Abstract
As noted in the Introduction, there are precious few examples in the academic literature on popular music where live performance is treated as performance, rather than as an expression of sub-cultural solidarity or as an incidental part of the industrial processes of popular culture. One of the few writers who treats the process with anything like the attention it deserves is Philip Auslander, whose book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (first published in 1999) deals with live music as an important, culturally indicative form in itself, and also as a clear example of a process which is overtaking all forms of performance:
[When] we go to a concert with a large video screen, for instance, what do we look at? Do we concentrate our attention on the live bodies or are our eyes drawn to the screen, as Benjamin’s postulate of our desire for proximity would predict? At an industrial party I attended recently, I found the latter to be the case. There was a live band, dancing, and a video simulcast of the dancers on two screens adjacent to the dance floor. My eye was drawn to the screen, compared to which the live dancers … had all the brilliance of fifty-watt bulbs.1
In other words, live performance is necessarily collapsing into mediatised representation: any special cultural claims that ‘liveness’ — the once and once only event, that disappears the moment it is over — could make are no longer valid in a culture that prizes replication over uniqueness.
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Notes
Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 38.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 146.
Eamon Dunphy, Unforgettable Fire: Past, Present, and Future — the Definitive Biography of U2 (London: Viking, 1987), p. 145.
Richard Schechnler, Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 15.
Diana Scrimgeour, U2 Show: the Art of Touring (London: Orion, 2004), p. 257.
Tim Quirk and Jason Toynbee, ‘Going Through the Motions: Popular Music Performance in Journalism and in Academic Discourse’, Popular Music, Vol. 24 (2005), p. 401.
Michael Kirby, A Formalist Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 10.
John Waters, Race of Angels: Ireland and the Genesis of U2 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1994), p. 187.
Douglas Kellner, Media Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 3.
Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: an Aesthetics of Rock (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), p. 76.
Fred Johnson, ‘U2, Mythology, and Mass Mediated Survival’, Popular Music and Society, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2004, p. 95.
Daniel Cavicchi, Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 65.
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© 2007 David Pattie
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Pattie, D. (2007). Performance and Mediation: Performance, Space and Technology. In: Rock Music in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593305_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593305_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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