by Professor Mark Willhard
Like fans of anything, music fans love to argue over the nitty gritty of their favorite artists. It’s easy to see such arguments – often based upon fairly unexamined notions of “authenticity” – as subcultural, and thus relegated to the underground of cultural critique. What I argue in this presentation, however, is that it’s not only possible to parse authenticity itself but that doing so is a way, perhaps, to reassert an ethical center to cultural critique. By looking at the symptomatic case of a song and its cover version, I explore what it might mean to understand authenticity as more than an excuse for toe-to-toe tussles.
Biography:
Having completed doctoral work on Hugh MacDiarmid and nationalism, Professor Mark Willhardt turned to gender and poetry as co-editor (with Alan Michael Parker) of The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse. He subsequently edited The Routledge Who’s Who in 20th-Century World Poetry. His current research interests in authenticity and popular music follow hard upon his publications on George Clinton and the Parlafunkadelicment Thang, and Billy Bragg. He is Professor of English at Monmouth College (Illinois, USA).
