what's so great about "sincerity"?

or not.

please not.

And really, if you're not being ironic or sincere in some fashion, then what are you?

(© 2003 Amateurist)

also that being insincere or ironic can be honest - it can be a way of saying what you mean.

I have nothing against irony, but without some kind of feeling/emotion/heart/whatever you want to call it, it's hard to connect with a band. The difference between a Nirvana and the four million Nirvana soundalikes.

When I put Interpol in between a couple of similar bands - say, Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen, or even contemporary NYC acts like the Ex-Models and Erase Errata, they come off weaker. The wink-and-nod factor is just too much.

Personally, much of my interest in music is in what seem to be people’s calculations and decisions, rather than just their untreated impulses. I don’t think the untreated impulses are actually as different or interesting as people like to imagine, and I get the feeling that the biggest source of calculation in music is precisely in the service of removing all traces of calculation from music. This is the sincerity-as-another-pose issue, and it’s weird because for many people this is (usually rock) music: an attempt to laboriously craft something that seems uncrafted and immediate.

The key word here is POSE. If you're not posing Thhhhheeennnnnn you are sincere.
And, hey, lets not get toooo cynical. At least accept the faint, ethereal possibility that someone might actually be sincere/that the sincerity isn't an act.

I think most artists are sincere. Sometimes even the major ones.

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Sincerity doesn't have a lot to do with an artist not making "calculations and decisions." Johnny Cash's "American" recordings - covering modern rock songs. Sincere but calculated.

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And I agree with Dan Perry that sincerity isn't necessarily positive on its own. An attribute, not an accolade.

So low-level decisions never get called insincere—tuning one’s guitar or using non-improvised lyrics is rarely considered some sort of insincere pose—but at what point do we start drawing lines? The problem with the idea, in practice, is that it winds up being used to refer, basically, to whether or not artists’ music or lyrics can be reasonably believed to have to do with their actual lives, which is a bit silly—there’s no reason music can’t operate on the level of fiction or artifice just as “sincerely” as it can on the level of confessionalism. Beyond which “sincerity” winds up getting used to refer not to anything about the music’s production but about its, well, genre, about what types of things we usually deem sincere. (In an honest appraisal nothing could be more “sincere” than Max “I only sing about things that happen to me” Tundra, and yet I imagine you’d find more people calling him ironic or insincere than the other way round.)

This isn’t to say that “sincerity” as a concept doesn’t exist, just that its usual application to music leaves something to be desired. I get the sense Fritz and I are thinking about this very much the same way -- this fetishizing of spontaneity thing. I wrote some long thing about Stephin Merrit on here once addressing this issue.

is it because people think songs are somehow inherently auto-biography or selfportraiture no matter what?

What he said, of course.

"But the Dave Matthews Band are so sincere!"

"They still suck."

Hmmm. I prize "naturalism" in film and literature WAY more than in music. (Been thinking about this especially after seeing All the Real Girls.) But maybe that's because I use music almost strictly for pleasure -- the pure, ephemeral enjoyment of sounds coming together in interesting ways -- and almost never to confront any stark emotional truths. (Which is not to say I don't prize "emotion" in music -- but that its function is mostly aesthetic.)

(I'm going to start an All the Real Girls thread tomorrow; can you wait for me?)

You’re right, the Sincere Guy has totally been made a Bogeyman of ILM, though I’m glad you said Bogeyman instead of Straw Man, because not only does Sincere Guy exist all over the place, but the general idea he’s built on is one that functions just as much in here. I mean, I know I think that way sometimes. But I think the concept of “sincerity” that kind of thinking is built on is actually sort of a faux-concept, or at least not quite what it seems, so I’m skeptical of it in a lot of cases—especially since a lot of things I’ve liked lately have been tagged insincere or soulless or what have you and I just don’t hear that at all.

If there were some other, objective, "measuring sticks," then the subjectivity of sincerity or intent would render them irrelevant. But there aren't. All criticism is subjective, drawing on what the critic perceives of the work and what the critic perceives of the artist.

"Sincerity" as musical ticksheet i.e. stripped-down instrumentation, 'hushed' vocals or alternately very passionate/soulful vocals - bogus, and often horrible sounding.

Claiming to especially value sincerity as a listener/critic - generally a pose, because of the impossibility to prove thing and because it is a dodge to win the moral high ground when often all you really mean is 'I like the genre of Sincere Music' (see para above). Not that you insincerely like that music, obviously.

BUT BUT BUT. I adore Dexy's Midnight Runners and part of the reason I do is that Kevin Rowland sounds so utterly, foolishly, frighteningly sincere. So I'm not going to dismiss sincerity. But maybe I need to find better words for what he does. Or work out a position whereby Kevin Rowland is the only pop star to have EVER been sincere!

I agree

"but without some kind of feeling/emotion/heart/whatever you want to call it, it's hard to connect with a band."

I don't feel i have to "connect" with a band to love them. shyness, goofing around to avoid expressing emotion, coldness, cynicism - it's all as fascinating to behold as someone being "sincere". that said, i've nothing against sincerity - but I agree that it's impossible to prove: without knowing an artist personally, you can't know if they "mean it". (I always get a vibe of : "I like the tunes" = "They mean it!" and "I don't like the tunes" = "They don't mean it!").

Not at all, and that's why I like "earnest" as a word: to me it just implies that the tone of the work, the way it's presented, has qualities of ostensible honesty and forthrightness.

For instance, Hollywood makes movies all the time where there's not what we conventionally call "commitment to the work" or "emotional investment" on anyone's part (on the "artistic" level, anyway), but the tone of these movies can be "earnest" beyond all belief.

So I like "earnest" as a possible description of the results of artistic decisions, and the way the listener or viewer is being communicated with; I'm skeptical of "sincere" because it shifts that focus further back on whether someone "really" means what they say. (I mean, can art lie?)

"Yeah, kinda, but he was so, I dunno, goddamned earnest."

That's what I'm thinking when I hear the word earnest.

I like this sentence because I think its right, but I think that sincerity is almost always talked about in terms of lyrics. But no it isn't, I lied back there, a few words ago, because sincerity is talked about in terms of image (Shania), in terms of sound ("dude, they're not punk; yeah mebbes they sound it, but they don't act it") which also brings in the way folks act.

I like the idea of saying "I really like the drumming on this record, it's so sincere."

I'm lost, you are too, right?

I definitely think that sincerity is a sought value. Listening to music, for many people, is a very personal endeavor, and listeners want to feel that an artist has just as much personally at stake. It's hard to tell if an artist really means what they're saying for the most part, but for the ILX Boogeyman that Amateurist identified upthread, the artists that are sincere are generally the artists that he/she likes the most. It's an attribute bestowed by the listener, because if you deeply care about someone's music it's natural to think/hope/want that they care about it too.

A very odd, odd thing to say. But interesting. I don't agree but similarly I don't have any thoughts right now, sorry. But, yeah, odd thing to say, I think.

I was thinking about this whole notion that people think they "know the singer means it", cos you can tell when you look into the whites of his eyes and listen to his pained wail. and if you suggest that proving they "mean it" is actually impossible without knowing the singer personally, they'll suggest you're a soulless bastard who has "missed the point" of "what makes music great". but imagine i applied these criteria to a political debate and said "I know Bush isn't after Iraq's oil because i looked into the whites of his eyes and heard the passion and sincerity in his voice!", then i would (rightly) be called naive.

one of my buddies said he questioned the sincerity of no tears left for cry (in the vocal performance) - which i found super weird. how do you qualify sincerity in music and what doesn't feel sincere to you?

I can judge when a performer is attempting to convey sincerity, and whether or not it's believable is entirely up to the skill of the performer. Whether it is *actually* sincere cannot be determined.

Man what a weird fucking time it was that pundits were *sincerely* suggesting that "irony is dead" because someone blew up a couple buildings and disrupted our otherwise fat lives.

yeah that was p ridiculous

David Brooks types opining that irony was dead in the pages of the paper of record gave me at least as much of a creeping fascism feeling at that time as anything going on today.

I think music is generally sincere, insofar as it's expression and requires talent. It's harder to fake because you need to construct something that is not truthful, just like lies are more elaborate than truth.
Can we feel fake music / emotions ? Yeah I guess.
Then again, music can be about something. A cultural commentary for example. You can be ironic then.
That's as far as my analysis goes, I don't really get what "irony" was supposed to be in the indie context, it was rather confusing and I couldn't give a shit. People seemed to celebrate it. As seen from 2018, it seems very silly.

i thought irony died when alanis released that song and muddled the definition beyond all recovery