Identifying the pop persona

Etymologically, the term ‘persona’ is derived from the Latin word referring to a theatrical mask. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung conceptualized the persona as an external social function, a construction one could use to project a certain image, hide behind, or build up as a barricade against the world.Footnote ⁵ Jung described the persona as ‘a complicated system of relations between the individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, defined on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual’.Footnote ⁶ Following Jung, the term has come to generally concern the social role that people assume in relation to others, and that performers assume in relation to their audience.

In popular music scholarship, the concept is often used vaguely (as a substitute for either the artist's identity, alter ego, assumed character, or a song protagonist) or theorized and discussed in differing ways as musical persona or performance persona,Footnote ⁷ vocal persona,Footnote ⁸ electronic persona,Footnote ⁹ or instrumental persona,Footnote ¹⁰ which leads to a multiplicity of understandings that prioritize different facets of the music experience.Footnote ¹¹ While such plurality allows individual scholars to address in great detail specific aspects of how music constructs identities, the disparate understandings and uses of the term ‘persona’ can simultaneously lead to confusion and ambiguity. These circumstances signal the need for scholars to clarify their own definitions of the term in order to avoid misunderstanding. This is the task I undertake in the current article, reaching into a range of discourses and contexts to investigate the intertextual and transmedial processes whereby pop personae are constructed and negotiated.Footnote ¹²

I do not seek to oppose the viability or usefulness of existing models for approaching the persona in musical contexts – they can be well suited to their particular purposes. Rather, I want to contemplate some of the ways in which critical musicological perspectives can be merged with those from other fields to concede more holistic insights related to how personae are constituted and experienced in a broad pop context. Starting from this position, my primary focus falls on addressing the ways in which pop personae operate across multiple platforms. A suitable point of departure for approaching this topic is found in Philip Auslander's conceptualization of the ‘performance persona’. Entering from the field of performance studies, and drawing on Simon Frith's model for understanding the different aspects of the pop voice,Footnote ¹³ Auslander distinguishes between the real person (the performer as human being), the performance persona (the performer as social being), and the song character (the role that performers play in accordance with the lyrics of a particular song).Footnote ¹⁴ Auslander argues that the persona is the primary point of identification between pop artists and their audiences:

As Auslander concludes, representation in pop is as much about constructing and maintaining a compelling persona over time as it is about seducing audiences in the moment of listening. This does not mean that personae remain static, but rather entails that they are constructed through numerous events, utterances, and (con)texts, constituted partly by pop artists’ (self-)presentations through a variety of means including sound recordings, music videos, live performances, album artwork, promotional material, social media, and interviews. Accordingly, my definition of the persona subsumes what is often referred to as an artist's image: the values, actions, and traits with which an artist is commonly associated.Footnote ¹⁶ At the same time, I emphasize that the performative potential of aesthetics is central to the construction of the persona.

There are numerous ways in which pop personae are carved out through musical and audiovisual aesthetics. The singing voice is one central element in how identities are conveyed through sound recordings,Footnote ¹⁷ its connotative power resulting partly from how it is treated in production and mixing processes and positioned within (while contributing to) a track's stylistic framework.Footnote ¹⁸ The voice plays a key role in the corporeal theatrics that convey gender,Footnote ¹⁹ which does not detract from the matter that any musical expression has a similar performative capacity.Footnote ²⁰ Certainly, a persona is discernible also in electronic and instrumental forms of music,Footnote ²¹ through the performer's idiolect and its functioning as a sonic fingerprint.Footnote ²² Similarly, the personae of songwriters or composers can be gleaned from sonic patterns in musical works,Footnote ²³ and musical codes point to and resonate with a wealth of circumstances, phenomena, and agents outside of themselves.

Considering music's entwinement with visual imagery, the aestheticization of pop artists in music videos and live performances contributes to the construction of the persona by mobilizing audiovisual relationships in ways that are recognized as socially and culturally meaningful. The interplay between music and images opens up a new space, where the acting out of identity is intensified by the possibilities offered by techniques of editing, processing, and manipulating sonic and visual material.Footnote ²⁴ The audiovisual space is a fertile site for ‘the exploration of the interdependent construction of race, sex and gender’,Footnote ²⁵ and such exploration is underpinned by discursive formations with deep historical roots. Scrutinizing musical and audiovisual details, then, is a principal concern for reading pop personae, yet is insufficient on its own when it comes to explicating how the construction of pop personae unfolds over numerous platforms.

Given that pop personae are articulated in many different ways, they need to be addressed as multiply constructed. I align myself with Stuart Hall's view that ‘identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions’.Footnote ²⁶ An understanding of pop personae as multiply constructed facilitates investigations into the interaction between musical and non-musical elements in constituting them. The matter that pop personae are constructed transmedially by a plurality of interdependent texts and discourses, however, does not negate the fact that they can present a relatively consistent display of identity, which is a point to which I will return.

By defining pop personae as constituted by symbolic fragments scattered across multiple media, I diverge from musicological approaches that place primacy on the sonic construction of personae. Moore, for example, views popular music personae as manifested primarily in the recorded voice in its relation to musical elements such as lyrics and melody.Footnote ²⁷ He discusses the persona in terms of the role artists assume when singing, and upholds that this role is shaped first and foremost by markers in music and sound.Footnote ²⁸ To be sure, the artist persona (and its relation to gender, sexuality, race, class, and so on) is conveyed and negotiated through the recorded voice. But what of the ways in which artists articulate their identities in other situations? To describe an artist's identity outside of a sound recording, Moore conflates Auslander's ‘real person’ and ‘performance persona’ into what he calls ‘performer’, explaining that he is ‘less interested in musicians than [he is] in music’.Footnote ²⁹ A problem concerning this conflation is that it bypasses the distinction (or discrepancy) between the artist as a private, ‘real’ person and her/his public identity.Footnote ³⁰ I follow Auslander in insisting on a broad conception of performance,Footnote ³¹ and suggest that identities are constantly performed and that there is always a distinction to be made between the persona (the public identity) and the real person.Footnote ³² As Auslander argues, audiences can never be certain that they have access to the artist as a real person,Footnote ³³ and what audiences are presented with in any public context is a performance of the persona. This does not necessarily entail intentional deception. Philip Tagg notes that there is ‘nothing intrinsically dishonest or schizophrenic about our ability to adapt to the appropriate role in the appropriate situation. On the contrary, it's an essential social skill.’Footnote ³⁴ The persona is not necessarily consciously performed, but performed nonetheless.

While Auslander's model of the performance persona rightly defines performance in the broadest sense, which entails that even unconscious acts are defined by an element of performance,Footnote ³⁵ there are benefits to separating the prefix ‘performance’ from the persona. The inclusion of this prefix ironically belies the matter that the persona is constructed outside of what are usually considered performance contexts as much as within them. The pop persona is not confined to sound recordings or other musical texts, but is negotiated within every domain in which pop artists have a presence. In popular music discourse, pop artists are not simply viewed as performers, but also, perhaps primarily, as people.

Put simply, the multiple construction of the persona amounts to an idea of what the artist is like as a person. Frith touches on something similar when he observes that pop artists are always recognized as ‘themselves’ across contexts and despite assuming many different characters: ‘a pop star is like a film star, taking on many parts but retaining an essential “personality” that is common to all of them and is the basis for their popular appeal’.Footnote ³⁶ For Frith, a pop star's ‘“real me” is a promise that lies in the way we hear the voice’,Footnote ³⁷ but I would argue that pop artists are even more similar to other celebrities than Frith acknowledges here, in that the ‘real me’ is also conveyed through and interpreted in response to a variety of non-musical elements. It nonetheless follows that the processes whereby artists assume a role within a particular song or performance setting are relatively transparent. I am thus less interested in the different characters that artists assume – such as, to use one of Moore's examples, David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust – than I am in the persona as related to the conception of an artist's private self (but not identical to it). Here Moore and I diverge, in that he views Stardust as one of Bowie's personae,Footnote ³⁸ whereas I see Stardust as a character: when Bowie was in character as Stardust, he was nonetheless recognized as Bowie, but, importantly, the Bowie that the public had access to was still his persona and not the actual person (David Robert Jones), however tempting it would be to believe otherwise.

In one sense, the main significance of Bowie's performance of the Stardust character lies in how it influenced perceptions of the Bowie persona. The elaborate nature of Bowie's costumes, character stories, and stage shows were largely received as indicative of his creativity and capacity for innovation, which ensured the authenticity of his persona in relation to the demands placed on musicians to exhibit ‘talent’ and ‘originality’. On another level, the costumes, mannerisms, and narratives that Bowie made use of in character as Stardust provided an opportunity for theatricalizing his gendered identity and sexuality in ways that also raised questions about, and spurred interest in, his personal life.Footnote ³⁹ Moore concedes that ‘the relationship between persona and performer matters for the listener’,Footnote ⁴⁰ and notes, in relation to ‘The Jean Genie’ (1973), that ‘Bowie's wilfully obscure sexuality added to his notoriety’,Footnote ⁴¹ yet shows little interest in accounting for how this notoriety influenced experiences and interpretations of Bowie's performances and recordings.

The question of how knowledge about the artist persona impacts the experience of a musical performance has received some attention within the field of the philosophy of music. Introducing the term ‘personalism’ as an alternative to externalist views of art, Stan Godlovitch suggests that ‘personalist focal points capture our interest and imagination, and often sculpt what we hear and want to hear. We are drawn to personal details, and these seamlessly intertwine with our aesthetic expectations.’Footnote ⁴² Importantly, a musical performance (whether live or recorded) is experienced ‘not only as a sequence of perceptibles but also as the effect of real effort expended, as the product of a complex of inner affective and cognitive states … as deriving from a story which drags with it all the peculiarities of any human life’.Footnote ⁴³

Godlovitch's argument about the inseparability of performer and performance has been extended and tailored to the study of vocal performance. For example, Jeanette Bicknell draws on Godlovitch to posit that the experience of vocal performances in particular are shaped by the persona, in the sense that some songs are perceived as more ‘aesthetically appropriate’ for a given singer than others.Footnote ⁴⁴ Her argument concerns the aesthetic impact of the degree of match or mismatch between an artist's persona (defined by Bicknell as including factors such as gender, race, age, and ethnicity, as well as personality) and a song protagonist.Footnote ⁴⁵ This same issue is at the centre of Jerrold Levinson's study of jazz vocal interpretation,Footnote ⁴⁶ in which he demonstrates how the singer's persona contributes to managing the expectations and guiding the attention of audiences. Following Bicknell, he asserts the impact of the persona on an audience's experience of a particular performance:

Levinson's example, while somewhat crude, aptly shows how different personae would afford different readings of the same sonic material (whether recorded or live). Perceptions of the persona are integral to how the performance is received. What is missing from his discussion, however, is the dialectical relationship between personae and musical performances. Bicknell recognizes this dialectic, in pointing out that ‘the kinds of songs a singer typically performs also work to influence audience perception of his or her personality’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Likewise engaged with the dialectical relationship between personae and texts, William Echard notes similarly that the notion of an ‘author emerges from the textual universe as much as he or she dissolves into it, and both processes are at play in most cases’.Footnote ⁴⁹ On the point of how the persona is constructed across various texts, he suggests that texts function to the benefit of the persona ‘insofar as listeners approach a text specifically to augment or explore their “knowledge” of [an artist] or their relationship to him’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Going further than Echard, I argue that any text can serve to augment a listener's knowledge of the persona, regardless of the listener's intention to approach the text for that purpose. This point is key to an understanding of the persona as multiply constructed, and underpins a change of focus from text or performance in a narrower sense (as discussed by Bicknell and Levinson) to a broader view of how the persona is constituted and negotiated transmedially through the relationships between texts.

The means by which personae are constructed are intricately connected with the processes through which they are articulated in the wider sphere of popular culture:

The transmedial processes whereby pop personae are pervasively disseminated have become intensified following recent technological and cultural developments. In his work on media convergence – the flow of content across multiple media platforms – Henry Jenkins emphasizes that convergence should not be viewed simply as a technological process.Footnote ⁵² Focusing on the social and cultural implications of having multiple media functions accessible via the same device, he argues that convergence ‘represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content’.Footnote ⁵³ This is a pertinent point with regard to a contemporary pop context: as new media technologies facilitate easier access to artist personae across multiple platforms, audiences in turn become more accustomed to seeking out additional information through different media to enrich their musical experiences. This development raises further issues about how pop artists are situated within a broader celebrity culture by occupying (and being ascribed) several roles outside of the musical text,Footnote ⁵⁴ all of which add up to shape their personae.

Negotiating the public and the private: celebrity, persona narratives, and authentication

The argument that pop artists are viewed as people as much as musicians prompts a consideration of the celebrity aspects of pop culture.Footnote ⁵⁵ The intersection between pop music and celebrity culture is a multifaceted topic, not to mention that discourses on celebrity more generally are fraught with contention and contradiction, as borne out in the tension between positive and negative views associated with celebrities and their status. This issue is called to attention by P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond, who emphasize the endurance of celebrity as a cultural phenomenon:

Interest in both the public and the private lives of celebrities has been afforded a central place within an online-driven Western cultural discourse.Footnote ⁵⁷ This is evident in how ‘celebrities operate as a transcendence of categorization in their obvious display of their uniqueness, their singularity and their public visibility and thereby serve as the locus of debate about all forms of cultural codes, etiquette and discussion of what is “normal” and acceptable’.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Marshall argues elsewhere, a ‘personalization of value via consumer culture and the recalibration of reputation and impact through the value of celebrity culture have laid the groundwork for what is the critical technological – and cultural – change that has shifted the contemporary moment to an obsessive focus on the public persona’.Footnote ⁵⁹ If, as Marshall suggests, celebrity personae have become a measure for how audiences and fans enact their own identities and express specific values, such an influence is facilitated by the pervasiveness of these personae across the various dimensions of (popular) culture.

When it comes to pop artists, they frequently transgress the musical realm to establish strong presences in other cultural spheres. Many pop artists cross over to movies or TV series:Footnote ⁶⁰ Cher was awarded an Oscar for her role in the movie Moonstruck (1987), and more recent examples include Beyoncé (Austin Powers in Goldmember, 2002; The Pink Panther, 2006; Dreamgirls, 2006), Mariah Carey (Precious, 2009; The Butler, 2013), and Justin Timberlake (Black Snake Moan, 2006; In Time, 2011; Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013). Similarly, many pop artists promote their personae by developing close relationships with major corporations and brands. Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, Pink, and Britney Spears have all had high-profile endorsement deals with Pepsi, while Selena Gomez, Jennifer Lopez, and Taylor Swift have endorsed Coca-Cola. Several pop artists have held titles such as ‘creative director’ at major companies: Lady GaGa at Polaroid, Alicia Keys at Blackberry, and Justin Timberlake at Bud Light. Demonstrating the entwinement of popular music with broader consumer culture, the mobility of pop artists across various spheres of popular culture highlights their role as celebrities – public figures – as much as musicians.

With regard to the effects of corporate collaborations and brand endorsements on the construction of the persona, it is a notable point that corporations, products, and brands can have strong personality traits of their own, which potentially rub off on those who endorse them. In a study that investigates brand trait transference to celebrity endorsers, Ashley Arsena and colleagues offer the following example:

Even if endorsement deals can help pop artists reach new audiences, thus broadening the potential appeal and popularity of their personae and the commercial success of their music, celebrity endorsements are also frequently associated with negative views of commerce. According to Arsena et al., consumers are often distrustful of marketing efforts and ‘aware that celebrity endorsers often do not choose the products they endorse, receive a substantial payment for their efforts, and tend to endorse more than one product, which reduces their credibility and trust to the consumer’.Footnote ⁶² On the other hand, artists who distance themselves from the commercial side of pop can imbue their personae with (sub)cultural capital.Footnote ⁶³ In an interview with The Guardian, Adele revealed that she has turned down every single endorsement deal offered to her, stating that ‘it's very easy to give in to being famous … Really, it's harder work resisting it. But after a while I just refused to accept a life that was not real.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Adele's statements assert the authenticity of her persona by claiming that her public persona reflects her private self – the ‘real’ Adele. This sentiment is reinforced later in the interview, when she suggests that fame has not really changed her and observes that ‘it's everyone else that changes … more so than the person who becomes famous’.Footnote ⁶⁵ By sharing her views on how fame affects her personally (or, allegedly, does not), Adele effectively narrows the gap between her public persona and her private life.

Public personae are commonly characterized by, and promoted as, a display of the private, which is as true for pop artists as it is with regard to other celebrities. The stories that pop artists tell about themselves (and, I will argue, that are told about them by others) form part of the persona, which concerns how negotiations between the past and the present impact on constructions of identity. Stan Hawkins and John Richardson approach this topic through a conception of personal narrativity: ‘By marking certain events in personal histories as significant, while at the same time bypassing others, personal narrators create navigational beacons that enable themselves and others to make sense of the past, while providing points of reference that will inform interpretations of future actions and events.’Footnote ⁶⁶ They view personal narratives as integral to the construction of identity ‘through an open-ended process of reflection and revision’,Footnote ⁶⁷ which always involves both the production and the reception ends of pop texts. Further developing his work on personal narratives, Hawkins describes them as ‘defined by the recounting of one's own life circumstances’, and highlights their significance for the performance of popular song in particular.Footnote ⁶⁸ By building on Hawkins and Richardson's theorization of personal narrativity, I adopt a view of pop identities as narrativized by a number of people and across a wide range of circumstances.

Rather than emanating simply from the acts and utterances of pop artists themselves, narratives concerning pop artists’ identities are partly defined also by journalists, critics, and audiences, whose responses to the persona play a part in shaping it. In other words, the multiple construction of the persona involves not only how artists present themselves, but also the material that surrounds them in the form of magazine articles, reviews, commentary by critics and fans, gossip, and so on. Granted that pop personae are shaped by the stories told about pop artists as well as by them, I move from a consideration of personal narratives towards one of persona narratives, further emphasizing that such narratives pertain more to the persona than they pertain to the actual person (even if they are often perceived to concern the latter). Persona narratives permeate the multi-platform construction of identity, raising issues not only about what is being shown and how, but also equally about what is concealed or glossed over (and by whom).Footnote ⁶⁹ The theoretical turn implied by the slight change of terminology also directs attention to the matter that pop personae can be shaped by the fictional as much as the factual, as well as the matter that it is not always easy to distinguish between the two.

By discussing aspects of Paul Ricoeur's work,Footnote ⁷⁰ Keith Negus shows that the distinction between the fictional and the factual is often inconsequential when it comes to how narrativity structures our experiences, arguing that ‘[i]dentities and experiences are comprehended as we narrate events and interactions that will always incorporate the views and behaviour of others’ and that, accordingly, our ‘grasp of the temporal world is acquired as much through the “fictional” as it is through the “factual”’.Footnote ⁷¹ Following Negus, I argue that pop personae straddle the line between fact and fiction, comprised simultaneously by the actual and the imagined. Regardless of the truthfulness or accuracy of the narratives concerning an artist (press releases, media coverage, fan commentary, gossip), they can influence audience perceptions, expectations, and opinions.Footnote ⁷² As Negus shows, the shifts from ‘nobody’ to ‘somebody’ can be either voluntary or involuntary,Footnote ⁷³ which is a point that extends itself to how the persona is defined both deliberately and inadvertently.

There are countless examples that demonstrate how personae are shaped by external influences. Consider the impact that the press coverage of Britney Spears's 2007 breakdown had on perceptions of her persona, or the way in which Boyzone's Stephen Gately was pressured by the media into discussing his sexuality in public. Both of these incidents formed part of the narratives associated with the artists, and functioned as points of reference in relation to which their subsequent personae were articulated and interpreted. A more recent example is found in how Beyoncé’s persona is characterized partly by narratives concerning her popularity. The dedication of her fans has become a cultural phenomenon in its own right, to the point of being subject to caricature and parody. When Beyoncé announced her second pregnancy in an Instagram post in 2017, the Atlanta Police Department jokingly entreated the public not to fire their guns in celebration,Footnote ⁷⁴ referencing her widespread popularity in Western culture. While the joke received much criticism for being in poor taste, its underlying premise – Beyoncé’s overwhelming popularity – was arguably substantiated by the post breaking the Guinness World Record to officially become the most-liked post in Instagram's history.Footnote ⁷⁵

Beyoncé’s Instagram post also further highlights the blurred lines between pop artists’ public and private lives.Footnote ⁷⁶ The permeability of the distinctions between the public and the private is raised by Alejandro Madrid, in a study that investigates the excesses in Mexican singer Juan Gabriel's vocality and persona.Footnote ⁷⁷ Madrid argues that even though there are clear ontological distinctions between the characters played by Gabriel in films, his private personality, and his public persona, the amalgamation of and interaction between these three categories ‘provides a space for a negotiation between fiction, public desire, and expectation, and the private construction of self for both the singer and his fans’.Footnote ⁷⁸ He continues to argue, in a similar fashion to Negus, that ‘fiction and real life seem to clearly inform each other’ and that an artist's ‘self and public persona are developed in relation to each other and in continuous response to the longings of the audience’.Footnote ⁷⁹ As Madrid implies, the blurring between the public and the private that occurs in the persona plays a role in securing and maintaining audience interest.

Representational strategies that showcase a version of a pop artist's personal life plays into the widespread public investment in the private lives of stars, what Nicola Dibben refers to as a ‘desire for access to the person behind the persona’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Persona narratives frequently anchor artists’ music in their personal lives. For example, in a video clip that promotes his album Man of the Woods (2018), Justin Timberlake muses: ‘this album is really inspired by my son, my wife, my family, but, more so than any other album I've ever written, where I'm from. And, it's personal.’Footnote ⁸¹ Reviews of the album make much of its purported connection to Timberlake's personal life and experiences,Footnote ⁸² thus demonstrating how (a version of) the past offers context for listeners’ interpretations, and simultaneously adds to the allure of the persona as grounded in an artist's biography.

Such persona narratives, promoted by the press as much as by artists themselves, frequently conflate the public and the private in ways that construct an illusion of intimacy, which in turn contributes to notions of the pop star's ‘private self’ spilling over into performance settings.Footnote ⁸³ As Lori Burns observes, the amount of information we come to learn about pop artists can make it ‘difficult to separate the artist from the musical product’.Footnote ⁸⁴ This is quite paradoxical, considering the elaborate processes and large number of people usually involved in the creation of musical texts and pop artists’ public presentations alike. Nonetheless, as Will Straw has observed, music recordings, videos, or concerts are generally evaluated as the output of a single individual or integrated group.Footnote ⁸⁵ Straw explains that ‘[t]he unique character of music evaluation in this respect stems from the willingness with which we grant this primacy to performers (few would do the same for film or theatre). The precise input of composers, producers, engineers, and backup musicians is, most of the time, unclear to us.’Footnote ⁸⁶ Granted that pop performers are afforded the primacy that Straw describes, this is arguably because their personae are a quite persuasive means of laying claim to artistic agency, authorship, and authenticity.

The persistence of Romantic ideals of creativity, authorship, and authenticity underpins the persona narratives that make it easy to interpret an artist's music and videos as emanating simply from their own intentions.Footnote ⁸⁷ It is a compelling idea that pop artists’ private selves can be gleaned from their interviews and public appearances. And the blurred lines between the public and the private often makes it too easy, as Burns warns, ‘to approach the music as merely a reflection of the artist's personal experience’.Footnote ⁸⁸ This pertains in part to the high value placed on the author role in popular music discourse. Indeed, a ‘widespread vernacular valuing of authorship in popular music’ is evidenced, as Negus points out, by ‘journalism, discussions among fans on internet fora, and a plethora of blogs’, as well as in music scholarship.Footnote ⁸⁹ Pop personae often mobilize discourses on authorship and authenticity in ways which facilitate and encourage interpretations of pop texts as personal expressions, despite the multiple layers of authorship in any pop recording, music video, or live performance.Footnote ⁹⁰

One aspect of how musical experiences are attributed meaning pertains exactly to how they connect with notions of authenticity, which are commonly entwined with perceptions of agency and authorship. Such attributes ‘matter to most of us to the extent that we build up images of the various creative agents involved in expressive pursuits in our heads that inform experiences in varying degrees’.Footnote ⁹¹ Attributes of agency, authorship, and authenticity are in this sense ascribed by audiences rather than inscribed in texts or performances.Footnote ⁹² Pinpointing the ramifications of this distinction for the definition of authenticity, Moore notes that ‘[s]iting authenticity within the ascription carries the corollary that every music, and every example, can conceivably be found authentic by a particular group of perceivers’.Footnote ⁹³ By placing primacy on processes of authentication, Moore's argument shows that authenticity can be ascribed to any assembly of codes and signs that are given value within the conventions of time, place, and the listening or spectating subject's personal references.

This point does not negate the matter that some notion of authenticity – something that resonates as ‘true’ or ‘honest’ within the framework of the listener or viewer's values and expectations – often is vital to making sense of and deriving pleasure from musical experiences. As Derek Scott writes:

Finding middle ground between Scott and Straw, I would argue that, less than believing in particular forms of music, audiences to a large extent believe in, or at least want to believe in, the personae of their favourite artists. This tendency extends across genres and styles despite the common stereotypes and assumptions made about the superficiality of certain musical expressions and fandoms. Regardless of how ideals of authenticity vary according to time, place, and genre, it is a compelling proposition that popular music artists (to some extent and in some sense) are ‘being real’.

This is not to say that audiences are oblivious to the processes whereby artist personae are authenticated. On the contrary, as Frith points out, the ‘up-front star system means that pop fans are well aware of the ways in which pop performers are inventions’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Media scholar Erin Meyers argues similarly that it is exactly the openly constructed nature of celebrity personae that ‘allows the audience to derive pleasure from the ability to construct and reconstruct the star image from a variety of texts in complex and often contradictory ways’.Footnote ⁹⁶ By pursuing the ‘real’ person behind the façade, she argues, audiences contribute to bestowing a heightened cultural significance on the persona and its power to represent the active construction of identity as an affective force.Footnote ⁹⁷ Focusing on the related issue of authorship, Negus argues similarly that one reason why fans ‘discuss songs (whether in person before and after concerts, in virtual fora on the internet, or as academics at scholarly conferences) is for the pleasures of disagreeing and even fiercely arguing about the way authors are implicated in the meanings of songs, their stories and contexts, and their wider social significance’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Audiences can be completely aware of the arbitrariness of authentic expression and experience, and still feel rewarded for letting themselves participate in the authentication of particular artists and their music. A principal aspect of the pleasures and perils of engaging with pop personae, then, relates to the matter that the aesthetics and narratives that constitute them activate vast networks of interconnected values, ideologies, and meanings, often in contradictory, unpredictable, and open-ended ways.

Reading Sam Smith: outlining a transmedial approach

By suggesting that pop personae can be ‘read’ as transmedia phenomena,Footnote ⁹⁹ I assert the applicability of (inter)textual analysis as a means for investigating them. I concur with Richardson's proposition that a primary aim of reading is ‘to elucidate the aesthetic experiences and attendant cultural meanings of the objects, events, or performances that are its principal focus’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Accordingly, readings of pop personae can attend to the meanings that are afforded by encounters between audiences and pop artists across multiple points of contact. This argument indicates a broad view of the practice of popular music analysis that strives for a holistic understanding of how pop personae are constructed, disseminated, and received.

My starting point is that pop personae are multifaceted phenomena, shaped by the complex interrelations between multiple different texts, events, discourses, and narratives. As such, investigations of the persona focusing on any given text or element (be it a sound recording, the voice, an interview, a live performance, or something else) are bound to overlook important details that emerge only when these texts and elements are viewed in relation to the broader transmedial negotiation of the persona. In an early conceptualization of transmedia storytelling, Jenkins describes it as a process where a phenomenon or story unfolds across several distinct media platforms.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Jenkins understands ‘additive comprehension’ – the degree to which each individual element adds to the impression of the whole – as integral to the transmedia process,Footnote ¹⁰² which concerns the expansion of a given phenomenon or story in ways that would not be possible within any single medium. Relatedly, media scholars and narratologists Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon deploy the term ‘transmedia storyworlds’ to describe multifaceted representations that are ‘deployed simultaneously across multiple media platforms’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Within this conceptual paradigm, personae can be understood as representative of an artist's ‘personal storyworld’, a network of interrelated narratives and aesthetic effects that unfold across various channels and contexts. Dwelling on the significance of the term ‘across’, Ryan and Thon remind us of ‘the expressive power of different media … for stories and their worlds are crucially shaped by the affordances and limitations of the media in which they are realized’,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ which is not least crucial to understanding how individual media texts work together to shape a broader narrative phenomenon.

Interest in this issue is emerging in some recent critical musicological scholarship, most notably in Burns's study of popular music, transmedia, and multimodal narrative.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Highlighting the multimodality of popular music texts,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Burns develops a framework for understanding the relationship between individual elements and the complex narrative functions of a transmedia phenomenon, placing emphasis on teasing apart their specific attributes and textual parameters.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ While Burns's primary objects of study are concept albums and songs, I argue for the applicability of a similar theoretical framework for investigating the multiple construction of the pop persona. A key concern for reading pop personae, then, relates to how their individual elements (often multimodal in character) contribute to the whole in distinct ways – sound recordings, music videos, artwork, social media posts, interview statements, and other elements all convey information about the persona in different, yet intersecting ways.

Taking an initial step towards demonstrating a transmedial approach for studying the multiple construction of artist identities in pop music, I turn to the persona of Sam Smith. He has been a prominent figure on the international pop scene in the 2010s, yet, to my knowledge, has hitherto received no comprehensive scholarly attention. Building on Jenkins's view of transmediality as a combination of ‘radical intertextuality and multimodality for the purposes of additive comprehension’, I pursue an understanding of personae in terms of the ‘multiplicity that emerges from seeing the same characters and stories told in radically different ways’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In doing so, I am less interested in identifying any definite hierarchical organization of the various components of the persona than I am in elucidating the interpretive possibilities afforded by different points of contact between artist and audience. Even if space does not permit a full exploration of Smith's persona, this compressed reading explicates some of its facets.

Samuel Frederick Smith was born in 1992 in London, UK, and is known professionally as Sam Smith (a moniker that represents the persona I dwell on here). Smith gained fame in 2012 as a featuring artist on Disclosure's hit single ‘Latch’ (2012). He has since released two studio albums, In the Lonely Hour (2014) and The Thrill of It All (2017), which have resulted in numerous chart-topping hits, as well as four Grammy Awards. Musically, Smith's recordings concede stylistic influences primarily from pop, soul, and R&B. His most commercially successful and widely circulated singles – for example, ‘I'm Not the Only One’ (2014), ‘Stay with Me’ (2014), and ‘Too Good at Goodbyes’ (2017) – all favour a somewhat retro aesthetic,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ resulting from the prominence of acoustic instruments (as well as the stylistic deployment and treatment of these instruments) and the (audible) absence of digital or electronic elements. Such musical details mobilize intertextual stylistic connections that frame listeners’ interpretations of the persona as much as the track.Footnote ¹¹⁰

For example, ‘Too Good at Goodbyes’ starts sparsely with just piano and vocals. The lyrics, which are placed in focus on account of the absence of intervening musical material, detail a failing relationship. Smith's voice is positioned at the very forefront of the mix, with clear vocal sounds (breath intake),Footnote ¹¹¹ which establishes a sense of intimacy and authenticity of expression commonly associated with the singer-songwriter tradition. As Negus suggests,Footnote ¹¹² the singer-songwriter is associated with a ‘“confessional”, acoustic, and intimate style of delivery’ which often accentuates the blurred distinction between the performer as a private and public person, and facilitates the impression of authentic emotional expression. In ‘Too Good at Goodbyes’, emotional intensity is heightened by the use of strings, gospel choir, and prominent vibrato in the lead vocal, as well as by key words being highlighted musically: in the phrase ‘everytime you hurt me’, the word ‘hurt’ falls on the downbeat and coincides with the highest pitch in the vocal melody, further accentuated by Smith leaping a fifth upwards into falsetto register.

A similar intimate, confessional mode of address is evident in ‘Lay Me Down’ (2014), which also starts with just piano and vocals. Here, the piano is even more subdued, simply playing chords at the first beat of every four-bar period. This leaves a lot of space for Smith to manoeuver vocally, in terms of melody, rhythm, and timbre: the extensive use of glissando and vibrato, in combination with micro variations in timing, play with vowel sounds, and ornamentation (case in point, the phrase ‘next to you’ during the chorus), add up to a seemingly spontaneous, emotional delivery. Again, the lyrics come across as deeply personal, which is underpinned by the phonographic staging of the voice as ‘natural’ and intimate (as in ‘Too Good at Goodbyes’), further indicating the expression of emotional authenticity.Footnote ¹¹³

The combination of personal lyrics and particular aesthetic choices (instrumentation, production, mixing) in both of these tracks encourages the listener to ‘hear the real person exposed, revealed in the narrator of the song, seemingly with no critical distance between the real author, implied author, and persona’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Smith's music is, indeed, routinely interpreted as an expression of his real-life experiences and emotions. This is exemplified by Alexis Petridis's review of The Thrill of It All in The Guardian,Footnote ¹¹⁵ which describes the album as an ‘outpouring of authentically moving romantic misery’, and as containing ‘genuine despair’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Such descriptions contribute to the media discourse that characterizes Smith's music as emanating from his personal experiences, representing one influence on perceptions of his persona in this regard. This persona narrative is also substantiated by Smith's own interview statements – for example, regarding how he recounts ‘actual relationships’ in his songsFootnote ¹¹⁷ – which may serve to further enrich and authenticate interpretations of Smith's music as inspired by actual events.

Another articulation of Smith's persona resides in the album artwork of The Thrill of It All, which shows a monochrome portrait photograph of Smith, shot against a plain white background with minimal interfering visual material. The photo is a close-up of Smith's face, but the framing reveals enough of his shoulders to imply that he is naked, thus recalling the sense of intimacy found in his music (or prompting interpretations of his music as intimate). The Too Good at Goodbyes music video also constructs a sense of intimacy in its opening scenes, albeit by very different means. Before the song starts, Smith is depicted in a recording studio along with a band, in what amounts to an intricate staging of a ‘behind-the-scenes’ moment. The group appears to be captured in an informal pre-take setting, with band members improvising on their instruments while Smith warms up his voice. The scene is highly aestheticized (Persian carpets and instrument cables on the floor, dim lighting, camera panning slowly), and its spontaneity or ‘live authenticity’ is further highlighted by creaking floorboards and muffled talking in the background, as well as by Smith letting out a quiet laugh just before the song begins.

After the song starts (at approximately 00:47), images of Smith and the band in this setting recur only sporadically. Yet, the opening scene frames the rest of the video within a live aesthetic (accentuated by the track's band-centred sound) that is highly valued in most popular music genres.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Interpretations of the emotional lyrics as an expression of Smith's personal feelings are, to some extent, authenticated by the initial audiovisual staging of the performance aspects of the video as a ‘live’ event. The opening scene resonates with persistent views of the live performance as the pinnacle of authenticity in popular music (especially when represented by analogue instruments and a general aesthetic that recall the ‘real’ rock and soul bands of previous decades), and a similar liveness-ideal of authenticity is reflected also in, for example, the design of Smith's merchandise: at the time of writing, the only item of clothing available from the store of his official website is a long sleeve T-shirt depicting Smith in concert. The authentication of Smith's skill as a live performer is extended by reviews of his concerts, which have described him as breathing ‘youthful wonder back into live performing’ by displaying ‘the purity and authenticity that comes with musicianship’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Taken together, the emphasis placed on Smith as a live performer in the music video, merchandise, and media coverage demonstrate the transmedial articulation of this aspect of his persona, with each of these individual elements adding to perceptions of Smith's attributes as a musician in their distinct way.

As the video Too Good at Goodbyes progresses, it presents an abstraction of troubled romance in accordance with the lyrics. The video depicts a range of people in everyday contexts, with a particular focus on (both same-sex and opposite-sex) couples in various degrees of emotional distress. From one perspective, the video promotes a plurality of identities, in a gesture that can be interpreted as an expression of Smith's own political views, values, and identity. Smith himself is in a tight embrace with another man at points in the video, which further grounds the song and video in his persona narrative: he has talked openly and widely about identifying as gay, and has credited an ex-boyfriend with inspiring him to write his debut album,Footnote ¹²⁰ further blurring the boundaries between his personal life and creative output. Other music videos (e.g. Lay Me Down, 2015) similarly foreground Smith's sexuality by depicting him in romantic relationships with men,Footnote ¹²¹ further demonstrating the integration of this aspect of his personal life within musical and audiovisual texts.

Smith's persona is also shaped by the gendered narratives that unfold through, among other outlets, interviews and other media appearances. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Smith expressed that he identifies as gender fluid, explaining that ‘I feel just as much woman as I am man’.Footnote ¹²² His enunciation of a non-normative masculinity is further exemplified through his social media posts. For example, many of the photos posted to his Instagram account show him wearing high-heeled shoes, glitter dresses, and make up, situating Smith within a tradition of pop artists playing with markers of gendered identity in their self-aestheticization.Footnote ¹²³ The topic of gender fluidity is approached from another angle in Smith's appearance on ‘Carpool Karaoke’, a segment of The Late Late Show with James Corden. Smith talks about his love for the all-female pop group Fifth Harmony, and how listening to them makes him ‘feel like the woman in me is on fire’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Narratives concerning Smith's sexuality and gendered identity represent likely influences on interpretations of his songs and videos, as well as perceptions of his persona,Footnote ¹²⁵ and it is when such narratives are mapped against the aesthetics of his social media posts, artwork, songs, and videos that the complexity of gendered expression in pop emerges in full.

Smith's persona is also gendered through musical codes. For example, the singing voice forms a key part of the performative construction of gender, not least (though not simply) on account of norms related to pitch and register.Footnote ¹²⁶ The performativity of the voice is further determined by various technologies,Footnote ¹²⁷ such as those employed in recording or live performance settings (as discussed in relation to ‘Too Good at Goodbyes’ and ‘Lay Me Down’). Smith frequently sings in a falsetto register,Footnote ¹²⁸ and with a sensibility (use of vibrato, glissando, ornamentation) which has led to his voice being described as having a ‘diva quality’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Smith himself has on numerous occasions cited female singers as his main influences, once stating that he strives ‘to have the presence vocally that some of the divas did. We need a male diva’,Footnote ¹³⁰ thus narrating the gendered significance of his voice. In different ways, Smith's musical-stylistic physical deployment of the voice, the phonographic staging of it in recorded tracks, and persona narratives (expressed by Smith and others) that frame his singing all function as gateways for interpreting his persona in gendered terms, and intersect in audiences’ narrativizing of his gendered identity.

The above paragraphs account for some of the affordances provided by different points of contact between Smith and his audience, even if a different selection of material could amount to a different reading of his persona. For example, Smith has given contradicting statements in interviews, changing his stance on particular issues.Footnote ¹³¹ He features on several hit singles by prominent EDM artists, such as Calvin Harris and Disclosure, which provide radically different musical aesthetics by which his persona is also shaped. The realistic, low key visuals of the Too Good at Goodbyes music video is contrasted by the more lavish and eccentric Pray (2017) video, which trades a construction of intimacy for a play with costumes, props, and effects. Readings of Smith's persona will depend on one's prioritizing in this wealth of contradicting material. The fragments prioritized above amount to one, brief reading of Smith's persona.

Concluding thoughts

In this article, I have argued for a holistic understanding of the pop persona as a starting point for investigating how artist identities are negotiated transmedially across a variety of platforms and contexts. Placing the multiple construction of the persona at the centre of inquiry accommodates the complexity of pop personae as an object of study. Moving towards an understanding of how to read pop personae as transmedial phenomena, then, I emphasize that social media posts, artwork, music videos, interviews, and so on are not just secondary texts that serve to infuse sound recordings with additional meaning (at the same time as they do). A vast network of meaningful texts and events operate in relation to each other in a complex interplay, and the continuous interweaving of multiple different texts, discourses, and narratives ultimately shape pop personae. As such, the task of reading pop personae is less about scrutinizing any particular text, and more about an assessment of the conglomerate of texts and contexts that shape both the production and the reception of pop expressions. This goes to the core of the dialectical tension I identified in the opening paragraph of this article, and which has underpinned my discussions throughout – pop artists’ musical and audiovisual aestheticization and navigation of style through performance are key elements in constructing their personae, yet, simultaneously, pop aesthetics are interpreted vis-á-vis perceptions of the persona.

Resituating the persona as the focal point of intertextual interpretation, the agency of the reader assumes significance in elucidating its affordances. As Hawkins argues in his discussion of textual analysis and identity politics, there is ‘always an element of ambiguity in the coded text’.Footnote ¹³² This element of ambiguity is also present in the persona. Meyers describes the celebrity persona as ‘a site of tension and ambiguity in which an active audience has the space to make meaning of their world by accepting or rejecting the social values embodied by a celebrity image’.Footnote ¹³³ In their theorization of transmedial storyworlds, Ryan and Thon similarly assert the agency of the audience when they initiate a move from ‘storyworld creation’ to ‘storyworld imagination’, arguing that ‘while the author creates the storyworld through the production of signs, it is the reader, spectator, listener, or player who … construct a mental image of this world’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Certainly, each listener or viewer brings different experiences, tools, and values into their interpretations, and the multiple and sometimes contradictory facets of personae are arguably central to how meaning is ascribed to pop experiences through acts of constructing and reconstructing the persona from multiple texts and narratives. Conceding the ambiguity that defines popular music experiences thus offers up opportunities as much as complications when it comes to reading pop personae.

As I hope my discussion of Sam Smith has made clear, reading pop personae is not an endeavour that can hope to identify any one, true version of what meanings they afford. Rather, it should be seen as an effort to denaturalize and deconstruct how artist identities operate, which entails acknowledging the matter that identities ‘are constantly in the process of change and transformation’.Footnote ¹³⁵ The symbols and signs that constitute pop texts can be mutually supportive, or they can present contesting articulations of the persona. The public discourses surrounding pop artists are frequently characterized by conflicting narratives and accounts. The resulting ambiguity makes it difficult, if not impossible, to pin down any single version of the persona. Nevertheless, the persona emerges as meaningful through the processes whereby it is interpreted as such – the act of reading pop personae involves assessing how different facets and expressions of identity are positioned in relation to each other, making prioritizations about which elements to emphasize as one comes into contact with different sides of the multiply constructed persona. The astoundingly varied and complex ways in which pop personae are constructed and negotiated are matched only by the flexibility with which audiences interpret and attribute meaning to their experiences. Manifested in the pop persona are countless opportunities for playing out, and playing with, expressions of identity, which, for many of us, are central to how pleasure is derived from engaging with pop music in its many forms.