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It's bizarre to me that De Boer here can't recognize his own massive blindspots, and realize that he's written an article not about America but about the dynamics of white Blue Tribers. He writes extensively about music, and never mentions Country, only Pop (which he despises) and 90s Punk or Indie (which he valorizes). He writes extensively about the concept of Selling Out in the year of our Lord 2024, and never mentions Donald Trump, the dominant figure of American (and by extension, world) politics for a decade now, who is the embodied avatar of Selling Out. He skips talking about the current kerfuffle in Congress, in which a rich man is openly threatening to fund primary challengers against sitting politicians who go against him. When he discusses celebrities, they are exclusively the celebrities he cares about, not the ones that have dominated other branches of American culture.
He writes about culture becoming a series of fakes, without talking about the physical manifestations of this: licensing deals. Professional sports jerseys used to be made in the USA, largely for a while in Pennsylvania by Majestic. It used to be possible when I was a kid to go to the Majestic Factory Outlet here, and actually buy factory seconds or overruns of jerseys. Now, Majestic is just a license owned by a corporation, Fanatics, who manufactures all of the jerseys and gear through contracts with other companies, which actually make the jerseys in China or El Salvador or Vietnam. The question of whether Fanatics or Nike or Under Armor or Reebok gets the uniform contract is purely one of which logo is placed on the jersey, the actual manufacturing will be bid out largely to the same foreign manufacturers regardless. Yet the price of an "authentic" jersey is the same, or higher, than it ever was. What does authenticity mean in that case? It's mostly a legal concept, this jersey is authentic because some money was paid to the team and the league. But it no longer really signifies quality, no longer really signifies particular skill in its creation, or even that it was made in the same way or in the same factory as the professional jerseys. Everybody knows that the item is being made by contract factories.
And this is true for virtually every fashion brand, even most high end fashion brands outside of Hermes and a few others don't have their own factories and craftsmen. Even bags that brag that they are "made in Italy" are often made by Chinese workers who have been imported to Tuscany so that the label can be applied.
It used to be possible to purchase an item that was meaningfully "authentic" and one that was meaningfully "fake." The authentic jersey was properly made from high quality materials in Pennsylvania, the fake was cheaply made in China. Now the on-field pants are so bad that you can tell the fake jerseys in the stands because they are nicer. And anyway, they're all made in some contract factory overseas. So what makes one "authentic" and the other "fake?" What makes a real Chanel a real Chanel?
The reason the idea of "authenticity" has been abandoned is because it always resulted in something incoherent, an endless internecine conflict over minutiae. Punk was largely a cultural failure. I don't know why Freddie is trying to resurrect it.
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