There is an authentic essence to American life, even if it’s often defined subculture-by-subculture: There really are real New Yorkers, real southerners, real gangsters, real country musicians, real McCoys, real gun nuts-and real Nantucket whalers, once upon a time. The answer is that we’re both Ishmael and Ahab, and that the two poles can’t exist without the other.
Are we Americans more like Ishmael, wandering the streets of a port city, wondering at the world beyond dry land-or are we more like Captain Ahab, serious people connected to concrete places and ways of life (whaling-era Nantucket, in Ahab’s case) possessed of a sense of purpose that is pathological and unimpeachably pure? Do Americans even have a true self, or are we all liars? Melville’s narrator is a rootless dilettante inhabiting a world populated by the real thing. One crucial premise of Moby Dick is that Ishmael isn’t a real whaler. Who is a “real New Yorker?” Is Garth Brooks “real country?” Which rappers are lying in their lyrics, and which ones don’t write their own lyrics at all?ĭirect ancestors of these questions have consumed Americans for centuries. Yet it is America’s artificiality that makes our culture so strangely fixated on the real. We made this whole country up as we went along.
There’s barely anything in America that’s more than 400 years old. In Las Vegas, you can gamble inside three different simulacra of Italy visitors to Disneyland begin in Main Street USA, a fake version of an imagined small-town American past. America is also a place where nothing can seem authentic. It isn’t just that America is a land of reinvention, a continent-sized reset button for every conceivable type of human being. Thirty years from now, when future generations are listening to “Stir Fry” or “Hannah Montana,” Takeoff’s tragedy will surely factor into the experience, much like “I Saw the Light” derives some of its awe-inspiring power from Hank Williams’s failure to save himself.Īt first glance, authenticity would seem a paradoxical value for Americans to hold. Takeoff, a hugely influential stylistic innovator and the most famous rapper to be murdered in years, died within an eerily perfect tableaux of the glitz and danger of some half-fantastic version of the American inner city, as if he was subsumed into a scene from his own music.
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