Ellis on authenticity, in music and beyond

[arbre_rieur]

Six pages from Doktor Sleepless 5. According to Ellis, the series is meant to be a sort of spiritual successor to Transmetropolitan.

Comments

[thandrak]

I should never post immediately after waking.
Ahem. There are three things here, and they are three separate things. Being real, being authentic, and being hardcore.
Being hardcore, I brought up, and it covers doing something most would find beyond belief in pursuit of a goal. Mr. Les Paul's arm being set so he could continue to play guitar, would come under it.
Being authentic is an objective statement. It is either true, or it is not. It is about the facts of the matter. A city-raised blues player being set up to be a farmer on the acoustic is not being authentic.
Being real. Being real is a subjective statement, and further, it is a statement about the communication between the audience and the actor or writer or musician. Hunter S. Thompson was certainly in part, acting when he went gonzo. But the communication, the truth in the middle of what he was writing, even when he was telling blatant lies, kept him blatantly real. Being real while telling untruths is the gift and challenge of the bard, to put the audience in the shoes of another, to try to capture a meaning and essence and communicate it utterly to someone who has no conception of it.
Robert Zimmerman's construct of Bob Dylan is no less real for being inauthentic.

Of course, as Dr. Thompson proved, keeping things real has costs.