Jeff Sharlet: I’ve a review of Faking It: the quest for authenticity in popular music, in the U.K. magazine New Statesman. “Barker and Taylor, two publishing professionals who have turned out their personal record collections to produce a persuasive defence of inauthenticity as the defining characteristic of great popular music, borrow the title of their book, Faking It, from a suicide note – the most authentic, and also the stupidest, genre of all. “The fact is,” wrote Nirvana’s singer Kurt Cobain shortly before eating the muzzle of a shotgun in 1994, “I can’t fool you, any one of you . . . The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I’m having 100% fun.” (The italics are Cobain’s.)” Speaking of fakes, you can save your eyes the trouble and instead listen to “me” read the essay out loud, in my alter ego as a female British radio announcer.