Faking It: A Dissection of Authenticity in Popular Music

Faking It: the Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), takes aim at the sacred cows of “authenticity” that permeate music criticism and marketing. The authors argue that romanticized ideas about suffering, addiction, and technical rawness often do more to constrain creativity than foster it, ultimately narrowing the scope of the popular music canon.

Building their case on a survey of major pop genres—including grunge, folk-blues, disco, punk and post-punk, the singer-songwriter tradition, world music, and recent electronica-roots hybrids like the work of American composer Moby—Barker and Taylor dissect a term that is too often lazily thrown around. Authenticity supposedly means honest, unvarnished self-expression and a kinship with everyday life, especially the lives of outsiders, the working class, and the urban disenfranchised. Yet the authors reveal how loaded this concept really is. They are not afraid to call out the inverted racism and patronizing attitudes that lurk within it. Early folk music archivists such as Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson, despite their invaluable work preserving the country blues and folk songs that laid the groundwork for rock, held thoroughly unreconstructed views that sometimes fetishized black spontaneity, sexuality, and expression.

Western popular music grew out of a blend of folk, blues, “stomps,” and jazz thriving in the US South. In cheap dance halls, African Americans gave voice to the twentieth century even while they were denied basic rights. High-minded observers initially dismissed this music as uncouth and raucous, and feared its popularity would incite “miscegenation.” Over time, as African Americans fought for social progress, some eschewed the visible poverty that had marked their lives. But new threats kept appearing—the many guises of “The Man”—so many remained justifiably suspicious. The blues artist Leadbelly, for instance, had to change from suit and tie into prisoner’s overalls, trade his electric guitar for an acoustic, and perform simpler material than he liked, all to satisfy white left-leaning audiences looking for an “authentic” blues aesthetic.

The authors also critique “world music,” suggesting that this category became narrow because of the very same reverence for novelty and purity. This sweeping judgment may be too simple for such a vast field. The musicians themselves may not provoke the commercial compromises they face—and for every overhyped cliché, there is another genuinely uncompromising artist. Barker and Taylor cite Malian singer Salif Keita, whose jazz-fusion leanings were played down by his record company to emphasize his return to “rural” African sounds. An alternative reading is that Keita was marketed to Western listeners in a way that might have reached fans of keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s world-jazz experiments. The attempt failed; Keita then went back to making music he preferred. The authors argue that commercial pressures ignore the many geographic and electronic influences that actively reach developing nations today. Perhaps large music corporations do ignore this reality, but with the Internet and easier production (creating CDs or casual digital releases rather than bulky vinyl), locally produced material flourishes and is easily accessible. Creative musicians constantly combine what they hear into fresh forms, just as creative artists everywhere have always done. Three decades of the WOMAD festival and the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards have expanded audience perceptions well beyond what Barker and Taylor’s cynicism might acknowledge.

Another example of bias in this polemic appears in its handling of the Buena Vista Social Club and Cuban music. Cuban artists explore a strikingly diverse range of regional styles and modern forms. Yet the only music this book presents is a re-recording of 1930s dance material, and the text leaves the impression that this is all that matters. In truth, Latin music in every style is widely popular, and Western tastes for these sounds are varied, discerning, and sophisticated, whether the buyer is a listener or a dancer. What the authors probably mean is that mainstream North American capitalist entertainment companies were once quite conservative, as were many non-urban consumers. Those big companies have struggled to adjust to today’s much more independent listeners. Latin and Hispanic musicians regularly sell millions of records and concert tickets in the United States—and they are not all selling what the authors dismiss as “Starbucks salsa.”

A much sharper target for the authenticity critique is the widespread expectation that an artist must be afflicted. Addiction-chic—using heroin, cocaine, or alcohol as validation—lets mediocre artists excuse poor results and inflate their credibility. Yet artists in other media regularly maintain hedonistic lives without assuming that outward glamour signals special insight. In popular music, mental illness is elevated into profound vision: Syd Barrett’s drug-induced psychosis, Ian Curtis’s suicidal depression with Joy Division, or exaltation such as Paul Morley’s postmodern declaration in the New Musical Express that “Ian Curtis died for you.” Barker and Taylor dig through Nirvana’s mythologized remains and find that Kurt Cobain’s home and material circumstances were far less desperate than his public narrative suggested. In popular music, image and myth creation often weigh more heavily than musical skill itself — and sadness seems to sell far better than being happy or balanced.

Overvaluing authenticity means romanticism saturates criticism so that emotional impact can trump genuine competence. Wynton Marsalis has pointed out that some quarters actively dismiss skill and technique in jazz, a problem that echoes sentimentalized primitivism. Black musicians remain sensitive to both hang-ups because the overtones of inverted racism have not dissipated. Marsalis reminds listeners that creators sometimes behave more like artisans than geniuses, and in our time “art” has become a lifestyle rather than a specific set of accomplishments. Yet Marsalis is widely heard—not silenced by pressure—and the art itself survives: listeners simply ignore third-rate critics and their new, short list of major figures. Faking it may merely describe one rather crude marketing phrase from an era that tried harder to paint authenticity-than-create anything authentic, and quite legitimately remains as passé and crass as does the over-commodification of suffering.

A closing judgment: Faking It is primarily a critique of an increasingly irrelevant North American mainstream and the cynical biases that do not reflect true global musical reality. Many musicians, listeners, and educators have already moved on.