Moore — “Authenticity as Authentication”

Author: Allan F. Moore
Title: “Authenticity as Authentication”
Year: 2002
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (in Popular Music 21, no. 2)
Type: Essay

“Authenticity as Authentication” is an essay by the musicologist Allan F. Moore, of the University of Surrey, published in Popular Music in 2002. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh had written in 2000 that scholars had discarded the concept, and Moore gives reasons to think abandoning it premature. Authenticity, he argues, is something listeners grant a performance, not something its sounds contain, so he asks whom a performance authenticates. He gives three answers: the performer, in what he calls first person authenticity; an absent other whose ideas the performer seems to carry, in the third person; and the listener, whose own experience of life the music seems to confirm, in the second person. He closes by proposing that the study of authenticity turn from musicians’ intentions to listeners’ reasons.

In 2002 Moore was professor of popular music at Surrey and head of its Department of Music.¹ Popular Music published the essay in its May 2002 issue, and Moore reprinted it in Critical Essays in Popular Musicology (2007), a collection he edited.²

The first of Moore’s two assumptions is “that authenticity does not inhere in any combination of musical sounds.” In his words, “‘Authenticity’ is a matter of interpretation which is made and fought for from within a cultural and, thus, historicised position. It is ascribed, not inscribed.” His second is that it is “a construction made on the act of listening,” and so, he writes, “rather than ask what (piece of music, or activity) is being authenticated, in this article I ask who.”³

Rock discourse, Moore writes, prizes “unmediated expression,” and his example of the first person is Paul Weller, whose voice on “The Changingman”, rough and without ornament, sounds as though he has been crying or shouting. Weller, he writes, is in effect telling his audience, “this is what it’s like to be me.”⁴ By the late 1980s, he argues, authenticity could attach even to a frank embrace of pop: in Neil Tennant’s flat delivery with the Pet Shop Boys, “the refusal of emotional involvement he conveys is widely perceived as a refusal to ‘cheat’ the listener.”⁵

The blues rock movement of the 1960s is Moore’s first case of the third person. In Cream’s “Crossroads”, listeners hear Eric Clapton conveying both “this is what it’s like to be me” and, at a double remove, “this is what it was like to be Johnson,” that is, Robert Johnson. The search that Clapton and Peter Green made for the soul of such singers entailed, in Moore’s words, “an unquestioned assumption that African Americans in the southern USA were somehow more ‘natural’ beings than white, college-educated Londoners.”⁶

Moore frames the second person, the listener’s, as a matter of belonging, and the line between the commercial and the authentic, he writes, is “illusory,” “since all mass-mediated music is subject to commercial imperatives”; what matters to listeners is whether a musician seems to accept, resist or bargain with them.⁷ Even “manufactured” pop, “that conventionally most inauthentic music,” authenticates its listeners: among his daughter’s friends, he writes, S Club 7’s “Bring It All Back” did so most clearly.⁸ Any music, he concludes, “can conceivably be found authentic by a particular group of perceivers,” and the study of authenticity “should thus, I believe, shift from consideration of the intention of various originators towards the activities of various perceivers.”⁹ By October 2026 Crossref counted 244 works citing the essay, among them studies of grunge, jazz and grime.¹⁰

Key contributions

• The formula “ascribed, not inscribed” for the idea, which Moore shares with Sarah Rubidge, that authenticity is ascribed to a performance, and his assumption that it is “a construction made on the act of listening.”
• The question of who a performance authenticates, with three answers: first person authenticity (the performer), third person authenticity (an absent other, whose ideas the performer seems to represent accurately within a tradition of performance) and second person authenticity (the listener).
• A case against dismissing authenticity as a concept in the study of popular music.
• A reading of the 1960s blues rock movement as third person authenticity, and of the assumption, unquestioned in Eric Clapton’s and Peter Green’s search for the blues, that African Americans in the southern USA were “somehow more ‘natural’ beings than white, college-educated Londoners.”
• The proposal that the study of authenticity examine listeners’ reasons for finding a performance authentic.

See also

• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music