This first ran on Splice Today.
What is good music? In America (and not just America) the answer often comes down to, what is authentic?
Bob Dylan is certainly a touchstone of authenticity. The roughness of his singing and the improvisatory almost/randomness of his lyrics signal honesty, down-home genius, and virile swagger; his is a world where you meet women working in topless places and stop in for a beer. His references to folk, blues, and country sources points to experiences of pain and loss. He knows about folks who are real, and so he’s real too.
Obviously, Air Supply is coming from a somewhat different place.
The reason Air Supply is a butt and a punch line is because it isn’t Bob Dylan. Instead of gritty amateurishness, Air Supply has that professionally slick piano tinkling along someplace that is absolutely not a cross roads and Russell Hitchcock emoting like a fruity castrati in too-tight pants. The winking reference to making the “stadiums rock” (emphatically in quotations) as a vivisected guitar pretends to be cock rock for a couple of bars just underlines the gratuitous lack of grit. Because there is no grit. There is only schmaltz.
So, yes, if you’re looking for authenticity, Air Supply is telling you right there in their name they are the wrong vendor. Instead, what Air Supply has to sell is their very inauthenticity; the transparent showmanship of bathos. Instead of knowing earthiness, you get that preposterously gifted voice soaring amidst lyrical puffery like “The beating of my heart is a drum and it’s lost and it’s looking for a rhythm like you.” It’s a towering cotton candy blank; emotions pinned, as the song says, to not much if anything. Rather than pretending to be real when you listen to Air Supply, you get to pretend to not be.
Air Supply isn’t a great band…but some inauthentic bands are.
The Carpenters are working the same sort of territory as Air Supply — you’ve got the tinkling piano, you’ve got music heading for the ramparts, you’ve got the voice heading up there with it. Karen Carpenter’s singing has a purity and expressiveness that Hitchcock’s helium novelty lacks, though, and Neil Sedaka’s lyrics manage sophisticated cheese that’s a significant improvement on Air Supply’s more lumpen brand. As a result, the smooth surface comes across not just as exuberant bombast, but as a kind of disavowed desperation. The smiling Disney mask gapes open, and inside is a bleak emptiness of soul.
That’s the appeal of Brian Wilson’s music as well. Why exactly the Beach Boys are critical darlings is a bit unclear; perhaps it’s just that they timed their careers right in the middle of boomer heaven, or maybe it’s the flashes of Chuck Berry-esque guitar on their early hits. But by the time of the 1968 Friends, such authenticity as there was is gone, and what you’re left with is the kind of fruity, neutered vocals that will later lift Air Supply aloft, and the funkless, polished plastic jazz arrangement that Richard Carpenter would clone. Even more than his successors, Wilson wallows in his inauthenticity — the vacuous space where a real self should be.
“I get a lot of thoughts in the morning
I write ’em all down
If it wasn’t for that
I’d forget ’em in a while.”
The next verse is him trying to remember a friend’s phone number and thinking about it and remembering it and calling, but then the friend isn’t home so he has to write a letter. No doubt consumption of weed (and other things) is in part responsible for this anti-narrative, but through whatever chemical combination, the song is about its lack of being about anything — it’s adrift in its own expansive hollowness. Proponents of authenticity often argue that you need to be real to be an individual, but in their different kinds of lacks, Air Supply, the Carpenters, and the Beach Boys show that you can be idiosyncratic and even occasionally beautiful and still be made out of nothing at all.
This reminds me that I continue to be amazed that no on has ever compiled a CD of Jim Steinman-written bombastic lite rock, which would include the Air Supply song above, as well as Meatloaf’s Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad, Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart and Holding Out for a Hero, and Barry Manilow’s Read ’em and Weep. As far as swaggering inauthentic pop music goes, Steinman literally wrote the book.
I love that Meatloaf song! Also the Bonnie Tyler; hadn’t realized they were all by the same person.
I think full on popism is perfectly fine, but the genre of white orchestrated soothing “yacht rock,” which overlaps with easy listening instrumentals and Tony Bennett, is a special genre that deserves more than just a general celebration of inauthenticity. I feel like David Lynch and shoegaze both did a lot to validate that music.
Write it for us and I’ll print it!
Happy to have filled in a gap for you, Noah, as vapid as it might be. When I was a radio disc jockey I was fascinated by how Steinman seemed to possess music acts like The Borg Queen, turning them to his own purposes. I mean, these songs ALL sound like they are of a piece, despite being by different singers and musicians. FYI, Steinman actually wrote MOST of Meatloaf’s hits, including Paradise by the Dashboard Light and the more recent I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That). This all may be the most entirely useless thing I know way too much about.
Hey Noah, while I think The Carpenters are certainly a good choice for coming across as authentic, with the melancholy of Karen’s voice cutting through the slickness, I don’t hear any virile swagger in “Tangled Up in Blue.” Notably, that character who stops in for a beer and has the stripper flirt with him becomes part of some sort of observer to another couple’s relationship falling apart. Any swagger has evaporated long before the song is over. And I don’t see Brian Wilson as inauthentic at all. Even the song you cherry-picked sounds to me like a guy (who we all know was deep into mental illness) acknowledging he’s in a funk and music is the only way he knows to navigate out of it. How is a guy writing “Til I Die” around this time vacuous?
Total Eclipse of the Heart has one of the most effed-up videos ever.
“Any swagger has evaporated long before the song is over.”
You’re saying his complex artistic depth is too awesomely authentic and thoughtful to be described by “swagger.” Or, his swagger is too swaggery to be contained in such dismissive language. I don’t agree.
I love Brian Wilson’s vacuousness. But writing about being stoned and forgetting someone’s name is still vacuous. “Till I Die” is beautiful blankness, but still pretty blank.
Wilson’s relationship to authenticity is complicated. Seeing him as mentally ill is certainly one way that his emptiness is tied to tropes of authenticity.
Ah, I am a sucker for Jim Steinman’s preposterously bombasitc melodies, productions and inane metaphors. Seriously.
I know I’ve mentioned this book before, but Barker and Taylor’s Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Pop Music is a brilliant book. I came across it by chance–because he’s filled with praise for the vocal work of Donna Summer (a fave of mine) who he posits never got the credit she deserved, ranking her voice up there with the likes of Aretha, due to the genre and polish of the music she did. Ironically, unlike Aretha, she actually did write or co-write most of her music which, in theory, should make her more “authentic” but…
Alan–one reason may be that Steinman always wrote from the same voice–and a HUGE number of his songs came from the homoerotic, post-apocolyptical Peter Pan musical he was working on constantly for decades (called at one time, when Joseph Papp workshopped it, The Dream Engine I believe–at that point it had killer nuns as the villains). Of course that’s not true of all–apparently It’s All Coming Back to Me Now was meant for a Wuthering Heights project–the moment when Heathcliff dances with Cathy’s dead corpse.
Speaking of which, while Steinman remains a guilty pleasure, I am a big fan of one of his biggest flops–Pandora’s Box-Original Sin, where It’s All Coming Back to Me Now first appeared (check out the Ken Russell S&M video–which was done with the cast of the West End production of Cats, no less–on Youtube). Choosing four of his fave female session singers the plan was to create a girl group the way one of his faves, “Shadow” Morton did with The Shangri-Las.A big enough cult hit to have a deluxe reissue some time back, but not a big seller. As he always did, he re-recorded most of the songs from it later with other acts (including MeatLoaf who covered Good Girls Go to Heaven on Bat II).
But you’re right that any act he worked on was totally morphed into his own same image. Even his musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber (not surprisingly, a big fan) Whistle Down the Wind for which Steinman apparently only did lyrics, not music, sounds like Steinman wrote the music as well.
I also want to appreciate Rotary Connection, who did an amazing choral-Afrofuturist kind of showtime experimental -orchestral thing that seems to also fit in to this charmed era.
Yuval Taylor lives in Hyde Park, and we’ve gotten together several times. He’s a lovely guy (and that book is great.)
I’m jealous! That book has been my go-to argument whenever this “authenticity” shit comes up.
I had a memorable argument where people were yelling at me why Destiny’s Child is fake, unlike old R&B. I said, “Well, yeah, I don’t like this newfangled crap like Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin; what we need is real singers like R.H. Harris and Marion Williams.” They didn’t know what I was talking about, which was satisfying in some sense, but also frustrating.
C’mon, man. Destiny’s Child were crap–how could something I love with amazing vocals like Cooke’s for Chain Gang be anything but judged “authentically”. :P
For all of the reasons illuminated above, I’ve turned to music in foreign tongues. Even YeYe, and the overtly sensuous musings of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg seem exciting against the backfield panderings of today’s pointless American pop music.
??? The above is about how sneering at current American pop music is kind of silly. Gainsbourg is great of course, but there’s lots of good pop being made now, imo. Beyoncé’s latest is really ambitious and well done, Kanye can be great, Kendrick Lamar is good, etc. etc. It’s hit or miss, but that’s alwyas the case with pop, or anything.
It’s probably overly ironic, but I’ve just been appreciating “vaporwave” (old person quote marks) for borrowing from old electronic sounds in a way that is obviously supercool but also taps into the uncanny-valley aspect of adult contemporary, a la Everyrhing is Terrible.