Authenticity Revisited: The Rock Critic and the Changing Real

Abstract

The idea of “authenticity”—sometimes verbalized in terms like “integrity,” “honesty,” “sincerity,” “credibility,” “genuineness,” and “truthfulness”—is central not only in writings on (pop, rock, and classical) musical value and significance, but also in recurring debates about the role of music journalism. More like a rollercoaster than a rolling stone, the concept seems to spin around its own axis, still claiming its usefulness, as if untouched by increasing reflexivity and critical disclaim. How can that be? How can pop or rock music be authentic in the first place? How are such claims legitimated? Has this highly charged, but slippery, term anything to offer in a contemporary critical perspective? Based on the authors’ previous study of rock criticism as a cultural field (Lindberg et al. 2005), this article argues that when dealing with “authenticity,” one should be prepared to meet a number of quite differing ideas and concepts.

Notes

^[1] Critique of mass society was a staple at this time. Modern life, as represented, for instance, in writings by the Beat Generation, in Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road (1959), Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), or Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964), was felt to have lost communal values as well as individual freedom, and become corrupted by routine, conformity pressure, and mindless mass entertainment. A vital part of the criticism of this state of affairs came from a folk music culture which rock assimilated through a series of symbolic displacements: as “adults became the foremost representatives of an alienating mass society, casting youth as ‘other’, rock was able to claim affinities with the cultures of the disempowered despite the fact that it sprang from within the mainstream and was exclusively youth-oriented” (Keightley 124).

^[2] We would like to thank Gestur Guðmundsson and Morten Michelsen for their significant contribution to this project, and hence also for some of the ideas developed here.

^[3] Dylan's early 1960s girlfriend Suze Rotolo, known from the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (Columbia, 1963), brings Foucault to mind as she states that “Dylan's public, his fans and followers, create him in their own image. They expect him to be who they interpret him to be. The very mention of his name invokes the myth and unleashes an insurmountable amount of minutiae about the meaning of every word he ever uttered, wrote, or sang” (2).

^[4] That rock matters was the claim both of the American clergy of critics that crystallized during the 1960s and of Chris Welch, when he started to report on the new British beat (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, etc.) for Melody Maker in 1964. Welch would interview musicians in order to “understand what a musician or band is after” and interpret and mediate their “intentions” to the readers (personal interview).

^[5] See, for example, Coleman's article “Just What Is R&B?”

^[6] In 1963, revival-jazz musician Chris Barber, who was also co-founder of the Marquee in London (and initiator of the British skiffle scene with Ken Colyer), had fired the Rolling Stones from their engagement at the club “because they did not play authentic blues” (Barber).

^[7] Much of the basis for such distinctions was prevalent already in Swiss conductor Ernst-Alexandre Ansermet's enthusiastic review of Sidney Bechet and the Southern Syncopated Orchestra's performance in London in 1919. This article appeared in Revue Romande in 1919, and later in the French journal Jazz Hot (and is reprinted in Gottlieb 741–46).

^[8] Chris Welch, for instance, claimed to be influenced by the work of his older jazz-critic colleague Max Jones (1920–93) at Melody Maker. Welch would typically apply a “jazz critics’ point of departure” by commenting on individual performances, such as a bass player's or drummer's musical competence (personal interview).

^[9] See, for example, Charters; Oliver; Moses Asch's Folkways Records project. Alan Lomax also wrote reviews in Melody Maker in the 1950s.

^[10] The folkloric constructions of “authenticity” have been under heavy attack in recent deconstructivist readings; Filene characterizes the workings of the Lomaxes as a “cult of authenticity” (47–133) and many authors connect interest in “black music” to “white desire” (Hamilton). While the primitivist aspects of the folkloric gaze seem highly problematic, the deconstruction of such discourse at times appears simplistic or anachronistic, in the sense that it seems to render aesthetic experience (or musical reasons why certain artists were “authenticated”) irrelevant.

^[11] A problem with this criticism is that it is far from self-evident what the term “Romanticism” implies. As Monroe Beardsley writes in his classic study of aesthetics: “The historian who seeks to identify a Romantic aesthetics, or at least some leading principles, finds that he is drawn, willy-nilly, into a congeries of general propositions about practically everything under the sun, and above it” (245).

^[12] When 16-year-old Paul Williams founded Crawdaddy! in 1966, he proclaimed that “the specialty of the magazine is intelligent writing about pop music” (2).

^[13] Nevertheless, this is a tricky business. Most fans are well aware that Dylan mythologized his background, narrated stories, and told effective lies about his personal career, but they may still believe that his music holds a lot of truth; we also know that not only the Rolling Stones but their manager Andrew Loog Oldham strongly contributed to the building of their rock star mythology; fans are equally aware of Malcolm McLaren's impacting marketing talents with the Sex Pistols; and so on.

^[14] Neil Young “My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue),” Rust Never Sleeps (Reprise 1979).

^[15] See, for example, Reynolds and Press.

^[16] Significantly, of the major American rock magazines it was Creem, committed to a pop aesthetic and featuring Lester Bangs as its star critic, that was best received in the UK.

^[17] The question of the artist simply “being” himself is complicated insofar as the act, even the pose, might very well take on its own reality. It seems apparent that Bowie's staging as his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, also feeds back into our (as well as Bowie's own?) idea of who Bowie is: that is, someone who challenges the everyday codes both of the staged rock star and, in particular, the gendered codes of male masculinity (anno 1972).

^[18] For someone who grew up in the 1970s, for example, it might be difficult to listen back to the voices of Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins of early Genesis recordings, since the amount of airplay and the overexposure of the familiarity of their voices have taken a complete hold on the listening experience. And this might hold true for a number of artists.

^[19] This term is discussed in more detail by Morson and Emerson (15–62), and is central to Bakhtin's understanding of the self and communicative processes.

^[20] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, quoted in Zanes (60).

^[21] Crouch has commented profusely on gangsta rap in his column in New York's Daily News and elsewhere (claiming it promotes violence and degrading attitudes toward women) and also on the racial aspects of jazz criticism and the discourse of “authenticity” more generally.