This article investigates how the persona enacted at the end of the 1990s by Brian Molko - British band Placebo’s lead singer and guitarist - resonates with contemporary approaches of persona performance. Amplified by presentational media along the lines of Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, persona increasingly proliferates as enmeshed in everyday practices and identities. This is no different in the domain of (popular) music. Yet, contemporary music personas whose image approximates ordinariness rather than extravaganza do sometimes reject the connotation of artificiality attached to the term persona, resulting in a type of ‘reluctant persona’. Practicing a form of anecdotal theory (Gallop 2002), I tap into how I experienced Molko’s persona through fan archives, and link his historical negotiation of an ‘ordinary extraordinariness’ with this present-day reluctant persona. A close re-reading of a selection of 1997-1999 music magazine articles in the Placebo Russia archive not only shows how Molko’s music magazine persona curates identity markers of extraordinariness as ordinary, but also demonstrates how the media texts that go into a persona continually perform these anew. Through the lens of performance studies, online fan archives shed light on the intensified correlation between (new) media and music artists’ engagement with performing the ordinary, subsequently entangling the discourses of theatricality and performativity.
The Oxford Dictionary's definitions regarding the notion of spectacle primarily stress the visual character. One of the definitions speaks about "a visually striking performance or display", the other about "an event or scene regarded in terms of its visual impact. " It is as if the only thing that seems to matter is what the eyes get to devour; yet what about the sonic impact? When we talk about spectacle in general, we usually indicate interplay between various elements contributing to a total experience that we experience as spectacular. Yet the visual component usually occupies a privileged position in our society full of tantalizing screens as it is. This assumption, that we are seduced solely by what we see spectacle-wise, is precisely what the work of sound collective VA AA LR counters with their performances, staged to affect more than just our eyes.
In this article, I will look at three contemporary music artists and how they present their musical personae on social media. Based on theatre, performance and media studies, it is an attempt to shed light on the several colourful elements constituting the total spectacle of music performance in terms of musical persona. The dynamic that arises between the performances being staged online and the simultaneous emergence of a new virtual stage, will be the central focus point. Relying on Hannah Arendt’s theorization on public space in terms of space of appearance and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this research introduces a framework that will help to comprehend the current ubiquity of selfies, videoclips and Instagram in the specific context of music performance beyond the live show.
For a very long time, spectacle and colour have been associated with joyful festivities, such as carnivals or fairground attractions, liberating people from periods of hard work and 'dark days' . However, spectacle and colour are closely intertwined with suppression and power as well. Colourful fireworks were traditionally a strategy of ruling powers to demonstrate their dominance over their spectators, as fireworks were the result of expensive chemical explosions and strong military forces who had the skill to handle them and the willingness to take the necessary security risks. For many centuries using colour in spectacle meant luxury as it implied hazardous chemistry, colourful gems, expensive colour pigments or colourful exotic birds and flowers. This resulted in an 'aristocratic' connotation for colour. In brief, colour meant exclusivity, luxury and partying.
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