This thesis identifies the emerging conventions of rock music liveness in the late-1960s and early-1970s, and discusses them across media (records, film and television), to argue that these modes of representation were informed by key changes in rock music culture of the period. Using a cross-media, historical approach, supported by textual and contextual analysis, the thesis aims to move beyond discussions of liveness as myth, focusing instead on the ways in which it is constructed. To this end, the work analyses how producers navigated these attitude shifts and negotiated the specificities of each medium to convey liveness in a way that appealed to both rock fans and music critics. The work moreover identifies how this process established conventions of representing rock music liveness that continue to this day. The thesis is structured in four chapters. The first of these identifies the key shifts in rock music culture (and associated liveness) in the late-1960s, setting the scene for the next three chapters, which detail how these shifts were articulated in different media. Through this approach, the thesis provides a comprehensive view of the meanings of liveness in rock music cultures, highlighting its historical and contemporaneous centrality and thus adding to debates around popular music and liveness.

This thesis is a feminist enquiry into the relationship between gender, embodiment and voice in recorded popular music post-1990. In particular, the study focuses on the term ‘embodiment’ and defines this term in a way that moves forward from a simple understanding of representing the body in music. The expression of embodied subjectivity through the voice is crucial to this interpretation, and therefore is the central concern of this thesis. I describe this relationship between embodiment and voice in recorded music as phono-somatic. From the Greek, ‘phono’ suggests not only voice and sound, but also the process of recording itself. ‘Soma’ is the Greek for body. By connecting the two, phono-somatic as a term highlights the interplay between body and voice through the recorded medium. Central to the analysis of phono-somatics is an exploration of the concept of ‘the feminine’. The 1990s saw a new kind of female artist emerge, writing songs that focused on intimate topics of sexuality, gender and the body in an explicit, direct way. This study looks at the work of three artists – PJ Harvey, Björk and Tori Amos – who make challenges to dominant conceptions of gender and sexuality and looks at how they use phono-somatic strategies in their work. The thesis explores three key areas: feminine vocality and pleasure, embodied trauma and maternal bodies. It analyses the ways in which these women performers use an embodied language in their musical practices, of what this language is made, and of what it allows them to speak. Through the analysis, this study demonstrates that phono-somatic practices are used to move past representation, into embodied experience whereby norms around gender and sexuality can be challenged.

Through practices of anonymity electronic music culture has advanced a critique of the institution of star personality in pop music. This study investigates how academic research can learn from such pop music-related critical practices. As it becomes an object of academic knowledge, the notoriously anti-representational electronic music culture calls for an experimental research methodology. This performance ethnography experiments, in the tradition of activist and performative anthropology, with research practice as performance. Resisting the tendency to objectify culture as a factual research object, this study explores the processuality and performativity of cultural research matter: instead of substantial, post-personal anonymity states, the practice of fabricating anonymity in electronic pop music (in discourse and sound) is its starting point. From there, it focuses on anonymity performances – institution-critical practices of star personality that operate within the discursive and media institutions of pop music. Adopting a symmetrical methodology, two personality-critical projects from the field of electronic pop music are addressed as laboratory cases and consulted for their tactical operations. Their anonymity performance practices – tactical persona performance, fake or collaborative imagination of a musical persona – take the form of immanent and particulate ‘critical practice’ (Butler, Foucault). Rather than distancing themselves from their ‘object’ of critique, these laboratory cases engage in concrete, affirmative or self-critical performances of pop stardom. Their resistance to the frameworks of identification and discursivity in pop both engages with and corrodes the epistemic-constitutional level of the field of pop music. How can researchers learn from such musico-artistic knowledge practices? Guided by its laboratory cases, this study proceeds from a detached reading of an electronic pop music live performance as a (poststructuralist) study of persona construction in pop music to become an engaged performance ethnography. Performance is incorporated as critical academic practice through a reflexive and increasingly performative writing style. The study concludes with the advocation of an ethnographic research format derived from one laboratory case: the collaborative investigation of imaginary research objects as a radical implementation of the performative turn in the cultural studies of music.

The aim of this thesis was to examine changing representations of men and masculinities in a particular historical period (“The Sixties”) and to explore the impact that this had in a period of rapid social change in the UK and the legacy of that impact. In order to do this, a multi-method study was developed, combining documentary research with a set of eleven semi-structured interviews. The documentary research took the form of a case study of The Beatles, arguing that their position as a group of men who became a global cultural phenomenon, in the period under study, made theme a suitable vehicle through which to read changing representations of masculinities in this period and to reflect on what this meant for men in UK society. The Beatles’ live action films were chosen as a sample of Beatle “texts” which allowed for the Beatles to be looked at at different points in the “The Sixties” and for possible changes over that time period to be tracked. Textual analysis within discourse analysis (based on a framework suggested by van Dijk [1993], Fairclough [1995] and McKee [2003]) was used to analyse the texts. Ideas advanced by the Popular Memory Group (1982) about the interaction of public representations of the past and private memory of that past were influential in the decision to combine this piece of documentary research with interviews with a sample of men, in an age range of 18 to 74. The interview stage was designed to elicit data on the perception of the participants of the role of representation (with particular reference to the Beatles) of masculinities on them as individuals and their ideas about how this may have had an impact in terms of longer term social change. Ehrenreich’s (1983) notion of a male revolt in the late 1950s, an emergence of a challenge to established ideas about men and masculinity, was also influential, particularly as it is an idea at odds with the “crisis in masculinity” discourse (Tolson, 1977; Kimmel, 1987; Whitehead, 2002) at work in a number of texts on men and masculinity. Examining further Inglis’ (2000b : 1) concept of The Beatles as “men of ideas” with a global reach, the chosen Beatle texts were examined for discourses of masculinity which appeared to be resistant to the dominant. What emerged were a number of findings around resistance, non-conformity, feminised appearance, pre-metrosexuality, the male star as object of desire and The Beatles as a global male phenomenon open to the radical diversity of the world in a period of rapid social change. The role of popular culture within this process was central to the thesis, given its focus on The Beatles as a case study. However, broader ideas about the role of the arts also emerged with a resultant conclusion that “the sixties” is where a recognition of the importance of representation begins as well as a period where representations of gender (as well as class and race) became more accessible due to the rise in popularity of TV in the UK and a resurgence in British cinema. The thesis offers a number of ideas for further research, building on the outcomes of this particular study. These include further work on the competing crisis/ revolt discourse at work in the field of critical men’s studies, ascertaining female perspectives on representations of masculinities and their impact, further work on the Beatles through fans and an application of some of the ideas at work in the thesis to other periods of British history.