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Writer's pictureDr Stephen HIll

Eurythmics and the Aesthetics of British Pop Art Situationism




Abstract

This article looks at how the British music culture of the 1980s transformed the way authenticity was conceptualised in popular music. I will argue that ‘new pop’ and the televisual aesthetic of MTV challenged the division between British and American codes of authenticity. This distinction is marked by the use of the term rock in America, to describe popular music of generalizable importance, of which authenticity is the key talisman. By contrast, in the UK, pop is less of a pejorative term, and the preference for authentic modes of address is tempered by the playful sensibility of the carnivalesque. As a barometer of this, I will be focusing on the work of the UK duo Eurythmics, whose creative output spanned the decade, and for whom MTV was pivotal in breaking the American market. In particular, I will suggest that the duo’s propensity to bend genre as well as gender, positioned ‘rock’ as a contingent discourse: a free-floating signifier around which competing notions of authenticity coalesce. In this direction, the terms rock and pop can also be read against discourses linked to both sexuality and national identity. Indeed, the Britishness of their music videos, and their camp sensibility, are central to the way in which authenticity is repositioned as a more plural construct. Emblematic of this is both the duality of Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox’s identity as Eurythmics and the diversity of their musical output. Encoded in this are some very specific strategies for listening, that draw upon the legacy of British Art schools and the Independent Group.

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