"This seems very subjective to me Jim"
It probably is Colin - I admit - pop music as it stands means sfa to me as it stands at present - my choice.
When it is applied to folk song it turns basically narrative pieces into gibberish.
Pop certainly works for some people but for me, when compared to folk song - chalk and cheese.
Introspection when applied to song has the opposite effect that I have always found folk song has - it excludes the listener.
Tom Munnelly once put it beautifully in describing a modernist 'Sean Nos singer' - you feel you want to tap him on the shoulder as ask, "Can I come in".
We have interviewed dozens of the older generation of singers and the message we got was more or less the same each time - the songs were sharings of experiences - they were an outlet of those experiences rather than the internalising of them.
This seems to have been the thread running through all of them - certainly as far back as Sharp recording the mud-caked stone picker who sang him 'The Lark in the Morning' then, grabbed his lapels and said, "Isn't that beautiful".
I have no objection to people masturbating - I'd rather they didn't do it in public.
"you are deluded."
Please don't tell be about something I have been working at for half a century Al - I was ******* there and part of it - you appear not even to like the subject we are discussing
Jim Carroll