Anonymity Performance in Electronic Pop Music

In electronic music culture, anonymity practices have long been established as a method of critique of pop star cult and identification regimes. How can scholars research an anti-representational music culture and what can they learn from it? Recently, electronic pop music has resorted to a performative play with identity involving fake or parafictive identities or collaborative persona imaginations.
This study sketches two musico-artistic projects of anonymity performance as forms of immanent and particulate `critical practice' in the sense of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. Adopting performance in a reflexive and performative writing style, this `performance ethnography' calls for a radical performative turn in the cultural studies of music.

Stefanie Kiwi Menrath teaches arts and cultural education, pop music studies, ethnography and qualitative research methods. Since she finished her bi-national PhD at Goldsmiths in London and the University of Oldenburg in Germany, she has worked in Berlin on the intersection of practice and research with a focus on transcultural and diversity education and arts and science collaborations. Between 2014 and 2017, she was a research fellow in cultural education at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin.