Abstract
In this thesis, 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 pop artists Marit Larsen and Marion Ravn as cases in point. Notions of authenticity shape the artists' persona in media discourses on popular music. However, artists themselves also contribute to maintaining and even controlling these discourses. Marit Larsen, previously a member of M2M with Marion Ravn, has received consistent praise from both the press and fans for her solo albums. Ravn, though also successful as a solo artist, is often perceived as the “bad girl” of the two. In the light of her solo contract with Atlantic Records after the break-up of M2M, her relative lack of (global) success has led some fans to construe her as a "failure" in comparison to Larsen. I argue that Larsen's persona draws on three notable female stereotypes – the pre-adolescent girl, the girl next door, and the housewife. These stereotypes function as guises that Larsen can assume rather than any inherent 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. This allows her to convey 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' theorisation of the pop dandy, I analyse how Larsen constructs her persona partly on nostalgic conceptions of gender and partly on a strategy of fake naivety, and also how any perception of Larsen can and should be understood in the light of Ravn's project and vice versa. I also aim to locate both artists in a transcultural context, in order to illuminate how artists outside of the hegemonic Anglo-American field create transcultural popular music.