Moore — “Authenticity as Authentication”

Author: Allan F. Moore
Title: “Authenticity as Authentication”
Year: 2002
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (in Popular Music 21, no. 2)
Type: Essay

“Authenticity as Authentication” is an essay by the musicologist Allan F. Moore, of the University of Surrey, published in Popular Music in 2002. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh had written in 2000 that scholars had discarded the concept, and Moore gives reasons to think abandoning it premature. He starts from the premise that authenticity “is ascribed, not inscribed”: no combination of sounds contains it, and listeners construct it as they listen. He therefore asks who a performance authenticates and gives three answers. A performer whose utterance seems unmediated is authenticated in the first person. When a performer seems to represent accurately the ideas of an absent other, embedded within a tradition of performance, the performance authenticates that other, in the third person. When the music seems to confirm a listener’s own experience of life, the listener is authenticated in the second person. His examples include Paul Weller’s “The Changingman”, the Pet Shop Boys, Eric Clapton’s devotion to Robert Johnson, the English folk revival, tribute bands, records made for dancing and the pop group S Club 7. He closes by proposing that the study of authenticity turn from the intentions of musicians to the reasons listeners have for finding a performance authentic. Later writers drew on the essay in studies of grunge, jazz and grime, and an essay on Radiohead placed it in a line of models made less specific to cover every style of music.

In 2002 Moore was professor of popular music at Surrey and head of its Department of Music.¹ One of the essay’s notes is dated May 2001, in the run-up to that year’s general election, and he had presented versions of it in 2000 at a Critical Musicology forum at Surrey and a Comparative Music Praxes conference at Middlesex University. It expands a discussion of theories of authenticity from his 1998 article “U2 and the myth of authenticity in rock.” Popular Music published it in its May 2002 issue, volume 21, number 2, at pages 209 to 223, and Moore reprinted it in Critical Essays in Popular Musicology (2007), a collection he edited.²

The essay opens on nine terms, among them “authentic,” “real,” “honest” and “sincere,” which Moore takes to be perhaps the most loaded of the value terms in music discourse.³ He takes from Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson their account of what 1980s rock had to do to count as authentic, in which “artists must speak the truth of their (and others’) situations,” and he separates three senses in it: that artists tell the truth of their own situation, of the situation of absent others, and of their own culture, in which case they represent present others. Only two other writers, he writes, appear to have attempted to cover this general ground, Timothy Taylor and Johan Fornäs, and the essay is not set up in opposition to them.³

The first of Moore’s two assumptions is “that authenticity does not inhere in any combination of musical sounds.” In his words, “‘Authenticity’ is a matter of interpretation which is made and fought for from within a cultural and, thus, historicised position. It is ascribed, not inscribed.” He shares the point with Sarah Rubidge, for whom authenticity is “not a property of, but something we ascribe to a performance.” His second assumption is that authenticity is “a construction made on the act of listening,” and he writes, “rather than ask what (piece of music, or activity) is being authenticated, in this article I ask who.” Born and Hesmondhalgh had written that the concept “has been consigned to the intellectual dust-heap,” but three reasons seem to Moore to make that abandonment premature, the first two of which he develops. The first is that equating the authentic with the original is only one of the understandings in use, the second that, in one sense, listeners’ appropriation of what they hear remains basic to the process of authentication. The third is that the social alienation of modernity, which appears to him the ideological root of the search for the authentic, “grows daily more apparent.”⁴

In rock discourse, Moore writes, the term “authentic” has often defined a style of writing or performing, especially a singer-songwriter’s, in which intimacy and immediacy tend to connote authenticity. It is also used of a musician’s social standing, of the reasons a musician is supposed to have for working and of a performer’s integrity, and every one of these usages is applied from outside.⁵ He summarizes Lawrence Grossberg’s argument that the distinction between the authentic and its opposite, “entertainment” at some times and “commercial” at others, underpins the history of popular music since Elvis Presley, a history that “proceeds as a pendulum,” and Roy Shuker’s view “that using authenticity to distinguish between rock and pop is no longer valid, though it continues to serve an important ideological function.”⁵

Moore begins his first type, the performer’s, with the English folk revival, where the opposition between the authentic and the commercial is already in place. Praising the founding of the English folk song revival, in an inaugural address to the Folk Song Society in 1899, the composer Hubert Parry said that folk songs had “no sham, no got-up glitter, and no vulgarity,” and in Moore’s reading he set them against the music hall. In the second English revival of the 1950s, Moore writes, a leading figure, Ewan MacColl, insisted that singers sing only in their own native tongue and only songs from their own social or cultural setting. Some clubs took that to exclude recent material and even recent instruments such as the acoustic guitar, which led in the 1970s and early 1980s to a high degree of separation between “policy” clubs and “contemporary” ones. Georgina Boyes, whom he quotes, records that as late as 1984 a band playing only “traditional” material met objections on “policy” grounds for using electronic instruments, though, “unaccountably,” no policy club seems to have refused a singer with a concertina, which was “after all, ‘authentic.‘”⁶

For Richard Middleton, any approach that aims to place music in context as cultural expression must foreground discussion of authenticity, since “honesty (truth to cultural experience) becomes the validating criterion of musical value.” Rock discourse, Moore writes, reinterprets that criterion as “unmediated expression,” and “the recent singing of Paul Weller provides a rich example of this.”⁶ On “The Changingman,” Weller “employs gravelly vocals connoting a voice made raw from crying or shouting,” and his voice eschews embellishments and melismas. These features, Moore writes, can convey to Weller’s audience that they are perceiving real emotion, although American audiences, he adds, crediting Robynn Stilwell, “tend more to hear his (inauthentic) references.” A rock line-up that recalls the early 1970s, late-1960s guitars and recording live in the studio support that impression, and Weller, in Moore’s words, “is, in effect, saying to the audience he attracts, ‘this is what it’s like to be me’.”⁶ Such expression, Moore writes, is perceived as authentic because it is unmediated, because the distance between its mental origin and its physical manifestation is “wilfully compressed to nil by those with a motive for so perceiving it.”⁷ Steve Redhead had written that in Bruce Springsteen’s rise “real instruments were seen to go along with real feelings,” and Moore calls that reading constructed: Springsteen’s instruments were amplified, while early Bob Dylan had to play unamplified to achieve the same result.⁷

Moore cites Redhead’s argument that constructions of authenticity are no longer made by denying commercial processes but consciously, within them, and writes that in the late 1980s, with no politicized counter-culture of the kind the late 1960s had, authenticity became allied to constructions of “innocence” and to an unreserved embrace of pop. In Neil Tennant’s flat, regular delivery, “the refusal of emotional involvement he conveys is widely perceived as a refusal to ‘cheat’ the listener,” and Moore gives the Pet Shop Boys’ “So Hard” as an example.⁸ In all these understandings, Moore writes, “the audience becomes engaged not with the acts and gestures themselves, but directly with the originator of those acts and gestures.” He calls this pole “authenticity of expression,” or first person authenticity, which “arises when an originator (composer, performer) succeeds in conveying the impression that his/her utterance is one of integrity, that it represents an attempt to communicate in an unmediated form with an audience.”⁸

The blues rock movement of the 1960s is Moore’s first case of third person authenticity. Clapton, in the early work Moore takes as the movement’s example, worked back from urban blues to Johnson, and in Cream’s performance of “Crossroads”, Moore writes, listeners interpret Clapton as conveying both “this is what it’s like to be me” and, at a double remove, “this is what it was like to be Johnson.”⁹ For Clapton and Peter Green, and to a lesser extent Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, the search for the soul of blues singers like Johnson was driven, Moore writes, by a desire to appropriate the “unmediated expression” that was 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.”⁹ By appropriating the Black blues artists’ patterns of performance and making them available to a wider audience, Clapton “authenticates them.”¹⁰

Moore reads the musical nationalism of Ralph Vaughan Williams as an aim of uniting the social function of music, in folk song, with “the transcendent claims of a functionless art music, in a music both timeless and new.” That duality, he writes, “seems to me key to the identification of what I shall term a third person authenticity.”¹⁰ Paul Gilroy, Moore writes, is heavily critical of views like Vaughan Williams’s, and he quotes Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: “the syncretic complexity of black expressive cultures alone supplies powerful reasons for resisting the idea that an untouched, pristine Africanity resides inside these forms, working a powerful magic of alterity in order to trigger repeatedly the perception of absolute identity.”¹¹

Moore’s second example, after Clapton’s, is “a very different type of strategy for tapping in to ‘original’ practices,” and it comes again from folk: many singers of the 1950s revival interspersed one or two lines of a traditional ballad with an odd number of instrumental beats, a way of keeping “a certain traditional metrical flexibility” while fitting the songs to guitar accompaniment. Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” (1966), a song learned from the revival singer Martin Carthy, uses the device, though Moore places the record strictly outside this line of development. The device also appears in John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” (1970). Lennon appears, Moore writes, to have wanted to make clear that the experience he relates is his own, but the device “suggests that he is building on the harsh reality of the traditional singer, in an analogous way to Clapton’s employment of the blues.”¹¹ Tribute bands, which often aim at faithful reproduction to recover the reality of the original performances, provide another, “markedly different,” example.¹¹ Moore defines third person authenticity, or “authenticity of execution,” as arising “when a performer succeeds in conveying the impression of accurately representing the ideas of another, embedded within a tradition of performance.”¹²

Moore frames the listener’s type, second person authenticity, as a question of belonging, set within a distinction between mainstream and margin, and the form of that distinction he takes up is the line drawn in the mid-1960s between “pop” and “rock” over commerce. “Dispassionately speaking, of course,” he writes, “this commercial/authentic polarity is illusory, since all mass-mediated music is subject to commercial imperatives.” What matters to listeners, he writes, “is whether such subjection appears to be accepted, resisted, or negotiated with, by those to whom they are listening.”¹² In his reading of Grossberg, the fans of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll found its authenticity in “its ability to articulate for its listeners a place of belonging.” Following George Allan, as he had in his 1998 article on U2, Moore defines that place as a “centredness,” an experience that centers the listener, and sets it against postmodern accounts of “de-centred” experience.¹³ In the 1980s, he writes, musicians nominally from the Celtic periphery, U2 among them, and Springsteen gave “white urban bourgeois youth,” a label Moore later calls simplistic, a space for “metaphorical escape to a pre-modern communitarian ideal.” Moore follows Middleton’s scale of a listener’s responses to a style, running from appropriation to rejection, with the sentence “the music we declare to be ‘authentic’ is the music we ‘appropriate’.”¹³ He cites Sarah Thornton’s account of dance culture, in which recorded music came to be heard as “something uniquely its own, rather than a poor substitute for a ‘real’ musical event.”¹⁴ Moore adds that “manufactured” pop, “that conventionally most inauthentic music,” plays a crucial part in children’s self-authentication, and that among his daughter’s peers S Club 7’s “Bring It All Back” did this most clearly.¹⁴ Second person authenticity, or authenticity of experience, as he defines it, “occurs when a performance succeeds in conveying the impression to a listener that that listener’s experience of life is being validated, that the music is ‘telling it like it is’ for them.”¹⁴

In its conclusion Moore writes that the three types overlap in practice and that keeping them apart makes for sharper analysis, and he reads three consecutive songs from the folk singer Dick Gaughan’s Sail On. Moore finds first person authentication in “No Cause for Alarm”, third person in “The 51st (Highland) Division’s Farewell to Sicily” and, for an English Celtophile audience, second person in “No Gods and Precious Few Heroes”. Moore calls this a procedure, each song enabling a different kind of authentication, and across that range of material, he writes, it is strong enough that Gaughan can include on the same album a cover of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’s “Ruby Tuesday” “without compromising his authenticity.” Moore calls the song an overt fantasy and thinks Gaughan read it through Melanie Safka’s “highly fey interpretation.”¹⁵ Locating authenticity in the ascription, Moore writes, means “that every music, and every example, can conceivably be found authentic by a particular group of perceivers,” and that what counts is the success with which a performance conveys its impression, a success that depends “in some part on the explicitly musical decisions performers make.”¹⁵ The study of authenticity, he concludes, “should thus, I believe, shift from consideration of the intention of various originators towards the activities of various perceivers,” and should ask what reasons they might have for finding a performance authentic, or failing to.¹⁶

Crossref counted 244 works citing the essay in October 2026.¹⁷ In a 2011 book on grunge, Catherine Strong wrote that Kurt Cobain “can also be understood as displaying what Moore (2002, p. 209) called ‘third person’ authenticity, that is, he has also been praised for being able to ‘speak the truth of [his] own culture’.” The phrase Strong quotes is the third of the senses Moore lists in his opening, that artists speak “the truth of their own culture, thereby representing (present) others”; Moore’s third person authenticity authenticates “an (absent) other.”¹⁸ Catherine Tackley, in her 2012 book on Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, found third person authenticity in Bobby Hackett’s re-creation there of a solo by Bix Beiderbecke. The re-creation “might be regarded as an aesthetically worthless copy,” she wrote, but in that context it retains its authenticity “through the signifying of an absent other”: its subject “is Beiderbecke, not Hackett.”¹⁹ Todd Dedman, writing on hip-hop and grime in 2017, drew on the passage in which Moore, following Taylor, describes an expression as “perceived to be authentic if it can be traced to an initiatory instance.”²⁰ In what appears to be a note to his introduction to a 2011 collection of essays on rock, in a series Moore edited, Mark Spicer wrote that “if it were up to me, we would jettison the myth of authenticity altogether,” and pointed readers who still found the concept useful to “Allan Moore’s excellent essay.”²¹ An essay in The Music and Art of Radiohead (2005) wrote that Moore, following Grossberg and Johan Fornäs, had rewritten the terms into a “globalising” model, one that “continues the trend of becoming progressively non-specific in order to encompass all styles of music.”²²

Key contributions

• The formula “ascribed, not inscribed” for the idea, which Moore shares with Sarah Rubidge, that authenticity is ascribed to a performance, and his assumption that it is “a construction made on the act of listening.”
• The question of who a performance authenticates, with three answers: first person authenticity (the performer), third person authenticity (an absent other, whose ideas the performer seems to represent accurately within a tradition of performance) and second person authenticity (the listener).
• A case against dismissing authenticity as a concept in the study of popular music.
• A reading of the 1960s blues rock movement as third person authenticity, and of the assumption, unquestioned in Eric Clapton’s and Peter Green’s search for the blues, that African Americans in the southern USA were “somehow more ‘natural’ beings than white, college-educated Londoners.”
• The proposal that the study of authenticity examine listeners’ reasons for finding a performance authentic.

See also

• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music