Just gimme some truth: do stage personas compromise an artist’s authenticity?

Last Sunday, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl used his Grammy win as a platform to speak out on what makes music authentic. “It’s not about being perfect,” he said. “It’s not about what goes on in a computer.” He continued, “It’s about what goes on in here,” pointing to his heart, “and what goes on in here,” pointing to his head. Although the presentation was a bit melodramatic, his general argument is a widely held belief. We saw just how much so in the responses to Lana Del Rey’s awkwardly bad performance on “Saturday Night Live.” The main issue the critics had was not her skill as a performer but rather her authenticity as an artist. “She changed her name, you know,” they say. “She must be a phony!”

Yes—she changed her name, but as the Huffington Post was quick to point out, so did Declan McManus (Elvis Costello), Reginald Dwight (Elton John), and Allen Konigsberg (Woody Allen). I don’t equate her with any of these geniuses (in fact I’d go as far as to say I’m not a fan), but creating an artistic persona doesn’t necessarily make her a phony.

Truth in art is a tricky thing. We expect authenticity, yet we also expect creativity. We want something we’ve never heard before, but we want it to be relatable. Artists are creators, not documentarians. Strike that­—even documentarians take artistic license. While a created persona might not follow the dictionary definition of “truth,” it can definitely represent the artist’s inner truth.

Musicians create a persona because that’s how they see themselves, and that’s how they feel they can most effectively share their music with the world. Why should something as personal as art be subject to superficial labels such as the surnames we inherited from our great-great-great grandfathers? As an artist, your calling is to create something out of nothing. Why should your artistic persona be any different?

The one caveat to this is when management forces a persona onto a rising star. I don’t think it happens quite as much as our skeptical music fans think, but it does happen. For this situation I think the best judge of truth is time. Does the artist stick to their stage name long after they need to, or do they ditch it the moment they ditch their current management? That being said, even if they do it’s always possible for them to reclaim control of their own career. We should always be wary that we don’t miss out on good music just because someone has had a commercial streak in the past. By this logic we would have abandoned the Beatles after their first couple of albums, and we would have never seen any of George Carlin’s HBO specials.

College students are perhaps the most skeptical about “truth” in music, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. It’s the time in our lives when we are the most experimental with our identities, when we go through an unhealthy number of “phases,” and when we consume art we don’t even like simply to seem “intellectual.” We should be the most understanding demographic when it comes to wild personas, fake names, and fabricated identities. We all have different taste in music, and that should be what guides our listening habits, not pretentious arguments about an artist’s inherent “authenticity.”

David Ecker is a first-year in Columbia College. Slightly Off Key runs alternate Fridays.