What are you wearing?

I'm pretty certain that performances of such material by DJ Spooky, Philip Glass, Sonic Youth, and Lou Reed will be questionable at best.

Regarding the title, we must bear in mind this apt comment. People have an all-too-unfortunate tendency to lionize performers for "authenticity" that the performers wouldn't have recognized at all. Performers nowadays thought of only as bluesmen performed with such a diversity of styles and influences that today they could only be called sellouts.

I bet it's still a cool flick for all that, though.

2: Yes, yes, ben, but what will you be wearing to the screening?

(Of course, if M/lls' inquiry was about ogged's attire at-the-present-moment, I'm sorry to have invaded their quite personal exchange.)

2: Are you arguing that DJ Spooky et al. aren't authentic enough, or that authenticity doesn't matter? Or both?

I am curious about that notion of authenticity in popular music. I wonder how far back it dates among performers themselves rather than among critics.

You certainly get it in the (British) folk movement going back quite a long way, and in jazz from the bebop period onwards.

There's the 19th century Romantic notion of authenticity but that's a bit different, I suppose.

I'm arguing (claiming) that "authenticity" was retrospectively assigned to badly misconstrued versions of figures to whom the concept was probably alien, and claiming further that I have no reason to expect that DJ Spooky et al. would be interesting interpreters of the music.

You certainly get it in the (British) folk movement going back quite a long way

Say more?

There was a fairly lengthy TV series here in the UK covering the history of the modern folk revival beginning with Cecil Sharp at the beginning of the 20th century and running right through to the likes of Richard Thompson and Bert Jansch in the 60s and people like Seth Lakeman and Eliza Carthy today..

My impression from the TV series was that there's been a long-running battle between folk purists seeking a certain authenticity and those who see the music they are making as being part of the broader spectrum of popular music. Ewan MacColl, for example, came across as a pretty interesting but also fairly judgmental and doctrinaire figure.

My impression was that this purist versus populist split dates almost as far back as the beginning of the folk movement itself. 'Course that confuses the issue slightly as a lot of the purists were keen on the idea that folk music be a living tradition, they didn't want it to ossify, but they had a fairly narrow idea of what it consituted.

The BBC stuff was:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/music/features/folk-britannia-season.shtml

I think there are some clips buried around on that page.

7: Recently I was going through the history of the electric guitar, and I listened to T-Bone Walker. It was pretty jazzy for blues, and I thought he was trying for crossover, but he was actually one of the first electric bluesmen. Chicago blues came later.

Charlie Christian played a lot in the Dakotas before he went to New York and joined Benny Goodman. I hear little country licks (probably Texas swing) here and there in his stuff. But he was one of the first be-boppers.

Authenticity is crap. Aesthetics are everything.

I've just been doing some important research. The "Kum n Go" chain's territory doesn't overlap with the "In n Out" chain's territory. They're within 415 miles of one another, though (Prescott AZ "In n Out" --> Battlement Mesa CO "Kum n Go"), so a little more expansion could give us neighboring outlets.

Yeah, insomnia.

See, everyone thought my bringing up the whole Bonnie Dobson / Tim Rose thing yesterday was just about inflating comments for the worthy Becks, but actually it was just a foreshadowing of this thread. It's still not quite relevant, but will be before the morning is out.

Dobson dropped out as a folk singer, and went on to study philosophy, and then ended up as an administrator of a philosophy department at an English university. This will not become relevant in this thread, but in one that will appear in a few days.

I thought Ogged was in Chicago? Did I miss a big move?

Since we're talking about music and film festivals, has anyone gotten to see Once? If you have any sort of soft spot for street musicians, I recommend it.

(And if you have seen it, I need opinions on whether I was reading too much into it during one scene.)

13. He isn't a lawyer, either, cerebrocrat.

A friend of mine starts calling people "Thurston Moore" when he's drunk. After that comes the wrestling challenges.

Aesthetics are everything

I want to claim some portion of the "everything" spectrum for laughter.

The authenticity discussion is fine, but the linked comment about "the old weird america" is a bit odd; the performers needn't have been trying to be unheimlich to feel unheimlich to us; in fact, I think that's the force of the phrase: America was pretty different back then.

Isn't "the old, weird America" a Burroughs line?

DJ Spooky is OMG *so* cute.

No, it's a Greil Marcus line.

I have no reason to expect that DJ Spooky et al. would be interesting interpreters of the music.

Insufficiently obscure or not enough strained bagpipe?

the performers needn't have been trying to be unheimlich to feel unheimlich to us ... America was pretty different back then.

I take that to be the point of Marcus' book of the same title. Which I liked. And America was pretty different when these performers began to be rediscovered, back in the early '60s, too. In an age of music on demand, it's probably hard for us to imagine just how unheimlich some of those records must've sounded to the white boys who were discovering them. Marcus described Really! The Country Blues, a bootleg comp of the period as:

"a relic [of the] unspeakably rare, and otherwise unhearable sounds it presented to the public. That is, it is a relic of white people who set out to discover an America created decades earlier by small groups of black people - set out to discover a real America, free of shame and lies, a place of passion, danger, and splendour, and found it. Today, of course, no right-thinking multiculturalist believes there ever was such a place."

I think that's the force of the phrase: America was pretty different back then.

This is a good explanation, but I wonder if it appeals to an intuition which can be deceptive. Yes, America was pretty different, but not as different as the sound of the music might suggest.

The question is would we be better served by listening to it as "pop music" than as "weird" music?

22 gets it right, I think. It was different, but there was (and is) significant exotification going on.

Of course it also silly to suggest that we could listen to it as pop music without it sounding strange, but that's different from hearing in it "a real America, free of shame and lies, a place of passion, danger, and splendour"

But "Today, of course, no right-thinking multiculturalist believes there ever was such a place" is also one of those multiple ironies that Marcus is too fond of, sometimes. He's cognizant of how the music was made exotic, but I don't think he believes that the search for "a real America, free of shame and lies, a place of passion, danger, and splendour" was a dishonest or disreputable one.

The question is would we be better served by listening to it as "pop music" than as "weird" music?

I think so. The concept of appreciating something as "authenticity" predominantly because you don't find it in yourself is pretty patronizing. A lot of blues fans' approach seems to be "Oh man, this blues guy is the weirdest I've heard yet, his guitar only has four strings, and he never left Alpharetta, Georgia in his whole life." Yes, but do his songs all suck? Did he write his own songs?

I have a Robert Johnson album, and it definitely sets a particular unique atmosphere in the room, but there's only a couple songs I like listening to over and over again.

I'm particularly suspicious of the "authenticity" approach to music appreciation because I keep detecting it in myself, and it keeps leading me to buy CDs I don't actually like. If you're not a bluegrass expert, all the Stanley Brothers songs sound either like the fast Stanley Brothers song or the slow Stanley Brothers song. I should have bought something by the Avett Brothers or Nickel Creek or some act less alien to me, authenticity or no.

I know nothing about the movie, but the anthology itself is wonderful, and relatively recently reissued on CD. I assume you all know that, so I'm commenting for no reason, I guess.

Er, apparently Alpharetta, Georgia is an affluent suburb of Atlanta. It sounds pretty rural and backwoodsy, though. Replace that with Petal, Mississippi.

Even in this thread, we're talking about several kinds of "authenticity." There's the purity of form that ttaM is talking about, the "true to a time and place and experience" kind, and the "alien to me" kind.

I want to sit next to you in the dark.

(Is this part of the Unfogged dating service?)

I respect the "purity of form" authenticity, as long as you don't become resentful that more people don't like what you like. I respected the Steve Buscemi character in "Ghost World" for example.

I want to sit next to you in the dark.

That warms my heart, but don't you live in the UK?

(Is this part of the Unfogged dating service?)

Full service, baby.

Ogged is so going to try the hole-in-the-bottom-of-the-popcorn-tub trick, isn't he?

Damn right. We just hope he remembers not to load it with hot butter this time.

Perhaps we should just decide that cheesy stuff is inauthentic, and leave "authentic" undefined.

The least authentic music I've ever heard was ABBA singing work songs:

"Get down, jump around, pick a bale a cotton. Get down, jump around, pick a bale a day".

It was probably a cover of something by the Kingston Trio or someone like that.

Perhaps we should just decide that cheesy stuff is inauthentic, and leave "authentic" undefined.

The least authentic music I've ever heard was ABBA singing work songs:

"Get down, jump around, pick a bale a cotton. Get down, jump around, pick a bale a day".

It was probably a cover of the Kingston Trio version, or like that.

In terms of the different layers of authenticity I think there is a difference between blues and "English and Scottish folk ballads."

Blues songs don't exist in a fixed form in quite the way that the folk ballads do. I can't think of a comparable blues equivilent to finding 17th century songs being sung, unchanged, in a Nova Scotia fishing village. I think that's why there are a number of British songwriters who are really uncomfortable calling their music "folk" -- because they want that lable to refer to something specific.

I don't think he believes that the search for "a real America, free of shame and lies, a place of passion, danger, and splendour" was a dishonest or disreputable one.

No, but I read that quote as suggesting that it would be impossible for us to undertake such a search now, with what we know, and therefore we foreclose the excitment and belief, however illusory, and the happiness and achievement that followed from that belief.

But this too is an old perception. It's somewhat analogous to the end-of-the-frontier notion, that the age of adventure is past. Except that it keeps being re-discovered, by those too ignorant to know better. There's a whole literary tradition of this, based essentially on the capacity of the young to see fresh. On the Road comes to mind.

If anyone thinks I am coming to San Francisco to sit n a darkened cinema next to a Lur with a hole in the bottom of his popcorn tub, they entirely mistake the kind of Englishman I am.

Yet, still, what is "the hole in the bottom of the popcorn tub trick". They did not teach this in my youth.

Since I seem to be the resident expert...

Buy popcorn to share with your date.
Put the popcorn in your lap.
Extract your willy from your pants and insert through bottom of popcorn bag (a popcorn tub is not recommended).
Wait for your date to reach for those delicious kernels in the bottom of the bag...

I think the movie Diner has a good dramatization of this maneuver.

Oh, nasty.

It's ok, JM, I don't think anyone actually does this.

Holy shit! Thanks, Ogged. There is a similar joke whose punchline is the girl saying "No thank you: I don't smoke." In those days, of course, masturbation was banned in cinemas, and smoking encouraged.

Oh the popcorn, she's a pretty snack
As the tub sits on my lap
Don't you want to grab a handful
As we watch Phillip Glass

In those days

In the meantime, public acceptance of the two activities has exactly switched poles.

I never heard of it before Diner, and I don't remember it works for Mickey Rourke there either, but the whole routine must have been a common urban legend. Anybody remember hearing about it before the movie came out?

39. I think that's correct. Still, the whole notion of "the old, weird America" seems to be partly that while the same search may be foreclosed, similar searches motivated by the same ideals are still open to us. (Speaking of On the Road, it's #2 on the list of top ten books young Chinese are reading these days.)

The least authentic music I've ever heard was ABBA singing work songs

That would be awesome.

41. Doesn't the salt smart?

Not if you don't have open sores.

41. Also, fingernails.

48: It does work as he intended it to-- he wins the bet he made that he could get the girl to touch his penis.

51 reminds me to mention: it can be an incredibly erotic experience to watch a young woman with pale skin and long fingernails painted black, eating french fries with lots of ketchup on them from a paper bag while riding the D train late at night. The ravenous black nails descending to pluck their prey from the bag, her serpentine tongue licking the ketchup from her fingers.

52: Yeah, but she runs out in horror. But the non-agency of women is a pretty thoroughgoing theme in that movie, culminating in the quiz of Colts knowledge and wedding to the Colts' marching song.

[Thinks] Perhaps Greil Marcus' style can be explained as a result of frightful trauma involving a penis, popcorn, and good Owsley acid at some primitive multi-media event.

I see in my mind's eye the young Greil Marcus, listening to pigpen exhorting the audience to "take your hands out of your popcorn ... take your hands out of your popcorn ... and put them into someone else's!" So he does - and - no; no. I can't go on. But ever since then, whenever he approaches coherence, his mind recoils, as once his hand did from the popcorn bag, out of which rose in the darkness of the Fillmore Auditorium a vast, winged, hooded purple dragon, shaking and spitting at him ...

after such an experience, what remained but rock criticism?

I'm super-busy on saturday, and I'm not terribly interested in seeing a movie this weekend anyway, but we really should have a bay area meetup sometime.

Ogged, the force of the comment I linked in 2 was mainly directed, I think, at the so-called "new weird america" music, which does aim at the unheimlich, and mostly sounds like a put-on. (I like Tower Recordings a lot, but I'm not sure they were ever considered really new weird. They're much different from, say, Sunburned Hand of the Man or MV & EE (though I think MV was a member of TR?) or Vibracathedral Orchestra, who aren't even American!)

I'm not terribly interested in seeing a movie this weekend

This kind of advance planning/foreknowledge of one's desires has always been mysterious to me. Do I want to see a movie on Saturday night? Ask me Saturday afternoon!

Do I want to see a movie on Saturday night? Ask me Saturday afternoon!

So why the fuck are you making plans today to watch a movie this weekend? 's what I want to know.

Ogged, the walking counterexample to both Bratman and Velleman.

This looks like a good book on authenticity in music:

http://www.newstatesman.com/200704160044

Well, I know that I don't want to see a movie Saturday night (I'm running a 150-person 7 hour puzzle extravaganza that day), monday is a bit less clear. But I have enough things that I've been putting off due to the puzzles that I'd probably better do those things rather than sit in the dark.

The article linked in 62 is interesting, but not completely convincing.

Two thoughts, first that it seems obvious to say that what makes one performer better than another is talent, not "authenticity" but at the same time the ability to communicate a believable persona is an important talent in performance.

Secondly, it's one thing to say that all pop music is inauthentic but not all music is pop music. I've had an ongoing disucssion with a sailor friend of mine about sea shanties. He claims that part of the essence of a sea shantie is that the environment of singing a work song on board a ship constains the performance. For example, the songs have to be shouted as much as sung to be heard over the wind and the noise of the boat. He's frustrated that every recorded sea shanty that he's heard is sung as it would be on a stage, not as it would be on a boat.

I'm sure he would say that there's something more "authentic" about sea shanties shouted over the wind than one performed, however spiritedly, at a festival.

Couldn't he just say that the ones that are sung, not shouted, are being performed wrong? There are canons of performance for sea shanties, and if you're singing one all sweet and mellifluous, you aren't adhering to them. Authenticity needn't enter into it.

Right, and the bale-of-cotton songs should be sung only while heaving cotton bales (take that, ABBA!), and the hog-castrating songs should have real squealing hogs in the background.

66: Ol' Blind Skinny Puppy presents America's folkways.

Reading 65 and 66 makes me realize that in the back of my head I was thinking that one could establish a grounding for "authenticity" in certain genres. But, as any philosopher will tell you, there are no non-arbitrary criteria. I was arguing that the requirement that sea shanties be loud enough to be heard over the wind and not use instruments that are sensitive to dampness seems like a non-arbitrary constraint.

But is it any less arbitrary than the fact that three-minute pop song was determined by the length of one side of a 78? (I think it is, because I think there's a category difference between constaints on live performances and constraints on the recording medium -- but the difference isn't as clear as I would hope).

So I'll fall back to my comment that it is a talent in performance to be able to artfully communicate a persona.

I own the entire "Anthology", but have never been able to listen to it straight through...a lot of tracks come from the old can't-carry-a-tune America. There is some great stuff on there though. Plus it led to the whole Mississippi John Hurt revival, which is one of the great stories in music.

Anyway, I'd be interested in this movie, and I'll even volunteer to sit next to Ogged, though I'm not a nubile young swimming instructor. Maybe Saturday, but that often ends up being being poker night. Monday should be good though.

If this doesn't end up coming off, though, I'd definitely be up for a meetup, if the in-crowd around here ever decides to put one together.

Authenticity is the ability to just be your very own funky self. Abba is authentic, Joan Baez is not. The Rolling Stones are more authentic than Keb' Mo'. It's mysterious but unmistakeable.

I, too, will be unavailable this weekend for movie festival or other suchlike shenanigans, but would also endorse the idea of a Bay Area (a/k/a San Francisco) meetup.

45 not 78. Kids today.

I am willing to conceded that ABBA did things never done before, and which will never be done again. Calling it "authenticity" is a stretch.

...Skinny Puppy...

...San Francisco...

*perk*

72 -- I think 78 is optionally correct. According to wikipedia 78s had a playing time of 6 minutes (three minutes per side) and 45 rpm singles "emulated the playing time of the former 78 rpm discs"

OK. So they trimmed the 45 size to save plastic.

The new singles run at 33rpm, and have the small hole to match. When my daughter bought her first single a few years ago, I, thinking of the old ones and their large center hole, told her I didn't know where an insert was. She didn't know what I was talking about.

76: Some run at 33, some at 45. And these days they even have 12" singles! Wild, I know.

I'm also unavailable Saturday but am interested in other festivities at some later date.

I too am unavailable saturday but &c.

'Smasher, any updates on your travel plans?

They used to have 16 2/3 RPM. Never knew what that was about.

That'd be about 17 RPM, I think.

81 -- from wikipedia that was designed to allow a longer recording time at lower quality and was used (rarely) for recorded radio announcements and books for the blind.

This is one of those cases in which wikipedia sounds plausible, but I have no idea whether or not that's true.

I have a commitment to see a movie with a friend on Saturday night, but if I can get them to go for this, I would like to come. Otherwise Monday would be even better.

OK this "OK. So they trimmed the 45 size to save plastic." isn't so, cos EPs. 2 tracks per side at only twice the price and the same size.

Idon'tpay may be interested to hear that European 45s always had small central holes. I just sold my Seeburg EDS160 jukebox (the European model ewhich played both small & large-holed 45s without needing a "spider"

16 2/3 rpm LPs were for spoken word mostly. There were also big 78s, bigger than 12", from before the tape era which were used for radio transcriptions, so lots of radio stations played the same episode of "The Shadow" at the same time. They were also used to record "Duke Ellington at Fargo" without which no home should be, authenticity be damned.

Though I didn't respond to 75 earlier, I think the point is the one I made in 68, that the length of a single was established by the 78s and that a 45 single was 3 minutes long because that's how long a song was.

B-but, "Like a Rolling Stone"!

72: ABBA is authentically ABBA. I mean, they're not an old black man playing the blues on his back porch, but that's not the measure. "Dancing Queen" is a fucking awesome song. Maybe it's just been too long since you were 17, and felt the beat of the tambourine. Oh yeah.