Friday, October 2, 2009

Authentic Homestyle Fresh Cut Honest Music

What the hell do "authentic" or "honest" mean when it comes to someone talking about music, generally the music he or she chooses to create?

Based on my encounters with honest, authentic music, I seem to discern a few tendencies:

1) Electronic instruments aren't allowed.

2) Electric guitars and basses are tolerated, but an electric violin is not.

3) Don't even ask about using a drum machine.

4) The hurdy gurdy used to be acceptable until every third band started using it. Replace it with an accordion, but not an electric or electronic accordion.

5) You can only use bagpipes if you also use a diggeridoo in the same song.

6) The only organs you're allowed to use are the Wurlitzer (for authenticity) and the Casio (as an ironic musical statement about the emptiness of suburban life and mass culture).

7) Major label acts need not apply.

8) A gold record automatically makes one inauthentic.

9) Any dancing done to authentic music must not be out of place at a hootenanny, a barn dance, and/or some place where white guys do that 'air guitar' dance.

10) If your band uses a saw, a ceramic brown jug, a washboard, a wooden board, a two-by-four, a pumpkin, or some other non-instrument as an instrument, it is almost automatically authentic.

11) You should be able to play the time-lost original version of "Stagger Lee."

12) You should be able to converse knowledgably and at length about the music of Buddy Bolden.

13) You know that Billy Bragg became inauthentic with the release of "Sexuality" and all the versions of Blake poems and all the collaborations with Wilco can't change that.

14) You've written a song in which the only instruments are a Jew's Harp (politically correctly, now spelled 'Juice Harp'), a washboard and a ceramic brown jug.

15) You've used an incense stick as a sex toy.

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