As seen in Edmonton's own SEE
I've always been irritated to no end by the hipster scene and their circlejerk take on modern music, most of it from a source too stagnant to offer anything better than the very pop-marketing machine they scorn, especially since I more typically associate myself with more aggressive and theatrical music. To them, this is a cardinal sin because it's not about pressing personal issues that we all face in our day to day life expressed as profoundly as the Bob Dylan handful of chords formula will permit them, but to me, most metal songs and their themes serve as a lens for those same topics, and the theatricality is disarming and gets closer to me in a roundabout way.“I can’t fool you, any one of you. It simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.” —Kurt Cobain, addressing his fans in his suicide note
“I’m real, I thought I told you / I’m real, even on Oprah / That’s just me / Nothin’ phony, don’t hate on me / What you get is what you see” —Jennifer Lopez, addressing her fans in “Jenny From the Block”
It’s hard to think of a recent figure in popular music more respected than Kurt Cobain, prized for his raw vocal style, his turbulent songwriting (with many of the lyrics drawn from the most emotional aspects of his personal life), his tortured ambivalence in the face of the corporate marketing machine (most famously evident in his decision to pose for the cover of Rolling Stone while wearing a T-shirt reading “Corporate Magazines Still Suck”), his championing of borderline-unlistenable “outsider” musicians like Jandek and Daniel Johnston, and, of course, his suicide—ultimate proof that the pain he sang about was no exaggeration.
Similarly, it’s hard to think of a recent pop star less respected by the critical establishment than Jennifer Lopez, whose CDs and videos are the pinnacle of glossy, prepackaged, image-conscious record-label “product.” Lopez, despite her claims to the contrary on “Jenny From the Block,” seems unmistakably inauthentic, whereas Cobain is indisputably the real thing. And as any good rock fan knows, real is much, much better than fake.
But as Yuval Taylor points out in his new book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (which he co-authored with Hugh Barker), telling real from fake is a much more complicated matter than it first appears. Take Leadbelly, one of Cobain’s favourite artists, whose sparse, elemental recordings of traditional folk songs made him an icon of authenticity to his (mostly white) fans—but whose image was in fact carefully crafted by his manager, John Lomax, who had him perform in a prison uniform and deliberately expunged the “white” pop and jazz songs from his live repertoire.
Actually, though, Taylor and Barker are less interested in tearing down musical myths than in simply figuring out exactly what we mean when we say a record sounds “authentic,” and exploring the effect that the cult of authenticity has had on how music is made and perceived by the public. Their test cases span the history of recorded song, from Mississippi John Hurt and Jimmie Rodgers to Donna Summer, Neil Young and Moby, and there’s nothing fake about the level of intelligence and scholarship they bring to each of their subjects.
Yuval Taylor spoke to SEE Magazine over the phone about Faking It.
SEE: Is there a date where you can see a sea change taking place in music history, when authenticity suddenly became the yardstick music is measured by—or at least when a perceived lack of authenticity became something that made people say a piece of music was bad?
Yuval Taylor: Well, I think there are certainly moments where you can see authenticity suddenly becoming more important. The idea of an authentic musical experience goes at least as far back as the 19th century. But you can see it really flaring up in country music in the late 1940s, for instance, when Hank Williams became the paragon of authenticity. And it happened again in the late 1960s, with the rise of Bob Dylan and the singer/songwriter. Plus I think there was just a general sense of disillusionment then, that people didn’t want to be lied to anymore and were looking for authenticity in all aspects of the culture, even in the pop charts.
SEE: Authenticity in someone like, say, Joni Mitchell is one thing, but what do pop stars like Jennifer Lopez get out of these displays of authenticity? That “Jenny From the Block” song didn’t seem to convince anybody and she was widely derided for it.
YT: Well, people who weren’t her fans derided her, but her audience ate it up. That song wouldn’t have been the huge hit it was if the fans didn’t like it. I don’t think J.Lo ever lost credibility with her core market, but reaffirming her authenticity was an important career move, and I think that was exactly the right song at the right time. Plus, she really is from the block—she’s from a working-class Latino neighbourhood. Hugh would very much disagree with this statement, but I think it’s a really clever and empowering song. She acknowledges that she’s rich, but she does so in a way that says, “Girls, I did it and you can do it too.”
SEE: But it’s not a song that many critics would want to be caught praising. Can you give some examples of artists whose reputation has suffered unfairly because they didn’t seem authentic enough? How about the reverse: are there artists whose perceived authenticity has artificially inflated their reputation?
YT: I think Donna Summer’s reputation has suffered greatly because of these concerns. She is one of the great musical innovators and performers and she is definitely not seen that way. As for overrated musicians, I’d say John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins are both pretty limited talents whose output has been overpraised for its supposed authenticity and where the praise far exceeds the music’s value. I also feel that the whole metal scene has suffered greatly because of the pursuit of authenticity. Metal used to be a great, theatrical, inauthentic genre, and the personal, confessional mode of all these pop-metal bands like Staind and Evanescence is nowhere near as much fun.
SEE: Throughout the book you’ll play off a supposedly authentic artist against a supposedly inauthentic one—Neil Young vs. Billy Joel, Michael Nesmith vs. John Lennon—and often the inauthentic one will come off looking pretty good. Did you take some pleasure in making these contrarian arguments, knowing you’d tick off a lot of rock fans?
YT: Well, it’s always fun outraging rock fans. But we’re not just trying to get people’s goats; hopefully, we’re making comparisons that bring out some nuances in the music. For instance, the comparison between Neil Young and Billy Joel is a really interesting one, especially when you consider that they both recorded well-known songs about the search for authenticity: Neil Young recorded “Heart of Gold,” Billy Joel recorded “Honesty.” And we ask, well, where’s the difference? And the difference, I think, is that Joel is simply being earnest and talking about telling the truth, whereas Young is slipperier. He’s more interested in exploring himself and being honest in his own way, in being honest to himself at any given moment.
SEE: Could a case be made that authenticity is “out” these days? Look at American Idol, which is pretty much the epitome of inauthenticity, but which is also one of the biggest popular music phenomena of the last 25 years.
YT: Well, I think American Idol is a very old idea—it’s basically just an update of Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts from the 1940s and ’50s. But interestingly, American Idol is careful to put signifiers of authenticity in there that Arthur Godfrey never would—the backstage moments with the performers, the way the judges are always urging the performers to “be themselves.” No, if anything, I think our culture is more aware of authenticity than ever. You see Alicia Keys recording an album called The Diary of Alicia Keys or Ashlee Simpson recording an album called Autobiography, and you see displays of authenticity in genres like pop-metal which never tried to be authentic before, or even in Broadway shows like Rent.
SEE: You suggest in your final chapter that a truly mature music fan will have “grown beyond” worrying so much about the realness of a song or a performer. Have your own tastes changed and evolved over the years?
YT: Well, I still find myself intrigued by questions of authenticity and wondering how true a song is to a performer’s life. But when I was young, I’d dismiss a lot of songs for being too theatrical and fake—I hated Van Halen, for instance. Now I like all kinds of music that make no pretense toward being real. At the same time, however, there’s no getting away from the fact that a Neil Young album will go up in my estimation in direct proportion to how real it seems.
/steps off soapbox
So yeah, any truth to this?
