KEY POINTS:
Who's a fake singer? Milli Vanilli? Crazy Frog? Marion Cotillard doing Edith Piaf? I'm pretty sure even I'm not a fake singer. Windows don't rattle on their own.
Think what you will of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa's now infamous quote regarding popera singers, and by default, Hayley Westenra. The Dame later defended herself against the public onslaught that followed, explaining on talkback radio that the "fake" she was talking about referred to singers who use microphones or lip-sync. She conceded she'd done it herself at the Commonwealth Games and said Pavarotti had used the fake singing method in later years.
She also said the comment was not a personal attack on Westenra, and argued that her comments had been taken out of context and that she'd been referring to the crossover genre rather than Westenra's voice.
But "fake" is not a word to be bandied about lightly. It has such an ugly stigma. Fake is that sickly stuff you pour on your pancakes that didn't come out of a tree in Canada. Fake is a Miu Miu handbag you bought for $50. Fake is a pair of breasts that doesn't budge on the Gravitron.
The notion of being fake has been the bane of pop music since pop was invented. Its opposite, "keeping it real", has become everything from a punk mantra to a hip-hop cliche. But it's hard to define what it really means.
I've had intense disagreements with friends over what constitutes "real" music as opposed to "fake", and how it should be judged. According to a mate who reckons he's only into "real" music (and this includes Babyshambles), music should be judged purely on its artistic merits as opposed to, presumably, its emotional effects on the masses.
I'll never convince anyone that What You Waiting For? by Gwen Stefani is a triumph of masterly chord progressions, musical literature or the stuff of Bob Dylan's dreams. But I can say it's a good pop song that makes me feel like going blond. I'd be happy to judge it on its own terms, whereas he'd rather lump it into the "fake" category because it "won't go down in history as a truly great song".
Reviewing albums throws this whole dilemma of real versus fake into the equation. Should a manufactured pop band with catchy songs, computer-generated beats and Botoxed faces be allowed a four-star review, simply because they're a record company creation and therefore "fake"? Is it possible to judge something for what it is - an emo album, for instance? Are bands like KISS, TISM and Slipknot keeping it real by hiding their identities? Should white people be allowed to play the blues? Should synthesizers be banned?
As Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor write in their book Faking It, the Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, (2007) it's impossible for any performance to be entirely authentic. "Nobody goes out on stage and sings about exactly what they did that day. Authenticity is an absolute, a goal that can never be attained."
Neither can it be counted on. In the summer of 1969, a non-existent band called the Archies released the song Sugar Sugar. The song was designed to give a popular kids' show a pop soundtrack. But it wasn't just kids who liked it. The song flew up the charts and stayed at number one for weeks.
Kurt Cobain once wrote, "I can't fool you, any one of you. It simply isn't fair to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I'm having 100 per cent fun."
He wasn't kidding. It was in his suicide note.
