The day the music died

While preparing for the Newcastle Conference (see previous item of this blog), I thought it would be useful to consider sub genres and hybrid genres of 'folk' music. There are of course many, ranging from roots and world music through to folk rock, punk folk, acid folk, folk metal, folktronica, neofolk and 'anti-folk' - click here for the Wikipedia entry on this latter concept!

I've only recently become familiar with the idea of'anti-folk'. One of my UCE colleagues, Mark Sampson runs Iron Man Records in Birmingham and regularly manages UK tours for New York band with anti-folk tendencies, Dufus (pictured).

Jason Toynbee discusses genre in popular music and argues for an understanding of ‘genre as a social process’, rather than simply as a set of textual properties:

…social formations often have a strong affiliation with musical genres and may invest them with intense cultural significance. (Toynbee 2000:103 - see references below)

This is an important point. Genres are often seen as a set of properties inherent in the music itself, or self-referential categories. People who talk about genres often ignore the social processes that brought them about in the first place. From other texts I've been looking at (Georgina Boyes 1993, Niall Mackinnon 1993 and, in particular, Dave Harker 1985 and Michael Brocken 2003), a view is emerging of a post-revival folk scene, at least in the UK, appropriated by the middle-classes imposing their own definitions of 'folk' as a musical genre. Their 'cultural capital' and skills in academic research of folklore have produced a huge reservoir of folksongs and tunes (and dances and mummers plays) which can be preserved, covered and arranged, often by new blood folk musicians with access to modern instruments, digital recording studios and the short list to Radio 2's Folk Awards.

This is great if you don't mind the 'folk music' genre affiliated with bourgeois myths reinforced through the 'preservation' of 'traditions' (folk-as-heritage). But this masks the essential revolutionary act of performance that folk music represented in the 1950s and early 60s as a back-room-of-the-pub alternative to an encroaching, glitzy and commercialised pop music culture. Think of Ewan McColl in the UK and Woody Guthrie in the US.

Preservation techniques for any 'museum' piece could include embalming or even taxidermy, but for processes like these to be applied, the original life force must first be removed. So here's something to think about - by preserving 'folk', are the middle classes essentially killing it and stuffing it?

'Anti-folk' suggests a convergence of traditional music and punk mentality, rejecting the polish and professional gloss that folk music has had to acquire to get accepted by mainstream media propomoting 'populist' tastes. The author of the Wikipedia entry refers to:

music that sounds raw and poorly executed, but mocks the seriousness and pretension of the established mainstream folk scene and also mocks itself.

This appeals to the revolutionary sentiments that my own middle class upbringing didn't quite succeed in suppressing. Some who know me may argue that this description is not a million miles from the sound of The Oddsods - a band that I know has been accused by some as not a 'serious' folk band (although we're seriously not 'anti' folk - we just see folk music as something that should be fun and broad in appeal!)

The trouble with 'anti folk' as a sub genre is that it could end up heading in the same direction as 'punk' - a category of commercial music that has its own section in the CD displays of HMV and Virgin Megastores.

genre    anti-folk    Dufus     Iron Man Records     preservation of folk     Oddsods    
folk music     middle-class




Boyes, G., 1993, The Imagined Village: Cultural Ideology and the English Folk Revival, Manchester: Manchester University Press

Brocken, M. 2003, The British Folk Revival: 1944-2002, Aldershot, Ashgate

Harker, D., 1985, Fakesong: The manufacture of British ‘folksong’ 1700 to the present day, Milton Keynes: Open University Press

Mackinnon, N., 1993, The British Folk Scene: Musical Performance and Social Identity, Buckingham, Open University Press

Toynbee, J. 2000, Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions, London: Arnold