The Real-I-Am

I'm on a train to Canterbury to spend the New Year with friends.

As I travel into London to switch trains at Kings Cross and travel on from St. Pancras (what a wonderful restoration that has become), I'm thinking about authenticity in music.

After turning it over for a while, here are some thoughts on the subject.

My Grandfather used the term ‘The Real-I-Am’ to describe things that were authentic. He’d been through the death camps in the Second World War, and then the chaos of post-war Germany immediately afterwards with its swilling press of millions of displaced peoples, competing armies and ideologies and shortfalls of the basic necessities of living.

He knew the difference a copper and gold wedding ring had on the blackmarket. One was the ‘real-I-am’, giving you purchasing power that might keep you alive; the other was counterfeit. It might pass during a hurried handshake deal on a darkened street, but it also might get you beaten to death for trying it.

American or Allied-made was also a ‘real-I-am’ - as much for its cultural and ideological value as its material worth at that point. American chocolate, cigarettes, coffee, clothes and so on were all genuine compared to the chicory and sawdust equivalents churned out by the Nazi regime as their evil Empire crumbled; and those American goods symbolically represented all of the things the fallen Nazi Party didn’t: freedom, liberty and democracy.

We’ll come back to those ideas of actual value and symbolic value shortly.

But first, it’s a self-evident truth that ‘authenticity’ is as central to the making, marketing and selling of music in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth. In certain genres, it is positioned as an absolute hallmark of value as well as criterion of entry to the field.

Would Stormzy be as big a deal if he was a privately-educated trust-fund kid called Gerald from Marlow, Bucks? The talent, the charisma and the music might well be equally as good, but a significant part of Stormzy's success, allure and cultural value derive from the perceived authenticity of his origin story.

For all the slick marketing around him, like the original bluesmen Stormzy is as real as it gets in terms of his relationship with a musical form based on cultural marginalisation and geographical location.

His 'real', though, is based on a perception of what 'real' is. Gerard is just as 'real.' It's just that Gerard is the wrong sort of real. Stormzy is London, Grime, Urban. He's been stabbed. He's seen his friends die. All of these things are mobilised to position him as ‘real’ and therefore ‘authentic’ in a way that Gerard can never be.

The irony, of course, is that the things mobilised to position Stormzy as ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ are things that those doing the mobilising would run a million miles from if faced with their squalid, desperate and sordid reality themselves.

There's nothing fun about a life-or-death situation.

There's nothing cool about one.

Surviving one doesn't make you hard or tough.

Surviving one doesn't magically make you authentic or real.

It makes you lucky.

That's all.

And it leaves wounds that never heal.

Because ‘authenticity’ in music sells, however, it follows that that's what the music business (the clue is in the title) sells as much if not more than it does the actual music.

This equation leads to the phenomenon where artists pretend to be things that they're not in order to get noticed and sell.

It is not a new phenomenon.

The need for authenticity one way or another led to the sort of PR contortions that saw The Beatles - working-class Northern toughs who could and did fight their way out of Hamburg’s Bierkellers - portrayed as lovable mop-tops while The Rolling Stones - Home-Counties schoolboys, LSE entrants and men learning trades - branded themselves as international outlaws simply by behaving like childish spoilt bastards.

Exile on Main Street is a great album because it's a great album - not because it was recorded in a basement in the South of France by a bunch of smacked-out vagabonds.

Which, incidentally, it wasn't. I've talked to Robert Greenfield. Yes, the basic tracks were recorded at Nellcôte, but it was finished in the USA in one of the world’s best-equipped and most-expensive studios. At the time it was released, Exile was one of the most costly albums ever produced.

It wasn't jammed into existence in between drug fixes and groupie shenanigans, as the PR spin and self-mythologising suggests.

It was made carefully and deliberately and at great expense by a band who weren't a raggle-tag gang of rule-breaking outlaws but members of the international jetset elite then approaching a decade as cold-eyed negotiators and navigators of the music business. They were in France because they were avoiding their tax bills. Robin Hood, an actual outlaw, just didn’t bother paying his.

That the album and them are still portrayed as the former rather than the latter proves the point. When given the choice between printing the truth and printing the legend, artists, musicians and the business invariably print the legend - because that's what sells.

With so much money to be made from success, it should come as no surprise that musical history is littered with other artists who also played fast and loose with the truth.

Take Bob Dylan.

Had Bob, as he claimed when he arrived in New York, travelled across America, jumping trains like a hobo to collect the material that would later inform his work?

No.

Did a black bluesman called Wigglefoot teach him to play guitar, as he also suggested?

No.

Did Bob sleep under the stars and live on the road?

No.

Of course he didn't.

Bob was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota. His parents ran a mom-and-pop shop. He went to school, grew up, discovered rock n' roll, discovered Woody Guthrie, decided to be a folk singer and went to New York City to make it.

In other words, he was normal.

The backstory was one he created to break into a music scene that prizes authenticity above everything else.

'Hi folks! I've just blown into New York City from the heartlands with a pocketful of hard-won wisdom; I'm a gunslinger of truth coming in from the desert ...' sounds way better than 'Hi. I'm Bob, from Minnesota. My Mum and Dad love me and I had everything I needed growing up emotionally and materially.'

Bob was faking it to make it. Ultimately, he was self-mythologising just as much as any Shoreditch hipster pretending to be street in an ironic trilby while their Home Counties-based professional parents are still picking up the bill for them living in London.

Still want to play?

Okay.

Let’s take another starter for ten.

How many blue-collar jobs do you think Bruce Springsteen actually worked? How many Chevy '59's did he fix in the Jersey garages? How many logs did ‘The Boss’ chop in the Adirondacks? How many hours did Bruce put in working a blast furnace in a steel-mill town?

That’s right.

None.

Bruce struck out early for success as a musician, living the sort of itinerant hand-to-mouth hippy bum lifestyle in the late-60's and early 70's that was hated by the American working-classes who later became his primary inspiration and audience. He was the long-haired drifter get a job bum they hated, which makes it a savage irony that Bruce’s success and the working-classes becoming his pot of gold came when he realised the road to the El Dorado he craved (recognition, fame, success and wealth) lay in telling stories about worlds and lives he had no direct experience of.

To be fair, Bruce cheerfully admitted as much in his entertaining memoir.

The bottom line is that the music business is littered with plenty of fakers and bullshit artists - some of whom go on to be great, even if they also remain fakers and bullshit artists - and some of whom just remain fakers and bullshit artists.

Why?

Because.

Because saying you're an outsider and a loner and a rebel appears cooler to some people than admitting 'I was a nerd at school. I picked up a guitar / computer / mixer because I was no good at sports and normal girls / boys wouldn't talk to me.'

Because there are huge rewards on offer. Even in its current state, because of its current state, the music business still has money sloshing around in it like beer in the belly of a drunk (although, as ever, very little of it reaches the musicians). With so much money involved; and so much power; and so much kudos attached to being an 'artist'; and so much external validation on offer for those who crave it so much they'd sell their soul for it (even though they know it'll never, ever be enough to fill the emptiness inside), do you honestly think that some people won't lie about who they are to get it?

There have been plenty of copper wedding bands passed off as ‘the real-I-am’ in handshake deals on the darkened streets of musical history.

Musical history is littered with rappers who were never in the gangs and the feuds they claimed to be; privately-educated stage-school kids who claimed to have come from the streets; and sons and daughters of rich and famous parents who say they made it without nepotism playing a part ...

The reality is that whenever there's a great success story there's usually some blurring between the facts and the story going on ...

But, particularly in the arts, when we are in the presence of the real-I-am, we know it.

We know it without needing a backstory and a slick marketing department.

It doesn't even come from the music.

Music is just a vehicle - albeit a one capable as much of remarkable transparency as it is of considered confection.

Music is a made thing. It is simultaneously as natural as oxygen and sunlight and as artificial as strip-lighting and concrete.

In that context, ‘authenticity’ doesn't come from geography or ethnicity or tribal allegiance.

‘Authenticity’ doesn't come from attitude, equipment or our ability to provide variations on a theme of existing patterns and tropes.

‘Authenticity’ comes from how and why the music is made.

‘Authenticity’ comes from the honesty of our desire and our intent to connect and communicate.

What matters is the intent behind it.

Is the music I'm currently recording authentic?

I didn't cheat death in a cool way. A member of another crew didn't try and shank me outside a local chicken shop. Someone I knew smashed a bottle against my face and tried to kill me. I can assure you there was nothing cool and exciting or glamorous about my experience of it.

It was paralysing and horrific.

Have I been hassled by the police because of the colour of my skin?

No.

But the above was ignored and treated with contempt by professional safeguarders.

Does any of this make me 'authentic'?

No. It makes me someone who lived through something they wished that they hadn't had to.

Of course, Folk music is always saying that the genre offers ‘real’ music, telling the true stories of real people who suffered murder, rape, violence, abuse, injustice, displacement, disenfranchisement, starvation and misery.

By that measure, I'm authentic.

It doesn't make my music authentic, though.

Only our intent and honesty in the way we make music and why we make music does that.

Kings Cross.

Time to change trains.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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The first Origin(al) Stories Journal was a blog launched to track the writing and recording of the Northumbria album. You can read about the thought processes behind that here.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage website, I’ve decided to continue with the Origin(al) Stories posts.

The Landing Stage showcases some of the things I do.

The Origin(al) Stories posts show some of the thoughts and processes and activities that go into those acts of doing.

Drawn from my personal diaries and journals, the posts might often seem unconnected, elliptical and fragmentary.

This is because the Origin(al) Stories blog doesn’t offer the definitive conclusions, hacks, lists or ‘how to …’ advice beloved of Youtube gurus, bro-science and self-help manuals.

This is because there’s no one road through the forest, no one route to the top of the mountain, no one path to where you want to be and what you want to do.

The Origin(al) stories only shows how I’ve found a path through to doing something.

The path always has to give you as much as the destination.

They are, as I noted in the original post about it, postcards from the journey. Snapshots of work in progress - which is what all lives and endeavours are.

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If you’d like to listen to Northumbria, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Alnwyck Jameson Badger, download it here.

If you’d like to listen to Broken Oars Podcast, download it here.

Thanks for reading. Have a great day. Tell the people you love that you love them. Be a positive force.