Recently I've been thinking about how we gauge the authenticity of music. The thought came up while I was reading an album review on Pitchfork and it resurfaced following a bogus mp3 leak.
Last week the internet was peppered with a new Justice mp3, shortly followed by news that they were not responsible for the track. I enjoyed the song that sounded like Justice, but the artist responsible got exposure as a nameless, faceless fraud rather than somebody that released an original song that sounded like Justice. Which way gave them a better exposure? When is it OK for an artist to go beyond an influence and mimic a signature sound? I hear Elvis Costello when I listen to Girls and I hear The Postal Service when I stumble into Owl City. One is acclaimed while the other is ripped apart. Who or what determines if Girls is more relevant/authentic/talented than Owl City. One of the two had a number one hit.
Alex Ebert is the vocalist for pop-punk band, Ima Robot, and indie-folk band Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. A review of the latter band's album on Pitchfork compared Ebert to Fruitopia, in that he is tricking people into thinking he's a folk singer. It's easy to accuse him of jumping on an indie rock bandwagon, but could it be possible that he is a musically well-versed artist that is simply reinventing himself? Is it fair to speculate what an artist's intentions are, and to what degree should it influence our attraction to the music? Should all music be heard in a vacuum, free of image and explanation or are the peripherals part of the authenticity?
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