Authenticity and singer-songwriters

Singer-songwriters have traditionally fared well in authenticity debates.¹ Those of a particularly style (acoustic and minimal instrumentation) have been considered to ‘convey their own truth’ by giving the impression of unmediated expression.² Further, the singer-songwriter’s status rises in popular music discourse, by virtue of his or her fluency in multiple musical areas (i.e. singing and songwriting). This can be viewed in terms of Allan Moore’s ‘third-person authenticity’ (‘that they speak the truth of their own culture, thereby representing (present) others’),³ insofar as the singer-songwriter is true to the values of their popular music culture.⁴ Moore’s third category also acts as the springboard for the current chapter, which addresses New Zealand singer-songwriter Don McGlashan. One of the prominent themes in New Zealand music discourse is what may be termed ‘local authenticity’.⁵ A number of authors have focused their work on artists who demonstrate a relationship, explicitly or implicitly, with their ‘local’ geographical and socio-cultural settings.⁶ Zuberi argues that the nationalist strands of this idea are borne out of a ‘postcolonial and oedipal reaction’ to British influences and a ‘backlash’ against American cultural imperialism.⁷ Authenticity, in this context, can thus be understood as presenting a distinct New Zealand voice in the face of global musical forces. McGlashan has been an important figure within this discourse; as per the ideas above, the aim of this chapter is to develop a greater understanding of McGlashan’s status as an ‘authentic’ New Zealand singer-songwriter.

Don McGlashan’s local authenticity

Firstly, however, some background material may be useful.⁸ McGlashan has been the singer and songwriter for several New Zealand bands since the 1980s, including Blam Blam Blam, the Front Lawn, and the Muttonbirds, as well as forging a successful solo career. He plays multiple instruments, including the guitar, drums, and French horn, and has developed a stylistically plural approach to songwriting courtesy of a diverse musical upbringing: in his words, ‘while my friends were listening to the Clash, I was listening to the Clash and Mahler’.⁹ Critics and academics have held McGlashan’s output in high esteem, with many highlighting the local connections in his songs. Tony Mitchell is particularly praiseworthy: ‘McGlashan and the Muttonbirds [McGlashan’s early 1990s band] have specialized most outstandingly in eerie divinings of the terrestrial spirits of the North Island’;¹⁰ McGlashan ‘expresses one of the most profound relations to place’ in New Zealand popular music,¹¹ and is ‘the country’s most profound sonic “psychogeographer”’.¹² Critic Russell Baillie has noted the geographical aspects that run through the singer-songwriter’s work.¹³ McGlashan himself has encouraged these views, arguing that New Zealand’s environment has a profound impact on local musicians and, subsequently, local music.¹⁴ He has further commented that, having spent time abroad in the 1990s, New Zealand settings resonated with him and inspired his songwriting in a way that English settings did not.

McGlashan’s place in this discourse invariably rests on the fact that he writes song lyrics that address the people, places, attitudes, and culture of New Zealand. In this regard, he exemplifies notions of local authenticity as invoked in the work of the aforementioned New Zealand academics and critics. The problem, however, in accounts of his work is that they are limited, for the most part, to discussions of the lyrical content. Mitchell provides some general musical descriptions, such as the ‘jaunty, uptempo’ nature of ‘Queen Street’ or the ‘very Pākehā-styled musical setting’ of ‘Andy’, with the latter description referring to the folk elements of the song;¹⁵ but elsewhere, he refers only to the words of songs.¹⁶ Bannister’s analysis of McGlashan is nuanced and ties the singer-songwriter into New Zealand cultural tropes and identity themes, but does not cover specifically the musical components of his output.¹⁷ Accordingly, there is a disconnect between Mitchell’s claim that McGlashan is ‘surely the most important New Zealand singer-songwriter after Neil Finn’,¹⁸ and the writing that both enhances and seeks to explain his importance. In other words, how do McGlashan’s singing and the musical aspects of his songwriting contribute to appraisals of local authenticity? An immediate problem is that there are few, if any, stylistic traits of his songs that are distinct to New Zealand: as McGlashan puts it, ‘most New Zealand songs and instrumental pieces don’t come with their birthplace clearly stamped on them for the listener’s convenience’.¹⁹ What this points to is a need for a different means of engaging McGlashan’s singing and songwriting techniques.

‘Andy’ and the persona–environment model

I propose that Moore’s ‘persona–environment’ framework provides a useful lens through which one can evaluate McGlashan’s songwriting in relation to the notions of local authenticity. This is not to suggest that it is the only means of understanding McGlashan’s authenticity, as individual listeners will make such assessments based on their unique interpretations of the song. Nonetheless, the persona–environment model allows for coverage of the full compass of McGlashan’s singing and songwriting techniques. Moore’s analytical method considers how the environment of a song, consisting initially of the musical accompaniment, shapes the listener’s interpretation of the song’s persona, primarily articulated through the lyrics, the voice, and the vocal melody.²⁰ There are a number of components to Moore’s model: the relationship between the persona, performer and protagonist; the role and place of the persona within the narrative; how the listener relates to the persona; and, finally, how the environment relates to the persona.²¹

I will draw on Moore’s approach with respect to only one of McGlashan’s songs, ‘Andy’. The song was written by McGlashan in the second half of the 1980s. It was recorded with his band at the time, the Front Lawn (a collaboration with Harry Sinclair), with additional support from the musical group, Six Volts. The song featured on the Front Lawn’s debut album Songs from the Front Lawn (1989).²² What one finds in ‘Andy’ is a rich tapestry of details, concerning the persona, the environment, and their interrelationships, all of which combine to amplify the autobiographical story of losing a family member, and of losing one’s home town. Although Moore’s model admits the interpretation of myriad details, I will limit the discussion and analysis to the text of the song (what the persona conveys), McGlashan’s vocal tone and stylings (how the words are conveyed), and several rhythmic, harmonic and textural features (how the environment frames the persona).²³

To start, the persona’s words in ‘Andy’ are plain.²⁴ The song begins mid-scene with the narrator proposing a walk along the beach; he lightly scolds his companion for missing a party last night. Initially, the first-person plural (‘Let’s take a walk’) and the second-person (‘You sure missed one hell of a party last night’) voices raise questions as to whom the narrator is addressing – another person? The audience? The ambiguity is resolved shortly thereafter with the short refrain – ‘Andy, don’t keep your distance from me’.

As the song progresses, we learn that the titular character is the narrator’s brother; the narrator starts to recall elements of their childhood, such as roaming on the beach, watching sailing races up at ‘North Head’. The nostalgic tone is clear. From the mid-point of the song, however, the nostalgia gives way to anger, as the persona relates the gross urbanisation that has taken place in his home town. Where there was once a beach, there are now ‘buildings [made] of glass’. Where the children used to explore and roam, there are now vapid teenagers who are concerned only about their looks. The third and final verse further highlights two important pieces of information:

Firstly, the song is set in Takapuna, a suburb located on the North Shore of Auckland. Secondly, we learn the reason Andy was not at the party, and the reason he cannot see the transformation of his home town is simple: he is dead. The persona’s words thus deal with the pain of loss, and perhaps, a type of unnecessary loss – the places for childhood adventures have been replaced by buildings; Andy has died at a young age. While these broad themes may be applicable to varied locations, the important detail in this context is the specific reference to ‘Takapuna Beach’. ‘Andy’ and McGlashan acquire their authentic status because the song is situated in the metropolitan heart of New Zealand. Accordingly, by telling a story in a local setting, McGlashan ‘validates’ the ‘experience of life’ of other New Zealanders.²⁵

What of the persona’s voice? McGlashan’s singing is resonant and firm in tone, but also unstylised. His voice has little vibrato, pitches are attacked more or less directly, and there is little in the way of added rasps, gravel, or breathiness. These traits minimise any sense of vocal strain. The primary change occurs in the bridge sections, as the melody extends out of his comfortable register, to G above middle C. At this point, there is a slight crack in McGlashan’s voice, and the resulting tone is thinner. The combination of these singing traits is important because it connotes a sense of normality and ordinariness in the persona of the song. McGlashan’s singing voice is tuneful, pleasant, and lacking in any demonstrative flair. The fact that his upper register thins out in tone supports this reading, giving the impression of a voice that is, if not untrained, then lacking in overt finesse and polish.²⁶ Thus the persona of the song does not necessarily strike one as being unique or exceptional; he could be a friend or a relative singing to the listener, an observation borne out in the very opening lines of the song. What we have is McGlashan engaging with, to a certain extent, Moore’s second category of authenticity, in terms of ‘conveying the impression of accurately representing the ideas of another’.²⁷ The ‘everyman’ singing style gives the impression that the persona is not just relating his experiences, but relating, on their behalf, the views and experiences of others who have suffered similar losses.

On the persona side of the equation, then, McGlashan’s words authenticate a specific aspect of New Zealand life; his singing does not necessarily concern the local narrative, but it authenticates his listeners who have shared cultural experiences. The environment side of the equation is notable for the way it strengthens the conviction of the persona’s story. To begin with, McGlashan has set the song in a folk-derived style: the song can be heard as in a fast triple or slow compound metre and the refrain sections conclude with plagal cadences. With the inclusion of the gamelan, the instrumental connotations are complicated somewhat, but the presence of acoustic instruments including an accordion and tambura have immediate folk connotations.²⁸ This stylistic setting supports the persona’s general attitudes of nostalgia and anti-urbanisation; further, the rural connotations of the folk style support the song’s setting, New Zealand being a traditionally rural-oriented country.

Example 27.1 The Front Lawn, ‘Andy’, Introduction, 0’00”–0’17”.

Beyond these general characteristics, there are passages and details that frame the narrator and offer insight into his emotional state. Example 27.1 reproduces the opening instrumental section and first vocal phrase.²⁹ Several details stand out. Firstly, there are the contrasting surface rhythms provided by the triangle and gamelan (a 3/4-like pattern) and the lap steel guitar (a 6/8-like pattern). The drone of the double bass does little to confirm a dominant metre. Secondly, the harmonic orientation of the introduction is equally unsettled. The double bass and lap steel guitar outline an open fifth chord on F. The fragments of gamelan melody complete an F major triad, but with no other melodic or harmonic material initially, there are few clues as to the tonal context of this chord. Thirdly, the texture of the introduction is striking, partly because of the unusual instrumental combination, but mostly because of the spatial arrangement of sounds: the double bass sustains an F three octaves below middle C; the steel guitar oscillates between F and C directly above middle C; the gamelan plays a short melodic fragment an octave higher. There are holes in the texture; the instrumental combination spans four and a half octaves, but each instrument occupies a narrow region of the pitch spectrum, resulting in a hollow and empty sound.

This environment is important for several reasons. As with the style settings mentioned above, the meandering quality of the accompaniment sets the laid-back and casual tone for the narrator; when McGlashan starts singing, his delivery is marked by rhythmic fluidity, with words falling around, rather than on the beats. Equally, the environment hints at the persona’s emotional state-of-being, details of which are made clearer as the song progresses. The accompaniment that goes nowhere, rhythmically or harmonically, enacts the narrator’s inability to move forward in his life. The environment’s sparse and hollow sonic qualities further speak to the emotional emptiness of the persona. When he starts talking to ‘Andy’, there is a suggestion that the narrator’s casual outwards demeanour is masking a sense of inner uncertainty and uneasiness.

Example 27.2 The Front Lawn, ‘Andy’, Bridge, 1’55”–2’41”.

The environment of the bridge section contributes further to one’s understanding of the persona; Example 27.2 presents the bridge vocal melody and the harmonic outline. Through the initial lines, one can observe a turn away from the tonic, insofar as the harmonies hover predominantly between C major and B♭ major, IV and V, without resolving back to F. This harmonic tension is made more explicit after sixteen bars, with the appearance of oscillating D and D^sus4 chords, the lack of a tonic now giving way to repeated chromatic chords. This increasingly pent-up harmonic energy mirrors the tension riddling the narrator – for much of the song, he appears to express only mild frustration and disappointment at the various events; as the harmonies move further away from the tonic, it appears more likely that a change in his sentiments is forthcoming.

This is indeed the case. As the D^sus4 chord resolves to G (a local V^sus4–I movement), the persona’s emotional wall cracks and he delivers his bluntest and most pointed words. And yet, it is not the case that the narrator’s anger represents the final point of resolution. In the subsequent passage, his words become somewhat more tired, as he wonders, ‘Don’t know why I’m telling all this to you’ and repeats the line ‘On Takapuna Beach’. The supporting harmonies at this point are G major and D minor; with the vocal melody falling to D in each phrase, there is a strong suggestion of a modal turn to D Dorian. Moore has observed that the Dorian mode evokes an ‘illusory possibility of escape’.³⁰ The environment therefore potentially provides a more nuanced view of the narrator’s emotional scope. His words suggest anger at the events that have happened around him; the environment suggests to the listener that the narrator wants, but cannot escape from this situation. He is weary from the conflicting feelings over the death of ‘Andy’ and the loss of his home town. Earlier in the song, the narrator told his brother that the ‘rest of the family don’t even mention his name’; while the family may have moved on from Andy’s early death, the narrator, it appears, remains caught between reliving his past with people and places no longer present, and moving forward in his life.

Conclusion

Two final remarks are necessary. Firstly, the analysis above was couched within a singer-songwriter framework. Although McGlashan was primarily responsible for many aspects of the song that create meaning (the lyrics, the voice, the melodic shape, the harmonic language), other elements, namely textural design, lay outside McGlashan’s immediate control. Indeed, he has been effusive in his praise for other musicians with whom he has worked during his career; in particular, he has noted their ability to provide colour and shape to a song. This raises interesting issues of perceived authorship, issues which are touched on in a number of chapters in this volume (e.g. Chapters 3, 11, 14, and 26).

Secondly, one can draw several conclusions regarding McGlashan’s local authenticity with respect to his singing and songwriting. Through the lyrical components of his songs, McGlashan connects his narratives directly with New Zealand places and people, thus validating the lives of other New Zealanders. His ‘ordinary’ singing gives the impression that his narratives are representative of others, thus validating the experiences of those who cannot tell their stories. His song environments support and amplify the narratives being told; this reflects another of Moore’s poles of authenticity, in that McGlashan ‘succeeds in conveying the impression that his/her utterance is one of integrity’.³¹ To varying extents, these ideas hold for other McGlashan songs that are informed by local contexts (‘A Thing Well Made’, ‘There is No Depression in New Zealand’, ‘Dominion Road’, for example). Accordingly, one can conclude that it is through McGlashan’s lyrical writing that he engages notions of local authenticity; his singing and musical components do not directly connect with New Zealand contexts, but they engage other forms of authenticity, and thus they are equally responsible for strengthening McGlashan’s standing as an authentic New Zealand singer-songwriter.

Origins of canzone d’autore

Early attempts to renovate Italian popular song, freeing it from old-fashioned escapist lyrics and pre-WWII music styles took place in the late 1950s. Most lyricists and composers active then had started their careers in the 1920s and 30s, and their songs circulated thanks to the Sanremo Festival (established in 1951) and RAI’s broadcasting monopoly.¹ No trend comparable to the renovation of cinema (neo-realism) or literature could be found in post-war (and post-Fascist) Italian popular music, until a group of composers, poets, and singers established ‘Il Cantacronache’ in Turin in 1958, with the aim to ‘escape from escapism’.² Influenced by French auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes (ACI) and by Brecht’s collaborations with Weill and Eisler, Cantacronache was a marginal group of engagé intellectuals (including writers like Italo Calvino, Franco Fortini, Umberto Eco), and their work left traces mostly in political song and folk revival.³ In 1958, the winning song at Sanremo was Domenico Modugno’s (and Franco Migliacci’s) ‘Nel blu dipinto di blu’. It was a huge international hit, composed by its performer: a rare feature in Italian popular music history. Modugno’s success encouraged young recording industry executives to sign new lyricists and/or composers as performers (as they wouldn’t find proper interpreters for their songs), or to persuade singers to write their own songs (rather than cover foreign material or interpret songs by old-fashioned professional authors). Between 1959 and 1961 some of these singer-songwriters (Umberto Bindi, Gino Paoli, Giorgio Gaber, Gianni Meccia) hit the charts. A new term, cantautori,⁴ created by one of the first (and few) female representatives of the category, Maria Monti, was adopted to designate them: by 1961 it was firmly established in Italian language. Initially, it was intended almost as a joke – a lighter term compared to the cultural connotations of chansonnier.⁵ However, during the 1960s cantautori became more and more involved in the debate on cultural and political commitment (versus commercialism) in popular music, also under the influence of foreign examples: from French ACI to Bob Dylan, and also Theodorakis (especially after the 1967 coup in Greece). When one of the best-known cantautori, Luigi Tenco, committed suicide during the Sanremo Festival in January 1967 (see p. 322 below),⁶ amongst the reactions to this event emerged the perception of a need that a type of popular song be identified, which could be opposed to the commercial mainstream: after ‘canzone diversa’,⁷ and ‘nuova canzone’,⁸ the term ‘canzone d’autore’ (author’s song, obviously modelled after cinéma d’auteur, and coined in 1969)⁹ was proposed. It was officially adopted in 1974 within the title of a festival (‘Rassegna della canzone d’autore’ – hereafter ‘Rassegna’ – organised since then annually by Club Tenco), and soon became a widely accepted concept.

Origins of entechno

The Greek term entechno [tragoudi], the literal translation of which is ‘artful’ [song], originally emerged as the first component of the paradoxical term entechno-laïko tragoudi (‘art-folk song’)¹⁰ invented largely by leftist intellectuals in urban Greece, prominent among whom was Mikis Theodorakis. This artistic endeavour followed an effort to sanctify the previously repudiated rebetiko music, initiated by the composer Manos Hadjidakis with a groundbreaking speech in 1949.¹¹ Rebetiko song was an urban popular music genre, which emerged prominently during the relocation of refugees from Asia Minor to the Greek mainland, as a result of the Greek–Turkish war between 1919 and 1922. Influenced by genres prominent in the urban areas of Athens and Piraeus and folk musical elements from the refugees’ home culture, rebetiko became connected in the Greek middle-class imagination with marginalised underclasses and perceived ‘decadent’ behaviours.

From the late 1950s onwards, both Theodorakis and Hadjidakis invested their creativity in the search for new genres that utilised the rebetiko style within more highbrow musical forms combined with contemporary poetry. The Greek popular music scene after the 1960s was dominated by the work of Theodorakis and Hadjidakis to the extent that, within international music circles, Greece was often referred to as ‘the country of the two composers’.¹² Specifically the release of Theodorakis’ album Epitáfios in 1960 epitomises the new entechno-laïkó genre by combining the leftist poetry of Yannis Ritsos with laïko compositions.¹³ A dedicated Marxist and Western-educated composer,¹⁴ Theodorakis aimed to create a genre that would familiarise the working class with contemporary poetry, while at the same time incorporating pan-Hellenic folk musical idioms, free of references to particular regions.¹⁵ Manos Hadjidakis’ role, even though less political, was equally important to the development of entechno-laïko. His incorporation of folk music was part of a wider search for compositional styles, less pompous and patriotic and more introverted than Theodorakis, thus closer to the entechno style that survives after the 1970s.

The transition from this period of entechno-laïko to the more eclectic (if less wordy) entechno, coincided with the emergence of the term tragoudopios (literally, ‘song-crafter’). Similarly to the Italian cantautori, Greek tragoudopii (pl.) used the term as a less charged offset to the ‘composers’ (synthetes) of the Theodorakis–Hadjidakis period. Epitomised by the versatile performer Dionysis Savvopoulos, this new caste of singers-songwriters emerged through the turbulent years of the Junta of the Colonels (1967–74), and achieved popular stardom after the restoration of democracy. The aesthetic foundations for this new trend were set by the artists of the so-called neo kyma (lit. ‘new wave’, a direct translation of the French nouvelle vague artistic movement), most prominent among whom was the composer Yiannis Spanos. Utilising some of the musical principles of intellectualism and left-leaning sensibility from Theodorakis along with the lyricism of Hadjidakis, neo kyma artists were decidedly more low-key and minimalistic, often their music comprising merely vocals with an accompanying guitar.

Entechno after the dictatorship: new directions

If entechno-laiko was created by Theodorakis with a clear political agenda, the musical production that came to be known plainly as entechno after the end of the Junta was characterised by a process of depoliticisation. The restoration of democracy (or metapolitefsi as it is often referred to in Greek) brought about a number of political developments with the clear intention of reconciling populations on the left and the right of the political spectrum who were in open or concealed conflict since the end of the Nazi occupation and the Civil War in the 1940s. The most important of those were the abolition of the monarchy with a referendum and the legalisation of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), both within months of the end of the dictatorship in 1974. These new developments cultivated a climate of acceptance, or even open celebration of leftist aesthetics and ideals, especially among urban intellectual circles. The electoral victory of the Social-Democrat party PASOK in 1981 sealed this transitional period and was accepted by many, even within the communist left, as the end of the national divide.

While Theodorakis was turning from a prosecuted communist (during the Junta) to a celebrated artist,¹⁶ the need for his maximalist revolutionary music was diminishing. Ironically, the more Theodorakis’ music was featured in state-sponsored festivals and performances, the less relevant it was becoming to current aesthetics. The new wave of entechno that developed from the 1980s onwards was less overtly political, more introvert, wider in its musical references, and more diverse and experimental. The aesthetic of the post-dicatorship entechno is defined by three fundamental features: eclecticism, intellectualism, and technophobia.

The effective abandonment of ‘folk’ (laïko) in the genre label from the late 1980s onwards is due to the fact that its artists began to expand well outside the realm of Greek urban-folk music in their pursuit of inspiration. The popularity of French chanson, as well as the Anglo-American folk revival and its singer-songwriters became catalytic in this new trend, but entechno artists of the Greek 1980s and 1990s utilised influences as diverse as jazz, fado, and Brazilian popular music (MPB).¹⁷ While entechno expanded its musical influences, it similarly widened its lyrical themes from leftist activism to a range of other topics, most notably romantic, poeticised love. If this signalled an abandonment of Theodorakis’ militant aesthetic, however, the emphasis on intellectualism remained intact. Singer-songwriters such as Dionysis Savvopoulos were celebrated as both musicians and poets, while a whole caste of professional poet-lyricists emerged, including Manos Eleftheriou, Manolis Rasoulis, and later Lina Nikolakopoulou.

Within the 1990s, entechno artists incorporated more forcefully two, until then clearly demarcated, music styles: rock and ‘traditional’ (paradosiaka). Greek rock music, which in its more subcultural form was already in the 1980s expressed forcefully by numerous bands, broke into the mainstream through the voice of Vassilis Papakonstantinou. His collaborations with entechno composers such as Manos Loizos and Thanos Mikroutsikos paved the way for the incorporation of rock idioms, and specifically the sound of the electric guitar, within entechno productions. In the 1990s this practice became prominent in the work of singer-songwriters Dionysis Tsaknis and Lavrentis Mahairitsas. If the electric sound of rock was a natural development within the cosmopolitan entechno aesthetic, the search for sounds from rural ‘traditions’ was more problematic, since rural folk music (dimotiko) was often perceived among urban middle classes as having nationalistic overtones, heavily connected in their imagination with cultural displays promoted by the Junta. The incorporation of traditional instruments from the Eastern Mediterranean, including rural Greek instruments like the laouto and the lyra, was eventually made possible through an engagement with an ‘ethnic’ aesthetic, in its essence utterly cosmopolitan.¹⁸

Technophobia is a less-discussed but equally important defining element of entechno. Although, as we saw, the electric sound eventually made it into mainstream entechno in the late 1980s and 1990s, the aversion towards anything electronic or programmed has been a consistent attitude. This, however, applies to the aesthetic rather than the practical dimension. For example, digital technology in the recording studios is widespread in entechno productions, and this is not seen as a breach as long as it remains inaudible.¹⁹ To use Thomas Turino’s celebrated terms, entechno has consistently produced ‘high fidelity’ rather than ‘studio audio art’ recordings.²⁰ This aesthetic choice should be understood within the increasing dipole between entechno and folk-pop (laikopop), with the latter genre availing of the opportunities of digital programming to an extent that is often perceived by entechno artists and fans as overly commercial and kitsch.

From cantautori to canzone d’autore

The choice of ‘canzone d’autore’ as a label for Italy’s singer-songwriter genre was a political one. Amongst the possible choices, it was the most neutral term: ‘nuova canzone’ (a label that was used, anyway, for conferences held during Club Tenco’s ‘Rassegna’) had its origins in the context of folk revival and political song, ‘canzone diversa’ bore excessive connotations of otherness, and notwithstanding the prestige of its creator (semiotician Umberto Eco) had never become part of the community’s common cultural awareness. In the Sessantotto – the years of Italy’s political turmoil, which lasted from 1968 to the end of the 1970s – what was needed was the delimitation and distinction of a field of music activities, different both from conventional, market-oriented Italian popular music, identifiable with the Sanremo Festival, and from radical leftist political song, as well as from the Anglo-American pop-rock mainstream, then hegemonic in the record market. As a matter of fact, cantautori, before Tenco’s suicide in 1967, had been sharing the same scenes and places with more traditional singers: they participated in the Sanremo Festival and had huge juke-box hits. The name cantautore itself had ambivalent meanings and connotations, suggesting the existence of two subcategories: 1. an artist who was at the same time a singer and a songwriter – often just a composer, as it soon became common in Italy for singer-songwriters to collaborate with professional lyricists; 2. an author of songs of a ‘special kind’, implying uncommon artistry or engagement, which deserved to be performed by the author himself. As the very figure of the singer-songwriter was new in Italy’s late 1950s and early 1960s, the two meanings were blurred, although – as we shall see – the difference will emerge later as a substantial factor in the construction of canzone d’autore’s ideology. Technically, the list of cantautori in the early 1960s includes singer-songwriters who won or scored well at the Sanremo Festival, like Domenico Modugno,²¹ Tony Renis,²² Pino Donaggio,²³ Bobby Solo:²⁴ but with the exception of Modugno, for his role as a pioneer, these cantautori are very seldom included in accounts on the genre, and other best-selling early singer-songwriters, like Gianni Meccia, Nico Fidenco, or Edoardo Vianello, are similarly forgotten. It must also be said that other cantautori, like Gino Paoli, Umberto Bindi, Giorgio Gaber, Sergio Endrigo – generally ascribed to the second subcategory – took part in the Sanremo Festival in the early 1960s, and that some of their songs aimed at the mainstream market (not presented at the Festival) enjoyed great commercial success, like Paoli’s ‘Sapore di sale’ of 1963.

Luigi Tenco’s participation in the 1967 edition of Sanremo was not a novelty or a special compromise: it followed a wave of cantautori trying to use the Festival as a platform to reach a wider audience: Tenco himself had declared a few months earlier that he would ‘use’ media and commercial institutions (including Sanremo) like American singer-songwriters had been doing in the USA.²⁵ His models were Bob Dylan and Barry McGuire. His disillusion at the results (his song was immediately eliminated), his suicide, and especially the cold, embarrassed reaction of the industry, of the media, even of his colleagues (only one, Fabrizio De André, attended Tenco’s funeral), moved a burgeoning community of fans and activists to see Sanremo as the paradigm of commercialism, lack of artistry and authenticity, the exact contrary of what lovers of ‘quality songs’ were looking for.²⁶ Journalists hailed Endrigo’s victory at Sanremo in 1968 as Tenco’s – or the cantautori’s – revenge, forgetting the continuing participation and success of cantautori in former editions, and possibly implying with that lapsus memoriae that the term cantautore was not apt to sustain an overt semantic and political opposition against the music industry. The Sessantotto had begun.

New cantautori, and a new genre.

While the term ‘canzone d’autore’ was making its way from the columns of a local newspaper to the title of a festival celebrating Tenco’s memory, provocatively based in Sanremo, new cantautori became popular: among them, Fabrizio De André,²⁷ Francesco Guccini, Lucio Battisti, Lucio Dalla, Francesco De Gregori, Antonello Venditti. With two notable exceptions, they were all authors of their own lyrics; they were also composers of their songs’ music, but their craftsmanship as musicians (composers, or singers, or players) was bound to occupy a lower place in the new genre’s ideological hierarchy compared to their ability and authenticity as poets. Exceptions were Lucio Dalla, who emerged from Italian beat²⁸ and participated in the Sanremo Festival, collaborating with lyricists and poets, as well as writing his own lyrics, and Lucio Battisti, who became one of the best-known artists in Italian popular music, collaborating with professional lyricist Mogol, and later with poet Pasquale Panella. The very existence of Dalla and Battisti is a challenge to canzone d’autore’s ideology: they were among the best-known cantautori for nearly three decades, but – especially Battisti – they failed to be acknowledged as ‘proper’ members of the genre. Battisti never took part in the ‘Rassegna’, Lucio Dalla participated just once, in 1986. They were never awarded the Tenco Prize, which has been given since 1974 to almost every famous cantautore and to many singer-songwriters from other countries.²⁹ The obvious explanation for such an anomaly is that Battisti was not left-wing, and scorned the intellectualism and political commitment of most other cantautori.³⁰ But this cannot be applied to Dalla. It is also worth noting that until 2014, when Maria Farantouri (not a songwriter!) was awarded the prize for her role in the international success of entechno, no Greek author or singer had ever been invited to the ‘Rassegna’. If we add that Battisti and Dalla are probably the only Italian cantautori known in Greece,³¹ we are suggesting another possible explanation: that the top hierarchical criterion for authorship in canzone d’autore was attached to the image of the ‘singing poet’, and singer-songwriters who focused mainly on music (just like some forgotten early cantautori, or like some prominent figures in entechno) have been seen by the genre’s communities as ‘out of place’. In fact, the practice of setting to music existing (literary) poems, or lyrics written by known poets, which has been an important feature of French chanson (since at least Yvette Guilbert in the 1910s), and of Greek entechno, never took off in Italy, with very few exceptions related to lesser-known cantautori; on the contrary, the public debate about canzone d’autore has been focused for decades on the issue of whether cantautori should be considered as poets, or even as ‘the real poets of the twentieth century’.³²

Genre conventions (‘norms’) are often hierarchically ordered, and ideology can be seen as the hyper-code controlling such hierarchy.³³ The focus on the cantautore as a poet, articulated in various conventions (formal-technical, communicational, behavioural, proxemic, economic, etc.), also dictates the relevance of practices ‘allowed’ in the genre. Two striking examples, which emerge in the comparison between canzone d’autore and entechno, are: 1. the relative scarcity of collaborations between authors/interpreters in Italy (regarded as notable exceptions, rather than almost a norm, like in Greece); 2. the acknowledgement of ‘pure’ performers as fully representative of the genre, which is again common in Greece (including male interpreters, like Manolis Lidakis), while limited to a handful of ‘classy’ female singers in Italy (Ornella Vanoni, Fiorella Mannoia), who have been seen as, so to speak, ‘guests’ of the genre and corresponding scene. On the other hand, a number of cantautrici (female singer-songwriters) have appeared since the mid-1970s: Gianna Nannini, Alice, Carmen Consoli, Paola Turci, Elisa, Cristina Donà, Nada Malanima,³⁴ and others. However, cantautori still outnumber cantautrici by at least an order of magnitude.

Any genre’s hierarchical system of values (i.e. its ideology) is subject to continuous negotiations within the genre’s interrelated communities: artists, producers, critics, fans, etc. In canzone d’autore a community of ‘experts’, formed by members of the Club Tenco, by the organisers of the ‘Rassegna’ and other festivals and prizes, by critics and organised fans, has been ‘dictating the rules’ for about forty years, slowly evolving from the early celebration of the French ACI model to the formulation of a more general ‘quality principle’, at least theoretically unbound from the figure of the singer-songwriter. In fact, groups have participated in the ‘Rassegna’ since the earliest editions, and, more recently, prizes for the interpreter or the record producer of the year were launched, opening to a collaborative model closer to the cinematic origins of the canzone d’autore concept. Although canzone d’autore originally implied an anti-rock stance, sooner or later its communities had to acknowledge the success of singer-songwriters whose styles were closer to those of British or US singer-songwriters: from Franco Battiato, who drew initially from Brian Eno’s solo albums, to Ivano Fossati, who dedicated his first album (1983) to Randy Newman, from Vasco Rossi to Luciano Ligabue, both strongly indebted to Bruce Springsteen, to Vinicio Capossela, initially a Tom Waits epigone, later a rebetiko addict (he imitated or covered classics of the genre, even recording them with Greek instrumentalists from the entechno scene).

Nonetheless, some artists are still closer to the canon than others, and it isn’t surprising to see that they are (or were) cantautori in the stricter sense: Paolo Conte (as a singer-songwriter, a creature of the ‘Rassegna’, as he had been a successful song composer earlier), Roberto Vecchioni, Fabrizio De André, Giorgio Gaber, and Enzo Jannacci. The last three in the list died recently (respectively in 1999, 2003, and 2013): their deaths, along with Battisti’s (1998), were the origin of a flood of comments with ambivalent effects, on one hand allowing a deeper critical reflection on canzone d’autore, on the other consolidating some aspects of the genre’s ideology, like the demiurgical image of the auteur/poet. The effect was especially notable in many accounts of Fabrizio De André, who excelled in collaborating with lyricists, composers, arrangers, and engineers, and could be best described as a ‘singing producer’, but was sanctified as the archetypal poet.³⁵ As a reaction, some of the new Italian singer-songwriters preferred to hide behind a fictional band’s name, like Bologna violenta (Nicola Manzan, from 2005) or Luci della centrale elettrica (Vasco Brondi, from 2007). It is also true that, especially after the beginning of the recording industry’s downfall, ‘pure’ performers became a rare species in Italy (like almost everywhere), as co-authoring a song is a way for singers to compensate for decreasing record sales and royalties.

Contemporary entechno: artists, roles, and gender conventions

As we have seen, after the dictatorship entechno emerged and developed with close reference to the image of the lone singer-songwriter. This image is compatible with all its origins: Theodorakis the pioneer, left-wing intellectual composer/activist, the influences from international artists (chanson, cantautori, folk-revivalists), and the low-key solo performers of neo kyma during the dictatorship. However, to assume that contemporary entechno is dominated by singer-songwriters is quite misleading. Instead, what should be noted is a change in the distribution of creative roles that happened around the early 1990s; the early period of the 1970s–80s was characterised by collaborations, while the latter period, from the 1990s onwards, becomes defined by a strictly gendered division of roles, focusing mainly on the singer.

In order to identify that change, it suffices to examine some of the key artists of the two periods. The collaboration between composer Manos Loizos and singer Haris Alexiou, or that of composer Apostolos Kaldaras and singer Yiorgos Dalaras, produced multiple albums in the 1970s. It is indicative that, in many of those albums, the names of singers, composers, and lyricists are written alongside each other on the cover, turning the collaborative procedure into a point of attraction for the audiences. Similarly, the collaboration between composer Nikos Ksydakis, lyricist Manolis Rasoulis, singer Nikos Papazoglou, and producer Alekos Patsifas for the albums Ekdikisi tis Gyftias (‘Revenge of Gypsydom’, 1978) and Ta Dithen (‘The Pretentious’, 1979), has been seen as catalytic for the musical production of the period. In fact, such collaborations have been heavily mythologised within the audience’s imagination, with numerous stories of their internal conflicts surviving through the interviews of the artists until today.

During the period after the 1990s, however, the discography of entechno revolves around two types of artists: female solo singers, and male singer-songwriters. Female singers such as Eleftheria Arvanitaki, Alkistis Protopsalti, Melina Kana, and Eleni Tsaligopoulou perform songs written by male composers such as Nikos Ksydakis, Stamatis Kraounakis, or Thanos Mikroutsikos, and appear in live performances as solo singers with almost exclusively male backing orchestras. With the roles of the composer and lyricist diminishing in favour of the singer after the 1990s, albums often feature multiple, lesser-known songwriters who are commissioned to support the presence of a popular singer. Their contribution is rarely acknowledged on the album cover, thus altering the previous attitude of collaboration towards a division between main artists and supporting personnel.

At the same time, male representatives of contemporary entechno are more often than not the authors of the songs that they perform. Singer-songwriters Orfeas Peridis, Alkinoos Ioannidis, Sokratis Malamas, Christos Thivaios, and Thanassis Papakonstantinou are the most prominent exponents of the genre from the late 1990s until today. All of them are equally appreciated as composers, lyricists, and singers, and they usually appear onstage with an instrument (acoustic guitar or lute), a practice almost unheard-of among the female artists. In some notable collaborations between male and female entechno artists, such as Malamas with Kana or Ioannidis with Arvanitaki, the norm is for the male to take the role of songwriter and backing vocalist, while the female is promoted as the main singer.

This change in roles and production style from the 1970s to the 1990s, cannot be seen outside of the political circumstances explained earlier and the neoliberalisation of the Greek music market. While the leftist political imperative of entechno as represented by Theodorakis, Loizos, and the early Savvopoulos increasingly lost its aesthetic appeal, the industry switched to the more globally established norm of promoting vocalists. This coincided from the mid-1990s onwards with the economic decline of the label Lyra, the main production force of entechno from the 1960s, and the eventual dominance of multinational recording companies over the Greek popular music scenes.

Conclusion

Two genres that sound very little alike, canzone d’autore and entechno have remarkably parallel histories. The emergence of the terms cantautore and tragoudopios, and the scenes that followed, have similarly fluctuated between left-wing sensibilities and commercialism, often taking advantage of the converging interests of the political opposition and the music industry (like in the US: ‘The Revolutionaries Are on Columbia!’). The intense debates of authenticity exercised by critics, artists, producers, and audiences have managed to turn these seemingly low-key performance styles into terrains of ideological–aesthetic conflict, through which national politics and transnational affinities are tried. The remarkable ways in which canzone d’autore and entechno artists managed to bring poetry and ideology into the everyday musicality of people of all social backgrounds seems to serve as a common thread between many singer-songwriter genres of the late twentieth century. Yet, the different political phases through which people in the two nations have related to each other, to Europe, and the international stage, have ensured that canzone d’autore and entechno are as deeply entwined in the particularities of their homelands as in their cosmopolitan influences.

Framing intimacy: singer-songwriters and their use of social media platforms

When examining the contemporary vista of engagement between musicians and their fans, use of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram has proffered a most startling and disruptive interjection. Prior to this, although fans have always been able to attempt to communicate in some form with their object of fandom, these communications would have had to be via a letter⁴ or through a personal encounter, both forms of which may have been filtered by management or security. In addition, aside from the music itself, and any possible fan club magazines or official website posts, the majority of revelations and insights from the musicians would have been through media interviews, which are again possibly filtered by the press. Social media disrupts this and permits messages seemingly direct from the poster and the ability to reply and engage in conversation with fans. In this sense, it appears that musicians can use these platforms, whether strategically or not, to ‘build camaraderie over distance through the dynamic and ongoing practice of disclosing the everyday’.⁵ It is this ‘everyday’ that can be confessed most explicitly though Twitter, with it being determined as ‘the most salient means of generating ‘authentic’ celebrity disclosure’ in that it can offer the potential to ‘simultaneously [counter] the efforts of the papparazzi, fan mags, and gossip blogs to complicate or rewrite the meaning of the star’.⁶

To give a snapshot of the possibilities of contemporary engagement with digital media, a musician that has dynamically embraced these platforms is American singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer. Utilising blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, Palmer speaks directly to her audience, who are ‘her contributors, co-conspirators, and supporters within a much larger do it yourself (DIY), participatory culture forming between artist and fan’.⁷ This participatory culture has formed within a space where both parties work together to challenge traditional understandings and barriers within the music industry – Palmer successfully crowdfunded over $1million on Kickstarter in 2012 to fund a new record, art book, and tour⁸ and also used crowdsourcing to locate fans who were willing to volunteer as musicians during her tour.⁹ In this sense, Palmer’s fans became active funders and contributors to her musical output and thereby somewhat integral to the music production process.

For other singer-songwriters, a transition from online communities and blogs into social media has also been apparent, in similarly explicit ways. For example, Suzanne Vega’s official website maintained an online community/bulletin board named ‘the Undertow’ from the early 2000s, where members were informed that Suzanne read the messages posted to the community and made an effort to reply to them as often as she could.¹⁰ This openness to communicate with fans has been further cultivated by Vega within her use of Twitter, which she joined in February 2009. Since then, she has been replying directly to fans, retweeting their mentions of her music and engaging in conversations with listeners on the platform. Her official Facebook continues this momentum, as does her Instagram account, which features snapshots of her concerts and life on the road.

Most recently, use of social media is also being embraced by singer-songwriters that previously had not fully aligned themselves with these forms of communication. For example, up until 2014, American musician Tori Amos, who has a dedicated online fan base, had previously explicitly refrained from fully engaging with these platforms. She did have a Facebook and Twitter account which, very occasionally, featured messages seemingly from her (which were signed with her name to indicate this), but the majority of the messages were formed with news and updates from her management. Although Amos did not engage with this media as other singer-songwriters did, she maintained strong connections with fans at live concerts (for example, keeping eye contact with audience members and playing requests for fans) and the meet-and-greets that regularly precede them. However, in 2014, during the release of Unrepentant Geraldines, and coinciding with her world tour, this momentum changed, with an explicit adjustment to social media. Although Amos maintains connections with fans at concerts and public appearances, she began to embrace these platforms in a skilful way that gave rise to two key dynamics: (1) this strategy not only gave further insight into her off-stage life, but also (2) engaged fans further in the proceedings to make them a part of this process, that worked further to promote her music and tour. For instance, on Instagram, the ‘Unrepentant Selfie Tour Instagram Photo Contest’ was launched where fans were asked to take selfies¹¹ of themselves demonstrating that they were attending a concert (showing the venue or ticket)– using the hashtag #Unrepentantselfie and also a hashtag for the city they were seeing the show in. One winner in each ‘tour market’ could then win a signed tour programme. Amos also seemingly engaged in this initiative herself, taking selfies in different locations and submitting them via the hashtag. However, this was then taken further, with Amos taking two kinds of selfies surrounding each concert that were simultaneously posted on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram: pictures of herself backstage preparing for the show and pictures afterwards of the set-list (complete with hand-written chords and last minute changes) adorned with a few items from her dressing room. This use of social media has been very effective for some fans – even if this process is constructed (with her management sometimes helping and posting the photos), it gives a key impression that Tori is trying to develop a stronger connection with her fan base through these channels – for those both physically present at the show and those following from afar. These strategies also give insight into ‘intimate’ or everyday moments, that previously would have been unseen – the prospect that these pictures are ‘selfies’ taken by Tori herself also give further momentum to their seemingly intimate and revealing nature. This is a sense which, I would argue, is given further authenticity and credence by it coming from a singer-songwriter on social media – an individual who may have developed a fan base through connection to their personal and intimate lyrics and music and is now seemingly broadcasting their thoughts and photos to fans directly from their smart phones, without apparent management and media industry filter. In other words, the closeness that can sometimes be felt by listeners and fans towards singer-songwriters can also, on occasion, translate very well and skilfully to the terrain of social media. Thus, these are interesting examples of how social media use by these artists can deliver fans a sense of intimacy, so that it seems ‘the long established, while historically variable, distance between [star] and interested enthusiast is eroded (although we can of course argue that this is illusory)’.¹²

In this sense, for some singer-songwriters, a developed and skilful use of social media platforms adds a further dimension to their engagement with their fans. However, for others, it is not viewed with this same positivity, or adjusted to in the same manner. For instance, Neil Tennant, half of British singer-songwriter duo The Pet Shop Boys, does not view these connections as valuable, due to social networks being ‘fundamentally insincere’, and working to foster a ‘fake intimacy, which … results in frustration and ultimately makes people angry’.¹³ This anger, he observes, results from unequal power and illusory connections between public figures and their fans: ‘people tweet a celebrity and they get no response. It’s a totally fake relationship’.¹⁴ Tennant concludes that this situation is troubling, since ‘everything turns into a row, and it’s because it’s presented as though they care what you think, but you realise they don’t, and then it turns nasty’.¹⁵ This tumultuous scene, then, and the realisation of falsity that he views fans as being confronted with, led to the musician refraining from using Twitter (aside from an official Pet Shop Boys account, run by their management), after experimenting with it for two years: ‘it’s a sort of fake democracy. And we prefer to be not fake’.¹⁶ Instead, the band opt to communicate with followers through ‘pet texts’ which appear on their official website and feature photographs and messages from the musicians’ smart phones – a practice which promotes a more one-way flow of communication, as fans can only read, but not comment on these updates. In this sense, for Tennant, ‘pet texts’ are a more realistic and less illusory form of communicating with The Pet Shop Boys’ fan base, as they do not profess to offer replies and engage in conversation.

Both Amos and Tennant developed their careers in popular music before the inception of social media, and demonstrate how perception, approaches, and adjustment to social media use by musicians can differ between artists and fan cultures. Thus, while social media platform use can foster new trajectories in the contact and communications between fans and singer-songwriters – processes that can indeed be revelatory and highly pleasurable –they can also be complicated for both parties.

New trajectories, new implications: embracing and negotiating digital fandom

This section will consider more closely the areas and implications of these interactions and the questions that they can pose surrounding our contemporary uses and understandings of social and digital media. These include (1) crowd inspiration/involvement practices, (2) the negotiation of public/private selves, (3) music/fan expectations, and (4) exposure to anti-fandom and ‘trolling’, which will now be discussed in turn.

(4) Exposure to anti-fandom and ‘trolling’:

Another problematic aspect of Twitter use by singer-songwriters is exposure to declarations of hate online, and negotiating these outbursts. As outlined in the first section of this chapter, whereas during pre-social media times fans would have had to write a letter or meet their object of fandom in person to send a message (avenues that could be filtered by management or media), these processes have been disrupted by social media, offering new opportunities to seemingly connect directly with artists. However, this theory also applies to ‘trolling’, or what has been termed and theorised by Jonathan Gray as ‘anti-fandom’, individuals who ‘strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel’.²² A key element of Gray’s analysis of anti-fans is his emphasis that they construct and form an image of the text that they can react against, with this process being ‘as potentially powerful an emotion and reaction as is like’.²³ It is possible that this power within dislike also rests within, and is reinforced by, an element within much anti-fandom, of an ‘interest, or even sense of responsibility, in sharing one’s reading and, thus, encouraging an avoidance of the aesthetic text in others too’.²⁴ Anti-fandom translates strongly to Twitter, with not only anti-fans being able to bound and give strength to their hate-tinged messages through hashtags, but also, and most significantly, able to send these outpourings straight to the object of anti-fandom. In this sense, whereas before hate letters written by anti-fans to these individuals may have been filtered by management and not exposed to the artist, Twitter is a more direct form of communication that may give stronger possibilities for anti-fans to spread their dislike, and for the musicians to be exposed to, and possibly read, their hate mail.

This raises the question of how music artists, and their fans, negotiate anti-fandom online? An intriguing and successful example of how to navigate the terrain of hate online is British singer-songwriter James Blunt, who has ‘been executing expertly judged smackdowns of people who tangle with him’²⁵ on Twitter, gaining him more followers and seemingly improving his public image. Building on this momentum, in 2013, Blunt was deemed by Buzzfeed as one of the necessary personalities to follow on Twitter.²⁶ For example, in response to one anti-fan who tweeted ‘Jesus Christ, James Blunt’s got a new album out. Is there anything else that can go wrong?’ Blunt retweeted the tweet, prefixing it with ‘Yes. He could start tweeting you’ (20 October 2013, Figure 29.1). In response to another individual who tweeted ‘I bet James Blunt is sitting in a dark room and crying somewhere’, he did the same, prefixing it with, ‘Crying with laughter, mate’ (19 February 2012, Figure 29.2).

Figure 29.1 James Blunt tweet, 9:08am, 20 October 2013.

Figure 29.2 James Blunt tweet, 12:35pm, 19 February 2012.

However, although these responses were humorous, they also had power and impact – they worked to expose the Twitter trolls and anti-fans, and publicly displayed the kinds of messages tinged with dislike and hate that he receives. As Blunt stated in an interview with the Daily Mirror: ‘I’ll read comments on Twitter which are often quite negative, but it seems to be this security in people’s bedrooms where it’s okay to write such aggressive things behind their computer screens’.²⁷ In this case, just as James Arthur’s tweets displayed elements of his personality that did not previously form part of his public image, James Blunt’s sense of humour and innovative method of dealing with hate and difficulty, positive elements of his character which had not previously been an evident part of his image were revealed in his tweets, thereby adding a further dimension to his engagement with his online public and fans.

Thus, overall, although social media use delivers both parties increased opportunities to interact and reveal elements of themselves and their thoughts that may have previously been filtered or blocked, it also raises some challenges and complications for both – many of which are not clear cut and evade easy solutions.

Concluding thoughts and suggestions

In this chapter I have argued that the personal and confessional framing of the musical output of some singer-songwriters can further charge their communicative practices on social media platforms, with fans given glimpses and previously unattained insights into the everyday, intimate lives of the musicians. As I have shown, these glimpses can often reveal elements of the artists that previously had not been explicitly forefronted or presented as part of their public image, as is the case with James Arthur and James Blunt. In addition, while use of social media has allowed new forms and methods of communication between singer-songwriters and their fans – processes that have been welcomed by some as revealing – they can also be complex and challenging.

From these arguments there are a number of related, and interconnecting, points to consider, that require further research, and may give rise to a multitude of further questions and implications. For example, how do fans negotiate any differences in the way that musicians approach and value these new forms of engagement and communication? For example, and as I have pondered elsewhere (see n. 21), while some singer-songwriters such as Amanda Palmer, and some of the musicians within Nancy Baym’s 2012 study,²⁸ speak of robust, valued, and genuinely ‘close’ connections with their fans through social media, others such as Neil Tennant despair at the ‘fake intimacy’ that they view as conjured. When these differences of views occur, how do fans situate themselves? For example, how would a fan of both Amanda Palmer and Neil Tennant make sense of these differences in how the platform is valued and perceived in terms of communications between artist and fan? And to what extent would these perceptions impact on their connections with the music?

Further research that explores these issues and the questions and implications I have raised in this chapter will be vital, in order to move further towards understanding and making sense of contemporary forms of communication between singer-songwriters and fans. As technology develops further, and may possibly provide even more avenues for engagement and participation, we may witness even further trajectories and complications arise, as both parties continue to negotiate and attempt to situate themselves on digital and social media platforms.