As I was finishing up Barker and Taylor's Faking It last night, and started Simon Reynolds Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, I got to thinking more and more about the whole issue of authenticity. One of Reynolds major theses is that postpunk, unlike punk, sought to undermine ideas about authenticity as it consciously merged a variety of musical styles, believing that the destructive aspects of punk had opened up all sorts of possibilities. Thus the deliberate adoption of early dub and reggae by bands like the Clash and Madness (and later No Doubt) are examples of mixing and matching musical styles that move beyond sterile, facile notions of authenticity.
Yet, I have to wonder. Part of the problem with the whole notion of authenticity is a kind of cultural monism; one is only truly authentic if one is playing a music rooted in one's own cultural experience. An African-American playing European art music is deemed less authentic than a southern white man playing the blues; West African musicians using traditional instrumentation and chord structures is more authentic than if those same artists use blues progressions and augment the rhythms with hip-hop beats. The biggest swipe at prog rock is its inauthenticity precisely because it sought to take rock beyond the three-minute pop song, based in the blues, and seemed to highlight musical virtuosity over and above the spontaneity of music rooted in the moment.
Except this latter description is utterly false. King Crimson, for example - at least in the eighteen-month long period from early 1973 through mid 1974 - set aside time during their concerts for group improvisations, or "blows" as the band called them. If one listens carefully enough to live recordings from Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and Genesis, one hears intimations of the various group members pushing the boundaries of even the most rigidly structured songs. The live version of "Perpetual Change" on Yessongs is a thirteen-minute example of Steve Howe stretching out during a long breakdown offered in the midst of the song.
More to the point, however, as Robert Fripp suggests in liner notes to several of the KC box sets, the criticism that the music of his band, and other related bands, is inauthentic and self-indulgent misses the mark precisely because - at least in the case of King Crimson - it was rooted not so much in any cultural dynamic from which the members emerged (the English working class striving to move upward). Rather, the music was "authentic" precisely because it was the music they enjoyed playing. As Chris Squire from Yes said once in an interview about the early years of the band, "Everyone had ideas and the songs tended to grow." The whole point was to include as much of everyone's input as possible, as long as it made some kind of musical sense in context. Whether it's "Firth of Fifth" by Genesis, "Yours Is No Disgrace" by Yes, "Lark's Tongue in Aspic, Part I" by King Crimson, or "Lemmings" by Vandergraf Generator, the songs hold together pretty well.
Fripp's further point that much of the criticism of self-indulgence and "faking it", at least in the case of the British music press, was rooted as much in typical British class bias; these bands, made up for the most part of young men from the working class, were not supposed to do anything above their station, to achieve more, to attempt something new and different. Like the scene in the film of Pink Floyd's The Wall where the public school teacher humiliates young Pink by reading his poetry out loud, children of a certain "station" were not to have pretensions to anything artistic. The success of the British blues revival in the 1960's was acceptable because, while inauthentic from one perspective, it was rooted in a common sense of experience. Keith Emerson, Robert Fripp, and Rick Wakeman borrowing from classical and modernist orchestral pieces was inauthentic precisely because, as children of the working class, this was not something people such as they should be doing.
This is not to say that there were not self-indulgent moments in prog. Emerson Lake & Palmer were particularly guilty of showing off a bit too much, concert solos becoming exercises in self-aggrandizement long past the point of boredom. Yet, there is really little to distinguish Peter Gabriel's theatricality as lead singer of Genesis and David Bowie's theatricality as Ziggy Stardust, or to separate Rick Wakeman's cape from Freddie Mercury's mime get-up.
In the end, even at their worst moments, the progressive bands still maligned by so much of the music press were no less authentic than any other band precisely because they were playing what they wanted to play the way they wanted to play it. The issue was less with any inauthenticity on the part of the musicians, and more with rock critics straitjacketed by a combination of British class prejudice and a simplistic, and quite racist, view of what rock should and should not be. If one listens without the burden of ideology, the music has some great moments, and stands up on its own merits in the same way as the music of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Bruce Springsteen.
