| The Real Deal
With the music festival season in full swing,
Australia is playing host to a vast array of performers including
veterans and legends like Buddy Guy, Maceo Parker, John Hammond
and Mavis Staples amongst others.
But two performers who can’t really be described as either,
in spite of their mature years, neither recorded until they were
over 40, have stepped into the public arena late in life.
Sharon Jones has been strutting her soulful stuff
on stages all over Australia, including five sold-out venues in
Melbourne and performing at three festivals; last year she was here
as part of Lou Reed’s Berlin live show, belting out a dynamic
version of Sweet Jane. Quite an achievement for someone who did
not record her first album until 2002 at the tender age of 46, as
a result of a chance meeting with her backing band The Daptones
in 1996 whilst working as a prison corrections officer, giving her
the opportunity to record for the first time and give up a lifetime
of non-musical jobs.
Two more albums since and her high energy no-frills all-thrills
live performance and personality-plus persona have cemented her
late-life musical career with audiences all over the world.
Looking and sounding like Jack White’s grandfather,
Seasick Steve did not record until he was in his 60s. Homeless at
14 and then a life of train-hopping, jail-birding, cowboy-ing, carnival-working,
migrant farm-picking, hobo-ing, living in over 50 houses, pal-ing
up with Kurt Cobain and eventually recording in mono in his kitchen.
He is a larger-than-life character who did not receive public acclaim
until appearing on Jools Holland’s TV programme in 2006. Performing
on a three and one string guitar and his “Mississippi Drum
Machine”, a small carpeted box that he stomps his beat on,
he batters out a primitive free-form version of the blues, telling
musical tales of his colourful and varied life.
Now Sharon and Steve both find themselves in Australia
playing to audiences half their age receiving long overdue attention
for their life-long apprenticeships.
So what is happening here? Perhaps there is an
audience fed up with the synthetic nature of much of modern music
and in pursuit of an authenticity un-polluted by hyperbole and image,
the desire to relate to performers who have lived a “real”
life rather than an artificial life within the music industry. Outsiders
who have only come inside by chance rather than calculation and
enjoy it all the more.
That authenticity or the lack of it is the theme
of Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity In Popular Music by Hugh
Barker and Yuval Taylor, a very interesting analysis that spears
some sacred cows and looks at music history in a new way. They believe
that in-authenticity is the defining nature of popular music and
that notions of authenticity have been manufactured and marketed,
as a matter of fact they argue that the more performers try to “keep
it real” the more artificial they become. Everything from
black-and-white minstrel shows, the “primitive” blues
of the South, and The Monkees, to Neil Young’s Tonight’s
The Night as the most “honest” record and Kurt Cobain’s
suicide note denouncing his own “fakery” are all grist
for their mill.
Two stories in particular caught my interest.
They argue that Leadbelly was a master of faking it, a sophisticated
cosmopolitan musician who was pressured to play a more limited repertoire
of “negro” music and even wear convict clothing, often
singing songs written by white men with black inflections. The strongest
argument of Faking It is for the endless "miscegenation"
of music. Great popular music is always a collage of cultures, while
the quest for authenticity all too often functions as a means of
policing racial boundaries. Another case was Mississippi John Hurt
who was in fact was not from the Mississippi delta, his name was
amended by his record company for marketing purposes. Originally
he played a mixture of Tin Pan Alley tunes and ragtime guitar with
a white fiddle player but that was seen as problematic, the reverse
of the situation where Jimmie Rodgers who was a white blues player
was told to play folk and country because it was more saleable for
a white man. For Southern whites, meanwhile, “authenticity”
consisted of fiddle tunes, Appalachian ballads and square-dance
songs. And so, after one recording session, John Hurt went back
to his house in Avalon, Missouri. He stayed there until 1963, when
two young white men found him and hauled him off to help lead the
blues revival. That he didn’t think of himself as a bluesman
seemed not to matter.
The authors argue persuasively that the authenticity
commonly ascribed to these forms of so-called roots music is, as
often as not, artificial in that the distinctions drawn between
these musical categories distort both the experience of the musicians
who played the music and the history of the songs assigned to one
category or another. Considerations of authenticity distort the
music and constrain the musicians in the world music genre (Ry Cooder,
Paul Simon and the Buena Vista Social Club) and how authenticity
plays out in genres that embrace artifice such as a bubblegum pop
(The Monkees), dance/electronica (Kraftwerk) and early rock (Elvis
Presley).
It’s a complex and fascinating argument
that will no doubt confront and confound many readers of this magazine
and lead to some heated discussions, but the book’s vitality
and iconoclastic attitude is stimulating in the way that it makes
us question our assumptions and music itself.
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