Authenticity

I casually searched my online name there other day and found, to my surprise, that I had accidentally spawned a polemic. I commented elsewhere that the secret connection between Grunge and Britpop was the pursuit of authenticity. My polemicist took umbrage with this in particular relation to Blur. They did not like Blur. Blur were inauthentic.

It says something about the 90s and their legacy that authenticity is regarded as unambiguously positive. Why does a work of art (however high or low) have to be authentic? There is no objective reason. We don’t expect feature films to be documentaries. We don’t expect historical novelists to have experienced what they write about first hand. You get the idea.

The desire for something real is, however, objective. The key quality of 90s pop culture was authenticity, or at least perceived authenticity. In the 90s you had to keep it real and play it straight. Drama was estimated by how true to life it was (or felt). Millionaire rappers talked about the ghettoes and gang warfare, while rock singers cried over their loneliness and angst. They did this because it was real.

In terms of music there was a clear reaction against high 80s values, primarily multi-tracking and synthesised sounds; the very things that are currently making a comeback. In America this was expressed as a general enthusiasm for low fidelity sound. British music makers swapped sampling and funky shuffle beats for strings, brass and big guitar reverb (the change from concentration on the groove to shifting harmonies did wonders for indie bands’ song writing, not to mention singing).

What defined 80s music was production. It is a simple step of logic to go from production, to product to commodity. Britpop and Grunge emerged at a time of shifting cultural values. Grunge artists were overwhelmingly liberal, while the British music scene was massively anti-Tory.

Whether they venerated underground punk bands or listened to high 60s pop, musicians were trying to connect with a past vitality that stood in sharp contrast to early 90s numbness. This numbness was not just musical, but cultural and social.

But classic pop/rock was not vital because baby boomers were an unusually brilliant generation. The great music of the 60s and 70s was particularly brilliant because it was made in an atmosphere of upheaval and questioning. It was the time in late capitalism where people, especially young people in the west felt inspired, empowered and optimistic about the future.

Having sampled some early Britpop albums I started turning on to The Beatles and through them saw the sixties appear “sun-flooded” across the chasm of time. It doesn’t matter so much whether the people who lived through the 60s felt like it was a golden age, growing up in the 90s amid the anti-climax of the cold war it certainly did.

Pursuing an ideal gives people energy. In another arena, this is what turns working class politics from the struggle to survive into socialism. Culture does not follow the same rules as social movements. Utopianism is ultimately harmful to the socialist movement. In terms of culture it matters not a jot. The illusion is objective if the artist is able to bring it to life. If, in pursuing musical authenticity by using past methods of making music to renovate modern culture, musicians fail to make completely expressive, non-alienated art then… never mind. Great music was made in the 90s. If we want to free culture we have to destroy the commodity system in its entirety.

Music alone cannot change the world. We knew this already.