it's not more or less real than any other music or any other art

Talking of the relationship between The Tradition and The Revival in terms of social class & social funtion then I feel we can question the reality of the latter - which isn't to dismiss it entirely. Even revival notions of The Tradition are (at best) a tad shadowy, but it serves as a convenient watershed between the wan thing an't'other.

There's so much that's wrong with that sentence, I barely know where to begin...

And who the hell are you to tell me I'm wrong? By all means disagree, but all I'm doing here is riffing on a few notions as they pop into my weary brain after a Very Stressful Morning.

Suffice to say that, straight off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of people and performances that wholly belie that generalisation. And I'm sure you could too if you felt like playing devil's advocate with yourself.

Nope, I don't think I can - not in Revival Folk anyway. It's what makes it interesting. For sure sometimes the shortfall between intention and result is such that it doesn't quite come off, but generally I can be transported by even the most mediocre of singers if their hearts are in the right place.

Exactly the same can be said about pop music.

No it can't - because there the music is a multiplicity of living & breathing musical traditions, unlike the idiom of Traditional English Folk Song which is dead.

You're in danger of suggesting that what's subjective doesn't count as "real".

Not so, just that it isn't objective. My reality is not your reality, and vice versa, but there is a reality we both share. The reality I share with Carmen Perkins-Blodmonath (not her real name) over the road is another matter entirely. I'm sure my subjective reality is not in the least bit real to her, but we often stop and chat about things that matter to us both (seagulls mostly).

And actually, you're coming close to suggesting that dominant artistic forms such as chart pop (ie the forms that make the most money) are more vital and "real" than the ones on the margins.

In terms of objective cultural process they are. My position is that there is an unbroken continuous popular musical reality going back 50,000 years (at least) that takes in Traditional English Folk Song and evolves into the sort of stuff people are doing & experiencing today which has just as much meaning in their lives as Admiral Benbow had to Bob Copper.

Simon Frith and Simon Cowell would doubtless agree.

Hey, I watched Sounds of the 70s on BBC2 last night and came close to suicide. The fringes are my reality & always have been, but I don't expect anyone else to go spend their down time immersed in Magma bootlegs or archive recordings of McCoy Tyner, Roland Kirk or Harry Cox.

I dunno about your "real" world, but it certainly sounds like a fantasy: trains don't go whizzing by, they have been privatised into an extortionately priced inefficient carve-up. And chart pop is a cynical racket sewn up by TV marketeers, which even the occasional good bit of hip-hop or cheesy disco can't rescue.

Well, I see trains whizz by and every time I get hip to what's going down on Tim Westwood, it's vanished away like easter snow. Time was I could keep up, these days I can't. But I disagree about the cynical racket - it's no more cynical a racket than Broadsheets or Topic CDs. It betrays cultural process and creativity and artistry at a very high level indeed, no different from the ordinary working class men & women who made the old songs (but very different from the upper-class ones who collected them, or those who sing them today, but that's another issue).

(And don't forget that pop music is merely music that's popular, nothing more, nothing less: it doesn't care about genre.

I use the term Popular in exactly the same way Prof Child use it. It's not a numbers thing - it's popular as in people. And yes - Genre is immaterial.

Folk music is pop music if it happens to sell enough copies.

Folk music was once Popular Music. Now it's a handful of musical genres. Irrespective of how many units a folk album sells it will always be Folk.

The music of decades passed routinely top the contemporary album charts thanks to the infinitely re-recuperating wheel of new formats - I wouldn't be surprised if the Beatles were currently no.1 again. Folk music is pop music whenever an album happens to sell enough measly few copies/downloads to hit the top 10.

Culture is leveling out into a very Traditional / Nostalgic phase, hence last nights Sounds of the 70s debacle. But this is true for classical, jazz, prog, gamelan, etc. etc.

I discover plenty of "reality" in folk song, and that reality is no less real and true than that of any other art form I might happen to interest myself in. I got into folk and blues because I was into hip-hop and punk.

That sort of reality is still very subjective, even if I happen to share it with you. I still love punk & hip-hop & blues, though these days I prefer The Young Marble Giants to the Young Tradition. In the end, it's just a matter of whatever floats your boat.