Authenticity in Crisis – Triplecanopy
Sunday, April 19th, 2009Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Inaugural America.
“As Ice-T implies, the thing called authenticity seems self-evident: obvious in its presence, glaring in its absence. As a question of being true—to beliefs, institutions, and traditions—authenticity strikes many as worth defending, or mourning. The epitaph “Hip-hop is dead,” for instance, is almost as old as hip-hop. Typical is the reaction of Ice-T, a rapper since the heyday of beatboxing, against Soulja Boy Tell ’Em, who’s still too young to drink. Soulja Boy, who produced his breakout singles in a home studio and became famous through social-networking sites, is emblematic of a new and notably independent moment in musical promotion. But to Ice-T’s aged ears, he’s complicit in the desecration of hip-hop’s authentic essence—the raw sound, the social message—in favor of the saccharine hook.
……authenticity today, in the expanded field of media, is more deeply in crisis. This crisis does not involve mere negation, but inversion. Inauthenticity, which looks a lot like the opposite of authenticity, is actually its successor—or its mirror.”
