That quaint, charming fella you've been listening to strum the mandolin and sing about growing up on the farm? Don't let the cowboy boots fool you he's from Albany and drove a Ford Focus in high school. The folk "revival" is roughly the musical equivalent of a Civil War reenactment, starring guys who work for a telecommunications concern by day entertaining uncritical audiences by night by pretending to be rural. The folk revival could be an entry on this list unto itself, but there's a great deal of inauthentic music floating around today. White rappers with college educations come out of the suburbs to tell us all how rough things are on the streets. Boy bands sing about purity rings and abstaining from drugs while they're on the road getting away with we-only-wish-we-knew what. Musicians used to sing about what they knew. Now they sing about what they think they know from movies and TV. Of course, a suburban life in the 80s or 90s is hardly worth singing about, so that explains some of the branching out but some examples of this are pathetic. "Give the people what they want", that's what they say. It doesn't matter if you've never even seen a car in your neighbourhood older than a 2005 if you can convince enough people you've got the blues, you can play it all you want.
Kyle Schmidlin is a writer and musician living in Austin, TX. He manages the news blog at thirdrailnews.wordpress.com. Follow him at facebook.com/kyleschmidlin or twitter.com/kyleschmidlin1.
