I think we're all poseurs on this bus

Here's a well-written review of what sounds like a pretty interesting book by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor called Faking It.

I haven't read the book yet, but it seems like they're pointing to the inherent pointlessness of dividing musical acts into authentic and inauthentic. And it feels kind of liberating to think of all pop music as essentially contrived, and therefore it becomes a matter not of judging realness, but of examining all kinds of other aspects of the music. After all, authenticity has this monolithic quality based on the fact of its indefinability-- most often it's cited by people as something you "feel," or as something a performer either has or doesn't. Well, that's not very helpful, now is it?

It seems definitely true that certain bands are going to get at you in a way that feels profound and for which you have no explanation, but that doesn't mean they're any more authentic than a band that doesn't do that to you. We're all conglomerates of influence and experience, and it seems to be, by my own internal reckoning, that a band that strikes me in that peculiar way falls in a kind of sweet spot between so familiar to my taste that they don't challenge me, and so outside of my familiarity that they don't connect with the things that I've previously found meaning in.

One thing that always perplexes me a bit is when people say they like a band because it's not like anything they've ever heard before. I mean, I can appreciate the feeling of discovery, but in my experience, the things I've heard before (and heard a lot), I've heard because I liked them. That is, I've chosen to delve into and listen to things because they reverberated in some way with me, and things I haven't gotten into, well, they've left me cold. I can always appreciate it when a band does things differently enough that I begin to reconsider things I've previously ignored (viz. Jay-Z w/r/t mainstream hip-hop or Boris w/r/t metal), but those artists are gateway artists precisely because there are aspects to them which connect to what I know. Boris bring elements of experimental music into metal, which everyone acknowledges, but their recordings also have a garage-y quality which is quite different from most of the metal that I've heard in passing. The drums often sound more like the Meters in tonal quality-- they have a kind of boxy, woodiness to them that sounds more Motown than Motorhead. And then seeing them live totally sold me. There was very little of the posturing I associate with metal; the whole thing was very zen and calm, despite being overwhelmingly loud. Of course, I also appreciate a band like Zebulon Pike for embracing those very inauthenticities w/r/t their album art and stage presence.

Sigh. I guess we're back to discussing realness. But at least we're discussing it, rather than just haphazardly attributing it to stuff we like.