The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #157386 Message #3717366
Posted By: Lighter
18-Jun-15 - 03:41 PM
Thread Name: Still wondering what's folk these days?
Subject: RE: Still wondering what's folk these days?
Presumably the "experimental" is of greater significance to Hval and Crawford than is the "folk," but Crawford clearly describes Hval's music as "a kind" of "folk music," whether Hval thinks so or not.
Crawford doesn't call it "experimental music that [kind of] resembles folk music, with few hooks or choruses."
She says flatly it's a "kind of experimental folk music." That logically means "an experimental subset of folk music." Whether some "folk music" has "few hooks or choruses" doesn't change that.
In fact, the phrase "few hooks or choruses" seems at least as likely to modify Hval's music as it does "folk music."
Moreover, Crawford's review comes from the same editorial office as Donahue's. To influential and highly educated New Yorker reviewers (and thus presumably to many, many others), one kind of "folk music" seems to be little more than "non-mainstream music."