Faking It

Here Come the Indians, Part Three

In this, the third of a series of posts of songs about American Indians (here’s part one and part two), I’m looking at authentic Indians.

But before I start with those, let’s take a brief look at the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans. These are African Americans who have formed gangs that dress in truly wild Indian costumes and whose songs are full of fighting words. Unlike the songs in the previous two posts, here the Indians are neither martyrs nor laughing stocks--instead they’re proud warriors. And unlike Outkast, the Mardi Gras Indians take great care and pride in dressing like Indians. I’m posting the Wild Magnolias’ “Two Way Pak E Way,” my favorite song from their 1974 self-titled LP (which, curiously, is still in print but not on CD). I suppose there’s not a world of difference between the Mardi Gras Indians and Adam and the Ants, except for the fact that the former have been around a whole lot longer. But let’s consider some history for a moment. About two hundred years ago Louisiana slaves escaped to Western Florida and joined the Seminoles in battling the white man. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to call the Mardi Gras Indians their descendants.

Now in case you were wondering whether Outkast’s “Hey Ya” has any real Indian basis, here’s a traditional Navajo Mocassin Game Song, “Cicada or Locust Song,” recorded in 1933 at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition. Here’s a gorgeous Creek lullaby, sung by a young woman named Margaret, recorded for the Library of Congress in 1943. And here’s Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Cree, singing a rousing version of the traditional Cree call “Isketayo Sewow” in the late 1960s. These songs are as authentic as you can get.

Now for a real treat, especially for you folks who enjoy rarities. I here post three versions of Jim Pepper’s “Witchi Tai To,” a pop arrangement of a Kaw peyote chant. Here is the rousing original version recorded by Jim Pepper’s band Everything Is Everything (1969) on their self-titled Vanguard LP. Here is the hit recorded by Harpers Bizarre the same year--but please note, this is the real version from the LP, not the atrocious digital remaster. This has to be one of the most gorgeous recordings ever made. And lastly, from Jim Pepper’s 1971 LP Pepper’s Pow Wow, here’s the original chant, as it probably sounded when chanted by Kaw Indians. Pepper was an Indian descended from the Kaw and Creek tribes, and on Pepper’s Pow Wow he performed traditional, jazz, and pop versions of traditional Indian songs, accompanied by his relatives. (He also performed a couple of songs by Peter LaFarge, the subject of our next post.)

There have been any number of American Indian songwriters and performers. The jazz singer Lee Wiley was part Indian, so I’m posting her 1954 version of Rodgers & Hart’s “Give It Back to the Indians.” Link Wray was also part Indian, and his song “Days Before Custer” (1971), here sung by Mordicai Jones (from Jones’s self-titled LP), is one of my favorites. Other Indian performers and groups include Blackfoot, Rita Coolidge, Redbone, Robbie Robertson, and John Trudell. There's a very informative article about contemporary American Indian pop music here, written by Neal Ullestad.

But the greatest Indian songwriter--the one who wrote most perceptively about Indians and their plight--has to be Peter LaFarge, the subject of my next post. Watch for it in the next few days.

- Yuval

P.S. Thanks to David Scott for the "Witchi Tai To" files.

Push the Authenticity Button!

In the book we mention how the quest for authenticity has infiltrated even the most plastic of pop genres. A perfect recent example of a pop star singing a hymn to her own authenticity is Mutya Buena's “Real Girl.” This is her first solo single after a successful spell in the pop band Sugababes, which she founded with her friend Keisha Buchanan.

Sugababes were a decent pop band, responsible for some great singles, including “Push the Button.” But in spite of the fact that they were formed by two childhood friends, they were widely regarded as a bit plastic, or manufactured. So “Real Girl” follows a well-trod rehabilitation path. Mutya proclaims how real she is, denies she's a fake, and, er . . . that's pretty much the entire content of the lyrics, actually. The chorus includes the lines “I never pretend to be something I'm not. You get what you see, when you see what I've got. We live in the real world--I'm just a real girl.”

Just like “Jenny from the Block,” Mutya is trying to reconnect with her audience by asserting her authenticity, and probably succeeding pretty well. It is of course a wonderful pop song, involving a Lenny Kravitz sample, some delirious Barry White style string riffs, and a terrific vocal performance. I've got nothing against Mutya, and wish her well with her solo career, but I hope she will eventually have something to talk to us about other than how real she is.

- Hugh

P.S. I liked the Moto Blanc remix edit of the single a lot better than the original single, so what I've posted above is a link to the video thereof. One thing I like about this particular remix is that every single word is edited (clipped) so that there's no "real" singing here at all. If you want to hear the original single version, you can click on a stream here. - Yuval

 

Here come the Indians, Part Two

This is the second in a series of three posts. The first one dealt with songs that ridicule Indians; this one concerns noble savages; and the third will deal with authentic Indians.

The trope of the noble savage can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau or perhaps even earlier. The noble savage was the embodiment of Western virtues, uncorrupted by civilization; the concept was applied equally to Polynesians (see Melville’s Typee), American Indians, and Africans, both enslaved and free. Because of the genocide perpetrated across the Americas, the representation of these noble savages took on an inevitably tragic air, and in popular song, the Indians almost always die at the end--they are America's number-one martyr.

Early in the twentieth century the myth of the noble savage was partially supplanted, under the influence of Darwin and Freud, by primitivism--the idea of the savage as brute, untamable, pure id. But this idea was applied far more to blacks than to Indians, perhaps because primitivism doesn’t go so well with martyrdom. In “Red Wing: An Indian Intermezzo” (1907), Red Wing’s lover dies in battle at the end of the second verse, but we never see him fight--we’re simply told he was brave, and we focus instead on his grieving squaw. Throughout the rest of this post, the Indians are Christ-like.

Our first MP3 file is Johnny Preston’s “Running Bear” (1959). While the background vocals sound pretty ridiculous, the singing is earnest; the Indians are fearless, constant, and die in the end.

Why Johnny Horton felt compelled to write “The Vanishing Race” (1960) I can’t tell. It’s certainly a far cry from his lame “Cherokee Boogie,” which he had recorded a year before. Horton was known for his story songs like “The Battle of New Orleans” and “North to Alaska,” though his best work was hardcore honky-tonk/rockabilly stuff like “Honky Tonk Hardwood Floor.” Which makes this song all the more atypical. Once more, we don’t actually see the Indians fight for their land--they simply die. But they do appear again in outer space, making this an eerie prefiguration of the Caetano Veloso, Kansas, and OutKast visions detailed below.

Johnny Cash devoted an entire album, Bitter Tears (1964), to the plight of the Indian, and here’s “Apache Tears,” which he wrote himself--another funeral dirge that says nothing about self-defense. (The album also includes a terrific cover of “The Vanishing Race.”) I’ll have more to say about this album in my next post; right now I’ll just mention that it stirred up a lot of animosity: it was banned from most country radio stations and the Ku Klux Klan burnt a cross on Cash’s lawn. That didn’t stop Bitter Tears from getting to number two on the Billboard country charts, though.

Even though it’s probably time to post something by someone not named Johnny, I’m sticking to chronological order here, and my next song was written by John D. Loudermilk, most famous for “Tobacco Road.” It’s Don Fardon’s “Indian Reservation” (1970), a hit both for him and for the Raiders. Here, at last, the Indians remain alive, reflecting the new consciousness of the 1970s. This may be the most straightforward, direct, and stirring political American Indian protest song not written by an Indian. Yet even without knowing the writer, his race is obvious. It’s simply too mythic, too hokey, for an Indian to have written it. It never feels real, lived in. You’ll have to wait until the next post for songs like that.

The next John to record a noble savage song, as far as I can tell, was Elton John, whose 1971 overblown seven-minute epic “Indian Sunset,” complete with piano, orchestra, and choir, adopts the point of view of a young renegade Indian who refuses to surrender to the white man and kills himself instead. I haven’t posted the MP3 because it’s simply too awful to listen to. “Oh, great father of the Iroquois, ever since I was young, I’ve read the writing of the smoke and breastfed on the sound of the drum,” Elton yells at the top of his lungs; a few seconds later the strings break into the kind of music that characterized the Indian attacks in ’50s Western movies. Heavy indeed.

Also too awful to listen to is Cher’s tragic tale of the “Half Breed,” which was a number-one hit in 1973, and which everybody probably knows. Cher wasn’t the first to sing about this subject--Ricky Nelson also had a hit called “Half Breed” in 1959, a lousy song whose chorus runs, “Half breed, they’re hot on your trail, boy, half breed, but you better not run. Half breed, you better get a gun, boy, better get a gun and stand, boy, better get a gun and stand.” Both songs depict the uncomfortable situation of the half-Indian half-white teenager, but nothing really happens in either one. As usual, we don’t see the protagonist actually practicing self-defense.

At some point between 1968 and 1972 Joe Ely wrote “The Indian Cowboy,” which he didn’t actually record until 2007. Guy Clark’s version (1989), which I’ve posted here, is probably the best; Tom Russell, Townes Van Zandt, and the Flatlanders also recorded it before Ely got around to doing his solo version. In it, an Indian rescues the circus from a fire by lassoing a horse. Now why wasn’t that good enough for Ely? Why does the Indian then have to pay for his courage with his life? See the rest of the songs in this post for the answer.

Neil Young spent practically his entire career singing songs about Indians, from “Broken Arrow” with Buffalo Springfield in 1967 to “Inca Queen” in 1987. “Cortez the Killer” is his most famous, but the best is definitely “Pocahontas,” whose basic track was recorded sometime between 1975 and 1977, though it wasn’t released until 1979. This completely insane song seems to cover all the bases. We’ve now come to expect the massacred martyrs, and considering Pocahontas as an exile in modern-day Hollywood is a nice twist. But to throw in “I wish I was a trapper: I would give a thousand pelts to sleep with Pocahontas” is taking things a bit far, don’t you think? Was it too much to hope that by the mid-1970s having sex with squaws would be out-of-date?

I mean, by this point both North and South Americans were starting to expect Indians to come down from outer space and save them in the not-too-distant future. This was Caetano Veloso’s vision in “Um indio” (1977), Kansas’s vision in their 1979 album Monolith, and OutKast’s vision in their 2004 Grammy Awards performance of “Hey Ya” (see previous post). In case your Portuguese is rusty, here are the lyrics to Caetano’s number, kindly translated by Julian Dibbell.

For some reason, most of the American Indian-themed songs of the 1980s came from Britain. Adam and the Ants’ stirring 1980 anthem “Kings of the Wild Frontier” begins, “I feel beneath the white there is a redskin suffering from centuries of taming.” Then come the chanted “heys,” surf guitars playing Western-movie melodies, and Adam complaining that he’s “just a shade too white.” This is hero-worship at its most primeval. But Iron Maiden went one step further in 1982 with their delirious “Run to the Hills,” probably the angriest Indian massacre song ever and one of my all-time favorite heavy metal numbers. And to top it all, the Cult, a British hard rock act formed in 1984, devoted practically their entire careers to the idea of the martyred noble savage. Yikes!

Tragic Indian songs seemed to have more or less dried up since then, with a few exceptions here and there (e.g. The Magnetic Fields’ 1994 “Fear of Trains,” not one of their better songs). If you know of any other recent numbers, please comment below.

Stay tuned: authentic Indian songs are coming up next.

- Yuval

P.S. Thanks to David Scott, Jake Austen, Jody Rosen, Josh Goldfein, and Julian Dibbell for alerting me to some of these numbers.

Here Come the Indians, Part One

I’ve been listening to songs about American Indians lately. You can divide them into three basic types, and I’m going to devote the next three posts to this taxonomy. Today I’ll be posting songs ridiculing Indians; the next post will be about noble savages and martyred heroes; and the third will be devoted to authentic American Indians. In all three, I’ll be featuring MP3s for you to download, but only of the good stuff.

Be forewarned: the songs in this first post are grossly offensive. There’s some great music here, but it doesn’t excuse the lyrics or the sentiment behind them. Here the Indians are laughingstocks, mocked for their customs and language or simply stereotyped for maximum chuckles. This tradition began in the nineteenth century or perhaps even earlier, but it continues undiminished until today. If you’re at all racially sensitive, these songs are guaranteed to make you see red (no pun intended).

We’ll start at the dawn of the twentieth with “Navajo” (1903), pictured at left. This song is about the love of a “coon” for an Indian--the verses set up the situation, and the chorus has the “coon” sing, “Nava, Nava, my Navajo, I have a love for you that will grow. If you’ll have a coon for a beau, I’ll have a Navajo.” Now I don’t really know if “ho” carried the same meaning in 1903 that it carries today, or if “I have a love for you that will grow” carried the same sexual implications. But if so, this is a genuine forerunner to Slick Rick’s “Indian Girl” (see below).

There were plenty of others in this vein. Here are a few: “Mineola (or the Wedding of the Indian and the Coon)” (1904), “Big Indian Chief” (also 1904, with lyrics by the great black New York songwriter Rosamond Johnson, James Weldon’s brother), “Pawnee” (whose chorus runs, “Pawnee, oh my little love so tawny . . . Sleepy, leave your teepee,” etc.; 1906), “Arrah Wanna (An Indian Irish Matrimonial Venture)” (1906), and “Clysmic Water, Daughter of White Rock” (1920).

The prospect of Indian intermarriage with other ethnic groups was clearly considered hilarious. The one where the Indian marries the Jew is Blanche Merrill’s “I'm an Indian” (1921), here sung by the fabulous Fanny Brice. Irving Berlin was Jewish too, but “I’m an Indian, Too,” from his 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun, wasn’t an answer song to Merrill’s number--it had little of its zip and sparkle.

It was left to Hank Williams and Fred Rose to write the next great Indian-clown song, “Kaw-Liga,” in 1952, though it wasn’t released until after Williams’s death. Everyone knows the original version, so I’ve decided to post Roy Orbison’s 1965 cover version, which brings to it an intensity that’s hard to conceive of if you’ve only heard Williams’s or Charley Pride’s hit versions. (If you want to hear more, the Residents recorded nine different versions on Poor Kaw-Liga’s Pain).

“Ten Little Indians” is an old nursery rhyme, originally called “Ten Little Niggers.” In 1967, Harry Nilsson set it to music and changed the words to make them more Biblical. Now it’s more like “Ten Little Indians Flout the Ten Commandments” or something. As usual, I have no idea what was going through Nilsson’s head.

Loretta Lynn’s “Your Squaw Is on the Warpath” (1969) uses practically every cliché in the book and gives each one a fresh twist--all in two minutes flat.

Most of the Indian-themed songs of the 1970s fell either into the noble savage/martyr camp or were written by actual Indians--very few fit into the tradition I’m limning here. It was an era of greatly increased sensitivity about Indian affairs and troubles, and deriding Indians was, for a short time at least, unconscionable. One band from that decade, Siouxsee and the Banshees, gave themselves a silly Indian name, but they never performed any songs about Indians as far as I know. Even B.T. Express’s “Peace Pipe” refrained from the all-out scorn of the songs featured here; and despite Felipe Rose’s outrageous Indian costume, the Village People ignored Indians in their peace-and-love anthem “Go West.” The only exception I’ve found is Cory Daye’s glorious 1979 hit, the sadly out-of-print “Pow Wow.”

In the 1980s, though, making fun of Indians was cool again, God knows why. Maybe it was the ascension of Ronald Reagan, who killed plenty of fake Indians in The Last Outpost and actually played Custer in Santa Fe Trail. Anyway, the next few songs are as insulting as they get.

The Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache” (1981) took an old instrumental number (see Michaelangelo Matos’s “All Roads Lead to Apache,” a brilliant history of the song in all its permutations), rerecorded it with their own house band, and added some raps. Following the now ancient tradition of songs of this ilk, the Gang tries to have sex with the squaws.

The Gun Club’s “Bad Indian” (1983) portrays Indians as zombies. The lyrics are hard to make out, so here are a few lines: “Bad Indians--they love the land they hate; eat your flesh and then forget the taste. Someone describe that primal drive to consume what’s theirs and seek what’s mine. . . . You are like a ghost with crazy hands and mouth, a necklace made of eyeballs--you are like a bad Indian.” I suppose this song doesn’t really fit in with the rest of those in this post, but it doesn’t fit anywhere else either--it’s absolutely unique. It’s hateful, too, but it’s meant to be--it’s meant to make your skin crawl.

I’m not sure why Slick Rick decided to record X-rated songs about horny Indians not just on his first but on his second album too. “Indian Girl (An Adult Story)” (1988) is absolutely jawdropping in its gall--the punch line is unlike anything ever recorded in American music. “Tonto” (1991) is an altogether different matter. It’s from The Ruler’s Back, recorded in its entirety while Rick was out on bail for three weeks before his trial for attempted murder. Like the rest of the album, the lyrics are telegraphed incomprehensibly--even if you can figure them all out you can’t make head or tail of the story. Maybe that’s why The Ruler’s Back is my favorite hip-hop record--I can listen to it again and again and every time get something new from it. It’s manic, absurd, damn funky, and never fails to surprise me. Besides, what other rap album has songs about Moses, Tonto, Venus, James Bond, baby boys, and the many mistakes of Slick Rick?

Tim McGraw’s 1994 “Indian Outlaw” is probably the biggest-selling Indian song of all time, and one of the most reprehensible too. I’m not going to post it here because I hate it. The only interesting thing about it is that it features a quote from Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Indian Reservation” at the end for no good reason.

Just so that you’re absolutely convinced that the tradition hasn’t died, we’ll conclude with a little minstrel number from the 2004 Grammy awards. Our next post will feature two additional examples of Indians coming in from outer space to save the world. So stay tuned.

- Yuval

P.S. Thanks to David Scott, Eric Weisbard, Jody Rosen, Jonathan Taylor, Josh Goldfein, and JP Chill for their suggestions.

Does the Overdub Undercut Jazz?

In 2002, jazz pianist Brad Mehldau released Largo. His most experimental--and best--record, it was produced by Jon Brion, celebrated for his film scores and his production of Fiona Apple’s records. It’s a real studio record--it doesn’t sound “live” at all. Here’s an example: Mehldau’s exquisite, moving, and effects-heavy cover of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android.”

Inside the packaging appears the following statement. “All music was recorded live, on the floor. There were no overdubs.”

Why not? Because overdubs are more or less forbidden in jazz. They smack of inauthenticity. Jazz is music improvised live; if you overdub, you’re not really interacting with your fellow musicians. You’re faking it. Do a google search on “jazz” and “no overdubs” if you don’t believe me. Practically every aspiring jazz artist proclaims loudly that they don’t overdub. Ever.

What most people don’t know is that the first overdubbed record was made by one of the giants of jazz, and it was truly a jazz record: Sidney Bechet’s One Man Band’s 1941 “The Sheik of Araby.” This was done in the era before multitrack audiotape, so the fidelity grows worse and worse as Bechet layers on each instrument (soprano and tenor sax, clarinet, bass, drums, and piano). The American Federation of Musicians was so outraged by the record that they banned overdubbing for years. As for multitrack recording, it was invented by a jazz musician, Les Paul, whose most famous overdubbed recording was his absolutely wild 1947 “Lover,” featuring eight guitars recorded at various speeds.

Here are a few more landmarks in jazz overdubbing.

For Lennie Tristano’s 1955 “Line Up,” Tristano had the bass (Peter Ind) and drum (Jeff Morton) parts recorded first, then altered the tape speed and overdubbed his piano part.

Miles Davis’s 1957 masterpiece Miles Ahead relied extensively on overdubs. Here’s the ebullient “I Don't Wanna Be Kissed (By Anyone But You).” As Loren Schoenberg explains, “during the taping of the orchestral track for ‘I Don't Wanna Be Kissed,’ Davis unexpectedly played a few random portions of his solo. Months later at the overdub session, he had to tailor new passages to lead in and out of what he had already played on the prerecorded track. During five attempts, Davis used a variety of rhetorical devices (many borrowed from his mentor, Lester Young) to solve a musical problem.” In other words, the Miles Davis playing you hear was stitched together from six different takes, five of which were overdubs.

When Dave Lambert & His Singers, who would soon become Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, recorded their debut album Sing a Song of Basie in 1957, each singer sang his/her part separately, all overdubbed. Here’s “Little Pony” from that record.

Creed Taylor produced not only the Lambert record, but Bill Evans’s 1963 Conversations with Myself, an overdubbed and Grammy-winning three-piano album. But Evans may have been taking a cue from Lennie Tristano’s 1955 “Turkish Mambo,” also featuring three overdubbed piano tracks. Here’s “How About You?” from that record. Conversations with Myself sounds pretty gimmicky at first, but I don’t think Evans’s rhythmic genius was ever put on better display.

Charles Mingus’s 1963 The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady relies on extensive overdubs. The first 2:45 of “Track C: Group Dancers” is recorded straight. At that point, Charlie Mariano’s alto sax begins wailing, the guitar comes in, and the collective improvisation begins. Well, Mariano’s entire 4-minute-plus brilliant alto sax solo was entirely overdubbed.

The overdub never really died. Pharaoh Sanders used it on his 1970 album Thembi. Pat Metheny used overdubs on Bright Size Life and New Chautauqua later that decade. Smooth jazz hasn’t been hesitant about using overdubs, even overdubbing over dead people’s music (e.g. Kenny G overdubbing lame sax solos over Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World,” which caused Pat Metheny to throw a memorable fit.) To conclude, here’s Matthew Shipp’s “Space Shipp,” from his 2002 Nu Bop, on which I surmise, from reading an interview with Shipp, that William Parker’s bass is overdubbed; and Jason Moran’s overdubbed take on Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” from his breathtaking 2002 album Modernistic.

If one sticks to conventional wisdom, there’s something very wrong with all of these tracks. They’re studio gimmicks; they’re not real jazz; they violate the very principles of jazz. They’re fake, phony, inauthentic.

Back in 2002, when The Future of Jazz, a book I edited, came out, I gave an interview about jazz in which I said, “Classical music is a written art form; rock is (or has become) a recorded art form; jazz is a live art form. Of course, this is essentialist thinking, but I do think it gets to the heart of the music. The major appeal of classical music lies in harmony, in the play of resolutions and dissonances. The major appeal of rock music, at least after 1965, lies in the manipulation of electronic sound. And the major appeal of jazz will always lie in improvisation, which really has very little to do with the recording process. Improvisation is done on the spur of the moment, live.”

Here I stated in a concise form jazz’s essentialist position, one which I’m reluctant to deny now. I really do believe that overdubbing goes against jazz’s fundamental nature.

So why do the tracks I’ve posted above sound so good? Why is there more improvisational brilliance on every single one of these tracks than in the mass of Wynton Marsalis’s non-overdubbed records?

Because playing with new technology has always been a fundamental part of jazz too. If Sidney Bechet, Les Paul, Lennie Tristano, and Miles Davis aren’t enough to prove that, just think of the fact that the saxophone was one of the newest instruments around when it became one of the central instruments of jazz, and that both the electric guitar and vibraphone began as jazz instruments. Jazz has always been experimental, cutting-edge.

Studio trickery can get in the way. I find Miles Davis’s studio electric albums, with their splices and cross-fades, less satisfying than his unedited and live cuts from the same period--there’s a momentum to Agharta that Jack Johnson only hints at. Most of Jason Moran’s Modernistic is even better than “Planet Rock,” its only overdubbed cut, and I’d rather hear Sidney Bechet’s small-group sides or Bill Evans’s piano trio over their overdubbed work any day.

But as long as musicians ensure that studio trickery doesn’t interfere with the thrill that great improvising can create, let them use as much studio trickery as they want. Not all, but the majority of the most exciting jazz records of the last decade have been impeccably produced studio products, records that sound in some ways like rock records. Even if presenting something fresh and new occasionally smacks of inauthenticity, its rewards can be irresistible.

- Yuval

What the Folk Are You Singing About?

That's the teaser for a piece we wrote entitled "Segregation Blues" which appeared in today's issue of The Guardian. The arts editor asked us to write a piece about "why folk music is a racist con," and we were happy to oblige him. Check it out.

- Hugh and Yuval

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