Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music
Barker and Taylor's exploration of the idea of authenticity in modern  music takes them from the falsely labeled "pure" and "primitive" style of  Leadbelly to the first truly "autobiographical song" (Jimmie Rodger's version  of "TB Blues"), the disintegration of the Monkees and Neil Young's  "Drugged-out, driven, and death soaked" albumTonight's  the Night—what the authors believe to be the most "honest" rock  record of all time. Strangely, the book does not include a discussion of  hip-hop, a surprising omission given the attention paid to other aspects of  black music and the genre's particular concern with the book's themes. By the  end, Barker (a musician and songwriter) and Taylor (I  Was Born a Slave) find the distinction between real and fake  "[b]reaking down and becoming increasingly meaningless." It becomes clear that  even seemingly obvious examples of authentic and inauthentic defy easy  categorization when scrutinized. After all, is disco's well-intentioned  alternate reality any less "real" than the violent, "mocking pretenses" of the  Sex Pistols? Though the book's final conclusions are not revelatory, it offers  an intriguing take on the development of popular music.(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.