“Let me know you’re out there!” male rock vocal and audience participation

Abstract

Since the emergence of rock as a distinctive musical category during the 1960s, audience participation has been a central aspect of its live performance aesthetic. A variety of rock vocalists, notably the late Freddie Mercury, have turned engagement with the audience into a fine art, leading the crowd through anthemic choruses and unaccompanied sequences of call and response. Audiences themselves have also played a creative role in this respect, introducing collective chants that have became integral to the live performance; a telling example of this being the soccer-esque ‘quo’ chat that fans of British boogie-rock group Status Quo engage in during gigs. Similarly, the desire of the audience to participate in live performance has also inspired a series of now classic live performance cuts, including Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ the catalyst for which, according to composer Brian May, was the continued singing of crowds during an early tour of Japan long after the band had left the stage. During the 1970s, the increasing popularity of the live album, combined with the sophistication of studio technology, saw producers flexing their creative license through repositioning the audience so that it took centre-stage at critical points in the music, producing an example of what Simon Frith has referred to as ‘ideal’ rather than ‘actual’ events. This in turn created new dynamics of expectation between audience and performer, the live album supplying templates for interaction at future live concerts. This process was further accentuated in the video age when the visual dimension of audience participation could also be creatively edited to achieve maximum effect. Drawing on a variety of examples from classic rock of the 1970s and early 1980s, this chapter considers the significance of audience participation in relation to our understanding of the meaning and significance of the male rock vocalist. Drawing on perspectives from cultural sociology, the chapter will centrally argue that both vocalist and audience are critical to the production of meaning attached to the role of singing in the context of the live rock music performance and the way this is represented in various forms of mechanical reproduction, e.g. CD, video and DVD.