Faking It

Three Kinds of Authenticity

We've been looking at a few internet reviews and comments on our book. A lot of people who haven't read the book yet hear that it is about authenticity and question if it is even possible to write about such a slippery concept. This is a fair question. In order to explain the book better, we thought we should post a few sentences from its introduction.

“When we listen to popular music, some songs strike us as ‘real’ and others as ‘fake.’ This book explores that distinction, and how, especially in the last fifty years, the quest for authenticity, for the ‘real,’ has become a dominant factor in musical taste. Whether it be the folklorist's search for forgotten bluesmen, the rock critic's elevation of raw power over sophistication, or the importance of bullet wounds to the careers of hip-hop artists, the aesthetic of the ‘authentic musical experience,’ with its rejection of music that is labelled contrived, pretentious, artificial, or overly commercial, has played a major role in forming musical tastes and canons, with wide-ranging consequences.

“What do we mean when we call something authentic? A lot of things, as it turns out; but the word seems to be defined primarily in opposition to ‘faking it.’ There’s little authentic in, say, a KISS concert, where the band wears make-up and plays songs about people they pretend to be, all with the explicit aim of making money, rather than telling the truth about themselves or the world they live in. This is not to say that such a performance can’t be wildly entertaining, but simply that it’s not considered authentic.

“When people say a musical performance or recording is authentic, they might mean a number of things. They might refer to representational authenticity, or music that is exactly what it says it is--unlike, say, Milli Vanilli posing as singers, which they weren’t. They might refer to cultural authenticity, or music that reflects a cultural tradition--the traditional black guitarist and singer Mississippi John Hurt’s version of ‘Stagger Lee,’ an old African American song about an outlaw, is more culturally authentic than, say, the Grateful Dead’s. They might refer to personal authenticity, or music that reflects the person or people who are making it--when Ozzy Osbourne sings ‘Iron Man,’ he tells us nothing about his own life, but when Loretta Lynn sings ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ she tells us a lot.

“Every performance is to some degree ‘faked’--nobody goes out on stage and sings about exactly what they did and felt that day. Authenticity is an absolute, a goal that can never be fully attained, a quest. Sincerity and autobiography are techniques one can employ in the service of personal authenticity, just as using traditional instruments and singing old songs are techniques one can use in the service of cultural authenticity. But it’s important to distinguish the means from the end.”

We hope this clears a few things up.

- Hugh & Yuval

Impostors

This blog is supposed to be about faking it, but most of these posts haven’t been nearly fake enough. So it’s time to get real, real fake for a change.

Here’s Louis Armstrong singing Britney Spears’s hit “Oops, I Did It Again.” Here’s Bob Dylan singing Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs And Ham,” circa 1966. Here’s Karen Carpenter singing “No One in the World” on a record by Locust. And here’s Ray Charles singing on Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.”

These songs go beyond parody or imitation. You are actually meant to believe that it’s really Louis, Bob, Karen, and Ray singing. This is imposture, pure and simple, and as gloriously fake, as inauthentic in every sense of the word, as you can get. If you can nominate anything faker than this, I’ll give you a free copy of our book.

The first two are obviously jokes, but like all good jokes, they resonate--in this case they say something about the differences between our era and a past one. The story behind the third is that Richard Carpenter denied Locust permission to use Karen Carpenter’s original vocals from the Carpenters’ “Hurting Each Other,” so Locust found someone to impersonate her--to a T (thanks to David Scott for alerting me to this song).

Dozens of trumpeters have imitated Louis Armstrong over the years (and done a better job of it too), and plenty of would-be Joni Mitchells populated the early 1970s folk scene, but that’s imitation, not imposture--none of them were really pretending to be Louis or Joni.

Of course, this kind of thing used to be far more frequent in the golden days of the movie musical (the plot of Singing in the Rain revolves around just such impersonation). Here's a terrific list of movie dubbees (thanks to Jody Rosen for this one).

Credits? Louis Armstrong was impersonated by Shek Baker and Kurt Stockdale of Supermasterpiece.com. Bob Dylan was impersonated by the anonymous folks who constitute Eye Berried Pall. Karen Carpenter was impersonated by Wendy Roberts, who makes a living impersonating her. And Ray Charles was impersonated by Jamie Foxx, who played him in the biopic Ray.

- Yuval

A Podcast

Here's a podcast interview with me about our book, on a terrific public radio show called The Sound of Young America. It's the most in-depth interview I've done on the subject of authenticity, and it's a good way to get a handle on the book.

- Yuval

Why Authenticity?

Greg Quill of The Toronto Star asked me an interesting question the other day: Why is authenticity so important to so many music fans?

One way of answering that is to pose a similar question. Why is authenticity important to fans of punk rock and country music and unimportant to fans of disco or showtunes or bubblegum? Why was authenticity important to Neil Young and unimportant to Elvis?

I think the answer lies in a philosophical question: should the aesthetic sense be allied to the moral sense? For punk rockers, country fans, and folksingers, the answer is yes--their cultures have very well-developed moral senses that are based on ideals of honesty. Fans of disco and showtunes, rockabilly and bubblegum, on the other hand, are, when it comes to musical aesthetics, more or less hedonists--anything goes, as long as it’s fabulously entertaining.

Can one apply this to other genres as well? I believe so. Classical music is notoriously moral: one must play the music as the composer intended it to be played, and thus authenticity is the sine qua non of artistic success. Hip-hop is also preoccupied with authenticity, and there’s a strict moral stance that goes along with it: tell truth to power. Contrast that with blues--at least in the pre-war era there was very little concern with authenticity among blues players, and they were a rather hedonistic bunch. The same goes for heavy metal. The distinction only breaks down if we go back to pre-twentieth-century popular music, which was neither hedonistic nor concerned with authenticity, and whose morality was far more tied to sentiment than to truth-telling.

Interestingly, this conjunction of aesthetics and morality applies not only to the ideal of honesty or authenticity in music, but to sex as well. Sexual intercourse is not a very important subject matter for country, punk, or folk; but it is just about the only subject matter for rockabilly, disco, and bubblegum, and provides the winking pretext for a wide range of blues and showtunes as well.

Are those interested in keeping their music authentic puritans, then, and those uninterested libertines? To some degree, I believe so. Authenticity among music fans has assumed the status of belief in God among voters: if it's an important issue, you vote one way, if it's not, you vote another way.

I find myself, then, in the position of the left-wing believer--just like my belief in God won't prevent me from voting for left-wingers, the fact that some music stirs me because of how authentic it tries to be won't prevent me from dancing to disco in public.

- Yuval

Is Keith Jarrett Faking It?

In 2005, the great jazz pianist Keith Jarrett released a solo piano CD entitled Radiance. In the liner notes, Jarrett stated, “Everything on these discs is completely improvised.”

Jarrett has made a cult out of his improvisatory skill (his Köln Concert remains the bestselling solo piano record of all time, and one of his DVDs is entitled The Art of Improvisation). And with Radiance, his rhetoric seemed to reach a new peak. In an interview about the CD he gave to The New York Times, he said, “I needed to get rid of stuff in my own brain that I was using as the raw material for my art. . . . If I can say I’m experienced at something, I guess it’s acting as a conduit. I know how to get to that place where that line is about as open as can be.” And in the liner notes, he wrote, “My career [has] a lot to do with transforming energy into something new each time. . . . The material [here is] seemingly unmotivated by any concept at all. . . . I didn’t want any premature resolutions. . . . I had in mind letting the music happen to me without sitting there deep in thought. I wanted my hands to tell me things.”

In other words, according to Jarrett, he clears his mind of preconceptions, moves away from any music that he might have previously played or heard, and simply lets his fingers carry him away, improvising purely, without “melodic--or even motivic--content,” to quote his liner notes once more.

Radiance is a terrific record, full of emotional peaks and valleys, but it’s wildly eclectic. One moment he’s imitating Prokofiev, the next he’s playing gospel. Some of his music is rather original, but most of it is utterly derivative. And exactly how improvised is it?

“Part 6” is one of several Chopinesque moments on Radiance. But it’s a bit too Chopinesque, isn’t it? Compare it to Chopin’s Nocturne op. 55 No. 1 In F minor (here played by Artur Rubinstein). It’s not the same piece, but it’s eerily similar in several ways. Jarrett uses not only the same harmonic and melodic language but most of the same chords in his opening theme.

So if something is really quite unoriginal, can it be said to be “completely improvised”? Jazz improvisers usually take as a basis a set of chord changes and improvise around them; Jarrett, instead, takes as a basis a certain style and improvises around it. Just as most jazz improvisers will improvise over a number of different tunes in a concert, Jarrett improvises over a number of different musical styles.

We shouldn’t consider this kind of improvisation any more pure or creative or, as Jarrett puts it, “transformative,” than Coleman Hawkins improvising on “Body and Soul” or Charlie Parker on the chords of “I Got Rhythm.” For a long time, fooled by his rhetoric, I thought Jarrett was more in-the-moment, more absolutely improvisatory, and therefore more authentically in touch with his creative impulses than other jazz musicians. I no longer think so. Jarrett is definitely not “faking it,” and his music is indeed “completely improvised.” But his rhetoric seems overblown.

What about Jarrett’s free jazz pieces, as exemplified by most of the music on his brilliant 2002 release Always Let Me Go, as well as certain tracks on Radiance? Free jazz is often defined as jazz without set chords, rhythms, or melodies. Yet why should improvising without them be favored in any way over improvising with them? The skill and inspiration required to do each is much the same. I find Jarrett’s “free” and tonal improvisations equally satisfying.

Certainly some jazz musicians improvise more than others. Quality of improvisation is also fair game for discussion. But, like authenticity, absolute improvisation is a goal that can never be reached. No matter how skilled you are at freeing your mind from preconceptions, you cannot improvise completely free from everything you have heard in your life; you cannot, as Jarrett so often seems to imply, reinvent your music on the spot. At the heart of every improvisation will always be something you already knew.

- Yuval