Vicars of ‘Wannabe’: authenticity and the Spice Girls

Abstract

Popular notions of value in art – even popular definitions of art itself – are much indebted to the idealist narratives of late romanticism and its maximalised form, elite modernism. Since artistic value is normally imputed to one side of a dialectically related pair of oppositional terms, two principal strategies exist by which to ascribe value to the music you love, find interesting, or want to study: either show how it merits the positive term of the valorising pair (if necessary redefining the specific markers of that term), or attack the narrative underlying the binary itself. A typical postmodernist strategy is to do both these things simultaneously, so as to collapse notions of value into a win-win polysemy.

PJ Harvey and remembering England

“…It has been, and continues to be, a topic of debate across popular music, both in academia and within industry discourses and Moore's (2003) oft-cited paper positions it as a construct characterised by 'rawness ' (Frith and Horne, 1988:88) and unmediated communication (Grossberg, 1992(Grossberg, ,1993. It has become allied to a white masculinity (Bannister, 2006b, Leach, 2001) despite its historical link to 'difference' (Bannister, 2006a:58) and counter-cultural possibilities, particularly with providing space for women to perform and produce (Kruse, 2003;Reddington, 2007;Schilt, 2004;Leonard, 2007a). A seam through all of these conversations is the notion of 'authenticity' (Shuker, 2013: 18).…”

Traditional jazz and the mainstreaming of authenticity

“…Relatedly, Huber (2008) demonstrates, with particular reference to the extensive literature on Madonna and the Spice Girls, that when popular music studies does take an interest in mainstream performers it is almost always for the purpose of revealing a sub-text of 'resistance' to the mainstream, as opposed to considering the mainstream in its own terms (Davies 1999;Leach 2001).…”

“Reality Goes Pop!”

“…Although this clearly draws on Pop Idol's particular investment in the ordinary person/star duality, this particular mobilization of ordinariness is traditional within the construction of stardom and celebrity (Dyer 1998;Gamson 1994, 168). As Elizabeth Eva Leach (2001) has described in relation to the Spice Girls, class definitions of ordinariness can make a powerful claim to authenticity. They seek to diffuse charges of commercialism and artificiality, downplay the negative connotations of fame, and-particularly crucial to Pop Idol's insistence on audience interactivity-promote "accessibility" to the audience (p. 149).…”