The real thing? From blackface to the Bad Seeds BY MATT ASHARE

Two weekends ago, a couple hundred music critics and academicians descended on Seattle for Pop Conference 2005 at the city’s Experience Music Project. EMP itself is a massive building in the area of the Seattle Center (home to the city’s famous Space Needle) designed by Frank Gehry to house a labyrinthine museum dedicated to, well, experiencing music. Yet the imposing skin of rippling riveted steel that dominates the building is more suggestive of two metallic UFOs fused in an intergalactic fender-bender. The interior is also futuristic, with its slick silver surfaces, curving corridors, and large video display screens. Since opening five years ago, EMP has had to open a Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame to supplement its budget. But thanks to two of EMP’s curators, Ann Powers (who collaborated with Tori Amos on the book Piece by Piece) and her husband, Eric Weisbard, the building has become home to perhaps the only annual music conference of note not hosted by a college or university. Austin’s South by Southwest and NYC’s CMJ music festival are industry schmooze-athons and showcases for new talent; EMP has no significant live-music component. And instead of the kind of gabfest panels that dominate SxSW and CMJ, EMP invites critics, scholars, and even some performers (this year Pere Ubu’s David Thomas was one such luminary) to deliver papers.

"Music As Masquerade: Poseurs, Playas, and Beyond" was this year’s theme. The "Beyond" gave panelists the option of talking about whatever they wanted to; for the most part, though, the presentations stayed on topic. And separating the playas and the poseurs from the real thing has been a hot-button issue in pop ever since white people started playing the blues. It was no surprise that blackface figured in the opening plenary, "Love and Theft Revisited: Poseurs and Playas from Blackface to Hip-Hop (And What This All Means for Rock and Roll)." "Love and Theft" refers to a book University of Virginia cultural- and American-studies professor Eric Lott wrote a dozen years ago, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, in which he argues that as mean-spirited and downright nasty as minstrelsy was, it had a positive impact on race relations in a divided United States by helping whites to identify with and appreciate African-American culture. Some of the same forces were at work a century later when Elvis and just about every other white rock-and-roller made black music palatable for white audiences. And though hip-hop would have thrived in the absence of Aerosmith’s teaming up with Run-DMC in 1985 or the emergence of the Beastie Boys as platinum rappers the following year, both events made what was possible probable — perhaps even inevitable. With all that, we still get hung up on authenticity whenever a Vanilla Ice or an Eminem comes cruising up the charts.

Lott was on the plenary panel to defend/revise/extend his thesis. But one of the most interesting and revealing comments came from NYU associate professor Jason King, who explained that it wasn’t till after he’d finished auditioning musicians for his current band that he realized he’d assembled a multi-cultural ensemble. He’d been so focused on practical artistic decisions, he’d been blind to race and gender. And he teaches this stuff. At the other end of the spectrum is the reality of the commercial hip-hop industry, where image, if not color, all too often overshadows artistic considerations. When Dave Chappelle does Lil’ Jon, it’s blackface without baggage. But it’s also a commentary on how playing the dumb tough is where the smart money is until actual gunfire — not sampled gunshots — intrudes. Of course, if you survive the assault, it’s money in the bank. Right, 50?

Hip-hop may wear its authenticity issues on its bloody sleeve, but no genre is immune to the identity crisis that’s built into the way so many of us consume music. It’s okay for Kurt Cobain to rip off the Pixies because we hear a certain integrity in "Smells like Teen Spirit." But Gavin Rossdale and Scott Weiland come across as poseurs for playing music that sounds like Nirvana’s grunge. In the end, it was Cobain who said he felt like a phony in the suicide note he left behind, though maybe it wasn’t what he was faking but what he was taking that led to his demise. Fortunately, there’s a more whimsical side to all this hand wringing. In his paper, Phoenix contributor Douglas Wolk reminded us that a Coca-Cola radio-ad campaign from the late ’60s had big rock bands and pop stars playing what sounded like their original tunes until the inevitable segue into the by-that-point-ironic "It’s the real thing." Even the Who got in on the action in a campaign for a flavorful milk additive, proving they weren’t immune from just the kind of sellout they’d parodied on 1967’s The Who Sell Out. A decade and a half later, Boston’s Del Fuegos and the West Coast roots band the Long Riders were excoriated for pitching Miller beer — apparently, punk had made commercialism uncool. Right now, Johnny Rotten, as he’s gone back to being called, is probably negotiating to have "God Save the Queen" licensed as a cell-phone ring tone. And after a weekend in Seattle deconstructing poseurs and playas, that strikes me as progress of a sort.

One of the most effective authenticity ploys throughout the ’90s was MTV’s Unplugged franchise. There’s something about an acoustic guitar that can accord even a band like Kiss a touch of authenticity. Not that the best career move Kiss made that very same decade wasn’t to put the make-up back on. But as one speaker on the panel I moderated — "Simulated Roots" — suggested, unplugging plugs into the deep-rooted belief that a song’s not really a song unless you can pick up an acoustic guitar and play it.

In our pomo age of cut-and-paste digital pastiche, that idea seems hopelessly outdated. And yet unplugging remains a meaningful and often profitable way for an artist to (re)connect with his or her core audience. I don’t think it’s any accident that the new Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds three-disc boxed compilation B-Sides & Rarities (Mute) opens with not one but three acoustic versions of songs likely to be familiar to fans of the saintly sinner persona Cave has created for himself since leaving the noise of the Birthday Party behind. If you hadn’t already caught the gospel drift of "Deana" (from 1990’s Tender Party), you will from the handclapping rhythm and the Jordanaires call-and-response vocalizing that adorn the otherwise naked acoustic take of the new version. Cave got his start in Australia before moving his Birthday Party to new-wave London, where they were sure to be outcasts in the ’80s, but he found a formidable foil in Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist Blixa Bargeld, the Bad Seed who kept the avant up as Cave let his guard down to indulge in an American Gothic Southern spiritual awakening. Take Bargeld’s guitar out of the mix and we’re right back where we started — in the old plantation South, replete with the "Ku Klux furniture" of "Deana," and worshipping at the throne of Leadbelly with an almost ridiculous jive-ass a cappella rendition of "Black Betty." It’s blackface minus the cork, except that’s reverence, not ridicule or repulsion, pulsing through Cave’s voice. And that is progress.