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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Richard ElliottORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Popular musicians with long careers provide rich source material for the study of persona, authenticity, endurance and the maintenance (and reinvention) of significant bodies of work. The songs of successful artists create a soundtrack not only to their own lives, but also to those of their audiences, and to the times in which they were created and to which they bore witness. The work of singers who continue to perform after several decades can be heard in terms of their ‘late voice’ (Elliott 2015a), a concept that has potentially useful insights for the study of musical persona. This article exploits this potential by considering how musical persona is de- and re-constructed in performance. I base my articulation of the relationship between persona, life-writing and retrospective narrativity on a close reading of two late texts by Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run, the autobiography he published in 2016, and Springsteen on Broadway, the audiovisual record of a show that ran from October 2017 to December 2018. In these texts, Springsteen uses the metaphor of the ‘magic trick’ as a framing device to shuttle between the roles of autobiographical myth-breaker and lyrical protagonist. He repeatedly highlights his songs as fictions that bear little relation to his actual life, while also showing awareness that, as often happens with popular song, he has been mapped onto his characters in ways that prove vital for their sense of authenticity. Yet Springsteen appears to be aiming for a different kind of authenticity with these late texts, by supplementing the persona developed in his earlier career with an older, wiser, more playful narrator. I appropriate Springsteen’s ‘magic trick’ metaphor to highlight the magic of retrospection and the magical formation of the life narrative as an end-driven process.
Author(s): Elliott R
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Persona Studies
Year: 2019
Volume: 5
Issue: 1
Pages: 17-32
Online publication date: 12/07/2019
Acceptance date: 13/05/2019
Date deposited: 12/08/2019
ISSN (electronic): 2205-5258
Publisher: Deakin University
URL: https://doi.org/10.21153/psj2019vol5no1art848
DOI: 10.21153/psj2019vol5no1art848
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