Popular Music and Society: Faithful or foolish: the emergence of the "ironic cover album" and rock culture.

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Faithful or foolish: the emergence of the "ironic cover album" and rock culture.

Popular Music and Society, June, 2003, by Steve Bailey

Introduction

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, American popular culture has been marked by an increasing tendency to utilize an ironic sensibility. From the popular success of television personalities like David Letterman and programs such as Mystery Science Theater 3000 to the literary work of Carl Hiassen and Mark Leyner and the films of the Coen brothers (Raising Arizona, Fargo) and Sam Raimi (Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness), the "irony epidemic"--as it was pithily termed by Spy magazine ("The 1994 Spy 100")--has infected a variety of mass media. The culture of popular music is no exception to the trend. For example, musical groups as diverse as Talking Heads, They Might Be Giants, Devo, and the Smiths have all produced work that reflects a distinctly ironic approach to rock and roll; much of this work emerged out of the remnants of the punk/new wave movement that first achieved widespread impact in the late seventies and early '80s.

One important manifestation of this larger trend within rock was the proliferation of the ironic cover version, in which a band or individual would record a new version of an older song which, through the choice of song and the performance, conveyed an ironic attitude towards the material. The Dead Kennedys' version of Elvis's "Viva Las Vegas," Too Much Joy's take on Terry Jacks's "Seasons in the Sun," the Replacements' cover of Kiss's "Black Diamond," and the Sex Pistols' notorious reinterpretation of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" are only a few examples of this trend. By the late '80s and early '90s, entire album-length collections of "ironic covers" began to appear. There was Peter and the Test Tube Babies' The $*H*I*T Factory, a collection of covers of songs associated with the British pop production team of Stock/Aitken/Waterman, as well as a series of albums from Chicago's Pravda records that ironically mimicked the K-Tel compilations sold on television in the 1970s. There were also ironic tributes to the Carpenters and Kiss, two popular but much maligned '70s rock acts, respectively titled If I Were a Carpenter and Hard to Believe.

There are two particularly significant cultural aspects of the trend toward ironic covers and especially ironic cover albums. The first is that these albums tend to involve a fully ironic approach, as opposed to one that is merely satirical or parodic. Irony, as de Man (300) reminds us, is dependent upon a process of creating discordance between two rhetorical codes such that there is a fissure in the normal unity of signification. Less ambivalent modes, such as satire, parody, and burlesque, are, as Muecke (34-35) notes, not truly ironic in that they lack the tension between serious and irreverent codes; there is no real articulation of the former, which eliminates the ambiguity that is central to an ironic effect. The examples noted above are marked by precisely the sort of ambivalence that defines the ironic mode. The new versions tend to ridicule the originals, often exaggerating particularly dated or embarrassing aspects of a given song, but, at the same time, they tend to celebrate the continued vitality, despite these shortcomings, of the music and its importance to the rock audience. This is not "making fun" in a monolithic sense, nor is it pure validation, but rather an often uneasy and thoroughly ironic hybrid. This ambivalent character--this swing between validation and ridicule--places the ironic cover in an unusual and analytically challenging position, as it suggests a unique relationship to the traditional rock aesthetic.

This leads to the second intriguing aspect of the trend, which is the departure of such ironic strategies from the conventional semiotic and rhetorical organization of rock. Rock, as critics from Carl Belz and Dave Marsh to Simon Frith and Lawrence Grossberg have noted, tends to be predicated upon a strong sense of authenticity, one that involves a particular fidelity of the performer and the performance (see especially Belz 6; Frith 463; Grossberg 206). The ironic performance, of course, reverses this formulation, relying upon an intentional disjunction between the performer and the material. Thus, any ironic popular musical strategy, including the ironic cover version, is working against a long-established and widely accepted cultural and aesthetic tradition. This makes the proliferation of such strategies particularly noteworthy, and reflective, I will argue, of a broad reshaping of the rock and roll taste culture.

While it may be tempting to view the examples of such musical irony from the '80s and '90s as merely reflective of a wider cultural phenomenon filtering down into the domain of popular music, particularly given its relative "lateness" to this medium, this is an oversimplified explanation. In fact, the proliferation of the ironic cover album is itself prefigured by crucial musical work from the 1970s. In the following paper, I examine this earlier work, focusing on two albums by British musician Bryan Ferry and, to a lesser extent, one by American rocker Todd Rundgren. My purpose in doing so is threefold: first, I want to examine the cultural and industrial roots of this work, particularly in the context of 1970s rock culture; second, and more generally, I want to discuss the semiotic and cultural conditions of possibility that enable the emergence of a rhetorical mode, irony, which, as mentioned, is so dissonant with the dominant aesthetic ideology of rock and roll; and, finally, I want to examine the broader ramifications of this analysis for rock culture and the larger popular culture. The essay begins with an analysis of Ferry's work, discussing the mid-'70s musical culture in which it emerges, Ferry's own ironic persona, the music itself, and, through a comparison with the work of John Lennon, Ferry's departure from rock conventions. This is followed by a much briefer analysis of Rundgren's greatly dissimilar approach to musical irony. The essay concludes with an exploration of the larger symptomatic value of this admittedly small body of work, particularly its prescient character in light of recent developments in popular music, and the ways in which scholarly analysis can better understand the production of meaning within popular culture.

The emergence of the cover album

In the early 1970s, a number of established rock acts released album-length collections of cover versions, often including new versions of established rock classics. The most notable of these collections include Moondog Matinee by The Band (1973), Rock 'n' Roll by John Lennon (1975), Pin-Ups by David Bowie (1973), and Givin' It Back by the Isley Brothers (1971). For the first time in the rock era, artists best known for performing original material made a conscious departure from standard musical practice and presented collections of nonoriginal, often historical material. The practice of covering, of course, was hardly new to rock. In the '50s, white acts such as Pat Boone and the Crew Cuts had garnered hits by recording songs originally done by black artists, taking advantage of racism in the radio and record markets. Later, many of the bands associated with the "British Invasion"--the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, etc.--included numerous covers, usually of American R&B and pop hits, on their early albums. As Weinstein (142) points out, this reflected the influences important to these artists and served to educate an audience often oblivious to such material. At this point in rock history, there was little emphasis on album releases (in fact, the U.S. and U.K. versions of early Beatles and Stones albums were vastly different), and thus little significance was attached to the combination of original and cover material.

By the 1970s, though, when the album had achieved critical status as the pre-eminent form of rock art (as opposed to the more ephemeral medium of singles), the release of a cover album had important implications. For one, many of the albums, and especially the aforementioned releases by The Band, Bowie, and Lennon, seem to represent an attempt at constructing a kind of "sonic museum," one offering a privileged view into the influences that shaped the development of the respective musicians. In all three cases, the material covered tends to date from the earliest periods of the performers' artistic development. The autobiographical resonance is further evidence of the evolution of dominant aesthetic standards for rock towards a more classically modernist model, one in which influence and evolution, rather than the spontaneity and naivete associated with a folk tradition, were paramount. It should be noted that there is a second, more cynical explanation for the spate of cover albums, which understands this development as evidence of the creative bankruptcy of these major musical figures. Lester Bangs, who labeled the trend a "disgusting phenomenon," sees it as evidence of a creative dry spell rather than as a significant stylistic move (Bangs 100). Even if Bangs is partly correct, though, the aesthetic choices made in the production of such albums are none the less significant.

The most notable aspect of the trend is that all of the albums mentioned above tend to present the material in a reverent and reasonably straightforward manner. There are few, if any, drastic alterations to the material, and the performances suggest aesthetic validation, even canonization, rather than critique. For example, Moondog Matinee presents versions of such rock classics as "The Great Pretender" and "Mystery Train" that, while updated sonically, are quite close to the originals; Rock 'n' Roll does much the same for "Sweet Little Sixteen" and "Stand by Me," among others. Bowie chooses less canonical material for his effort, favoring early-and mid-'60s British hits, but these are performed remarkably faithfully, particularly given Bowie's less classicist rock lineage--as compared with Lennon and The Band, especially--and proclivity for constructing disingenuous musical personas (e.g., Ziggy Stardust).

The great exceptions to this tendency toward antiquarian respect are Ferry's These Foolish Things (1974) and Another Place, Another Time (1975), and, for very different reasons, Rundgren's Faithful (1976). Ferry's work is striking in that, rather than reverence and homage-paying, it offers an explicitly critical and heavily ironic view of the historical musical texts that are "covered." Both These Foolish Things and Another Place, Another Time operate against the tendency toward validation and the presentation of timeless classics. Instead, they seem to provide a rather sophisticated critical commentary, enacted largely through the use of musical irony, upon specific songs and styles, and ultimately upon the nature of popular music. Both albums consist of songs from a variety of musical eras and genres. For example, These Foolish Things includes several rock and R&B classics: Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby," and others. However, the album also includes a number of songs that would normally be held in low esteem within the rock aesthetic, such as Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" and "I Love How You Love Me," a hit for both Bobby Vinton and the Paris Sisters. The album concludes with the standard "These Foolish Things," from the 1930s musical Spread It Around and a huge hit for Benny Goodman. Another Place, Another Time is similarly diverse, including another Dylan classic, "It Ain't Me Babe," standards such as "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "You Are My Sunshine," and two R&B hits, "(What a) Wonderful World" and "The In Crowd." There is one original, the title track, which bears a strong resemblance to a Broadway or Tin Pan Alley standard in its opening verse before breaking into a standard rock instrumental style. The sole original thus brings together musical strands from a number of elements found throughout the album. Before moving into an analysis of how this material is ironized, though, it is important to examine the extramusical ways in which Ferry constructs a more general ironic persona, which is then articulated across both albums.

Bryan Ferry: the "Gatsby" of rock?

As mentioned, the very idea of an "ironic persona" is largely at odds with the strong emphasis on authenticity in rock culture, so it is worth noting that Ferry, to an even greater degree than Bowie, who was well known for regularly constructing a new musical/theatrical persona, has repeatedly deployed just such a mask to considerable stylistic effect. Muecke discusses the use of such ironic masks as a distinct mode of irony, which he terms "self disparaging irony":

   The ironist is present not simply as an impersonal voice, but, in
   disguise, as a person with certain characteristics. And the sort of
   person the ironist presents himself as being is our guide to his
   real opinion.... But his disguise is meant to be penetrated, and
   our judgment is directed not against the ignorance of the
   speaker but against the object of the irony. (Muecke 87)

Thus, to get a true sense of Ferry's ironic musical strategy, one must first explore the dynamics of this persona, which is created out of visual elements such as stage clothing and album graphics, as well as musical performances. In interviews, Ferry has been quite candid about the use of such ironic masks, and his unusually cogent self-analysis provides additional clues to the deployment of this self-disparaging irony.

It should be noted that Ferry's use of an ironic persona precedes the release of These Foolish Things by a few years. At the time of its release, Ferry was well known, particularly in Britain, as the vocalist for Roxy Music, a group that had released two popular albums and had toured extensively in the United States and Britain. Ferry's crooning vocal style, which was quite unusual for rock and roll, was immediately noticed, but even greater attention was directed at his unusual visual image. In an interview with Allen Jones, Ferry explained his unorthodox stage clothing:

   I look better in tailored things, so I wore a tuxedo on the last
   tour. An odd thing to wear at a rock concert, but it's the classic
   outfit, with endless images--a Cunard class suit, playing the tables
   at Monte Carlo.... (Jones 31)

In a different essay, Frith remarked that: "Showbiz has always been a term of abuse in the rock ideology," (Frith 474) and it is therefore significant that the tuxedo has often been a potent symbol of this antirock, showbiz aesthetic. For example, Elvis was forced to wear a top hat and tails (and sing to a dog) on The Steve Allen Show in an attempt to ridicule his wild, sexually potent image. Later, as Greil Marcus points out, Presley narrowly escaped a similar tuxedo-clad fate on his famous 1968 Christmas special (Marcus, Mystery Train 125). Thus, by donning a tuxedo or, in the case of the LP sleeve for Another Place, Another Time, a white dinner jacket, Ferry presents a visual image that is constructed directly against the dominant visual standards of authentic rock and roll.

Ferry himself has pointed out that this seemingly odd choice of fashion is no more artificial than the equally calculated "street" look favored by most rock musicians:

   ... it would be utterly false for me to walk about in hobnail boots
   with a cloth cap on my head. It would be quite ridiculous....
   [T]hat [Ferry's working-class background] doesn't mean I have to go
   around looking like a miner from Jarrow. It's unnecessary, really,
   and I feel no such obligation. (Jones 31)

Here, Ferry is claiming a certain stylistic freedom, denying the obligation to retain a visual image consistent with his personal class origins. The use of stylistic masks has long been equated with various forms of irony (see Behler 96-99), so it is perhaps unsurprising that the "Gatsby of rock," as one writer put it (Powell 224) has embraced this visual stylization.

There are certain factors in Ferry's personal background that are also worth exploring in order to understand the genesis of such ironic strategies. In addition to his aforementioned roots in northern English working-class culture, the most important of these factors would seem to be Ferry's art-school background and especially the influence of Richard Hamilton, with whom Ferry studied at Newcastle University (Nicholl 48). As Frith and Horne point out in their Art Into Pop, a study of the influence of the British art-school system on rock music, a great number of noteworthy English '60s and '70s rockers attended art school. However, Ferry seems to have incorporated elements from his artistic training into his musical and visual style in an unusually direct and pervasive manner (Frith and Horne 114-15). Ferry himself has frequently mentioned the influence of Hamilton, particularly on his use of imagery borrowed from the larger popular culture. As he explains:

   Richard Hamilton was always the heaviest, the most intellectual of
   the British Pop artists, which was what attracted me to him....
   [O]ne thing that shaped the idea [of combining styles] was that I
   wasn't afraid of delving into different styles.
   In the same way that pop artists would make comments on art that
   had gone before, art about art, I wanted to mix up styles.
   (Truman 25)

This blending of images is evident in Ferry's visual presentation, which in addition to the aforementioned tuxedo, included, as Caroline Coon (12) noted, "the Gaucho, the country squire, Hitler's cousin, [and] the sleazy fifties mohair." While this collection of styles is consonant with Ferry's interest in ironic pop art, it also reflects a significant departure, as noted, from the standard visual iconography of rock. While visual presentation and especially fashion had always been an essential element of rock style, from the "cat clothes" of the '50s to the psychedelic fashions of the '60s, it had rarely been used in such a calculatingly ironic manner. Rather than signifying stylishness and individual flair (as with rockabilly "cat clothes") or integrity (as in the distinctly proletarian style of Dylan or Springsteen), or even a defiant assertion of preppy style against one's class origins (as in the mod style associated with the Who and the Small Faces), Ferry's visual sense conveyed a self-conscious artifice, a distance from the conventional symbiosis of performer and performance common to the rock aesthetic. It also provided a visual counterpart to the ironic musical style, which is discussed below.

Ferry's ironic musical strategy

There is a striking similarity between the blending of styles, many quite distant from the conventional rock milieu, that characterizes Ferry's visual presentation and the similarly ironic juxtaposition of styles within the music itself. Ferry had stressed his ambition to create "art about art" in the pop art tradition, so it is no surprise that These Foolish Things and Another Place, Another Time feature numerous examples of the type of ironic critique favored by pop artists. In a review of Another Place, Another Time, Stephen Holden (51) describes the album as "an inspired work of scholarship," and a number of other critics, including Dave Marsh and Robert Christgau, have made similar observations about Ferry's unusually intellectual and critical approach to cover versions.

Most often, Ferry's ironic critique involves performing a particular song in a manner that draws out musical and cultural implications of the text, and thus acts as a sort of musical metacommentary. The best examples of this type of performance are the versions of "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," "It Ain't Me Babe," "Sympathy for the Devil," "Piece of My Heart," "The In Crowd," and "These Foolish Things." Ferry's choice of Dylan songs is itself intriguing. Both "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "It Ain't Me Babe" date from Dylan's early '60s folk-singing years and were recorded with simple acoustic guitar accompaniment. Both are well-recognized classics in the canon of popular songwriting, and dozens if not hundreds of versions of both have appeared. For example, the Turtles had a substantial 1966 hit with an electrified but quite faithful version of "It Ain't Me Babe." Thus, by choosing these songs, Ferry is not merely recording "Dylan songs," but particularly well-known and highly valued examples of the composer's work. The choice of this material lends Ferry's drastic recastings an even more radical character. One critic confessed that upon first hearing Ferry's "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall": "I nearly broke the radio in two. It seemed a travesty..." (Nichol148). What is it about Ferry's version, which was a top 10 hit in Britain, that was so shocking?

To begin with, instead of the solo guitar arrangement of the original, Ferry's cover uses a much more complex musical arrangement with a female chorus and string section. The beat is pushed to the front, giving the song a rhythmic thrust associated with the vaudeville tradition. Ferry's voice moves from a clipped delivery to an overblown theatricality, approaching some of the lyrics with an operatic grandeur. This mannered singing style is similar to Ferry's singing with Roxy Music, but is notable in this context because it nearly opposite in character to Dylan's raspy, nonprofessional vocals. Ferry takes this theatricality a step further in the third verse, when sound effects are added to illustrate some of the lyrics. For example, following the lyric "thunder that roared out a warning," a thunderclap is heard on the track. After each of the subsequent lines in the verse, a similarly didactic sound is heard; examples include waves, laughter, and crying. This approach fits Linda Hutcheon's identification of "literalizing" as an ironic strategy; the poetic charge of the lyrics is undermined by the overly literal sound effect (Hutcheon 36). This pushes Ferry's version even further away from Dylan's understated treatment, yet it would be inaccurate to describe it as pure parody, as a lampoon of Dylan. As Christgau (132) points out, "Ferry both undercuts the inflated idealism of the original and reaffirms its essential power". Ferry's version never loses the melodic intensity of the original, and the vocal style, while highly mannered, never dissolves into total absurdity.

The version of "It Ain't Me Babe" on Another Place, Another Time is not as striking as "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," but it reflects a similar inversion of the unpolished style of the original. Rather than pushing the song in the direction of musical theater, "It Ain't Me Babe" is performed in a style associated with '70s R&B. Ferry's vocal style was always indebted to the soul tradition; his singing career began with a late '60s R&B band called the Gasboard, so his use of this style would not be unusual, except that it is applied to material far removed from the sweet soul milieu. The instrumental arrangement, featuring strings and horns, gospel-tinged piano, and a slow, pulsating rhythm, is similarly reminiscent of '60s and '70s soul. Interestingly, the song sounds very similar to "End of the Line," recorded by Roxy Music the following year on their Siren album. As with "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," this musical style removes the song from the context of folk authenticity and transforms the somewhat dismissive tone of the original into an eroticized lament. Once again, the song makes considerable sense in this transposed context--but it is transformed in a manner that both critiques and celebrates Dylan's songwriting skills.

If the Dylan covers are ironically rearranged through musical inversion, the interpretations of "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Piece of My Heart" isolate elements of the original versions and of the original artists' wider cultural standing for ironic reworking. In the first case, Ferry uses a "horror flick scary" approach, to quote Marsh's (49) description. By presenting the song as high camp drama, the rather silly Satanic image of the Stones is thrown into relief. "Piece of My Heart" features a cool, dispassionate singing style that contrasts with Janis Joplin's hyperemotional, screaming style on the original. In this instance, the constructed soulfulness of Joplin's white blues vocals is put under scrutiny. In both cases, the melodic and lyrical thrust of the song is not lost in the new version--both work quite well in this refreshed context.

While the above examples seem to offer an ironic commentary on some of the musical and cultural conventions within established rock culture, each of Ferry's cover albums also contains a track that provides a more reflexive commentary on Ferry's own status as a performer and upon the act of musical interpretation itself. For example, "These Foolish Things" reflects, microcosmically, a number of Ferry's aesthetic preoccupations. Obviously, its use as the title track of the album implies a view of the album's contents as "foolish things." This is a truly ironic notion given the album's juxtaposition of material by conventionally serious (e.g., Dylan, Beatles, Stones) and frivolous (e.g., Bobby Vinton, Lesley Gore) artists; much of the material is indeed foolish from the conventional rock perspective. However, Ferry's treatment of much of the more canonical material, especially "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Sympathy for the Devil," tends to draw out, as mentioned, the absurd and overblown tendencies of this work. Thus, by treating "It's My Party," "I Love How You Love Me," and "River of Salt" with considerably more respect (at least in terms of fidelity to the original), Ferry is able to question the conventional mode of rock aesthetic evaluation, echoing Rorty's assertion that one of the strengths of irony is that "anything can be made to look good or bad" (Rorty 73-74).

In addition to the connotations of the title, the lyrics to "These Foolish Things" are also intriguing in light of the album as a whole. The lyrics list numerous artifacts--"airline tickets," "fairground swings," etc., which remind the singer of a lost love. The song's theme, the emotional potency of such artifacts, is of course relevant to the structure of the album itself, which mirrors the random character of such artifacts in its chronological and aesthetic diversity. However, Ferry's rather postmodern approach to the material works to undercut any nostalgia. In a 1974 interview, he explained his attitude toward such sentimentalism:

   I don't want to become a copy of someone else. I prefer to use
   nostalgia to my own ends, rather than flog it to death and just be
   purely derivative. The idea is to adapt it to one's own needs of
   the moment, rather than trying to recreate the
   past. There's nothing more boring than people trying to be
   blatantly nostalgic in what they do. (Randall 12)

Thus, while Ferry is attempting to personalize the material, just as the narrator of the title track imbues a number of artifacts with personal meaning, he is also trying to avoid the type of sappy nostalgia that is also undeniably present in the thematic structure of the song. In that sense, "These Foolish Things" seems a particularly apt choice for the title track. This quality is further reflected in the instrumental approach to the song, which begins in a style faithful to the original and slowly evolves into a more conventional rock instrumental style.

"The In Crowd," the first cut on Another Place, Another Time, seems to comment more directly on the status of Ferry himself as a performer. The dated lyrics of the song (e.g., references to being "outta sight" and "making time"), particularly in contrast with a very modern art-rock instrumental arrangement, lend a particularly absurd tone to Ferry's version. Ferry himself compared the lyrical imagery to that of pop artist Richard Lindner--the "neo-Berlin kind of thing," (Randall 12) as Ferry put it--drawing further connections to his own art-school background. In this sense, the song functions in much the same, ironic fashion as Ferry's visual image; the application of a vocal and instrumental style associated with art rock--the track sounds like early Roxy Music--signals an ironic approach, much as the wearing of a tuxedo at a rock concert alters one's understanding of both the artifact and its context. The song's comically elitist lyrics also serve as a kind of ironic reflection upon Ferry's own position as a rock intellectual and his membership in an "in crowd" of British musicians (Bowie, Brian Eno, etc.) who enjoyed particular critical esteem. The song thus possesses a genuine duality as it is both a laughably dated artifact and, simultaneously, a fairly astute comment on Ferry's own status in rock culture.

John Lennon/Bryan Ferry--modernism/postmodernism?

While the above analysis may document the extent of Ferry's ironic approach to the cover version, it does not necessarily demonstrate Ferry's status as a harbinger of paradigmatic changes in the rock aesthetic. This status is best illustrated through a comparative analysis with John Lennon's Rock 'n' Roll, an album that, as noted, fits clearly within the nonironic mode of musical interpretation. A comparison between Ferry and Lennon is particularly interesting given some important biographical similarities. Both share a northern English working-class background; Ferry, born in 1945, grew up in coalmining family in Newcastle, while Lennon, born in 1940, was raised by his aunt in Liverpool. Both began their musical careers performing in bar bands with roots in traditional rock and roll, and R&B styles. Although Lennon is unquestionably the more significant cultural figure, both attained fanatical followings with their original bands, particularly in Britain. Both were art students, Ferry at Newcastle University and Lennon at the Liverpool College of Art, though it is perhaps notable that Ferry was a more prominent student (Frith and Horne 84). What may be even more significant, are the high-cultural influences that seem to have impacted the two. While Ferry, as noted, was highly influenced by Hamilton and the pop art tradition, Lennon, according to friends, was interested in the modernist drive for pure expression and the confessional, emotionally direct literature of the Beat movement (Frith and Horne 85).

The modernist drive for unmediated expression would find a place within Lennon's work, especially 1970s Plastic Ono Band album. This record, which was heavily influenced by Lennon's experience in Janovian primal scream therapy, utilized a raw musical style, lyrics that eschewed metaphorical and poetic structure in favor of literalism, and an unmannered, intense singing style. The result, which was widely acclaimed, was nearly the opposite of Ferry's stylized ironic distance. Thus, while Roxy Music--which released its first LP two years after Plastic Ono Band appeared--was developing a postmodern art-rock style, Lennon, with similar avant-garde credentials, was attempting to fulfill the modernist potential for free and total expression within the rock idiom.

It is no surprise, then, that Rock 'n' Roll, a far more conventional recording than Plastic Ono Band, offers a rather different take on musical history than Ferry's albums. As mentioned, the choice of material tends toward classics, with no choices outside the rock canon. The performances reify this classicism in their straightforwardness. Unlike Ferry, who is interested in critique, Lennon tries to illustrate the timeless expressive potency of his material. Lennon frequently affirmed his love for traditional rock and roll, as in his famous 1971 claim that "no group, be it Beatles, Dylan, or Stones, has ever improved on 'A Whole Lotta Shakin's Goin' On'" (Wenner 45). This can be compared with Ferry's aforementioned frustration with the nostalgic, oldies approach to interpretation. This chasm in sensibility is captured rather nicely in a comparison of the cover art of both albums. The sleeve of Rock 'n' Roll features an early '60s photo of Lennon, dressed in a leather jacket with his hair greased up in the rockabilly fashion, standing in front of a brick building. The cover of Another Place, Another Time pictures Ferry in a white dinner jacket and holding a cigarette, standing in front of a swimming pool; Ferry describes it as "a sort of Last Year at Marienbad [referring to the 1961 art film] thing" (Nicholl 48). While Lennon evokes a nostalgic longing for the early days of rock and roll, Ferry presents a heavily ironic image of elitist sophistication.

In The Postmodern Turn, Ihab Hassan (91-92) presents an oft-cited table indicating the overarching aesthetic-cultural attributes of modernism and postmodernism. The table includes the following set of binary oppositions:

Modernism       Postmodernism

Selection       Combination
Hierarchy       Anarchy
Metaphysics     Irony
Transcendence   Immanence

Many of these distinctions seem quite relevant to a comparison of Ferry's and Lennon's approaches to "covering"; for example, while Lennon chooses canonical works (selection), Ferry's choices span generic and historical categories (combination). Also, while Lennon's work affirms traditional aesthetic norms (hierarchy), Ferry tends to use irony to question them (anarchy). It might be more useful, though, to construct a specific table illustrating the distinctions between the two musical approaches reflected on these "cover" albums (Table 1). While such a diagram will inevitably elide some of the nuances of both artists' work, it does offer a nice summary of some of the significant distinctions at work here. The fact that both appeared in the same era, the mid-70s, and both enjoyed a broad popularity, suggests that both modernist and postmodernist modes of musical reinterpretation could resonate with a significant body of listeners. The postmodern mode, however, became much more prominent within rock culture in the decade that followed, suggesting a prescience to Ferry's work, one that will be explored in greater depth below.

Ferry and the '70s: the beginning of an aesthetic crisis?

If Ferry's work is reflective of larger shifts in the aesthetic standards for rock music, then it is imperative to examine the cultural conditions that enabled his radical approach. In this light, it is important to reiterate that both These Foolish Things and Another Place, Another Time enjoyed considerable commercial success, particularly in Britain, outselling Roxy Music's early records and producing several hits (Jones 30). Thus, while Ferry might have been a member of rock's avant garde, he was also unquestionably a popular artist, particularly in the mid-'70s. One important development that may have helped clear a space for Ferry's success was the exhaustion of many of the initial impulses of the art-rock movement. As Lennon and others explored rock music as a medium of pure expression, others were pushing rock in directions influenced by different varieties of high culture. For example, Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, and Deep Purple recorded original material with symphony orchestras, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer recorded music from classical composers Mussourgski and Ginastera. While this work was frequently reviled by rock's critical elite, it also reflected the fulfillment of the high-low cultural fusion suggested by the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Who's rock opera Tommy. The emphasis on instrumental virtuosity and the rejection of standard song formats, which had seemed so radical in the '60s, now seemed like a pretentious cliche. The explosion, a few years later in the '70s, of the punk and disco genres reflected this taste crisis in broad form; Ferry's early work may offer an individual and particularly intellectual response to this situation.

Ironic aesthetic effects often seem paradoxical in that they are enabled by the very objects and standards that they appear to be targeting. This is true for Ferry's work, as he relies upon an established body of rock musical discourse. For example, Ferry's choice of highly familiar material (e.g., the Beatles, Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, etc.) is enabled by the solidification of a canon of rock musical works. More importantly, his ironic inversion of Dylan's authenticity, the Stones' Satanic aura, and Joplin's uninhibited soulfulness are largely dependent on the firm establishment of such concepts in the aesthetic understanding of a large number of rock fans. Similarly, Ferry's ironic image is enabled by the deployment of styles that are clearly far removed from rock conventions, especially as they had ossified by the '70s. Ferry's tuxedo and short, styled hair are antithetical both to a countercultural fashion sense and to the broader tendency for art-rockers, as serious artists, to shun the visual flair that Ferry embraces. Ferry's popular success is evidence of his ability to draw upon these common aesthetic dispositions; his ironic stance, though radical in many ways, never operates within a small subculture or intellectual clique. In this sense, he may have succeeded in his declared ambition to harness the metatextual critique of the pop artists to the energy and popularity of rock music.

The pervasive use of irony in Ferry's early albums was, as noted, a precursor to later changes in rock culture. This is demonstrated partly by the considerable number of musicians who have imitated--to differing degrees--Ferry's musical and visual style, including Martin Fry of ABC, Ric Ocasek of the Cars, Nick Cave, and the Pet Shop Boys. Beyond these direct examples of Ferry's influence, the larger turn away from conventional rock standards of authenticity, originality, reverence, and spontaneity in the 1980s is prefigured in Ferry's music. This is especially clear in the proliferation of the "ironic cover" mentioned in the introduction, but is hardly confined to this phenomenon.

Technical perfection and nihilistic irony: Todd Rundgren's Faithful

In 1976, two years after the release of Ferry's first solo LP, Todd Rundgren, an established rocker with a particularly devout cult of fans, released Faithful, recorded with his band Utopia. The first side of the album contains covers of six 1960s rock classics. As with Ferry's work, Rundgren's reinterpretations attracted considerable notice from critics and fans. However, the reasons for this attention were nearly the opposite of the case with Ferry. Rather than altering the songs in a sacrilegious manner, Rundgren offered nearly exact replications of the original works, covers so "faithful" as to be pointless.

The attempt to create perfect reproductions of previous material is not in itself revolutionary or even ironic. "Soundalike" covers have often been created for commercial reasons; record companies have released collections of material intended to sound exactly like the original songs to avoid paying artists' royalties. I can recall buying an eight-track of Paul McCartney & Wings' Greatest Hits at a K-Mart in the '70s only to discover that these hits were recorded by P. K. & the Sound Explosion. Also, artists have been required to duplicate their own earlier work for compilation albums if the originals were unavailable for legal reasons--see George Jones's 1977 All Time Greatest Hits on Epic Records, for example. Rundgren's album becomes potentially ironic only as it is interpreted through the discursive screen of Rundgren as artist. This culturally constructed status serves as an "author function," to use Foucault's term, which conditions the interpretation of the music. Foucault explains, "the author function explains the presence of certain events within the text, as well as their transformations, distortions, and various modifications" (Foucault 465); lacking the expectations provided by this author function, Rundgren's covers would be no different, in connoted meaning, than those of P.K. & the Sound Explosion. It is thus critical to examine Rundgren's status within rock discourse and to get a better picture of the symbolic dynamics of this author function in order to understand why his cover versions seemed so ironic.

Like Ferry, Rundgren was associated with rock's avant garde and counted among the most artistically ambitious popular musicians. Unlike Ferry, who was acclaimed for his manipulation of pop-culture imagery and his creation of innovative visual and musical personas, Rundgren was regarded as a technical genius and a studio wizard. This status placed him in a line of rock legends, including Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, known for their keen musical sense and advanced use of recording technology. Rundgren's success as a producer of other acts (Grand Funk, the New York Dolls, and many others), and his mastery of numerous instruments helped support this image of him as a musical renaissance man. In this regard, he fits the general characteristics of the modernist artist, using his technical prowess to create very personal works. The stylistic diversity of his career prior to Faithful was positioned to suggest a lack of concern for commercial success (though he was quite popular) and a drifting muse, rather than the calculated eclecticism favored by Ferry. Rundgren certainly reinforced this image, telling interviewers: "I want records that people have to listen to because they want something out of it, because they desire to come away from a record with a new experience (Brown 51) and "I don't make records for the masses and I don't make records to pacify people into that position ['complacency'] even further" (Edmonds 40).

It should be noted that the second quote comes from a 1975 issue of Creem magazine that also contains an ad for the "Todd Rundgren Fan Club," featuring a bare-chested photo of Rundgren that places his professed indifference to rock's "cult of personality" (Brown 51) in some perspective.

Rundgren's heavy mystical streak (e.g., 1975's "A Treatise on Cosmic Fire") and his frequent use of the one-man-band format (playing all the instruments himself) reified his reclusive artist image, one, as mentioned, closely associated with modernism. This is not to say that the rather postmodern character of Faithful was entirely unexpected. Throughout his career, Rundgren had demonstrated a considerable fluency with a variety of pop styles; for example, "Real Man," from 1975's Initiation, eerily replicated the sound of mid-60s Motown recordings. However, as Coleman points out, this earlier work tends to avoid direct mimicry in favor of an indirect "harking back" (Coleman 610). Faithful, though, crosses the line between influence and imitation by precisely replicating the original songs, including production technique, instrumental style, and, most notably, vocal inflection. In that sense, they are hardly "interpretations" at all.

Rundgren's choice of material is absolutely canonical. Like Ferry, he includes the work of the Beatles ("Rain," "Strawberry Fields Forever"), the Beach Boys ("Good Vibrations"), and Dylan ("Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"); Jimi Hendrix ("If 6 Was 9") and the Yardbirds ("Happenings Ten Years Time Ago") are added to these figures. As Coleman puts it, Rundgren creates "the first 'classic rock' block," referring to the popular '80s and '90s FM radio format (610). To an even greater extent than Ferry, Rundgren chooses work that would be likely to enjoy a high degree of familiarity with the mainstream rock audience. As noted, the versions of these classics are hardly "versions" at all; "you can fool your friends," suggests Christgau, referring to the precision of these reproductions. What is particularly interesting about them is that the material includes music that was regarded as technologically adventurous (e.g., "Good Vibrations," "Strawberry Fields Forever"), as well as "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine," which is valued for its spontaneity and lack of polish. While one might view the replication of "Good Vibrations" as a tribute to Brian Wilson, an earlier studio wizard, the Dylan and Hendrix covers reveal deeper implications concerning the use of technology and the reproducibility of genius.

At one level, Faithful could be regarded as an act of artistic masturbation, as a studio savant engaging in pure self-indulgence and merely showing off his undeniable technical prowess. This was certainly one reaction to the album in the '70s, as in Lake's review in Melody Maker, which characterizes the album as "a complete waste of time" (26). However, the seeming pointlessness of the gesture is the key to its ironic effect and the reason why it enjoys a kinship with Ferry's work. Indeed, while Ferry works within the tradition of pop art, Rundgren engages the avant-garde passion for the copy, one exemplified by Warhol but present, as Hillel Schwarz argues, in a great deal of recent "appropriationist" art (Schwarz 246-47). Jacques Derrida, in "Plato's Pharmacy," suggests that an interpretation or "reading" that involves no personalization, no commitment, would not be a reading at all. Using the metaphor of embroidery, Derrida (63-64) argues that following the original pattern exactly would be as senseless as discarding the original "thread" entirely, and that it would do little to produce any meaning at all. Rundgren approaches this threshold, and the irony here is that his utilization of studio technology and personal virtuosity--normally tools for maximizing self-expression--produce a work free of personal commitment. By turning technology upon itself, Rundgren takes the Benjaminian aura-smashing potential of mechanical reproduction one step further. Not only is art reproducible, it no longer requires an original. "Good Vibrations" by Rundgren becomes indistinguishable from "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys, and thus the technology that allowed Brian Wilson to create his pop masterpiece renders the achievement meaningless.

Like Ferry's albums, Faithful reflects a response to the exhaustion of art-rock as a genre. The Beatles, Hendrix, and Wilson were especially important in the attainment of rock's recognition as art--see Belz's (6) distinction between '50s rock as folk art and '60s rock as high art--and thus serve as forefathers to Rundgren's generation of art rockers. The cloning of these figures is thus especially pointed, as a similar replication of less esteemed figures would lack the nihilistic quality of these covers. While Ferry responds to the aesthetic crisis of mid-70s rock with an ironic recombination of older styles, Rundgren turns art rock's ideology of technocracy upon itself in an act of willful pointlessness. In this way, the Dada-esque nature of Faithful anticipates key aspects of the punk/new wave movement. As early as 1975, Rundgren was embracing the "rock is dead" position that would later be a centerpiece of punk ideology, claiming that industrial and cultural factors had rendered rock "a big game ... as if the music wasn't necessary at all" (Brown 51). In this aspect, at least, Rundgren shared a bond of cynicism with many of the punk/new wave musicians who otherwise found his variety of technocentric progressive rock repugnant.

Conclusion: ironic covers, popular culture, and meaning making

In this final section, I want to explore some of the wider implications of the foregoing analysis, which, as noted, is focused on three albums that enjoyed considerable popularity in the mid-70s but were, none the less, a relatively small part of the larger rock culture of the era. I will explore three central aspects of the larger significance of this work: first, its prescient character given later developments in rock music; second, its connection with a wider ironization of popular culture; and, last, what it might mean for the analysis of popular music and especially the ways in which a rhetorical effect--such as irony--is produced within rock and roll.

In the introduction, I noted the proliferation of ironic covers in the '80s and '90s, including the cuts by the Replacements, Too Much Joy, and the Sex Pistols. This list could be expanded considerably, with Marshall Crenshaw's version of Abba's "Knowing Me, Knowing You," Cake's interpretation of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," and Aztec Camera's cover of Van Halen's "Jump" being exemplary, as all three highlight the dual-coded character of irony, balancing reverence and mockery particularly artfully. There have even been a number of ironic covers that have found chart success, such as the Flying Lizards' cover of Barrett Strong's "Money," the Lemonheads' recording of Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson," Frente!'s cover of New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle," and the Pet Shop Boys' versions of both Elvis Presley's "You Were Always on My Mind" and U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" (conjoined with Frankie Valli's and the Four Seasons' "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You"). The aforementioned Flying Lizards' track came early in the ironic cover explosion, dating from 1979, but the trend continues today; recently, Fountains of Wayne caused a sensation by releasing a promo-only recording of Britney Spears's recent smash "Baby One More Time," which subsequently became widely available via the Internet. Even more recently, Robbie Fulks, who has been dubbed the "poster boy for alternative country" and a major figure in the critically lauded "No Depression" genre of country rock, has taken to performing an ironic but clearly not simply parodic version of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" in concert appearances. All of these interpretations are very much in the spirit of Ferry's initial foray into this style of musical revisitation, and the proliferation of these covers suggests that his work has resonated greatly, albeit perhaps indirectly, in the past twenty-five years.

Nor is this kind of ironic musical sensibility limited to the individual instances described here. Indeed, a number of groups, including They Might Be Giants, Too Much Joy, the Pet Shop Boys, and Devo (who achieved early acclaim for their ironic recastings of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" and Johnny Rivers's "Secret Agent Man"), have built careers on a thoroughly ironic approach to both cover versions and original material, with the same sense of simultaneous embrace and critique that marked both Ferry's and Rundgren's musical strategies. To this list one might add such recent bands as the Barenaked Ladies (who have included the Spice Girls' "Spice Up Your Life" in their concert repertoire), King Missile, Nashville Pussy (whose name is taken from the stage patter on Ted Nugent's Double Live Gonzo album), and the aforementioned Fountains of Wayne, who offer similarly ironic approaches to rock. Treatments range from the wry powerpop of Barenaked Ladies to the carnivalesque '70s pastiche of Nashville Pussy, but all of these acts refuse the kind of authenticity that marked both the folk art and high modernist tendencies in rock and roll.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the widespread proliferation of ironic covers and of a wider ironic sensibility is provided by the recent Gap clothing advertisements that feature models emotionlessly speak-singing the words to Madonna's "Dress You Up," Donovan's "Mellow Yellow," and Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough." The ads point to the dissemination of this initially radical strategy--recall the critic who "nearly broke the radio in two" upon hearing Ferry's Dylan cover--to the rather mundane world of television advertising. This connection, though, is only one of a number that link the earlier recordings with a wider process of cultural ironization. There are the television programs, movies, and literary works noted in the introduction, a collection that, like the list of ironic covers, could be expanded considerably: in television, Twin Peaks, Wild Palms, and The Pee Wee Herman Show; in film, Natural Born Killers, Bulworth, Happiness, and American Beauty; in literature, the novels of Robert Ferrigno, Bret Easton Ellis, and David Foster Wallace.

This broad spectrum of artistic work shares a common element with the more minute realm of the ironic cover in that both reflect, to varying degrees, the popularization of an aesthetic approach that has a strong pedigree within an elite art avant garde. Much as Ferry's work betrays the heavy influence of his art-school background and fascination with pop art, and Rundgren's evokes his antipop, elitist sensibility, the recent wave of ironic discourse across a wide variety of media reflects the dissemination of an avant-garde sensibility to the domain of the popular. As a general phenomenon, the process begins with the work of liminal figures who work within popular art forms--rock music, Hollywood cinema, mass market novels--but who situate themselves within a relative elite in these fields. Ferry and Rundgren, as noted, were clearly part of a rock aesthetic elite, much as directors such as David Lynch, Oliver Stone, and the Coen Brothers work within contemporary cinema as members of a sort of popular elite.

In an interesting twist, just as the postmodern ironic style of Ferry and Rundgren reflected a reaction against the pretentions and limitations of conventional art-rock, as this postmodern ironic position has become widely accepted a new wave of reaction has begun to appear across a variety of media. One finds evidence of the reaction against the inauthentic turn in pop music, for example, in the resurgence of the "jam band"--acts like Phish, Govt. Mule, the Dave Matthews Band, etc.--a movement that restores an emphasis on instrumental virtuosity and unfettered expression, just the sorts of things that Ferry and Rundgren were reacting against. There are signs of a stepping back from the "irony epidemic" of recent years in other cultural fields as well. From the popularity of authentic, unironic films such as Saving Private Ryan and television programs such as ER, to the resurgence in interest in a variety of religious and quasi-religious movements aimed at uncovering a truer sell there are indications of a return, in varying forms, to a (constructed) authenticity and genuineness far removed from the varying degrees of irony and hyperbole common to so much '80s and '90s culture.

I want to return, finally, to the specific case of the ironic cover and briefly discuss what the preceding analysis might tell us about rock culture in general and especially the ways in which aesthetic strategies achieve social meanings. One interesting and perhaps obvious implication is that innovative aesthetic strategies and the subsequent dispersion of such strategies within rock culture--as in the spate of ironic covers in the '90s--are not entirely dissimilar from the same process in many elite art media. While critics from Allan Bloom on the far right to Theodor Adorno on the far left have decried, in the strongest terms, the lack of aesthetic complexity in popular music, the picture one gets from a study of rock irony is complex indeed. It is tempting, of course, to overstate the elite/popular similarities, particularly when one is dealing with artists as highbrow (in rock terms) as Rundgren and Ferry; this danger is increased considerably by the latter's formal training and explicit high art influence. However, it would be equally foolish to dismiss the emergence of the ironic cover and its subsequent wider popularity as entirely anomalous; from the earliest moments of rock and roll as a distinct musical culture to contemporary artistic developments, there has been a similar pattern in which initially radical aesthetic gestures achieve a widespread popularity, thus triggering another reaction.

This process is quite evident, for example, in the way that Lennon and Ferry play out the modernist/postmodernist binary, one that was more commonly associated with both high literature and elite art. The remarkable suitability of Hassan's analytical table, one devised primarily for literary criticism, for capturing the divergence in approach between Rock 'n' Roll and Ferry's early albums is significant here as it suggests that the aesthetic simplicity so often assigned to popular music is at least partially rooted in an inability to grasp the stylistic nuances that give rock its meaning. As noted in the analysis, the differences between Ferry's and Lennon's interpretations (and Rundgren's as well) are not merely formal but also rhetorical in the sense that they engage a set of historical traditions, modes of musical valuation, and even norms of fashion. The postmodern character of both Ferry's and Rundgren's work is significant secondarily because it reflects an undermining of the aforementioned modes of authenticity common to rock aesthetics, which, like the norms of unfettered personal expression in literary modernism, had lost a great deal of their original power.

The move away from an emphasis on authenticity is also reflective of a cracking in the rock consensus, a rupture that became particularly evident in the mid- and late-70s. Assessing the state of the rock audience in 1992, Lawrence Grossberg argued that there was little aesthetic solidarity among fans from various factions of the larger culture:

   There is a very real "crisis of taste" in the rock formation where,
   for many fans, no single alliance, no single organization of taste
   seems more real than any other.... [I]t is impossible today to
   define any model of rock which could serve as a definition of
   the center, or as a vector pointing to its future. (Grossberg 237)

At one level, there is an interesting overlap between the chaotic, fragmentary, and highly transitory nature of cultural-aesthetic "alliances" in rock culture described by Grossberg and the unstable rhetorical character of irony as noted by de Man, Rorty, etc. Second, though, Grossberg's description of the collapse of consensus among fans seem to be like a popular extension of the cultural-aesthetic conditions from which work like These Foolish Things and Faithful emerged in the '70s. The lack of a clear "vector" for the future is certainly a factor in any decision to revisit, however ironically, musical history. In fact, the avant-garde fusion of historical reinterpretation and irony reflects, as argued, a response to this "crisis." Once again, Ferry and Rundgren are "early" in recognizing the crisis, but would soon be followed by the widespread emergence of the punk/new wave movement, one similarly cynical about the future, with "rock is dead," "no future," "cash from chaos," and so on emerging as slogans reflective of a real disaffection with what rock could offer and where it could go, musically and culturally. Greil Marcus has pointed out that punk rock, and especially the Sex Pistols, "made a breach in the pop milieu, in the screen of received cultural assumptions governing what one expected to hear and how one expected to respond" (Marcus, Lipstick Traces 3); one could argue that Ferry and Rundgren anticipated this more notorious move with their own subtler assault on rock's historical reverence and its technocratic ideology, respectively.

The issue of expectations and of meanings leads to a final ramification, which involves the ways in which the meaning of rock music is produced through the intersection of a myriad discursive fields--especially when a mode as tricky and double-coded as irony is involved. As the analysis of Ferry and Rundgren demonstrates, the ironic quality of their interpretations cannot be located purely in the formal dynamics of the music. While this is undeniably important, it is only a part of a much larger system of meaning production, which includes fashion and the use of visual style as a kind of mask (particularly important in Ferry's case), the "author function" associated with a given performer (likewise for Rundgren), and the relative historical valuation of various genres, performers, and individual songs. The reduction of rock's meaning to any single line of analysis would thus be as simplistic as the monolithic condemnations of rock offered by antirock pundits in the name of cultural sophistication. One of the real challenges for scholars of rock and popular music in general will be coming to terms with the character of popular music in all of its aesthetic and sociocultural fullness. This will require, at least partly, a willingness to dig a bit deeper into the music and related discourses upon which the rock community has been established. I hope that I have accounted for a small but significant element in this culture, the ironic cover, and in doing so provided some illustration of popular music's rhetorical complexity.

Table 1. Ferry and Lennon: Stylistic Comparison

Lennon                        Ferry

Classicism                    Irony
The Canon (Rock 'n' Roll)     Foolish Things
"Working Class Hero"          "Gatsby of Rock"
Nostalgia                     Reinvention
Vindication                   Critique
The Leather Jacket            The Dinner Jacket
Passion                       Distance
Expression                    Artifice

Works cited

Bangs, Lester. "Here Comes Bryan Ferry." Stereo Review. Nov. 1974: 100.

Behler, Ernst. Irony and The Discourse of Modernity. Seattle, WA: U of Washington P, 1987.

Belz, Carl. The Story of Rock. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Brown, Geoff. "Rundgren-Rock is Dead!" Melody Maker 12 July 1975: 51.

Christgau, Robert. Rock Albums of the 70s: A Critical Guide. New York: Da Capo, 1981.

Coleman, Mark. "Todd Rundgren." The Rolling Stone Album Guide. Ed. Anthony DeCurtis, James Henks, and Holly George-Warren. New York: Random House, 1992. 609-10.

Coon, Caroline. "Ferry: Putting on the Style ..." Melody Maker 12 July 1975: 12-13.

De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979.

Derrida, Jacques. "Plato's Pharmacy." Disseminations. Ed. and trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago, IL: U Chicago P, 1981.61-173.

Edmonds, Ben. "Todd Rundgren." Creem Nov. 1974: 39-40.

Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" Rethinking Popular Culture. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1991. 446-64.

Frith, Simon. "Art Ideology and Pop Practice." Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson. New York: Routledge, 1989. 461-76.

Frith, Simon, and Howard Home. Art Into Pop. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Grossberg, Lawrence. We Gotta Get Out of This Place. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn. Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1987.

Holden, Stephen. "Another Place, Another Time." Rolling Stone 2 Jan. 1975: 51.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Jones, Allen. "In Ferry's Mind." Melody Maker 29 Jan. 1977: 30-31.

Lake, S. "Rundgren: Faithful to a Fault." Melody Maker 15 May 1976: 26.

Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

--. Mystery Train. New York: Dutton, 1990.

Marsh, Dave. "Matinee Idol in Evening Dress." Rolling Stone 15 Aug. 1974: 49-50.

Muecke, D. C. The Compass of Irony. London: Methuen, 1969.

Nicholl, Roger. "Bryan Ferry: Dandy of The Bizarre." Rolling Stone 24 Apr. 1975: 48-50.

Powell, Joanna. "Word on ... Bryan Ferry: The Original Art Rocker." Glamour Apr. 1989: 224-25.

Randall, Bob. "There's Nothing More Boring Than Blatant Nostalgia--Bryan Ferry." Melody Maker 2 Mar. 1974: 12-13.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Schwarz, Hillel. The Culture of the Copy. New York: Zone Books, 1996. "The 1994 Spy 100." Spy Jan./Feb. 1994: 44-62.

Truman, James. "Bryan: A Kitsch-in-Synch Drama." Melody Maker 14 June 1980: 23-25.

Weinstein, Deena. "The History of Rock's Pasts Through Rock Covers." Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory. Ed. Thomas Swiss, John Sloop, and Andrew Herman. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. 137-52.

Wenner, Jann. Lennon Remembers. New York: Fawcett, 1971.

Discography

The Band. Moondog Matinee. Capitol, 1975. LP SW-11214.

David Bowie. Pin-Ups. RCA, 1973. LP SWLP-277.

Dead Kennedys. "Viva Las Vegas." Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. Alternative Tentacles, 1980. LP SP-70014.

Ferry, Bryan. Another Place, Another Time. E.G., 1974. LP SD 18913.

--. These Foolish Things. E.G., 1973. LP 26082-2.

Flying Lizards. "Money." Virgin, 1979. LP V-2150.

Fountains of Wayne. "Baby One More Time." Atlantic (promo only), 2000.

Frente! "Bizarre Love Triangle." Marvin the Album. Mammoth, 1994. CDD-93367.

Isley Brothers. Givin' It Back. T-Neck, 1971. LP TNS 3008.

Jones, George. All Time Greatest Hits. Epic, 1977. LP KE-34692.

Lemonheads. "Mrs. Robinson." It's a Shame About Ray. Atlantic, 1992. CD 7567-82460-1.

Lennon, John. Plastic Ono Band. Apple, 1970. LP SW 3372.

--. Rock n Roll. Apple, 1975. LP SK-3419.

Pet Shop Boys. "Where the Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off of You." EMI, 1991. CD 97097.

--."Always on My Mind." Discography. EMI, 1987. CD 97097.

Peter and the Test Tube Babies. The S*H*I*T Factory. XXX Records, 1991. CD 51067.

Replacements. "Black Diamond." Let It Be. Twin/Tone, 1984. LP 8441.

Roxy Music. "End of the Line." Siren. E.G., 1975. LP SD36-127.

Rundgren, Todd. "A Treatise on Cosmic Fire." Initiation. Bearsville, 1975. LP 6963.

--. Faithful. Bearsville, 1976. LP 7086.

--. "Real Man." Initiation. Bearsville, 1975. LP 6963.

Sex Pistols. "My Way." The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. Virgin, 1978. LP V-2168.

Too Much Joy. "Seasons in the Sun." Son of Sam I Am. Giant, 1992. CD 24403-2.

Various Artists. Hard to Believe: A Kiss Covers Compilation. C/Z, 1992. CD ZCZ-024.

--. If I Were A Carpenter. A & M, 1994. CD 5402258.

--. Twenty Explosive Dynamic Super Smash Hit Explosions. Pravda, 1991. CD PR6338.

--. Twenty More Explosive Fantastic Rockin' Mega Smash Hit Explosions. Pravda, 1992. CD PR6342.

Steve Bailey is Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Information Age in the Division of Humanities at York University in Toronto, Canada. His Work has appeared in Velvet Light Trap, Communication Review, Discourse of Sociological Practice, and several other journals.