What really is the “authentic” thing?

The way the word gets used, you would think authenticity was a property — a substance some things contain and others lack, like fiber. I no longer think it is a property at all. I think it is an event. It happens, and then, like other events, it is over. A “real” thing seems to live in the interval between the moment something is meant and the moment it is noticed, and the interval can last three centuries or fourteen months, but it does not survive being pointed at.

I came to this conclusion thinking about the grunge scene in the 90s. If you want to watch the entire life cycle run once, at speed, under stadium lights, there has never been a better laboratory than Seattle, Washington, between about 1988 and 1993.

The conditions were ideal because they were miserable. It rained. Rent was cheap. The city sat a continent away from anybody's idea of the music business, so the bands played for each other (much like the original cabaret), there being no one else available. They shared drummers, amplifiers, and electric bills. They wore flannel for the same reasons loggers had — warmth, three dollars at the thrift store — a fact that would eventually cost a prominent Manhattan designer his job. The sound they made was not a strategy for success. It was what honesty sounds like with the amplifiers turned up: unglamorous, pretty self-doubting, and generally loud about the things pop music had agreed to whisper about. Nobody was watching, and they didn’t care. Nobody watching is the native climate of the real.

Then, on the Billboard chart dated January 11, 1992, an album made by three unkempt young men from this scene did something that still reads like a misprint: Nirvana's Nevermind replaced Michael Jackson at No. 1. The eighties did not fade. They were deposed, in writing. Within a few seasons an entire industry of spandex was quietly looking for work. The new men onstage dressed like the men in the crowd and sang — this was the radical part — as if they were not having a good time. The wall between performer and audience, in place since Elvis, came down, and millions of people heard somebody mean it and recognized the sound on contact, the way you recognize water when you are thirsty.

What happened next took about fourteen months. Fashion arrived first: in November 1992, the designer Marc Jacobs sent the thrift store down a runway, two-dollar flannels reincarnated in plaid-printed silk. He was fired for it. He mailed samples to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love in Seattle as a tribute; the recipients reportedly burned them.

The press arrived the same month, and here the story achieves a kind of perfection. A reporter from The New York Times, assembling a definitive piece on the movement, called a twenty-five-year-old named Megan Jasper, formerly the receptionist at Sub Pop Records, and asked for the scene's secret slang. Every subculture has a code, he explained. What was theirs?

There wasn't one. So Jasper, by her own account several pots of coffee into the morning, made one up while he transcribed. Hanging out was "swingin' on the flippity-flop." An uncool person was a "lamestain." A bummer was a "harsh realm," torn jeans were "wack slacks," and a loser — this may be her masterpiece — was a "cob nobbler." She escalated on purpose, she said later, because at some point any sane person would have to say oh, come on. No one ever said it. On November 15, 1992, the paper of record printed the full lexicon, verbatim, under the headline "Breaking the Code." Her lone regret was editorial: "tuna platter," meaning a hot date, did not make the paper.

A small magazine exposed the joke a few months later, catching on to the farce. Seattle received her as a civic hero; kids clipped the printed lexicon to their shirts at shows, which is the only time the code was ever actually worn. And by 1993 the man at the center of it all was being photographed in a homemade T-shirt reading GRUNGE IS DEAD — less a complaint, by then, than a coroner's report. The revolt against packaging had been shrink-wrapped in just over a year.

It is easy to laugh at that reporter. But his question deserves a moment of sympathy, because it was sincere, and it was impossible. He wanted the code — the part about grunge that you could print, learn, wear home. The true answer was unprintable, not because it was rude but because it was useless: there is no code; they just meant it. And this is the phone call every honest thing eventually receives. The couple married sixty years is asked for their secret and gives an answer the whole table writes down and no one can use. The teacher whose classroom people remember for decades is asked for her method and says something about caring, which photocopies poorly. Asked to explain the magic, the honest have two options — say something true and useless, or something quotable and false. Jasper found a third, which was to let the question answer itself.

Because the question, the capture, is the problem. Sincerity is attention pointed outward; a question about it bends the attention back. The moment a thing notices itself working — notices that the honesty is charming, that the plainness photographs well — it begins, without any villainy anywhere, converting into technique. The copy is not a crime. It is homage with the meaning drained out, flannel reborn in silk. The market did not murder grunge; it agreed with grunge, enthusiastically, at scale, and agreement is the one thing no sincerity survives. Opposition had kept the scene honest for years. Applause finished it in fourteen months.

That discovery is the movement's longest shadow. Grunge taught American commerce, in one industrial demonstration, that sincerity sells — that the most valuable thing a person can appear to be is unperformed. Every brand that has since addressed you like a candid friend, every carefully unproduced video, every bio promising realness, is downstream of Seattle. Commerce has been performing unperformance ever since, with terrific production values.

But nothing real was destroyed in 1993, which is why this is not a sad story. Sincerity is not a deposit that depletes; it is a behavior that relocates. It moved, as it always moves, to wherever the conditions quietly reassembled — broke, unwatched, meant. It is somewhere right now: a garage in a city no trend piece has located, a church basement choir that is not good, exactly, but is not kidding either, a kitchen table where somebody is writing a thing no market has requested. Wherever it is right now, it is almost certainly not where the cameras are pointed. That sounds like the tragedy and is actually the mercy. The supply is protected by the search itself; by the time the phone rings, it has moved.

As for Megan Jasper, the story saves its best joke for the end: she is now the chief executive of Sub Pop. The scene put its flame in the keeping of the one person with a proven record of refusing to translate it. Somewhere in Seattle she has meetings, quarterly reports, a parking spot — the whole “authentic” experience. And somewhere else entirely, unbranded and unbothered, the real thing carries on, swinging, as nobody has ever said, on the flippity-flop.

John

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John Conrad