While Oliver Flies

Oliver is in the air as we speak, winging his way to the city of dreams. I'll be joining him there shortly, but while he's in transit and ill-quipped to prevent me from spewing forth on this website, allow me to have my say:

This is a project about authenticity. In his manifesto essay, Oliver defines good pop as "inarguably authentic and easier to understand than Mozart", and it's this phrase I wanted to slip into the spotlight for y'all today, because reading it again it occurred to me that if the part about Mozart was necessarily subjective (my father, a lifelong orchestral musician, would find Mozart significantly easier to understand than pop music) then the part about authenticity might be no less so. What is authenticity? It's a question worth asking before we embark on our journey (or whilst we are in the process of embarking on our journey). And it's one of those irritating "What is..." questions with which people often open articles, essays and lectures; the sort of unanswerable question which might possibly be useful to an enquiring mind treading a subject for the first time, but which carries out the more crucial role of making the writer look really really thoughtful and clever. (S)He's simply got his subject and stuck two words on the front of it, but it's like (s)he's taken the bottom out of your very world!

What's happening in this scenario is that the writer (let's call him "Will" to save on further gender equivocation) is cultivating an aura of authenticity by beginning a work with the established trappings of academia. Authenticity, in other words, can be faked, and I don't see this applying to music any less than it applies to academic writing, or anything else. Oliver will tell you (I suspect, he's free to correct me) that earnestness will shine through even the most vacuous pop; that you can always tell when someone is faking. As a cynic, I simply suggest that while you may have spotted a lot of fakers trying to get away with it, you'd never know if you'd seen a successful one.

But let's perform that trick again. What is faking? When I play solo I consider my music fairly authentic, I suppose, but I'm not the same person onstage (or on film) as I am off - not quite. I try to keep the two as close to each other as I can, but at the end of the day you're in a bizarre situation when you're performing, and some small part of you is always going to change to reflect that. It's the part that changes when you're with family as opposed to friends, or in a job interview instead of an opium den. Which is the 'authentic' me - the taxpayer, the musician, the son, the literature student, the gamer?

So now for the slam-dunk. Why does it matter? Authenticity is at least party subjective, impossible to quantify, easy to manipulate, and arguably actively disadvantageous when it comes to record and ticket sales (whatever it does for your cultural credibility). I agree with Oliver that the subject is approached somewhat schizophrenically by music fans and critics - what I want to find out about is why it's approached at all. Why does it matter so? Should it? What would happen if it didn't?

There's a whole lot more to be written round this but I thought I'd pave the way for these issues to come to the fore. They create rocky ground for a project such as the ABBA Confusion, which is a fusion of authenticity and its opposite - if one is trying to be authentic, is that not inauthentic too?

See you in New York.

Will