ABSTRACT
Pop performance, to be popular, is deliberate: controlled, contrived, packaged. To say this is to say that every bit of it is as advertised: it is always a performance and a good deal is involved: what is seen, what is heard, but also what we do not see and do not hear. Thus a good part of this takes place behind the scenes, beforehand. This is the work done by the performers and the production teams that support them, and this is also the work done by the listeners themselves, as Adorno stresses, as Anders argues, and as Bennett, Baudrillard, and others also argue. To say this takes no part of the achievement away from either k.d. lang or Leonard Cohen. We are always watching a consummate artist at work. And as Nietzsche said, speaking of Wagner, we might do well, for aesthetics sake, for the sake of the artwork itself, to ignore all issues of technique, along with all questions concerning or considerations of the conditions/motivations/practices of the artist where, as Nietzsche supposed, what matters is the work, the working of the work of art, as music. And Nietzsche also distinguished art before witnesses, art for the sake of spectators, for the sake of an audience, from what he called the creator’s art, the artist’s art, which was also what he called monological art of the non-histrionic variety, which he also spoke of in terms of the “music for forgetting” 1 the self, forgetting oneself. 2
