Authenticity and its discontents

Authenticity, in popular music, is the quality of seeming true to a performer, to an absent other whom a performer represents, or to a listener’s experience, the three kinds Allan F. Moore (2002) distinguishes. The debate over it asks whether that quality lies in the music or is given to it by listeners, and who has been allowed to have it. Simon Frith (1996) calls authenticity a necessary critical value, judged against each genre’s idea of itself. Philip Auslander (1999) takes from Frith that authenticity can be heard in the music yet is an effect, and argues that in rock it is an effect of convention, resting on the relation between records and live performance. Keir Keightley (2001) divides rock’s authenticity into Romantic and Modernist tendencies. Karl Hagstrom Miller (2010) traces the folklorists’ idea of authentic music, which located it outside the market, and Elijah Wald (2004) argues that it was white folk and jazz fans who would “crown” Robert Johnson “king of the Delta.” Richard A. Peterson (1997) studies “fabricating authenticity” in popular culture through country music’s first decades. Maureen Mahon (2004) describes Black rock musicians held to two standards at once. Scott DeVeaux (1991, 1997) describes jazz criticism’s hostility to the marketplace and writes that as jazz entered the 1960s authenticity was more than ever associated with ethnicity. He reads bebop as an attempt to reconstitute the improvising virtuoso’s idiom so as to give its Black creators “the greatest professional autonomy within the marketplace.” Moore, answering the claim that the concept had been abandoned, asks who a performance authenticates.

A necessary critical value

In Performing Rites, Simon Frith writes that people who “live in genres” judge each new act or record against their idea of the real thing, asking whether it is really jazz or punk or disco. “Authenticity is a necessary critical value,” he writes, and “the musical judgment is necessarily a social judgment: does this music understand the genre, is it true to it?”¹ Elsewhere in the book, Frith writes that fans can apply the term even where production would seem to rule it out, and can tell authentic euro-disco from inauthentic. In Frith’s account they are judging whether the music seems sincere and committed: “It’s as if people expect music to mean what it says, however cynical that meaning.” His own example of failing that test was Paul Simon’s Graceland (1986), to which his reaction was “I just don’t believe it!”; what he already knew about Simon, he writes, affected how he heard the music, and new knowledge might change his mind.² A genre’s sense of itself, Frith writes, comes in the first place from an account of its own past, usually a mythical one. When a collector writes an academic account over the mythical one and the genre’s history is rewritten “in terms of a new purism,” the critical question, most familiar, he supposes, in folk music, becomes what might be called “formal authenticity: does this singer or song obey the genre’s musicological rules?”³

Authenticity as an effect

Philip Auslander’s Liveness takes two points from Frith: that authenticity “can be heard in the music, yet it is an effect not just of the music itself but also of prior musical and extra-musical knowledge and beliefs,” and that what counts as authentic varies from genre to genre.⁴ Rock fans, Auslander writes, treat authenticity “as an essence that is either present or absent in the music itself.” He treats it “as an ideological concept and as a discursive effect.” Despite citing Frith’s definition approvingly, he argues that authenticity is “not simply present in the music itself,” and he stresses its “cultural, rather than ethical, dimension.” He posits that creating the effect of authenticity in rock is “a matter of culturally determined convention, not an expression of essence.” In rock, he writes, live performance traditionally served to authenticate the recording.⁵ He accepts Theodore Gracyk’s argument that the primary object of rock music as an aesthetic form is the recording, but holds that, although rock is a diverse category with fuzzy borders, within rock culture the music is nevertheless often defined by “an exclusionary concept of authenticity,” and that Gracyk “certainly goes too far” in counting Whitney Houston as a rock musician.⁶

Auslander’s rock chapter starts from the scandal of Milli Vanilli in 1990, when the duo’s producer said that they had lip-synced in their concerts and had not even sung on their record. Auslander quotes the sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard on what follows when “the real is no longer what it used to be,” including “a panic-stricken reproduction of the real and the referential.” These phenomena, Auslander believes, followed in the wake of Milli Vanilli, and he is thinking chiefly of two developments: the renewed emphasis in rock on acoustic performance, with MTV Unplugged as its “apotheosis,” and the multiple awards given to Eric Clapton at the 1993 Grammys, which Auslander ties to Unplugged (1992), the live album of Clapton’s appearance on the program. Auslander reads the excess of signs for the real and the authentic on MTV Unplugged, and particularly in Clapton’s performance, as “the panic to which Baudrillard refers, the music industry’s urgent program of damage-control designed to rescue the reality principle and, hence, its own power, from the exposure of simulation.” In place of Milli Vanilli, “we are given what Arthur Kroker … might choose to call ‘Panic MTV’ and ‘Panic Clapton’” that “apparently reinstate the signs that signify the real in the cultural context of rock music.”⁷ In the preface to the second edition, Auslander wrote that, assuming younger audiences had grown indifferent to it, he had predicted the demise of rock’s ideology of authenticity, and that “in fact, that ideology seems to be more powerful than ever.” He chose to “bookend” the revised chapter with Milli Vanilli and “the similar Ashlee Simpson scandal of 2004.”⁸

Romantic and Modernist authenticity

Keir Keightley’s “Reconsidering Rock” divides rock’s idea of authenticity, which, he writes, “can be thought of as the compass that orients rock culture in its navigation of the mainstream,” into two families.⁹ They are “tendencies rather than absolutes.” Romantic authenticity tends to be found more in tradition and continuity with the past, roots, community and directness, and in folk, blues, country and rock ‘n’ roll. Modernist authenticity tends to be found more in experimentation and progress, the avant-garde, the status of the artist and irony, and in classical music, art music, soul and pop.¹⁰ Both tendencies, Keightley writes, “position rock against the mass pop mainstream” while organizing differences inside rock. One might expect Romantic authenticity to favor the rural and Modernist authenticity the urban, he writes, yet much so-called heartland rock, such as Bruce Springsteen’s, celebrates urban backstreets and rooftops while being “a predominantly Romantic genre.” Conversely, Keightley writes, “we can perceive a kind of pastoral quality in Modernist groups such as the Smiths, who use acoustic or undistorted guitars and Romantic imagery as part of a larger Modernist strategy,” one of playing with the politics of gender and sexuality.¹¹ Janne Mäkelä, in a study of John Lennon (2004), writes that Keightley “admits” the two modes are tendencies that often overlap in a single genre or performer. In fact, Mäkelä adds, those “who deploy romantic and modernist authenticity more or less equally” are “often regarded as auteurs in rock culture.”¹²

Folkloric authenticity

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Karl Hagstrom Miller argues in Segregating Sound, two ideas of authenticity collided. Folkloric authenticity, he writes, “maintained that truthful music came from outside the marketplace,” and it located authenticity away from modern life and modern media. Minstrelsy, he writes, suggested that musical authenticity came from contact between the races in the market. “If minstrel authenticity maintained the mutability of racial identity,” Miller writes, “folkloric authenticity posited its fixity.”¹³ Folklore, at least in name, so thoroughly defeated minstrelsy, he writes, that historians rarely discuss its rise, and “the folkloric paradigm is the air that we breathe”: it is the basis of most music histories, “even many of those that are critical of folkloric authenticity.” Neither model, he adds, came out of the era intact: the folkloric paradigm rose “in part, by inheriting and perpetuating some of the qualities of minstrel authenticity.”¹³

Robert Johnson’s place in blues history, Elijah Wald argues in Escaping the Delta, was made by white fans. Until the 1960s, Wald writes, Johnson’s name “was all but forgotten, except by his immediate neighbors, his playing partners, and a handful of white folk and jazz fans,” and “it was these white fans who would crown him king of the Delta.”¹⁴ Wald judges the blues by the standards of its musicians and their first audiences, and he declines to treat poverty, rural roots or a lack of training as marks of greater depth or authenticity.¹⁵ On purely artistic grounds, Wald writes, Johnson’s posthumous acclaim “may be deserved”: the early Mississippi masters, Charley Patton, Son House and Skip James among them, are in his judgment among the greatest musicians the country has produced, and Johnson’s work “can be seen as summing up their tradition.” Still, “that does not give his fans the right to rewrite history”: as far as the evolution of Black music goes, “Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure.”¹⁶ Frank Matheis wrote in 2006 that Wald “may be fundamentally correct in many, but not all, of his points,” but argued that Johnson “is not popular because of white writers, blues pundits or white audiences” but because many people worldwide “eventually got a chance to hear him and realized he was an awesome musician.”¹⁷

Fabricating authenticity

In 1997 Richard A. Peterson’s Creating Country Music took as its subject “the general process of fabricating authenticity in popular culture,” studied in country music’s first decades. The phrase is ironic, he writes: authenticity “is a socially agreed-upon construct in which the past is to a degree misremembered.”¹⁸ The industry tried many versions of rustic authenticity, and the book follows three of them, the old-timer, the hillbilly and the cowboy. In Peterson’s account the music alternates between hard-core and soft-shell styles, one usually predominating though both are always present.¹⁹ In an essay for his publisher, he wrote that the book’s chapter on them “shows how the hard-edged Roy Acuff displaced the slick, smooth-sounding, crooning Vagabonds as the hit act on the Grand Ole Opry” and describes the characteristics of “these two parallel traditions in country music.”²⁰ Many later commercializers said in retrospect that they had loved the music, Peterson writes, but the record man Polk Brockman told him in 1973, “My interest in hillbilly music and black music is strictly financial.”²¹ In Peterson’s account, barn-dance managers, the Opry’s among them, held acts to a single specialty. The Opry musicians of the mid-1930s whom he interviewed were, he writes, “vexed with their stereotyped roles,” and DeFord Bailey, who played forty-nine of the fifty-one weeks the show aired in 1928, “was very bitter that George Hay would let him play only his fast, trick harmonica tunes.” Most performers, Peterson writes, nonetheless strongly defended the system because it “gave them the security of an uncontested place on the show.”²² In blurbs the book’s publisher quotes, Timothy White, in Billboard, called it “one of the most important books ever written about a popular music form,” and Robert Crowley, in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology, called it “a triumphal history and theory of the country music industry between 1920 and 1953.”²³

Race, the market and who may be authentic

Maureen Mahon argues in Right to Rock, her study of the Black Rock Coalition, that Black rock musicians are held to two standards at once: “Black rockers are at once too black to be real rockers and not black enough because they rock.”²⁴ Matt Stahl, reviewing the book for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), wrote that Mahon, an African American rock fan, began her research as an insider and was soon invited by the coalition’s New York group to be its secretary. He found what he perceived as “larger framing problems,” among them her “adoption of the [coalition’s] discourse of rights,” which, he believed, left unexamined the tension between the members’ images of themselves “as politicized identities fighting for rights and as depoliticized entrepreneurs struggling for market power.” He closed, however, by crediting the book with a “very useful wealth of ethnographic detail.”²⁵

In his 1991 essay “Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” Scott DeVeaux describes jazz criticism’s hostility to commerce, which he calls “agoraphobia, fear of the marketplace,” all the more remarkable in a music that grew up largely within mass-market capitalism. He writes that the relation between capitalist institutions and jazz musicians has an exploitative side, “especially when the effects of racial discrimination on the ability of black musicians to compete fairly are factored in,” but that jazz is kept separate from the marketplace “only by demonizing the economic system that allows musicians to survive.” As jazz entered the 1960s, he writes, “authenticity was more than ever associated with ethnicity.”²⁶ In The Birth of Bebop he reads bebop as “an attempt to reconstitute jazz—or more precisely, the specialized idiom of the improvising virtuoso—in such a way as to give its black creators the greatest professional autonomy within the marketplace.”²⁷

Who is authenticated

Allan F. Moore’s “Authenticity as Authentication” answers Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, who had written in 2000 that authenticity had been “consigned to the intellectual dust-heap.” Authenticity, Moore writes, “is ascribed, not inscribed,” and he takes as an assumption that it is “a construction made on the act of listening.”²⁸ He asks who a performance authenticates, the performer, the audience or an absent other, and gives three answers. A performer whose expression seems unmediated is authenticated in the first person. Third person authenticity arises when a performer seems to represent accurately the ideas of another within a tradition of performance, and it is that absent other who is authenticated. His example is the blues rock movement of the 1960s, and Clapton playing Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads” with Cream, in which, Moore writes, listeners interpret Clapton as conveying both “this is what it’s like to be me” and, “doubly vicariously,” “this is what it was like to be Johnson.” The search by Clapton, Peter Green and, to a lesser extent, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page for the musical soul of blues singers like Johnson was driven, Moore writes, by a desire to appropriate the “unmediated expression” thought to be the preserve of the country blues style, and it entailed “an unquestioned assumption” that African Americans in the southern USA were somehow “more ‘natural’ beings” than “white, college-educated Londoners.” A listener whose own experience of life the music seems to confirm is authenticated in the second person.²⁹ The study of authenticity, Moore believes, should “shift from consideration of the intention of various originators towards the activities of various perceivers.”³⁰

Further reading

• Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (Faber and Faber; W. W. Norton, 2007) — a book-length history of the quest for authenticity in popular music

See also

• Pop as craft — the debate over whether made-to-order pop is art
• The pop factory — the debate over the industrial division of labor in pop
• The songwriter-performer divide — the debate over who is the author of a record
• The color line in pop — the debate over race and the categories of popular music
• The transatlantic feedback loop — the debate over British and American exchange in pop
• Cultural capital — the debate over taste as social distinction