The standards of authenticity for pop stars - and c’mon, that’s what she is - have always been fluid and hard to define. (What that says about the world of indie is entirely for you to decide.) Graves cites the endless debates around Lana Del Rey’s authenticity circa Born to Die, but everyone stopped arguing about this once it became clear Del Rey was aiming for bona fide pop stardom, not trying to position herself as part of the “indie” world. (Remember Vanilla Ice?) It’s as much a function of genre and context as anything else. I certainly agree with Graves that music fans are often more a priori skeptical of women’s authenticity, but there are also plenty of men who’ve been ridiculed for their lack of “realness,” etc. This doesn’t necessarily invalidate her larger point, but examining authenticity debates as purely a product of gender - “When a female musician is in any way fake, she’s denied creative agency, written off as uninventive and talentless” - is oversimplifying a complex phenomenon. You can understand Schreiber misreading him on face value, but 12 years later, it’s kinda disappointing that Graves can’t do better - and she’s also, knowingly or otherwise, perpetuating some of the rather sillier Andrew WK-related conspiracy theories that have been bobbling around in the sewers of the Internet over the last decade. It’s an easy impression to form, but it sells the man short (as Pitchfork’s Ian Cohen argued on the album’s tenth anniversary a couple of years back). (It’s not like he hasn’t talked extensively about this, either.) Her vision of him recalls Ryan Schreiber’s review of I Get Wet for Pitchfork in 2002 - seeing him only as a long-haired dudebro who exists to entertain dudebros, perhaps ironically. Arguing that his party-centric persona is an encouragement toward “the ultimate cure for confronting your bleak feelings: getting wasted” is a pretty egregious misreading of the man and his ideas.
His sadness isn’t hidden it informs everything he does. Graves argues that “real women with fake names are somehow considered exponentially less authentic than completely fake men harboring a real, hidden sadness.” In this respect, I think she reads him wrong. Andrew WK the character certainly began as an invention - he’s told me as much himself - but also, the character and the man have become so inseparable now that the distinction between the two has become largely irrelevant. The interesting thing about Andrew WK is that if he’s playing a character - Andrew Wilkes-Krier inhabiting the persona of ultra-positive, white-clad party philosopher - he’s doing it all the time.
Sometimes such image construction is part of the artist’s appeal: David Bowie, for instance, or Madonna, who’s been constantly praised over the years for her penchant for reinventing herself.įirst, then, to Meredith Graves and Andrew WK. Often, the two coincide in a completely contradictory fashion: hip hop, for instance, places great emphasis on “keeping it real,” but also allows former prison guard Rick Ross to construct an entirely fictional history for himself, and in the process create a new identity. On the other hand, pop music has always valued authenticity, or at least the veneer thereof.
(It’s similar to the way that, if you’ve ever been on the radio, your Radio Voice is different from your everyday voice, despite whatever efforts you might make to the contrary.) It’s impossible to “just be you” on stage, because by stepping on stage you begin to inhabit a character, the character of You On Stage, whoever that might be. You’re becoming something or someone that you wouldn’t be otherwise. On the one hand, playing music is an inherently performative process, because the minute you strap on a guitar and/or climb onto a stage, you’re performing. Pop music (and I mean that in its most literal sense here, i.e., popular music, not necessarily just the genre, which will herewith be referred to as “chart pop” to avoid confusion) has always had a vexed relationship with the concept of authenticity. So, who’s right? Do we care about authenticity anymore? The answer, I’d argue, isn’t as simple as either Graves or Christgau wants to argue. Most notably, it’s manifested in two places: in Perfect Pussy singer Meredith Graves’ Basilica Soundscape talk on Andrew WK and Lana Del Rey, and the differing standards of authenticity to which she claims they’re held and in the fact that someone at Billboard thought it was a great idea to get Robert Christgau to review Iggy Azalea’s New Classic, a review in which he compares her to the Beatles, suggests that Tupac’s “flow was never world class,” and holds forth on how Azalea’s authenticity, or lack thereof, matters not a jot.
The question of authenticity in music is one of those debates that surfaces periodically, and it’s raised its scaly head a few times this week.