsteen live than in the mass conditions which make simultaneous reproduction necessary. Despite the nostalgic evocations which one often hears of the good old days when Springsteen played in the cramped intimacy of night-clubs, one could hardly invite him and the E Street Band to come along and play at 40 watts in the local school hall. The normal condition for Springsteen's performances is a condition of ecstatic, somatic excess that spills over into and is constituted by an excess of representations at the very heart of the live experience. It is for this reason that 80,000 people a night attended Springsteen's concerts in Wembley to watch a video, albeit a 'live' video: the ecstasy of experience is turned into what Baudrillard calls an 'ecstasy of communication', a fantastic, uncontrollable surplus of images and representations. Something similar happened with the Live Aid concerts, when Phil Collins, after playing in London, absurdly travelled across the Atlantic on Concorde in order to be physically on stage in Philadelphia, in a monstrously inflated version of the prank in which a schoolchild runs from one end to the other of the serial school photograph in order to be photographed in both places. Phil Collins travelled 3,000 miles not in order to be visible in the flesh, but to provide an image to be projected on to the huge video screen which projected close-up images of him to the audience in the stadium and around the world.