FAKING IT

Nothing is more prized, or fetishized, in popular music than the idea of authenticity - the notion that honest, raw, pure self-expression is the thing that matters. It killed Kurt Cobain and Sid Vicious. Being fake, or the feeling that an artist is getting that way, can be a fate as bad as death. This book is about that cult. It takes a series of famously authentic pieces of music, or musicians, and systematically demythologizes them.

The book opens with the moment when Kurt Cobain performed In the Pines, a death-haunted song made famous by Leadbelly, the black ex-convict who was a touchstone of primeval folk authenticity in the ´30s and ´40s. But Leadbelly had been carefully manipulated, marketed by the famous blues and folk collectors John and Alan Lomax, who forced him to perform in prison clothes and wouldn´t let him sing the more sophisticated (or popular) material that really attracted him.

The authors then explore the history of the blues, and show how white enthusiasts made a religion out of raw simplicity and perceived country purity, in the process marginalizing many of the most interesting black blues musicians, not to speak of jazz artists: in the ´60s and ´70s it was hip to be obsessed with John Lee Hooker and his two chord boogie but not with Skip James, still less Duke Ellington. They discuss the rise and rise of autobiographical song, and the tide of confessionalism, which they trace back to a song called TB Blues by the yodelling country musician Jimmie Rodgers. They write about the artifice of Elvis Presley, bubblegum pop and the Monkees, and the sugar songwriters Neil Young and Donna Summer and disco, punk and world music and electronica.

This is a provocative and important book about the least-examined assumptions in popular culture.