Lip-Synching
Cultural studies academic Phil Auslander contends that “the rock myth” (whatever that is) has lost its currency: “changes in rock culture over the last ten or more years suggest that the values championed by rock ideology may have lost their hold”.
According to Auslander, the watershed was the 1990 Milli Vanilli scandal, in which the Grammy award for Best New Artist was rescinded when it was revealed that the band not only lip-synched during performances, but that they had not even provided the vocals for the original recording. Auslander points out that most of the complaints about this did not come from the fans:
Milli Vanilli’s young audience was not upset at their lip-synching. This is perfectly understandable in terms of the ideological distinction between rock and pop. Milli Vanilli was not a rock group; it was a pop dance group whose audience would not be expected to be concerned about authenticity. Rather, it was the fan’s parents and parental surrogates (such as the representatives who called for legislation and the attorneys who filed consumer fraud suits) who were disturbed.
He continues that it was this indifference to the concerns of authenticity that marked the scandal as a crisis that threatened the basis of rock ideology: “the arrival of a new era of music performance in which the visual evidence of performance would have no relation to the production of the sound”. Liveness has been seen to have an authenticating function in popular (particularly rock) music, demonstrating that the band can reproduce the sound of the recording, and thereby reassure fans that the sound is due to their musicianship, not to studio trickery.
For Auslander, the rise of the video clip has seen the end of this authenticating function.
Or not. From today’s ABC online news:
China plans to punish singers who lip-synch for “cheating the public,” the Ministry of Culture says.
A draft set of rules for commercial performances published on its website stipulates that artistes must not “use pre-recorded songs or music to replace live singing or instrument playing” to “cheat the public.”
Those who are caught in the act will be punished, the rules say, without specifying what the penalties will be.
Your Comments
jason writes:
About time too. Let the punishment fit the lip-synching crime. And lets get to the bottom of this “Veronicas” business while we’re at it.
Posted: 14 11 2008 - 10:50 | Permanent link to this comment
Wendy writes:
An interesting program on SBS last Friday followed the story ofTara Morice and her “biggest fan” Mildred – a Florida retiree who has turned lip-synching classic broadway and hollywood songs into an art form that draws huge crowds to her retirement home annual concert. Watching her “belt out” an Ethel Merman number was quite an unusual viewing experience….because it really looked like she was singing even though we were clearly aware she wasn’t. So perhaps if the pretence is acknowledged up front then there is no problem? not sure?
Posted: 14 11 2008 - 11:27 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
Jason, that’s a bit harsh :-)
I think the point that Auslander makes is that the lawyers who sued Milli Vanilli are (as, I guess, are the Chinese government) making a category error: lip-synching is an affont to the rock-myth, but Milli Vanilli, the little girl who (didn’t) sing at the Olympics, Mildred, and the Veronicas aren’t party to the rock-myth.
Pop, dance music, mass cultural celebrations, and retirement-home entertainment (surprisingly, I haven’t previously mentioned this genre in my thesis) are subject to a different logic where the necessity for “liveness” is irrelevant.
A large chunk of my thesis is examining this claim, and finding counter-examples where people who, according to Auslander, Grossberg, and others, shouldn’t care about the authenticity of the performance, but do.
Posted: 14 11 2008 - 12:17 | Permanent link to this comment
Wendy writes:
“retirement home entertainment”: maybe there’s a whole world of cultural practices out there waiting for someone write a thesis!
:)
Posted: 14 11 2008 - 14:45 | Permanent link to this comment
Phil Auslander writes:
Greetings!
I’m glad to see these issues consider to be the subject of lively discussion.
I’m guessing that John Gunders drew on the first (1999) edition of my book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture in his comments.
In the second edition, which came out early this year, I expanded the discussion a little by comparing and contrasting the Milli Vanilli “scandal” with the later flap over Ashlee Simpson’s lip-synching on SNL. One of the points I try to make that seems relevant to John’s project (though he may disagree with it) is that the response to Ashlee Simpson shows, “not only does the particular relationship between liveness and authenticity defined within rock ideology remain the standard for assessing those matters in rock, the ideology has expanded its hegemony to include forms of pop music against which rock previously defined itself” (p. 127 of the 2nd edition).
Bests,
Phil Auslander
Posted: 17 11 2008 - 02:25 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
Hi Phil
Dammit! Couldn’t you have waited until I finished my thesis before you published the 2nd edition ;-)
The point you make about Ashlee Simpson is exactly what I’ve been arguing in this section of the thesis (and elsewhere): the rock myth has colonised areas of popular music that we would never had expected in 1999, to the point that I can identify (thinly veiled) references to authenticity in the dance-scene street press and in magazines dealing with electronic music.
Larry may have been correct in the mid-1990s that “the ideology of authenticity is becoming irrelevant”, but in 2008, it is alive and well.
Thanks for your comment: I’ll get onto our library and tell to hurry up with the second edition of Liveness (still on order, apparently!)
Posted: 17 11 2008 - 09:34 | Permanent link to this comment