Real Rock: Authenticity and Popular Music in Canada, 1984-1994

This dissertation investigates the production and reception of English-Canadian rock music sound recordings, from 1984 to 1994, in relation to mutually constitutive understandings of race, ability, gender, sexuality, class, age, and place. It examines how different forms of domestic Anglo rock served to reinforce or subvert the dominant ideologies undergirding the social order in Canada during the late twentieth century. This study analyzes a multifaceted discourse about authenticity that illustrates the ways in which a host of people including musicians, music journalists, record label representatives and other professionals from across the music industries, government administrators, and consumers categorized recorded sound, defined bodily norms, negotiated commerce and technology, and evaluated collective communication in Canada. This study finds that the principle of originality fundamentally structured the categorization of sound recordings in Canada. Originality, according to rock culture, encompassed the balancing of traditionalism with innovation. This dissertation determines that Whiteness organized English-Canadian rock culture in terms of its corporeal standards. White bodies functioned as the norm against which racialized Others were compared and measured. This study also shows how the concept of autonomy encouraged the proper negotiation of commerce and technology in an increasingly neoliberal political and economic condition. Independence of will fostered acceptable behaviour. Finally, this dissertation reveals that the rock status of a given concert rested upon the actions of the performers as well as the composition and reactions of ticket holders in the audience.