Authenticity in Music

In a world of AI slop, where do we find something real?

Today I’m sharing one of the “big” essays that define my life’s work as a critic—a piece I’ve worked on for years. I’m publishing it here in its entirety for the first time.

It’s my response to the debunking and ridicule frequently targeted at the concept of authenticity in music, which modern critics often dismiss as a kind of marketing gimmick or ideological construction.

Unlike them, I take authenticity seriously—as something we crave for a good reason. Some performers possess it, while others do not.

This is not a small thing. And if we don’t come to grips with this hidden source of power in songs, we will never understand where our music comes from or what it can mean for us today.

At a later date, I may release this as a short book—or part of a collection of my essential writings. But here I’m making it available to everyone.

Because of its length, the text might get cut off by some email providers. But you can access it in its entirety by clicking on the headline and reading it online.

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Authenticity in Music

By Ted Gioia

I

After my father died, I took on the melancholy responsibility of organizing the objects he left behind. I dreaded the moment, but it proved to be a much simpler job than I expected.

Dad, as it turned out, owned almost nothing.

The closet in his bedroom, where he stored most of his personal possessions, was tiny—especially in comparison with the huge walk-in storage areas (really more rooms than actual closets) of my home. Yet even this small space he failed to fill.

Living in an unprecedented age of conspicuous consumption, Dad barely lived up to the status of entry-level consumer. The only expensive heirloom I inherited from him, a gold watch, was actually a gift he had received from me a few years before his death—I can’t recall a single lavish expenditure he made on himself during his 84 years on this planet.

The way I look at it, I ended up giving myself this gold watch. It’s somehow fitting that the pricey gift came back to me as his heir—almost as if Dad couldn’t keep something so ostentatious. It wasn’t the right style for such a simple man. But having it returned in this way gave me no joy, as you can imagine.

I’ve now owned this fancy watch for more years than my father did. But I don’t wear it—somehow I’m shamed by the thought of doing so when I contrast my own possession-filled life with his austere one. I will give that family heirloom to my oldest son (who was named after my father) in a few years’ time. Maybe he will make better use of it than I have or Dad ever did. I hope he does.

In any event, that timepiece isn’t the most important thing I inherited from Dad. Not even close.

In fact, when I recall my father’s simplicity, I don’t think of any of these matters first. Instead there was something intangible in his character, hard to describe, that stood out even more sharply, a certain translucent quality to his actions and demeanor. This was where his true simplicity resided, not in his half-filled closet.

At first glance, it almost seemed like a character defect, because it was most easily defined by the long list of skills my father lacked. The most obvious was Dad’s complete and total incapacity for irony. He couldn’t make an ironic comment if his life depended on it. Nor did he ever show awareness of the irony others used, no matter how thickly they laid it on. In the kingdom of words, he lived on the surface level—he said what he felt, and felt what he said—refusing to take even the most cursory peek at submerged meanings that might reside in the basement.

This would have been noteworthy under any circumstances, but especially in the context of our household. My siblings and I gave an ironic twist to everything that came our way, and Mom joined in happily in this wry banter. Like my Father, she had grown up in poverty and never attended college, but had a sharp wit and enjoyed the equalizing power of irony.

Our social betters were knocked down a few rungs by the sly twists we imparted to our critiques. Elites weren’t quite so elite after one of our rejoinders hit the mark—rarely delivered to their face, but imagined in vivid detail in the course of our sharp repartee around the dinner table. My father may have presided, in some symbolic manner, as head of the household at these repasts, but in reality it seemed as if he was an oblivious onlooker at a performance he never quite comprehended.

Ah, but irony rarely shows up alone at any conversation. It usually is accompanied by its close associates sarcasm, smugness, and cynicism. And somehow my father had managed to avoid these bad boys as well. I look back on all my various interactions with him over the years, and can’t recall even a single sarcastic or smug remark. In his universe, things were what they were, and it would never have occurred to him to reframe his narrative (as we might say nowadays) with these potent tools that serve as both protective layers and assault weapons for the rest of us.

I rarely thought about all this back in those days—in our early home life, we tend to accept the quirks and quiddities of parents as basic facts of the natural world—but if someone had asked me point blank during my teen years, I would have admitted that these huge gaps in my father’s toolkit were serious deficiencies. Not only was he defenseless, at least from a verbal standpoint, in a hostile world, but he was also missing out on much of the fun.

I’m not so sure anymore. Nowadays I often envy my father’s obliviousness to the ironic postures of the rest of his family. It’s almost as if he had been born with immunity to a disorder that was infecting everyone else. Thinking back to those times I am reminded of that charged family moment in Hamlet when the protagonist’s mother asks why he seems so upset—and he responds “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems.”

There are certain people incapable of adopting the roles and postures prevalent in their time and place. They are, not seem. It’s not that they have renounced the advantages of ironic distance; rather they don’t know how to make the trek there—in the case of my father, he sometimes appeared unaware that there was even a journey that might be made.

I think about these things more often nowadays, and oddly enough in the context of considering music and the arts, and especially that fraught term authenticity that keeps on recurring in our discussions of artists. I’ve come to wonder whether the true benchmark of the authentic isn’t precisely this same kind of obliviousness my father demonstrated again and again. The musicians who strike me as most authentic never realized that inauthenticity was even a choice—they wouldn’t know how to arrive at that destination, even if you gave them a map and GPS coordinates.

Discovering this kind of authenticity is a gift, but it’s an unusual kind of gift—defined as much by what you relinquish, not what you gain. Most people in the music world find about it from some old blues singer or an antiquated folk song or in so-called world music from far, far away.

In my case, I learned about authenticity at home, and from the best possible teacher. Even now, so many years after his death, I’m still learning from Dad’s example. And if I could somehow manage to pass it down on to my children, it would be worth a whole lot more than a gold watch.

I say this in full awareness of the contentiousness and backlash arising from almost any assertion of authenticity, especially in the arts—but in other spheres of life as well. There’s been so much debunking of authenticity in recent years that it’s remarkable that anyone is still willing to use it as a term of praise. Sometimes words in the critic’s lexicon become tainted, defeating the very purpose for which they are applied. The situation is so dire that I might even claim that we are facing an “authenticity crisis” in the arts—especially now with the rapid rise of AI. But even making that statement would spur a meta-backlash against the implicit assumption that there’s any legitimate concern over such a debased concept. After all, why defend authenticity if it doesn’t really exist?

In this regard, authenticity is coming to resemble its kindred word ‘sincerity’, which now implies the exact opposite of its dictionary definition. As Lionel Trilling points out, in his magisterial Harvard lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, the term “has an effect that negates its literal intention—‘I sincerely believe’ has less weight than ‘I believe’; in the subscription of a letter, ‘Your sincerely’ means virtually the opposite of ‘Yours’. “ [Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, (London: Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

II

Music plays a surprisingly large role in the history of the divided self, and has repeatedly been highlighted by the most influential thinkers as intimately connected with inauthenticity. In fact, the entire history of Western philosophy begins with a firm conviction that music has a direct cause-and-effect linkage with our psyches and souls, such that the wrong songs degrade both individual behavior and social well-being.

This view not only figures prominently in Plato and Aristotle, but even has roots back with the pre-Socratics, especially Pythagoras who holds a double position as an originator of Western philosophical thought and inventor of musical tuning systems. What an odd coupling of skills! At first glance, it makes no sense that a famous tuner of musical instruments would also figure as the most esteemed source, in his day, of theories about the meaning of life, but for Pythagoras and his successors in the ancient world this connection was an obvious one. The good life was constantly endangered by the wrong choice of playlist—and even your life could fall out of tune.

For these thinkers, music is capable of both positive and negative effects in character formation. But for most of them, the dangers of song took on far greater significance than the healthy attributes. This is obviously true in history of religious thought—a whole book would be necessary to convey even the basic variations of this aversion to sinful songs—but it’s just as true in the highest circles of European intellectual life. Take Nietzsche, for example. When he set up his influential opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the former representing control and order and the latter embodying chaos and disruption, he associated the Dionysian explicitly with the power of music.

By the same token, when Diderot wanted to cast light on the disintegration and deliberate falsity of the new personality types of his day, he picked a musician as a case study. In fact, much of this work, Rameau’s Nephew, is devoted to a grotesque mock opera in which the title character plays all the parts simultaneously—showcasing what it means to have no authentic core to one’s personality.

When this strange manuscript was finally published, two decades after Diderot’s death, more than a few readers must have seen it as a comic trifle—but the deepest thinkers of the day grasped its significance in delineating a distinctly modern character. Goethe, Hegel, Marx and others responded with enthusiasm to its disturbing portrait. Hegel refers to it repeatedly in his Phenomenology of Spirit, and even sees in the apparent buffoonery of Rameau’s nephew the positive seeds of the unfolding future. Yet at the same time, he describes this fractured personality as “the madness of the musician” who grasps the painful truth that his moment in history requires “the perversion of every Notion and reality, the universal deception of itself and others; and the shamelessness which gives utterance to this deception is just for that reason the greatest truth.” [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 317]

Music can do all that?

Are songs really to blame for the divided personality? Is there something in music that, in its very essence, tends to inauthenticity? If so, we may be forced to abandon our quest of authentic music from the very outset—that would be like searching for the proverbial lead balloon or praising the much ballyhooed ‘deafening silence.’ Authentic music would be little more than an oxymoron, an amusing subject to speculate about, but never found in practice.

Yet even when you put aside the philosophy books, and talk to casual music fans you find the same conviction. There’s a widespread belief that great musicians are unbalanced, or even crazy. In fact, music is one of the few spheres of human endeavor in which the word insane is used as a term of highest praise.

I’ve even heard musicians grumble that they are punished by fans if they lead a balanced and controlled—or what Nietzsche might call an Apollonian—life. They can never match the mystique captured by their peers who spend time in prison, rehab, mental institutions and other places of confinement for those whose edginess has gone beyond the edge.

Even the most casual words we use in reference to music imply its causal connection with inauthenticity. We talk of a musician “playing” an instrument—the very same word we use for actors who “play” a role. The inescapable notion embedded in this terminology is that the very moment when the performance begins, artists are already separated from their true, authentic selves.

There are only three professions in which work is literally play. In acting, sports and music, we never use the verb work. You play football, you don’t work it. You play guitar, you don’t work those six strings. You play a role, you if someone said you worked at it, that would imply a failure to bring it to life. What a marvelous thing to consider: the notion that work gets transformed into play. You could never imagine other professions gaining this same distinction. No coal miner would ever claim to play the mine. The very notion is ludicrous. Yet the same conceptual shift that turns work into play for these three vocations also imparts a sense of unreality and pretense to them. Life on the stage is not real life. It is, in fact, staged—another example where the words we use points to our subconscious attitudes.

This is much more than a matter of words and etymologies. I’ve seen even the most rudimentary techniques of music turned into a pathway to inauthenticity. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, the livelihood of almost every professional musician in town depended on adaptability to the wide range of commercial opportunities at hand. There might be better music cities than LA, but could any other town match the range of music gigs: on any given day you might get enlisted for Hollywood film soundtracks, commercial jingles for advertising, TV theme songs, pop and rock record sessions, symphony orchestras, jazz jam sessions, along with the usual fare of weddings, bar mitzvahs, school dances, cruise ships, and other casual bookings. Authenticity wasn’t called for in this ecosystem—in fact, it was a definite handicap. You weren’t supposed to have deeply-held musical values; what you monetized was your flexibility and versatility.

I was never very happy with the aspect of my home town’s musical culture. But I’ve seen it spread throughout the entire world in the intervening years. The main culprit is the ever-expanding scope of music education, with thousands of guitarists, keyboardists, vocalists, horn players, drummers and other performers now getting degrees each year from institutions that instill this same kind of versatility in their graduates. Almost the first thing that comes out of the mouth of a music educator in the current day is some mantra about mastering a wide range of performance styles. Today I will teach you the Afro-Cuban montuno. Tomorrow we start on Baroque counterpoint. And from a purely commercial and professional perspective, who can deny the value? Who wants to stand up for ignorance? Who wants to take the side of inflexibility?

Yet there is always a cost when you sacrifice your own artistic personality for the demands of the marketplace. The word we most often use to describe that lost quality is authenticity.

III

Given these constraints, does any music deserve the label of authentic? Certainly there’s plenty of talk about the subject. I did a Google search on authentic music, and the search engine responded with more than 300 million results. But maybe that hyperactive chatter measures only our yearning for this authenticity, not its actual existence. After all, the things we talk about the most are often what we lack, not what we’ve got.

It’s especially unsettling that authenticity seems to disappear the moment we try to measure it alongside the inauthentic. It’s the Schrödinger’s cat of the music world. In fact modern physics might even help us in grasping the paradox here. One of the unnerving precepts of quantum mechanics is the discovery that phenomenon are changed by the very process of being observed. That’s the curse of authenticity—as soon as it gets noticed and praised for its gritty realness, it starts to look like a pose.

As a result, music critics have grown into expert debunkers of authenticity. As soon as they hear the word, they rush to point out its falsity. A whole sub-genre of music history research has been devoted to this subject, resulting in books with names like Fakesong and Faking It. (And what are we to make of the fact that even musicians themselves refer to the song compendiums they take to gigs as “fake books”—does any other mode of creative expression so openly embrace the notion of phoniness?)

Yet the quest for what’s real and uncompromised continues unabated. The resulting tension is never resolved. In fact, it often seems as if the genres most proud of their hard-won authenticity are also the most mired in arguments over which artists are poseurs and phonies. Go check out the message boards where fans of punk, metal, hip-hop, and jazz congregate and measure the anxiety level for yourself.

A long list of culprits have been identified as the source of our authenticity crisis in music. Money ranks high on the list, as will be no surprise—isn’t it guilty of corrupting everything it touches? Record labels and their minions get plenty of blame too, for meddling and manipulation, which (so we are told) distort the whole artistic enterprise of music-making. But there’s something even worse than these usual suspects, although I am reluctant to tell you what it is. But it comes up so often in exposés of authenticity in the arts, that I can’t, in good faith, skip over it.

And what is that ultimate source of debasement and corruption?

Alas, it’s you and me. The audience. We are the root of the problem, at least according to those at the forefront of debunking authenticity. Our cherished musicians may appear authentic and answerable only to their deeply-held inner values, but in reality they all play to the crowd, working to please an audience. Every performance is a construct, impure and compromised from the outset.

I recall a debate with a prominent music writer who held this view—and he kept repeating that “all music is created with an audience in mind.” This was, he believed, as obvious as saying water is wet or fire is hot. And at first glance, this opinion appears true, or at least plausible. But it isn’t, not in the least. And the confusion over this matter of the so-called audience may be the single biggest reason why our arguments over authenticity never seem to get anywhere.

The truth of the matter is that most music throughout human history has existed without any concern over the audience. The concept of an audience only emerged gradually during the history of music-making, and even when it finally entered the discourse, it was frequently an object of scorn and derision. Until very recently, music flourished all over the world in happy ignorance of this all-powerful audience.

In most communities, until very recently, everyone participated in the musical culture. They were not an ‘audience’, under any reasonable definition of the term; rather they were embedded in the music as a constitutive part of performance. In fact, there are entire categories of music that not only thrive without an audience, but are degraded when treated as entertainment for outsiders.

Consider a parent singing a lullaby to a baby or musical laments at a graveside—these are closed systems for participants only. By the same token, I spent years researching and writing a book on work songs, and dealt with thousands of musical performances in the course of it—but few of them had any relationship whatsoever to what we might call an audience. The authenticity of these performances can hardly be questioned. The singers, like my father at our dinner table conversations, are incapable of assuming a posture or stance. They have a direct, unambiguous connection to their songs that resists inauthenticity—for the simple reason that this music exists outside the dynamic of performer and audience.

These kinds of embedded songs are far more common than you might think, especially if you judged matters on the basis of what you read in reviews or books on music history and aesthetics. If you’ve taken a class on music appreciation, you might even assume that all compositions exist as links between a composer and a “listening audience.” But if you left the classroom behind, and walked into a church and saw the whole congregation joined together in song, you would struggle to identify the audience.

If everybody performs, who is left to serve that much more diminished role of passive listener? God, perhaps? And there are many other situations in which it’s impossible to draw the line between performer and audience. If I am dancing at a wedding reception, aren’t I participant? If I sing “Happy Birthday” at a party or stand for the national anthem at a sporting event, aren’t I now an embedded part of music-making? In these settings, I have become part of the ritual, as is the music itself—and the ritual sets the rules, not the audience. Here again, the authenticity of such performances are almost never called into question.

The same is true of the person singing in the shower or along with car radio during the daily commute or dancing alone to some favorite song in the privacy of a home or bedroom. There’s usually no audience in these settings—unless you shower in groups or car pool with some very tolerant fellow-workers. Your singing in the shower may be good or bad, soft or loud, but its authenticity cannot be compromised by the audience.

If you study these matters in the context of the full history of human music-making you reach the inevitable, but perhaps surprising, conclusion that songs in most times and places have flourished without any need for the audience. By the same token, the authenticity of the music is hard to undermine. In many settings, the participants have no conception of an inauthentic alternative to their music. It is what it is.

IV

At this point, you may be willing to grant that authenticity in music does exist. But I suspect that many of you remain skeptical that this has much bearing on what actual musicians do in the current day. After all, the life of a professional performer has nothing in common with the average person singing out-of-tune radio hits in the shower, and even less to do with traditional work songs or medieval peasant dances. You might even be tempted to stop reading right now, convinced that nothing I am saying has any relevance to the music you care about.

But before you shut the door on me, I want to make sure you grasp the significance of what we lose when we walk away from the concept of authenticity. It is much more than a musical or aesthetic concept. Every aspect of our lives, from the most intimate to the most public, now operates under the shadow of inauthenticity—especially with the rise of AI. In fact, I believe that authenticity will soon become a widely-accepted measuring rod of the good life—a life liberated from the manipulations of tech-enabled simulacrums.

Our very notion of personal identity, in the modern world, is undergirded by the demands of authenticity. It is the first and primary choice that serves as the foundation for all the other choices we make. Whether we decide to commit ourselves to God or mammon, mother nature or a political cause, a philosophy of life or some specialized code of conduct—and even if we narrow our scope of interest to just our family or our solitary and self-centered day-to-day needs—the rightness or wrongness of our life mission rests on its perceived authenticity. We might have extraordinary success, as validated by external measures, but if this is not accompanied by a deep-seated sense of authenticity, our achievements feels hollow.

So if you are so quick to decide that no one can even pluck a guitar string with authenticity, what hope is there for the rest of us in our fraught, complex lives? If something as simple as a song can’t reach this bare threshold of rightness, forced instead into degrading compromises with external norms and expectations, what can we possibly expect from our vocations, our relationships, and our aspirations for a holistic, integrated life?

In short, if authenticity is a fraud, this has implications that go far beyond our playlists.

By the same token, we do well to dig into the deeper significations and real world implications of this modern concept of authenticity. Perhaps if we understand how people successfully apply it to their moral or social or personal lives, we might grasp its true dimensions as an aesthetic mandate. Given the stakes here, this is clearly worth our time and energy. To some extent, exploring the path to authenticity is the best possible use of our time.

That is, assuming a path actually exists. Our lives often feel so constrained, so much at the mercy of circumstances and contexts beyond our control, that we can easily despair of rising to the demands of an authentic life. Even if we can identify the core components of such an integrated, fulfilled existence, what chance do we have of achieving it? Like that hypothetical guitarist struggling to please a fickle audience, we constantly feel forced to adapt to standards others impose us—our boss or teacher, our parents, our friends and romantic partners, our neighbors, and all those others who actively prevent us from defining ourselves in our own terms.

Given all this, it should hardly surprise us to learn that authenticity has not always been accepted as a legitimate or even conceivable goal. Until the 18^th century, the notion that individuals ought to define the terms and conditions of their participation in the world around them would have been viewed as laughable, if not demonic or subversive. And when the concept of authenticity did emerge, it first only encompassed a small number of elites. It gained credibility in the context of formal philosophies, as articulated and expanded over a period of decades by Rousseau, Herder, Hegel, Marx (especially in his early years), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and others. But the notion was limited to those who paid attention to matters of theory; it had not yet entered the sphere of practice.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) deserves our particular attention. In his account of the history of authenticity, philosopher Charles Taylor focuses on a decisive moment in Western culture when this concept became “crucially important.” That happened when Herder “put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own ‘measure’ is his way of putting it. This idea has entered very deep into modern consciousness. It is also new. Before the late eighteenth century no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance.” [Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p, 28.)

This is of especial interest to us because Herder was also the father of folk music—the very same genre of singing that is most weighted down with expectations of authenticity in the current day. In an earlier day, historians and other leading thinkers tried to define a nation’s character and destiny on the basis of its military conquests or royal decrees or famous works of literature and art, but Herder had a different approach. He praised the Volk (or folk) and especially their songs, poems, dances and folklore as the most authentic expression of a nation. Forget the king and nobility and look instead to the peasants—they are the true repositories of a nation’s treasures. Under the impetus of this new way of thinking, the folk song gained unprecedented respectability. Campaigns to preserve and promote it took on a sense of urgency, infused with a national pride hitherto unknown in the field of vernacular music.

Can it be mere coincidence that the philosophical origins of modern authenticity can be traced back to the same roots as the song collecting movement? Not at all. In fact, one of the defining characteristic of authenticity, as it emerged during this period, is its peculiar insistence that the artist is a role model for all of us.

This view emerged with enormous power around the year 1800—and turned musicians into more than just heroes and celebrities. They were now also visionaries who had grasped the essence of human potential and creative expression. They not only entertained us with their songs, but set the example for what an authentic life might look like. “With Herder, and the expressivist understanding of human life,” explains Charles Taylor, “ the relation becomes very intimate. Artistic creation becomes the paradigm mode in which people can come to self-definition. The artist in some ways becomes the paradigm case of the human being, as agent of original self-definition.” [Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 61-62.]

More than two hundred years have elapsed since this attitudinal shift, but not much has changed. Musicians come and go, but the leading stars always serve as guiding lights for lifestyle definition, even when their own lives are marked by disorder and self-destruction. In fact, the self-destruction is often seen as the ultimate proof of authenticity—the badge of honor that sets apart a Sid Vicious or Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix from their peers. Entire generations and demographic groups have come to define themselves by their particular preferences in disruptive music—over time we have seen the rise and fall of beatniks, punks, hippies, headbangers, and other identity groups, each arriving on the scene with their own modern spin on Herder’s mandate.

So the authenticity crisis in music is actually inseparable from the authenticity crisis in society at large. We can’t judge one without the other. And that puts music critics who debunk authenticity in a very strange and uncomfortable position. For a start, what validates the standpoint from which they do the debunking? What kind of life are they leading, if authenticity is a myth? What gives their words authority? And what are they saying about the rest of us, our hopes and dreams and values, if even the songs we sing are degraded and compromised beyond redemption?

If you believe these critics, everything starts to fall apart. When they actually confront an authentic life, they are forced to adopt one of these responses—always delivered in a tone of smug superiority:

1. The quest for authenticity—or “finding yourself” in the popular parlance—is just a ruse by a lazy new generation, many of whom will probably end up unemployed and living in their parents’ basement; or

2. Authenticity is a pose, adopted by hipsters, and thus the very opposite of what it claims to be, as fake as a TV wrestling match; or

3. The much-vaunted individualism of authenticity is simply a mask for scamps and reprobates, who break the rules we all need to follow, whether religious, moral, legal, social, etc.; or

4. Those who claim they are pursuing authentic life are reactionaries caught up in the past, or

5. Revolutionaries deluded by an impossible future, or

6. Idealists deceived by some utopian dream, or

7. Misfits who will never thrive anywhere;

8. And so on and so forth.

Is there any way of aligning ourselves with an authentic life in the face of these critics and their litany of objections? Once again, I turn to philosopher Charles Taylor, who has long been a guide for me, starting decades before he began winning million dollar prizes. In recent years Taylor has received the Templeton Prize ($1.5 million), the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy ($1 million), the Kyoto Prize (100 million yen, roughly another million dollars), and the John W. Kluge Prize (sharing the $1.5 million payout with co-winner Jürgen Habermas)—perhaps an ironic grand slam giving Taylor’s prominence as a critic of materialistic and profit-maximizing approaches to life. But when I first encountered Taylor, almost forty years ago, I was a student of philosophy at Oxford and he was a young professor, best known at the time for his expertise in Hegel and dialectical materialism.

I was impressed by his writings and lecture style back then, but perhaps even more by his private guidance of a classmate going through a personal crisis of meaning, who turned to Professor Taylor for life advice. She related much of what he said in their conversations back to me, and I was struck even then by his depth of wisdom, a kind of inspired discernment that isn’t as frequently found among academic philosophers as you might assume. I couldn’t predict back then that he would evolve into the most persuasive interpreter of authenticity of our times, but certainly he was already laying the groundwork for it at that juncture.

And how does Taylor reclaim the tarnished honor of authenticity from its many detractors? First of all, he makes the obvious—yet very powerful—point that even the most hostile critics of various authenticity movements, say Allan Bloom or Christopher Lasch or whatever pundit-du-jour shows up on a TV talk show this week, actually lead their own lives in pursuit of the same ideal they denounce in others.

“It is hard to find anyone we would consider as being in the mainstream of Western societies who, faced with their own life choices, about a career or relationships, gives no weight at all to something they would identify as fulfillment, or self-development, or realizing their potential.” [Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 75.] So even the critics of various authenticity movements need to have one of their own—and can hardly function without it.

Taylor goes on to map out the degrees of freedom we have in pursuing this goal, recognizing both the obstacles to the quest, yet also reminding us that individuals aren’t entirely powerless to overcome them. We witness this daily as we observe others—some more advanced on the way, others lagging far behind—and also ourselves. If we are in the slightest bit self-aware, we recognize our own progress, or stumbling, on this path. Once we cut through the overheated rhetoric of the critics, we inevitably conclude that authenticity is a valid ideal; that we can talk about it rationally and with a shared understanding of many of its ramifications; and that these explorations and discussions make a difference in our lives.

I won’t try to summarize the various ways Taylor supports these conclusions, but I do want to dwell on what I believe is the most significant aspect of his analysis of the quest for authenticity—one that will also help us when we return to our assessment of music (and needless to say, of great value for other reasons too).

The single biggest obstacle to authenticity, Taylor argues, is a grand misunderstanding that isolates this quest from the world around us. The concept of authenticity has gotten hopelessly muddled with notions of extreme individualism and self-actualization that dominate so much of our public discourse. We are left with the mistaken view that authenticity requires us to resist all pressures from outside, that somehow we are called upon to define our own meanings in isolation from what others say and do and think. When pushed to an extreme, this misguided view of authenticity begins to resemble a manual for narcissism or self-centered behavior—making the quest impossible to achieve.

“No one acquires the languages needed for self-definition on their own,” Taylor reminds us. [Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p.33.] In a healthy relationship with a loved one, our partner becomes embedded in our authentic life. By the same token, this integrated and fulfilled way of existing is responsive to the local community, the broader society, and the natural world. We don’t acquiesce willy-nilly to every demand made of us, but neither do we fetishize some solipsistic ideal in which we flourish while everything around us goes to hell in a hand-basket. Part of our journey to fullness is a reaching out, a cherishing, a nurturing of reciprocity and respect.

That last word is worth emphasizing. We hear much about the need for respect in the current day. If fulfillment could only be achieved in isolation from society, that would hardly be the case. If my process of self-realization took place as a solitary, egotistical pursuit, I wouldn’t waste time fretting over what my neighbors think about it. But in the real world, we are connected, and not just via email and text messaging. We can hardly make the healthy, constructive connections necessary to our advancement and maturation in a hostile, adversarial environment. We do well to remember this, not just for our own benefit, but as we deal with others who also seek to find the good life.

When viewed in this broader, more contextualized manner, the path to authenticity doesn’t get easy, by any means, but at least there is a path. We can see, with greater or less clarity, how we might embark upon it and what milestones we should look for along the way. We also come to view the much-discussed obstacles and enemies to this lifelong enterprise—whether money or technology or career demands—with more nuance. We see that, with persistence and vision on our part, they can be enlisted in our project of self-definition.

I know this brief summary does not do full justice to the concept of the authentic life, or to the contributions of those who strive to define it in our times. But I hope that I have, at a minimum, reclaimed the word from naysayers who insist is has no relevance or validity in the current day. I hate to interrupt the discussion at this point—perhaps at the very juncture when you were ready to jump on the authenticity bandwagon and apply it to your own day-to-day problems. But we must move on. This is, after all, an essay on music.

V.

Now let’s return to the considerations of authenticity in music, and see whether we can make any sense of this concept—so often ridiculed that critics hesitate even to speak its name.

I want to mount a rehabilitation effort here, in other words construct a case for authenticity as a valid and useful concept in music. Perhaps even the most useful concept in assessing certain songs and artists. But before proceeding, I need to acknowledge two particular obstacles that add to the degree of difficulty of a task already dauntingly hard. I don’t believe either of them prevents us from embracing authenticity as an aesthetic criterion, but they both ought to be recognized.

First, we need to accept upfront that authenticity can never be measured with scientific precision. You can’t put a musician’s authenticity on the scale and weigh it, like they do with boxers before a big match. It would be delightful if you could—just imagine measuring Bob Dylan’s authenticity against Woody Guthrie’s, or John Lennon’s against Mick Jagger’s. But that will never happen. Authenticity is not susceptible to empirical metrics. None of our five senses can grasp it directly. In the truest sense of the term, authenticity is metaphysical.

But this hardly seems a sufficient reason to abandon the concept. I note that virtually all of the key motivating factors in the human psyche are also metaphysical. You can’t see or touch or measure love—or hope, faith, friendship, trust, compassion, integrity and a host of other defining qualities of the good life. Even justice, often represented as a weighing scale, cannot itself be weighed on a scale.

Yet each of these qualities can still be assessed and even measured to some degree, just not directly. I know my spouse loves me more than does the postal worker who delivers my mail, even if I can’t assign comparative numbers or weights to their affections. We constantly rely on indirect evidence to gauge the presence (or absence) of metaphysical attributes. Sure, you can decide to lead your life without believing in any of these things, but you would be relegating yourself to a shallow, flattened existence that would be a kind of empiricist’s hell on earth.

So I am happy to proceed with the notion that authenticity in the arts must be measured indirectly, and I encourage you to do the same. And I do so for the best possible reason—namely that there is no alternative. It is in the nature of authenticity to exist as an inner quality, residing in our hearts and souls, not something you can buy off a shelf in convenience store or order in the mail from Amazon. And, frankly, you shouldn’t want it any other way.

But there’s a second obstacle facing us, and this one is more troubling. I’m speaking about the annoyingly close relationship between music and inauthenticity. As we have already seen, musicians more than almost anyone else, seem destined to fail in their quest for authenticity. True, we have encountered situations where authenticity was implicit in a performance, embedded into the circumstances in which it takes place—at a peasant wedding in a traditional society, for example, or at various rituals and ceremonies. But these situations are not typical of the contemporary music business, which is built on concerts and recordings, where authenticity is constantly at risk or, even in the best case, at doubt.

In these latter settings, the powerful relationship between the artist and the social context—that guarantor of authenticity in more traditional contexts—is broken by the intervention of a third force, namely the audience, those fickle consumers of entertainment who present a temptation to any artist to deviate from the true path. In the parlance of popular culture, musicians are thus rewarded for selling out.

But we learned something important during our previous detour into the philosophy of authenticity. We discovered that the artist’s connection to an audience, typically viewed as fraught with a risk of inauthenticity, is not inherently a bad thing. Just as the authentic life for you as an individual requires connecting to other people—family, community, society—in proper and judicious ways, in a similar manner the authentic path for a performer in the current day is bound inextricably with the audience.

We may have some idealized notion that the artist who stops giving concerts, say Glenn Gould or the Beatles in their later days, operates at some purer level than those who play for the crowd, but we have each us of experienced other situations in which audience and artist operate together to create a transcendent experience that could not have happened without them coming together. These two forces, in a dynamic process of give-and-take, define jointly the priorities and values at stake, and create the context in which legitimacy lives or dies. In other words, authentic music isn’t limited to sacred ritual or the distant past, but can also take place at Carnegie Hall or a techno rave or stadium rock concert, provided the right conditions are met.

But what are these conditions? As a member of the audience, what do we require of an authentic artist? And, just as important, what responsibilities do we carry on our own shoulders in this process? In fact, this may be the most neglected part of the equation—we place the burden of authenticity on the artist, but we as listeners are inextricably part of the problem, or solution as the case may be. Nobody would sell out if there weren’t buyers.

Let’s start with the artist. What do we look for when judging a musician as authentic? A whole galaxy of attitudes and practice are involved here, but many of them can be organized under the larger concepts of commitment, reverence, and dedication. This shows up, for example, in the formative experiences that happened long before the record contract and concert tour. I get irritated when I see musicians play styles of music they haven’t mastered, and even highly-trained performers are sometimes guilty of this indiscretion—usually seeking what we call audience expansion or crossover sales. But I am gratified in the same degree when I hear an exponent of African drumming who spent twenty years learning the craft, or a Brazilian bossa nova guitarist who studied under the best in Rio, or a blues musician who came up working juke joints in Mississippi. They aren’t just faking it—a term that probably originated among musicians, no?—instead they put in the time and energy necessary to dig deeply and authentically into their craft.

You may claim that you are a jazz singer, but if you spent the last thirty years touring with your stadium rock band, don’t be surprised if I call you out as a poseur. You may act like you’re killing it as a DJ, but if you just bought your equipment and got your first gig last month, I’m probably not buying it. If you want to play Bach, but can’t tell the difference between an acciaccatura and an appoggiatura, don’t expect a standing ovation from me.

But there’s a different kind of commitment that takes place on stage, in the very process of performing. And this facet of authenticity is very important to us as listeners. This kind of commitment is no different from those we count on in everyday life. When someone makes a commitment to us in other settings, we ask ourselves: Can I trust this person? Will they deliver what they promise? Are they honest and credible? In an odd sort of way, we are making a judgment on the other party’s inner life. Do they mean what they say? Even if we are dealing with something hard-headed and pragmatic, for example a business contract or legal commitment, we still assess these metaphysical and psychological factors. But, of course, we are all the more reliant on them in matters of artistic commitment, where we have no contract to fall back on, and are clearly dealing with something intangible—namely, the emotions and experiences going into a song. We want to feel safe in trusting what the artists communicate to us.

This is one reason why fans are obsessed with all those gossipy tales and rumors about musicians’ private lives. It’s hardly a coincidence that this obsession first appeared in Western culture when singers started singing about their private lives, back in the time of the troubadours. Scholars nowadays tend to doubt the reliability of the so-called vidas, which recount the romantic and heroic exploits of the medieval singer-songwriters. I’m less skeptical than most of the academics, but even if the stories are mostly built on falsehoods, the very fact that listeners of this era wanted to know what singers did when they weren’t performing suggests that our concern with authenticity was shared by audiences almost a thousand years ago.

We don’t demand rigorous honesty here—we understand that a singer is allowed a certain degree of artistic license in crafting a song. Lyrics can fudge the details, changing names and circumstances. Emotional currents can be amplified or refined as they get turned into musical expressions. Even so, we want to feel that this music is not a pose or contrivance. The inputs into the performance, like the ingredients in those natural foods touted at the farmer’s market, ought to be real ones—something that is organic, growing out of the deep roots of the inner life, and not a contrived substitute. If there were a polygraph test for artistic expression, we would want our favorite musicians to pass without the needle dipping into the dangerous red zone, where falsifiers and con artists do their dirty work.

When we turn to the private lives of our most cherished artists—as we invariably do, given our almost instinctive sense that this is relevant to their artistry—we often find confirmation of this unflinching honesty. For example, I have turned again and again to Joni Mitchell’s album Blue since my high school years, because it resonates with precisely this kind of authenticity. And I’m sure I’m not alone in this regard. When NPR ranked the 150 best albums made by women, Blue took the top spot, and the listing cited its origins in “the private places where love and art is made.” And when I turn to Mitchell’s own comments on the album’s genesis, I find this revealing statement: “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world.” [David Yaffe, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017), p. 148.]

Some artists achieve this direct connection between inner life and external expression almost without consciously deciding upon it. They remind me of my father in those family conversations mentioned earlier, where he had no recourse to the postures or poses adopted by the rest of us, for the simple fact that he was incapable of them. Others, in contrast, need to reach this directness after many stopping points along the way. In the community of musicians, these are sometimes the most gifted of them all. Their very ability to assimilate and emulate the styles of others puts up obstacles to self-discovery. This is the source of that seemingly paradoxical adage attributed to Miles Davis: “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” In either case, the journey may differ, but the destination is the same—you come back to who you really are.

Perhaps the concept of authenticity seems most suited to prickly jazz improvisers or moody singer-songwriter albums. But I hear it in many other kinds of music. I feel it reverberating in the grunge rock of Kurt Cobain, the Afrobeat sounds of Fela Kuti, the haunting blues of Son House. I also encounter it in the piano performances of Glenn Gould, even though he is playing music written by long-dead composers—a peculiar proof of the transitive principle of music (a subject for a different essay, I’m afraid), which allows performers to channel these qualities from sources outside their own psyches. A musician can serve as an authentic interpreter of another’s song, but when that happens it’s much more than just an external mimicking of notes and tones, but requires an inner assimilation at a profound level.

But this process is hardly as mysterious as it sounds. As listeners we often experience this deep and powerful resonance with music we can’t claim as our own in any legal or intellectual property sense—we certainly didn’t compose it—yet it corresponds with such raw honesty to our own feelings, that we can say with complete truthfulness: This is my song. This music expresses my inner world more accurately than any words I could summon.

When I studied the history and sociology of the love song, I frequently encountered that phenomenon in romantic relationships. When a couple plans a marriage they often tell the DJ at the reception: You must play this track—it’s our song. That sense of authenticity is almost the equivalent of what the performer or songwriter must feel. Even if the logical and epistemological rules that govern verbal expressions have no bearing in the realm of music, we still feel that songs can serve as a kind of truth statement.

When I consider these varied examples, I am tempted to say that authenticity is hiding in the grooves of these recordings, but that would be very misleading: It’s not hiding at all, but confronts the listener with raw, bristling power almost from the very first note. The integrity and legitimacy of this music can be overwhelming. No, I can’t prove that any of this is authentic music with logical syllogism and laboratory experiments. But I can hear it unmistakably in the performances, and I suspect you can too.

I used the term reverence above, and that’s not a word we hear much nowadays—and especially not in the context of art and pop culture. An attitude of reverence is often inseparable from these feelings of authenticity, and the overtones of a sacred quality, typically implicit when we speak of reverence, are not inapt. The deejay wouldn’t dare tell the couple that they chose the wrong song as their romantic anthem, or suggest the substitution of a better track for the first dance at the reception. That would be a violation of this sacred quality.

Some of my readers will be uncomfortable with my use of the term reverence as an aesthetic concept. Many will feel that, far from serving as a positive force in artistic creation, it’s actually a constraint or weakness. They see reverence as incompatible with the rule-breaking and iconoclasm of the innovator. In fact, I recall a dinner conversation with Stan Getz when he boasted that irreverence was one of the four essential attributes for a great jazz artist (the other three, in his opinion, were individuality, taste, and courage). Yet Getz’s own life, his formative experiences and musical values, make clear that the rule-breaking that he labeled as irreverence coexisted with a deeper kind of reverence that underpinned everything he did. In our conversation, he confirmed the anecdote—I thought it might have been an exaggeration—that Getz left the Stan Kenton orchestra because the bandleader had made an insulting comment about saxophonist Lester Young, who was Getz’s hero and role model. So clearly Stan had some things he revered so much that he would walk away from a pay check and steady gig. In many other settings, he stuck to his guns, standing up for his core musical values, felt at such a deep level that he might not even have been able to put them into words.

That’s the kind of reverence I’m referring to here. There’s nothing complacent about it, and often comes at a heavy cost. And such reverence is hardly a hindrance to innovation. To some degree, it’s an essential attribute for an innovator, whether in music or other matters.

If my descriptions of an authentic musical performance sound as if they borrow from the language of sacred ritual, that’s not a coincidence. Anthropologist Victor Turner showed us long ago that the same considerations cut across these two spheres, and his perspectives have been applied to a wide range of genres and performance contexts, including rock concerts, raves, New Age music, even the staid symphony concerts at the philharmonic. And just as in a sacred or religious observance, everyone involved in these performance settings—not just musicians but also audience members and ancillary individuals (ushers, ticket takers, etc.) are expected to contribute to the efficacy of the ritual.

The experienced attendee at the symphonic performance knows not to applaud between movements, but the jazz connoisseur will clap even while the music is still being played, but only at the proper junctures defined by the ritual (after the sax solo, for example, and not before it). The very existence and persistence of these behavior patterns, which abide for decades and across generations, testify both to our concern that music be performed in the right (or authentic) way, and also to our recognition that even the casual music fan plays a part in this quest for authenticity.

VI

I have to say, at this final juncture, that I simply don’t accept the frequently-stated opinion that members of the audience have no responsibility to the music. “I paid for my ticket, so buzz off buster—I have the right to stare into my phone screen during the whole concert.” “Screw copyrights—I’ll download whatever songs I want from wherever I can get them.” “I brought my client to the jazz club to close the deal, and it’s your tough luck if you don’t want to hear me talking through the entire set.”

The reasons for this should be obvious. The music world is an ecosystem and habitat no different from what we encounter in a rain forest or nature preserve, and thus everything that happens, even at a granular level of detail, is interconnected. And like the rain forest, the ecosystem that supports musical performances is quite fragile. When I look back at the most exhilarating musical performances of my youth, I rarely spend much time thinking about the nightclubs or concert halls where they took place, but if I consider the matter I realize that around 90% of these venues eventually went broke and disappeared from the face of the Earth. And if changing times have done great damage to live music, it has wreaked even more havoc with recordings, which have almost completely disappeared into the virtual world, taking with them many musician’s ability to earn a decent living.

No, it doesn’t take much to degrade or even destroy a thriving music scene. And now AI is adding to the problem—not just displacing musicians, but stealing from their own work (in the form of training data) when they do it.

But this isn’t the place to dwell on the economics or technology of the music world, or the cultural trends that cause venues and record labels to come and go. Instead, I want to focus solely on the audience’s responsibility in the sphere of musical authenticity. How do we, as listeners and consumers, impact this variable? If authenticity, as I have already mentioned, is embedded in the hearts and souls of the performers, do we really have any influence on it at all?

Of course we do.

The artist is no different from the rest of us. You can either listen to your inner voice and stay true to your convictions and values, or you can conform to external expectations. For certain blessed individuals, these two forces overlap perfectly: What the world demands of us is precisely what we want to give it. But everyone of is familiar with those inevitable situations where a hard choice must be made. In creative endeavors, the gap between these alternative can be described as the difference between entertainment and art. The entertainer, almost by definition, gives the audience exactly what it wants. That’s what it means to be an entertainer, and those who do it well are amply rewarded. But art doesn’t always work that way. It frequently conflicts with the expectations of the crowd, challenges their preconceptions and takes them outside their comfort zone.

So this choice faced by the artist is mirrored by the exact same choice we need to make as consumers of culture. We can demand entertainment, which is almost always an experience that matches familiar entertainments from the past.. We want a new Star Wars film that resembles previous Star Wars films. And the same is true of James Bond, Spiderman, Pirates of the Caribbean, and the nostalgia-generating aging rock star tour, etc.

Yet there’s a strange paradox here. I’ve talked to many individuals who perpetuate this cycle at the heart of pop culture—the people who support the brand franchise economy—and even they hunger for something that will take them outside this endless cycle of crowd-pleasing entertainments. They understand that the very experiences that the entertainment industry avoids—those challenging, mind-expanding moments outside our comfort zone—are far more potent and satisfying than the repetition of a stale formula.

The cycle resembles what clinical studies tell us about addiction: the stimulus loses it power when it is replicated so frequently, but the individual caught in the cycle merely holds on to it all the more fervently. To some extent, this is the same double bind that haunts popular culture, which can’t really renounce the ‘popular’ part of its agenda—after all, that’s what give pop culture its pop. But we all know in our heart-of-hearts that this closed loop succumbs, sooner or later, to the law of diminishing returns.

The reason why I focus so much on authenticity—an issue many dismiss as too theoretical, too academic, perhaps even irrelevant—is because it provide the exit point from this doom loop.

What does this mean in practical terms? First and foremost, we need to be willing to make that essential first step in any authentic artistic experience—namely, we must be willing to go to where the artist is, rather than force the artist to adapt to our expectations. We open ourselves up, rather than close ourselves down. We broaden our horizons, and perhaps even find that our comfort zones are larger than we previously realized. Instead of seeking the familiar formulas, we allow ourselves to be beguiled by the artist’s inner truth.

An audience that brings these qualities to a musical performance may experience disappointment, perhaps even repeated disappointment—that’s always a risk when you put yourself in a new situation—but this is a small price to pay for the long-term benefits of living in this kind of porous, adaptive, open-to-the-world manner. The most powerful cultural experiences almost always hit us in unexpected ways, and our only way of tapping into their transformative power is by taking the plunge.

I could make a long list of other habits and attitudes exhibited by authentic listeners. But once you understand the broader principle—the willingness to adapt to the art rather than force the art to adapt to you—they are no mystery. You can figure them out for yourself: the types of artistic experiences you cultivate, the ways you align the time and money you invest in music with these values, the emotional and psychological outlooks you bring to the listening experience. In fact, much of the fun and excitement of this whole process is your finding it out for yourself, rather than reading a “to do” list from me. You will inevitably learn things I could never have told you.

We seem to have arrived at the end point of these considerations on authenticity in music. My goal, at the outset, was to take this concept—so often the target of mockery and smug debunking—and reclaim it for our every day use. And I did so for the simple reason that this aspect of our musical culture is too important to treat in a cavalier manner. If I have made any progress at all in this reclamation project, I can perhaps move on, and leave it to each of you to expand and apply what we have learned.

But it’s perhaps worth adding one final point, even though it is too large for a postscript. Yet it is also too important to leave unsaid. So it must fit into the constrained dimensions of a closing paragraph.

Almost everything dealt with here has a bearing on our experiences and relationships outside of music. Good listening and responsive participation are not merely aesthetic concepts. It may well be that the practice of authenticity comes to us more easily (and with less threat to the defenses in our psyches) via song, where our obligations to the performer are comparatively modest and defined. But if we succeed there, what’s to stop us from applying this same mindset, this same willingness to go outside our narrowly-defined selves into the expansive world of others, in all spheres of our lives? That a rich concept for consideration, beyond the scope of this essay, but perhaps all the richer when left for each of us to pursue in our own individual sequels.