Conference Agenda

In July 1989, during a live performance of "Girl, You Know It's True," German pop duo Milli Vanilli were exposed for lipsyncing when their track malfunctioned. What initially appeared to be minor deception—the failure to sing live—was later revealed to be far more extensive when producer Frank Farian admitted that the voices on the duo's album were performed by uncredited session singers, leaving them entirely absent from their own record. Responding to backlash, Farian asked, "People were happy, so what's the problem?" I argue that the controversy stemmed not from lipsyncing alone, but from the sudden exposure and breakage of a mutually sustained illusion of liveness. Drawing on Philip Auslander's (2008) phenomenological account of live performance, I treat liveness not as an ontological state but as a negotiated, technologically mediated condition shaped by audience expectation. Through frame-by-frame analysis of the 1989 performance, I trace how the audience's temporal and spatial orientation shifted as the illusion unraveled, transforming perceived co-presence into estrangement. I pair this with analysis of press coverage and parody to show how the malfunction was reframed as moral failure.

Situating this case within broader discussions of authenticity and performance (Phillips-Hutton 2018; Tetzlaff 1994), I argue that Milli Vanilli faced backlash not because their performances were mediated, but because that mediation was presented as invisible. Lipsyncing was not unprecedented: earlier instances—from manufactured television acts like The Monkees to late-20th-century boy bands—exposed tensions between industry production and performer authenticity, but those acts renegotiated authorship or incorporated mediation into their image. In more recent traditions such as K-pop and drag performance—where vocal substitution and mediation are openly stylized and embraced (Kim 2018; Bird 2020)—audiences knowingly participate in the artifice. Milli Vanilli's production, however, depended on concealing mediation to naturalize authorship and sustain the illusion of unmediated presence. When that concealment failed, audiences experienced betrayal—not because mediation occurred, but because the affective agreement sustaining liveness was broken. In an era of autotune and AI-made music, revisiting Milli Vanilli highlights that liveness is not simply physical presence, but an affective agreement that continues to shape how authorship and authenticity are understood.

Thirty years after their debut in 1996, the Spice Girls remain the best-selling girl group of all time. They are regarded as emblematic of both Britain and the 1990s, evidenced by their inclusion in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022. While today the group’s enduring cultural significance feels inevitable, the Spice Girls’ longevity broke temporal expectations for “pure pop” acts in the 1990s which the music press characterized as fun in the moment but ultimately forgettable. This inversion reflects a broader temporal phenomenon in 1990s Britain: in popular music as in broader culture, the presumably ephemeral became historically meaningful.

This paper contends with discursive tensions surrounding the longevity and cultural value of the Spice Girls, putting the group in conversation with broader conceptions of temporality in 1990s Britain. Through analysis of music press coverage (primarily in New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Smash Hits) from 1996-1998, I illustrate how the Spice Girls were framed as authentic and able to last despite their status as a “pure pop” group, comparing their framing to that of Britpop bands including Oasis. Parallel discourses between these groups blurred conventional lines between rock and mainstream pop, ultimately disrupting the temporal expectations of both. I draw this phenomenon into discussion with what historians have dubbed Britain’s “holiday from history”: a sense of ahistoricism and frivolity resulting from the decade's relative stability and prosperity (Geiringer and McCarthy 2024). This sense of impermanence is in conflict with the decade’s enduring neoliberal political and cultural shifts (Stubbs 2016), just as the ongoing cultural presence of the Spice Girls contradicts the presumed ephemerality of pop acts. I argue that, by embodying these tensions between ephemerality and history, the Spice Girls serve as a proxy for conversations regarding temporality in 1990s Britain—and, moreover, that analyzing pop’s temporal framings can nuance our understandings of broader neoliberal temporality. This work not only expands consideration of the Spice Girls beyond the group’s relationship to feminism and consumerism, but also sheds light on the interrelationships between popular music and temporal phenomena in broader culture.

This paper theorizes “neo-neo-traditionalism” as a distinct formation within twenty-first-century mainstream country music, arguing that contemporary invocations of tradition function not as revival but as a digitally mediated cultural strategy. Building on Richard Peterson’s account of authenticity as fabricated through cycles of legitimation, I position the resurgence of fiddle, pedal steel, narrative lyricism, and honky-tonk imagery as a response to three perceived threats: aesthetic permeability, generative AI and algorithmic production, and anxieties surrounding demographic change and political polarization. Unlike the neo-traditionalism of the 1980s and 1990s, this formation unfolds within a streaming economy in which playlists, metrics, and platform governance displace radio as primary gatekeepers.

Methodologically, the paper combines musical analysis, drawing on Allan Moore’s layer-based framework and Megan Lavengood’s theorization of timbre as cultural signification, with media-industrial analysis of authorship, label affiliation, chart performance, and social media circulation. Through case studies of Luke Combs, Cody Johnson, Zach Top, Lainey Wilson, and Ella Langley, I demonstrate how marked vocal timbres and instrumental coloration anchor songs in country’s traditional orthodoxy, even as production and means of dissemination make use of advanced technologies.

The paper further argues that neo-neo-traditionalism is structured by the competitive and gendered nature of cultural labor. Building on theories of artistic labor in the digital age advanced by Matt Stahl (2012) and Ellis Jones (2022), alongside scholarship on gendered creative work by Brooke Erin Duffy (2015), Connor, Gill, and Taylor (2015), and Ming Liu et al. (2025), I contend that contemporary country artists operate as entrepreneurial subjects within platform-driven economies that reward visibility, adaptability, and affective authenticity. While male artists often stabilize tradition through moral didacticism and honky-tonk revivalism, women such as Wilson and Langley mobilize within “reputation economies,” leveraging TikTok and Instagram virality to circumvent historically male-dominated radio infrastructures. In this context, tradition becomes both heritage signal and algorithmic cue, enabling artists to perform authenticity while navigating monetized visibility and persistent gendered double binds.

By framing traditionalism as participatory nostalgia shaped by institutional strategy and platform capitalism, this study reveals neo-neo-traditionalism not as resistance to modernity, but as one of its most adaptive and profitable cultural products.