With its roots in an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project that studied older women in popular media, Rock On narrows the broader agenda of the project in order to focus on popular music. By utilising age and aging as theoretical tools, it aims to extend existing discourses around the representation and negotiation of identity markers such as gender, sexuality and ethnicity, in popular music. The contributions come from diverse disciplinary spaces and practices: media and gender studies, music journalism, broadcasting, popular music studies, ageing/memory studies and biographical writing, with the focus on representation, self-representation and negotiation of age by British, American and Latina women music performers.
The collection consists of eight chapters, equally distributed across two parts. With the exception of Chapter 2, each chapter focuses on a single artist. Part I ‘Renewal, Recycling and Renegotiation’ incorporates cases studies of Madonna, Shirley Bassey/Petula Clark, Celia Cruz and Grace Jones, while Part II ‘It's Not Over …’ examines the phenomenon of ‘mom rock’, media coverage and representation of the premature death of Kristen Pfaff, post-riot grrrl Courtney Love, and analysis of several contemporary Madonna music videos. The editors' introduction, outlining the key theoretical frameworks, methodologies and themes is particularly useful in situating the book within the emerging field of ‘ageing studies’ while outlining the scope for Arts and Humanities' contribution to the examination of age through a sociocultural lens.
O'Brien's opening chapter traces and analyses Madonna's image and persona transformation from ‘the maiden’ via ‘the mother’ to ‘the crone’, mapping it upon her musical output. Following Madonna's foray into a more avant-garde terrain around the time of her Drowned World tour, O'Brien suggests that such space could have more readily accommodated Madonna's aging body. However, Madonna's ‘strategy’ of body discipline through health and exercise regimes in order to ‘pass’ as a younger woman exposes the cultural prominence of the ideology of ‘californication’, where youthfulness and beauty are aligned with righteousness and success. Additionally, her attempts to connect with younger fans through collaborations with ‘trendy’ producers and younger artists, coupled with reconfigurations of her public (and business) self in branching out into non-musical territory, signify the necessity of ‘diversification’ in order to stay on top in an industry where the majority of female performers arguably have ‘the five year shelf-life’ (Reddington Reference Reddington2007, p. 185).
In the final chapter of the collection, Watson and Railton expand on the themes identified by O'Brien, by analysing the representational strategies employed in Madonna's recent music videos. Their analysis incorporates ‘Madonna's Feminist Rebellion Version 1.0’, juxtaposing Madonna as a feminist role model with Madonna as a cultural tourist, and ‘Madonna's Feminist Rebellion Version 2.0’, consisting of her attempts to reconceptualise, negotiate and confront the ageing process through narrative, performative, filming, lighting and editing strategies employed in her recent videos. What connects the two ‘versions’ is ‘Madonna-ness’ – achieved through consistent employment of performative practices, and resulting in work that is distinctly ‘Madonnaesque’. Such a strategy of ‘doing’ identity allows Madonna to disrupt the age binary, occupying two spaces simultaneously: ageing private body and ageless professional (performing) body, thus ensuring her artistic longevity.
The theme of musical career longevity is pertinent in Jennings's chapter focusing on the age-related performance strategies of Shirley Bassey and Petula Clark, through a close comparative reading of BBC2's 2009 broadcast of Bassey's Electric Prom and Clark's live 2008 performance at Cheltenham Town Hall. Bassey's divadom and ‘feminist camp’ are contrasted with Clark's ordinariness and misguided attempts at the employment of ‘heterosexual camp’, Bassey's contemporariness and freshness with Clark's nostalgic forays into the 1960s, Bassey's management of biological/external signs of ageing through bodily excess, extravagance and exposure with Clark's covering up. Professionalism, well-managed voices and an ethic of hard work are ‘strategies’ that the two performers share. They are recognised and appreciated by their audiences, thus continuing to ensure their ongoing approbation and following.
In her case study of Celia Cruz's 60-year-long career, Poey also examines longevity, which in the case of Cruz is achieved through ‘a counterpoint between tradition and change’ (p. 54). Cruz is recognised for challenging both gender and race barriers in Salsa, the latter achieved through the internationalisation of Cuban music (itself transcultural and syncretic). Never sexualised as a performer, and not being ‘beautiful in a conventional sense’ (p. 59), allowed Cruz to negotiate the ageing process in a manner where the focus remained on her talent, rather than shifting to her biologically ageing body. In her employment of excess, through her flamboyant wardrobe and eccentric wigs, Cruz exposed age as a cultural construct. Furthermore, she negotiated change and cultural trends by attempting to remain musically current, for instance by incorporating elements of Reggaeton in her repertoire when she was in her late 70s, as well as through collaborations with younger artists.
Intersections of ethnicity, gender and age inform Gardner's analysis of broadcast press and blog responses to Grace Jones's performance at Meltdown 2008. Jones's iconic status in 1980s popular culture stemmed from her androgyny, her unique vocal style, her association with the hip crowd of Studio 54 and her ‘work of art’ status. As such, Jones had already destabilised many of the clichés of race, gender, body and sexuality, and by reading the discourses surrounding Jones's albeit brief reappearance in the public eye, Gardner seeks to establish if Jones is beyond the reach of ‘aged gaze’. She suggests that the language used in the mainstream coverage of Jones's re-emergence relied on ‘othering’ in the following ways: by assigning a variety of non-human qualities to Jones's aged yet ageless body (‘cyborg’, ‘sculpture’), in making references to animals and animal parts (‘old bird’, ‘hind quarters’) and through expressions of astonishment and surprise (Jones as ‘“awe” ful artefact’) due to defying ‘white expectations of ageing’ (p. 73). Gardner traces far fewer responses to Jones's reappearance in the Black UK press, and those encountered tend to focus on Jones's ‘subversive presence’, the black femininity and the ways in which she contributes to the heritage of black music, rather than on stereotypes associated with the body, femininity and age.
As acknowledged by the editors, Part II does not engage with age and ageing in the direct manner of the articles featured in Part I, instead focusing on the way the artists in question ‘negotiate with and also deny the absence of youth’ (p. 9). Coates' article discusses the emergence and marginalisation of ‘mom rock’, suggesting that the participants in this white, middle-class, suburban pursuit are united by reproductive rather than unifying sound/genre status and are thus seen as a fad rather than a potentially subversive cultural phenomenon. She contrasts it with ‘kindie rock’ and ‘family band’, as ‘genres’ given far greater credibility. In examining the representation of ‘mom rock’ in the media, Coates exposes the tension between mothering and rocking, pointing out that the coverage of the phenomenon tends to appear in lifestyle, rather than arts sections of the press, as well as featuring on television programmes targeting female viewers such as NBC's Today and CBS's Good Morning America. Such placement and coverage imply a lifestyle choice, trend and fashion, without the potential to ‘make cultural noise’ (p. 99), while self-parody by the performers coupled with a limited thematic repertoire (e.g. the domestic sphere) does not give it a wide enough appeal for the music industry to take any real interest.
Hearsum's and Strong's contributions are united by their references to femininity, grunge music and judgments about the lifestyle choices of Kristen Pfaff and Courtney Love, who at one time, prior to Pfaff's premature death at the age of 27, recorded and performed together as part of Love's band Hole. In conjunction with the broader issue of representation of ‘a gendered musical life’ (p. 103) Hearsum focuses on coverage of Pfaff's death, contrasting it with media representation of Kurt Cobain's suicide, which occurred a few months earlier. With a few exceptions, the coverage of Pfaff's death consistently tended to incorporate references to either Cobain, the grunge scene or Love. Where Pfaff has been addressed more directly, her drug taking and lifestyle choices, rather than her musicianship, were foregrounded, thus turning her into a cautionary tale. Furthermore, the article discusses the conventions, ethics and politics of obituary writing, as well as questioning the mediation of grief, public mourning and memory; ultimately calling for a greater degree of social responsibility and professionalism in death mediation, achieved through ‘thoughtful journalism’ (p. 116). While informative and relevant in its own right, Hearsum's contribution is only loosely connected to the overarching arguments of the collection, and only by the notion of ‘frozenness in age’ due to death.
By focusing on media representations of the ageing, post-riot grrrl Courtney Love, Strong builds upon a number of earlier threads about the performer's non-conformity to the existing scripts of femininity. Examining the period between May and July 2010, which coincided with the release of Hole's album Nobody's Daughter, their European and UK tours as well as Love's 46th birthday, Strong utilises Google Alerts to collect data through the daily digest of stories from both professional, journalistic channels and audiences (personal blogs, social media, etc.). Additionally, Strong examines Love's self-representation through Twitter and particularly the ‘What Courtney Wore Today’ website, set up by Love to portray a more sophisticated, grown-up look and identity, achieved through the embracement and endorsement of designer labels and consumerism, standing in stark opposition to her grunge-era politics of rebellion. The article extends to broader issues of authenticity, retro nostalgia, gender and ageing – intertwined with (self-)representation and the negotiation of identities by both artists and their audiences.
Timely and pertinent, the collection successfully opens up a space where the ageing female body traverses musical discourses of identity and subjectivity, always and already marked by gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Although the remit of the collection excluded a more direct examination of fans and audiences (central to writing on age and popular music elsewhere, e.g. Bennett Reference Bennett2006; Hodkinson Reference Hodkinson2011), where incorporated such an approach provided a useful platform for thinking about negotiated, interactional narratives of ageing in the public eye. Heavily reliant on textual analysis, as well as focused on the performing bodies and identities of well-known women artists, the collection would have benefited from both further incorporation of ‘con-textual’ approaches such as ethnography, an examination of negotiation of gender and age by lesser known, ‘hidden’ female performers as well as those occupying more alternative and experimental musical spaces.
