Popular Music (2021). © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press, page 1 of 15 10.1017/S0261143021000295 ‘Freak Show Excess’: Steve Vai and his self-presentation in the media ANDREI SORA Independent researcher E-mail: [email protected] Abstract This article attempts to uncover the complex relationship between musical expression, artist discourse and personae, by focusing on the way virtuoso guitarist Steve Vai presents himself and his music in the media. I analyse video and print interviews that span the three decades of Vai’s career to trace patterns and contradictions in his views on his music and artistry. This is not to assume intention- ality, but rather to ask what sort of gap there is between how Vai sees himself and presents himself as a musician, and whether he sees music as self-expressive, or as involving a constructed persona. Introduction I was made aware of Vai’s music in the early 2000s, having received a copy of the G3: Live in Concert (1997) CD as a gift. His performance of ‘For The Love of God’ (1990) completely changed the way I understood expression on the electric guitar. Given the title of the song, the voice-like quality of Vai’s tone and the intensely idiosyncratic playing, that specific performance felt like an intimate praying ritual. Yet Vai some- times seemed to not view himself and his music on the same spiritual level. There is a clear difference between the Vai who claims that, at the time of recording ‘For the Love of God’,hewas‘in the middle of [a] 10-day fast’ (Vai n.d.) and the Vai who, while doing a rundown of his gear and guitars, declared: The one thing I can’t do without is (...) my fan. (...) First and foremost, (...) it makes me look cool. Because, you know, you get your hair blowing (...) and, come on, isn’t that what it’s really all about, looking cool? You know that I’m a poser from way back, so let’s not kid anybody here! (Vai 2009b) Humour aside, such sentiments beg the question: if the fan (a character also pre- sent on stage for the G3 performance, as I later found out by watching the DVD) is there for entertainment value alone, what else is there just for cool factor? There is a clear rift between the real emotions of Steve Vai (the real Steve Vai) and how he pre- sents himself in the media (the poser from the 1980s). Consequently, what I interacted with during that G3 performance of ‘For The Love Of God’ was not the direct expres- sion of Vai the person, but Vai the persona. The humorous and playful manipulation of an over-the-top shredder persona is central both to the artist’s self-positioning as a poser and to the music he creates, as the following pages will show. 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.42, on 25 Sep 2021 at 22:38:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143021000295 2 Andrei Sora This article aims to contribute to the literature on enactment of musical persona by exploring both the role of music itself and authorial self-positioning in media texts, through a close reading of virtuoso guitarist Steve Vai. It evaluates the coher- ence or gap between these different modes of voicing the musical self in the absence of lyrical content. This strand of instrumental guitar hero rock is ideal for an analysis of expression and persona, as it sees the integration of performer/composer in music- making (as opposed to classical music), puts emphasis on individual expression (rather than collective expression) and results in instrumental music by personalities. The following discussion will not give imagery equal weight, despite Steve Vai’s obvious awareness of the role of image in persona construction (describing himself as a poser and trying to find ways of looking cool). This is not to say that sound is somehow associated with the true self and that image is mere artifice. Watching Vai perform is perhaps as important as listening to him perform, particu- larly to his fans. Nonetheless, the absence of a detailed visual analysis leaves room for a more exhaustive look at sound, which is ultimately the focus of this article. A visual analysis of Vai’s persona could proceed from dividing the visual realm into live performance (attire, gestures, etc.) and iconography (album artwork, etc.), which could help in both creating a multi-medium approach to his persona and pla- cing him within the idiom he is part of (guitar hero rock, shredd scene). While the current study is not concerned with issues of gender, the glam rock, glam metal and hair metal styles that influenced Vai (or that he influenced in turn if we take his stint with Alcatrazz or Whitesnake into account) carry heightened gen- dered elements of which he is clearly conscious in his establihshing of an androgyn- ous image. Nonetheless, these issues also remain outside the scope of this article. My enquiry paints a different picture of rock, drawing attention to the peculi- arities of instrumental rock as a popular music form, not least in its elevation of other sounds/instruments over the voice, while retaining a similar account of stardom. Instrumental stardom and the self-expression that seems to be endemic to Vai’s work create a sphere of music that is ripe for analysis, particularly with the analytical tool of the concept of persona. Academics have discussed the persona in regards not only to classical music, but also to popular music with vocals (Cone 1974; Tagg 1999; Clarke 2005; Robinson 2005; Cochrane 2010; Moore 2012; and the list can go on), and all of them suggest that listeners tend to identify person-like qualities in music. However, the instrumental rock persona has not been studied in the context of popu- lar music, nor has expressivity been explored through the prism of the persona in instrumental rock. Of course, not every research gap needs filling, but I believe that valuable insights on expressivity can be gained through this approach. Analysing popular music personae in songs with lyrics opens an entirely new avenue for exploring how the singer expresses the emotions, so the potential for persona ana- lysis in instrumental music is immense, given the lack of a vocal strand, and can offer fascinating new insights into the expressive power of instruments, in any genre. Literature review Expressivity and persona are fused in pop music into the star, an entity that has been a mainstay in both public and academic discourses. We seem to be unusually pre- occupied with ‘the publicization of the self’ (Marshall 2014, p. 154), making the ‘con- tinuous interplay between the self’ and a wider audience more and more prominent Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.42, on 25 Sep 2021 at 22:38:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143021000295 Steve Vai and his self‐presentation in the media 3 (Marshall 2014, p. 163). Harries (2009) argues that factors as diverse as on-screen per- formances, marketing performances or interviews come together to construct the star persona. Dyer and McDonald (1998, p. 1) also note that, from a sociological point of view, the stars are dependent on the texts that make them. Outside of these texts they are real people, but even though this fact is important to ‘how they signify’, ‘we never know them directly as real people’, only ‘their signification’ (Dyer and McDonald 1998, p. 2). While a thorough analysis of the complete persona of any guitarists must consider all the behind the scenes ‘extra-textual elements of celebrity’ (Marshall 2014, p. 166), this is too great a task for the present study. Moreover, as Moore (2012) notes, if we follow the whole output of a band or artist, then our sense of musical persona ‘will have a historical dimension’ (Moore 2012, p. 212). Stars can change, and I think we need not go further than Cat Stevens, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Michael Jackson, John Lennon or Alex Turner to acknowledge this. Yet both onstage and in the recording studio, the real person makes choices about the sounds they make. The decision-making process reveals much about their persona, and is presumably coherent across different music-making situations. Certain trends might influence an artist to such a degree that their overall persona changes drastically throughout their career, even though we know it is the same per- son at the helm (David Bowie being an obvious example). A person can certainly have a changing persona: in everyday life, we are used to treating people who age, change partners, change sexual identity, become parents, etc., as the same per- son. Growing older is an interesting factor in music, as the voice changes with age (especially the singing voice). Samples (2018, p. 120) also takes this into account, not- ing how Tom Waits’ characteristic vocal distortion has created an extreme distinctive- ness, ‘a timbral characteristic of his branded persona’, regardless of the ‘significant vocal changes and timbral variations’. Finally, stars can change but their ability to change then becomes a (stable) part of their persona, with David Bowie being the obvious example. This apparent paradox of ‘a changing voice [sound, persona etc.] that retains recognizability’ is ‘an essential sonic marker’ of what Samples dubs the ‘brand persona’ (Samples 2018, p.