Access All Eras: Book Review
Homan, Shane (ed), Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture, Open University Press, Maidenhead, 2006. Publisher’s website
As Shane Homan says in his introduction to this fascinating collection of essays, “the tribute act has received little critical attention in popular music or cultural studies” (2) and attributes this to the suspicion with which the “inauthentic” is held within the industry as well as within the academy. A specialist subset of cover bands, tribute acts are those bands who “exclusively perform the recordings of one band or artist, and may even concentrate on a specific period of the artist/group” (5). This is the first collection of essays to deal exclusively with the tribute phenomena, despite the format gaining significantly in popularity (if not respect) since tribute bands first started appearing in the early 1980s, and connected no doubt to the surprising paucity of publications dealing with “pop” as opposed to “rock” music (again, that issue of “authenticity”). This collection deliberately steers a path between the rejection of tribute acts as merely formulaic mimicry, and a postmodern celebration of simulacra, and instead “seeks to understand contemporary thinking about pop and rock history as it is performed on a nightly, global basis” (14).
The 14 essays in this collection cover a broad range of issues and themes, from discussions of postmodern pastiche and parody, through analyses of the fans’ attitudes to tribute acts and their place in the global economy of popular music, to discussions of the way in which tribute acts challenge the dominant rock discourses of originality and stardom.
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