Tom Lehrer:
There are innocuous folk songs
But we regard them with scorn
The folks that sing them got no social conscience
Why, they don’t even care if Jimmy cracked corn
I don’t think that koeeoaddi was bashing, given that (s)he was replying to the tone of my post. And I was simply warning VCO3 away in the fruitless hope that less for him means more for me*.
*That can’t help me climb a tree in ten seconds flat
Eh, I don’t see the problem (and I was a card carrying, Martin-strumming, incense burning, Indian bedspread wearing, pass the hat around, mediocre hippie folk-singer from back in the day). I agree that the artists I metioned represent widely different styles of folk music (bluegrass, singer/songwriter, celtic, just plain weird*) but then folk music has never been easy to define – even for purists. If it’s euphonious and acoustic, it pretty much works for me. YMMV.
*Joanna Newsom
Finagle and Ichbin Dubist, the discussion is about the subject in the OP, not about another poster. If you want to take a poster to task, do so in the Pit; Cafe Society, however, is meant for the dicussion of art and entertainment.
I have been expressing the sentiments of the OP, nearly word for word, on and off for about 20 years now; ever since I had to correct someone who insisted that Jane Siberry was a “folk” artist. She can’t be, I said; she’s a genius and folk music sucks. (And how is, frinstance, an eleven minute song about the image of a white tent floating downriver on a raft a folk song?)
I’ve always though of the sucky kind of folk music as music that has, like, a deformed sense of humor: either not enough, or too much. Most “serious” folk music is just too self-righteous and over-earnest; unsubtle. It says what it wants to say in bare, bald, unpoetic bumperstickerspeak: the children of Pete Seeger*, like Holly Near or the Indigo Girls. This lyrical lack of imagination, in the annoying kind of folk music I’m referring to, is almost always accompanied by an equal lack of musical imagination: every song, whether it’s a cute song about your cats or a “protest” song about The Man, is written and sung in the same kind of childlike, singsongy, musically unsophisticated style: as if the music were totally irrelevant, and only the message counts. The most atrocious example of this that I’ve witnessed personally is the performance that permanently put me off Judy Collins. She was on some PBS special or something—this was like 20 years ago—and she sang “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” This song is a dark masterpiece; a lament for all the “forgotten men” of the Great Depression. Well, Judy sang it like she was on Sesame Street singing “Three Little Fishies.” Big Raffi grin, and snappin’ her fingers, like she had no earthly idea what she was singing about. The divorce of message and tone that defines most folk music was suddenly starkly apparent to me.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the cutesy stuff that I just cannot stand. I would rather have my teeth removed, one by one, by a ball peen hammer, than listen to the Nields or Moxy Fruvous. It’s like that dork who thinks he’s the life of the party when in truth he’s appallingly unfunny and obnoxious. That kind of music makes me want to shoot myself in the kneecap just to distract myself from the pain of hearing it.
I think the reason for all this is the same thing that happens to any genre: the genre’s inventors—Woody, Pete, Bob—were (are) geniuses who carved out something new from old materials. Almost everyone since has invented nothing; they’ve just copied the geniuses. If you’re a real genius, that can work (Victoria Williams, the Mountain Goats, Rosie Thomas, Billy Bragg, the Be Good Tanyas, Will Oldham, John Prine, Katell Keinig, Ingird Karklins, et al.). If you’re not, you suck (Dar Williams, Shawn Colvin, Jonatha Brooke, Jewel, Veda Hille, Moxy Fruvous, ad nauseum).
*(Let me pause here to point out that, yes, I’m aware there are exceptions to all of the generalizations I’m making. As the wise man said, 90% of everything sucks. With folk music, it’s closer to 99%, but I’m aware that there is that 1% that transcends the genre. So no need to point that out here.)
Where are you putting the “freak-folk” types in your assessment? Because when I think of “modern folk”, I think of acts like Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Joanna Newsom, the Bowerbirds, etc. Most of the acts you mention have been around for quite a while. (For instance, that Gourds cover became popular via the original Napster, where it was commonly mislabeled as Phish. How long ago was that?)
I think you’re just seeing Sturgeon’s Law in action. Like every other genre of music, there’s a lot of folk out there right now, which means a lot of crap.
Right-on, what I came in to mention. Just last summer was known by some to be the summer of new folk, aka freak folk. Devendra Banhart kicks ass, but doesn’t often release a lot of his Woodie/Pete Seeger-esque anti-whatever songs. His concerts, though, are full of angst against assholes. Probably the next best known freak folk artist from last summer would probably be Antony and the Johnsons.
Otherwise, look to local artists. The amazing Atlanta dude no one knows, Juju B Solomon, is fairly folky in my opinion. A lot of local acts are, for that matter, like Isa Cooper and so forth. What the hell is folk? More importantly, once you’ve heard a folk song, have you heard them all? These are the reasons you don’t know of folk bands. They might exist, but they aren’t even getting indie-level record deals, because it rarely is anything new. Except for freak folk.
(And CoCoRosie sucks, sans one or two songs. Indie darlings my arse!)
See, this highlights another relevant issue: even the nomenclature is subjective.
IOW, if you asked me to think of a currently performing artist who was the 180est degree away from folk, the most non-folk artist I could think of, it would be Antony and the Johnsons. If he’s folk, I’m Pete Seeger. (For the record, I’m not Pete Seeger.)
And while I’d never call Devendra Banhart the anti-folk, like Antony, I’d sooner call him pop with a folk flavoer. Again, subjective; I wouldn’t argue too strenuously with anyone who’d call him folk.
How is it not a folk song? I haven’t heard the song, but if you asked me, “If you heard an eleven minutes song about a white tent floating downriver on a raft, what genre do you think it would be?” I think I’d go right to, “folk song.” I don’t know if I could come up with a better subject for a folk song if I were going for deliberate parody.
Huh. I wanna listen to more of your folk music. To me, folk music is more simple, more mundane. An abstract, even surreal, image, like a white tent floating downstream on a raft, seems 180º antithetical to folk music. And the concept of eleven minutes–that’s prog rock, not folk music. Again, subjective.
Also, as you mention, you haven’t heard the song. But still, an eleven minute song about–about, not just mentioning–*about *an abstract image like the one described seems entirely the opposite of what I think about when I hear the phrase “folk music.”
So essentially, you’re coming up with your own definition of folk music that excludes everything that you don’t hate and then complaining about all the music that fits within that definition.
That seems like a silly way to make an argument.
Um, no. I’m trying to describe what it is about folk music that I like and don’t like. I’ve given quite a few examples of folk music that I do like, so apparently you’re only reading the parts of the posts you want to argue with. Now *THAT *seems like a silly way to make an argument.
(If this entire discussion is going to come to a screeching halt because I chose a bad example, or described it badly, or whatever, then please pretend I offered no such example.
I think maybe “folk music,” as it is being used in this thread, and by a large segment of performers for that matter, is a misnomer.
My own opinion is that just because you have an acoustic guitar, that doesn’t make you a folk singer. It makes you an acoustic performer.
For the “folk” in folk music to mean anything, it has to mean that the music is something that has been passed around among the people. The Carter Family, for example, sang folk songs. Songs that had been percolating through the hills for generations.
Call me a strict constructionist, but unless a song is being interpreted (and interpolated) by at least its third performer (in other words, until enough folks have gotten hold of it), it ain’t a folk song.
Well, for most people, I think, a folksinger is someone who performs in that style. Most people would know exactly what style you meant with that description; I think only a handful of scholars would assume you meant capital-F Folk Music, as you define it.
You’re a strict constructionist. 
You’re right, too, but if I use your definition it would mean that anyone who performed original material (Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Joni Mitchell) could not be included in what I think of as folk music. Acoustic performer may be an accurate description – maybe even a better one – but I’ll still think of them (and myself) as folksingers.
You know, I haven’t heard this argument in a decade or so. Could that mean that maybe the whole folk music thing isn’t as completely irrelevant as I feared?
Granted, it’s probably about 45 years too late for me to pick that particular nit.
I think it’s more question of how performers market themselves that anything you could specifically pick apart in the music itself. Joni Mitchell’s early stuff is pretty folky, but she never really performed traditional music the way Joan Baez did (or if she did, it was really early on). But I think you’ve hard a hard time defining (say) The Hissing of Summer Lawns as folk music. Joan Baez, even though she did make recordings much closer to pop records starting in the 70s, still seems like a folkie to me, mainly because that’s how she presents herself. Joni seems to have stepped away from the label.
Someone like Townes Van Zandt also seems problematic to me. If he was born in Vermont or California, he’d be a folkie. Because he’s a Southerner, he was kind of markleted as a country guy early on. Later in his career he ended up in a category I like to think of as “Texas oddballs” – in with guys Lyle Lovett, Butch Hancock, Joe Ely, and Guy Clark. But he was still a guy with an acoustic guitar playing pretty simple songs in a pretty ballady style. What stops him from being a folkie? Because he doesn’t seem like one to me.
For some reason “folk” music is much harder to define than, say, rap, or reggae. That makes it hard to have a civilized discussion on the topic, I think - one that goes further than “I hate so-and-so”. “Well I love so-and-so”
There comes a point in the discussion where anything that’s melody driven, or as koeeoaddi said “euphonious and acoustic” is called “Folk music” . And that’s so broad there’s bound to be stuff we’d all either hate or love.
Anyway, I enjoy Holly Near’s music, and Judy Collins’ early stuff will always compensate for any later gaffes as far as I’m concerned.
I know more about filk, which is supposed to be weird and silly, but I’ll take a stab at it: Folk music originally was folk music – made up by the common people, not by professional musicians or songwriters. Sea chanteys were invented by sailors. When professionals got into it, it was bound to drift away from its roots, sooner or later.
So…if you’re not a real genius, whatever that is, you might as well go home?
I have this image of a sailor pulling on a hawser and thinking, “You know, this sea shanty wasn’t written by a musical genius. To hell with this.”
The funny thing about the whole “genius” argument is that folk music is supposed to be the most accessible form of music. In pre-literate days, it carried news and oral tradition. Acted as work songs. Entertained people. If it relied on geniuses to write, there wouldn’t be much of it.
As for sucking … In my opinion, a few of Dar William’s songs do venture upon brilliance (February, Travelling I, Iowa). Same with Shawn Colvin (her “Diamond in the Rough” album was very good). Not all their work is to my taste, but to say they suck is to fly so flagrantly in the face of common opinion that anyone saying that with a straight face should seriously question whether there’s something that they’re missing. You can’t arbitrarily define "musical genius"as “what I like” and “suck” as “what I don’t like”. Well, you can, but you’ll end up looking like a closed-minded pretentious twit if you do.