From the weekend, an excellent episode of "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio. The topic was Authenticity, and starting about about 12 minutes in, host Steve Paulson interviews Yuval Taylor, co-author of Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music. Taylor notes that authenticity is an over-riding value for some genres of music, such as folk, while others have complex layers of artifice and authenticity, such as punk rock. While few people ever debated authenticity in disco.
By necessity perhaps, Yuval speaks of authenticity as a kind of construct or academic concept rather than its simpler meaning, which to me implies honesty of communicative and artistic intent in the performer. Admittedly that's impossible to measure and it has something complex to do with ambition for commercial success, since musicians need to market themselves at some level. There's a great discussion of Leadbelly, who was a true folk artist who was managed by Alan Lomax into some rather phony situations designed, ironically, to showcase his authenticity. In modern pop music, you can't be a vessel of artistic purity and survive. That said, I don't think there's anything disturbingly phony about U2 or Prince or Madonna, even though each manipulates images and seeks wider audiences. Whereas an example of inauthenticity in popular music for me might be my favorite whipping boys Rascal Flatts, who seem to make every esthetic and commercial decision to maximize their mindshare among a target demographic. They would, I'm sure, take issue with that, as would their fans.
I thought it interesting that the topic came up the same weekend that Nashville was hosting the CMA Music Festival downtown and Bonnaroo a few miles down the highway. It caused me to investigate my long-standing belief or bias that Bonnaroo's musical ethos is more authentic than the CMA's. That's based on musicological observations, such as the degree to which Bonnaroo performers are free to embellish on and adapt their songs in every performance, while the CMA crowd largely prefers performances that hew closely to the recorded versions, highlighted perhaps by a predictable array of crowd-rousing techniques of the 'put-your-hands-in-the-air' variety. There is also ample evidence that CMA country music is heavily leveraged to be part of a larger lifestyle marketing complex that includes carefully selected mass market fast foods, household cleaners, beverages, soap opera stars, sports figures and the like. Bonnaroo is obviously not free of sponsorships or lifestyle branding (though it used to be nearly so) but on balance, I'm more impressed by Bonnaroo in its fealty to the music and the artists who make it. It clearly represents a wider range of sound, including avant-garde ideas that would never make it on a mainstream country album, let alone a Fan Fair stage.
This is an over-simplified start to a very complex and interesting debate that could be and I'm sure has been the subject of PhD dissertations. I raise it because I've agonized for years about the degree to which country music, ostensibly a music rooted in authentic communication between artist and fan, has been interfered with by a variety of interests far more interested in separating Joe Six Pack and family from their consumer dollars than any song, sound or style that would one day be enshrined in the Hall of Fame. While from its inception, Bonnaroo has felt to me like a showcase for music itself, for people who live and breathe music and who are jazzed by witnessing its creation in real time, versus that less-than-satisfying group swoon over a handsome guy or pretty girl singing a song the same way for the thousandth time.
