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Introduction From a Basement on Long Island to a Mansion on the Hill Taste Biographies and Stylized Gestures Traditionally, in books of this sort, this is the place where the author establishes his authenticity. This is my chance to display some musical cred—my personal intimacy with the blues and country and redneck rock and roll. At the very least, I let you look at my record collection—bootlegs and all—so you know you’re dealing with a guy who knows his stuff. But, hell, unlike Robert Palmer, I’ve never sat in Muddy Waters’s kitchen dining on shrimp and champagne. And unlike Guthrie P. Ramsay, I’ve never sung gospel with a South Side Holiness choir. Unlike Adam Gussow, I’ve never played blues harmonica with a man who then got himself shot in the chest. And, when it comes to country music, I haven’t sung in a North Austin honky-tonk like Bill C. Malone. And I’ve never been backstage at the Ryman like Richard Peterson. And I’m pretty sure that, unlike Nick Tosches, I’ve never spent the night in a Cheyenne motel with a transsexual country star. And when it comes to Greil Marcus, American music’s most famous scholar-fan, I don’t even have the map skills to find Harry Smith’s house in Berkeley or Dock Boggs’s place in Letcher County.1 But I’ve read the work of each of these writers, and, to be sure, they’ve all deeply complicated my understanding and appreciation of popular music. As a whole, they’ve taught me that music matters precisely because its meanings are contingent and its significance—as a form of expression, as a marker of identity or desire—changes with context and time. And yet I Comentale_Text.indd 1 2/19/13 4:11 PM 2 Introduction find it peculiar that even as these authors challenge the presumed authenticity of musical experience, they all feel some pressure to put their own authenticity on display. Together, they seem to have recreated vernacular music in terms specific to their own generational needs, refashioning its experience according to a series of oppositions that include not just authenticity and inauthenticity, but also expression and exploitation, rebellion and compliance, tradition and modernity. In other words, insofar as their work has preserved any sense of vernacular music in America, that music is now perceived in largely romantic terms, as primitive, passionate, and prelapsarian, or, as Elijah Wald puts it, “a heartfelt, handmade alternative to the plastic products of the pop scene.”2 At best, I think this bias reflects the cultural politics of the Cold War/civil-rights era and, in this, compellingly repackages the desire for social change that informs so much musical expression in America. At worst, though, it sanctions a troublesome sort of fetishism—of race, masculinity, the past—that still marks pop-culture consumption in America. Either way, all of these authors, and many of their fans, seem to believe that music must be lived through—and indeed suffered through—for it to have any meaning or significance. No worries about that here—I’ll accept not only the inauthenticity of my musical experiences, but also the passive, and at times mindless, inconsistency of my tastes. I came of age on Long Island in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and most of my early musical encounters took place in basement apartments and station wagons. No swamps, no shacks, no barn dances for me—just a lot of linoleum and wood paneling. Most of the songs played to me as a child had little connection to my actual living situation, and they were all piped into our home by artificial means. I remember playing Matchbox cars while my dad blasted Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out” on his JVC stereo. I would wait for the sound of the engine revving up in the middle of the song and then race my cars back and forth across the kitchen floor. I remember the day Boy George first sauntered onto MTV singing “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” My aunts jumped up from the couch, shrieking in horror, while I sat quietly munching on cereal. I remember when my younger, rowdier brother brought home a cassette version of Guns ’n’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. I told him I thought the skulls on the cover looked “retarded,” but I secretly played the tape on my Walkman after he went to...

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