ABSTRACT
Authenticity has long been a regular topic in discussions of popular music (see Frith 1984). Popular music scholars and journalists, the music industry, and fans themselves tend to treat authenticity as an objective reality: a feature of popular music that can be discovered, assessed, measured, and evaluated. Authenticity is assumed to be a normal feature of music as much as its quality, beauty, and danceability. The popular music industry itself is particularly concerned with marketing and product definition-essential components of the construction of authenticity in all styles of popular music. As Richard Peterson (1997) has argued for example, the country music industry centered in Nashville, Tennessee, became a powerful force in popular music by producing music that was marketed and appreciated as authentic country music. The industry often works with entertainment media to generate mountains of publishable copy through stories on authenticity. Much of this writing appears as critical evaluation of performers and performances in terms of authenticity. For instance David Grazian (2003) has written at length about the importance of critics in influencing public consumer opinion on whether contemporary blues music and musicians are authentic.
