J A M E S O N , B A U D R I L L A R D , A N D T H E M O N K E E S

BRIAN DIEMERT, BRESCIA COLLEGE

W h e n The Monkees sing "Mr . Green he 's so serene / He ' s got a TV in every

r o o m " ("Pleasant Valley Sunday" by Goff in and King), a n u m b e r of ideas are

suggested that lead us towards, bu t do not answer, several overwhelming ques-

tions. Are n u m e r o u s television sets the key to lasting happiness? W h a t can we

infer f r o m the fact that those offering this commen t are themselves products of

television? Cou ld there be i rony in the song 's in te rp re ta t ion and its pe r fo r -

mance? Clearly, the sent iment , the song and the b a n d raise several issues of

some impor tance for a considerat ion of the relat ionship of pos tmodern i sm to

rock music. What , after all, do The Monkees represent bo th as a television show

and as a p o p group? The history of the "band" may be familiar to some of us:

inspired by The Beatles' fi lm A Hard Day's Night, producers Bert Schneider and

Bob Rafelson sought to create a television si t-com about a struggling young rock

band . To this end, they recruited Don Kirshner as a music supervisor and held

audit ions for the actors. Michael Nesmith and Peter Torkelson won parts while

Mickey Dolenz (a fo rmer child actor) and David Jones (active in British musical

theatre) were recruited by Schneider and Rafelson. The Monkees went on, for a

brief t ime, to become hit recording artists selling 16 million a lbums and 1VA mil-

lion singles in a thirty m o n t h per iod f rom the fall of 1966.1 Stories abound : Jimi

Hendr ix briefly opened for t hem on a 1967 tour , and Stephen Stills, who later

f o u n d fame with Buffalo Springfield and then as part of Crosby, Stills, and Nash

lThe Monkees aired on NBC from September 1966 to August 1968. The band consisted of Mickey Dolenz, David Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork. The show was later aired by CBS on Saturday mornings from September 1969 to September 1973 (Brooks and Marsh 162). Sales figures, no doubt approximate, are noted in Bruce Newman's brief TV Guide profile.

GENRE XXXIV - FALL-WINTER 2001 - 179-204. COPYRIGHT © 2002 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA. ALL RIGHTS OF REPRODUCTION IN ANY FORM RESERVED.

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(and sometimes Young) was turned down in the auditions because of "imperfect teeth and incipient baldness" (Ward 320), though he succeeded in encouraging his friend Peter Torkelson to audition.2 (Stills later played, as did Glen Campbell, Leon Russell, Neil Young and others, as a session musician on several Monkees' tracks.3) Consciously patterned on The Beatles (that an Englishman was chosen to front the band seems no accident), The Monkees were clearly manufactured by NBC and invoked the ascendent codes that ensured popularity in the Ameri-can 1960s.

As in the Beatle films Hard Day's Night and more particularly Help!, The Monkees presented a carefree group of four young men living together, con-fronting bizarre, comic-book circumstances, and coming together to make pleas-ing and inoffensive music that happened to be written by some of the period's most successful song writers. Carol King and Gerry Goffin, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, all of whom worked for Aldon Music, wrote such hits as "Pleasant Valley Sunday" (Goffin and King), "Last Train to Clarksville," "(I 'm Not Your) Stepping Stone," and "Valleri" (Boyce and Hart), while, later, future stars Neil Diamond, Harry Nilsson and David Gates also wrote for The Monkees. Quickly dubbed "the pre-fab four," The Monkees found their success was often scorned because the group was so obviously manufactured: "serious rock fans hated them" (Ward 321).4

In a period when many of its fans believed rock music to be a harbinger of social revolution, The Monkees represented one version of rock and roll 's domestication. For many Americans, rock music from Elvis Presley's time was seen as a corrupting and dangerous new form of expression,5 and their suspi-

2Torkelson, like Nesmith, had been floating about the edges of the music business in Los Ange-les. In 1965, Torkelson, later Tork, had briefly joined Stills and Ron Long in Los Angeles to form a trio called Buffalo Fish (Downing 22-23).

information about The Monkees recording sessions is available on-line at www.geocities.com/ SunsetStrip/Towers/3152.

4In early 1967 the London Sunday Mirror called them a "disgrace to the pop world": "Here are a bunch of kids trading on other people's talents and cashing in on millions" (qtd. lones, "Out"). Lil-lian Roxon's 1969 Rock Encyclopedia noted: "Nobody really minded that The Monkees were manu-factured entirely in cold blood and for bluntly commercial reasons. But when, never having played together before, their record hit the top of the charts on the strength of what seemed like nothing more than TV exposure and a good, sound financial push, the bitterness was overwhelming" (qtd. in Sandoval).

5See Larry Bennett (141-42) for some responses from the 1950s to rock music. The case against rock music is also summarized in Orman's first chapter, "Rock and Destruction: Elite Responses to Rock Music" (1-21).

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cions did not abate as the 1960s wore on: the struggle over civil rights, the anti-war movement, urban unrest, the loosening of sexual mores, racial violence, and the increasing politicization of young people all seemed to play out against a rock soundtrack. Threatening social conditions, however, always seem to find themselves tamed through a variety of means, and consequently it is significant that The Monkees should emerge when they do. For many observers, 1965-66 is the time when rock music—serious, political, artistic music produced by newly respected and valued singer-songwriters—separated itself f rom the teenage dance music that made up rock and roll. As is usually the case in matters of cul-tural history, the exact moment of the divide is difficult to locate: is it the release of Rubber Soul (1965) or Dylan's conversion to electric guitar6 or some other event?

In any case, the emergence of The Monkees is completely understandable within the dialectic of popular music.7 Amply il lustrating the hegemonic dynamics of capitalism, The Monkees embody contradiction. As their theme song announces, The Monkees are "too busy singing to put anybody down," but they are also "the young generation, and [they've] got something to say." But what? The Monkees' opening theme song for their television show hints at the politically neutral and inoffensive qualities of The Monkees, whose songs seldom extended their subject matter beyond the vicissitudes of adolescent love. Even "Pleasant Valley Sunday," which is ostensibly critical of the capitalistic values that spawned The Monkees is so muted in its critique as to make one wonder if it is a critique. That is, the song's target is so vaguely defined and so general (the middle-class, suburban consumerism of "status-symbol land") as to lose its criti-cal force. Lacking the specific targeting of Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" or the metaphysical statement that Louis MacNeice reaches in his poem "Sunday Morning" (surely an ancestral text for Goffin and King's song), "Pleasant Valley Sunday" buries its critique under lilting harmonies and bouncing rhythm tracks. Equally problematic in this song is that The Monkees, as performers of a song

6See Theodore Gracyk's discussion of this moment with reference to The Beatles and to Bob Dylan (9-13). Dylan's shift from acoustic to electric guitar in 1965 is often seen in rock historiogra-phy as pivotal because it marked the assertion of the artist's desires over those of his audience, who saw the move as Dylan's selling out to commercial interests. Although I came to it late in the writing of this paper, Gracyk's book is one of the best discussions of rock that I've read.

7R. J. Warren Zanes writes, " Within rock culture, a fantasy of an intrinsic authenticity requires that the commercial be kept alive as rock culture's 'foreign body,' the prerequisite fantasy that keeps the engine in motion" (64).

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written for them by others, are doubly located in the Pleasant Valley. They may desire "a change of scenery," but the song they sing is being rehearsed by a sub-urban "rock group down the street" who seem another piece of the milieu. Firmly ensconced in the land of creature comforts, the singers' cry for change goes unheeded in the generic world of Mrs. Grey and Mr. Green, who may after all be watching The Monkees. Again, the song embodies the contradictory posi-tion of the band's theme song and of the band itself: the simulacrum of rebel-lious youth is present, but no one is really put down.

As Fredric Jameson observed long ago, the domestication of the other, of the threatening, is a fundamental trait of postmodernism "whose function is to cor-relate the emergence of new formal features in culture [in this case, rock music] with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order—what is often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer soci-ety, the society of the media or the spectacle, or mul t inat ional capitalism" ("Postmodernism and Consumer" 113). The Monkees was purely a commercial product; as Mickey Dolenz often stated, "The Monkees was never a band, it was a television show about a band. . . . The Monkees has nothing to do with The Beatles. The Monkees has to do with Bonanza" (qtd. in Newman; see also Ward 322). As evidence of The Monkee's status as less than a band, the group wasn't allowed to play its own instruments in early shows or on its first albums (though pressure from Michael Nesmith and the others succeeded in altering this situa-tion in 1967.) Clearly a commodity, The Monkees were despised by rock critics (see, for example, Meltzer 270-275), yet years later found themselves the object of baby-boomer nostalgia and renewed celebrity.8 A 1986 reunion tour followed in 1987 by MTV exposure sparked new interest in The Monkees, and, in 1994 Rhino Records purchased and rereleased a host of Monkee material. In 1997 an ABC television special brought all four together again, and, indeed, The Mon-kees, minus Nesmith, who has largely avoided the oldies tours, continued to tour in the summer of 2001.

This renewal of interest can be attributed to two causes. The first is the ubiquitous power of the media—The Monkees was after all a television show that spawned records, fashion design and countless other merchandise items in the

8The Rolling Stone history of rock notes that "even The Monkees' biggest detractors would have to admit that their albums have worn considerably better than some contemporaneous offerings from 'serious' groups" (Ward 321).

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1960s that proved exceptionally popular with young adolescents and pre-teens. Many of those attending, or even interested in, post-1960s Monkees' perfor-mances would remember these things with nostalgic pleasure.9 The second cause is more complex and reflects changes in the contemporary psyche that have also led to the popularity of newer pre-fab groups such as New Kids on the Block, Spice Girls and Sugar Jones (from the television show Popstars), all of whom have much in common with The Monkees who first went down this road.

What we see played out in discussions of rock and roll music is something similar to the kind of thing that literary critics and philosophers have dealt with when the issue of canon formation is discussed. That is, a canon in popular music, institutionalized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has emerged over time that values, for instance, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys, and even Stephen Stills10 (in his many formations) over other artists who are denigrated for being, among other things, "one-hit wonders," overly commercial, derivative, or "pre-fab." The Monkees, as a group manufactured for television, is perceived by Richard Meltzer and others as lack-ing legitimacy (Meltzer 274). With rare exceptions, they didn't write their own songs, and there were obvious doubts about their musicianship, though Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork had some experience in the music business. Equally important to my mind in considering The Monkees' poor critical reception is their lack of a past. That is, a group like The Beatles possessed a clear "aura," in Walter Benjamin's sense of the term1 1 ; they struggled and worked to amass expertise through long hours of live performance in Liverpool, Hamburg, or anywhere else they could play. The Monkees of the 1960s had no such period of growth, no "aura," except what the television show provided through its fiction of the boys as struggling musicians. (Somewhat paradoxically, The Monkees of the 1990s and beyond can be said to possess an "aura.") The absence of a history points to one of the reasons that pre-fab rock groups so often encounter hostility

9Jean Baudrillard writes, "When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning" (Simulacra 6).

10A11 of these performers have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Dylan, The Beatles, and the Beach Boys (1988); The Rolling Stones (1989); the Jimi Hendrix Experience (1992); and Stephen Stills as a member of both Crosby, Stills and Nash (1997) and of Buffalo Springfield (1997).

1 'Benjamin writes, "The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experi-enced" (574).

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and so quickly fade from view. Obviously, liberal12, Romantic notions of artistic creativity persist, though perhaps with fading strength, in our culture and espe-cially in the critical discourse that surrounds rock and roll. Notions of originali-ty and authority conflict with our (and Michael Nesmith's13) sense of a band that records songs written by other people with the aid of musicians and technolo-gists who are not "part" of the band's public face. In The Monkees's case, they owed their existence as recording stars to Don Kirshner, the p romoter and record producer behind Aldon Music and later Screen Gems (Shaw 147).14

Again, we see replicated in the case of The Monkees some of the old debates among literary critics concerning distinctions between formulaic writing and art. The "pre-fab" model suggests the formulaic (Brill Building industry) but the "fab four" model suggests art. Yet the obvious questions suggest themselves: to what extent are the formulaic original and the original formulaic? And, as Mary Harron asks, "what is authentic music in an age of mass media" (175)? Indeed, the very category of the "authentic" is at the very least problematic in a consider-ation of rock music. As Frith and H o m e observe, " 'True' expression always means faking it (Eric Clapton didn't grow up black, American or poor and Bruce Springsteen long since ceased to be a working man) while even the most exces-sive Vegas routines depend on conventions of sincerity" (74). "Authenticity" is fundamentally recognized within postmodernism as another construct of inter-pretive communities. In rock music, the inauthentic has traditionally meant "rock that is dominated by economic interest, . . . that has lost its political edge, bubblegum, etc.," while authentic music is unique, meaningful and politically uncompromised (Grossberg, We Gotta 207). If it isn't clear f rom Grossberg's distinctions, the situation is more complex than one might at first imagine: he continues, "The authenticity of rock [is] measured by its sound and, most com-monly, its v o i c e . . . . The eye has always been suspect in rock cu l t u r e ; . . . visually, rock often borders on the inauthentic" (We Gotta 207-8). In the postmodern moment , however, the older, Romantic not ion of the "authentic" no longer

12For discussions of rock and liberalism see Grossberg, We Gotta, 137-70, and Gracyk, 218-26. 13Nesmith was at the forefront of efforts to get The Monkees out from under Don Kirshner's

thumb. In a January 1967 Saturday Evening Post interview, he called The Monkees first two albums "totally dishonest": "Do you know how debilitating it is to sit up and have to duplicate somebody else's records? . . . That's really what we were doing" (qtd. Jones, "Out of Sync").

14In 1958, Don Kirshner, the show's music supervisor, had with A1 Nevins founded Aldon Music, one of several music companies associated with the Brill Building in New York City (Shaw 143).

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appears to obtain. Instead, authentici ty is measured in ironic terms; that is, in

te rms that suggest a self-consciousness about the manipula t ion of the image and

of artifice. Hence , the Rolling Stones appeared authent ic "because they were

clearly in charge of their own selling-out process" (Frith and H o m e 102). Simi-

larly, the Sex Pistols' 1996 "Filthy Lucre" reunion tour expresses an albeit cynical

awareness of the real reasons for the tour : "Your money" (Johnny Rot ton qtd. in

S loop) . This k ind of i ron ic self-awareness , of " a u t h e n t i c inau then t i c i ty" in

Grossberg's phrase (We Gotta 224), is very m u c h a part of the pos tmodern sensi-

bili ty: Ro land Bar thes so o f t e n charac ter izes the m o m e n t wi th re fe rence to

Descartes' mot to , Larvatus prodeo—"As I walk forward, I po in t ou t m y mask"

(Writing 40). Yet, despite the fact that quest ions of authenticity and commer -

cialization have domina ted rock criticism (Sloop), we have to wonder whether

the te rms have any place in discussions of rock music. Wha t , after all, can these

categories mean in an age of sophisticated recording techniques that allow bands

to create music they could never hope to pe r fo rm live? Equally relevant is the

ubiqui tous manipula t ion of the image that occurs th roughou t the rock industry,

for " the history of rock . . . is a history of image as well as sound" (Frith and

H o m e 18). John Lennon made the poin t long ago in the Rolling Stone interview

following The Beatles' break u p that

we were performers . . . what we generated was fantastic, when we played straight rock, and there was nobody to touch us in Britain. As soon as we made it, we made it, but the edges were knocked off. Brian put us in suits and all that and we made it very, very big. But we sold out you know. The music was dead before we even went on the theatre tour of Britain. . . . The Beatles' music died then, as musicians. That's why we never improved as musicians. We killed ourselves then to make it. (Lennon 45-6)

Well before the peak of the group 's internat ional popularity, Lennon asserts that

The Beatles had already sold out; that is, they 'd become a manufac tu red com-

modi ty cut off f r om their roots. (Is such a state darkly hinted at in the title of

1965's Rubber SouP.)

"Selling ou t " may naturally accompany popular success (see Larry Bennett 's

piece 152 f f . )—someth ing rock pe r fo rmers are not unaware of as The W h o ' s

a lbum The Who Sell Out, Frank Zappa 's a lbum We're Only in it for the Money,

a n d T h e Sex P i s to l s ' "F i l thy Luc re " r e u n i o n t o u r d e m o n s t r a t e — b u t m o s t

observers still confer authent ic i ty on the Beatles because they wrote and per-

fo rmed their own songs and because they possessed a documented past. Para-

doxically, f r om Lennon 's poin t of view, the group 's "selling ou t " coincided with

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the blossoming of their creative talent as songwriters. From playing others ' songs, including Goffin and King's "Chains" on Please Please Me, The Beatles gained the commercial clout to enable them to record their own material.15

Commercial success gave them, as it did to a lesser extent The Monkees, the leverage with which they could gain creative control. Categories, in this case of authenticity, break down here as they do so often when we consider The Beades.

The Monkees, on the other hand, can be said to lack a pre-selling out phase; that is, as a pre-fab group they had no history to provide fodder for countless biographers like those who have documented the minutia of The Beatles' story. It isn't even accurate to say that The Monkees sold out (who or what would they have sold out from?), for without the selling they didn't exist. Of course, the fact that The Monkees did not usually write or perform their own material (indeed, only Michael Nesmith's songs, such as "Mary, Mary" and "Different Drum," achieved any kind of notoriety) is hardly an unusual situation in the history of rock and pop music. The Byrds, whose members proved very talented, had their first hit with Bob Dylan's song, "Mr. Tambourine Man," while instrumentation on their first album came from a variety of studio musicians (Gracyk 95). Simi-larly, Motown artists such as The Supremes (and this is true of other girl groups) usually sang others' songs and did not play any instruments; The Beatles, on the other hand, often supplied material for other artists, including The Rolling Stones who had an early hit with Lennon and McCartney's "I Wanna Be Your Man." What plagued The Monkees and dogs the Spice Girls, Sugar Jones, and similar artists is the fact that they fail to satisfy two of the most important criteria for critical if not commercial success: they lack a history of growth (emerging instead, like Frankenstein's creature, fully formed), and they lack the authority of authorship. What they have behind them is the power of the media to create the simulacrum of the pop group and to construct conceptions of legitimacy.

These three factors—originality, history, and promotion—are the crucial components in the ascension of rock/pop musicians and perhaps of any canoni-cal artist. If we look at these criteria closely we will recognize that each has its own history: the third, promotion, as the heir to patronage, has a long history, which I needn't go into here, while the first two are thoroughly grounded in

15On three of the first four Beatle albums the ratio of original material to covered songs was 8 to 6. A Hard Day's Night was the exception, but the subsequent Beatles for Sale reverted to the previ-ous pattern.

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Romanticism's privileging of the individual imagination and of the organic. That is, the individual's politically and socially uncompromised self-expression is seen as intrinsically valuable while the evolution of the band, its history, and its relation to tradition are framed as narratives of organic development: John and Paul met at a church bazaar in July 1957; George was a school friend of Paul's etc.—the whole story has become a piece of the culture's mythology.16 The "growth" and decay or rise and fall of rock ensembles is one of the most domi-nant myths that rock music tells about itself and that exists in its historiography. Again, the saga of The Beatles is paradigmatic: early driving ambition and a hunger for success (Lennon said they were "the biggest bastards on earth" [87] because they wanted to be more successful than Elvis, while he and McCartney hoped to be the "Goffin and King of England" [Lennon 70]), led to hard work and phenomenal success that was followed by a collapse into mutual recrimina-tion and acrimony (who can forget Lennon's attacks on McCartney both in interviews and in the song "How Do You Sleep"?). The pattern is so fixed as to provide the narrative for countless rock efforts—most notably David Bowie's The Rise and Fall ofZiggy Stardust, but it is also seen in individual songs such as "Shooting Star" by Bad Company and "Into the Great Wide Open" by Tom Petty. Indeed, the narrative of the acrimonious breakup is part and parcel of rock's declared preference for youth ("Hope I die before I get old"17) over the slow drift into old age and the oldies' circuit, an alternative but less spectacular ending to the rise and fall narrative (Bennett 153-8).

The popularity of the organic narrative of the rise and fall of the rock artist is one manifestation of the Romantic ideal of the artist that persists in popular music. Equally potent is the myth of artistic integrity. Promoted by both record companies and the artists themselves, the notion of artistic integrity is vital to the industry's arguments against music piracy, home taping, and the free distribu-tion of music on the internet as well as to the genre's historiography. (Similar industry concerns were raised at one time about radio.) The idea of artistic integrity in rock music, however, has been emphatically challenged both within the industry through increasingly sophisticated recording technologies and with-

16Charles Shaar Murray somewhat scornfully calls it a bedtime story and, like all good stories, "subject to endless embellishment" (339).

17The Who, "My Generation." The sentiment is also echoed in Neil Young's "My My Hey Hey Out of the Blue" ("It's better to burn out than it is to rust") and in the title of Blondie's song, "Die Young Stay Pretty."

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in the culture at large through a revised understanding of "authenticity" in the

current moment. The emergence of postmodernism marks a profound shift in the larger cul-

ture, but its terms are easily mapped onto smaller units. As Jameson suggests, "newer media [such as rock music] recapitulate the evolutionary stages or breaks between realism, modernism, and postmodernism, in a compressed time span" ("Politics of Theory" 104; see also Connor 185). That is, in fiction, for example, we think of E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, to name three, as embodying modernist preoccupations (with subjectivity, with form, etc.), but Salman Rushdie, Peter Ackroyd, and Angela Carter we consider postmodern (self-conscious and self-reflexive, ironic, and skeptical). Yet if we look for it we see this post-modernism in Forster, Ford, and Woolf as well (in the questioning of language's efficacy and the limitations of the novel).18 Indeed, the category of the postmodern itself is so elastic as to make a purely historical definition of the postmodern impossible (if postmodern is after modern, then what is modern?), and so postmodernism often seems to evince itself as a style or as a way of look-ing at the world. In this respect, it becomes possible for one to find postmod-ernist (e.g. Ballard's Crash) and modernist novels (e.g. Vonnegut's Jailbird) in the same decade.19 Lyotard speculates that the postmodern "is not modernism at its end but in its nascent state, and this state is constant" (Lyotard 79). Such a situation undermines the modernist/postmodernist distinction and pushes us either towards over-generalizing fictions to support historicizing categories or to the effacement of aesthetic categories altogether. In pop music we can conceiv-ably see The Beatles as modernist,20 pattern-seeking innovators who consciously built on the past, and Punk as postmodern. But can we also see The Beatles as postmodern? Is Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band self-conscious play with genre and form, the "random cannibalization of all styles of the past" (Storey 151; cf. Jameson, Postmodernism 19) or is it a unified structure offering a partic-ular vision of the English past and employing the common modernist device of

18For evidence of the recessive nature of the postmodern, see the essays in Postmodernism Across the Ages: Essays for a Postmodernity that Wasn't Born Yesterday, ed. Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1993).

1'Postmodernism is not always considered a historical category. Jameson notes that "the term and its various substantives seem . . . to have evolved into various partisan expressions of value, mostly turning on the affirmation or repudiation of this or that vision of pluralism" (Seeds xii).

20Jameson's off-hand remark at the outset of Postmodernism (1) and elsewhere has sparked a minor debate over who is and who isn't postmodern. Connor accepts Jameson's view (161, 185), but Andrew Goodwin offers a dissenting opinion (see Storey 152).

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the persona? Drawing finer distinctions, is "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" an iron-ical postmodern evocation of the pre-war world of the circus?; is "She's Leaving Home" the self-conscious rendering of romance cliche? How far is the distance between "A Day in the Life" and the great modernist poem The Waste Land? Perhaps Paul is modernist and John postmodern? Rock music and postmod-ernism seem to develop as contemporaneous events: does this mean the "pre-fab" group(s) are reflective of the postmodern? (Is "pre-fab" before or "post" fab four?) Again, Jameson's definition of postmodernism as a stage in the devel-opment of industrial capitalism is helpful.

Let's think about it: are The Monkees postmodern? This question begs many more, not the least of which involve questions of intentionality, but in The Monkees' case, whose intentions—the band's, the producers', the music supervi-sor's? What we need to think about is the very construct of the postmodern. If we see postmodernism as a mode characterized by overt self-consciousness, then The Monkees at least in the television version are postmodern (as is Batman, which self-reflexively mirrors its comic book world). We might remember as well that television "is . . . in itself always a representative part of the postmodern scene of simulation, ecstasy and obscenity " (Connor 171). If we see postmod-ernism as characterized by the collapse of metanarratives (such as those govern-ing historiography, the transcendent, originality, and the subject) as Lyotard argues, then The Monkees and the proliferation of "pre-fab" artists are equally postmodern phenomena. All lack "history" and so participate in the historical amnesia that Jameson sees as characteristic of the postmodern: "our entire con-temporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions" ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society" 125).21 In the case of The Monkees, this "historical amnesia" was slyly acknowledged in 1997 when their television special (ABC February 17, 1997) took as its premise the idea that the original show had never been cancelled and that episode 781 was

21 The d i s cont inuous flow o f a perpetual present is m o s t clearly ev inced by M T V (Aufderheide 119-20) . Jon Savage, in 1983, m a d e the same po int about c o n t e m p o r a r y music ' s use o f the past:

The past is being plundered in Pop as elsewhere in order to construct a totality that is seamless, that cannot be broken. It is characteristic of our age that there is little sense of community, of any real sense of history, as "The Present" is all that matters. Who needs yesterday's papers? In re-fashioning the past in our image, in tailoring the past to our own preconceptions, the past is recuperated: instead of being a door out of time, it merely leads to another airless room.

The Past is then turned into the most disposable of consumer commodities, and is thus dismissible: the lessons which it can teach us are thought trivial, are ignored amongst a pile of garbage. (179)

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being presented (Newman). Similarly, these contrived artists reflect the t r iumph of the s imulacrum that Baudrillard recognizes as postmodernism's defining characteristic because "the real is no longer possible" (Simulacra 19).

The defining and primary trait of the pre-fab group is its status as commod-ity. Wholly shaped by commercial interests, it quickly falters when the sustain-ing promotional apparatus is removed. While The Monkees continued to find success with their third record, Headquarters, on which they played their own instruments and performed some of their own songs, their subsequent album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones reflected a growing but not surprising dis-persal within "the band" as members began recording their own songs in sepa-rate sessions with other musicians; on occasion multiple Monkees' recording ses-sions were being held at the same time at different locations. Within months of the series ending in August 1968, the group began to break up as Peter Tork left in December while Michael Nesmith hung on until March 1970. Despite Mickey Dolenz's later claim that The Monkees had more to do with Bonanza than with the Beatles, the present field of comparison does slope towards the music and not television or film.22 The Monkees did briefly outsell The Beatles and they did perform in sold out venues, both in the 1960s and in the 1990s (something, Bruce Newman of TV Guide writes, "Hoss and Little Joe never did"). Playing live, though, has had a surreal quality for Dolenz: "It's like one of the actors on ER actually becoming a doctor" (qtd. in Newman).

The fact is that the line between authenticity and simulation may no longer exist in the postmodern moment. The case of music videos, in which artists lip-synch and mime performances of their songs (as The Monkees did in their show), emphasizes this fact, yet we also recognize that in most cases there is some kind of link between the artist in the video and the song.23 Such a tie might not be validated in the video, whose images may have nothing to do with the song, but external factors—such as radio play, the presence of the track on an album or CD by the performer, and any credits that appear at the video's open-ing and closing—affirm the connection for us despite the apparent anonymity of the video production.24 Similarly, the concert experience has become for many

22Peter Tork voiced this conflict in the 1980s when he acknowledged the truth of Mickey's comments, but added, "At the same time we were the Monkees. If we'd been a group, we would have fought to be a group or we would have broken up as a group" (Ward 322).

23For some of the semiotic implications of lip-synching in video see Aufderheide 122-23. 24See Aufderheide 116 on this point. Music video has evoked considerable critical commen-

tary. E. Ann Kaplan's book is one of the first and still one of the best treatments of the form.

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viewers an experience akin to television. While the demand for concerts express-es "the desire for the visual mark (and proof) of authenticity" (Grossberg 208), concerts are themselves subject to "the Baudrillard effect"; that is, "a concert feels real only to the extent that it matches its TV reproduction" (Frith, "Pick-ing" 124-5).25 In large venues, such as stadiums, giant video screens present oversized images of the artist, whose actual performance is largely invisible to thousands of spectators: literally, and this is doubly true of a Monkees' concert, "signs of the real [are substituted] for the real" (Baudrillard, Simulacra 2). The visual image on the stadium's screens seeks to assure us that the tiny figure on stage is the person we expect her or him to be. Again, the electronic signifier is supported by the presence, albeit small, of the signified. In this sense, the con-cert experience literalizes Saussure's sense of the sign as Signifier over Signified, with the top value being overwhelming. But as the Beatlemania experience demonstrated, compared to the immersion in the sign system, the experience of seeing and hearing the band is largely diminished. The signified no longer mat-ters. Indeed, the very notion that the authority of rock should lie in the aural, in its sound (Grossberg 207), becomes suspect in the pos tmodern moment ; as Michael Coyle and Jon Dolan put it, "for rock audiences seeing is believing; rock plays live largely as spectacle, which is why acoustically horrific venues such as arenas or stadiums are increasingly appropriate" (18). In the case of The Mon-kees, these venues proved advantageous, since poor acoustics concealed the band's limitations as musicians. Nonetheless, early live performances sought to emphasize The Monkees' authenticity in contrast to the fake milieu out of which they emerged. As if to underscore this point, they "leapt through fake speakers on to the stage" (Glenn A. Baker, qtd in Thompson): out of the make-believe world comes the "real" or, rather, the "hyperreal." Baudrillard's theorizing of the "hyperreal of the simulation" is particularly relevant to this context because stadium rock concerts since The Beatles at, say, Shea Stadium, have been an experience in which one's presence at the concert is of more importance than seeing or hearing the band. The Beatles' concerts were characterized by scream-ing that obliterated the sound of the music,26 and, of course, in their case there

"Significantly, concerts by The Monkees in 1986 and 1987 acknowledged this paradox in that the set on stage was constructed so as to look like The Monkees' apartment on the television show. Jokes and routines were also made part of the act (Thompson).

26The Beatles have often remarked on the detrimental effect of the audience's inability to hear the music. See, for instance, comments by Ringo Starr quoted in Hertsgaard 88-9 and the comments that I quoted from John Lennon earlier.

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were no jumbo-trons or oversized video screens to offer images of the perform-ers to distant spectators. As Lennon remarked, "I reckon we could send out four waxwork dummies of ourselves and that would satisfy the crowds" (qtd. in Hertsgaard 89). From Baudrillard's point of view, such a phenomenon is proto-typical of postmodernism wherein both the performer and the spectator become the "terminal[s] of multiple networks" ("Ecstasy" 128). They constitute the hyperreal, a "system of nuclear matrices" that renders the body (or the band) "simply superfluous, basically useless in its extension . . . since [Baudrillard con-tinues] today everything is concentrated in the brain and in genetic codes" (129).27 Immersed in mass experience, the spectator finds a return to the real boring and unsatisfying in relation to the experience of being part of the "hyper-real." Consequently, Baudrillard argues, the hyperreal is "projected into reality, without any metaphor at all, into an absolute space which is also that of simula-tion" (128): the cheering isn't so much for the Beatles on stage as for what the Beatles represent, for their reputation and the cultural and artistic meanings accrued to them. In many ways, they already were "four waxworks," already a simulacra f rom which they could never and can't escape.28 For the spectator, films or, more relevantly to our case here, pop music becomes the matrix within which we live our lives.29 Pop music provides the soundtrack for experience so that "everything seems like a movie," as the Goo Goo Dolls sing in their song, "Iris."

Of course, there is another factor that ties the projected image to the per-former and that is the music (if it can be heard). From a Romantic point of view, live performance offers the only opportunity to "see the actual production of sound, and the emotional work carried in the voice" (Grossberg, We Gotta 208). However, even in the concert setting lip-synching remains a distinct possi-bility and is frequently employed in order to ensure fidelity to the recorded

27It is hard not to be persuaded by Baudrillard's arguments in an age when the ubiquitous pres-ence of the walkman/discman has been supplemented by cell phones and palm pilots. His comments on television are easily verified by anyone who has sat with friends in a bar where a big screen TV hangs broadcasting, often, music television: "the simple presence of the television changes the rest of the habitat into a kind of archaic envelope, a vestige of human relations whose very survival remains perplexing" ("Ecstasy" 129).

2 8How often do the names Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, or John Lennon appear in the media without "ex-Beatle" attached to them? Their quest for the real, for authenticity, finds expression in Lennon's "God"—a song that locates the authentic in the metaphysical.

29 A point repeated in several discussions by Jameson ("Reification" 20), Doctorow ("Stan-dards" 177), and Frith and Home in Art into Pop (5).

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product. Similarly, prerecorded instrumentation and electronically reproduced sound are often as much a part of "live" performance as they were on television shows such as American Bandstand and Soul Train. In these cases, the boundary between authentic performance (itself an oxymoronic concept) and simulation is completely effaced. Technology (in the form of sound amplification systems, television and video projection, electronic recording devices, and the like) facili-tates the conditions of the postmodern musical performance, anticipated in The Monkees' own concerts, wherein the simulacra are taken for the "real" which, in any case, are themselves simulacra.30

The question is—do people care? Are there limits to reproduction beyond which the performer will lose the audience and his or her status as commodity? The case of Milli Vanilli comes to mind as one that answers this question in the affirmative, though not without complications. Milli Vanilli, a German-based singing duo consisting of Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, were stripped in 1990 of the American Music Award (the Grammy) they won for "Best New Artist" on the strength of their Girl You Know it's True album after it was revealed that the members, who did not write their own material or play instruments, did not even sing on their records. Milli Vanilli, even more than The Monkees, was purely an image—a face for the music. As Ted Friedman observes, however, image is not, and music video has confirmed the point, an inconsequential fea-ture of popular music.31 He sees the Milli Vanilli case as tied to a larger "crisis in the shared assumptions about authenticity in popular music." Faced with the challenge of increasingly sophisticated recording techniques "which could filter and modify any voice into a radio-ready instrument," the exploitation of synthe-sizers, and the emergence of remixing and sampling technologies in hip-hop music—all of which call a song's "originality" into quest ion—the recording industry sacrificed Milli Vanilli "to prove the integrity of the rest of their prod-uct" and to reinforce the myth of authenticity (Friedman). Indeed, f rom the industry' point of view, the myth of authenticity, the romantic notion of the

30The sense of reality as image is almost taken for granted in postmodern theorizing: Bau-drillard remarks that "at the limit of reproducibility, the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal" ("from 'Order'" 186), while Terry Eagleton writes disparagingly of postmodern art that "if art no longer reflects life it is not because it seeks to change the world rather than mimic it, but because there is in truth nothing there to be reflected, no reality which is not itself already image, spectacle, simulacrum, gratuitous fiction" (152). Iain Cham-bers concurs, noting that in the "'postmodern' world, the 'artificial', the 'imitation', the 'plastic', are no longer an embarrassment" (199).

3'See Aufderheide on image in the music video 122-24.

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artist 's integrity, is of considerable financial impor tance . And in this context ,

Romant ic not ions of artistic integrity sustain the commodif ica t ion process that

uses nostalgic not ions of art and artistic creation duplicitously in the service of

pu re commercial ism. 3 2

The un ion of art with the commercia l is a lmost a defining feature of post-

m o d e r n culture wherein the b o u n d a r y between the artistic image and the com-

mercial image collapse—as it does in Warhol ' s soup cans for instance.3 3 Such a

collapse is the logical extension of a similar collapse of distinctions between what

used to be thought of as high and low cultures: "high" culture had largely been

identified with serious, "original" work, in the Arnoldian sense, while "low" cul-

ture f o u n d its identity in the popular and in schemes of formulaic repeti t ion.

Rock and p o p music, of course, have always been based in such schemes.

T h e bas ic t h r e e - c h o r d p a t t e r n is t h e f o u n d a t i o n of songs as diverse as "La

Bamba" (Ritchie Valens), "Louie Louie" (The Kinsmen) , "You Really Got Me"

(The Kinks), "No Fun" (The Stooges), and "Blitzkrieg Bop" (The Ramones) 3 4 .

But the p h e n o m e n o n extends beyond formula , echo, allusion, and quota t ion to

embrace a wider field of concern. Jameson makes the point that

we never hear any of the singles produced in [rock, blues, country western, disco] . . . "for the first time"; instead, we live a constant exposure to them in all kinds of different situations, from the steady beat of the car radio through the

32Simon Frith writes that "The crucial struggle for 1960s rock fans was between music as art or folk culture and music as commodity" ("Formalism" 166). Mary Harron has explored the conflict well and cites two moments (San Francisco in 1967 and London in 1977) as of particular importance in the failed struggle of artists to free themselves from their status as commodities. Theodore Gra-cyk's chapter, "Romanticizing Rock Music," in Rhythm and Noise pp. 175-206, has one of the best critiques of Romanticism and rock music: "rock musicians themselves use Dionysian authenticity as a standard for artistic success. But they also use it as a selling point, and many do so consciously. Once Romantic stereotypes are part of their marketing strategies, the line between the real and the artificial is hopelessly muddled" (183).

33Baudrillard notes that "it is crucial to see that the analysis that one could make of objects and their system in the '60s and '70s essentially began with the language of advertising" ("Ecstasy" 133 n. 4).

34I've drawn these examples from Lester Bangs' essay, "Protopunk: The Garage Bands" (357), but repetition in rock music is so common as to be provide fodder for games turning on the idea of "who does this sound like"? In popular music, repetition can take the form of allusion, quotation, or even theft (as in the case of M.C. Hammer's borrowing in "Can't Touch This" from Rick James' "Superfreak," Vanilla Ice's use in "Ice Ice Baby'of Queen's riff from "Under Pressure"; George Harri-son's echoing of "He's So Fine" in "My Sweet Lord"; or Led Zepplin's unacknowledged borrowing from Willie Dixon for "Whole Lotta Love.") In the contemporary moment, artists such as Oasis, Beck, Everclear, and Garbage quote as freely from the rock tradition as Eliot did from the literary tra-dition in The Waste Land to create postmodern pastiche. Gracyk is particularly perceptive on the matter (91-98). See also Jon Savage's essay, "The Age of Plunder" for an earlier, but still relevant analysis of the situation with respect to the use of visual imagery on sleeve art.

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sounds at lunch, or in the work place . . . The passionate attachment one can form to this or that pop single, the rich personal investment of all kinds of pri-vate associations and existential symbolism which is the feature of such attach-ment, are fully as much a function of our own familiarity as of the work itself: the pop single, by means of repetition, insensibly becomes part of the existential fabric of our own lives, so that what we listen to is ourselves . . .Under these cir-cumstances, it would make no sense to try to recover a feeling for the "original" musical text, as it really was, or as it might have been heard "for the first time." ("Reification" 20)

Similarly, E. L. Doc to row writes that songs are woven into the fabric of ou r lives:

"when people say 'our song' they mean they and the song exist as some sort of

generational t ru th . They are met to make a c o m m o n destiny. The song names

them, it rescues them f rom the accident of ahistorical genetic existence. They are

located in cultural t ime" (177). Doctorow gives "s tandards" a spiritual impor -

tance: the Tin Pan Alley songs are " industr ial spiritual p roduc t [s]" (176) tha t

seem, he says, to offer the suggestion of "having been a round all along, and wait-

ing on ly for t he p r o p e r his tor ical m o m e n t in which to reveal [ themselves]"

(177). Doctorow's self-consciously Romant ic approach to early formulaic stan-

dards, like Jameson 's Marxism, shifts the g rounds of authori ty f rom the artist as

creator to the aud i to r as consumer of the song: such a move is o f ten typical,

especially in sociologically oriented discussions of rock's impor tance and mean-

ing that are inf luenced by the Bi rmingham School of Cul tura l Studies.3 5 For

Jameson and other theorists of the pos tmodern such as Baudrillard, author i ty is

never really an issue since it cannot be located. Baudrillard takes his depar ture

f r o m Jameson's posi t ion and sees in the ubiqui tous presence of p o p music, for

example, an excess that he describes as "obscene" ("Ecstasy" 130): " the space of

the FM band is . . . saturated, the stations overlap and mix together (to the poin t

tha t somet imes it n o longer communica te s at all). . . . I fall in to the negative

ecstasy of radio" (131-32). The sheer excess, the fluidity, the pervasive and inva-

sive na ture of the music becomes par t of the hyperreal.

Jameson's point that we can never hear a popular song for the "first t ime"

looks towards the realization of literary theorists that the whole not ion of "origi-

nality" and "intentionali ty" as the basis of aesthetic achievement is suspect. One

reason we don ' t hear the song for the first t ime is that its formulaic status and its

35See, for example, Grossberg's We Gotta Get Out of this Place or Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Methuen, 1979). Grossberg writes, "It is not so much that rock's difference matters, but rather the fact that it matters that defines its difference" (236).

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position within popular culture assure us of our prior familiarity with it, and so pop music has nostalgia built into it. Literary theory recognizes this phenome-non in notions of the intertextual and in what Roland Barthes calls the "deja lu," the already read (S/Z 20). Literary texts in this sense are "always already read" and pop songs are "always already heard."3 6 In such theory the role of the author or artist is radically reduced and the work detached f rom its point of ori-gin to exist, like the popular song heard on the car radio, at work, or in the shop-ping mall, as a free-floating artifact within the culture. In this context, poststruc-tural ist theory part ic ipates in the process of reif ication that characterizes capitalism.37

The history of rock music, as Mary Harron and Theodore Gracyk convinc-ingly demonstrate, has always been self-consciously entwined with commodifica-tion (the very concept of charting sales implicates consumers in the process), and in this respect rock music exemplifies developments within postmodern aesthet-ics. "Revolt" quickly becomes "style," as poet T h o m Gunn wrote of Elvis Presley38, and threatening impulses are bound in an ideological straightjacket with unimaginable speed and so taken in stride: the cycle of inclusion, of incor-pora t ion , taming, commodif ica t ion has accelerated beyond belief (Connor 186).39 The development of groups like The Monkees, Spice Girls, and Sugar Jones only points up the logic of rock itself as an industry. It is no longer, if it ever were, possible to speak of "authentic music in an age of mass media" (Har-ron 175; Gracyk 179). As in the days of Tin Pan Alley, the various music facto-ries of the East and West coasts of the United States, such as those associated with the Brill Building, supplied early rock and roll with a constant stream of hits for a range of artists such as The Drifters, The Chiffons, Little Eva, later The Monkees, and others. If The Monkees strike us as "inauthentic," then what are we to make of The Archies, another of Don Kirshner's creations who, unlike The

36"Popular music is not really about 'being heard', but rather about 'being heard again'; and being heard again and again and again' is what really popular music is really about" (Buchahan).

37"'(T]heoretical discourse' is also to be numbered among the manifestations of postmod-ernism" (Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" 112).

38"Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs / He turns revolt into a style" (10-11). 39Gunn asks the question all rock fans ask in his poem "Elvis Presley": "Whether he poses or is

real, no cat / Bothers to say: the pose held is a stance, / Which, generation of the very chance / It wars on, may be posture for combat" (13-16). The uncertainty dogs rock fans who, recognizing rock's sta-tus as commodity, see its socio-cultural meaning as greater than commerce. Gunn's point about Elvis's pose/stance seems to have been part of The Clash's thinking: their sleeve for "London Calling" directly imitates that of Elvis Presley's first HMV LP (Savage 174).

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Monkees, never made the unreasonable demand of wanting to play their own instruments? As the incomparable Lester Bangs observes, "From fake bands concocted in the studio, it was but one short step to total cartoon groups" (Bangs, "Bubblegum" 453). The sound of The Archies, like that of o ther "bubblegum"4 0 rock groups, is "the basic sound of rock and roll—minus the rage, fear, violence and anomie that runs from Johnny Burnette to Sid Vicious" (Bangs, "Bubblegum" 453). Flagrantly commercial, bubblegum has nonetheless been cited as an influence by artists of no less stature than David Byrne (Talking Heads) (Bangs 452) and Michael Stipe (REM) (Stipe 62). Again, attempts to dis-tinguish "authentic" art f rom commodity falter in the consideration of rock music—if we persist in viewing "authenticity" as a useful category in the discus-sion of what is arguably "the most representative of postmodern cultural forms" (Connor 186).

Our difficulty, though, remains trying to articulate distinctions among, say, Milli Vanilli, The Monkees, The Beatles, and The Clash, and in this task much of postmodern theory seems woefully inadequate because postmodernism cannot defend or even employ such terms as authentic/inauthentic, art /commodity, originality/ formulaic repetition.41 Indeed, since Eliot's The Waste Land, if not before, a tolerance for bricolage has come to dominate both the producers and the consumers of cultural artifacts. Conventions harden into genres, "and gen-res," Doctorow writes, "we call markets" (178). Postmodernism has, from the romantic point of view, meant the impoverishment of much of contemporary art including rock music.

It is, perhaps, a recognition of this situation that has pushed musicians and the recording industry towards a re-evaluation of the authentic. Consequently, we can adapt Eliot's insight about poetry, "Every revolution in rock music is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be, a return to common speech"42; that is, rock's various "revolutions" have been characterized as returns to "the primal energies and origins of rock music" (Connor 185), but equally important here is the sense of a return to common speech, to the vernacular. In rock

40"Bubblegum" as a term derives synecdochally from the dominant age of the music's fans. 41Lyotard's suggestion that profit-making be our criteria hardly suffices: "Artists, gallery own-

ers, critics, and public wallow together in 'anything goes,' and the epoch is one of slackening. But this realism of the 'anything goes' is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield" (76).

42Adapted from T. S. Eliot's essay, "The Music of Poetry" (111).

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music, this gesture has often taken the form of a return to folk or country music, which, though as formulaic as urban forms such as rap and hip-hop, positions itself through its identification with rural life as the "natural" voice of the com-mon people. The Byrds, for example, traveled to Nashville to write and record their album Sweethearts of the Rodeo in 1968, while others such as Don Henley, Glenn Frey, Linda Ronstadt and Neil Young explored a folk-country sound in California. Michael Nesmith, who had always been most bothered by The Mon-kees' ambiguous status as a group, also went to Nashville in 1968, and we can easily read his journey as another step in his futile efforts to authentic the band.

The return to rock and roll roots, however, manifested itself in several other ways as well. The Beatles and other British artists re-energized moribund Ameri-can pop-rock music in the early 1960s by bringing to rock their own readings of music derived from their study of formative American recording artists such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Carl Perkins, and of course Elvis Presley. Compara-bly, the punk explosion in the mid-1970s equally was a return to first principles after the growth and popularity of "art rock," "glam rock," and "stadium rock" which were characterized by pretension and an overblown sense of artistry (in Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes, or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, for example). Punk turned its back on the music business by "denouncing] multi-national record companies," inspiring the growth of independent, "indie," record labels, and by "demysify[ing] the production process" (Frith, "Formalism" 168). While punk was not free of its own marketing strategies (Malcolm McLaren bluntly stated in 1987: "To be honest with you, at the time the group [The Sex Pistols] was only a means to sell more clothes—the reason I got involved with the Sex Pistols was to sell more trousers" [qtd. in Harron 198]43), its "Do It Yourself' aesthetic pointed to a genuine desire to make rock something more than a commodity. Such a goal has proven to be a difficult if not an unrealizable one: punk, too, quickly became commodified as "new wave" (surely the movement from the safety pin to body piercing attests to capitalism's ability to commodify anything), while 1996's reunion of The Sex Pistols quickly discredited even punk's apostles' ability to resist commodification: punk nostalgia, as Robert Cristgau of the Village Voice observed, is "a grotesque oxymoron" (qtd. in Sloop). The not ion of "un-plugged" performances also marks, on the surface, a bid for artistic authenticity,

43Is it significant that the Sex Pistols covered the Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone"? (Incidentally, Sid Vicious did not play on the Pistol's studio recordings [Gracyk 179].) Before one answers yes, consider that REM used to sing it too (Stipe 62).

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but wrapped in the mantle of MTV, who with postmodern efficiency have totally obliterated distinctions between artistic performance and commercial commodi-ty, "Unplugged" takes its place as another product to be sold as a video and as an album.4 4 A final mythical location for artistic credibility lies in independent record labels, but the reality is that indie companies have been swallowed by larger corporations while their successful artists quickly slip into the commercial maw of multinational recording companies. Escape is impossible except, if we can believe some of the comment on Kurt Cobain's suicide, through death.45

Eliot's point about poetic revolutions being a return to "common speech" reminds us of the importance of voice as one of the usual markers of artistic authenticity.46 This is the direction of punk's DIY emphasis, where musician-ship and the ability to sing don't matter, and of the "unplugged" performance. It is also the distinguishing feature in the Milli Vanilli case, though, as Friedman points out, someone still sang the Milli Vanilli songs, and we are quite used to recognizing art forms such as movies as collaborative products (we know, for instance, that the stars do not perform their own stunts, so can we not view the Milli Vanilli product in the same way?). To locate authority in the voice, in the human utterance, may be a nostalgic and Utopian, even atavistic (not to say Romantic), gesture hearkening back to the days of oral cultures, but it may be all we have to go on in these days when the oral culture of the folk song has long been superceded not just by written culture but by the culture of the image. As Benjamin foresaw, the release into the image may be liberating,47 but it also

44Baudrillard comments: "Ideology only responds to a corruption of reality through signs; sim-ulation corresponds to a short circuit of reality and its duplication through signs. It is always the goal of ideological analysis to restore the objective process, it is always a false problem to wish to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum" (Simulacra 27).

45"Punk had gone corporate, and corporate rock sucked. Kurt Cobain knew it sucked, knew he'd been sucked in, and hated himself for being there" (Coyle and Dolan 21). Neil Nehring discuss-es Cobain's death in these terms as well in his chapter, "Kurt Cobain Died for Your Sins," in Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger is an Energy (79-104, especially 88-100).

46For an interesting discussion of voice in rock music, see Dave Laing's essay, "Listening to Punk."

47See comments by Margaret Morse in Aufderheide 112, and by Grossberg ("Another" 477ff.). Angela McRobbie offers a compelling argument for the liberating qualities of the postmodern in pop-rock music when she suggests that the intertextual play of quotations, evident in sampling and other forms of echoing, are not symptoms of aesthetic exhaustion but the expression of marginal classes (blacks, working classes) who attempt to communicate, as Philomel did, with the materials and images at hand in a culture that has largely denied them a voice (Storey 153). Of course, one might also say that rock music has always been about providing a voice for the disenfranchised and powerless, namely adolescents: "Rock worked by offering youth places within the transitional spaces of youth where they could find some sense of identification and belonging, where they could invest and empower themselves in specific ways" (Grossberg, We Gotta 205).

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brings the loss of aura, which along with voice, may give us the tools we need to distinguish Milli Vanilli from The Archies f rom The Monkees f rom The Beatles. Just as we might see the Milli Vanilli scandal as crucial to preserving the myth of authenticity in the recording industry, so might we see the continuing interest in the biographical histories of, say, The Beatles. All those Beatle books contribute to the aura of the group and our sense of The Beatles as "authentic"; their story is authored. Of course, the whole idea of biography, like any form of history, is also subject to the questioning of postmodern and poststructuralist theorists, but lived experience—synecdochally reflected in the voice (the singing, writing, play-ing of one's own songs)—can never be discounted by those critics interested in preserving notions of truth and knowledge. As "the privileged . . . site of differ-ence" (Barthes, "Music" 279), voice has traditionally possessed authority; it is the product of the breath, of the pneuma, "and any exclusive art of the breath is like-ly to be a secretly mystical art (a mysticism reduced to the demands of the long-played record)" (Barthes, "Grain" 271). Such mysticism is implicit in the notion of "soul" music (though "soul" too quickly became a label for blues and gospel inflected stylings in black popular music). The problem, of course, remains essentially the same one of trying to distinguish an authenticity in voice from the postured stylings of the performer. Barthes suggests in "The Grain of the Voice" and in "Music, Voice, Language" that he can do it, but his criteria remains obscurely subjective and involves an almost intuitive awareness of "a lapse, something non-spoken which designates i tself ' ("Music" 279) in the perfor-mance—something "not flattened out into perfection" ("Grain" 277). For other observers, any utterance made in the commercial context, in the context of per-formance, is perceived as an act— "As I walk forward, I point out my mask"— and is drained of authenticity; hence, Courtney Love's anguished expressions of grief over the death of her husband were read as yet another attempt to sell a record album called, with prophetic insight, Live Through This (Coyle and Dolan 21). In this context, Grossberg is right to recognize "authenticity" as just anoth-er style (234).

Examining the relationship between rock music and postmodernism expos-es several of the contradictions within rock while also reflecting shortcomings in postmodern theory that rejects notions of history and authenticity. There can be no denying that commodity has its own pleasures, and there is no shame in enjoying "Pleasant Valley Sunday" or "Daydream Believer"; but rock's claims for itself as art must surely be viewed with skepticism. However much we may

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desire the means to recover a sense of the "authentic" in rock (and Barthes's comments may serve as a guide), we may have to resign ourselves to the fact that such determinations may ultimately rely too heavily on an individualist meta-physic that precludes consensual agreement. Consequently, in the absence of any convincing theory that can renew our sense of the importance of the past, of an aura, and that can reconstitute the power of human articulation through an aesthetics of voice freed from Romanticism's limitations, the form collapses into the jingle, the accompanying soundtrack to the purchase of a new car.

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