Faking It - Softcover
In the last fifty years, the quest for authenticity, for the 'real,' has become a dominant factor in musical taste - whether it be the folklorist's search for forgotten bluesmen or the rock critic's elevation of raw power over sophistication. "Faking It" explodes the myth of what it means to be 'real' and 'fake' in pop music. Why does no one listen to the Buena Vista Social Club in Cuba? Why do white suburban teenagers love rap? And what did Kurt Cobain's suicide note really mean?
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About the Author:
Hugh Barker edits music books for several UK publishers, and lives in London. Yuval Taylor has published and edited books about music for fifteen years. He lives in Chicago.
From Publishers Weekly:
Barker and Taylor's exploration of the idea of authenticity in modern music takes them from the falsely labeled "pure" and "primitive" style of Leadbelly to the first truly "autobiographical song" (Jimmie Rodger's version of "TB Blues"), the disintegration of the Monkees and Neil Young's "Drugged-out, driven, and death soaked" album Tonight's the Night—what the authors believe to be the most "honest" rock record of all time. Strangely, the book does not include a discussion of hip-hop, a surprising omission given the attention paid to other aspects of black music and the genre's particular concern with the book's themes. By the end, Barker (a musician and songwriter) and Taylor (I Was Born a Slave) find the distinction between real and fake "[b]reaking down and becoming increasingly meaningless." It becomes clear that even seemingly obvious examples of authentic and inauthentic defy easy categorization when scrutinized. After all, is disco's well-intentioned alternate reality any less "real" than the violent, "mocking pretenses" of the Sex Pistols? Though the book's final conclusions are not revelatory, it offers an intriguing take on the development of popular music. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherFaber and Faber
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 0571226604
- ISBN 13 9780571226603
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
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