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Groove Column: on truth, myth and being busted.
Nik Cohn, one of pop writing’s greats, wrote the article which became the movie ‘Saturday Night Fever’. Published in New York magazine in June 1976 ‘The Tribal Rites of Saturday Night’ profiled a dancer named Vincent (immortalised by John Travolta as Tony Manero), a ‘face’ at the 2001 Odyssey discotheque in Bay Ridge. Cohn hung out with him for days and wrote it up in the tough New Journalism style popular at the time. Except Vincent didn’t exist. Twenty years later Cohn admitted that he was a ‘complete fabrication’. What had been presented as reportage from the youth-cultural front-line – right down to the pseudo-academic title and the bald introductory statement that ‘everything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly by the people involved’ – was fiction. ‘Not having been to a place never stopped me from describing it… Any more than not meeting someone stopped me talking about my interview with them.’
In the UK last month* it was discovered that award-winning journalist Johann Hari – who had met his very real interviewees – had been passing off words they uttered in other interviews and books as having been said directly to him. Hari’s borrowings caused a furore and a Twitter meme where the public imagined him interviewing historical figures and scooping all their most famous lines.
Context is the contract between writer and reader; we judge what is presented to us by where it’s located, how it’s categorized. But for both our campaigning journalist and subcultural correspondent a higher authenticity was paramount. Hari claimed what he was writing was more than mere interview, that he was doing a service to the figures he profiled by using their most well-turned phrases no matter where they came from (and implied that his readers were somewhat pedestrian for not getting that). Cohn – already a published novelist – chose rather to present his work not as fiction but fact – using journalism as a cover for his belief in the greater resonance of myth.
Hari – pushing the logic of our internet-assisted age to breaking point yet busted by a quick Google search – is currently suspended.** Cohn the trickster, the myth-maker, got away with it but eventually decided to confess anyhow (albeit when it was too late to matter). Great writers may believe that to lead us to higher truth they need to pull the wool over our eyes, but somehow they still want to be caught in the act of doing it.
*NB this article was written for Germany’s Groove magazine in July of this year. Since then Hari has also admitted that he had been editing his and others’ Wikipedia entries under the alias ‘David Rose’.
** After an internal enquiry Hari is currently on unpaid leave from the Independent but will be returning to work there in 2012.
http://chronicle.com/article/Uncreative-Writing/128908/
Steady on there.
Perhaps you should scrutinise your own field before you scrutinise the work of journalists who are mostly underpaid, under-rated and work particularly hard in everything that they do.
If I was to explore the culture of ‘sampling’ and ask every single ‘DJ’(?) who they have sampled in their music I have been met by walls of silence or admissions of sampling but not declaring same etc etc…..There is no doubt that several recent tracks I have heard recently have sampled and yet there is no admission from the ‘DJ’….Think about that one Mr. Pearson.
I think its very easy for you to point a finger and try to be ‘intelligent’ about it in this article but this just looks like petty musician who wants to control and thinks journos/writers etc are puppets and not independent ‘voices’ also…
hi polly,
thanks for your comment. a few thoughts.
firstly, the culture of sampling in music is well-documented and even celebrated, especially in its early manifestations as being a creative form of borrowing / stealing whatever. its practitioners admitted to it, boasted about it – it’s hardly been hidden in any way. lots of plagiarism occurs all the time in music (as in all artistic pursuits) – and is to a certain extent inevitable. there are only so many notes, so many genres; we are essentially always repeating something someone else has done before.
secondly, I don’t think you can compare journalism and music ethically – they are very different pursuits. we don’t go to music for ‘truth’ we go to music to be entertained, moved whatever. journalism is predicated on a contract between the writer and reader – on being based in truth and on fact (well, unless you read the Daily Mail). the issue of trust here is absolutely vital; to be honest, although this wasn’t what i wanted to write about really I consider the trolling and sock-puppetry that Hari got up to a lot more alarming than the creative attribution of quotes.
I remain a massive fan of Nik Cohn’s writing – I dedicated most of a chapter of my MA dissertation and a chapter of my book to his work on disco – and I was surprised to find his admission that he had fabricated lots of it, and found that fascinating rather than a moral flaw – his belief in the idea of the greater resonance of myth and wanted to explore that a bit. maybe i wasn’t clear enough in the very short space I have for these columns.
As for Hari, for the record I have loved his writing in the Independent and am massively disappointed at the recent turn of events. And I think its very important that people on the left don’t give him a free pass just because he’s ‘one of us’. We have to demand higher standards. I think he’s a superb writer and although I agree with many of his political views I don’t think I could ever entirely trust him again.
anyway, I’m sorry if you thought the whole piece was an attack on journalism. it certainly wasn’t intended as such.
with best wishes,
ewan
Personally I think there are a lot of musicians who look down their nose at journalism, writers and journalists. One example a certain musician who told me that the ‘artist’ (his definition of an artist of course) were the centre of it all and basically those who made our living from writing and journalism were nothing more then a PR tool to support the ‘glorious’ function that he believed musicians like he delivered moreso then other creatives.
What I also find ironic in what you are saying is where you compare journalism being based on truth and the same not being comparable to music.
I have watched musicians (mostly from an EDM background as this is the area I write within) over the years take drugs in front of my face and then gone onto mainstream marketing websites, radio stations, blogs etc and ‘marketed’ themselves onwards as this pure, fluffy beautiful being to young demographics who innocently believe these beings to be what they market themselves as when really what they are is drug addicts and drug consumers.
Now when I try to write about this or ask questions about drugs I am met with denials, censorship or aggression from management or other. As if this does not exist.
So, Mr. Pearson what say you now. The truth should only exist in writing and journalism you think??
Polly,
musicians as people are of course capable of being lying untrustworthy disingenuous scumbags – as is anyone in any profession! But we don’t need them to be moral or ethical for them to be useful or successful in their work. Music – I’m talking about the actual work itself – makes little to no moral or ethical claim on us – maybe in a lyrical context sometimes.
Journalism on the other hand – or certain kinds of it – is predicated on somehow holding ‘the truth’ in high regard. If a writer claims to have witnessed something or spoken to somebody in order to tell me a story or make a political claim, I need to be able to trust them to have actually done so.
Yes, musicians can be hypocritical about claiming that they live one lifestyle and actually living another – but we could say the same of many other professions or people in public life; sportspeople, politicians and also journalists! But whether that’s the case or not it doesn’t affect in any way what they make – we don’t need to ‘trust’ music.
I actually think there is a parallel between trust and musical taste. I can listen to a track and think the producer is full of shit, just doing lots of build-ups and posturing, or I can think they’re genuinely onto a new idea and feel the excitement. It’s kind of an extension of finding someone with a similar personality, although obviously it’s just the side that they put into the music. In journalism it’s just much harder to tell the difference; you can listen to a full track much more easily than you can go where the reporter went and check the facts, and often the simplicity or brevity of writing makes it harder to get any grasp on the writer’s personality.
“musicians as people are of course capable of being lying untrustworthy disingenuous scumbags – as is anyone in any profession! But we don’t need them to be moral or ethical for them to be useful or successful in their work. Music – I’m talking about the actual work itself – makes little to no moral or ethical claim on us – maybe in a lyrical context sometimes.”
so we return to the issue of sampling. once again I have been in interview situations where producers have admitted to sampling but not declaring same as it was only ‘a little snippet’ or they might have to pay royalties etc etc…
“Journalism on the other hand – or certain kinds of it – is predicated on somehow holding ‘the truth’ in high regard. If a writer claims to have witnessed something or spoken to somebody in order to tell me a story or make a political claim, I need to be able to trust them to have actually done so.” ….fair point but journalists are not high court judges they don’t swear ‘oaths’ entering office…they adhere to certain guidelines such as representing truth and protecting sources….but music journalism is a different matter altogether….a sector that is cloaked and difficult to report on…
“Yes, musicians can be hypocritical about claiming that they live one lifestyle and actually living another – but we could say the same of many other professions or people in public life; sportspeople, politicians and also journalists! But whether that’s the case or not it doesn’t affect in any way what they make – we don’t need to ‘trust’ music.”….
yes we do need to ‘trust’ music. when youngsters year are buying records and buying into an image looking up to a ‘star’ that is also a contract of responsibility….but if that star is snorting cocaine out the back…well says it all really…
Good post…but frankly, aren’t popular versions of music culture history quite often sanitized versions, in a sense founded on lies anyway? It’s my understanding that in the popular imagination of the average person in the states, disco sort of boils down to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, and Madonna’s Vogue video, both of which are arguably quite derivative, and leave out all the non-male, non-white, non-hetero people involved in establishing discotheque culture.
My point is…these distortions seem unfortunately somewhat endemic to the ongoing tensions between (underground) music culture and its representation in popular media.
P.S. Re: Polly’s comments…way to steer the topic off course…