Metanarrative of stardom and identity

‘Sometime I just wish you could put records out anonymously.’ Lou Reed

Sites for character construction include:

Media interviews Imagery (including music video clips) Onstage performance iconography and direct address to the audience Critical commentary

Performances can demonstrate something important about the role of stardom in pop and rock music. They enable us to see that characterisation, fiction and perhaps even narrative itself in popular music exist at the point of narration, outside the digesis of individual songs, live performances or even video clips, through the persona of the pop star.

The significance of this is two-fold

1: The creation of character identities for pop stars provides a point of identification for the listener/spectator

2: the construction of star identities is central to the economics of the music industry. That is to say artist whose identities guarantee massive sales, or at least massive media coverage that make this a possibility.

Thus stardom, while it may have varied meanings for the consumer, is always functional from the perspective of the media industry.Along with generic stability, star loyalty is a key element in the music industry’s effort to predict public taste. Only few acts have ever attempted to sustain careers in popular music without some kind of metatexual identity: The residents remain to this day the most striking example of this, as they are a band whose identity is still not. (Although this can bee seen as sales gimmick in itself) In recent years the dependence of record companies upon star acts has become more marked than ever.

Forging identities

Recent cultural studies developments have made valuable contributions to our understanding if popular culture. Theories of manipulation have been rejected and the assumption that audiences are, in Stuart Hall’s (21989) words, “cultural dupes.”

Stardom and persona are the mechanisms through which record companies seek out career longevity for their investments. David Buxton (1990) suggests that this process of selling stars was fundamental to the development of consumer capitalism:

Attaching additional meanings to a piece of music thought the persona of the performers delivers further use-values to the consumer.

Guns N’Roses clip Paradise city presents the band performing live before thousands of fans at the Giants stadium early o in their career, how was this possible so many

fans at such a starting point. The roses were actually supporting Aerosmith and so were presented as having all these fans when they actually didn’t.

It is often suggested that a major weakness in the Frankfurt manipulation theory lies in their assumptions that intentions can be read off like results. As Robert Dunn (1986) notes: “The well-known pessimism of the Frankfurt school is but one manifestation of this tendency to identify the intentions of an administered commodity society with its everyday lived results” As this is broadly true is does not mean that intentions never produce results.

Elg and Roe (1986), in a content study of music television in Sweden, found that the largest category in terms of video style was the documentary. They comment:

The oft-remarked upon discrepancy between the aural and visual contents if music videos were clearly evident in the videos studied. A comparison of the lyrics of the songs with the themes expressed n the videos revealed that, while love/courtship accounted for 50% of the songs lyrics, only 16% of the videos dealt with that as their main theme. Conversely, the rockumentary and nostalgia (artist at work) were both overrepresented in the video compared with the song lyrics.

The explanation here is of course that the essential narrative component of the music video lies not in the lyrics, but in the star text that frames it.

Stars in music television are neither more nor less than characters in cinema. Characterisation is absent in the flimsy videos with little narrative, but if you accept the documentary status of music television then the characterisation is overwhelmingly present. In music television it is posing rather acting that counts. The display of the body in video clips actually works to displace the centrality of the voice. In brief the characterisation of stardom set up within the music industry can take a number of forms.

Sometimes pop stars take on a persona to the extent of appearing to become that character.

Other stars adopt a consistent image without necessary embracing one of down to earth honesty.

At the other end of the pole there are the stars who continually adopt new personas, often making radical changes to their appearance.

In between these two poles there are various ways of combining the two attitudes towards character. Further more some personas have been carried over form act to act.