The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #141147 Message #3252013
Posted By: GUEST,Suibhne Astray
07-Nov-11 - 10:25 AM
Thread Name: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
Subject: RE: 'Occupy English Folk Music!'
I've also met singer-songwriters who wanted to tell me that my music lacks creativity because I didn't write it
I've regularly argued that working with Traditional Folk Song inspires a degree of creativity far greater than that evident in the work of many popularist singer-singwriters who are quite happy to stick to well-trod formulas and cliches. As an idiom, singer-songwriter style tends to revert to a path of imitation and repetition greater than anything you'll find in the far wider parameters of Traditional English Speaking Folk Song, which is also a good deal less insistent of its own righteousness, be it in terms of music, or (God forbid) message and (horror of horrors) fecking comedy. Traditional Song inspires new life, new ways of looking at things, and fresh outlooks; whereas rehashing the three-chord trick in servility to the graven image of Dylan is just plain tedium and an insult to our hard-won intelligence.
Either that, or I just don't like it. Opinions, eh???
Thing is, I love great songwriting: Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Gillian Welch, Dave Cousins, Sandy Denny, Robert Wyatt, Scott Walker, Daevid Allen, Captain Beefheart, etc etc but much of the Folk Style just doesn't do that much for me. I'm not about to negate it though, much less place it into some false opposition of Us & Them. My personal Atheism is all consuming; I regularly play alongside people who do it with aplomb. I welcome them into my singarounds and sessions as I would anyone else because Folk is a very Broad Church and whate'er my personal tastes & consequent musical philosophies might be, I will recognise a common Joy when I see it. I will even bask in it; I will even join in on my violin & venture into such idioms where appropriate. The one thing most certainly does not preclude the other. Heavens, I even know people (whisper it mind!) who dare to do both...; likewise those who take a more catholic approach to both Traditional and Popular Idioms and synthesise them with canny & idiosyncratic knack no more or less valid than any other. It takes all sorts, which is just as well because all sorts are out there doing it, instead of sitting on their computers telling the rest of us what we ought to be doing & thinking and why they are so justified in feeling so very hard done to.
So love what you do by all means, but soon as you start saying your way is somehow better then you've lost the plot completely - because there are any number of ways of saying that it is (quite possibly) a good deal worse. The Folk Police are only ever the delusion of very paranoid imaginations; those that not only will create its devils in its own image, but then will send them raging against itself in an imaginary war.
In the words of Edgar Broughton: Out demons out!