Authenticity in Music
All this is tapping into a rich seam of musical meaning. I said that the Prudential commercial was all about authenticity – about being true to yourself even as you grow up and take your place in society (and buy a Prudential pension plan, of course). That is why it is based on rock music, for the idea of authenticity is built deep into our thinking about rock, into the meaning that it has for us. This goes back to the origins of rock in the blues, and specifically in the blues as they were played and sung by Black Americans in the deep South. The blues were seen as the authentic expression of an oppressed race, a music that came from the heart (or ‘soul’, as in the later music of that name), in contrast to the starched formality of the classical ‘art’ tradition – concert music and opera – that had been imported from Europe. But the idea that some music is natural, while other music is artificial, is a much older one. It is associated particularly with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the same Rousseau whose writings form part of the prehistory of the French Revolution), who criticized the artificial and contrived nature of the French music of his day; Italian music by comparison, he said, was free and natural, giving direct expression to emotion and feeling.
This idea has taken many shapes in American popular culture. A representative example, which you could almost believe to have been based on Rousseau, is an episode of ‘The Ghost of Faffner Hall’ (a feature-length spin-off from Jim Henson’s ‘The Muppet Show’) that included an encounter between Ry Cooder, the legendary blues-rock guitarist and singer, and a virtuoso violinist of the European tradition, Piginini. Despite his prodigious technique, the porcine celebrity has a fatal flaw: he can only play scales, and besides, he cannot play without a score in front of him. All this has not surprisingly brought on a sudden crisis of confidence, and it is at this point that Cooder, playing the part of a janitor, discovers Piginini cowering in a broom-cupboard.
How, Piginini asks, is he to satisfy his audience, who demand that instead of scales he plays all the ‘little black notes’ in different orders – ‘all piggley-higgley’, as he puts it; who, in a word, demand music? And so Ry Cooder gives him a lesson in playing from the heart, in letting it come naturally – in real music, that is to say, rather than the exercise of artifice. (Real music, it turns out, sounds remarkably like the blues.) Against such a background, it is hardly surprising that critical commentary on popular music – I am thinking in particular of heavy metal – concentrates overwhelmingly on its visceral and countercultural qualities, glossing over the extent to which it borrows from the classical art tradition. (Heavy metal guitarists like Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads have been heavily influenced by baroque composers such as Vivaldi and Johann Sebastian Bach, and such influences go back at least as far as Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer – not to mention Procul Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’.) But the idea of authenticity in popular music does not revolve just around the opposition with ‘art’ music. It has a directly ethical side, which derives largely from the commercialization of the blues – or to be more precise, its urban derivative, rhythm ’n’ blues – in the 1950s and 1960s. These were the years when for the first time the American recording and broadcasting companies saw the potential for marketing Black music to White audiences. Instead of simply marketing the recordings of the Black artists themselves, however, they had the songs re-recorded by White musicians. Rock ’n’ roll was in effect the White version of rhythm ’n’ blues (and the outstanding example was, of course, the ‘King of Rock’, Elvis Presley).
By ‘covering’ the songs, as such re-recording was known, the recording and broadcasting companies avoided paying royalties to the original artists. As the Black rights movement gained momentum, a scandal developed over this, and the whole idea of the cover version became disreputable. As a result the development of rock music, and particularly of progressive rock, became closely associated with the idea that there was something dishonest about playing music that wasn’t your own, something that went beyond questions of whether or not you had paid your copyright dues: bands were expected to write their own music and develop their own style. And above all, they were expected to come together naturally, rather than being put together by the entrepreneurs of the music business. Rock aficionados of the mid-1960s were disgusted at the success of The Monkees, an American group (modelled rather too transparently on the Beatles) which was effectively invented, and heavily promoted, by NBC-TV; they were seen as a synthetic band, an artificial construction, and thus a transgression against the very principle of authenticity.
And the same system of values remains broadly intact today. Popular music critics generally ignore the ‘look-alike’ bands whose aim is to mimic the sound and look of the great bands of the past, rather than developing a style of their own. They are suspicious, at best, of the Spice Girls, whose meteoric rise to fame in the mid-1990s showed how it is possible to manufacture success in popular music provided you have the right formula. And in a famous case, Milli Vanilli were stripped of their 1990 Gramophone award for Best New Act when it came to light that they did not actually perform any of the music on their records – a perverse judgement, arguably, in view of the extent to which modern studio technology has rendered the very concept of ‘performance’ problematic, at least as it has been traditionally understood. But something more complex is at work here than an anachronistic belief that music should be naturally rather than artificially produced, the product of personal sincerity rather than industry acumen.
When the Pet Shop Boys first toured in the late 1980s, by which time their recordings had already brought them international success, their staged performances made it very clear that they could not re-create the sound of their studio recordings. What is more, they were up front about it; Neil Tennant, their lead singer, told Rolling Stone magazine, ‘I quite like proving we can’t cut it live’. And he added: ‘We’re a pop group, not a rock ’n’ roll group.’ Now what is particularly telling about this last comment is that it is generally rock musicians who draw the distinction between themselves and pop musicians, and they do so as a means of disparagement. Expressed a bit crudely (but then it is a bit crude), the thinking goes like this. Rock musicians perform live, create their own music, and forge their own identities; in short, they control their own destinies. Pop musicians, by contrast, are the puppets of the music business, cynically or naïvely pandering to popular tastes, and performing music composed and arranged by others; they lack authenticity, and as such they come at the bottom of the hierarchy of musicianship. To put it another way, the hierarchy of musicianship elevates the originators of music – the authors, if you like – above those whose role is merely one of reproduction, in other words, the performers.
With the reissue of ‘rock masterpieces’ on CD in the late 1980s and early 1990s (predominantly to thirty- and forty-somethings whose original vinyl recordings had long since worn out), a new strain of critical writing came into being, the aim of which was to justify the masterwork status of the classic bands’ albums. It did this by showing how these bands did not simply reproduce existing music, but forged new styles and new compositions of their own on the basis of a unique vision shared by the band members. The music expressed this vision, not audience tastes or industry demand; the bands were genuine authors, in other words. But this kind of critical interpretation does a fair amount of violence to the facts. Relationships between the classic bands and the music industry were often problematic, but they were certainly close. And the distinction between authorship and reproduction is a very slippery one (doesn’t a performer like Madonna stamp her own identity on a song like ‘Material Girl’, make it her own, regardless of who wrote it?). In a way, it is the very difficulty of sustaining the distinction between an ‘authentic’ rock music and an ‘inauthentic’ pop music that is most revealing, because it shows how determined critics have been to draw it against the odds. But what has motivated this kind of commentary on popular music? What, to adopt a useful current term, is the ‘cultural work’ that it is intended to
accomplish? In the next text I shall provide a historical context for this kind of thinking, but first I want to show how it links with the way we think about classical music. You only have to scan the music magazines on your nearest news-stand to see how thinking about classical music centres on the idea of the ‘great’ musician, defined as an artist whose technical skill is taken for granted, but whose artistry lies in his or her (but usually his) personal vision. The record companies’ advertisements do not in general sell Beethoven or Mahler as such; like motor manufacturers (whose commercials are all about personal style because their products are practically indistinguishable), the record companies are primarily engaged in brand marketing. So what they sell is the interpretive vision of the exceptional, charismatic performer: Pollini’s interpretation of Beethoven, or Rattle’s interpretation of Mahler. In other words performers are marketed as stars, just as in pop music – and indeed some of the most striking examples come from classical artists who have broken into the pop market.
In this way, the classical music industry markets the great interpreters in their role of originators, or ‘authors’, rather than mere reproducers of music, and so
upholds the same values of authenticity that are found in popular music. But it is in books on classical music that the distinction between authors and reproducers is to be found in its most literal form. For the most part, they refer to ‘music’ but are actually about composers and their works; if you look in the two capacious volumes of the New Oxford Companion to Music, for instance, or for that matter in the Rough Guide to classical music, you will find a mass of information on even the most obscure composers, but performers are conspicuous by their absence. It is like the role of servants in Victorian society: they have to be there, but you don’t have to talk about them. (When such books do mention performers, it is as often as not in the context of a complaint at their unwarranted ‘licence’ or ‘extravagance’ in obscuring the original music through over-interpretation or gratuitous virtuosity.)
And even within the select world of the composer, the same value system operates: academic writing on music almost invariably emphasizes the innovators, the creators of tradition, the Beethovens and Schoenbergs, at the expense of the many more conservative composers who write within the framework of an established style. A value system is in place within our culture, then, which places innovation above tradition, creation above reproduction, personal expression above the market-place. In a word, music must be authentic, for otherwise it is hardly music at all.
