The Intimate Publics of Popular Music Memoirs: Strategies of Feeling in Celebrity Self-representation

Abstract

As P. David Marshall and other critics have convincingly argued, the contemporary popular music industry is organized around the production and consumption of affect: not only must the singer seem to genuinely embody the feelings they sing about, but her performance of this must be compelling enough to generate an affective response in the audience. The memoirs of contemporary popular music singers, my research suggests, must do the same; moreover, they must do so in a way that indicates continuity with their musical performances. In this chapter, I explore the rhetorical strategies and narrative techniques used in the memoirs of Celine Dion and Shania Twain to represent and prompt emotional responses from readers in ways that approximate the emotional and affective work done by their music. Using Lauren Berlant’s formulation of the intimate public, I argue that these tactics are critical to continuing the work done by popular music to forge publics based on a sense of shared and legitimized emotional lives. However, while the cultivation of intimate publics in these memoirs may serve the interests of the consumer, they also clearly serve the interests of the celebrity: the successful cultivation and mobilization of an intimate public can not only play a significant role in authorizing a memoir and renewing fan investments in the celebrity and her cultural products, but it can also be a powerful strategy for brand maintenance and/or rebranding and relaunching a stalled career.