All I'm seeing here is the same old righteous mithering about a theorectical loss of potential income by the actions of a few wayward souls who have been so moved by various albums to want to share them on their blogs - much, indeed, as people used to tape albums in the past, or might now rip them onto CD-R for friends who might be interested. This is common cultural practise in popular music - the lifeblood, indeed, where fans will buy the official product and yet gleefully partake of the treasures to be had down below, which serve as an essential sub-strata, freely available, with a life of their own facilitated by the broad-band internet. Last night, for example, I downloaded the complete recording of Joy Division's last ever gig (hitherto available incomplete on Still which I bought both on vinyl on the day it came out & twice more on subsequent CD editions) and New Order's legendary Western Works Demos from July 1980 which have never seen any form of official release. That we have bought pretty much every release by Joy Division / New Order these past 32 years is by the by - we continue to buy it now in new editions, deluxe editions, box sets, DVDs. I could make the same claim for Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, Third Ear Band...

So - where did we go wrong with Folk, I wonder? Why isn't there any form of cultural underground dealing in, say, those plundered field-recordings still languishing unheard in the ossuaries of the EFDSS only ever appreciated by way of academic research rather than the jouissance which gave the songs life in the first place? In fact, the entire Folk Ethos is choked by the dry academic dust of the rotten bourgeois corpse that gave it birth and which prevails in the stuffy righteousness we have seen here - barbed in its mercenary & superior brutality as it serves up the spoils of cultural plunder but only for those who are prepared to pay top-whack for the privilege. The marketing is, of course, as meticulous as the musical fabrications; an ill-founded myth of musical amelioration (nice word, Anne!) by which songs wrought from wild & feral vices (& voices indeed) of Traditional Working-Class Singers are sanitised & served up as bland MOR after-dinner adult-orientated easy-listening pap for the fashionable & affluent middle-classes as an essential aspect of their well-earned post-graduate professional life-style.

As I have said, several of my past works are currently on-line for free download - doesn't bother me in the slightest because I'm more concerned with the ongoing documentation of musical process than I am with marketing of PRODUCT, which is all I'm seeing here by the way. This is perhaps unsurprising, but none the less depressing, because that's all Folk has become - a consumer-commodity born entirely of demographic marketing, replete with copy-righteousness and ever-so-principled huffing & puffing that would suck the very life out of the music assuming it had any in it to begin with, which is debatable. But no music ever suffered from being listened to, shared & enjoyed. This is what we all do with music we love, and this is precisely what is happening here; people sharing music for the love of it. Musical Love, it would seem, is now the sole reserve of the listener / consumer; the producers - especially the Folk Producers - are too busy assessing the market place & working up their profit-projections to be too bothered about the pure love of the thing. A music which has been created solely as PRODUCT isn't even music at all, which is maybe why modern folk sounds the way it does - slick & soulless reconstructions a million light years away from the glad reality of the thing. The real mystery is why it keeps finding its way onto the blogs...