The authenticity problem, Pitchforkmedia, and Leadbelly

For some time now, I've been wanting to write a long essay (actually a book), about the problem of musical authenticity. Pitchfork has an interesting essay on the subject as of today. I have some problems with the conclusions, but it's well written and illustrates the problem of trying to find authenticity in a marketplace rut with capitalism. You can read the essay here.


The problem has a long history in anthropology--since anthropologists study culture, you need to find the most authentically "cultural" person to interview. But of course, what happens to creole people like the Metis in Canada (French and Indian ancestry)? I could spin off for paragraphs about this--how the approach of "true" authenticity is a bad one, mainly because it jettisons history and process (and usually power), but how many of the methods and theories developed under an "authenticity paradigm" of the 19th and early 20th century are still with us today. I won't make you suffer through that. However, what I will do is rattle off a few paragraphs about Leadbelly and Alan Lomax, which I think illustrate some of what I'm talking about. It's a condensed version of a paper I wrote when i first came to UMass, and it's also one of the few things I've written that I think still stands up.


For those of you who don't know, Leadbelly is one of the most famous "folk" musicians (what does that even mean?) of the 20th century. You can read a biography and discography of him here. His most famous song, "Goodnight Irene" has been on the pop charts many times, but never his version of it. The last song on the unbelievably good Nirvana Unplugged is a frightening cover of Leadbelly's "Where did you sleep last night?". Leadbelly spent most of his adult life in a harsh Louisiana prison (Angola, I believe) for killing a man (supposedly in self-defense, but in the racist 20th century south, that's life in prison either way).

In the 1930s, John Lomax, and later his son Alan were travelling the South on a Library of Congress grant to catalog the musical heritage of America. The Lomax's are as perhaps as important to the history of American folk music as any performer, because they served as documentarians and organizers. You can read a little about Alan here, while John's bio can be found here.

Anyway, Leadbelly is sitting in prison in the early 30s, and the warden calls all of the men into the yard. Standing with him are these two white guys, and they ask if any of the prisoners know any "old time" songs. Leadbelly had been an itinerant musician before getting arrested, and had even travelled with Blind Lemon Jefferson, so he raised his hand and got to talking with the Lomax's. He figured maybe it'd get him out of work detail for a couple days, and he hadn't played a guitar in a few years, so what the hell?


He recorded a bunch of songs for them. He had a good musical memory, and played anything he could think of. The longer he played, the longer he could hold out going back to the drudgery of prison They were very excited about his playing, but they kept asking him about "old time" songs. He knew pop songs, and blues, and jazz, and all kinds of stuff, but they really wanted this old-time music, so he did the best he could to figure out what they meant, and gave it to them.

Eventually, he got out of prison (there's some controversy as to whether he just served his time or the Lomax's actually convinced the governor to release him). The Lomax's picked him up at the door and took him to New York for a series of performances at Carnegie hall. When he got there, he saw that all of the posters for his performance showed him dressed as a convict, with taglines to the effect of "Come see the wild murderer Leadbelly, performing the lost music of America", and things like that. On top of it, the Lomax's wouldn't let him wear nice clothes to the performance, instead giving him his old prison clothes to wear onstage, much to the dapper man's chagrin. To make matters worse, they took a large cut of everything he made for "rent and expenses", and even (by some accounts) made him work as a chauffer and butler at their house while he was in New York. He didn't even mind that stuff so much (white folks want crazy things sometimes), but what really burned him was when he tried to get them to let him play Broadway tunes at the concerts (they were his favorite because of the interesting chord changes), but they insisted that they wanted the authentic old time music. Leadbelly died in 1949, and only a few years later, his most famous song "Goodnight Irene", a haunting, semi-supernatural ballad, jumped on the charts performed by a group called the Weavers (for which Pete Seeger played banjo), and kicked off the folk revolution of the 1960s.

I'm not trying to demonize the Lomax's. The service they did to American music is indescribable. But they were stuck in an idea of authenticity that made Leadbelly only legitimate if he was a "wild murderer", from the poorest and therefore most pure streams of American folklife. He could never have been a musician, only a violent conduit for the great tradition, and a symbol of some idea that was as much a part of the Lomax's vision of America as with the reality of America itself. Would Leadbelly have been any less of a musician if he had played broadway showtunes instead of blues tunes he learned from Blind Lemon Jefferson? Would his music have been any less authentic? Clearly the Lomax's thought so--for them, mass culture was phony while isolated groups (re: poor, black, etc...) were something pure, because they were outside of the phoniness.

While this is an interesting idea, especially as a reaction against the widespread penetration of consumer capitalism, and the ideologies associated with the differential priveleging of wealth, I have some problems with it. Namely, that authenticity becomes a tag placed by rich on poor people (or on black folks by white folks), and valorizes their poverty as something to be sought after because of its "connection to pure culture". The status quo of rich and poor becomes something that is naturalized--rich people may have power and wealth, but poor people have authenticity, so the system must be fair. Clearly, the Lomax's were not rich (there's a whole other essay on middle-class appropriation of dominant ideologies), but they were using concepts and ideas that fostered a maintenance of inequality. I can only guess, but I don't think Leadbelly found authenticity to be a laudable state of being. That's why I told the story from his perspective. The ludicrous nature of it all seems apparent, but despite this, the Lomax's are (still) heralded as "saving Leadbelly", when it seems to me that all they did was move him from one kind of servitude to another.

No desperation

Sorry it's taken me so long to post, and sorry this post will be so short, but, hey, who really reads this anyway?! :)

I spent some time yesterday calling senators asking them to support the filibuster against Samuel Alito, which has apparently failed. Since it's almost impossible for the democrats to muster enough votes to actually overturn Alito's nomination, given a minority of members, and some of whom actually support Alito (Ben Nelson from Nebraska and Robert Byrd from West Virginia, to name two) this makes his appointment essentially certain.

I was disappointed that only 25 senators voted against cloture, but as someone recently pointed out, 98 senators voted to confirm Scalia, and that was in a democrat controlled senate. The other thing that gives me heart, or rather, a sense of perspective, is this article by Howard Zinn. The summary of it is basically that, in the long term, its important to remember that our rights are not given to us by the supreme court, but are demanded from it, and from elected officials.

Brown vs. Board of education was the culmination of decades of civil rights work and grassroots organizing. The supreme court dealt the final blow (or lit off the fuse, depending on your point of view) to old-style segregation, but they did so because a whole lot of people got together, organized, and made it happen.

I'm certainly terrified of Samuel Alito, and the power he'll have over my life and the lives of the people I care about. But his confirmation is not the end of the world. It adds an extra step in the path toward true freedom, but no system of power is insurmountably vast, and any time we want, we can dictate the course of our own lives, and take what is ours from those systems..

"I ain't dead yet, muthafucka"

Maybe I'll write something longer, maybe I won't, but I just wanted to put this out there, in case you haven't heard.

Richard Pryor has died

So many comedians of his generation skirted any kind of social responsibility, or any kind of controversy (Lenny Bruce excepted of course). Pryor reveled in controversy, swam in it, and spit it out at his audiences. And we loved it. I've laughed so hard listening to Richard Pryor that I sobbed. My dad and I would have to pull off the road if we put in one of his tapes while driving, to keep from crashing. When they started giving out Grammys for comedy/spoken word records in the 70s, Pryor's albums dominated that category for nearly a decade.

There have been many since who have taken up his yoke and tried to speak laughter to power (Bill Hicks being my favorite, but also David Cross, and Dave Chappelle, to name a few of the righteous), but Richard Pryor proved that you could interrogate inequality with laughter--a fairly revolutionary proposition, given the long history of sober scholarship on the ills of the world, and something all of us seeking to change the status quo should constantly keep in mind.

Scary music--about frigging time

Everybody swings on Christmas, but not me. Halloween is, without a doubt, my favorite holiday. I've loved it ever since I was a little kid, and its been one of the few moments that I associate with innocence of youth that I've carried with me into this tenuous terror called adulthood.

It's atmosphere more than anything else. I guess it's the same with Christmas too, but around Halloween, there's definitely a feeling in the air, and all you have to do is prick up your ears and listen for it. It's especially palpable here in New England, where the golden leaves reflect the sunlight in colors you don't see any other time, and where the hills, forests, and rivers have given rise to so much great atmospheric literature (Hawthorne, Poe, and my man H.P. Lovecraft).

I play on that atmosphere every year. I readjust my world in small ways to better attune me to it. I watch certain movies, I read certain books, and more than anything else, I listen to music.

This list represents the contents of a mixtape that I made in 2000, right around Halloween. At the time it represented the spookiest songs in my record collection. I'd probably make changes now, but given that it represents a moment in time, designed to capture an atmosphere, it's kind of taken on a life of its own, and I don't know if I'd dare mess it up. I put this tape in a walkman and wandered around the North End of Boston on Halloween night, past Copp's hill cemetary, down the winding European streets and along the waterfront. Everytime I hear any of these songs, I go back there.


1.)"Good morning Captain"
by Slint

Maybe one of the most perfectly crafted pieces of art I've ever had the pleasure to experience. Someday I'll finish my essay on Slint's album Spiderland, and what they mean to me, but for right now, suffice it to say, this is a ghost story, to kick off my collection ghost stories (to greater or lesser extent), and it's the best. A sea captain crashes his ship, killing the crew. As he laments his fate, alone in the ocean, he begins to see things—a door rising from the sea, an empty house, a child who may be dead speaking to him. All the while, the music tense and tight, building and falling, building and falling until the ocean of the last few chords and the screams wash the whole scene out of existence. What a band. What a song.


2.)Big Empty
by Stone Temple Pilots

I can take or leave the chorus of this song, but the slide guitar reminds me of the beginning of Pirates of the Carribbean at Disneyland, where you're riding through the swamp, listening to the sounds of crickets and backwoods musicians who know that you're going somewhere dangerous. The other great moment is the breakdown after the second chorus, a whirlpool rising from the depths, engulfing you. Note in both cases, Scott Weilland is not singing. Sorry man, but sometimes songs are better when you sit them out.

3.)Riding
by The Palace Brothers

As a template for Will Oldham's later work in Bonnie Prince Billy, this song works. As a frightening morality play about incest and death and desire, it works beautifully. The guys from Slint are actually the backup band here (no surprise, given the ambience of the recording and the musicianship). When Oldham screams “I'm long since dead, and I live in hell”, you can here the soul he represents screeching and warning the living not to make the same mistake.

4.)As You Said
by Joy Division, performed by Tortoise

I'm cursed with a problem— I have a really hard time enjoying music unless the production blows me away. It has to sound full and filling, for me to get lost in it. It's for this reason that, try as I might, I've never been able to get into Joy Division. I think they would scoff at my desire, intent as they were on portraying the world as a fragile, crystaline thing. This song is instrumental, and doesn't have any of the manic nihilism that characterizes Ian Curtis's lyrics. Plus, it's performed by Tortoise, on a JD tribute I bought a few years ago. They turn the song into a bubbling, electronic, gradual decay, and the single note melody is like a pulse from a dead planet floating black and alone in space.

5.)Baby Did a bad bad thing
by Chris Isaak

I've been told that Chris Isaak is basically some great songs in a sea of filler. But what a song this is—if he had an album of stuff like this, I'd be all over it. As such, I got this song where a lot of people did—from Stanley Kubrick's final opus Eyes Wide Shut. The smokey rockabilly-delay intro is like a car driving off into the night, and then Chris tells us that “Baby did a bad bad thing/and I feel like crying”. He never says what she does, but it must've been something awful—certainly its a betrayal of his love, and it maybe something worse. In the movie, it functions to heighten the tension between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, but it stands on its own as a creepy testament to what love can make us do, or even forgive.


6.)Glenn by Slint

Slint pops up way too much on this tape, but that's because they epitomize to me how great music can be, and what kinds of sensastions it can inspire. Plus, they make some sounds that most of us have never heard on a record album—whispers, screeches, and that strange vibration during the chorus of this song. The melody of the verse could almost be a voice, but whatever story it's telling is most surely a little mad. Something is rotten in the state of Spiderland.

7.)Curse of Milhaven
by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Nick Cave used to raise all kinds of real hell in his original band The Birthday Party, quite possibly the scariest coterie of freaks ever to make an album, with the possible exception of the Stooges. People say that he mellowed out (re: kicked heroin) when he started the Bad Seeds, but one listen to this song, or the entire Murder Ballads album and you know you're in something frightening. I like to think of this song as the polka that will be playing at the gates of hell. The best line: when the murdering child has finally been caught and begins her confession, she comes out with this frightening description of herself... “my eyes ain't green and my hair ain't yellow/ it's more like the other way around/ I've got a pretty little mouth underneath all the foaming”. The bad seed indeed.

8.)Salo
by The For Carnation

After Slint broke up, the guys all went their separate ways, but Brian McMahon took the torch (or maybe the ember) of Spiderland and formed The For Carnation, which makes even Slint's music sound pleasant and unmenacing by comparison. This song is on their album Marshmallows, and its essentially a series of frightening viniettes, culminating in what appears to be a rape. All through the song, a single musical note pulses like a submarine ping in the deepest ocean, or maybe a satelite, sending out its last information on a dying battery in the dead of empty space. It's a message of something, but like all great art, it demands our attention because of its ambiguity and because we have to meet it to interpret. The only problem is that we may be horrified by what we end up seeing.

9.)Red Right Hand
by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

The problem with making a scary music tape is that some bands have made their careers on scaring the crap out of us. Slint and its progeny did this well, and nobody has mastered the macabre (and also redemption) better than Nick Cave. A lot of people know this song from Scream, and it worked well for that movie, but this is a song that's really old testament, trials-of-Christ type stuff. It's like a legend that hoboes and broken junkies might tell each other over a barrel fire, or maybe two men in prison talking about their lives. Satan, with his red right hand (this is an image from John Milton, apparently), is behind it all, and is constantly teaching us that the worst aspects of humanity come not from the evils that men do, but the greed and desire that they feel.

10.)I put a spell on you
by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, performed by Marilyn Manson

Ok, ok, don't switch off your computer just yet. I know there are far better versions of this song (including the original by Screaming Jay Hawkins, who was probably the original Marilyn Manson of his day), but it's not so much the song that's great as the way the band took to it. When the drums come in, pounding out a sailing rhythm for the galley slaves, it almost sounds like the dead have come up and are marching toward the city. Say what you want about Manson's voice, but at least the guy is somewhat expressive, and when he screams, you can feel it in your bones. When he starts yelping out “you, you, you!!!” it sounds like he's got his love taped to a chair in front of him, and every syllable is the wave of a sharp kitchen knife. Also, Twiggy pulled a great solo out of his ass for this one. If the lyrics are a stalker's diary, the guitar is his car, pealing away into the night after the horror has been concluded. For all the stupid shit he's done, I'll never begrudge Manson for this song.

11.)For Dinner
by Slint

Though part of Slint's magic was the whispers of stories that Brian McMahon would tell, just barely audibly, my favorite Slint song has no words. Not that it really matters, because the energy of this song is so palpable that you could tell any story and the song will take it away from you and transform it. It's dark and rumbling, and walking through Boston on Halloween nights, I would find myself looking over my shoulder at every turn to make sure I wasn't being followed. By the time the single guitar line subsides at the end of the song, you feel like something has happened, but you don't know what. Resolution is the wrong word, but maybe acceptance? Damnit—now I'm trying to tell a story over what is essentially a tone poem. Slint does it again.

12.)Wandering Star
by Portishead

I once heard a Portishead track without Beth Gibbons voice, and it was all I could do to not turn it off after ten seconds. She belongs there, and she makes her presence known at every turn. I have no clue what this song is about, but the imagery—stars, darkness, empty husks—send it into the realm of the frightening. Maybe it's just lonliness—the feeling that you're like a star, casting about the blackness of space, and nothing is around you, nothing speaks to you. Of course, as soon as I start thinking about floating silently in space for all eternity, I turn on every light in the house and call everyone I know, just to have some human contact.

13.)Musica Ricercata No. 2
by Dominic Harlan

This is the first track from the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack. Lots of people got annoyed with it, but I dare you, double dog dare you, to turn all the lights off and listen to it all the way through. I've never been able to do it. Every time that high piano note comes in after the long silence, I jump up and hit the stop button.


14.)Stuck in Here
by Filter

This is one of two acoustic numbers on Filter's first record Short Bus. I have no illusions about liking Filter anymore, but this first record (it also has “Hey man Nice Shot” on it) is really good. This song sounds like an old record player, and has a kind of surreal quality to it—the melody is just a little too off-kilter to be anything other than a dream, or a prelude to a nightmare.

15.)Don, A Man
by Slint

This is the last time, I promise! The only acoustic number on Spiderland, this was the first Slint song I sat down and learned how to play. It's essentially two songs held together by a bizarre narrative about partying, alienation, and driving way too fast. It's got some great lines too: “/like swimming underwater in the darkness/like walking through an empty house/speaking to an imaginary audience/he watched from outside”.
I won't say much about it, except that when the distortion comes in, you will jump out of your seat. If that doesn't convince all you bored music lovers to pick up Spiderland, you need some shock therapy.

16.)House full of Garbage
by Shellac

Shellac has dabbled with creepiness through the twisted metallic grind of their albums, but this song stands out in part because it never actually goes anywhere. There's no loud chorus, or a dramatic build up. The song actually ends with (I kid you not) about three minutes of Todd Trainer banging out single hits on drums. I threw this song on the tape because as a kid, I used to have nightmares about abandoned houses full of garbage. I still don't know why the image is so visceral to me, but every time I hear this song, I think of waking up screaming as a little kid, after dreaming about falling through the floor onto a dirty mattress piled high with garbage, and knowing that I was lost forever.

17.)Story
by Tool

I had to close with this. It's after the hidden track on Undertow, and it's also the last sounds that appear on that album, aside from some general cricket noise. Supposedly Maynard received this story/poem/suicide note on his answering machine, and felt it warranted inclusion on the album. I don't know what it's about, really, but the imagery gives me goosebumps, and if I'm listening to this at home, I lock all the doors when it ends. God help me if I'm outside.

What this story, and the rest of the songs make clear is that Lovecraft was right—the supernatural, the unknown, the ambiguous, and the undefinable are so frightening and horrifying to us in part because we have no way of categorizing what they tell us. It's cliché to say that the best scary movies don't show the monster, but it's not because the monster isn't there, it's because we have to engage our minds in what is going on. We are asked, on Halloween and anytime we get the shit scared of us, to entertain the possibilities of our own imaginations, and all great art succeeds, in one way or another, of engaging them to a greater or lesser degree. Hopefully these songs are no exception. If you want to recommend any other scary-assed music for my next year mix tape, I'd love to hear about it.

Scary music prelude

I'm working on a post about a halloween mix tape I made a few years ago. Every year in mid-october I find myself searching for creepy music. I know it's out there, but no one ever gives me a guide, or a way to think about looking.


Pitchfork put this up a few years ago. I've still never picked up any of these records, mostly because (no surprise, given the arena) they're too obscure to be found in any of my record haunts. Still, if you run across any of these albums, drop me a line and let me know if they live up to the hype:

Pitchfork: Every Day is Halloween

Also see an offering of scary music from another on-line rag, Stylus Magazine

Greenspan: Electroclash Godfather?

Since we've all heard that Alan Greenspan is retiring, to be replaced by Bush's chief economic advisor, I thought it'd be nice to reflect on some of his achievements: pragmatic economic policy (or dumb luck), closely guarded economic secrets, and...

electro-clash

The last piece by is by Ian Svenonius, formerly of the D.C. bands Nation of Ulysses and the Make Up, and currently in Weird War. I love music journalism like this. :)

"The problem of leisure"

My wonderful girlfriend got me a fantastic (and wonderful) birthday present a couple of weeks ago. I had mentioned that Gang of Four were playing in Northampton that weekend, and that I might like to take her. When I asked her if she wanted to go, she turned the tables and offered to take me. I enthusiastically accepted. I'm sure I spoke of their importance in late 20th-century popular music, and I probably even admitted that I felt like a total geek-boy when faced with the possibility of seeing such a seminal band. What I didn't and couldn't really speak about was whether they were any good. I had Entertainment! on Vinyl, and had given it a few listens, but the somewhat flat quality of the recording kind of turned me off--a topic deserving a longer post at a later date.

However, what I, and most everyone else I know understood was that so many bands that we loved (and plenty that we didn't) would not exist without this band. Although it pains my "indie cred" to say it, my friends and I didn't go to hear music. We came to hear a legacy, a tradition--we were looking for the source.

(Just an aside--Somebody needs to write a book about indie rock and the importance of tradition. Endless referentiality in the form of influences and styles forms an entire discourse among a huge group of people in North America, and as far as I know, that seems like a relatively modern phenomena. I want to know the circumstances, history, and the power dynamics involved in this particular cultural form).

For better or worse, a legacy is what we got. Most of the set came from Entertainment! and Solid Gold, Gang of Four's first two records. A few new songs were sprinkled in, but this was a reunion show, first and foremost, and like all reunion shows, the hits had to be trotted out for the kiddies. How different was this than seeing Bachman-Turner Overdrive play "Taking Care of Business" at the Hawkeye Downs Speedway in Iowa?

Let me be very clear--I had a tremendous time at this show. The band were ferocious (but how much of a pose was that?), and all of us danced our hearts out, even break out into an exuberant mosh pit during "At home he's a tourist". Jon King danced around the stage, pounding the air with his fists in time with the beat, and Dave Alexander and Andy Gill thrashed their instruments across the stage, playing at times in barely tolerable registers of noise, and all through, the tribal pounding of Hugo Burnham's drums, locking all the chaos in place, tying the morass of the experience into something knowable--a pulse, jagged and disjointed though it often was, like the pulse of our collective heartbeats.

Dancing is certainly part of Gang of Four. Their post-punk jitters and funk paved the way for an incalculable amount of more recent music of numerous sub-genres (insert trendy name here). But from their name on down, their music was always incalculably political. In the late 1970s, especially at British universities (where Gang of Four first met) social theory was undergoing one of its many radical transformations. Simplistically, the "post-punk" in the cultural world was prefaced by a whole series of "post-"s in the academic and philosophical world. The structuralist approaches of the 1950s and 60s were giving way to new understandings of the way that power was mobilized in social relationships, and what is now known as "cultural studies" was burgeoning in academic departments everywhere.

What this field of knowledge argued (at least as I understand it), was that Western cultural forms, especially popular culture, needed to be interrogated and understood as part of interal power dynamics within societies. People wrote books on punk rock and mod subcultures, television, Disneyland, and romance novels, anything that had previously been considered worthless, ephemeral, and vulgar by the academic gaze.

Gang of Four were part of this world, and they consciously espoused its theories and politics consciously. Their songs touched on the vague relationships between appearances and essences, the mysterious nature of love in the traditional pop song, the stultifying air of suburbia, and numerous other topics within the purview of the (explicitly Marxist) field of cultural studies. What they, and the fields of knowledge they represent argue for was that the aesthetic experiences we associate with popular culture are molded and shaped by unequal power
relations inherent in society.

Which is why it's hard for me to write a glowing review of the Gang of Four show that I saw. The show was powerful, certainly one of the best live concerts I've ever been to, and the band was everything I'd hoped they'd be. But what does that mean? Would I have felt the same if I had never heard of Gang of Four? If I hadn't read about their influence on the Dismemberment Plan, the Liars, Rage against the Machine, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and hundreds of other bands who, at various times in my life, had meant so much to me? Would I have felt the same if they had only played songs no one knew?

How can I trust my own feelings in a world where, at every turn, I'm told how to feel by the pop-culture I love (what does that mean?). My personality is a process of cultural apparatuses acting upon my being, trying to get me to respect the authority of governments, treat myself as more valuable than others, and above all BUY!!!! BUY!!!! BUY!!!!! I certainly partake of all those things at various times during the day--where is the real "me" in all of that? Or to conclude by paraphrasing, if our essence is rare, as Gang of Four seem to argue, what room is there for appreciating something as simple as a great rock and roll show by a great rock and roll band?