Assessment. 2 2000 words max

Popular Music (2002) Volume 21/3. Copyright  2002 Cambridge University Press, pp. 307–329.

DOI:10.1017/S0261143002002209 Printed in the United Kingdom

Authentic boy bands on TV? Performers and impresarios in The Monkees and Making the Band

MATTHEW STAHL

Abstract

Boy bands embody contradictory representations of their own individuality and authenticity and the corporate nature of their genesis and presentation. Boy band members, the impresarios and entreprene- urs behind them, and the producers of television shows about them must contend in their work and relationships with the social and symbolic conventions of their historical moment. In this article I analyse representations of boy bands on the American TV shows The Monkees (1966–8) and Making the Band (2000–) in order to highlight shifts in the ways the performers and production personnel have been represented and have sought to represent themselves. The internal push for legitimacy and autonomy of the young stars of these shows, acting from within a perceived but unstable gap between ‘musician’ and ‘employee’, exists in tension with the external push of TV and music producers, network, record label and marketing departments for rational, predictable products and behaviours that fit within an overall business plan. While the rock ideology of authenticity has lost much of the force it had in the 1960s and change in representational conventions seem to indicate a general acceptance of the overt commercialism of chart-busting pop, this article shows that even within the mainstream flows a strong current of concern over issues of authenticity, legitimacy and autonomy.

Producers of television shows about musicians and the performers who make up the casts of such shows must contend in their work and relationships with the social and symbolic conventions of their historical moment. In this paper I take a look at representations of boy bands on two weekly television shows broadcast in the 1960s and in the 1990s–01s in order to highlight shifts in both the ways the performers and production personnel have been represented and have sought to represent themselves. This analytic strategy allows me to explore shifts over time in the ter- rain of televised musical performance in America, which correspond in no small measure to broader political, economic and cultural shifts in the nation over the last thirty-five years. Televised musical performance and the narratives that extend it participate in regimes of authenticity and value in their historical moment. The comparison of televised performances and narratives from these two periods offers not only an engaging story of conservation and change in performer/impresario relations. Cultural production is also cultural reproduction; television narratives both reproduce and produce social relations, and change in such narratives and social relations is reciprocal and the product of struggle. When performers are con- ceived as positioned in complex sets of historically specific industrial relations, such

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a comparison offers a new perspective on the paradoxical discursive components of changing labour regimes in late capitalism.

Television and authenticity

American television has, since its 1948–51 ‘golden age’ of live broadcasting, been a distribution point for discourses of authenticity. The comedy-variety shows of this era were descended from the vaudeville tradition with its schtick comedians/ emcees such as Red Skelton, Sid Caesar and Milton Berle, who brought live per- formances to audiences as a form of highly scripted, but spontaneous and individu- alised play (Marc 1989, pp. 28–32, 38–44). Milton Berle’s enormously popular Texaco Star Theater was the model for this type of show, which put a quick-witted host at the centre of a hodgepodge of skits, musical numbers and monologues. His auton- omy and spontaneity were legendary, he ‘disliked working with a prepared script, preferred to ad-lib, and enjoyed the give and take of a live audience’ (Werthiem 1983, p. 59). Both Marc (1989) and Spigel (1992, p. 143) refer to Berle’s type of televised stand-up comedy as ‘presentational’: a comic host presents himself as what he appears to be – a commentator, a show’s driver or steersman, a joker, a personality whose direct address to the audience signals the presence of an individ- ual ‘being who he is’. ‘As is the case with professional wrestlers’, writes Marc, ‘the mask cannot be pried loose from the face of the performer. There are no perceptible differences in the personae of any of these stand-ups when they are ‘‘speaking candidly’’ in interview situations, as opposed to when they are ‘‘performing’’’ (Marc 1989, p. 17).

Often appearing in drag and or otherwise costumed, stealing scenes from his guest stars, and dashing into the live audience for impromptu banter, Berle, in Leach’s (2001) terms, spoke for rather than as his largely urban north-eastern view- ership, accustomed as they were to the distinctly New York/Jewish vaudevillian performance conventions of the witty raconteur. But as television sets become fix- tures in the homes of rural and suburban viewers across the nation, the comedy- variety show’s urban audience became less significant to networks while its style of humour threatened to alienate growing heartland audiences.1 In the early 1950s, the comedy-variety show was eclipsed by the new genre of the sitcom, which Marc characterises as ‘representational’ – that is, comedians in these shows take on roles in narratives that contain their spontaneity and self-presentation within represen- tations of domestic life designed to appeal to the most demographically varied audience. In this genre, character and performer do not have the same sort of appar- ent unity; Berle’s type of authenticity is devalued in favour of a wider intelligibility on the level of story and degree of moral complexity. From this point on, with few exceptions, the live, presentational, direct-address conventions of the comedy- variety show become subsumed into the increasingly story-oriented and morally unambiguous filmed sitcoms.

In contrast, late 1990s television turned live performance into the reality show with its focus on a small group of ‘ordinary’ people presented as the opposite of professional entertainers. Like the comedy-variety hosts, these ordinary people also ‘present’ themselves in the sense that they are ‘playing’ themselves, but they embody a different type of televised authenticity in that they are in crucial ways identical with their targeted audience; reality show performers speak as rather than for their audience. Andrejevic (2002) writes that reality show ‘cast members are

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drawn from the viewing public, and not from the ranks of specialized actors’; beyond obvious economic advantages, this ‘adds to the fantasy appeal of such shows by democratizing it’. As co-producer Jon Murray of MTV’s reality shows Road Rules and The Real World puts it, ‘the audience that watches the show think that they have an opportunity to be on it’ (Andrejevic 2002, p. 260). ‘[A] former cast member of Road Rules’, when interviewed by Andrejevic, said that being a fan of the show was what inspired him to apply: ‘‘‘there’s a bunch of kids in front of the camera . . . and you’re sitting on the couch thinking: that could be me’’’ (Andrejevic 2002, p. 260). This echoes Leach’s assessment of the Spice Girls’ popularity – that identification takes place because both the Spice Girls and their audience occupy homologous social positions and that the Spice Girls ‘convince us that they think what we would think of this mad world of stars if we were suddenly translated thence, which, because presence there implies that hard work and luck would be enough, they additionally reassure us we could be’ (Leach 2001, p. 150).

But the presence of these ‘real people’ on television represents more than simply a bid for authentic representation of a target audience. The reality show’s strategy of constant surveillance assures us that cast members are no more and no less than who they appear to be. Co-producer Mary-Ellis Bunim claims: ‘You can’t sustain a character that isn’t true to yourself, day and night, for 13 weeks. It’s just not possible. It would drive you mad’ (quoted in Andrejevic 2002, p. 261). The cast members’ contribution, writes Andrejevic, ‘is their ability to ‘‘be real’’ – to reveal their authentic reactions and to just be themselves’ (Andrejevic 2002, p. 261). These two moments of ‘live’ television – the late 1940s and the late 1990s – have played with two longstanding cultural notions of authenticity: one, individualised creative integrity, and the other, cultural representation of shared forms of life.2

If American popular music has sometimes been characterised by a genealogy of innovative musicians, it has also been identified as a homogenising source of generic American culture. The professional impresario has often been a major cre- ative force, organising ‘talent’ into a marketable product – something for all Amer- icans to buy and understand. Because of this institutional power, the impresario has often become a focus for conflicts over authenticity in the construction of popu- lar music. In the TV shows under consideration here, one of the most interesting currents running through the different representations of bands and their music was a shifting but sustained concern about authenticity that affected the narratives, musical performances, and social relations on and off the set.3 The two boy bands, whose TV shows I analyse here, were not assembled by the performers but con- structed by industry experts. On these two television shows, the sometimes visible, sometimes invisible role of impresarios and experts illustrate how changing dis- courses of authenticity mediated the relationships between performers and impre- sarios in different periods of American life.

By analysing televised representations of these boy bands I demonstrate that claims of value in this corner of the popular music world tend at any given time to cluster predominantly around one or the other of the two polar notions of authen- ticity described above. I show that while the two poles of authenticity may wax and wane over time, each remains an important part of American cultural life. An individualist, Romantic version of authenticity fuelled struggles over the complex division of labour characteristic of the popular music/TV narrative production com- plex in the 1960s and reappears today. The urge to produce a generic, shared Amer- ican culture has been more vital since the 1990s, but was nonetheless part of the

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music industry in the 1960s, when youth culture in America was still under con- struction. I argue that Romantic discourses of authenticity in popular music still carry narrative tension and serve instrumentally, along with the discourses of auth- entic ordinariness, as zones of identification offered by music/television producers to music/television consumers. I conclude that these shifts have consequences for performers and production personnel in determining the bases for and the kinds of claims that can be made in struggles over value in the production of popular music narratives.

The shows

The Monkees were formed in 1965 by two young television producers who pitched the idea of a weekly comedy TV show featuring a young band having wacky, sur- real, intertextual adventures that would trade on and draw its inspiration from Richard Lester’s 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night. The two producers rounded up their young Hollywood friends, hired a song-writing team, auditioned and selec- ted four young men and produced a successful television show that ran for two seasons and a band that was productive for years afterwards. The Monkees had several hit records, they toured the US, Europe and Australia and, in the early 1970s, dwindled from four to three to two members only to languish in relative obscurity until the ‘reunion’ tours and ‘where are they now’ television shows began in the mid-1980s.

While A Hard Day’s Night is widely regarded as the show’s primary model, the genealogy of The Monkees is multiply stranded and linked in large part to a British/American transatlantic popular culture complex of the early 1960s. Post-war British/American cultural and capital exchange were characterised at that time by Edward Francis Williams, in his American Invasion (1962), as intense and unidirec- tional, penetrating all spheres of British life. According to Williams, American com- mercial culture and investment capital virtually saturated Great Britain in the years following the war; for example, by 1962 American music accounted for nearly sev- enty per cent of BBC music programming, four of Great Britain’s top ten advertising agencies were American-owned and one in every twenty British workers had an American employer (Williams 1962, pp. 37, 157, 17). Conversely, on the other side of the Atlantic at the very same time, British cultural exporters were encountering a rapidly expanding taste and market for their goods. Miller (2000) credits John F. Kennedy’s publicly professed enjoyment in 1961 of Ian Fleming’s novel From Russia With Love with precipitating a wide-ranging James Bond infusion of British popular culture into American life. What’s more, Miller argues, in the anomie following Kennedy’s assassination there developed a new American receptivity for British cultural exports that allowed early 1960s British television to establish an increas- ingly prominent position in the US mediascape (Miller 2000, pp. 28–33).

As the Beatles were nearing their teens, Richard Lester, director of A Hard Day’s Night, was embarking on a career in live television in the US. By 1952 he had become a journeyman director at WCAU in Philadelphia; in 1955 he settled in Eng- land, finding employment in the burgeoning field of commercial television. Lester’s selection by Peter Sellars to translate the Goons from radio to TV led to The Idiot’s Weekly, A Show Called Fred, Son of Fred and Sellar’s and Lester’s 1959 short The Running Jumping Standing Still Film, held by many critics to be a stylistic prototype for the 1964 Beatles vehicle. Financed by US capital and completed on a very tight

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schedule in order to exploit a pop phenomenon United Artists thought would not outlast the year, A Hard Day’s Night depicts the Beatles’ playful attempts to elude their managers and fans, and tensions with their parents’ generation and the culture industry, accentuating characteristics of autonomous, pranksterish irrepressibility, disrespect for authority, and a small range of new masculinities. The film melds British documentary and Hollywood musical; ‘A Hard Day’s Night . . . uses and is about British talent and British success’ but is both a product and component of this post-war British/American cultural complex (Agajanian 2000, p. 93).

Charged with translating the Beatles into film, Lester employed avant garde film techniques and pioneered representational practices that would set a new transatlantic standard in popular music; in so doing he and screenwriter Alun Owen synthesised for the field of rock ’n’ roll new varieties of personae and sets of relations, a new structure of feeling. ‘Lester . . . gave the Beatles opportunities to improvise and be themselves’ (Agajanian 2000, p. 104), linking these selves to a new type of rock ’n’ roll narrative. Band mates, according to this model, should be equal, authentic, funny, irreverent, energetic, attractive and beguiling, and should be rep- resented with visual techniques that reinforce their claims of breaking with stodgy convention. Young American TV producer Bob Rafelson was to enact these rep- resentational practices the following year when he and co-producer Bert Schneider adapted this new rock ’n’ roll narrative in their work on the The Monkees pilot at Screen Gems.

While The Monkees clearly also draws from such elements of 1960s British popular culture as Lew Grade’s adapted-for-the-US-market series The Saint, Secret Agent and the colour version of The Avengers (see Miller 2000, pp. 25–50), especially when the four hapless musicians get thrust into some cold war espionage vignette, The Monkees was more than simply a transposition of swinging London to Southern California. The show combined elements of the vaudeville-derived comedy-variety show of American ‘golden age’ TV (such as musical performance, slapstick, direct address and outrageous costumed skits) with features of the early twentieth-century working-class-oriented comic cinema of Mack Sennet that profoundly influenced Lester: slapstick comedy, appetitive underdog heroes, and the confounding and lampooning of authority figures (see Putterman 1995, esp. pp. 66–8).

The televising of this particular mix of elements in the youth space of rock ’n’ roll fantasy was made possible by shifts in sitcom convention in the early 1960s. Marc describes the emergence of a new category of fantasy-comedy during this period. Mid-1960s sitcoms, according to Marc, ‘seemed utterly indifferent to verisi- militude’ (Marc 1989, pp. 128–9). Shows such as Gilligan’s Island, Mr. Ed, Bewitched, My Favorite Martian, The Munsters, The Addams Family, I Dream of Jeannie and Green Acres, featured incredible premises, and a ‘profusion of animals with human intelli- gence, aliens from outer space, families of monsters and supernaturally powered women who could do the dishes by sheer will . . .’ (Marc 1989, p. 130). In this narrative climate the way is prepared for stories about a young rock band of the new style becoming spies, making deals with the Devil, appearing in fairy tales, being kidnapped or chased by gangsters, and marrying princesses.

2000’s O-Town was put together through a process that was a central dramatic feature of the contemporary reality TV show, Making the Band. A successful impre- sario and his expert employees organised auditions in several major US cities (portions of which were televised in the first episode) and from an initial pool of twenty-five were chosen, over the course of a few episodes, a final five boys. The

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show’s first season focused on the struggles the boys underwent to learn how to be boy band members – rigorous training in singing and dancing and practice, prac- tice, practice – all leading to hoped-for auditions before A&R personnel of major record labels.

Reality programming costs about a third less to produce on average than dra- matic programming; for that reason alone it is of automatic interest to capitalist broadcasters in a media environment that is increasingly diverse and niche-focused and therefore in need of vast quantities of inexpensive new content.4 As implied above, reality programming offers to viewers a new type of ‘live’ television experi- ence – though rather than offering contingency on the level of a performer having to sustain an engaged relationship with an audience ‘without a net’, contingency comes into play via the dependence upon non-actors who must sustain engaged relationships with each other, and more importantly, with themselves. (In this sense, then, The Monkees, since it took pains to hire non-acting ‘real people’ as its stars, can be seen as an early experiment along these lines.) No amount of editing, it would appear, could fundamentally alter the relationship of the cast member’s performance to his or her ‘self’, therefore, dramatic tension (and viewer appeal) is guaranteed so long as that performer/self dyad is constantly put into situations which threaten the unity of persona and imputed moral core, especially in relation to social custom and manners.

As we shall see, much of the dramatic tension of Making the Band comes from the ways in which the boys manage internal and external conflicts engendered by the show’s placement of their physically trained bodies in the positions of singing stars before they have had a chance mentally and emotionally to train themselves for those positions, thus putting elements of their persons into contradiction. Just as with shows like Survivor and Big Brother, the audience is offered the opportunity to observe individuals put into situations that threaten destabilisation and compel action.5 How will they handle the requirements of them? How will their relation- ships with their girlfriends suffer as they are surrounded by thousands of young female fans? How will they reconcile a sense of themselves as individual auton- omous subjects with the experience of the control exercised over them by their handlers?

Making the Band and The Monkees thus offer different points of identification and require different sorts of audience participation. The Monkees was a succession of discrete episodes, each one resolving neatly in a half-hour’s time. Viewers could tune in at any point in the season and have all the tools they need to interpret the action just by virtue of being participants in the culture. The same is true for Making the Band, but to a much lesser degree. At the turn of the twenty-first century, reality TV has its own conventions that are more or less firmly established in the cultural vocabulary of the average viewer; however, the particulars of any given episode are not self-explanatory. Each segment begins with a ‘story so far’ type of introduc- tion, and ends with a ‘next time on Making the Band’ teaser, but mastery of the story requires constant viewing. Each episode ends with something of a cliff-hanger, asking viewers to speculate on how a particular dilemma will be resolved, but only insofar as it will make possible or at least precede another new dilemma.

Extra-musical narrative

While The Monkees appeared on television fifteen years before MTV and the ‘music video’ as we know it, and while it is not clear that The Monkees was conceived

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primarily as a means to promote a musical commodity (in fact, the first Monkees single promoted the show and their first album was released as an ancillary to it, a ‘soundtrack’ album), the presentation of the band members in the series was aimed at fostering extra-musical audience identification, a necessary ingredient in what Andrew Goodwin calls ‘star loyalty’. According to Goodwin (1992), ‘characteriz- ation, fiction, and perhaps even narrative itself exist in popular music at the point of narration, outside the diegesis of individual songs, live performances, or video clips, through the persona of the pop star’. ‘Star loyalty’, he goes on to say, ‘is a key element in the music industry’s effort to rationalise the impossible task of pre- dicting public taste’ (Goodwin 1992, p. 103). Though neither The Monkees nor Making the Band enjoyed top ratings, each was a very effective vehicle for extra-musical identification and, as we shall see, fostered star loyalty with very different narra- tives.

The Monkees was both ahead of and behind its time in this respect. The pro- ducers had a very good idea of what could inspire identification and loyalty in fans; their dual product of television show and records, each advertising the other, and both deepened by clusters of fan merchandise, was a master-stroke of marketing that presaged the vertical integration and corporate convergence so characteristic of the entertainment industry in the last couple of decades. Members of the Mon- kees, in keeping with the hip marketing spirit of the time, described by Thomas Frank (1997), were charged to provide ‘authentic’ objects of identification for their audience. Contradictions felt by the band members, simultaneously compelled to express themselves personally but suppress themselves musically, caused tremen- dous tension between the producers and the band members, and arguably led to the cancellation of the show and the commercial demise of the band.

Making the Band, with its obsessive, maudlin, reality-TV-voyeuristic focus on the mundane grind of professionalisation and the band members’ responses to and conflicts over that process, offers a different mode of identification to the viewer- listener. Josh Gamson (1994) suggests, in concordance with Leach’s arguments about authenticity, that there are two stories of Hollywood celebrity in twentieth- century America. The first hinges on the notion of natural talent intrinsic to the star as the basis of his or her stardom and corresponds to the Romantic version of authenticity; this story dominated the production of Hollywood celebrity through the early 1930s. The second, introduced into celebrity texts around that time as a strategy of product differentiation in a saturated market, featured centrally the construction of stars out of ‘ordinary’ people by industry experts. This second story, which holds that but for the grace of the lucky break, the star would be just like us, threatened the legitimacy of stardom as an ironclad cultural category. At this stage in the development of Hollywood celebrity the legitimacy of the star’s valoris- ation began to rest on the idea that the public becomes the final discoverer, acting as consecrator of the industry’s offering. Strategies of identification and legitimation thus become more subtle:

by embracing the notion that celebrity images were artificial products and inviting readers to visit the reality behind those images, popular magazines partially defused the notion that celebrity was really derived from nothing but images . . . Manufactured images, then, would be harmless to allegiances [of fans and stars]. The public could discover and make famous certain people because it (with the help of magazines) could see through the publicity- generated, artificial self to the real, deserving, special [in the sense that all are in some way special] self (Gamson 1994, p. 38).

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Audiences today, argues Gamson, are now instructed ‘not simply in viewing the self behind the image . . . but in viewing the fabrication process’. These strategies serve the interest of capitalist media in important ways. Reality shows are now a mainstay of US television programming; in the flood of TV content available to the average American cable household, ‘cynicism, irony, and invitations behind the scenes engage where tuning out would be quite natural’ (Gamson 1994, p. 54).

In the mid 1960s, when representations of construction processes were de rigeur in celebrity texts around film, and while variety shows (no longer the prov- ince of comedians but of pop singers like Andy Williams and Perry Como and consecrators like Ed Sullivan), a primary television venue for pop music, still depended to some degree on naturalised stars, something was happening in the world of pop that set the Monkees up for emotional and professional turmoil. Peter Wicke, in his writing on rock ideology (1990), explores the infection of pop music in Britain by Romantic notions of the artist and an anti-commercial ideology. In the early 1960s, structural changes in British higher education had begun to produce a significant number of fine arts and design students who found in rock music pro- duction ways of being an artist and of making a living that comprised an exciting urban lifestyle and a viable economic future. This new crop of art students pushed a Romantic view of the rock musician as autonomous artist into the world of pop music production and consumption.

‘The art school experience . . .’, writes Peter Wicke of this moment in pop, ‘pro- vided rock musicians with the basis of their consciousness of themselves as musicians in artistic and ideological terms. The result was that, in contrast to the traditional rock song, the contradictory relationship of art and commerce, of artistic claims and popu- lar culture, was reflected in rock music and became the driving force of its develop- ment’ (Wicke 1990, p. 96). These ideological terms were founded on Romantic notions that held tremendous currency in the culture of the British art school at that time. According to Frith and Horne, ‘the mode of expression of students (and of rock) in the sixties borrowed heavily from Romantic philosophy with its emphasis on autonomy and creativity and from avant garde manifestos of the early 20th century . . . In this ideology of art, in its relation to the individual, is a matter of individuality, of a turning inward, of an obsession’ (quoted in Wicke 1990, p. 97).

The Romantic notion of the autonomous artist wrestling with inner forces to produce material reflective of his or her individual subjectivity produced a reaction whereby much of the pop world was infected with the need to seem ‘real’ in a new way. Thus, when, in 1965, two young Hollywood TV producers hit on the idea of putting together a television show based largely on A Hard Day’s Night, the combi- nation of discourses of musical authenticity and television conventions discussed above was sufficiently powerful to propel the production of the show in particular and, as we shall see, contradictory ways.

Industrial relations and the boy bands on television

Allow me to introduce these two bands and television shows the way they intro- duce themselves. The shows’ opening segments will familiarise us with the per- formers and premises sufficiently to begin our analysis in earnest (see Figures 1–3).

The Monkees opening theme song (‘Monkees Theme’ – sung by the band over a montage of shots of them being wacky: in nightclothes pushing a four-poster bed down the

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Figure 1. Bed in the street.

Figure 2. Unicycles.

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Figure 3. The Monkees.

LA streets, riding motorcycles on grass, on unicycles with training wheels, in their cus- tomised ‘Monkeemobile’, etc., intercut with shots of them lip-synching the song as a band)

Here we come, walking down the street, We get the funniest looks from everyone we meet. Hey hey we’re the Monkees, and people say we monkey around, But we’re too busy singing to put anybody down. We’re just trying to be friendly, come and watch us sing and play. We’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say. Hey hey we’re the Monkees, you never know where we’ll be found, So you better get ready, we may be coming to your town.

Making the Band opening titles (titles superimposed over a montage of the O-Town boys: dancing, in their luxury home, with girlfriends, performing, hugging each other, etc.)

Look into a world Behind the scenes on the road to fame They will become superstars Live their dream Passion Sacrifice Determination 25 will become � � � 8 8 will become � � � 5 5 make the band Ashley Erik Ikaika

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Trevor Jacob Making the Band

Evident in the opening credits of each show is the degree to which expert construction of the bands will feature in the narratives thereby introduced. Gamson (1994) points to processes of star-making as central to contemporary celebrity texts. A primary difference between the two TV show/pop band constellations under discussion here is the degree of exposure and problematisation of each band’s con- structedness. The constructedness of The Monkees was not intentionally hidden – in the year of the show’s first appearance one of the producers had remarked in the presence of a NY Times reporter that ‘You can fool some of the kids some of the time’ (Canby 1966) – yet their constructedness was obscured by their naturalised presentation. There they were from their TV debut, looking and behaving not unlike the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, singing and playing and cavorting as if, like the Beatles, they had come together ‘organically’ and not as the result of calculated career moves on the part of the young performers, television producers and their associates.

For O-Town, the constructedness of the singing, dancing boy band is already a convention; it is totally unproblematised by the show’s producers and generally not represented as a problem for the boys (with important exceptions, as we shall see). Making the Band, a reality show to the core, makes the very process of construc- tion the central focus of the show. The first several episodes deal with the audition process and the winnowing down to the five boys from successive ranks first of twenty-five hopefuls, then of eight. Contracted by the television production com- pany on the basis of his excellent track record in the assembly and promotion of successful boy bands, the impresario (who naturally has a strong interest in the publicity such a show would bring his next project), organises the experts – the songwriters, the choreographer, the vocal coach, the road manager, the publicists, the wardrobe consultants. He gathers resources – rents a house for and sees to the physical needs of his future band, and secures space for training and rehearsal. He puts together a panel of selectors for the audition process and when all is in readi- ness the call goes out for auditioners via a notice on the Internet. The impresario in Making the Band is a father figure who likes to be called by his charges ‘big papa’; he shepherds them through the star-making process, giving succour when the chor- eographer or vocal coach comes down too hard, but does not suppress his wrath when the boys are flaky.

Open auditions were held for the four Monkees in order to attract ‘real’ people for the sake of verisimilitude on the level of personae – the Beatles weren’t actors; the Monkees had to be ‘real’ also. The ad in Variety specified that what was sought was a type known to congregate at a particular after-hours hipster hangout in LA: ‘MADNESS!! Auditions – folk & roll musicians-singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys, age 17–21. Want spirited Ben Frank’s types. Have courage to work. Must come down [from your ‘drug trip’?] for interview’. Ben Frank’s was a ‘late night restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard where you’d go in the morning after the Whisky Au Go-Go closed, and drop drugs’ (Baker 1997, p. 8). The auditions were personality tests that placed hopefuls into awkward situ- ations – sometimes the producers just sat in silence behind a desk without giving any instructions and took note of auditioners’ reactions; one auditioner walked in to find the producers juggling, another to find them balancing a pile of bottles and

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glasses on their desk. The producers posed questions such as ‘Do you like the colour of the carpet?’ ‘Would you like to be sitting in my chair?’ The chief producer, Bob Rafelson, later remarked ‘All of this was enormously revealing about what I was looking for, when and if they made it into the group. Did they listen? Did they compete? Did they challenge? Who was the natural leader? Who could be stupid? Who could be smart? I felt like a marriage broker, I couldn’t figure out who would dig each other, but I knew who wouldn’t’ (Baker 1997, p. 10).

Their initial training was six weeks of improvisation under the guidance of the show’s lead director, Jim Frawley. Of that process, he said, ‘It was like a group therapy session’ (Stone 1966). The nature of the audition process shows that what the producers were after was a group of intelligent, quick-thinking and funny young men along the lines established by Milton Berle nearly twenty years before, young men who could be relied upon to appear to be themselves in funny and interesting ways, that could be put into various comedic situations and whose crea- tivity and spontaneity would assure naturalised ‘authentic’ responses. ‘We didn’t even look at actors, and we didn’t look for experienced rock ’n’ roll groups because we wanted guys who could play themselves’ (Canby 1966). (It is important to note, however, that all of the Monkees did have previous music and performance experience.)

In the O-Town auditions, held in several cities around the US, the thousands of aspirants had a few minutes each to sing and dance and show their ‘personality’. A portion of the audition process was shown in the first couple of episodes of the series, and the way that process was represented tells us much about what is valued in the new regime, or more precisely, what the producers of the show want us to see as valuable. Boy band impresario Lou Pearlman and his expert consultants sat behind a long folding table and watched as each aspirant sang and danced to prerecorded tracks. The data we have access to concerning this process is limited to the edited representations presented in the first episodes of the television show and cannot be taken as a random sample. What can be seen, however, is how the producers of the show wanted to represent the process. One can see how specific the criteria of Pearlman and his associates are, and it is easy to see how clearly defined the conventions of contemporary boy band presentation are and how con- versant with these conventions many of the auditioners were. The representations of those who did not or could not emulate the presentational styles of extant boy bands (smooth, quick dance moves, an up-to-date fashion sense and polished, melo- dramatic vocal style) were intercut with shots of the pitying, dismissive or mocking looks of the judges.

What emerges is a sense that judges and auditioners are aiming at more or less the same ideal from different angles; the experts are judging the raw material (but not TOO raw, they appear to require that a certain minimum standard of training and discipline should have been achieved by each aspirant on his own) and the boys are presenting their boy band skills cultivated in the private realm of the home or the school. Whereas both The Monkees and Making the Band auditions were on one level after similar sets of features – handsome faces, a specific age range, and manners of self presentation reflecting contemporary conventions, Making the Band/O-Town auditions appear to have been weighted in such a way as to privilege specific, conventionally coded skills of singing and dancing, and, importantly, ability to take direction.

In an interview with Lou Pearlman on a television news programme, Pearl-

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man discloses some of his perspective on this audition process (of course, since this segment focused on conflicts between this impresario and his bands, his words here should be read as assertions of the value of his entrepreneurial and organisational skills and of his command of capital). This news programme was recorded during the production of Making the Band.

Interviewer: What are you looking for? Lou Pearlman: You need to have the young kid that definitely has the cute look, that the

young girls are looking for. The older guy has to have that older image. It’s great to have someone Latino, give some extra flavour to it. Or one guy has to have that GQ look.

Interviewer (to an auditioning aspirant): What was your dream in coming here today? Bourke Floyd: Lou Pearlman could just, on a whim – on a whim change anyone’s life here. Interviewer: It’s going to take somebody like Lou Pearlman to make Bourke Floyd famous. Interviewer: Doesn’t sound too promising. Lou Pearlman (VO): OK. Thank you. We’ll keep you posted. (To interviewer) I’d like people

to see that the Backstreet Boys weren’t, ‘Poof, you’re the Backstreet Boys’ And, ‘poof, you’re N’Sync’. I want people to see how hard it is. (ABC News 2000)

In both these television shows each band plays a part in a story the entertain- ment industry tells about itself. The producers of The Monkees wanted viewers to see an ‘authentic’ youth cultural expression – the rock band – based on their belief regarding what was required for market success, that is, the story of young musicians ‘doing their thing’ without the intrusion of ‘the man’ in the form of the culture industries (only a small number of the over fifty Monkees TV shows made any reference at all to the music business or the commodification of music necessary for the survival of a professional musician in a capitalist regime). The producers of Making the Band want viewers to see the cultural power of the (previously) behind- the-scenes experts and the work that goes into producing a boy band, as well as representations of the boy band themselves based on their belief of what is required for market success.6 Both bands were highly produced, but nonetheless were formed not primarily of television actors, but of musicians and singers who responded to open auditions. Because of their relative industry-outsider status, they brought to the television shows beliefs and desires about creativity and music that they often considered to be in tension with for-profit corporate music and television production.

Authentic band members? Conventions of authenticity in TV representations of musicians

A brief analysis of a clip from each show will help us to see different ways in which the two bands are presented. In an early scene from an episode of The Monkees, ‘The Spy Who Came In From The Cool’, the boys are discussing whether or not to take positions as spies working for the CIS, a government intelligence agency. Mickey is hot on the idea and seeks to convince the others that it is a good one.

The Monkees show excerpt (in their groovy Monkee pad, all seated on unicycles with training wheels)

(Unintelligible vocal exclamations, sound effects: Woo haa ha boyoyoing) Mike: Man, you know, I don’t think this espionage thing is such a good idea after all. Mickey: Aw come on, lookit, we’ve seen every spy movie, haven’t we? Really, there’s nothing

to it.

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The scene cuts to a secret spy laboratory, a la 007, where Mickey (in lab coat and with a British accent) demonstrates to each Monkee a secret spy gizmo – none of which ever get used in the story. Mickey: This cufflink contains a miniaturised tape recorder. Peter: If I wear two of them can I record in stereo? (Rhino Entertainment Company 1994)

In a scene from one of the first Making the Band episodes, tension arises as two finalists dispute acceptable standards of behaviour for ‘professional’ performers. Jacob tries to rouse Eric who’s sleeping off a night of partying – even though the final cut from eight finalists down to the five members of the band has not yet been made and his career as a pop star therefore remains uncertain. Eric has evidently been clubbing a little too energetically to perform to the standards expected by Jacob, and as we will see, by Mark, the vocal coach. The boys are supposed to be on their way to vocal rehearsal and are running late. From his bed, Eric complains that he’s been working all day and that Jacob should let him sleep a while. Jacob counters ‘You’ve worked less than us, so don’t complain about working all day. You need to get up’. In response, Eric mumbles into his pillow that he’s not getting up. Jacob tells Eric to grow up and castigates him for his hypocrisy: ‘You’re always, like, ‘‘I’m such a professional, I’m such a professional’’’. The scene shifts to a post- facto interview segment with Jacob reflecting in direct address, as is the custom in many reality shows, on the tense moment just depicted. He tells the interviewer and TV audience that he hasn’t yet figured out a way to help Eric understand how his actions are affecting the group. Shifting back to the bedroom we see Jacob storm- ing out, leaving Eric curled up on his bed. Jacob tells Eric never to call himself a professional again, if he can’t even get out of bed to practice.

With these scenes we can see different conventions for presenting young musi- cal ‘stars’ at work in the two periods. The Monkees are portrayed as a bunch of spontaneous, silly, footloose, ‘natural’ musicians who do funny things and make rock and roll music too. Their legitimacy as valorised (by their presence on TV if not in the narratives themselves) celebrities is never in question and does not have to be established within the narrative. O-Town are serious, hard-working, sexy young men who strive, often against their own very natures, toward excellence. Their legitimacy is nowhere near as established, in fact, much of the drama hinges on if and how they will manage to legitimise themselves. O-Town and their pro- ducers struggle to cultivate professionalism and rigour; the Monkees and their pro- ducers likewise cultivated an anti-professional, ‘natural’ ethos. Each band’s tele- vised presence can be taken to point to the types of struggles over value and principles of valuation predominant in the pop music world of each period.

As Wicke has shown, a spasmodic mixing of high culture, Romanticism, and individualist free expression threw up a new rock ideology and a new set of criteria for rock legitimacy in the mid-1960s whereby ‘real’ rock musicians were to distance themselves (symbolically, at least) from the culture industry, look inside themselves for inspiration, write music and lyrics that reflected their inner states, and sing and play these songs themselves. Frank Zappa articulated this ideology quite nicely:

If you want to come up with a singular, most important trend in this new music, I think it has to be something like: it is original, composed by the people who perform it, created by them – even if they have to fight the record companies to do it – so that is really a creative action and not a commercial pile of shit thrown together by business people who think they know what John Doe and Mr. Jones really want. (Wicke 1990, p. 93)7

The Monkees became famous at the apex of this spasm and are well known

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for their struggles with their musical producer, Don Kirshner – publishing magnate of Brill Building fame – who initially exercised complete musical control over the television show, the band and their records. Kirshner was hired at the insistence of Screen Gems executives, who, not trusting the young songwriters who had written, arranged and recorded the songs for the pilot, asserted their requirement for rational control of music production as an essential part of the Monkees project. Don Kirshner (Figure 4) describes his role in The Monkees:

Don Kirshner: My job basically was to pick the songs, uhh, get a song in each show, and I became the supervisor of the music, the albums, and I had creative control on the entire project. (Rhino Entertainment Company 1997)

Kirshner selected songs from his stable of songwriters, hired musicians and producers to arrange and record them and then allowed the Monkees to sing on the tracks. The Monkees themselves, as I have argued, had been auditioned not only as boys who would play musicians on TV, but, in keeping with this 1960s valuation of authenticity and spontaneity, they had been auditioned on the basis of their abilities to contribute to the conceptual work of the show through improvis- ation and collaboration. Their young, southern Californian hipness (not to mention Davy’s exotic British accent) was a resource to be exploited in the creation of the show. The show’s producers wanted young men who could do more than be them- selves. They wanted cast members who could play themselves as naturalised enter- tainers consistent with other TV personalities of the era. Here is an excerpt of the screen test of one of the Monkees that seems to show what they were looking for in a cast member, broadcast at the end of one of the second season episodes:

Figure 4. Don Kirshner.

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Bob Rafelson (off-camera): You think you can play another part? Mike Nesmith (seated at table): What, what, what is that? What do you want me to be, strong

and silent? Bob Rafelson: Yeah, be strong and silent. (Mike turns to camera and smiles) Bob Rafelson: What. Now be a girl. (Mike turns to camera and smiles exactly as before) Bob Rafelson: Mike, you’re the same thing! Mike Nesmith: Well, I mean, that’s your hangup man, not mine, not me, I know where it’s at.

(Rhino Entertainment Company 1997)

It was thought that, in order to appeal to the kids, these guys had to seem ‘real’, like the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night (even though, as Agajanian points out, the Beatles of A Hard Day’s Night were highly constructed (Agajanian 2000, pp. 99– 100)), not ‘phony’, like Wayne Newton – four ‘real’ guys playing ‘real’ youth culture music, conforming to the expectations of how ‘real’ band members comport them- selves. But this valuation of their hipness, creativity and spontaneity was not extended to their musical expertise and this contradiction became a problem very soon.

Faced with criticism for not playing their own instruments and thus not being a ‘real’ band deserving of all the attention they got, and, at the same time facing their guilt for the sham they felt they were participating in, and what they perceived to be the daily compromise of their authenticity, the Monkees did much more than just get Kirshner fired by threatening a walkout (the firing of Kirshner did not give the band total control, just a much greater degree than under his direction). They also distanced themselves from the fact of their construction by drawing attention to the processes by which they were being fabricated within the TV show, and in a press conference they held for that express purpose, a feature film and a TV special. Even after they managed to get Kirshner fired, thereby gaining a significant amount of control over their recorded output, they continued to draw attention to the con- structed nature of the band. In fact, following the cancellation of the series in 1968, the Monkees, their producer, and his friend Jack Nicholson made Head, a feature film the primary theme of which was the fakery in which they had all been engaged and its ultimate end. Here the Monkees highlight the construction process and prob- lems of inauthenticity within the show and feature film (Figures 5–7):

Figure 5 (from TV special): Shot of band playing live on TV stage, on-stage audience member holds up sign reading ‘HE’S REALLY PLAYING THIS’ (Rhino Entertainment Company 1997)

Figure 6 (from TV special, they dance mechanically with large wind-up-toy keys protruding from their backs): . . . wind-up man, invented by the teeny bopper . . . (Rhino Entertainment Company 1997)

Figure 7 (from the movie Head, in Indian fighter/western scene): Oh, I don’t want to do this anymore, man (arrows pierce him in chest, he tears them out and throws them to the ground). Ahh, these fake arrows, and this junk and the fake trees, Bob I’m through, it all stinks, man.

Mike: Whoah, well Mickey, wait a minute . . . Mickey storms off through paper scenery, tearing hole in painting of trees. (Rhino Entertain-

ment Company 1997)

Throughout the 1980s, the Romantic rock ideology that propelled the efforts of the Monkees to maintain credibility in the act of what to them was such obvious hokum, was trumped by the other pole of authenticity. Pop groups such as the Pet

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Figure 5. He’s really playing this.

Shop Boys delighted in drawing attention to their inability and lack of desire to perform their material live in the traditional rock format. The Pet Shop Boys exposed their dependence on technology, and spoke directly to their audience about their rejection of the Romantic version of authenticity. According to Leach, with the emergence in the mid-1990s of Britpop and that genre’s clear links to the Beatles, we saw the balance tip slightly to favour the Romantic pole again. At the turn of the twenty-first century we have again embraced the impresario, and returned to the more or less unproblematic domination of entertainment by impresarios and planners.

A Taylorist division of labour in popular culture has been shown in an aston- ishingly visible way by impresario Lou Pearlman, founder of O-Town, in the show Making the Band. Pearlman constantly makes his presence felt during the initial phases of the O-Town project, and though he recedes somewhat as routines are established, he remains a phone call away, able on short notice to step in, manage crises, and keep the band members and their support personnel on track. Pearlman evidently wants at least to appear to have a hand in every moment of the band’s production and refinement. In another scene from the aforementioned Making the Band episode, Pearlman tries to help audition finalists to see what he’s looking for in boy band members. In the mirrored dance studio, surrounded by remarkably fit boy finalists and their choreographers and trainers, he tells them that he knows ‘some guys keep it up very good, [but] some are like, slow motion’. The rotund and uncoordinated Pearlman waves his arms and exhorts the sleek, athletic finalists

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Figure 6. Mechanical band.

to ‘make sure you’re gettin’ the speed goin’, and the beat, you gotta feel that beat’. His expertise, if not embodied, is shown nonetheless to be crucial to the existence and success of the band.

Yet boy bands are still struggling with their handlers over issues of legitimacy. Pearlman himself, shortly before establishing O-Town, was successfully sued by two of his previous creations – The Backstreet Boys and N’Sync – who sought to break what they felt were unfair and exploitative contracts. Whereas the Monkees were struggling to conform to rock ideology, boy bands of today, it would seem, are for the most part struggling to conform to different criteria of authenticity and legitimacy.

The recent lawsuits show that the struggle is over the locus not so much of sym- bolic value, as it was with the Monkees who wanted to be allowed to be what they represented and to represent what they felt themselves to be, but of economic value and how the work that the boys do should be valued vis-à-vis other participants in the production chain. Authenticity in this case has to do less with representation than it has to do with remuneration. The Monkees made claims of value based on their ability to be while simultaneously representing an authentic band playing their own instru- ments, and on their Romantic belief in their own intrinsic ability and right as artists to judge and select what music they would record and release; contemporary boy bands make claims of value as the legitimate, authentic proprietors of valuable physical skills cultivated through hard work and determination, who can engender audience identification by virtue of their identity with their targeted audience. The Backstreet Boys and N’Sync want the value placed on those goods to rival the value placed on the expertise of the entrepreneurs and planners.

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Figure 7. Mickey storms off through backdrop.

Much of Making the Band focuses on the professionals who conduct the training and rehearsals, who exhort and castigate the sometimes recalcitrant boys selected to sing and dance in this resource-rich ensemble. These scenes show the expertise and authority of the cultural professionals whose services have been engaged to ‘make the band’. In one such scene, the vocal coach is enraged at the eight finalists, made two hours late to rehearsal in large part by Eric’s hangover. The coach is aware that he is working with a bunch of greenhorns and clearly wants to instill in them the discipline that, as an expert, he knows is required for success in the mainstream entertainment world. He tells them in no uncertain terms that he would sooner walk out of the pro- duction process than work with such undisciplined charges. Sternly extending his index finger he tells the hangdog aspirants that he doesn’t care if they had only two hours of sleep, they get to be late but once and this time is it. Invoking a reserve army of unemployed boy band boys, he warns ‘You already know how many talented people there are out there. You can be replaced. Quickly’.

The experts clearly exercise much power and their boss, the impresario, is pre- sented as the mastermind, marshalling vast resources and expertise to guarantee, as far as is possible, a significant return on investments. The boys are presented as easily replaceable pretty faces, more like members of a sports team, or even a team of sales clerks, service workers in a new, ‘post-industrial’, 1990s-style economy, than individ- ual ‘autonomous’ artists. The boys in O-Town were auditioned in a process that ignored their capacities to contribute conceptually to the production of the show or the music and focused instead on their individual disciplined bodies and voices, their good looks and charm. Yet despite the criterion of ordinariness characteristic of the

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ascendant discourse of authenticity, members of O-Town are not free of the Romantic notions of the artist and the rock ideology that plagued the Monkees. I will leave this saga with a final excerpt from Making the Band, where Jacob returns from demoing some of their own material, convinced that it will automatically be rejected by the over-rationalised, impersonal, alienating fame machine.

Jacob (narrating off camera): There’s, like, a lot involved with writing your own music when you’re with a company who doesn’t want you to.

[. . .] So I know Lou probably wasn’t going to be too excited, at all, cause it’s new, people aren’t used to hearing it from a boy band, they’re gonna constantly want the commercial stuff that’s gonna make them money.

Jacob (in motel room with management staff person): Not one person at TransCon [Lou Pearlman’s company] even knows what music is . . . That pop sound that all sounds the same, nothing original and no art involved at all. It’s all marketing and business and how to make the most money possible. ‘Just go in there, we’ll tell you what to sing, we’ll tell you how to sing, we’ll tell you how to dance, we’ll get you people to show you how to dance, what to dance, what to wear, what to look like’. . . Now you’re going to take the songs we just did and most likely hide ’em in the album, if they put ’em on at all.

Management Person: You’re way ahead of yourself. Jacob: No I’m not. Management Person: Yeeessss, you are. Jacob: No I’m not, Mark. Management Person: Yeah . . . Jacob: They’re gonna be afraid of it. (Bunim/Murray Productions 2000B)

Conclusion

Both groups represent particular historical approaches to managing uncertainty in the music/entertainment industries, to the management of the intersection of new- ness and familiarity that is the locus of all successful mass media products. A media corporation or alliance creates a band of ‘real’ people (not actors to play musicians), allowing for the televised expression of their ‘authentic selves’ (the Monkees through their individual personal styles and collaboratively created comedy and O-Town via the intrusive, confessional nature of ‘reality’ programming and their embodied skills) and at the same time rigorously constraining both the frames of their tele-presence and their roles in creating the music that they are employed to perform.

Through the representation of a Taylorism of cultural production, the appar- ent locus of value has been moved from the personae of the band members (the frontstage), to the expertise of the planners (the backstage, who are now moved into an increasingly crowded frontstage). The producers of The Monkees were so convinced of the value of the band members as participants in the production pro- cess that they structured the production of the television show in such a way that the band members were relied upon for conceptual and even productive collabor- ation in content – improvisational exercises often generated storylines and action for the shows, and band members were on occasion allowed to direct entire epi- sodes. Thus, if there can be imagined a continuum from conception to execution (Braverman 1975), the Monkees are situated closer to the conceptual end of the continuum than, say, O-Town.

The impresario and television production company behind O-Town are so convinced of their own value that not only do the experts have a much greater role, by way of enforced disciplines and micromanagement, in shaping what the audi-

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ence sees and hears than did those in The Monkees, but the experts themselves occupy a tremendous amount of the televisual space in the shows (the commodifi- cation of the process of commodification). The band members in O-Town are work- ers of the lowest rank, bodies and voices disciplined to perform highly scripted, routinised actions, analytically similar perhaps to those working in a high-volume fast food kitchen or production line.

The Monkees felt that their legitimacy was always in question because of the tension between the constructed nature of the group and the Romantic notions of authenticity operative in their era. O-Town, by all rights, should have no problems of legitimacy; contemporary conventions of authenticity line up quite nicely with their roles as employees expected to make no conceptual contributions to the production of the show or the music, and very little that was obscured in the case of The Monkees is not visible in their representation. Yet, since the efflorescence of the rock ideology and despite its current mainstream subjugation by the authenticity of ordinariness, the fact of being a performer in a particular type of band (within certain boundaries: a band of males, singing pop, in the US, etc.) seems to trigger certain notions about authenticity and legitimacy. The romantic, individualist discourse of authenticity seems to pre-exist and speak through band members; this old and ill-fitting discourse becomes embodied, with consequences rich in valuable dramatic tension, in the experiences, beliefs and practices of these contemporary boy band performers.

Popular culture is a symbolic social space where tensions and conflicts of social relations get played out in instructive ways, and these playings-out provide audiences with conceptual tools for understanding corresponding tensions and con- flicts in everyday life. But it is also more than a symbolic space; popular culture is itself a vast collection of social relations, sites of actual working lives, and those who are involved in the production of popular culture are not just representing it, they are living it. With the explosive growth of new media and the concomitantly expanding industrial needs for ever more exploitable ‘content’, this collection of social relations will only keep expanding in terms of the numbers of people involved, the positions they may occupy, and the ways in which struggles over value in the division of labour play out. What I am interested in is not whether something is authentic or not, or what kinds of markers of what kinds of authen- ticity are being employed by any given set of performers or their handlers, but how sets of social and industrial relations, in which various sets of producers and performers are implicated at any given historical moment, are shaped by such dis- courses as those sketched out in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Chandra Mukerji, Ryan Moore, Josh Gamson, Alison Huber, Geof Bowker, Bob O’Neill and David Hesmondhalgh for their assistance in preparing this paper.

Copyright acknowledgments

‘The Monkees’ words and music by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart Ι 1966 Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc., USA. Reproduced by permission of Screen Gems-EMI Music Ltd, London WC2H 0QY.

Excerpts from Hey Hey We’re the Monkees and The Spy Who Came In from the Cool by permission of the Rhino Entertainment Company.

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Endnotes 1. The comedy-variety show was the site of a fas- a particular definition of the situation, this rep-

cinating and high-profile struggle for rep- resenting . . . [a] claim as to what reality is’ resentational authenticity in the late 1960s. (Goffman 1959, p. 85). What happens when the Tom and Dick Smothers of the Smothers Bro- dividing line between front and backstage also thers Comedy Hour were hired by CBS in 1965 bisects the team, how the team deals with dis- in order to attract a younger audience. Their agreement over the definition of the situation sitcom was a disaster and in February 1967 and the recession of the dividing line between they were given a comedy-variety format to front and backstage over the decades, work with. The two were politically aware folk revealing more and more backstage regions, musicians and used their increasingly popular are some of the Goffmanian questions taken show to express increasingly critical political up in this paper. satire concerning, among other things, the 4. Andrejevic offers a provocative way of think- Vietnam war. At the beginning of their second ing about it. Reality programming, in his view, season the formerly clean-cut-and-golf- is propaganda for the kind of consumer sur- sweatered brothers appeared in longer hair, veillance made possible by e-commerce-driven moustaches and Nehru jackets. According to informatics, training in ‘the work of being wat- Bodroghkozy (1997, p. 205), ‘The Smothers ched’. By accustoming consumers to forms of Brothers show [at this time] was perhaps surveillance by way of narratives which natu- unique in its unconflicted support of the coun- ralise and reward the submission to near con- terculture – drug use and all’. The brothers stant surveillance, reality programming paves perceived their audience to be young, hip, pol- the way for new forms of marketing and the itically conscious youth and they did much to offloading of labour formerly the responsi- represent that audience to itself. Despite stag- bility of the firm. gering popularity, the Smothers Brothers were 5. The theme of zero-sum, competitive reality fired in the spring of 1969, most authors sur- shows such as Survivor corresponds to Mac- mise that CBS executives took that measure Pherson’s (1962) characterisation of modern to stay in the good graces of Nixon’s newly capitalist society as one in which competition constituted FCC (see also Krampner and is compulsory: ‘Since the market is continu- Spector). ally competitive, those who would be content

2. Elizabeth Eva Leach, (2001) has traced quite with the level of satisfactions they have are elegantly these two notions of authenticity in compelled to fresh exertions by every her ‘Vicars of ‘‘Wannabe’’: authenticity and attempt of the others to increase theirs. Those the Spice Girls’. Reviewing the ‘idealist nar- who would be content with the level they ratives of late romanticism and its maxi- have cannot keep it without seeking more malized form, elite modernism’, in the study power, that is, without seeking to transfer of popular music, particularly the legacy of more powers of others to themselves, to com- Adorno, Leach is concerned to point out how pensate for the increasing amount that the the Spice Girls, ‘a group put together after competitive efforts of others are transferring an audition, who do not play instruments or from them’ (p. 59). Making the Band, with its exhibit special musical talent’, transform focus on a group attempting to compete as these aspects into ‘the authenticity of the a group in an actual market, complicates this ordinary, rejecting the elitist pedestaling of theme somewhat. In the first season of the . . . musical talent’. Leach argues powerfully show, competition is not between so much as for this ‘authenticity of the ordinary’: ‘it is within the band members, as they discipline the ‘‘ordinariness’’ that they promote which themselves and each other in order to qualify diffuses the charge of commercialism or arti- themselves for competition with other groups ficiality, which is appealing (to audiences)’ in the market. (p. 149). 6. Though this is probably a subject for future

3. I present my analyses against the backdrop of work in this area, a generational phenom- Erving Goffman’s (1959) phenomenologies of enon is worth noting here. Many producers social relations and employ throughout such of popular culture today, conceptualisers and concepts as ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’. organisers such as Pearlman, are members of Relations between performers and production the Monkees’ ‘new generation’ and in these staff can be seen in terms of the constitution in struggles over value in processes of pro- each show of a team made up of all partici- duction they still ‘have something to say’ pants. To Goffman, the object of a team, like about who they are and what they do and that of an individual performer, is to ‘sustain why you should pay attention to them.

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Authentic boy bands on TV? 329

7. It is interesting to note that Frank Zappa vision show in a sort of epilogue where he and appeared not only as ‘the critic’ in the Mon- Mike Nesmith dressed up as one another and kees movie Head, he also appeared in the tele- conversed from directors’ chairs.

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