CONSTRUCTING AUTHENTICITY IN ROCK
Allan Moore
Rock discourse is rife with discussion of a quality which has come to be identified as 'authenticity'. Indeed, the very distinction between 'pop' and 'rock' as genres from the birth of the latter in c.1965 can be said to be founded on whether the expression of the singer is to be trusted ('rock') or not ('pop'). The distinction is thus one between what is 'authentic' and what is 'commercial'. Over the past thirty years, it has become increasingly clear that this distinction is illusory, if only because rock music requires some accommodation to commercial pressures (as represented by the record labels to which rock bands are signed) in order to reach any audience beyond their local one. Illusory or not, audiences nonetheless feel the need to ascribe authenticity to particular artists.
This brief discussion (1) takes as its starting position the refusal of two assumptions upon which the current discourse of authenticity appears founded, and which have led to countless fruitless discussions. (2) The first assumption is that authenticity is inscribed in music. The implication here is that any listener hearing the voice of Bruce Springsteen, let us say, will immediately perceive the truth of his expression. On the contrary, it appears to me that authenticity is a value which must be constructed. It is only once a particular audience has learnt to interpret the particular non-verbal sounds that Springsteen makes as indicative of his honesty, and has learnt to value that expression, that authenticity can be attributed to him. This assumption perhaps needs little attack these days.
The second assumption is more recalcitrant: it is that authenticity can be ascribed to a certain performance, and this assumption is held not only within the discipline of music. Again, however, this has led to much pointless debate about whether a particular performance can legitimately be read as authentic ('true to its origins') or not. Rather than ask what it is that is being authenticated, in this brief paper I ask who. I believe that this furnishes a more useful model for investigation of musical authenticity. Although my examples here deal exclusively with rock music, I believe the model to be employable in other fields.
British audiences (as opposed to contemporary US ones) have been apt to find Paul Weller's recent singing 'authentic'. (I have in mind such a song as 'Changingman' which appeared on the album Stanley Road.) His performances contain cues, both visual and sonic, to enable such a construction to be placed upon them. He engages the attention of his audience in the midst of performance through, for example, smiling (if somewhat reservedly). He appears to sing with his entire body, as it moves rhythmically in concert with the music he is playing. Such movement is stiff, not fluid, and may appear to be made with a little difficulty. His head is bent forward when he is not reaching for the microphone, emphasising both concentration and involvement in the very act of playing. His vocal cords are taut as he does raise his head to sing. The sound issuing contains few melodic embellishments and sounds raw, as from an excess of shouting or crying. The voice does not appear to be used as an end in itself, but as a means to expression. Knowledgeable audiences are aware of his recording procedures, whereby in the studio he creates the live performance situation as far as is possible, resorting to a minimum of overdubs and studio trickery. In short, the message Paul Weller is read as conveying to such an audience is 'this is what it is like to be me', with the inevitable difficulty that such soul-bearing can bring with it. Thus, what I term authenticity of expression (or 'first person authenticity') arises when an originator (composer, performer) succeeds in conveying the impression that his/her utterance is one of integrity, that it represents an attempt to communicate in an unmediated form with an audience.
British (and largely London-based) audiences for underground rock in the mid 1960s found Eric Clapton's playing 'authentic', an attribute which transferred to his membership of the first 'super-group' Cream. Their performances of the song 'Crossroads' provide a ready example. The song was originally written and performed by country blues artist Robert Johnson. Johnson's life has become highly mythologized, but his life as a poor, itinerant player, his idiosyncratic, rhythmically somewhat unstructured idiolect, and his early, unconvincingly explained death combined to make his music fascinating to white, urban, middle-class British players. Johnson's own playing was an early marker in the popular tradition of the rock guitar virtuoso, the player who explores his own expression through distorting the sound of the instrument to provide an analogue to his own 'tortured' soul, a manifestation brought on by existence in modernity. To a limited extent, Clapton's performances did authenticate his own self, largely through his body language, in a manner already described as first person authenticity. However, they went further. It is the appropriation of the tradition of which Johnson was a part which really provides the material to enable Clapton's construction as an authentic performer. His appropriation took place through his gradual discovery of that tradition from the playing of B.B.King, back through Freddie King and Albert King, to the country blues singers and to Johnson, and fits the pattern whereby the tracing of the origins of a practice transfers the originary power of that practice to the tracer. That aspect of Clapton's own biography was known to his audiences. This procedure is, as Richard Middleton implies (3), necessarily circular (Clapton was authenticated by his appropriation of Johnson, who was himself authenticated by his appropriation by an artist who was cared about, i.e. Clapton) since we only appropriate a tradition which seems to have a power worth acquiring. In short, the message Clapton conveyed to an audience was 'this is what it is like to be me' through 'this is what it was like to be Johnson', with all the pain that implies. Thus, what I term authenticity of execution (or 'third person authenticity') arises when a performer succeeds in conveying the impression of accurately conveying the expression of an (absent) other.
Mid 1980s audiences found the pre-Rattle and Hum performances of U2 similarly authentic. The reasoning here is, however, rather different. The question is one of cultural belonging. Those audiences' need for authenticity is best seen as a part of the Romantic bourgeois critique of industrial society which attempts to provide sanctuary from society's alienating presence. I define this as a 'centredness' (borrowing from George Allan (4)), explicitly anti-postmodern, calling attention to the experience that this cultural product offered a certainty, a cultural identity in the face of accelerating social change, in large part because it denied its own history. The crucial aspect here is U2's idiolect for (to paraphrase Lucy Green (5)), we feel affirmed by the music of those towards whose style delineations we feel positively. What enables such affirmation here? One feature is the lack of construction U2's songs appear to exhibit, particularly on The unforgettable fire and The Joshua tree. The sectional forms of rock music (verse, chorus, solo) are often replaced by a single arc (and nowhere more so that on 'With or without you'). It is as if the expression is formally unmediated. Allied to this is the uncomplicated, even simple, harmonic language (four-chord patterns, modal diatonicism, root position bass lines). Production qualities emphasise the creation of a sense of space through use of reverb, a sense which is amplified by the general sparsity of material within registral extremes, by the superimposition of fast intricate guitar work over slow moving chords, and by the iconography which emphasises bleak, uncluttered open spaces. Vocal production seems equally unmediated - the lack of hooks, the frequently recitative-like delivery and the asyllabism convey that the lyrics are made for performing, not for reading, while inarticulacy at key points implies a pre-linguistic vocality. All these factors need to be seen in the light of the 'centredness' offered to the audience by such an idiolect (6). In short, the message U2 were conveying to an audience was 'this is what (you would like it to be) like to be you'. Thus, what I term authenticity of experience (or 'second person authenticity') occurs when a performance succeeds in conveying the impression to a listener that that listener's experience of life is being validated, that the music is 'telling it like it is' for them.
The new perspective this typology offers is, I trust, self-evident. Its full explanatory power will have to await demonstration elsewhere.
(c) copyright 2000 Allan F. Moore, University of Surrey
NOTES
(1) This is part of a much larger project investigating the relationship between the typology presented here and the current state of authenticity discourse.
(2) Key moments in the debate appear in, for example, Sarah Thornton: Club cultures: music, media and subcultural capital; Cambridge: Polity (1995), Lawrence Grossberg: We gotta get out of this place; London: Routledge (1992), Sarah Rubidge: 'Does authenticity matter? The case for and against authenticity in the performing arts' in Patrick Campbell (ed.): Analysing performance; Manchester: Manchester University Press (1996), Roy Shuker: 'Authenticity' in Key concepts in popular music; London: Routledge (1998), Timothy Taylor: Global Pop: world musics, world markets; New York: Routledge (1997), Johan Fornäs: Cultural theory and late modernity; London: Sage (1995), Michael Pickering: 'The dogma of authenticity in the experience of popular music' in McGregor & White (eds.): The art of listening; Beckenham: Croom Helm (1986).
(3) Middleton, R (1990): Studying Popular Music; Buckingham: Open University Press
(4) Allan, G (1986): The importances of the past; New York: State University of New York Press
(5) Green, L (1988): Music on deaf ears; Manchester: Manchester University Press
(6) This song is explored at far greater length in Moore, AF (1998): 'U2 and the myth of authenticity in rock'; Popular Musicology 3
