The link has expired, but a couple weeks ago Jon Pareles had a review of the White Stripes in the Times that criticized them for selling authenticity despite their clearly contrived gimmick. True as far as the observation goes, but I find the criticism a little unfair. For one thing, the new album is actually quite good; gimmick or no, they actually have something fresh and urgent in their sound.
But even more, we shouldn’t take claims of ‘authenticity’ from punk, postpunk or its followers at face value. What’s appealing about rock music as a form is the ongoing tension between authenticity (that it presents an experience comparable to the person-to-person performance of popular music during pre-industrial times) and commodity form (stardom, to be sure, but also the mass reproducibility of the commodity form of the record album/single). From this perspective, calls to authenticity are actually a reaction to perceptions that something is out of balance, that industrial trends are pushing music away from the functions that subcultures want it to serve. And from this perspective, too, historical nostalgia can actually be read as desire for the person-to-person role of music performance (which is certainly what I felt seeing Spoon’s excellent performance last week here) or even desire for a better realized version of the commodity form (hence vinyl fetishism and retro-Beatlemania).
Or has this all been written before by Simon Frith somewhere?
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