Diggin' those Chicks!

Authentic! The Dixie Chicks ruled the Grammys last night as well they should have. Purists would say that you should only win for having the best music but realists know that there are a lot of politics involved in the voting - politics and Politics.

I have so much respect for these girls/ladies/women. Not only do I personally appreciate their music (which like the Anna Nicole story is irrelevant to the context of my post) I really like that they have never backed down from just being who they are and doing what they love.

They have had a rough go of it in the past three years since they expressed their feelings about the Iraq war. They never changed their views, their passion for their families, their love of music. All that changed was the venues they played in. Funny how three years later - with the same exact message - they are hailed as heroes not demonized any longer.

We were supposed to hate them for not supporting the war. Its interesting to me to see that in the iTunes reviews of their latest album, MANY of the reviewers are Iraq veterans and they are in favor of the album, the discussion and the band!

Speaking of which, remember when the Iraq War started and we were supposed to boycott all things French, including my beloved Grey Goose vodka (my dirty martinis were not a sacrifice I was willing make for the cause - sorry people!)? Come ON!

Anyway...a big cheers for the Chicks for a fantastic album, a bunch of well deserved Grammys, some new chicken foot tattoos and for being real - being authentic!

What is authentic these days?

In the crazy, zip-zip-zip, iPod, Blackberry, YouTube, MySpace world we live in now...things, to quote Gilbert and Sullivan, are seldom what they seem. We grow ever more skeptical of the things we hear and read and yet at the same time drawn into the frey more easily.

This past weekend was a media carwreck that you just couldn't help but get a little sucked into...the death of Anna Nicole Smith. The more you tried to avoid it the more ways the rumors and "news" surrounding her life and death crept into your world. What's the real story there? What's true? What's genuine? What's authentic?

I am NOT fascinated by this story for its content as much as for its hold on all types of media...traditional and new media - worldwide - instantly practically. I am sketchy on the details but I got home from errands about two hours after her death was announced on CNN and I had the feeling that I had really missed the boat. What I mean is it was a HUMONGOUS news story (I am not here to debate the merit of it being such news - merely stating the facts as I saw/observed/felt/experienced them) - and now there are so many channels (not the old fashioned kind - Two, Four and 49) to get information that you can't possibly cross reference them all to glean the "actual story" out of everyone's spin.

So I wonder - what does authenticity really mean to most people these days? Is it a quaint value that is slipping away like handwritten thank you cards, fish forks and finger bowls?

We live in a world where some people proudly buy a FAKE Louis Vuitton bag that looks really really really like the real thing but then they tell everyone how little they spent to get a bag that looks just like the genuine article. It could be argued:

(a) The purchaser of the fake is more authentic because while they buy it for the status they also are very forthright about its very inauthenticity!

-or- (conversely)

(b) The purchaser of the geniune purse is more authentic because they bought the Real McCoy.

It's a silly example but it does give one pause to think...

What is authentic these days?