The False Perception of Authenticity

In undergrad at DePaul University in Chicago, I took several great classes with an amazing professor by the name of Dr. John Kimsey.  I wish I could say I remembered more from the classes than I do (it was a long time ago), but I do remember him pushing us to question how we viewed art.  There’s an idea of “high art” and an idea of “low art”.  For those unfamiliar, an easy example of this would be calling Mozart “high art” and, maybe, The Exploited, “low art”.  One is for refined tastes, and one is garbage (my words, not Kimsey’s). 

I’ll spare you the academic breakdown, but suffice it to say, the question he challenged us with is, “who is to say what is high art or low art?”  What makes the Beatles less valuable than Bach? 

Another question we wrestled with in my classes with Dr. Kimsey was, “what is authenticity?”  We’re obsessed with whether or not a writer or a musician is being “sincere” or “for real”.  “Green Day, or Avril Lavigne, they’re not punks, they’re posers.”  Or, “they used to be cool before they ‘sold out’”.

I’m not going to tell you that there isn’t such a thing as authenticity, but I am going to ask, at least in regard to art, “who is to say what is authentic?”

Now, before I get out over my skis here, let me rephrase this with some real-life examples.

Was David Bowie inauthentic when he was Ziggy Stardust? 

Early in John Mellencamp’s career, he was in a Bowie and New York Dolls inspired band called Trash.  Was that his real self, or is the earnest, heartland rocker his real self?  Both?  Neither?

Is Marilyn Manson really who Brian Warner is?  Or is it just an act?

Continuing with the last example, what if I said I believed Marilyn Manson was who Brian Warner really is, and it is also an act? 

We often treat musicians differently than we treat other types of artists.  Of course, actors pretend to be other people in order to bring an authentic story to life.  Film directors and authors are just storytellers.  Painters are just showing you their point of view.  But musicians, that must be who they really are 100% of the time, or they’re phonies.

Personally, I don’t think it’s that simple, but, it is indeed, simple.

While there are songwriters who write from the outside, and there are songwriters who give nothing away, so you don’t know whether it’s real or not (thinking mainly of Bob Dylan here), I would say, without being able to quantify it, that the majority of songwriters are being authentic, even if the story isn’t autobiographical.  What I mean by this is that the feeling of the story is real for the writer without the details being real.  Using my own work as an example, on my latest EP, Let the Blood Flow, the last track is “Drop a Pin”.  This is a song that is essentially an inner-dialogue of a man in a failing marriage who is wondering how is wife would react if he killed himself.  It’s a little bit of a pity party to be honest.  Now, was this the situation I was in when I wrote it?  No.  Did I ever have that inner dialogue?  No.  However, I was very depressed and I did add a few real details from my life to make the story more real.  Does this make the song insincere or inauthentic?

No.  Absolutely not.

Essentially what art does is communicate ideas and emotions through creative means.  This is why creative writing and debate are two separate classes, with, broadly speaking, the same objective.  Instead of giving you a bunch of facts to make you think differently about something (or to bolster how you already think), it seeks to change your perspective in order to see yourself, others or the situation, from another point of view. 

Circling back to Manson (or Bowie, or Bono as Mephisto or The Fly, or, lest we forget… Chris Gaines), maybe his persona is partly who he is and partly a hyperbolic portrayal of a part of himself that he’s using as a mirror to reflect how he sees our culture.  Maybe he finds this part of himself, and this part of our culture, more interesting to explore than (as his ex, Rose McGowan, has described) his domestic life of staying in, cooking and watching lots of television.  Maybe he’s honest enough to admit he’s a part of this sick culture rather than standing on some flimsy moral pedestal pointing down at the rest of us. 

Finally, I think we can all admit we participate in this, just not to the same extremes that artists do.  If you listen to Sun Records recordings and go to car shows, are you a greaser or just pretending to be one?  Or maybe, you just enjoy the music and the cars?  Maybe this is one thing you enjoy, one thing that’s a part of you without it being the whole? 

Maybe, at least when it comes to art, the question of authenticity is really just, “is this real to me?”

And maybe, that’s enough.