Everything Is Plastic – The Corrupting Ideal of Authenticity In Music

 

By Scott Creney

Before we go any further, let’s be clear on something. ALL music is fake. That’s why they call it a performance; that’s why they call it an act. The act of performing a song in front of people is a profoundly strange and unnatural thing. It is ALWAYS pretentious. There is ALWAYS some degree of artificiality to it. People don’t normally get up in front of a bunch of strangers and express themselves melodically. It is, whether the artist is aware of it or not, an act of creation that — while it may share some, or no, similarities with the artist — is not the same thing as the person doing the creating.

This is something we probably don’t think about often enough.

Now, I will grant you that there are different levels of reality — though sincerity is probably a better word — within any given performance. Some performers put more of their ‘self’ into their work. But to dismiss a musician for being ‘fake’ or ‘inauthentic’ is similar to not liking Harry Potter because magic doesn’t actually exist. No shit. It is art, and all art is a performance. It is an artifice. It is artificial. Just ask Art Garfunkel.

We can question how sincere a performer is being in a given moment, but to accuse them of being insincere — and think that it actually means something, to think that it is some kind of damning criticism — is misguided. It’s one of those things that say a lot more about the accuser than it does about the accused. If someone is singing a song that sounds like it is meant to tug on your emotional heartstrings but instead you feel nothing, that doesn’t mean they are ‘fake’ or ‘insincere’. It just means they aren’t very good at their art. Note: It probably goes without saying that your reaction is entirely subjective, and someone next to you might be weeping their eyes out at the very same song.

If I told you about a performer who radically remade their body to conform to mainstream American standards of sexiness, allowed their manager to speed up their latest single in order to make it more commercial, started getting plastic surgery as they got older, has written countless songs that bear no actual relation to his real-life experiences, and actually went back and wrote & recorded a new song after finishing their album because the manager/record company insisted that the album needed a hit and couldn’t be released the way the artist had recorded it, you’d probably think that artist had pretty much zero artistic integrity, right?

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Bruce Springsteen.

Bruce turned his scrawny 70s body into an 80s muscular behemoth. He allowed ‘Hungry Heart’ to be sped up for radio play. His plastic surgery work is unconfirmed, but obvious. He has written most of his songs about situations and feelings that he didn’t experience first-hand (just ask my Vietnam vet father), and very few songs about being a successful millionaire. He wrote ‘Dancing In The Dark’ because he was ordered to. And that’s just the information I can recall from the copy of Dave Marsh’s Boss-bio Glory Days that I found in an El Cajon thrift store back in 1995-ish (note: Marsh is married to one of Springsteen’s co-managers, so the book wasn’t exactly Albert Goldman territory). And did you know it was his manager (Jon Landau, who previously had been a critic for Rolling Stone) who gave him all those books by John Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver? The ones that influenced nearly all of his writing, post Born To Run?Again, the point isn’t to denounce Springsteen as a fake. I just want to know why he’s held up as some kind of paradigm of rock authenticity.

Or how about a guy whose record label chose his name for him because they thought it would help sell records? (Needless to say, he went along with it.)

Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis Costello.

Next I’m going to tell you about an artist who engineered their own path to success. They got their record deal by approaching the head of the record company directly, with no management. At every step of their superstar career, they’ve chosen their own producer, wrote — or chosen to sing — songs that reflect their own personal experiences, and created the records and performances that they wanted to make. In return, they’ve been denounced as a talentless media creation for most of their lives.