Don't stare so romantically

"monograph review" final assignment...

Performing Glam Rock: Gender & Theatricality in Popular Music
Philip Auslander
University of Michigan Press, 2006

Until recently, popular music has proved outside the gaze of performance studies scholarship. A new generation of writers such as Susan Fast and Steve Waksman are beginning to weave performance theory into their analysis of rock music history, thus building a much-needed new addition to the literature. Philip Auslander’s Performing Glam Rock: Gender & Theatricality in Popular Music (University of Michigan, 2006) offers a significant new text to this bibliography and serves as important reassessment of the legacy of rock ideology on performers since the 1960s.
Auslander got his PhD in Theater Arts at Cornell University 1983, writing his dissertation on the pop sensibility in theatre and his master’s thesis on Fluxus performance. He has since become major scholar of performance, writing three performance monographs and serving as editor for two anthologies of performance studies writing. His last book, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge 1999), argued that the primary audience experience of performance in contemporary Western society is mediated, not live. Auslander then examines what “liveness” means in such a culture. The book includes a chapter on rock music that addresses how rock ideology privileges the “authenticity” of live performance, while the primary experience of aural and visual aspects of popular music comes from reproducible media like albums and videos. In 2004 Auslander founded a Performance Studies International working group called “Music as Performance.” The group’s basic premise is that, “Although Performance Studies takes the traditional performing arts as part of its purview, the discipline has thus far ignored music almost completely.” The group defined its object of inquiry as “non-theatrical musical performances (that is, concerts and similar performances rather than musical theatre or opera, not restricted to live forms) in any musical genre” (PSi 2006).
In creating the group, Auslander has turned his full attention to musical performance, and Performing Glam Rock is Auslander’s first monograph to directly address the question of how to apply performance theory to popular music. His chosen subject is the rock genre known as “glam,” a short-lived, highly theatrical and mostly British popular music genre that occurred directly after the 1960s psychedelic rock era. The book is organized in two categories, with two front chapters (under the somewhat forced titles “Glamticipations” and “Glamography”) placing the genre within the larger narrative of popular music and social history. The second half of the book uses performance theory as a the primary tool for analyzing a few of the genre’s leading musicians – David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Bryan Ferry and Suzi Quatro. In choosing famous subjects and an historical time-period, Auslander expands the traditional realms of performance studies subjects. In his introduction, Auslander reveals himself to have lived through the music’s era and to have been familiar but not a fan of glam. His primary experience with the genre is through audio and video recordings, published interviews and a few contemporary interviews with glam-era musicians. In this way, Auslander merges his argument from Liveness, that popular music can be understood primarily within its mediatized state, with his desire to further the relationship between performance studies and popular music.
Performing Glam Rock continues the exploration of the aspect of rock performance that Auslander first explored in Liveness: that rock ideology privileges live performance as a form of authenticity. He suggests that glam rock musicians complicate the relationship between liveness and authenticity by creating highly theatrical performance personae whose disruptive gender portrayals created liminal spaces for rock audiences in the post-hippie era of the early 1970s. He discusses the ambiguity between the “real” and “the persona” in performance, paraphrasing Schechner’s statement that “performance is always a matter of the performers not being themselves but also not not being themselves” (in Auslander 2006:5). Simon Frith splits Schechner’s division of the real self and the performed me-not-me into three layers: the real person, the performance persona and the character (in Auslander 4). Auslander’s main argument centers around how rock ideology of the 1960s demanded that the three layers appear to be one, whereas glam radically separated the layers and mocked the very idea of personae unity.
Auslander frames glam as response to the “anti-ocular” bias of the late 1960s countercultural movement. He writes that rock musicians of the late 1960s privileged seriousness, concentration and aural pleasure and distrusted the spectacular or theatrical aspects of musical performance. These musicians were “serious” about music insomuch that they performed seriousness on stage by turning their backs to the audience, closing their eyes while performing, and wearing street clothes that marked them as less concerned with being on stage than with playing music. These performance gestures were naturalized into a rock ideology of “authenticity” and those who did not conform to these performance standards were “inauthentic.” This performed identity was constantly in negotiation however, and Auslander cites folk-hero Phil Ochs April 1970 performance in a gold lame Elvis suit at Carnegie Hall as a watershed performance gesture that was “antithetical to the countercultural ethos of spontaneity” which “foreshadowed the emphasis on characterization, self-consciousness, and spectacle in the rock of the 1970s, particularly in glam” (19). These traits of characterization, self-consciousness and spectacle, which 1960s rock audiences normally associated with the insincere, became the dominant performance frames of glam. Auslander returns to this performed insincerity throughout Performing Glam Rock, and places it within Schechner’s continuum between the performance of “doing” and of “showing doing,” which is a form of performing that is “pointing to, underlining, and displaying doing,” (in Auslander 101). ‘Showing doing’ is a way to make the twice-performed performance visible to the audience, an intentional denaturalizing of staged performance.
Auslander is careful to point out that the decision of who is of “doing” and who is “showing doing” is a matter of “impression…on the audience and not necessarily differences of intent or procedure on the part of the performers” (101). One of Auslander’s goals with this book is to serve as a corrective to what he sees as an over-attention to reception of popular music performance by cultural studies and sociological studies scholars. He believes that these disciplines tend to focus too much on reception and give only “impressionistic” (2) remarks on performance. In discussing dominant ideologies that glam sought to break down and how glam formed a liminal space in rock however, Auslander would have been well served in discussing audiences as active participants in making the meaning surrounding a celebrity performer. Audience appears throughout the text either in passive constructions that obscure the agents who make and believe rock ideologies, as quotations from rock critics who serve as foils to Auslander’s argument, and then curiously, in his conclusion as the true reason for glam’s impact on culture.
Auslander’s decision to focus on British glam rock was not arbitrary, and he makes an important connection between the British “music hall” tradition of popular music entertainment and the glam rock genre. The connection is through the musician David Bowie, who the author devotes a chapter to under the subhead “the Theatricalization of Rock.” Auslander cites Frith in discussion of the tradition of character-driven song that dominated popular culture for a century preceding the rock era in Britain. This tradition had a significant influence on British rock culture in the 1960s and into the glam era, and Auslander shows how this allowed rock musicians in the UK to “take on multiple personae in the manner of a music hall singer or an actor” (111). Auslander argues that this way of thinking about shifting personae was up to that time “foreign to rock. The whole notion of self-consciously acting the role of rock star rather than presenting one-self as one is antithetical to the ideology of authenticity” (112). This is an important way of rethinking the difference between British and U.S. rock persona in the 1960s and sets the stage for Auslander’s argument about persona use in glam.
David Bowie was deeply influenced by the music hall tradition and incorporated a theatrical sensibility to his on and off-stage character-creation and personae. His commitment to audiences was one for continual change, not for maintaining their expectations of him. Auslander shows that the consequence of Bowie’s performed self-consciousness was that contemporary U.S. rock critics like Lester Bangs denigrated Bowie’s work as “sterilely distasteful artifice” (Bangs in Auslander 112), because the critics did not experience a similar relationship to self and persona as part of U.S. popular culture. Bowie refused the performance conventions of popular music of that time for more experimental relationships between his ‘true self,’ his on-stage personae and the audience’s understanding of them. Bowie’s willful creation of distance between self and persona is akin to Schencher’s discussion of Chinese theater and Brecht: that it is possible to create a theater in which the audience sees parts of all three performance layers and that the incomplete transformation into persona or character “is revealed as such to the spectators, who delight in the unresolved dialectic” (1985:9). Glam reveled in such incomplete transformations.
Auslander argues that proto-glam rockers like solo-era John Lennon and the rock n’ roll revival group Sha Na Na challenged the counterculture’s concept of authenticity along the lines of theatricality and genre-masquerading. These musicians were still similar to the 1960s counterculture in that they maintained largely heteronormative gender roles. Auslander argues that the performance formula for glam rock added theatricality, genre-masquerade, and the extensive use of masculine queer persona to the rock ethos. He cites Alice Cooper as “the first rock band of the 1960s to build their entire image around transvestism, intentionally confronting the rock audience with a visual practice – and intimations of a sexuality – that preyed on its insecurities” (33) and that these visual practices were part of a theatrical persona that Cooper consciously created and presented to the audiences. In doing so he rewrites the history of rock influence in terms of performance instead of the traditional sound-based genealogies that typify rock history.
Auslander analyses the D.A. Pennebaker documentary made in the midst of the David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour, showing how the overt theatricality of the performance threw non-traditional gender-performances into stark relief. He uses Goffman’s Gender Advertisements to discuss “feminine” postures, gestures and facial expressions that Bowie employed to structure an on-stage gendered division of labor. Bowie most often played feminine, with ingratiating smiles and costume changes, to lead guitarist Mick Ronson’s hyper-masculine 1950s rock god persona. This role-playing allows the two to create an intensely flirtatious sexual dynamic on-stage. Auslander argues that Bowie created the Ziggy Stardust character in part in order to perform gender identities that did not fit in traditional rock performance. He quotes a famous interview in which Bowie tells the interviewer “I’m gay…and always have been” (Watts in Auslander 134) but suggests that Watts “did not take Bowie’s declaration at face value” (Auslander 134). Instead the question becomes “is he or isn’t he?” The performance here is one of ambiguity, not necessarily queer identity itself, as Auslander states that Bowie gave the audience keys to understanding that the stage show was “a performance for which there was no underlying referent” (135). Auslander relates this to Judith Butler’s concept that “gender attributes…are not expressive but performative,” (Butler in Auslander 135), suggesting that Bowie’s queer identity showed rock audiences how highly constructed the performance of heterosexual identity was as well.
One of the most revolutionary aspects of Auslander’s approach to rock history is to reimagine genre as a function of performance choices. This usefulness of this approach is most apparent in his discussions of Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry and T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, two leading stars of the glam rock era whose adoption of highly sexualized sounds, gestures, and dress stood apart from rock convention and effectively created a new genre. Auslander uses the musician Marc Bolan of the band Tyrannosaurus Rex to personify the transition from an anti-ocular 1960s countercultural persona into a glam persona. Bolan’s band shifted from a psychedelic acoustic duo named Tyrannosaurus Rex into a full rock band with electric guitars under the name T. Rex. In doing so, Auslander addresses each aspect of the group as it underwent metamorphosis, from band name, to vocal affect, instrumentation, costume, lyrical content to on-stage presentation. His is a monumental reconstruction of genre-creation through the lens of performance, showing how minute timbral changes and vocal gestures can shift an audience’s perception of a performer.
His meditation on Bolan’s unique voice serves as a how-to for popular music performance transcription and analysis, resulting in a nuanced portrait of timbral affect that shifted Bolan’s performance from psychedelic rock to glam. Auslander writes that Bolan’s highly melismatic falsetto had already marked him as different from other psychedelic rockers who placed “emphasis on instrumental rather than vocal virtuosity: it was much more important to be a great guitarist than a great singer” and that perhaps Bolan’s success as a musician opened new space counter to the spirit of the times, linking “straightforward vocal styles of psychedelic rock to the countercultural ethos of authenticity: a highly mannered voice, after all, seems theatrical, artificial and perhaps unmasculine” (82). Where in Tyrannosaurus Rex Bolan left the queerness of his voice unexplored, in glam he used it as a space to create “cognitive dissonance” through “performing hard-rocking songs or heterosexual love songs in a queer voice normally considered to be at odds with both” (90). Auslander uses Bolan as an embodiment of this genre change and how subtle changes in vocal performance contributed to a break in rock that created a new genre.
Auslander calls up Victor Turner’s distinction between the indicative and subjunctive mood to describe the difference between normative rock and glam rock performance. Glam is “a world of as if” (Turner in Auslander 150) which forms a liminal space in which non-traditional identities could be explored and enacted. In a chapter on Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry, Auslander develops his discussion of the masculine vocal performance as creating liminal spaces in rock. Auslander states that there is “a direct link between authenticity and musical style in rock culture” (152) and that the rock performer’s primary sonic signature is his or her voice. In Ferry’s highly stylized, often parodic appropriation of many popular music vocal performance styles from crooning to blues, he helped Roxy Music destabilize the very idea of rock music as a distinctive genre. Instead, “rock” breaks down into its component earlier popular music forms. Auslander suggests that this sonic bricolage destabilized the very concept of genre, allowing audiences to reframe their listening outside of traditional musical boundaries and into a liminal zone.
Auslander’s discussion about the place of women within the glam rock tradition also helps in the reevaluation of gender performance in rock history. In his Glam “–cipations” and “–graphy” chapters he examines how 1960s rock ideology placed emphasis on individual freedom of expression and other radical identities but still actively reinforced gender roles and an imbalance of power between men and women. The chapters on Bowie, Bolan and Ferry discuss how glam created a new space for displays of alternative masculinity, but do not account for how women musicians and fans responded to this new plurality of sexual personae. This is why Auslander devotes a chapter to Suzi Quatro, a leather-clad Detroit-to-England singer and bass player who was the only female to have chart success in the original glam rock era. Auslander writes that Quatro’s hard-edged performance persona embodies what Judith Halberstam calls “female masculinity” (212) that refused to be reduced to a conventional version of femininity. Instead she performs a “butch” identity that pits her masculine persona against her female body, using the sweet, upper-register of her voice to further unhinge the fixed nature of gender identity (214). That this voice sings covers of songs written for men about women further decenters gender identity.
Auslander suggests that while Quatro played only a minor role in glam rock’s commercial success, her portrayal of a tough-girl rocker created a new role for women in popular music. He cites the all-girl band The Runaways and its breakout solo artists, Lita Ford and Joan Jett, as highly influenced by Quatro’s trailblazing portrayal of an alternative femininity. In this way, Quatro’s glam persona was itself a liminal space within the larger glam framework, and led to the development of new rock subcultures like L.A. punk, new wave and eventually riot grrrl. This point brings us back to discussion of audiences and how glam rock affected their perception of the genre and of themselves. One of the most amazing phenomena of the glam-era is only briefly noted in Auslander’s text: the rise of a community of Bowie-boys and Bowie-girls in the Ziggy Stardust era. Auslander called glam audience’s desire to emulate David Bowie’s onstage personae an inversion of the hippie ideology of radical individualism. With “Bowie’s audiences emulat[ing] Ziggy by showing up at concerts dressed in homemade Ziggy costumes, makeup, and hairstyles. To the extent that these fans, known as ‘Bowie boys’ and ‘Bowie girls,’ constituted a community, that community formed around Ziggy Stardust – it expressed him rather than the other way around” (132). Auslander suggests that fans made Ziggy’s meaning, that their belief in the persona lent the Stardust character its own sincerity.
This creation of a new form of desire – ambivalent or queer gender performance creating ambivalent or queer desire – is no small achievement for a rock genre, and Auslander’s discussion of the impact of performed gender identities would be all the more powerful if he openly addressed how glam rock gave audiences a new vision of desire. After all, his concluding statements hint that fans’ powerful responses to glam had been motivating much of his scholarship. “What is finally at stake in the interaction between musical performers and their audiences is the audience’s identity, not the performer’s,”(233) he writes. “Performers, then, are valuable to a particular audience not because they can demonstrate definitely that they belong to the same identity category…but because they give those audience members material from which to construct the performers’ identities in terms of their own identities and desires” (234). The general questions about authenticity and sincerity that he begins with in the introduction have, by the conclusion, narrowed to question of “is he or isn’t he.” Auslander argues that the response – a simple “yes” to the ambivalence– shows how decentered gender identity performance gave 1970s rock audiences a new gender identities to try on and to perform themselves in everyday life. Not knowing the answer to questions about their glam performer’s sexual identity allowed audiences to make up their own answers to fit their own fantasies. The most radical moment of glam performance comes from the audience, in the moment of recognition that Auslander calls “the pleasurable shock of seeing someone who displays externally what he suspects himself to be internally” (234). This pleasurable shock awakened new desires in rock audiences for more performances of queer gender identities, and thus rewrote rock history. Auslander’s Performing Glam Rock performs much the same way, showing the moment when rock was queered in sight, sound, opening a way to talk about audiences for whom glam offered a new way to love rock.


Bibliography

Performance Studies international (PSi).
2006 Music as Performance. Performance Studies international website.
Electronic document, accessed May 5, 2006, http://www.psi-web.org/texts/wg_map.html

Richard Schechner.
1985 Between Theater & Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.