KEEPING IT REAL

    I just came across this Onion AV Club essay by Marah Eakin about the TV show The Adventures of Pete and Pete.  There's a couple of lines I'd like to highlight:

"[Nostalgia] puts this hazy veil over everything in the past, and all the time we spend thinking about those things, we're not making new things, pushing art and culture forward."

"Watching old DVDs to try and recapture the feeling you once had the first time you saw something might be fun, but it can be a little pointless, too... Pete’s lesson—and our lesson—from this show is not just 'find a song and love it,' but rather, 'if you love something, go make something someone else can love.'”

     This reminded me so much of a phenomenon in music: the futility and artistic bankruptcy of trying to emulate sincerity and passion simply by copying the style of a musician who had it.
    And that's happening in a lot of indie music right now.
    With the collapse of the major music industry and the commercial explosion of what I'll loosely call "indie," it's gotten very difficult to tell what is authentic and "real."  Consequently, there's an outbreak of musicians who imitate latter day paragons of realness — in particular, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen.  A little artistic Xeroxing is typical of the nascent artist — look how derivative even the early Stones, Dylan, and Beatles were — but this is something past that.
    The imitators are missing the point by a mile.   Springsteen and Young (I refuse to call them Bruce and Neil; I don't delude myself that I know them personally just because I think I understand their music) didn't get over because they imitated anybody.  They got over because they were being themselves without compromise and they were engaging with the present, not trying to recreate some overly hallowed moment 40 years prior.
     Musicians, find your own self.  Engage this moment.  Because Jimmy Fallon does a better Neil Young impression than you ever will.

Comments

[santiago]

I do agree a lot

but I can't help thinking that the problem for an artist is not trying to be someone else but succeeding to being someone else

Maybe the way you fail to be someone else may lead you to something new? Maybe it can lead you to your own self?
(let's say Kurt Cobain trying to rip off the Pixies, Bob Dylan trying to be Woody Guthrie, or the Vaselines trying to be a rock band)

I also remember Francis Ford Coppola saying something like "steal but only steal to the best [...] it's a way to make them immortal"
(I know, this statement might only apply to movies and not to music... ^_^)

Great post anyway, makes me think a lot

Cheers

[John Albin]

Is "authenticity" within the world of commercial music even possible? That said, it's easy to forget that most of the people we encounter at the beginning of their careers are kids trying on adult personae one at a time until they find one that fits. At a few places and times in the history of popular music there have been these outbursts of astounding creativity from people who were exceptionally fully-formed at 20 years old. But it's unrealistic to treat that as a standard and expectation. When it happens, celebrate it, then go back to watching more modest and normal talents grow.

[Michael Azerrad]

Since we all live in a commercial world, artist and non-artist alike, one would have to ask whether authenticity is possible for anyone. And it is. So it's possible for commercial artists too.
And I'm not talking about kids who are 20 years old. Have you ever heard an Iron and Wine album?

[John Albin]

The point I'm trying to get to with respect to commerciality precluding "authenticity" has to do with the way people are captured and groomed by the music biz. I don't think selling records makes one inauthentic, but I think the music biz (even in its degraded and debased current incarnation) so quickly sweeps people up into image manufacture that by the time fairly out-of-it people like me notice a newish performer, odds are that performer's persona has been processed to at least some extent. If I'm hearing someone in Starbucks, someone else has already told that person what to wear and what to sing.

I hadn't heard Iron and Wine before, but am listening now. Do you see them as imitating someone else's "sincerity"? I hear influences and associations, but I can't really tell whether this is putting on someone else's clothes ...

[Michael Azerrad]

I guess you'd have to spend more time with contemporary indie music to really be able to tell who's putting on someone else's clothes. Just as I would have to spend more time with contemporary blues in order to figure out who's just copping Muddy Waters.

[John Albin]

You have no need to fear immersing yourself in the blues. Here's a handy-dandy checklist re: blues pseudo-authenticity (McKinley Morganfield variety). Any two constitute a positive diagnosis

_ Fedora
_ Wayfarers
_ Under age 70 and using either "mojo" or "hoochie coochie" in reference to self
_ Playing any "reliced" version of any Fender instrument.

An comparable indie pseudo bruce-o-meter would be much appreciated.