Page 252 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-12.qxd 5/9/2007 6:08 PM Page 241

••• Popular Music •••

incorporates representations of him or her across a vast range of media and contexts,
to the extent that the appearance of a star in a film has a signifying function that
goes well beyond the character they play. These arguments have been developed in
discussions of pop stardom. For instance, Longhurst (1995: 185) suggests that ‘a new
record by Madonna may be seen in the context of the various meanings of Madonna,
and not as, for example, another dance or disco hit’.
Record company marketing strategies have long depended on the creation of per-
formers who can guarantee sales to manage the uncertainties posed by over produc-
tion discussed earlier. For instance, it has been argued that ‘the importance of stars
for all sales means that papers will publicize them as much as they can, radio stations
play their latest records as soon and as often as possible, magazines litter their pages
with their pictures’ (Frith, 1983: 135, emphasis in original). Moreover, the star sys-
tem lay behind the development of a rock aristocracy in the 1960s, who were then
able to redefine the commercial terms of music making. This process has been
described in the following way:

Rock musicians, in response to what they saw as the increasing commercialization
of music during the 1960s, sought to distinguish themselves from this trend by
emphasizing the internal convictions of the artist as opposed to the external
trappings of style. In opposing stylistic manipulation, musicians returned to ‘sin-
cerity’, a previous criterion of the star, manifested by a commitment to coun-
terculture values and the themes of nineteenth-century romanticism, from the
communication of higher spiritual values like ‘love’ (Shelley, Donovan, Jefferson
Airplane) to the exaltation of decadence (Baudelaire, Velvet Underground, the
Doors).
(Buxton, 1983: 436–7, emphasis in original)

Although this is quite a romantic reading of the motives of late 1960s rock stars, it
does illustrate how one of the key qualities of stardom, ‘sincerity’, was sought in
order to legitimize the public identity of the artist in response to changing aesthetic
and cultural contexts. Other defining adjectives include ‘genuine’, ‘integrity’, ‘real’,
‘direct’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘immediate’, which taken together suggest that authentic-
ity is the key dynamic making the star phenomenon work (Dyer, 1991). Although it
is important to emphasize that audiences are acutely aware of the ways in which
artists are packaged as commodities, the central irony is that ‘in the very same breath
as audiences and producers alike acknowledge stars as hype, they are declaring this
or that star as the genuine article’ (ibid.: 70).
For some commentators, the boom in dance music in Britain since the late 1980s
has powerfully challenged the dominance of the mainstream recording industry in
important ways. It is often said, for example, that the lack of a star system within
dance music offers a politics of anonymity that enables ‘the music itself’ to speak
rather than the ‘image’ of a performer, while the use of digital technologies has
democratized music making and made possible the rise of the ‘bedroom studio’
(Hesmondhalgh, 1998). In fact, this apparent lack of concern with authorship reveals

• 241 •