In one sense this is about the twin poles of naturalism and performance, the naive and the affected, the authentic and the inauthentic, the organic and the plastic, the warm and the cold, the earnest and the artful and the play between these poles through time.
Reynolds is always at pains to stress the artificiality of the artless, as this was a commonplace in '80s music magazine discourse. He always brings up Marlon Brando in this context. Pattycakes takes the opposed view, that soul is soul, you know it when you feel it, you can't fake the funk, hips don't lie.
Both positions, the cynical and the credulous feel unsatisfactory.
This thread also fits in to our recent investigations of the '80s, what happened then, and why, and how it did that manifest in its musical artifacts and also, how does that resonate and rhyme with what is happening to day?
It's also a thread for posting power ballad youtubes