and elsewhere, he is the author of The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture (2019) and Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (2013).
Serazio applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it "Real" in Media, Culture, and Politics, and reported the following:
As random samples go, you could probably do a lot worse in terms of page 99 serving as a representative window into The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it "Real" in Media, Culture, and Politics. The reader arrives there at the conclusion to a chapter that just looked at how authenticity functions, idealistically and strategically, within pop music. That story, traced over the 30 or so pages that precede it, is one of a particular media industry that had long upheld authenticity as an artistic ideal, but, as digital technology decimated economic fortunes, it had to capitulate to commercialism in the form of branded sponsorships galore. Broadly speaking, that’s a microcosm of one of the book's core arguments. It’s a study of the tension between marketplace motives and authentic cultural forms that represent the antithesis of that. When revenues were healthy and times were good, musicians could resist “selling out,” but when those fell apart, that posture was revealed to be the product of privilege. Elsewhere in the book, those same dynamics and tensions are on display. In the case of social media influencers, they have to balance between being true to their organic content (i.e., their everyday, banal lives) and accommodating product placement. For politicians, the issue of “selling out” revolves around the suspected influence that big-dollar donors wield in the aftermath of Citizens United and the way that influence potentially corrupts true principles once deeply held. To be honest, the book never really arrives at a conclusion as to whether “selling out” still carries a stigma or represents a phrase of disparagement. From the landscape of pop music, as we see on page 99, selling out is necessary and a means to survival in tumultuous times for a particular media industry – one of several that the book explores in backstage detail.Learn more about The Authenticity Industries at the Stanford University Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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