Stepping aside for the moment from the discussion of Sprechstimme that seems to be developing in the comments on my last post, let's take a moment to look at a developing discussion in the pop music area.
The notion of "authenticity" comes up now and then in regard to music. Sometimes classical musicians are criticized for not being "authentic" the way popular musicians are, imagining pop musicians to be a supposed "working class" category of artist, out there sweating every night, exposing their individual struggles with life and love to the audience. While classical musicians are coddled elitists all dressed up in white tie, singing and playing music written by someone else.
Of course Richard Taruskin had a wonderful time blowing up this whole notion of authenticity used as a marketing tool by the early music folks. See his collection of essays, Text & Act.
Still, there is a meaning of authenticity that comes from knowing who you are and being who you are irrespective of the needs of marketing. Some performers stand out for this quality: Jascha Heifetz, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash. But this kind of performer is less and less part of the contemporary scene where how you appear is far more important than who you are.
So we have an interesting analysis by Fil from Wings of Pegasus of performances by Taylor Swift:
That seems to show quite conclusively that Taylor Swift is miming singing to prerecorded tracks instead of actually singing. The audience are paying, as Fil says, to watch her move around on stage. She is essentially impersonating herself singing her songs. Seems a bit light in the authentic department.
UPDATE: Or rather, afterthought. It seems to me that we live in a time with an astonishing amount of sheer fakery: musician's biographies are a list of half-truths, recordings are "heavily edited" which means phony, the narrative in the mass media is a farrago of outright lies and I don't even want to mention political campaigns! Everywhere you turn you encounter the exaggerated, the malicious distortion, the artificial, the misrepresented. Maybe we should bring back the sixties, at least they tried to be the real deal.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Fil from Wings of Pegasus probably deserves some kind of medal. Here is one of his most passionate videos exposing a really shocking bit of outright fakery:
30 comments:
You are certainly right about the prevalence of lip-syncing in the pop world, but it's a bit odd to reference Bob Dylan as an icon of authenticity, because his entire rise to fame was built on an elaborately constructed fictional persona.
Hi Ethan, thanks for the comment. You know, I have never thought of Dylan's as being a fictional persona, but I'm haven't done any research on his early career. Perhaps I should have chosen Leonard Cohen instead...
That pop artists à la Madonna, Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift, lip-sync has been an open secret for at least two decades now. People in the business will tell you that dance is such a huge part of shows now, and it just isn’t realistic for performers to manage both the moves and the singing consistently. I don’t know it would even faze many fans; it’s similar to kayfabe in wrestling: the fans accept the illusion because they value being part of the scene more than the authenticity.
I've been an observer of popular music since the late 60s and the underlying trend has been very much from the role of the popular singer involving some sort of personal testimony, i.e. related to their actual character and being, to one of completely fictional fabrication, though still with some pretense of authenticity. And I suspect that fans still like to believe that the persona is somehow real. Billie Eilish is an example, or Adele.
This is complex in an interesting way, because if you say, ok, we know they are just lip-syncing, but that's ok, we are really here to watch them dance, that makes me want to say, ok, the art form is dance. Now let's talk about the authenticity of the dance. Or, forget authenticity, let's just talk about the aesthetics of the dance. And I want to say that we only want to see the dance show because it is an emanation from the artist as a singer. So the core aesthetic is that of song. Which brings us right back to authenticity: who the heck is singing and what are they saying?
That's Entertainment!
I doubt saying "it's dance" covers a festival cultic event. They're there for the song and the dance and the group vibe. Ancient Greek civic cultic theater seems more plausible than going with "just" mime. Wagner didn't want people to "just" listen to his music or he wouldn't have made music dramas. Pop stars at the level of Swift are more total-works-of-art but Swift is just the latest iteration of something that has shown up in pop music, whether we're looking at the personas of Bowie or Michael Jackson and maybe we throw in Prince.
Dylan was clearly a knock-off of Woddy Guthrie's persona early in his career. You can't not hear it if you have even a passing familiarity with Guthrie and Dylan biographers have noted this for about half a century, too. There's even accounts that Cohen saw how successful Dylan was, thought "I could do that" and threw his hat in the ring.
The thing about Dylan's fictional persona is that it wasn't too hard to dig up and he's obviously told biographers his birth name so it's not like posthumous coverage of the late Buffie St. Marie being a "pretendian" that has come up. There's a difference between a persona that people can regard as an affectation and a persona that leverages an illusion of "authenticity" that isn't in the person's biography. Bob Zimmermann knew he couldn't perform as Zimmerman and he liked Dylan Thomas alright but he was in some ways more obviously influenced by the beatniks and still more obviously by Guthrie. That doesn't make him "fake" but I'd hesitate to say it makes him "authentic". Walter Cronkite used to say it bugged him he was "The most trusted man in America" because all he did was talk in front of a camera.
since you alluded to Cash, well, Johnny Cash was pretty up front that his performance persona was a persona and that there were songs he liked but felt he could not and should not cover because they just didn't mesh with his persona. Now his persona could cover a wide range of songs since he did a good job covering songs by Reznor and Lightfoot late in his career, but he's another case where there is something that feels authentic about his persona but it's still precisely that.
The Hatchet
Authenticity in the arts relates to attribution (Person X created Work Y) and sometimes handwriting ( Person X original manuscript). The idea that the Arts are an inherent part of anything real outside the mind is fiction. No pun intended. Nothing in the real world is sublime or beautiful in and of itself. That is why the Arts are not called the Sciences. Nor does any creator's comment or behavior mean anything related to authenticity. That is the intentional fallacy.
Maury, those comments are not particularly clear in connection to Bryan's post and subsequent discussion. The question of whether Person X created Work Y comes off like a fairly forensic definition of authenticity, for instance.
But then "The idea that the Arts are an inherent part of anything real outside of the mind is fiction" has no obvious connection to what came before. How George Berkeley is that line of thought going to get, dare I ask? :)
The Hatchet,
Sorry if I left out too many connecting thoughts. I'm basically agreeing with your comments. i was just pulling them to the logical conclusion. I agree with your Greek cultic comment as that is what all these events are basically and worrying about this or that aspect of a cultic experience is a scholastic exercise at best. But of course the Greek's idea of a cultic experience would seem weird to us while our version of a cultic experience seems great. There is not a singular type of cultic experience that would fit everywhere. So that means that the question of what is authenticity in the arts or in a performer is not going to have a fixed definition. Something is either convincing to a given audience or not. What is convincing to one audience may not convincing to another.
It's not Berkleyan to say that the real world is an external real world and human thoughts, perceptions and emotions are not properties of the external real world but just qualia of the person. These are communicated to others through signs and socially recognized forms. Because we find the twinkling stars beautiful doesn't mean we have found an inherent property of stars for example. If Art were a part of the external real world then presumably we would be able to precisely define it scientifically and mathematically. Without that, it is impossible to define authenticity or most other things in the arts in any testable way. We are convinced by a persona or not or even what is art by judgment, not by proof.
Sorry The Hatchet I can't get used to the change in format here where Anonymous is the default.
I knew it was you Maury because I rather liked your first comment and was thinking of writing a sentence or two in support as I read the objection but reading further down it was plain that the anonymous explication of the subjective realm as not at all necessarily denying an objective realm...was a continuation of the same subjective position. Not quite relevant to analysis of authenticity in lip-synching but moreso to this drift into perceptions of phenomena outside ourselves, I recently enjoyed a book on how the problem inevitably pervades science, philosophy and thoughtful life: The Rigor of Angels.
I 'm not convinced authenticity is a good test of art. All of it seems to produce a work that is to be regarded for what it is, inherently tied to how it moves us --as opposed to how exactly it mirrors something that is not art. But I think Maury already said that.
Finally, Mr. Bob Dylan has turned out to be quite authentic after all, consider his Christian period...that stuff was not created for his fans but as himself. The world-weary great troubadour we have now is no one but Zimmy. We all create personal, to what extent they are who we are is hard to measure. Am I not the clown I project when working on the roof with guys who talk about things I can't relate to? For better or worse, it feels like the persona we project becomes a dimension of what we are.
I despise autocorrect because if I'm not vigilant in fighting it, the comments under my name lose authenticity one machine-altered character at a time.
Perhaps I should have picked Frank Zappa as an example of an unaffected persona, but then someone could claim that was false too! What makes these discussions always a bit ambiguous is that musical performances are a sub-species of theater and hence always involve, to some extent smoke and mirrors. Just how much varies enormously. The amount of theatre in a formal piano recital is close to zero--about the only way it could manifest would be in costume (Yuja Wang), biography in the program or how you acknowledge applause. For the rest, your persona comes across in the interpretation. There is certainly an authenticity to be found there--or not. I think we might as well sidestep all questions of whether art is "real" outside the mind. Music is outside the mind along with concerts and instruments. How we receive music is phenomenological, of course, but all we can talk about is what we commonly perceive.
Let's talk a bit about extremes: I just heard a piano recital that was very bad: harsh timbre, clunky phrasing, attempts to use technique to cover musical weakness, poor phrasing, poor voice-leading and so on. This was an insensitive musician trying to cover it up by playing fast and loud. So all the positive promotion and information on the internet was, in essence, a lie. In the same way, economic statistics can be a lie when they are later radically revised. There are all sorts of lies floating around. If you promulgate lies, you are, of course, being inauthentic. In my view, moving around on stage, holding a microphone to your mouth and moving your lips in time with a pre-recorded track is essentially a lie. If it is an open secret that this is done, then why do you have to carry the microphone around and pretend you are singing into it?
Actual theater is not a lie in that it is in the essence of theater that actors play roles. The Ancient Greek theater used actual masks. Yes, the actor is pretending to be someone they are not, but it is not a lie, it is an established convention. Pretending to sing into a dead microphone is the musical equivalent of a lie. In my opinion.
It is easy to love a beautiful woman, all the easier when she sings and dances. The combinations of impulses that become love no doubt originate from different seats in the perceives, considering how many teenaged girls also love Ms. Swift. I've listened to some of her albums (Spotify!) and don't like much if it at all, the rest only a little for a short time...and yet I still like her. There's a totality there, the persona and the sensual have elemental appeal even when the music is not interesting to me. Of course I have therefore only listened a few times. But to your point Bryan, about why imitate your own singing? Perhaps if she put down the fake mic her live act would become more purely judged as dance, and however pretty and however sugary the music, she might not want to risk criticism focused on her dancing. That elemental scrutiny might be less kind than the love she gets for the Taylor Swift totality.
All very true, Will, and expressed very graciously.
Swift isn't my favorite but she and her team are better at picking subdominant substitutes than the Axis chord soul bros who keep using I-V-vi-IV. I don't blame Swift for making a point that when singer-songwriter dudes have dozens of relationships that makes them "world weary" or "wise" while a woman is a flake at best. Now I consider that bad across the board myself but, to shift the focus a bit, Heart didn't need to get slammed by rock critics for not being sure whether to be folk sirens or heavy metal tomboys because, dude, Zeppelin did that all the time and it wasn't held against them. The first couple of Heart albums were good, imo. In terms of vocal chops Ann Wilson would beat Robert Plant at his own game.
I actually like a fairly large chunk of Dylan spanning across his classic 60s trilogy into Oh Mercy. Stuff he did in his Christian period holds up (and since I am a Christian myself I admit a literally confessional bias toward liking stuff like "Every Grain of Sand"). I admit that there are tons of non-musical/extra-musical reasons why art resonates with me and one of the conundrums in arts criticism is how much people do or don't concede this element. I like Dylan's demonstrated capacity to cross reference classical literature with folk music traditions. He has a level of cultural literacy in what he does as a songwriter that I like. I am less drawn to the confessional mode of songwriting and poetry (by that I mean I never really cared for Plath as distinct from Donne or Levertov or Stevens or Frost, I mean confessionalism in more of a, I dunno, Wordsworthian navel-gazing self-examination for apotheosis stuff because poets who go that route aren't doing stuff I couldn't get from re-reading Augustine or Dostoevsky).
I was revisiting a Roger Scruton essay on music and transcendence where he said that music is a distillation of an emotion that is purer or more perfected in art than it could be in real life. Okay ... but, hey, wait a minute, that's only "if" Scruton loves late Beethoven string quartets (sure, okay, I dig `em, too) but if he DOESN'T LIKE something then what would be a transcendental iconic distillation of a feeling stops being "true" and becomes lies and kitsch based on Scruton's personal response.
But he just moves the goalposts and while I am a moderate conservative in my politics and religion I can't really blame progressives for pointing out that double standard because I can see it myself.
In the real world there are people who seem authentic who are grifters and there are people who don't seem authentic who are wonderful people. I think the challenge with personas is the propensity to assess authenticity on the basis of criteria that collapse person and persona. Back in the days when I was doing blogging about the former local megachurch I wrote that I was concerned that the preacher there could be a person who was disappearing into his persona. There are people who have personas for the public that are coherent and consistent and express some sense (if in part) of who they are, and there are some people who commit to a role and vanish into it, but in the bad sense.
I sense that what we're talking about is the distinction between persona as the public face of a figure and the "don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain" aspects of contemporary performance that raise questions and objections for those of us who lean toward "can you just go on stage and do this?" Thing is Swift has done Tiny Desk concerts like Hilary Hahn has and while I (to me obviously) prefer Hahn over Swift and have for years they both just got up and did a Tiny Desk concert and if you're into that it worked.
Swift isn't my favorite but compared to Jason Mraz or Shawn Mendez or X Ambassadors I can tune her out if she's on the radio, whereas those dudes really, really annoy me.
Just a few loose ends: Ethan, it is really unfair to say that in the case of Dylan "his entire rise to fame was built on an elaborately constructed fictional persona". What would be fair is to say that in his early career he modeled himself after Woody Guthrie, but that 95% of his rise to fame was based on the fact that he is one of the great songwriters of the last half-century. Right?
Re Johnny Cash, recognizing that you as a performer have a range of things you can do and sticking to that is not inauthentic.
The validity of the notion of authenticity is probably worth digging into. When it comes to classical artists in the great majority of cases, I judge the authenticity of the performance in terms of its expressive power, consistency, coherence and fluidity. The persona of the performer rarely even is an issue. With pop music it is more complex because there is lots of room for image, persona and marketing, also performances are more theatrical. But I think we can discern phoniness in a number of areas: in terms of the songs themselves (some artists are unoriginal and cliched, others are not), the performance itself may be honest or deceptive (largely deceptive these days it seems) and so on.
Wenatchee, I so agree with you on Jason Mraz, but the one time I tried to watch a Taylor Swift Tiny Desk concert, the second thing she said was cruelly misandrous, so I turned it off.
Bryan, I was the one who mentioned Dylan's modeling himself after Guthrie and Cash commenting that there were some songs he really liked but didn't feel he could cover. I also mentioned the Bowie personas (setting aside that David Jones took up Bowie as a stage name altogether).
Having been something of a Dylan fan I'd say that he wears his influences on his sleeves and urges people to keep going back. It's his open and obvious engagement with art and literary history that I liked. A tossed off line about Pound and Eliot fighting in the captain's tower in Desolation Row invites digging into whether Ezra Pound and T S Eliot ever did fight about anything, for instance. You have to know who they were to get where the line even could be going. There are legions of introversive and extroversive elements to his songcraft that I like.
When Cash covered "Hurt" Reznor reportedly said he felt like he almost couldn't perform his own song any more. No kidding! It might be comparable to how Carole King wrote "Natural Woman" but it's long since been Aretha's song. When Hendrix covered "All Along the Watchtower" Dylan made a point of changing the two chord song into the three chord version Hendrix did. I know that because I heard the original and I heard Dylan perform "Watchtower" in concert when he toured with Paul Simon (I was NOT going to miss a tour of both Paul Simon and Bob Dylan).
So I don't contest that Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters of the last century. I used to have Desolation Row memorized (and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock).
But the question of what we're actually talking about when we use "authenticity" is still the question.
Given that singer songwriter types who urge the public to give peace a chance could be domestically abusive drunks behind the scenes the question of how authentic that is remains a live issue. If DIckens was a nasty husband while being a socially alert novelist that isn't necessarily a sign he was inauthentic but I think there is a question of moral licensing that can happen. Some people feel they are "good enough" as public figures they can be selfish in their private lives.
It might be arguable that for sardonic observational/confessional songwriting tropes Swift couldn't even have happened were it not for Dylan, but I suggest that the issue there has little to do with "authenticity" and more to do with the nature of cultural influence, craft and precedent. Few songwriters since Dylan come close to the kind of wordplay and characterization of writers from the American Songbook.
Wenatchee, you cover a lot of ground in that comment. I think perhaps it comes down to distinguishing between hypocrisy and bearing false witness, which are both bad, but in different ways.
I suspect that a performing persona as such is fine by most people provided they are actually doing the thing the persona was created for. So whether it's Bob Dylan or David Bowie and his personas within a persona or Johnny Cash or whomever, we don't mind if they have a public face and a private face if they are doing on the stage what they did in the studio. Stevie Wonder has a stage name but nobody has some misconception about how he comes across on stage. He played a Key Arena gig here in Seattle years ago despite his head cold and let me tell you, STevie Wonder with a head cold still outsings a ton of people with clear voices. He did avoid all the false bass in "As" and that was understandable since not all vocal techniques work as easily for the voice if you're sick.
But if a Swift or Beyonce fan is watching dancing on the stage and the fans are okay with that cultic aspect it's not "my" thing but I still wonder about authenticity. Would participants in ancient mystery cults in Greece regard those rites as inauthentic, for instance? In terms of a vaguely neoliberal progressive feminist cult Swift might still be "all that" to her fans whether or not they care about if she's singing on the stage.
It ... does .... seem like a hugely expensive variation on a skit in a high school talent show ... if Swift does as has been described. If we're living in an era where superstars get to do what killed Milli Vanilli then times have changed.
With all this--very productive--back and forth, I think a few things have become clearer. A performer having a stage persona is neither good nor bad in itself. If it enhances the performance then it is just an example of theatre. David Bowie likely falls in this category. If you are a rock star who proclaims support for female empowerment in public, but in private is a sexual abuser, this is at a minimum, hypocrisy. If you are pretending to be actually performing in public but it is all prerecorded, then this is bearing false witness. Music performances as cultic rituals I would think fall into the justifiable theatre category.
"If you are pretending to be actually performing in public but it is all prerecorded, then this is bearing false witness." To go back to the point of my earlier comment, why does professional wrestling get a pass for kayfabe (indeed, for a non-fan to say “but it’s fake!” is a social faux pas, one can’t be a killjoy to fans), but pop music has to meet such high demands for "authenticity".
Sorry, that last comment should have ended with a question mark. Strange that Blogger still doesn't have an Edit button for comments, but Google stopped investing in this platform years ago.
Christopher, that was an excellent point about wrestling. I would love to comment, but I have no knowledge or skills whatsoever in the sociology of professional wrestling! But we might start by examining ancient gladiatorial contests and seeing how modern wrestling is similar but very different.
On further thought, it occurs to me that professional wrestling is probably a kind of theatre, so the participants are actor/athletes?
I actually read a few days ago an article about gladiators in Roman-era Anatolia, but sadly can't find the link. The author made the point that in spite of the popular imagination of death and gore, probably very many gladiator fights were fixed just like in modern professional wrestling. Stables would have been unwilling to lose their gladiators, since replacing them would be expensive, and touring them around different cities (just like wrestlers today) was lucrative.
Ah, the commodification of gladiatorial combat!
If you want pop music with authentic personal testimony, may I recommend rap and country?
True enough, Ethan, some good examples there.
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