When 'World Music' become euphemised as 'Mongolian Nose Flute Music' are we right in detecting just a smidge of xenophobia? I hear this a lot around the folk scene: I don't read Folk Roots / fRoots because I'm not interested in Polynesian Arse Trumpets, Transylvanian Techno Jungle Rap, Ladyboy Courtship Songs from Thailand or (most intriguing of all) The Bellowing of Prehistoric Siberian Mammoths Trapped in the Permafrost*. It's a blanket rejection of other musical possibilities that typifies a 'Folk Music' (AKA The Sort of Music We Like) purely in terms of its cultural insularity & inertia, which does seem to equate with xenophobia, or the belief (actually put forward by someone in Folk Roots back i'th'80's) that this thing we call Folk is somehow The Ethnic Music of the British Isles.

It's a complex issue, of course, one fraught with all manner ethnological dilemmas arising from the fact that whilst of course not all music is Folk Music, we still, as yet, ain't heard no horse singing a song. All music (bar none) is human; all music (bar none) is born of Tradition; all music (bar none) has an ethnic context. So what qualifies Folk to be Folk? Or even Traditional? Thing is, if an ethnomusicologist were ever to study the UK Folk Scene it would, I think, make for very interesting reading. David Toop was behind a Channel 4 Documentary in the 80s which did a nice job (I thought) though no Folkies of my acquaintance were overly impressed and saw the whole thing as an excercise in open ridicule. One wonders how Louis Theroux would get on in the Folk Scene? But, as I keep saying (and it's not a matter of saying something often enough either) it's a million country miles between Harry Cox and Peter Bellamy. One is real and the other illusory, and no matter how compelling that illusion might be, it pays to be aware of how (and why) the one thing is very different from the other. It is that difference that underlies the very essence of what Folk is.

*

I've been enjoying fRoots now for decades; it's an important part of my Essential Media Ambience along with Private Eye, Fortean Times & Wire. I've actually stopped buying newspapers; I used to get The Guardian on a Saturday but got so annoyed by its terminal soppy middle-class bias I gave up (the last newspaper I bought was the Sunday Times but only because it had Stewart Lee's review of our album in it). I may not agree with every word I read in such magazines but I approve of every word, and respect the passion, diversity of opion, commitment and Positive World View that rests at the heart of their very necessary existence. In short, FRoots (along with Private Eye, Fortean Times & Wire) represents Healthy Sanity in an Unhealthily Insane World.

Do we get such a positive World View in Folk as a whole? I keep saying Folk is a Religion: an elite & insular minority convinced of their own particular brand of (generally ill-founded) righteousness and (God forbid) fundamentalism. Those of the Folk Gene find a home here; those to whom Traditional equates with Old Fashioned; those to whom Old Fashioned is as much about ethnicity & 'values' as it is about music, yet those who are (justifiably) horrified that the BNP see Folk as a happy hunting ground. I recently read certain Folk Opinion to the effect that Liverpool Council were being 'racist' for not allowing black-faced morris dancers to dance at the Museum of Slavery. You come across this too often in the folk realms; just as you come across the so-called 'folklore' that will justify it. Go figure...

Obviously you can take this 'Folk Thang' as deep as you like really; most Folkies I know are white middle-English nominal lefties at least a decade older than I am with little interest in any music other than their chosen topic. Most of them (in their cups) will admit to being wary of UK Multi-Culturalism, and not without good reason - we have a long tradition of ethnic conflict in these islands, and humanity isn't exactly noted for its tolerance in such matters. Myself, I've always been a Cheerily Optimistic Individualist Outsider - this makes me a) very wary of Folk as a philosophy-cum-orthodoxy b) inclined to view collective humanity more in terms of the individuals that comprise it rather than by some blanket ethnicity or other cultural norm, musical or otherwise. I find it interesting that whilst in rock, pop & experimental music I regularly collaborate with musicians from all over the planet as well as UK musicians of a diversity of ethnic backgrounds, this is most certainly not the case in Folk. I used to work with a non-white UK singer who was passionate about British ballady & traditional folk song. We went to a folk club once where the MC said You're not from round these parts, are you, love? Needless to say she never set foot in a Folk Club again.

For sure, there are exceptions, but such exceptions only serve to prove rules, and whilst I can well understand the mindset that moves towards such a xenophobic world view I refuse to justify it on those terms. Reasons? God knows there are plenty. Excuses? None whatsoever.               

So enough with the Mongolian Nose Flutes, eh? If you only like Your Good Own English Folk Music at least have the guts to say so, and maybe admit to the reasons why this might be.

* All of these I've heard at one time or other.