they were never good. exclusively the province of 14-year-old scene girls with box haircuts and an over-reliance on kohl and duckfaces.
i've been enjoying a lot of the alchemist's beat tapes.
and his stuff with freddie gibbs is engagingly amusing. good sense of humour. the beats are cut through with a nice retro/lounge/soft jazz aesthetic. it's like soft-tootling kenny g teaming up with a crack-dealing gangster.
If you are committing a DUI while listening to Bruce in NJ, the police will actually knock down the charge and apologize to you for the trouble. Well known fact.
erm the 1970s and 1980s were full of discourses about authenticity. compared to now, it was doubly or triply important, because back then there were actual identifiable 'subcultures' and cliques. building an identity based on music taste or consumption was 100x more prominent in the 1980s – goths? punks? new romantics? metal fans? MOR rockists? hip-hoppers? ravers? – than it is today, where the culture seems to be a smush blend of spotify algo-bland.
just because you weren't interested or involved, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
people literally used to have fights on the beaches based on whether you were a 'mod' or a 'rocker'. there were huge fractious disputes in the ska community between the urbane skinheads and the racist far-right wing skinheads. i mean, how often did punk rockers argue over who was 'really punk' or who was a 'poser', or whether even 'punk rock was dead?' and the latest lame band killed it? what was the entire fracas about between metal fans and grunge fans, if not over what was 'real' rock music? ("they can't even play guitar!") F F S did you even live through that decade?
'authenticity' is a term imported from french existentialist philosophy, which undoubtedly had its hey-day in the cultural furnaces of the 1960s–1980s, being very in vogue and on every NME readers' lips with their steady diet of translated camus/sartre and jean-luc godard movies. if anything, the term has no meaning or importance nowadays, where it seems po-faced and passé to all those gen-z tiktokkers who move between many genres and styles without thinking twice.
as usual, you are illiterate and talk out of your ass, as if you automatically know it all.
