[written in conjunction with Dr. Shelley Armitage's Memoir and Identity seminar; Union Institute and University Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program]
now they’d come so far and they’d waited so long
just to end up caught in a dream where everything goes wrong
where the dark of night holds back the light of day
and you’ve gotta stand and fight for the price you pay
(Springsteen, 1980, “The Price You
Pay”)
Works of
art and culture require introspection of their maker: the sculptor seeks to represent
forms he has witnessed or imagined, the musician upon instruments sounds out
the beats and notes floating within his or her head. The blank canvas is
transformed by the painter, into a blistering—however vacant or sparse—and
likely colorful account of their world. We have stories to tell, and we have
new means with which to do the telling: the academic and social legitimization
of our autobiographical accounts, coupled with the technological means to tell
them, has left some perplexed. Does social media intend on doing the work a
memoirist once had to perform, in the compiling of their original blurbs and anecdotes,
but rather reference the uploaded representations of one’s actual life? If an
audience member may scan an artist’s Facebook pages, YouTube presence, blogs,
and critical scholarship prior to attending a gallery opening, how might a
viewer’s autobiographical expectations of the artist’s work change? What
stories are we going to expect from another’s art, if we have already learned
so much about their story?
Scholars
seeking to identify and define the role of autobiography in modern works of art
and culture may be challenged by the extent to which technology and the
expansion of mass media have permitted, and in some ways, encouraged,
individuals’ creative expression of autobiographical narratives. Philosophical
paradigms established by Facebook, YouTube, and other sites themselves deserve
separate and complete study; for this reason, this discussion will provide a
limited contextualization for the role of autobiography in popular recorded music.
A comprehensive tracing of themes, of autobiography and identity, across works
by the first generation of artists working within popular recorded music may as
well be too daunting a task: separate studies of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Patti
Smith, and Lou Reed , among many others, may each aid in framing artists’
efforts of identification and narrative across this emergent genre. This
discussion will focus on the public career of Bruce Springsteen, utilizing Elizabeth
Bird’s 1994 essay as well as Springsteen’s own 2012 comments at SXSW, an annual
music and arts festival in Austin, Texas, seeking to understand the extent to
which one may be able to establish authenticity within one’s own autobiographical
narrative.
The Art
of Constructing Narratives Within Popular Recorded Music
“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams… It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire—New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”
--Ronald
Reagan, September 19, 1984 (as cited by Bird, 1994, p. 44)
During the months prior to the re-election of Ronald Reagan, the former-actor-turned-politician solicited the support of key cultural figures, requesting the presence of both Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen in the Rose Garden, for remarks, commendations, and photo opportunities. While Jackson, by then fully pronounced as “The King of Pop,” agreed to Reagan’s offer, Springsteen declined; weeks later, Reagan utilized Springsteen’s widespread fame to his advantage, within a campaign stop in northern New Jersey. Bird (1994) notes this careful choice as critical to determining “The Boss’” ethics of self-identification: while Springsteen’s morality extended far to the left of the popular President, many fans simply dismissed the musician’s vision of society.
The dilemma
of establishing “authenticity” in popular recorded music may have evolved from
the earliest efforts of commercialization and commoditization of the form: the
role of social commentary and political critique in song became increasingly
widespread in the 1960s, as artists embraced the genre. By 1980, works of
recorded popular music had played a large enough role for Lester Bangs to name
rock music “the ultimate populist art form” (p. 21), within his work of
biography and contextualization, of Debora Harry and the group Blondie. “Rock
is for everybody, it should be so implicitly anti-elitist that the question of
whether somebody’s qualified to perform should never even arise” (1980, p. 21).
If a genre of creative expression maintains an implicit tenet of narrative
accessibility—regardless of special or technical skills—one may trace its
embrace by artistic communities during different political and social climates.
Political
and social ramifications of one’s narrative may engulf original intentions: “Lest
we too easily hail the metaphorics of coming to voice as a self-liberating
gesture, we might keep in mind that testimony also involves telling stories
that put the narrator in jeopardy because what is told is in some sense
publicly “unspeakable” in its political context” (Smith and Watson, p. 85). Reagan’s
use of Springsteen’s success in the weeks prior to his re-election illustrates
the use of one’s autobiographical narrative by another, for public
contextualization and understanding. The ways in which readers consume and
understand sustained works of autobiographical narrative may continue to
change, based upon current events and political climates: “And so, when we read or listen to
autobiographical narratives, we need to attend to methods of self-examination,
introspection, and remembering encoded in them through the generic conventions”
(Smith and Watson, p. 91).
The
“ultimate populist art form” (Bangs, 1980, p. 21) may have been Springsteen’s
specialty; Bird (1994) explains the artist’s spike in popularity following Born in the USA as due to “a
misinterpretation of the message” (p. 45). Citing Robert Rauch and John
Mendelsshon, Bird’s contextualization for Springsteen’s maddening popularity
comes due to either the public’s ignorance of the musician’s lyrical and
political messages, or the public’s expectations of the form: “a live rock
concert is not an occasion for thinking about political issues; rather it is an
opportunity to be temporarily transported. Springsteen himself may not have
appreciated that fully; he was often apparently frustrated by the failure to
get his message across in his songs and his regular monologues that introduced
them” (p. 45). Beyond the complications of collective and interactive presence
in popular music, the artist’s role in telling their own narrative may become
less clear: one may forge one’s story, but one may hold less control over how
and why the public interprets, and identifies with, a given narrative.
Springsteen denied American car manufacturers use of his patriotic anthem in
television commercials, turning down a $12 million dollar offer from Chrysler
(Bird, 1994, p. 48); one year after the release of Born in the USA, Chevrolet had commissioned a new marketing
campaign, based loosely around Springsteen’s themes (“the heartbeat of
America/today’s Chevrolet”). “As Safeway, Stroh’s, and Miller’s, among others,
developed the theme, it became impossible to tell the difference between the
opposite but merging images of Reagan’s and Springsteen’s America that were
evoked” (p. 48).
The Boss in Present Tense: Forging the Postmodern Authentic
While a full contextualization of Springsteen’s career may identify attempts at conveying authentic narrative in popular music, Bird (1994) summarizes the artist’s career following Born in the USA as having unsuccessfully provided audiences a clear explanation of his story: beyond commercialization and commoditization of Springsteen’s patriotic message, “along with the transformation and multiplication of meaning came the proliferation of images and the shattering of the coherent image of authenticity” (p. 45). Stuart Hall (1997) describes a “profound historical decentering in terms of social practice” (p. 43), in part because the “individual or collective subject [is lodged] always within historical practices, as we individuals or as groups cannot be, and can never have been, the sole origin or authors of those practices.” Acts of self-definition, identification, and the explanation of narrative are, according to Hall, to be eternally linked, traceable, in tandem with other individuals, moments, and works of expression that have come before: regardless of whether or not anything exists in our culture that we may have previously agreed upon. Elizabeth Bird’s (1994) contextualization of Springsteen’s career is important, both as a historical and critical analysis, but also for its consideration of ‘The Boss,’ as a musical, cultural, and political figure.
Nearly
thirty years after the release of Born in
the USA, in April of 2012, Bruce Springsteen delivered the keynote address
at the Austin, Texas music and arts festival South By Southwest. As a springboard
to his remarks, “The Boss” used music critic Lester Bangs’ grave
characterization of creativity and a solipsistic climate of representation and
identification within the genre, following the untimely death of Elvis. Bruce
Springsteen cited Bangs’ final paragraph, which appears here unabridged,
published originally in the Village Voice on August 29, 1977:
If love truly is going out of
fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even
more contemptuous indifference to
each others' objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever
else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely
circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because
solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one
thing: we will never again agree on
anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you
(Bangs, 2003).
As we seek to create new methods of self-identification and
representation, to what extent are our narrative impulses influenced by others
in our intellectual environment? Have readers, listeners, and viewers’
expectations of representation in art changed since Bangs described a culture
of fragmentation and solipsism; do we expect to see ourselves when we read,
watch, or listen? Or, have we come to expect creative expressions of
self-definition, across genres, to resemble each individuals’
coming-to-realization story of their connectedness? If audiences do maintain such
expectations, Bangs’ comment on how culture may come to nurture a “contemptuous
indifference to each others’ objects of reverence” remains, unfortunately,
salient.
As Stuart
Hall (1997) asks, “what is this never-ending theoretical work which is
constantly losing and regaining concepts?” (42), complicated situations regarding individuals’ identities and
abilities of self-expression arise. An elusive comment on this dilemma of
self-determination and representation comes in assessing modern mechanics of
identity creation, of how and where we state and make known our unique
abilities, insights, and narratives.
The action
of transformation and emergence in the construction of autobiographical
narrative may be the result of acknowledging a Derridadian ‘difference,’ which Toni
Morrison describes eloquently: it is the close and trepidations relationship
between the author and their representational narrative she seeks to represent
in her works, as well as the histories she may encounter and, by necessity,
represent: “when you kill the ancestor you kill yourself” (1984, p. 497). When
one seeks contextualization for one’s own life experience, a keen sense of
precedence, and what has come before, is essential. Morrison’s role of memoir “It
[memoir] should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel
something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his
congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way,
to stand up and to weep and to cry and to acede or to change and to modify—to
expand on the sermon that is being
delivered. In the same way that a musician’s music is enhanced when there is a
response from the audience” (Morrison, 1984, p. 494). This ‘enhanced’ retelling
of individuals’ narratives of autobiography and memoir may be subject to
climates of political, social, and economic identification: does popular
recorded music still enable and condone authenticity?
One answer
comes in Springsteen’s recent comments in Austin: according to “The Boss,” our
aims of expression and individual narrative come amidst a “post-authentic
world. And today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re
bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences, your
personal history. And at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your
music that matters” (Springsteen, as cited by Powers, 2012).
Works Cited
Bangs, L. (1980). Blondie. New York: Fireside.
Bangs, L. (29 August 1977). “Where Were You When Elvis
Died?” Retrieved from http://josephwaldman.livejournal.com/43782.html
Bird, E. (1994). “’Is that me, Baby?’: Image, Authenticity,
and the Career of Bruce Springsteen.” Kansas University Journals. Retrieved
from https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/2821/2780
Hall, S. (1997). "Old and New Identities, Old and New
Ethnicities." Culture, globalization, and the world system;
contemporary conditions for the representation of identity.41-68.
Morrison, T. (1984). “Rootedness: The Ancestor as
Foundation.”The Woman That I Am, ed. D. Soyini. Madison: St. Martin’s.
Powers, A. (15 March 2012). “Bruce Springsteen on the
Meaning of Music.” NPR.org. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/03/15/148693171/bruce-springsteen-on-the-meaning-of-music
Smith,
S. and J. Watson. (2010). Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting
Life Narratives. 2Nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Springsteen,
B. (1980). The River [vinyl sound
recording]. New York: Columbia.
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