Anti-Climacus

A reader asked me to comment on Amy Winehouse, or at least this Salon article about her. Truth be told, I paid little attention to her aside from "Rehab," which is excellent. I was more interested in the Dap-Kings,* the back-up band, for approximately the same reasons I find the Funk Brothers more interesting than the personalities that headed various Motown bands.

All that notwithstanding, the article stumbles into crude racial stereotypes about authenticity:

Authenticity was an especially dicey thing for Amy Winehouse. Already, she was working within idioms (black American soul, R&B, hip-hop and jazz, with a bit of blues thrown in) that plenty of people feel proprietary about. The story of those genres is often told via hardship: Who could possibly be more qualified to sing the blues, after all, than a black man in Mississippi in 1929? Authenticity can be a distracting and belittling narrative -- it takes an awful lot more than anguish to be a good blues performer -- but our understanding of these traditions is shaped by context. When a supposed outsider tries to appropriate one, it can read, however stupidly, as hubris. On her gutsy 2007 breakthrough "Back to Black," Winehouse was accompanied by the Dap-Kings, the Daptone Records house band, which typically backs up the powerhouse soul singer Sharon Jones. As a young, white, British woman, Winehouse’s cultural "claim" to this music was dubious -- until her personal troubles came into public focus. Addiction is a fundamentally different kind of hardship, but Winehouse’s life wasn’t charmed. She had credibility, suddenly, and that trumped everything else -- race, circumstance, origin. She made dozens of unforgivable professional and personal mistakes, but no one could accuse her of being full of shit.

This is stupidity from front to back. In the first place, it's rehashing a debate that's 50 years old. Can a white Englishwoman make a convincing and good soul record? If only someone had tried before. The white, British appreciation of American R&B is thoroughly new, and it's not like the British coined their own catch-all genre or formed a youth culture around lesser-known soul and R&B acts that allowed them to continue successfully as musicians when they were ignored by American audiences. (Ever wonder why the 80s group Soft Cell decided to cover a Gloria Jones song?) Then there's this, or this (it's why they called Eric Clapton "God"), or this. All are perfectly fine aesthetic products in their own right: Eric Clapton can attempt to sound like Freddie King or Albert King without it being simply derivative.

The second problem is that it attempts to make 'authenticity' into a value that's reified to a particular historical context. Reading guitar magazines in my formative years, this problem was brought up and discussed endlessly; it's the musician equivalent of, "but, like, what if the Matrix were true?" If "the blues" can only--or most perfectly--be played by black men in Mississippi in 1929, then, for example, Muddy Waters sold out by leaving Mississippi and going up to Chicago, and B.B. King is not an authentic example of "the blues." That way lies insanity. Alternatively, if "the blues" means a (more or less) twelve-bar repeating chord sequence approximately in the style of a I-IV-V, then it's a genre and form open to anyone who can play it, and the relevant criterion is not 'authenticity' but quality. Surely we can find a way to explain why Stevie Ray Vaughan was a better blues guitarist than the thousands of terrible blues cover bands that fan out over this fair nation of ours without making reference to Vaughan's being from Texas. Some of those terrible bands are probably from Texas, too. And, come to think of it, they probably made some terrible music in Mississippi in the 1920s (and if you've spent any time with the recordings made by Alan Lomax or Harry Smith, you know it's true).

Look, it's all art, which means it's both (if it's good) an authentic expression of emotion and calculated to appear in the form most likely to maximize its impact. The presence of calculation doesn't cancel out authenticity, though it can; authenticity doesn't guarantee quality; most of everything is mediocre. The Nirvana example cited in the article is apropos: if you watch Kurt Cobain during Unplugged, he does not look like a man who knows he's about to die: he does things like adjust his body relative to the mic when the volume of his voice changes, so that the levels stay constant for whoever's running the soundboard. That's a professional detail, but it doesn't make the music any less powerful.


*Not that it matters, except for the crude racial politics that infest the article in question, but the Dap-Kings are mostly white.