Jeff Buckley and Hipsters

I don't know much about music, so much of this is cribbed from a conversation with my friend Mike. I put it here as part of our ongoing investigation of irony.

Jeff Buckley's music is characterised by a complete lack of whimsy, humour, or irony. These markers of self-consciousness are basically expected from most cultural production, although they become devalued or inverted when they are used un-self-consciously (i.e. when they become part of the basic cultural framework, when they are marks of participation in the norm rather than distance from it). The lack of them is what turns lots of people off Jeff Buckley but it's also what makes his music powerful.

Is there something specifically American about his earnestness? Context is important. Buckley can be read as a response to (and building on) the radical, even revolutionary earnestness of grunge, as epitomised by Nirvana. How self-conscious was grunge as an attempt to construct a straightforward, non-staged, more raw style of music?

Is it even possible to be "earnest" deliberately? Does cultural performance (where there must be an audience) simply preclude sincerity? Perhaps we should just see all our performances (everyday as well as cultural, since there is really always some sort of audience) as incapable of total "authenticity". That is the classic "hipster dilemma" - or perhaps it is more true to say that it is the artist's dilemma, to which hipsterism is one possible (and now untenable) answer.