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It is also not necessarily because, at certain key points in the performance, the band make a point of switching the technology off (Zoo TV is the first tour to make use of a B stage, on which a more intimate set is played in the middle of the audience: at certain moments during the Popmart tour – during performances of ‘New Year’s Day’, for example – Bono asked for all the lights to be switched off ). It is because of the place of technology in live performance, and the logic of authenticity that has formed around it.

Auslander’s text is a polemic against a particular strain in performance studies, most notably expressed by Peggy Phelan in Unmarked: the Politics of Performance (1993). Phelan valorises performance as perhaps 21 22 Rock Music in Performance the only art form that can’t be entirely commodified: it can’t be bought or sold, because the moment of performance’s incarnation – the moment it happens – is also the moment of its death: Performance’s only life is in the present … To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of representation it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.

6 A well-made point, and an interesting one. For Auslander, Glam in its 1970s incarnation is the site of gender ambiguity; for Schippers, Glam-metal in the 1980s is preening, strutting cock-rock incarnate. Against this, the working man’s clothes adopted by Neil Young in the 1970s as the sign of an authentic maleness now become the preferred dress code for the ambiguously gendered alternative hard rocker. In such a shifting environment, any sense of hard and fast gender categories that are always and necessarily revealed in performance melts away.