Fandom, Image and Authenticity is part of Palgrave's new Pop Music, Culture and Identity catalogue, an interdisciplinary book series aiming to discuss the longevity of popular music, in part, as a meeting point between celebrity and heritage. The theme of this addition to the collection can be seen in its punning by-line: Joy Devotion and the Second Lives of Kurt Cobain and Ian Curtis. After a career in music industry marketing, its author Otter Bickerdike received a PhD in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths' College at the University of London. Unlike most other titles in the field, her book manages smoothly to combine attention to production, marketing and audience in roughly equal measure. Fandom Image, and Authenticity aims to “provide a rounded commentary on the theme of commodified death cult music fandom.” (p. 13) By examining commercial culture, generational memory, media representation and personal pilgrimage, it traces ways in which various social interests have enshrined the memories of a prominent pair of late twentieth century indierock icons.

Fandom, Image and Authenticity's moves forward by stealth. An opening discussion of theoretical frameworks is followed by attention to tribute acts, romanticism, ‘sanctification’, branding, generational memory, documentaries and dark tourism. At first sight, Otter Bickerdike's volume seems repetitive, circling through material to underscore different aspects of what is, overall, one central position. The argument starts by saying that stars, in death, have their life stories reformulated by a self-referential circus of media spectacles. Their images gradually become simplified and shaped for hagiography and to make them “investable enterprises” (sic, p. 16). The author explains that “personal attachments to dead stars… have been made easier, faster and more immediate through technology – while becoming further and more quickly alienated from the original text created by the individuals through the very same mediations.” (p. 3) Mythologization supposedly creates a kind of cookiecutter effect which relegates any aspects of the artist's personality and life beyond the pre-conceived template (p. 57). In the case of Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, however, the process has been especially catastrophic. Not only does the “literal transformation from human to handbag” (p. 42) make these dead heroes available only through their brands, but for Otter Bickerdike it also contradicts Curtis and Cobain's own, deeply held, oppositional beliefs. Ian Curtis's image has been used, for example, to brand Converse trainers and MP3 players – products that he would hardly have endorsed in his own short lifetime (p. 77). For Otter Bickerdike only horror can follow: pilgrimages allow alienated fans to feel closer despite, “The stories, the grisly bits attached to the locations” (p. 129).

Fandom, Image and Authenticity's argument depends on an ontological separation between the celebrity as person and as image. At one point the book laments: “The stencil underscores the capital invested in in the Curtis image and ideology, NOT Curtis the man.” (p. 26) If such reductive positions seem familiar it is because the theoretical spine of Otter Bickerdike's study comes from the work of mass culture theorists like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Fandom, Image and Authenticity contains thinking similar to the scholarship that defined debates on commercial music long ago. While the author's ability to combine a broadly ethnographic and auto-ethnographic approach with such cultural theory is useful, unfortunately the book's polemical approach has significant limitations.

In its unrelenting attack on commercial mechanisms and myopic audiences, Fandom, Image and Authenticity wilfully ignores the complexities of popular music culture. It points out reductive processes happening through market mechanisms, but does not seem to note that commercial forces can also bring out human creativity or bring information to light. It suggests that branding can silence or subvert celebrity voices, but does not talk about how those voices are organized through commodification in the first place – frequently in ways that express particular kinds of social opposition. Fandom, Image and Authenticity also forgets that stars themselves can play upon stereotypical notions of fandom. Kurt Cobain, for instance, deliberately used the idea of his fans as an ignorant mass to propagate his own legend.Footnote ¹

Otter Bickerdike's reworking of mass culture critique leaves Fandom, Image and Authenticity with a narrow model of fandom and fan behaviour. It wants to reduce fans to dreamers, people who have been fossilized during their first encounter with an admired artist and are only able to accept simplified, sanitized and fictional versions of their heroes. One of the things that characterizes Otter Bickerdike's book is its almost entire lack of engagement with counter-arguments, and tendency to skip over the last few decades of popular music studies or cultural studies. For example, although the book explores the DIY ethos of punk and Joy Division fandom in the chapter on tourism, there is no substantive discussion of work from subcultural studies or popular music studies on authenticity, punk, heritage, or related topics. Equally there is no sustained engagement with existing work in fan studies; the last two decades of scholarship have made little impact. While this might be defended as a methodological and ethical choice, the lack of critical engagement with other viewpoints significantly limits Fandom, Image and Authenticity's scope and usefulness. In Otter Bikerdike's model, fans are only ever alienated consumers, simplifiers, sanctifiers, and dark tourists. It is not just that they appear to lack agency; they also seem to blame for the failure of their heroes' missions. By so narrowly perceiving their role, Otter Bickerdike's approach unproductively confuses a critique of capitalism with a critique of fandom. There no sense that fandom might be a socially and personally productive pursuit. The book's oversight is most visible when Otter Bickerdike points out, for example, that anyone who began their interest in Ian Curtis by seeing the biopic Control (Corbijn, 2007) is basing his or her fandom on a fiction, not a connection with the ‘real’ musician. Otter Bickerdike gives as a case example the fandom of 19 year old Sarah Edington, who has Joy Division tattoos and visits Curtis' grave in Macclesfield cemetery: “Sarah's fandom revolves around the romanticized ideal of authenticity represented on celluloid – a pretend Curtis and Joy Division.” (p. 25) Quite apart from the ethical dilemmas raised by this unsympathetic portrayal of a research subject, there is no sense that Sarah's personal connection with Curtis might result in her fandom being a kind of lifelong interview in which her changing knowledge and life experience enable shifts of perspective. There is little indication of the possibility that Sarah might be continually developing her understanding of Ian Curtis as something she recognizes is provisional, since – as we all know – Curtis remains only partially available through a range of paratexts. Sarah's fandom cannot be seen a source of personal inspiration or emotional boost, because, for Otter Bickerdike, it is the result of a betrayal created by buying into a lie.

Fandom, Image and Authenticity offers a lively portrait of the cultural legacies of two troubled icons. Like the work of her intellectual forebears in the Frankfurt School, her hypotheses represent cautionary interventions in the debate on commodity culture. However, when Adorno dismissed fans, he did so from a starting point that said that all capitalist society could offer was versions of ‘damaged life.’ Fandom, Image and Authenticity, in contrast, lacks the big picture critique to provide a contextual framework for its interpretation. Ethical and methodological refinement required to examine how fans actually think and behave in detail is also missing. One reason for the book's approach becomes clear when one examines its author's motives:

On the next page Otter Bickerdike adds that she saw the need to think about some “troubling aspects of this business” (p. 12). The way in which her book concludes is interesting in this respect. Successfully self-deprogrammed, Otter Bickerdike writes that she has disvested herself of attachment to capitalist brands that have little to do with the actual people behind them (170). At Event Tech Lab's September Open Office meeting, however, on Google campus in London, 2015, Otter Bickerdike – billed as a world authority on fandom – gave a business talk called ‘How to Turn a One Time User into a Dedicated Fan.’ Rather than see such moments of outreach as disingenuous, it might be charitable to consider how they reflect the sense of utter ambivalence that runs through her book. Fandom, Image and Authenticity concludes by describing its author's visit to an almost empty Viretta Park, a pilgrimage site for Cobain fans. It is here that she is confronted by what seems to be a greater horror than all those described so far. Despite Kurt Cobain's strong sense of integrity and desire for social justice, and despite the legendary reputation of Nirvana, there is a chance that, in the long run, he might actually be forgotten.