Summary: Popular music is an arena of play—with identity, with power and resistance, and with despair and joy. Debates on pop often come down to a division between authenticity and artifice: the most authentic musician is idealised as a heterosexual white male rocker and the most artificial musician is a female or a queer male pop artist. Taking the recent Beyoncé versus Beck Grammy controversy as an illustration of this conflict, Rebecca Sheehan talks about how pop’s stakes, far from trivial, are personal, social and political.
