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This is the entire introduction to the book, and it took me almost fifteen minutes to write up, but that's just how important this book is. It is a book of revelations. Everyone in the music industry- and I know you're all part time djs- and all fans of popular music will find it revelatory.
What I found best was to read it near the computer, so as to look unfamiliar songs and artists they reference up on youtube. And then you're learning!
Here's a link to an actual review http://tunedintomusic.wordpress.com/2007/05/19/review-faking-it-the-quest-for-authenticity-in-popular-music-hugh-barker-yuval-taylor/


Introduction


When we listen to popular music, some songs strike us as "real" and others as "fake." This book explores that distinction, and how, especially in the last fifty years, the quest for authenticity, for the "real," has become a dominant factor in musical taste. Whether it be the folklorist's search for forgotten bluesmen, the rock critic's elevation of raw power over sophistication, or the importance of bullet wounds to the careers of hip-hop artists, the aesthetic of the "authentic musical experience," with its rejection of music that is labeled contrived, pretentious, artificial, or overly commercial, has played a major role in forming musical tastes and canons, with wide-ranging consequences.

What do we mean when we call something authentic? A lot of things, as it turns out, but the word seems to be defined primarily in opposition to "faking it." In a KISS concert, the band wears makeup and plays songs about people they pretend to be, all with the explicit aim of making money rather than telling the truth about themselves or the world they live in. Such a performance can be wildly entertaining, but it's not considered authentic.

When people say a musical performance or recording is authentic, they might refer to representational authenticity, or music that is exactly what it says it is-- unlike, say, Milli Vanilli posing as singers, which they weren't. They might refer to cultural authenticity, or music that reflects a cultural tradition-- the traditional black guitarist and singer Mississippi John Hurt's version of "Stagger Lee," an old African American song about an outlaw, is more culturally authentic than the Grateful Dead's. They might refer to personal authenticity, or music that reflects the person or people who are making it-- when Ozzy Osbourne sings "Iron Man," he tells us nothing about his own life, but when Loretta Lynn sings "Coal Miner's Daughter," she tells us a lot.

Every performance is to some degree "faked"-- nobody goes out on stage and sings about exactly what they did and felt that day. Authenticity is an absolute, a goal that can never be fully attained, a quest. Sincerity and autobiography are techniques one can employ in the service of personal authenticity, just as using traditional instruments and singing old songs are techniques one can use in the service of cultural authenticity. But it's important to distinguish the means from the end.

This quest for authenticity has inspired countless musicians to make heartfelt and often groundbreaking music, from Jimmie Rodgers, a pioneer of country music, to Kurt Cobain, a pioneer of alternative rock. On the other hand, some great music-- including entire genres such as rockabilly, Bubblegum, and disco-- has been scorned as inauthentic. At times, the need to "keep it real" has limited the kinds of music that musicians aspire to make and that critics and listeners appreciate.

White blues fans, for example, redefined the genre in the name of authenticity to exclude anything too jazzy or upbeat, thus enforcing a snobbish and racist exclusion of certain blues artists from the canon because they were too sophisticated. Instead, they lauded the most primitive blues artists they could find, such as John Lee Hooker, from whom blacks turned away. In this way, the quest for authenticity did tremendous damage to the blues by codifying certain traditions and limiting innovation.

Now, after punk, house, grunge, garage, and hip-hop, ideas of authenticity have seeped into even such transparently "inauthentic" genres as heavy metal (Metallica), techno (Moby), and showtunes (Rent). Especially in the music aimed at white teenage males, authenticity is seen as the sine qua non of artistic success. It is rare to come across a songwriter, rock singer, or rapper these days who does not aim to "keep it real" for his audience, or who doesn't talk about the difference between making it and selling out. Listeners too are acutely conscious of how much the artists they admire are faking it. It seems that one of the job requirements for a popular musician these days is convincing your audience that you're not the phony celebrity you appear to be. Case in point: Jennifer Lopez's biggest hit ran, "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got-- I'm just Jenny from the block." Even Donna Summer, the queen of disco and a brilliant musical innovator, castigates her former self as "fake" in her autobiography Ordinary Girl.

Of course, for many there is no distinction between real and fake: witness Courtney Love's statement, "I fake it so real that I'm beyond fake." In certain subcultures, being "natural" is either suspect or out of the question, and being theatrical is the only real possibility. For many academics as well, everything is more or less "constructed", and, as the Beatles said, "Nothing is real."

But while we don't claim that the distinctions we make in this book will apply to everyone, being authentic, or real, has been important to a large number of musicians and their fans, and that's where this book comes in. A number of other books have praised the virtues of authenticity and damned the fakes and the sellouts, but it's surprising that no single book has ever addressed the subject in all its complexity or shown how the quest for authenticity has shaped the music we listen to. It's as if the concept of realism in art had never been fully addressed-- as if the only books on the subject praised verisimilitude. The question of authenticity in popular music is not only fundamental to understanding the music's history but fundamental to thinking about, listening to, and performing it as well.

Faking It tackles this question by examining, in detail, ten turning points in music history, at most of which the musicians were faced with a choice: fake it or keep it real. Why were these choices made and what were the consequences? We start with Kurt Cobain's choice of a Leadbelly song to close his career, and then go in chronological order from twentieth-century field recordings to Moby's use of them at the turn of the twenty-first century. Along the way, we discuss the birth of modern country music, the moment Elvis reinvented rock'n'roll, the Monkees' decision to play their instruments, the defining moment of disco with a seventeen minute faked orgasm, the "public image" of punk rock, and much more.