Q: Are you someone who’s concerned with the concept of authenticity in any sense of the word as it relates to culture? Do you find it a viable concept?

A: I think it’s worthless. It only leads to people lying to others and themselves. It has never been true or meaningful. There have always been polyglot influences, particularly in this country, and people have sought them out, have wanted something different, new, strange. Take Dock Boggs, this great banjo player and singer from the Virginia mountains. That’s where his family has lived as long as anybody can remember. He learned songs from his father and brother in law, never left his little mountain community. What could be more folk than that, more authentic, his being truly the voice of his particular part of the Virginia mountains? Because when you talk about somebody as authentic, what you’re trying to do is localize them, narrow them down, pigeonhole them, stuff them and put them on display. But Dock Boggs actually became a performer and came to life as an artist because he listened to records by black blues singers from the big cities, that’s the stuff that really turned him on. You come back to Dock Boggs and you say, “No, he’s a phony, he just learned that stuff off records, that’s not his indigenous culture!” There’s a book called Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald that attempts to debunk Robert Johnson, essentially saying he learned everything off records. It’s not authentic, it’s not real, folk, front porch, traveling down the road. Well, I’m talking about Dock Boggs and Robert Johnson, two of the greatest artists this country has ever produced, who ought to be talked about in the same breath as Faulkner. But there are people who want to make Faulkner a regional novelist too, rather than to say, “This is a guy using one little community, just like Roth uses Jews in Newark, as a microcosm for the enactment of the entire American drama.” If you understand Dock Boggs as a working class white male from the first part of the twentieth century, living in an impoverished section of Virginia, you will lose ninety percent of his art, same with Robert Johnson.

Q: So as you’ve just asserted, the concept of authenticity in art is bunk right on the surface. What do you think explains the persistence of this drive in American culture, to codify the authentic and inauthentic?

A: Part of it has to do with the absolutely overwhelming presence of commercial culture, which arrived here earlier and has always dominated our lives more than anywhere else. Certainly, in the post-Civil War period, it has been relentless. There was a time when you could drive through the South and you couldn’t find a fucking rock that was bigger than two feet by two feet that didn’t have an ad painted on it. It is seeking another life out from under the avalanche of stuff that’s obviously contrived, made up, has nothing to do with anybody’s desires or needs. It’s the desire of some people, ultimately, to deny the power of art. You can deny the power of art if you can put it in a box and say, “This is what it is.” Trying to construct narratives of authenticity around objects you love or think are good or think would be good for other people is turning art into politics or sociology. I don’t know the whole answer to this, I just know that the notion of authenticity is intellectually, morally, and physically––I mean, look at Kurt Cobain––destructive.