I'm not particularly talking bout the 'navel gazers' John some of them display a great deal of skill and creativity, folk or not.
The ones that get me are those who regurgitate pop songs indifferently and call them pop, or attempt to cram old songs into pop disciplines, usually ineptly, otherwise they would be acceptable in the pop field.
Some`of the songs we are talking about as folk are centuries old - some of us believe the to still have relevance in their earlier forms - they did for many of us for long enough.
The problem with modern forms of popular creation is they come with a shelf-life of what - three, four, five months if you're lucky, then they're replaced by the newst batch off the conveyor belt.
It seems that much of the material being argued for here are the cast-offs of the pop industry, who won't let us claim them as our own, even if we wanted to.
Jim Carroll