ABSTRACT
For over half a century now, singer-songwriters have featured prominently among the best-known names in international popular music. Many such figures elicit great devotion on the part of fans, as shown by the outpouring of grief on the death of Amy Winehouse in 2011 and the growing numbers of attendees at the Annual Gathering in memory of nick Drake at Tanworth-in-Arden. The esteem in which such figures are held is high not merely within the music industry but also outside its borders, most impressively in the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres awarded to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith by the French Ministry of Culture in 1990 and 2005 respectively. Similar places in the Western collective imagination are occupied by individual artists who compose and perform their own songs in non-anglophone spaces. 1 Chilean cantautores Violeta Parra and Víctor Jara are still celebrated for their socially aware and politically committed compositions, as well as for their promotion of a national musical culture. In France, auteur-compositeur-interprète Georges Brassens was awarded the Académie Française’s Grand Prix de Poésie in 1967, and the close relationship between song and poetry that he and others forged in the post-war decades continues to be present in the work of figures such as Dominique A and Jeanne Cherhal. A superstar in her native Italy since the mid-1990s, cantautrice Carmen Consoli is revered for her feminist treatment of a number of topics. Brazilian Gilberto Gil’s successful blend of music and politics led president ‘Lula’ da Silva to appoint him Minister of Culture in 2003. These are just some examples of the wide-ranging influence of and popular admiration for singer-songwriters across the world. The status of this figure in popular music was serendipitously illustrated at the time we were writing our introductory chapter by the public spat between fans of Beck and Beyoncé played out on the former’s English-language Wikipedia entry, an aftershock of Kanye West’s loud objections at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards that the Album of the Year award had gone to Beck’s Morning Phase (2014) and not to Beyoncé’s <target id="page_2" target-type="page">2</target>Screenshot of archival record of Beck's Wikipedia entry at 05.27am on 9 February 2015 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315552910/82452450-fc2d-4c90-8d08-e4e3a6939ea8/content/figI_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beck&oldid=646298830" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beck&oldid=646298830 (accessed on 13 February 2015). This work is reproduced under CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-sa/3.0" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-sa/3.0). eponymous album (see Figure I.1). The fact that the defence of Beck and counterattacks aimed at Beyoncé were articulated in the very terms we wish to explore here – autonomy and authorship – attests to the continuing prestige of the single figure who displays such characteristics, and the heated debate to which questions of cultural value pertaining to these terms in popular music can give rise.
