Friday, April 20, 2007
Authentic Fake Art
I use to catch a certain amount of grief for loving The Monkees. I've never been too concerned about it. I like what I like and while I do enjoy explaining why it ultimately comes down to very personalized feelings, and while concrete qualities can be extracted from them they still exist mainly in the abstract. The biggest argument against The Monkees was that they were fakes. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor have just come out with Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity In Popular Music (ISBN 0571226590) and since I haven't read it yet I'll just make like the character Tom from Whit Stillman's Metropolitan and give you a link to critic Jeff Sharlet's review at New Statesman. Myself, I think the question shuldn't be one of authentic versus false, but perhaps one of artifice versus commerce and their intertwining.
1 comment:
Monkees - I just downloaded nearly the entire catalog onto my brand new big freakin' MP3 player. I'm old enough to have fallen for The Monkees during the first series of reruns after the show was canceled.
But more apropros to your post - my fave album is Headquarters - the first album in which they were responsible for almost all the playing as well as a lot of input into the production. So to the naysayers, I just say pffft.
Post a Comment