Re: demand for "authentic" ethnic

[Velaires <Velaires...>]

Actually, Simon is one of my closest friends, and we agree on exactly this 
issue in more ways than you would think.

Unfortunately, much of the backward-looking that goes on with earlier music 
becomes what I call the LL Cool Jew Syndrome.  Rather than "Am I Black 
Enough?", the question becomes "Can I Speak More Yiddish Than You?" etc.  
It's a form of d**kwaving.  How many obscure mannerisms do you need to trot 
out in order to be "really down with the authentic stuff"?

I call it the Buena Vista Social Disease, wherein only people who had a hard 
life can get the spotlight.  It's an American Syndrome.  Look at it this way 
-- Lefty frizell was probably a more influential country music singer than 
Hank Williams.  certainly the most imitated.  But, because Hank Williams' 
drinking and wife were so notorious, he gets mythologized.  Now, surely HW 
was great.  But Lefty Frizell's influence is still reckoned with at least as 
much (often second hand via Merle Haggrd's influence, and Merle is right out 
of Lefty).  But when a human interest angle is popped in there -- via 
NPR-type publicity and concentrating on hardship rather than music, you get 
this special disease.  ironic, in that music is supposed to be a voice that 
transcends that sort of journalism by becoming a journalism of the strength 
of the human spirit, not a laundry list of litany.  And most of all this 
holds true for Jewishness.  yes, the Holocaust was the most terrifying 
watershed faced by a people.  But Jews and Jewishness have totally proven 
that "Jew" does not mean victim.

It's a touchy issue, but that word "authentic" is segregationist, and music 
is really for people, not just "people who know about the special stuff">

sh

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