Popular Music Performance: An Editorial Introduction

Charles Bradley was an amateur musician who performed sporadically as a James Brown impersonator under the stage name Black Velvet. Eventually, he signed with Daptone Records in 2002 and recorded his debut album of original songs in 2011 at age sixty-two. The film Charles Bradley: Soul of America (2012) documents his growing anxiety as he prepared for his first promotional tour: he was asked to drop his James Brown persona and simply perform as himself. This situation raises complex questions. Does impersonating another singer—one who embodied the popular music performer—diminish one's own performance? Is performance not a form of pretense, a temporary suspension of reality where a new personality is granted? After the Godfather of Funk died on Christmas Day 2006, did it become easier for Bradley to shed Brown's guise and claim his own? Does the performing body onstage belong to the performer in the same way it belongs to the audience or to producers? What does authenticity mean when a singer-songwriter interprets their own material? Performance lies at the heart of popular music and its study.

These questions point to the complex ways music performance entangles issues of power, aesthetics, economics, and social roles. As Kun (2005) argues, "political and cultural citizenship is configured through the performance of popular music and its reception, via acts of listening, by the people" (30). Within composed music, performance is often viewed as interpretation—the performance of a work. Within improvised music, performance itself constitutes the work (Shumway 1999: 189–190).

The story of Charles Bradley suggests a renewed centrality for live music, which has emerged alongside declining record sales over the past decade and the restructuring of the music industry (Nardi 2012). This runs counter to Auslander's claim that mediated performance has become "the exception of musical perception and experience, to the extent that our retelling of popular music history often tends to be reduced to familiar and verifiable dates of 'important' recordings" (cited in Inglis, 2006: xvi). In the current state of the industry, placing performance back at center stage feels urgent.

Critically exploring performance can significantly enrich theories of musical meaning. The contributions to this special issue examine performance from both musician and audience perspectives, highlighting the roles of values, norms, meanings, and aesthetics in interactions between performer and audience. For instance, Allyson Fiddler broadens the concept of musical performance to include national identity, showing how Austrian musicians created a counter-image to the right-wing politics of the Freedom Party of Austria around the turn of the century.

This issue also explores the connection between performance and place. In a narrow sense, performance occurs at particular locations—venues, stages, clubs, festivals. In a broader sense, it helps define artistic districts, contested spaces, and associations with scenes, neighborhoods, rural regions, and nations. Performance not only happens somewhere but also speaks of and about that place, actively shaping it. Fabian Holt contributes a perspective on local urban cultural production by examining concert culture in mid-size New York City venues, highlighting changes in musical creativity and performance linked to urban gentrification.

Shumway (1999) and Frith (1996) demonstrate that performance—both our understanding of it and its productive role—is intertwined with technological and socioeconomic change. The development of sound recording, by freezing and reproducing seemingly unique events, brought a paradigm shift that reshaped the meaning of performance: a performance could now be repeated outside its original context, and a musician could become their own audience. New performing practices have since emerged. DJs actualize recorded music and its playback technologies through their intervention (Attias, Gavanas and Rietveld 2013; Fikentscher 2003; Katz 2012). Record producers and sound engineers are now often recognized as performers in their own right. Since the 1970s, the art of record production and remixing has grown increasingly important.

We have also witnessed the production of unique dubplates for performance purposes. Kim Ramstedt's paper on Finland's mobile dancehall scene illustrates this, showing how a localized version of globalized Jamaican culture emerges through the adoption of reggae-influenced music, performance styles, and sound system technology. As Middleton (1990: 90) notes, "once established, particular musico-technological crystallizations can take on definite connotational or ideological references; and these can be hard to shift." Nevertheless, translating performing practices into new national contexts can accelerate such shifts, as Ramstedt's paper demonstrates.

Daniel McKinna's ethnographic study of touring musicians takes mobile performance in a different direction. Applying Deleuze's syntheses of time, he explains the senses of musical authenticity experienced by rock and pop performers during repeated performances. This article is followed by Josep Pedro's ethnography of the Madrid blues scene, which develops a framework for understanding jam sessions by analyzing interactions between participatory action and presentational setting.

Ramnarine (2009: 221) makes an important point: perceiving music as a performing art allows us to grasp "the experiential dimensions of music, and its immediacy. Experiencing music in performance highlights music as an interactive process." She also stresses the extraordinary character of performing practice, noting that "it is often understood as standing apart from everyday life and it involves presentation to an 'audience'."

Although Shumway (1999) insists that performance is always for someone, Frith (1996: 203–204) counters that the audience does more than just listen. "Listening itself is a performance: to understand how musical pleasure, meaning, and evaluation work, we have to understand how, as listeners, we perform the music for ourselves."

While sound recordings may portray music—even live music—as a material object, performance reminds us to perceive it also as a process. Related to creative and communicative activity, performance encourages focus on what is immanent, transient, and interactive in musical practice. This resonates with Small's (1987, 1998) concept of "musicking," which transforms music from a noun to a verb and from an object to a process encompassing "the totality of a music performance" (Small 1998: 13). Drawing on these ideas, Kun (2005: 25) suggests an approach that accounts for "the entire process and context of a performance that involves everyone and everything that a performance touches, from the roadies to the record execs to the musicians to the audience."

Participating audiences are crucial to understanding performance. This issue includes two papers on metal fans who engage with performance spectacle, both through localized embodiment and globalized online adaptations. Gabrielle Riches, Brett Lashua, and Karl Spracklen examine the mosh-pit in Leeds, North England, taking an ethnographic approach centered on embodiment and performativity. They argue that this is a physically demanding, transgressive, homosocial space where moshing enables participants to overcome alienating effects of the spectacle. Crucially, as a site of resistance, it is itself transgressed by female participants.

Considering another space where metal performance is explored and transformed, Web 2.0 has further facilitated interactive production and consumption, accelerating the rise of the "prosumer." Performance is continually updated through online debates, praise, and criticism, creating conditions for new forms of music-making tied to mediated environments. Julian Schaap and Pauwke Berkers investigate online discussions among extreme metal fans, analyzing vocal covers on YouTube. Interestingly, they find no substantial difference in how male and female cover singers are judged, creating space for female performers to enter music production in the metal scene via the internet as a performance platform.

In addition to research articles, this special issue includes our first PhD abstract, from Julijana Zhabeva Papazova's work on alternative rock in Yugoslavia. The issue also contains nine book reviews addressing music venues, urbanism, improvisation, parody, identity politics, technologies, and a sense of place. We thank the authors, peer reviewers, book reviewers, copy editors, proofreaders, and our Editorial Assistant Dr Elina Hytonen-Ng for their valuable contributions to this diverse international collection. We hope it offers fresh perspectives in the field of popular music performance.