Playing Aldous Harding—‘I’m like the Jim Carrey of the indie world’

This article examines Aotearoa/New Zealand woman musician/songwriter Aldous Harding in terms of freak folk, laughter/humor, identity theory and settler studies. Laughter and humor are viewed as distancing devices that question aesthetic experience and emotional identification; and as responses to popular music historically, focusing on the emergence of “freak” in relation to 1960s counterculture, folk music and their post-punk re-invention in the 2000s as “freak folk”, also recuperating unusual, mainly woman, folk musicians. By comparing her practice to mockumentary and herself to comedians, Harding highlights her own “freakiness”, her use of multiple voices, unusual performing style, “gurning” and self-presentation in videos, also connecting to Pakeha settler identity anxiety and to feminist accounts of identity flux. Quirkiness in film and TV is presented as another way of understanding Harding’s persona—interpreting freakiness more broadly as a mode of response to a contemporary world where categories of seriousness and triviality, the authentic and the hoax, or any kind of stable identity, are increasingly confused. Harding’s work can be understood as interrogating authenticity—direct, individual, emotional expression—via laughter, the use of multiple voices and personae, also challenging Aotearoa/New Zealand culture’s historic emphasis on male musicians.