Photo: Twisted Teens | By Ann Powers, NPR Music | From manufactured fans to AI artists and “industry plants,” 2026 is one wild year for figuring out what’s authentic and what’s not in the music industry. For more, check out a catalog of the year in musical fraudulence, a historical survey of fakes and a conversation about why it feels harder than ever to know what’s real in our podcast.
In one of the most clamorous, messy and transcendent little songs of 2026, Caspian Hollywell of the New Orleans-based rock band Twisted Teens offers a shout toward the heavens: Is it real? He’s singing about a vision of salvation, or maybe the need to go back on his meds. He asks the question that also serves as the song’s title in a voice that’s disheveled, joyous, pleading, insistent, ridiculous. Is it real? The phrase threatens to destroy the song’s magic, its incipient empowerment. Music is the realest thing, “the angel trumpet loud”; it’s making Hollywell bigger and better than he’s ever been before. But it might be a trick. The anguish that Hollywell and the band whip up until it turns into grace is all in the service of making it okay to believe.
“Is it real?” That’s the most pressing question in music right now, and it’s one that feels impossible to adequately answer, in almost any context. Mainstream pop, seemingly falling out of fashion though it still fills stadiums and streaming playlists, is riddled with stories of chicanery and poison artifice. Every week a new scam seems to surface, making fans feel like they can’t trust what they hear, or see or buy — emerging stars allegedly benefitting from plagiarism or nepotism, viral successes that turn out to be rigged, faked musical identities, counterfeit vinyl, The Rolling Stones de-aging themselves in a video, the list goes on. It feels very chaotic, and not at all good.
Why does everything in music feel fake?
In response, a new wave of artists are turning to raw, confrontational sounds and D.I.Y. methodologies, whether it’s the punky retro garage sound of Twisted Teens, Westside Cowboy and other new indie bands, the noise rock of Mandy, Indiana, the self-dismantling hyperpop of underscores or the oozing jazz-funk of GENA. These artists are winning the most acclaim this year partly because they are engaged in a battle that, to serious music lovers and many musicians themselves, feels momentous: a fight for the very soul of music as it drifts toward the black hole of AI slop.
The battle feels bloody right now, and as always, music’s vanguard is ready to make it even bloodier. When Hollywell tells an interviewer, “You can like us or you can hate us, but you can’t say we’re not real,” he’s claiming a lineage that extends back to the beginnings of American music culture. (Real is always relative: Hollywell loves a stage name and has used a bunch over the course of his music career, including CPN, C-Bird and Cas P. Ian. He’s also spelled his last name Holywell and Halliwell.) Since before the turn of the 20th century, when Black brass bands brought noisy authenticity to the streets of New Orleans while orchestras played “real” European music in its concert halls, debates have raged about authenticity in music. They intensify with the advent of new technologies, shifting demographics and surfacing political anxieties. Something upends the feeling of authenticity that music so often communicates; then somebody finds a new way to ask Hollywell’s question, and answer it with a bang.
Authenticity tests
Nearly half a century ago, an authenticity debate arose when the guitarist and songwriter Ry Cooder took music into what one reviewer half-jokingly called a “robotized” age. A sought-after session man known for inventive, wide-ranging takes on everything from blues to Hawaiian slack-key guitar, Cooder focused on early R&B for his 1979 album Bop Till You Drop, enlisting friends like Chaka Khan to make sure he did the genre justice.
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Long but very educational and informative article:
https://www.npr.org/2026/10/27/nx-s1-5993861/why-does-everything-feel-fake-music-essay
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Photo: Twisted Teens | From Subpop Records’ Facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1551717293657678&set=pcb.1551724910323583
https://www.facebook.com/subpoprecords
