What does our orientation to the ephemeral and the past reveal about our fears and desires in the present? For decades, this question has subtly haunted western musical practice and scholarship via the work concept, performance, reproduction, and authenticity.Footnote 1 In Haunthenticity: Musical Replay and the Fear of the Real, Tracy McMullen directly addresses this question by examining obsessively precise live musical and artistic reenactments produced in the United States from the 1980s to the present. Through her analysis of an eclectic archive, McMullen offers “replay” as an incisive theoretical tool to examine how these reenactments work to stabilize whiteness and hetero-patriarchy.
McMullen first theorized “replay” in a 2018 article focused narrowly on reenactments of historic jazz performances.Footnote 2 Haunthenticity broadly theorizes “replay” as a set of practices by which live musical reenactments, from tribute bands to performance art retrospectives, treat their historic “originals” as fixed, objective, temporally bounded events (6–7). These originals serve as infallibly authoritative sources that arbitrate the authenticity of the reproductions. In doing so, “replay” practices often eschew interpretation, striving for perfect replications of the original. McMullen contextualizes the visual and gestural fidelity found in “replay” within anthropological and performance studies scholarship, drawing heavily from Rebecca Schneider's work on reperformance, reenactment, and authenticity.Footnote 3 However, McMullen finds “replay's” musical antecedents in the “eighteenth century with the advent of romantic aesthetics” and the work concept (10). Drawing from Carolyn Abbate's scholarship and several genealogies of psychoanalysis, McMullen argues that in late twentieth and early twenty-first century hypermediated western culture music is tantamount to the real, or “the impermanence of life, the unlocatability . . . of the subject, and the basic complexity of life that is intersubjective and interdependent” (12). Musical “replay,” situated within scholarship on copying and postmodernism, affords both the desirous capture of the real, while controlling it, or “keeping it at distance” out of fear (13).Footnote 4
This theoretical premise develops two parallel critiques throughout the book. First, that “replay” practices uncritically, and often problematically, reproduce historic sociocultural values about gender, sexuality, and race. This often marginalizes and erases the musical influence, reception histories, and interpretative practices of non-dominant groups. Second, the fears, desires, and uncanniness that underpin “replay's” authenticity expose the contingency, instability, and emptiness of identity and subjectivity.
Chapter 1 observes visually fetishistic tribute bands (clone bands) covering Genesis touring shows and ABBA performances. Expanding Edward Macan's work on English progressive rock and countercultures and Carl Magnus Palm's on ABBA, McMullen argues that tribute bands’ uncritical “replay” practices result in problematic reproductions and erasures.Footnote 5 For example, performances by the Genesis clone band, the Musical Box, naturalize the English nationalism and white universalism found in Genesis’ touring shows. Similarly, ABBA clone bands Arrival and the Concert erase the original group's queer cult following, instead fabricating a performance of “wholesome, family fun of the two heterosexual couples that seems to be the ‘real’ ABBA” (55). McMullen argues that both instances represent mainstream white performers’ and audiences’ desire for comfort and security through the past as “perfectly known,” amid the vacuity and instability of identity in a postmodern age (51).
Chapter 2 observes how “replay” practices shifted film and performance artist priorities by examining Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008), Marina Abramović's preservative retrospectives (2005, 2010), and Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's reenactment of David Bowie's last performance of Ziggy Stardust (“A Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide,” 1998). Again, building upon Schneider's work, McMullen successfully argues that the original performances represent a creative ethos endemic to the 1960s that prioritized liberated, playful self-exploration in which identity is fleeting and contingent. The reenactments, however, use “replay” practices to stabilize and erase this play with identity, resulting in live performances that function as objects. McMullen argues that this practice makes manifests the artist's desire to preserve the past, control the present, and prevent permanent loss and inauthentic performances in the future.
In chapter 3, McMullen discusses “replay” practices that supported the historicization of jazz in the 1980s through Jazz at Lincoln Center; and the memorialization of specific concerts, such as the Yale University Band's 1994 to 2004 reenactments of Glenn Miller's mid-1940s performance. Again, expanding on her 2018 article, McMullen argues that “replay” erases jazz's African and African American practices of difference producing repetition with stable, and arguably western, reproduction practices. Furthermore, “replay” in jazz often erases the participation of women in the original performances, producing an ultimately inauthentic reproduction dominated by masculinity and patriarchy. Drawing from her own discomforts performing in these situations, McMullen offers the insightful concept “in-passing” to describe the labor women, people of color, and queer people perform in order to maintain the myth of these performances (118).
Chapter 4 seriously, and at times humorously, considers how Led Zeppelin's gender androgyny afforded a replay-laden tribute by the all-female group Lez Zeppelin. In a welcome re-reading of the “cock-rock” origin story, McMullen expands on her previous scholarship in which she claims that the masculine features often attributed to Led Zeppelin are due to Janis Joplin's influence on the group.Footnote 6 In Haunthenticity, she argues that Lez Zeppelin's performance is successful as “replay” because it naturalizes the erasure of female influences that informed Led Zeppelin's masculinity and androgyny.Footnote 7 Following Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam's scholarship, this naturalization ultimately points to the emptiness of gender and identity as signifiers. However, McMullen observes that Lez Zeppelin's “replay” performance invests in whiteness by tacitly perpetuating the erasure of Black women's careers in early rock, and Joplin and Led Zeppelin's appropriation of their music.
As a response to the problems of “replay,” McMullen's conclusion elegantly expands her 2016 theorization of the “improvisative,” or a mode of subjectivity founded on creativity and generosity, not stability and recognition.Footnote 8 She demonstrates the utility of this concept as an analytical tool and generative practice through close listening to pianist and MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran's performance, In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959 (2007). Here, Moran's reenactment of Thelonious Monk forgoes the exact duplication, desires, and fears associated with replay, instead favoring a generous, “improvisative” disposition, that “plays with” and “gives to” the past as it is intimately and inseparably bound within the present (159–64). McMullen argues that this enmeshing of the past into the ephemeral and contingent present can be extended to other important theoretical categories from self and other to subject and object. Though compellingly argued, her brief foray into this provocative theoretical territory begs more extensive critical discussion. Following the extended critique of replay, questions loom about the politics and power dynamics that constrain a generous, “improvisative” subjectivity and performance.
Haunthenticity presents a detailed, yet accessible guide to “replay,” a phenomenon that has received limited critical attention in music studies.Footnote 9 Her detailed case studies offer critical insights into “replay” performances and opens up new ground for advanced music scholars studying the reception histories of the original artists. McMullen's theorization of “replay” creates space to consider music as part of interdisciplinary discussions of “memory culture” and public memory.Footnote 10 However, through the “improvisative,” McMullen ultimately calls scholars and artists alike to consider the social aesthetics surrounding performance and improvisation in order to develop a more critical and “generous” orientations to an “impermanent and interdependent world” (170).
