The Fake Fixation

Close your eyes for a moment and allow yourself to be transported into the past, back to a time when dinosaurs walked the earth. Seek out the first stranger you can find, and ask them to recite the first song lyric they can think of that contains the word “fake.”

It’s a bit of a stumper to anybody who hasn’t consciously prepared for it. So maybe a hint is warranted: Something involving faking a smile—you know—pretending you’re happy when you’re really not.

Given a few more moments, any true-blooded citizen of the 1980s might very well conjure this one up:

Every smile you fake
Every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you

A valid answer, but can they name another song lyric from that approximate decade containing the word in any sense? One that’s not the album track “Synchronicity II”: “But we know all her suicides are fake” that directly precedes the one they just named? It’s not so easy; there weren’t all that many. I’ll give you “911 Is a Joke” by Public Enemy and “House of Pain” by Faster Pussycat. For something at the opposite edge, “Easy” by the Commodores or “It’s Too Late” by Carole King. Now, what have you got? The 80s were simply too genuine, I suppose.

I’ll take Napster Downloads for $200, Alex.

Recently I found myself in the rather unenviable position of needing to sand the exposed surfaces of an entire deck. It was a back-breaking, hand-numbing, frustrating job that could only be complimented by one soundtrack: Angry alternative rock/post-grunge/nu metal from the early 2000s. It was the only thing that felt right at the time. Squatting and kneeling, occasionally hitting a particularly determined mosquito with the belt sander, I go with 120 grit to really smear her blood meal around, but that’s just me talking. I started to pick up a pattern in the music:

A whole lot of these song lyrics contain the word “fake.”

The longer I listened, the more apparent it became. Fake smiles and grins, like those Sting sang about twenty years earlier, are as present as ever:

This is the last smile
That I’ll fake for the sake of being with you

From Simple Plan “Welcome to My Life” to Crossfade, “Someday” Disturbed “Asylum” to Blink-182, “Story of a Lonely Guy” seems like nobody in any of these songs is really happy.

Can’t pretend just to fake a smile
‘Cause you know I feel every ounce of
Pain […]

And also Everlast, “Stay” Lostprophets, “Can’t Stop, Gotta Date with Hate” American Hi-Fi, “Happy” Marilyn Manson, “Better of Two Evils” and…

From now on I’m going to start holding my breath
When you come around and you flex that fake grin
‘Cause something inside me has said more than twice
That breathing less air beats breathing you in

And we haven’t even explored the likes of Taylor Swift, “Cold as You”; “Teardrops on My Guitar” Matchbox Twenty, “Bed of Lies” Alkaline Trio, “Another Innocent Girl” you know, the sorts of songs that make you fumble around for the “⏭” button due to how insufficiently angry they are for the task at hand. Every single one of these songs has some kind of unauthentic facial expression in the lyrics.

But we’ve barely scratched the surface. There is an entire universe of fakeness before us.

“Gonna make a break and take a fake”

It makes sense from a practical standpoint why the word “fake” in the abstract is useful in lyrics. Just look at the alternatives: feign, scam, pretend, bogus, phony, insincere, disingenuous. They all sound… goofy. It’s short, punchy, and it can be used to set up a whole mess of different rhyme options:

My sweet revenge will be yours, it’s in the making
It’s in the taking, making, baking, taking, faking
Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah, ah-ah

It’s a versatile word that can be molded to fit in any number of places:

Your tragedy, your misery
[…]
Your fakery, your butchery
Is nothing compared to my hate for you

Of course, no discussion on rhyme scheme would be complete without mentioning this piece of patterned perfection: The choruses and bridge in this one are pretty all-over-the-place in terms of rhyme, but this is the only instance of a verse breaking the AABB pattern. Maybe it was an intentional literary device, where “everything”—including this line—was “messed up.”

Everything’s so blurry and everyone’s so fake
And everybody’s empty and everything is so messed up

Pure poetry, that. Somehow I remember these words seeming more profound coming out of Winamp 3.

Beyond its use as a convenient glue word, “fake” occasionally serves as a one-word metaphor for an unbelievable or even dreamlike situation. Things never go the artist’s way, and anything different must not be real. Ergo, fake:

Man, I feel like mold
It’s prom night and I am lonely
Lo and behold
She’s walkin’ over to me
This must be fake
My lip starts to shake
How does she know who I am?
And why does she give a damn about me?

This sort of “situational” fakeness is sometimes directly contrasted with realness:

It plays tricks with my mind, some call it asinine
But it’s like love or hate, now is that real or fake?
Cause it’s a real thin line, but that’s your choice to make

I’m pretty sure that the larger context of this song uses the midday sun to represent God, The greatest trick the Devil ever played was making the world forget that P.O.D. is a Christian metal band. and the band was using the geocentric model where said sun revolved around the Earth as a natural satellite would. (Maybe the songwriters and Vanessa Williams “Sometimes the snow comes down in June / Sometimes the sun goes ‘round the moon” (“Save the Best for Last,” a song that does not contain the word “fake.” I checked.) all had the same science teacher, I dunno.)

“Fake” in adjective form also appears frequently in metaphors. But it really shines in its verb and noun forms, as we’ll see in a bit.

“Hitching a ride with a big fake rubber thumb”

It’s not uncommon to find lyrics containing a phrase like “fake [thing],” where the thing could either be a literal object or (more commonly) something to be taken in a metaphorical sense. In the earlier examples of “fake smile,” the interpretation is that there is an insincere emotion present—not that the subject of the song was wearing a literal smile-shaped wax novelty mouth.

These constructions tend to gravitate towards body parts across all manner of different genres. For example, Dashboard Confessional sang: Or so I have been told. By somebody who had a fleeting Dashboard Confessional phase in high school. Somebody who was not me.

I’m missing your laugh, how did it break?
And when did your eyes begin to look fake?
I hope you’re as happy as you’re pretending

In these usages, “fake” means nothing by itself and only serves to modify the object it’s linked with. The combination of the two sets up the metaphor.

For some reason, there has been a lot more ink spent writing lyrics around another body part: Apropos of nothing, I feel the need to highlight Wes Borland’s album cover work for anybody who might not be familiar with it already. It defies any attempt at analysis, only permitting one’s critical eye to come away with a single burning question: Why was the art stretched horizontally like that?

Fake-ass titties on a fucked up chest

A very particular body part:

Well I’m packin’ up my game and I’ma head out west
Where real women come equipped with scripts and fake breasts

And because I am an avid believer in the rule of three:

She clings to me like cellophane
Fake plastic submarine

This too, apparently, is a bosom euphemism (at least partially) expressed in the clumsiest way possible. I give them credit for trying, but honestly you’d get the same enjoyment out of the song if you just kept imagining the yellow bathtub toy you had in your mind before you started reading this paragraph.

Anatomical abundance aside, it doesn’t take much to find metaphors built around inanimate objects. System of a Down sings of “revolving fake lawn houses” “Boom!” to describe the overall vibe of some American suburban housing developments. There’s “fake anti-fascist lie,” Slipknot, “Psychosocial” “fake reality,” Sum 41, “Billy Spleen” fake shady tears, Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Storm in a Teacup” fake soul, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, “American X” and fake attention. Jimmy Eat World, “Over” In each of these, the “fake” is more of a color adjective—it’s not doing the heavy lifting all by itself.

“Our subject isn’t cool, but he fakes it anyway”

In verb form, the word “fake” starts sending these songs down new avenues, most of which involve a sense of scheming or deception. Staind Not to be confused with Trapt. uses “faking” to describe manipulative behavior committed by somebody—possibly a romantic partner, but definitely an enemy—that torments the narrator:

Faceless, faking
Pushing, taking
All this, just to
Bring me, down

Contrast this with Trapt, Not to be confused with Staind. who uses “fake” as… well, it’s essentially the same thing:

You know how to play that game
Even though you’re the only one who plays
So attached to the feelings that you fake
Your weakness is your only strength
[…]
You traded honesty for lies
You faked it all your life
You always swear this is the last tear
You’ll ever cry

Sometimes the target of such criticism is oblivious to the fact that they’re engaging in any sort of fakery in the first place:

How can we fake this anymore?
To turn our backs away and choose to just ignore
Some say it’s ignorance
It makes me feel some innocence

In this case, all of society is faking by failing to take charge of the world Or at least the world as it existed halfway through the George W. Bush administration. in order to make anything better for anybody. This is somewhat undercut by some of their lines from a different song released about two years earlier: “It’s all just a waste of time in the end / Don’t care, so why should I even pretend?” “Motivation,” which does contain the word “fake.”

Often a situation is encountered where one person confesses, accuses, or pleads another person to engage in an act of deceit:

Hey, hey, now, can you fake it?
Can you make it look like we won?

Though if I were to name one band that was the undisputed king of using “fake” in this sort of way, it would be Seether. Their usage is significant enough that they are going to get The Table™:

By my count, that’s 67 utterances of some variant of “fake” on 13 tracks spanning 18 years. The distribution is pretty even; they’re as down with the fakeness today as they’ve always been. In all of the research carried out in preparing this piece, I have not found another 2000s-era artist that is anywhere near as attuned to the world of fake as Seether.

Of all the forms of the word “fake,” this verb form definitely has the widest range. It can be used to build yourself up, Pantera, “Goddamn Electric”; Thrice, “Betrayal Is a Symptom”; The Offspring, “Come out Swinging” tear yourself down, Chevelle, “Don’t Fake This”; Papa Roach, “The Enemy”; Feeder, “Shatter” criticize a friend, The Offspring, “(Can’t Get My) Head Around You”; Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, “Lien on Your Dreams” criticize yourself, Stone Sour, “Socio”; Breaking Benjamin, “Phase”; Fuel, “Hemorrhage (In My Hands)” criticize society, Our Lady Peace, “Superman’s Dead”; Lagwagon, “Automatic”; Thrice, “Motion Isn’t Meaning” or destroy a relationship. SR-71, “Goodbye”; Motion City Soundtrack, “When ‘You’re’ Around”; Sum 41, “Crazy Amanda Bunkface”; The Offspring, “Vultures”; Atreyu, “Our Sick Story (Thus Far)”; Puddle of Mudd, “Blood on the Table”

Fundamentally each of these usages is based around some kind of lie. From living in a society of ignorant sheep, to suffering through a romantic relationship or parasitic sort of friendship, all the way down to an argument with your own (more than likely clinically depressed) self, the fakeness represents tension. Very few of these songs could be described as even remotely cheerful; it’s more, “I’m screwed up, you’re screwed up, everything’s screwed up, tune ’em down to drop C♯.”

For fake-filled songs that have nothing to do with the overall sound we’ve aimed for so far, I might recommend “I Wanna Have Your Babies” by Natasha Bedingfield, “6 in the Morning (Come on In)” by D12, “Hot Like Fire” by Jessica Simpson, or “No Diggity” by Blackstreet. Or “From Chaos” by 311, “I Know I Know I Know” by Tegan and Sara, “Crumble” by Dinosaur Jr., or “If Only She Knew” by Michelle Branch. Every damn one of these has some kind of fake behavior.

(Or “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne, “Explode” by Nelly Furtado, “Drop It Like It’s Hot” by Snoop Dogg, “But It’s Better If You Do” by Panic! at the Disco, or…)

“You know we figured you out, fake!”

The final layer of the part-of-speech cake has the nouns. In these usages, the subject is neither acting fake nor appearing fake—it actually is a fake thing: Like pretty much every other occurrence, these things are only fake in the metaphorical sense. I’m sure somebody has written a song about schizophrenic delusions where their friends and family are replaced with simulacra, but that’s not what most of these are.

Such a waste, what a shame
My whole life is a fake

Now, at this point, I’m going to piss off a bunch of English teachers by also lumping in usages that are actually adjectives, but behave more like nouns where they appear. See, you could say “Joe is a fake” like in the Crossfade lyric above, but you could also say “Joe is fake” to mean effectively the same thing:

I could be fake
I could be stupid
You know I could be just like you

In each of the preceding examples you could add or remove an article to convert “fake” from a noun to an adjective or vice versa without substantially affecting the meaning of the lyrics; songwriting as a form of communication is simply not precise enough for the difference to matter in most cases. The more noticeable effect is on the rhythmic flow of the line, which is most likely what dictated the word choice in the first place.

The noun form of “fake” fits a wide range of scenarios. Some use it in a cocky or self-aggrandizing way, proudly proclaiming that they are the best or most original at the kind of music they make, and the hell with all of the cheap imitators. Kid Rock, “Forever”; Pantera, “We’ll Grind That Axe for a Long Time”; Limp Bizkit, “Phenomenon” Other grandiose usages suggest that a society of sheep who are all going to be saved (or conquered) by some kind of epic figure. Rob Zombie, “Jesus Frankenstein”; Chevelle, “Bend the Bracket” On the lighter side of the spectrum, some of these lyrics describe vacuous fame-seekers who will happily pretend to be something they’re not for success, or to catch the romantic interests of a successful person. Big D and the Kids Table, “L.A.X.”; Good Charlotte, “I Just Wanna Live”; Marilyn Manson, “Ka-Boom Ka-Boom” (Absurd fact: Those last two songs both mention the idea of wearing a “lawsuit” as clothing.)

On a more interpersonal level, groups of people can be described as “fake” if they are a real or perceived enemy, or some kind of backstabbing liar. Korn, “Fear Is a Place to Live”; Hatebreed, “Straight to Your Face”; Crazy Town, “Skulls and Stars” Less adversarial but still disingenuous people can also be fakes simply by hiding the truth from others, which can go both ways. Breaking Benjamin, “I Will Not Bow”; Sum 41, “Over My Head (Better Off Dead)”; Smile Empty Soul, “Who I Am” (Yeah, from the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack. This song is basically the embittered little brother of “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” by Five for Fighting.)

And of course, all of this lying and faking inevitably leads to the breakdown of friendships and romantic relationships alike. Papa Roach, “Burn”; Godsmack, “I Fucking Hate You”; Placebo, “Battle for the Sun”; Black Label Society, “Low Down”; Saving Abel, “Out of My Face”; Goldfinger, “Bro” The beautiful thing about the word “fake” is that you can use it to describe the entire population of this planet, or you could use it in reference to yourself and yourself alone. It works equally well either way, and it tends to boil down to the same thing: “I am not like them, or they are not like me. Has anybody seen my DS-1 pedal?”

And if you thought I would end a section without a dense paragraph where I rattle off a dozen song names that didn’t fit into the rest of the article: “You Get What You Give” by The New Radicals, “I’m a Fake” by The Used, I actually laughed out loud while listening to this one. It is, uh, let’s just say it is not to my liking. “Fuck the World” by Insane Clown Posse, This might be the original “I said ‘fuck’ a preposterous and specific number of times!” list song, predating the release of Limp Bizkit’s “Hot Dog” by over a year. “Cold Wind Blows” by Eminem, “So Good” by Destiny’s Child, “That’s How Strong My Love Is” by Alicia Keys, “So Long, Jimmy” by James Blunt, “There for You” by Flyleaf, “Admit It!!!” by Say Anything, “Combat” by Flobots, “Fake” by Busted, How many Apollo space programs worth of computing power do you suppose went into the vocal processing on this one? and/or “So Damn Clever” by Plain White T’s.

“Good God, you’re coming up with reasons”

This leads to a question: Why? Not like “why did I do this”—we know the answer to that already: Because something is profoundly wrong with me.

Based on rough search result counts, I estimate the peak of this “fake” era to be right around the year 2004, extending maybe six or seven years on each side. You can find the word in all kinds of genres spanning every imaginable decade, but there is a definite hot spot at the intersection of roughly post-grunge/alternative metal and approximately the mid 2000s.

Song lyrics always have at least two layers: what is said “Fake” is what is said. For example, this article says “fake” 84 times. and what is meant. We’ve examined these already, but it’s worth a recap:

• Glue word to assist with a rhyme or metaphor
• Dreamlike situations
• Insincere emotions or acts
• Literal fake appearance (e.g. plastic surgery)
• Putting down exes, enemies or rivals
• Resistance to conformity, sense of superiority
• Refusal to come to terms with something
• Fear of showing weakness
• Self loathing

There are common themes present. The metaphors, dreams, and even a lot of the insincere elements have been building blocks for storytelling as far back as I care to look. Somebody did something wrong to me, here’s how I reacted, that’s the outline of this story’s plot. Most “fake” lyrics from before our era of interest tend to use one of the themes from this group.

The denial, fear, and self-loathing elements (whether real or perceived) all play well into most of the songs’ angry and anguished sounds. These kinds of lyrics tend to describe a person who is objectively depressed. Or at least a person who is on the road that leads to the condition. In these cases, the fakeness comes from the artist’s head, giving the listener a glimpse into their situation and the perspective to appreciate the blessing of not being burdened with that. Or if the listener is already angsty or wants to feel it a little more, the song can serve as a blueprint for that. This music is frequently introspective, sometimes drawing from real-life struggles that the songwriters have gone through. For instance, both “Satellite” and “Hemorrhage (In My Hands)” were inspired by the deaths of close family members, a bunch of Seether’s discography draws from frontman Shaun Morgan’s abusive upbringing, while “Teenage Dirtbag” finds its roots in the moral panic following a murder in a small community.

As these experiences are filtered into lyrics, conflicts take a sort of “us vs. them” framing. In these situations, the artist is quantifiably different from some other group, and either the artist hates the group and refuses to be like them, or the group hates the artist and is trying to force conformity. The plastic surgery group falsifies their appearance, the fame-seeking group sacrifices their integrity, the copycat artists imitate performance styles without understanding the culture, any any group the artist tries to make an emotional connection with uses that interaction for their own gain and hurts the artist in the process. This, I believe, is the central thread of what it means to be fake in the context of the larger genre. Which begs the question, what the hell is this genre anyway?

One could dive into Wikipedia’s gaping abyss rabbit hole on heavy metal—the common ancestor for a lot of this sound—and explore the seemingly endless landscape of sub-genres and minutiae that differentiate them, but for our purposes I think we might be able to get away with sweeping generalizations. Metal, much like rock, used to be a more monolithic thing back in olden times. The bands were composed of dudes who looked like ladies, their logos were shaped like Mr. Ouch, Mr. Ouch seems like a bit of a rat bastard. and the performances consisted of long protracted technically intricate solos played on unusually pointy guitars.

As inevitably happens, some younger group comes along, looks at all that, and says “Nah.” They pick and choose their influences and styles, throw away the bits that don’t suit them, and invent a sound all their own. This irritates the old guard who spent a lot of time perming their hair and sharpening their guitars. Why should these new bands have things so easy? Their wardrobe looks like something from a skateboarder’s yard sale, and the riffs are so primitive that a middle schooler with a Peavey guitar could play them. The establishment rejects the newcomers as “post-this,” “alternative that,” and “nü-[sticks out tongue].” Applying this kind of name to any genre is automatically dismissive, as if the hope is that it’s just a small anomaly that will go away on its own.

Simultaneously, these old groups retreat into themselves and start gatekeeping with pointless purity tests. “You think you’re a big enough fan to wear the T-shirt, huh? If you’re such a fan, name every sandwich Dave Mustaine ate over the course of that tour.” They accuse each other of abandoning the founding principles of the music, losing the message, polluting the sound, selling out, and all-around poseur behavior. Which is actually insane, because compared to all the other styles of music in the world, these differences are—at best—trivial and superficial. It’s sort of like two biker gangs beefing over territory. They’re both kinda gruff looking groups with chains attached to their belt loops, riding large American motorcycles, wearing leather vests with cartoon drawings sewn on the back. But each of their rocker patches says something different, therefore they need to beat the living shit out of each other. That’s just law.

Amid all the bickering, the one thing they didn’t want to happen happens: The alternative genre starts to grow. Now it’s not so alternative anymore—it’s huge. It’s playing over the speakers at the mall. It’s filling up concert venues. It’s outselling them. It’s expanding to the point where it’s starting to fracture and form even more sub-genres.

Thus the entire goddamn cycle repeats itself. Now the bands that were labeled as “alternative” are feeling threatened by the alternative-alternative Nope, still not coming up with any original names for any of this stuff. emo screaming and white kid rapping. And so begins a new generation of infighting and gatekeeping, which unintentionally plants the seeds for the next cohort. Over and over, seemingly faster and faster as the internet becomes increasingly involved in the mix. Potential fans can discover something on a message board, spend 20 minutes waiting for the MP3 to come in from a stranger on Napster, and cherry-pick from a virtually boundless buffet It also gave fans a new way to show pride in things they liked. I’ll bet a sizable amount of GeoCities, Tripod, and Angelfire site content consisted of song lyrics, video game cheats, or MST3K quotes. All misattributed, as is the custom of our people. of music—without having to wait for releases to trickle into the local record store. Bad for monoculture, perhaps, but a definite win for people finding what they wanted.

This music, at this time, is a snapshot of life at the center of that churn. Groups who are trying to do their own thing and break away from a stodgy establishment, while at the same time becoming that establishment and experiencing their own overthrow at the hand of even fresher groups. While very little of this music drew from the overtly political of well of punk, it was contemporaneous with the loud continuous drumbeat of the U.S. war on terror and I would have to think that had some effect on the overall mood. Maybe it’s just me, but I just can’t picture something like LFO’s “Summer Girls” being written in the shadow of 9/11.

There had also been an odd fascination with “realness” brewing in mainstream American culture for some time prior to that. I estimate that our modern model of “reality” television started around the beginning of the 1990s, with the pairing of Cops and The Real World, which ran from 1989–2020 and 1992–2017 respectively. I am not considering Cops after its move to Fox Nation or The Real World on Facebook Watch because I do not feel those audiences are a representative sampling of “mainstream” compared to the shows’ original networks. The midpoint of each of these year ranges is… 2004.

Judge Judy episodes from that year opened with the following narration: “The people are real. The cases are real. The rulings are final.” Emphasis his. Each instance of “real” really was enunciated that way. Three separate episodes from the 2004 season of Chappelle’s Show had a segment titled “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong.” From the primary U.S. run of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (1998–2007) to The Mole (2001–2008), Jerry Springer (1991–2018) to Fear Factor (2001-2006), shows centered around realness (or at least unscriptedness) rise and fall centered around this time period. Coca-Cola’s actual advertising slogan in 2004 was, and I am not making this up, “Real.” Really. 100% real. Our culture had realness on the mind, even though nobody really had a cohesive ethos for what “real” was supposed to mean. It was just, you know, real.

What do you get when you mash together youthful angst, in- and out-group dynamics, sociopolitical malaise, obsession with measures of cultural authenticity, and actually pretty catchy songwriting and production? This. This product of its time, this sum of it parts, this weird time capsule that unintentionally fossilized a little mosquito <plugs belt sander back in> of fakeness inside a chunk of once-kinda-mainstream musical amber. Admittedly these songs weren’t the first to express such ideas in this way, nor will they be the last. But they were unsettlingly plentiful at the time, forming a kind of fakeness nexus that I really don’t know will ever occur again.

The most tragic part of all that has got to be the infighting, though. The idea that “X music sounds like Y, and you don’t sound like Y, so you are not X.” That by itself might be alright, but when you start dictating that adherents you your particular style must also pledge their allegiance to its history and ideology, that really turns people off. Some folks just want to rock out, simple as that.

You call me a fake, I’m crashing in your scene
You’re giving me some punk rock test
You say how you could do so much better than me
But all you do is meth

The fact is, when you create something and release it for public consumption, you can’t dictate what happens to it after that. Sure, you have some overarching legal tools like copyright to keep it from being outright stolen or plagiarized, but you can’t make the audience sign a moral contract that dictates how and by whom it may be consumed. This goes for any sort of creative work, not just music—the work is created in a moment and perhaps by a movement, but there’s no way to permanently link the two. People can listen to Pete Seeger and Creedence Clearwater Revival without understanding anything about the Vietnam War. After a while it’s just music; no rational person would administer a U.S. history exam as a precondition for listening to it. Somebody hears that sound, models their own music after it, and now there’s a derivative without the political context. What would you do if you were in CCR’s shoes? Would you be angry that these young punks don’t respect the history, or honored that somebody liked your style enough to base their own work around it?

Bluntly, if you want to create an art scene that requires its participants and patrons to know the full history and understand the ideals that brought it into being, then maybe mass-market music isn’t the right medium for you to be working in. Perhaps a sort of immersive gallery installation would be better suited to all of that. Of course, that would severely limit the reach of your art to only those die-hard fans who want to take the time to learn all the same things that you have learned, and travel all the way to this temple, this cathedral you have created. You probably wouldn’t make nearly as much money doing it that way, but that shouldn’t matter. Right, you sellout fake?