To Örebro University

In this presentation I investigate into the politics of gendered representation in Norwegian popular music, and how these function in a transcultural context. To this end, I take Norwegian artists Marit Larsen and Marion Ravn as cases in point. In media discourses on popular music, notions of authenticity always shape the artists’ personae. However, as is often easy to overlook, artists themselves also contribute to maintaining and even controlling these discourses. This is no less true for artists from outside the UK–US continuum of globalized popular music.

Marit Larsen, previously a member of teenage duo M2M with Marion Ravn, has received consistent praise from both the press and fans since her début solo album, Under the Surface, in 2006. Ravn, though no less successful as a solo artist in her own right, has long been perceived as the ‘bad girl’ of the two. In the light of her initial solo contract with Atlantic Records after the break-up of M2M, her relative lack of global (read: US) success has also led several Norwegian fans to construe her as a ‘failure’ when compared to the seemingly infallible Larsen.

I argue that Larsen’s persona draws on three notable female stereotypes – the pre-adolescent girl, the girl next door, and the housewife. Always interchangeable, these stereotypes come across as guises that Larsen can assume and take off when needed rather than any constant traits of her ‘true self’. Furthermore, they function as central characteristics for Larsen’s singer-songwriter persona, whose alleged authenticity rests on her perceived honesty. She thus conveys the illusion of authenticity through a strategy of distance. Drawing on Simon Frith’s and Philip Auslander’s concept of the persona, Allan F. Moore’s three categories of authenticity, Barbara Bradby’s work on discourses of desire in girl-group music, and Stan Hawkins’ theorization of the pop dandy, I wish to analyse how Larsen constructs her persona partly on nostalgic conceptions of gender and partly on a distinct ‘fake naivety’, and also how Norwegian audiences’ understanding of Larsen can and must be understood in the light of how they perceive Ravn and vice versa. I also wish to locate both artists in a transcultural context of popular music, to illuminate how artists outside of the hegemonic Anglo-American force field create globalized’ popular music.