Introduction
- the aesthetic of the ‘authentic musical experience,’ with its rejection of music that is labeled contrived, pretentious, artificial, or overly commercial, has played a major role in forming musical tastes and canons. ix
- representational authenticity – when people say a musical performance or recording is authentic. x
- Cultural authenticity – music that reflects a cultural tradition x
- Personal Authenticity – music that reflects the person or people who are making it. x – The Beatles were / are thought to command this…Did the Beatles actually and actively pursue this?
- Authenticity is a complicated notion, an absolute goal that can never be fully reached. X → ‘Nothing is Real, Strawberry Fields Forever’
Chapter THREE – Blues and Autobiographical Songs
- Blues, said to be very personal music. However, blues lends itself very well to first-person narrative that purports to be autobiographical. This narratives were often fictional, too vague to be personal, or concerned an event in which the singer was only a peripheral figure. 106-7. (as related to Beatles’ inspirations)
- “Ballad of John and Yoko”. 123. Signifies a certain degree of personal, autobiographical narrative in Beatles songs
- explosion of singers/songwriters in the 1960s. 129. 1960s, countercultural / youth audience desire for authentic narrative. By writing own songs, Beatles strengthened their association with personal authenticity.
- The autobiographical song is perceived as a window to the singer/songwriters mind. However, “simply revealing oneself in a song, a goal that we now all take for granted, is a rather recent and comparatively artificial development in the history of artificial music. We now think of autobiographic song as a natural form of expression, but as anyone who has ever tried can attest, writing a song based on one’s own life, with a verse and chorus structure, that will appeal to a mass-market audience is no simple manner. It is far easier to sing about almost anything else.” 134
- “Are singers who go to great lengths to construct a song around those aspects of their lives that are already public knowledge being more honest then those who sing about fictional or universal subjects? Or are they self-consciously attempting to control their public personas through song?” 133. Regarding the Ballad of John and Yoko. Do the authors take liberty in assuming Lennon’s intentions?
Chapter FOUR – The Art and Artifice of Elvis Presley (as primary influence of the Beatles)
- Elvis was not the libidinal, crazed equivalent of movie stars – he was a quiet well-mannered Southern boy. 137. Seems uninformed - unless they knew John Lennon personally, this statement is basically heresay.
- RCA executives didn’t want ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to be his first single – but Elvis knew what his audience wanted. He confided to Lloyd Shearer a few months later…”I’ve made a study of Marlon Brando. I’ve made a study of poor Jimmy Dean. I’ve made a study of myself, and I know why girls, at least the young ‘uns, go for us. We’re sullen, we’re brooding, we’re something of a menace. I don’t understand it exactly, but that’s what the girls like in men…You can’t be sexy if you smile. You can’t be a rebel if you grin.” 137. He knowingly created an image…viewed himself as an actor, playing a part.
- Elvis re-invents rock and roll. Still imagined to be original, uninhibited, singing from the soul because of his dancing and his bizarre vocals. 140
- It is generally taken for granted that any singer who can convey Elvis’s energy and passion must be singing from the bottom of his heart. 142-3.
- At the heart of Elvis’s vision was his voice, with its inimitable combination of playfulness, arrogance, and desire….This mixture not only precluded any sort of personal authenticity, it seemed to be a reaction against it. In order to make arrogance and desire palatable to American listeners, they could not be genuine…By embellishing country music’s plainspoken style with all sorts of mannerisms, Elvis deliberately moved his music away from the this-is-God’s-truth mode of country delivery and the cult of authenticity that went with it.” 148
- “It only made sense, then, that the songs he and his managers chose rarely, if ever, bore any relationship to the events of his personal life.” 148
- “Rock ‘n’ roll was at its core self-consciously inauthentic music. It spoke of self-invention: If Elvis could reinvent himself, so could others; if he could assume a mask, so could anyone. Its inauthenticity gave it staying power.” 149. Inauthenticity allowed it to succeed?
- “John Lennon credited ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ with igniting his love for the music.” 151.
- Mid-1960s, spectre of authenticity grabbed hold of the reins of this runaway genre, and rock music became what it remains today: a mode of performance characterized by a strong desire to stop acting and get real. 157.
Chapter FIVE – Faking it in the age of singer-songwriters
- Prior to 1960s, record companies created hits by taking a songrwriter’s song and hiring singers….”Even more than Dylan, it was the Beatles who, by writing and performing their own songs, transformed the music industry from one in which the congruence between singer and songwriter was irrelevant to one in which it could not be ignored.” 168 To examine how important issues of authenticity were to conceptions of the Beatles, compare the group with the Monkees.
- “…the sheer scale of their success caused the music business to undergo a paradigm shift. Now every A&R department and label chief was on the hunt for groups who wrote and performed their own songs…” 169 authenticity invoked as a means to build commercial appeal.
- “Paul McCartney was the more polished and emotionally distanced one of the pair. A skilled songwriter, he could imitate and adapt any style he cared to. He varied from the straight rock and roll ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ to a great ballad like ‘Yesterday’…His songs were accomplished from the start, but the extra layer of gloss meant that they revealed less about the writer’s personality than Lennon’s did. And later in their careers it was Lennon’s pursuit of honesty in his songs that established his enduring mystique.” 173.
- Lennon: complex individual – clear even in early songs. Words of his songs can be quite bleak separated from the music. 171. “If I could see you now, I’d try to make you sad somehow” (“I’ll Cry Instead”.). These songs appear more honest than other love songs, because they aren’t all dreamy and nostalgic.
- “Before the scale of their fame became apparent, Lennon and McCartney had anticipated that they might end up as jobbing songwriters. For a while their efforts were almost as focused on producing songs for other artists as on writing for themselves.” 171. How does this impact their perceived personal authenticity?
- Beatles idolized Leiber and Stoller (who had written some of the songs that Elvis performed). 172
- Little Richard – another of Lennon’s heroes.
- “Given the way that Lennon and McCartney had revered these extraordinary songwriting teams, it is ironic that their own extraordinary achievements as songwriting performers helped to shift the focus of creativity away from the songwriter and toward the artist. With the success of the Beatles, it was no longer sufficient for artists to merely interpret a song, now it had to be their own song, their own self-expression, giving the audience a different expectation of the music’s level of intensity and experience…this heightened identification of the singer with the song also changed the kind of song that can succeed.” 172 personal authenticity intersecting with marketable success
- Beatles also influenced by Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, both of whom wrote their own songs, as had previous country and blues stars. 173
- As Beatles got more famous, the songs that the Beatles wrote started to change. By 1965, they were looking for ways to take their songwriting into different territories. 175
- “Lennon was by [1965] deeply frustrated with the band’s lovable public image, feeling that people didn’t see the real person behind his persona. He believed that he was not taken seriously, and that his true self was being submerged into the collective identity of the Beatles. The suits and polite bows that Brian Epstein had imposed on the band seemed funny and conformist to him. They grated against his rebelliousness and contrariness, as did Epstein’s natural deference to authority and tradition. Lennon had been struggling to find ways to express himself outside the straitjacket of Beatles songs – his two books of nonsense poetry and drawings (In His Own Wright and A Spaniard in the Works), published in 1964 and 1965 demonstrated his own anarchic side.” 176. Beatles’ image still managed by Epstein, conflicts with personal authenticity. The Beatles as a band, at least in the early years, were not even believed to be authentic by Lennon himself.
- ***“’Norwegian Wood’ was a transitional song for Lennon because for the first time he found a way to write a song directly about himself. The actual lyric is somewhat guarded, partly because he was speaking about a one-night stand and, as a married man, was reluctant to be too confessional. But the song is a recognizable version of Lennon’s real life and has a confessional tone, in spite of its surreal turn. In ‘Norwegian Wood’, we can see the seeds of a more direct approach that led to the styles and attitudes Lennon adopted a few years later.” 177
- ***Still, Lennon’s songs of this period tend to reveal little about his real life. While the odd song like “Help” and “Nowhere Man” did have clear personal relevance, songs like “I Am The Walrus,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “She Said She Said,” and “A Day In The Life” relied on tangential imagery that dropped clues and red herrings, but gave little away. 177
- ***”Glass Onion” – Lennon mocks the earnest interpreters who had searched for hidden meanings in Beatles songs.” 177 Does this include my interpretations, then?
- ***”Even ‘All You Need Is Love,” acclaimed as an anthem for the Summer of Love (1967), was more of a verbal game than a political statement, with its clever wordplay and riddle-like verses.” 177. Use of this song in Luvs diaper commercial.
- By the time he wrote “The Ballad of John and Yoko”, it was clear that he was becoming increasingly interested in a more personal kind of songwriting. 178
- Deeply personal songwriting was still relatively rare in the pop music of the 60s. 179.
- “By 1968, John Lennon was starting to chafe at the bounds of his group and to castigate himself for failing to achieve what he now really wanted: genuine self-expression. Over the next few years, as the Beatles began to disintegrate, he began to reappraise the situation.” 180
- McCartney – his songs were more sugar-coated than Lennon’s, less self-expressive. 181. The perception of personal authenticity was applied to the Beatles as a whole, then.
- “[Lennon] had come to be seen as someone with artistic sensibilities who held controversial political and religious views in his own right, rather than being a mere puppet. Now he wanted to live up to the possibilities created by this new improved public image.” 181. What created the change in his public image? What happened that he was first viewed as lovable, and then as revolutionary?
- “In his solo music he increasingly searched for ways to return to the raw roots of rock’n’roll (perhaps forgetting how playful those roots had actually been) and to make personal and political statements. While the surrealism and humor of his mid-period Beatles songs, with their layered production values and instrumentation, had represented a high point of his career, he now looked for ways to cut through the masks and layers of sound to communicate in a simpler, purer way, in order to show his audience his “real self.” 182. Pursued authenticity not just through lyrics, but through sound as well.
- With his first solo releases, in particular the single “Cold Turkey” and the Plastic Ono Band album, Lennon confronted his listeners with a presentation of his self as naked and rubbed raw…Never before had a pop star displayed personal complex written emotions with such intensity. 184
- “A common problem with self-expression and autobiography in songs is that however honest we may be, we tend to project a mixture of the person we are and the person we want to be, or the person we want to be seen as…But when performers come right out and say, ‘This is the kind of person I am, and what do you think of that,’ we react differently: we wonder why they want to make this statement about themselves and what they might be hiding. The very fact that they consciously assert something about themselves makes us treat their statements as deliberate attempts to project a certain persona, and we are led to question whether this is the truth, a self-deception, or a construction intended for public consumption.” 186 suspicion of autobiography
- ***”An indirect man had learned to be direct. And a natural-born individualist was trying to learn how to be (or refuse to be) one of the voices of a generation, no easy task…” 187
- “On the release of the next album, Imagine, Rolling Stone’s Ben Gerson saw a problem in Lennon’s modified approach to music, saying, “I fear that John sees himself in the role of the truth-teller, and as such can justify any kind of self-indulgent brutality in the name of truth.” 187
o “Gerson was referring to the tracks “Gimme Some Truth,” in which Lennon rails against hypocrites, politicians, and prima donnas in general, and “How Do You Sleep?” in which Lennon issues a series of insults calculated to hurt his erstwhile best friend Paul McCartney. Lennon’s faith in his own honesty encouraged him to revert to his earlier aggression but now with a self-righteous tinge that was uncomfortable to observe.” 187
- ***”Lennon said of his song “Imagine”: “Anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugar-coated it is accepted…Now I understand what you have to do. Put your political message across with a little honey.” He was justifying the commercial approach of the song’s music and lyrics, claiming that it was just as fundamental as the Plastic Ono Band material beneath its sugar-coating and that rather than ‘selling out,’ he was using the song’s commercial nature to smuggle through his political messages.” 198 Does his willingness to ‘play the game ‘weaken his authenticity (perceived and otherwise) or strengthen it?
- ***Lennon may have been misunderstanding the universal power of his own song. “Imagine” is able to rise about the particular political moment and be applied in different ways because it is abstract and speaks in riddles and questions rather than in bald statements. Can we imagine no possessions? Even when we know that the man who wrote the song had a room full of fur coats?...In this song, Lennon had taken a step away from the extremes of self-expression and hard-line politics and created a fable that could be applied to any listener…In fact, Lennon wasn’t disguising a moment of authenticity and self-expression beneath commercialism – he was taking a healthy step away from authenticity and self-absorption in order to communicate a message while still entertaining us. It is partly for this reason that “Imagine” is still a powerful song and one that will last a long time.” 198. “Imagine no possessions’. This very song was a possession.
Chapter TEN – Moby, the KLF, and the Ongoing Quest for Authenticity
- Moby’s record, “Play” went to number one in many countries, sold ten million copies and three million singles, and propelled Moby to the position of the world’s best-selling dance musician.
- Moby’s tracks, in turn, “…were sold as commercials for a wide range of luxury goods. Producers of commercials recognized that while the music was modern and unobtrusive, it had an emotional effect on the listener, which made it ideal for underpinning the selling moment.” 321-2. How does Beatles music function within this realm of emotion and advertising?
- Moby defended his music’s ubiquity in advertisements on the basis that it is a kind of guerrilla marketing, compensating for his underdog status. If music doesn’t get played on radio, commercials are another way to hear it. 321
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