The New Populism

Subject: The New Populism
From: Jim the Bart
Date: 09 Feb 01 - 11:45 AM

If the word "populism" brings to mind figures like Woodie Guthrie and Joe Hill, you are in touch with your folk roots but out of touch with the New Economy. I recommend reading an article in the Nation magazine called "The Rise in Market Populism". It discusses the "unprecedented upward transfer of wealth" in America and the ramifications on our national psychology.

Anyone trying to ply your trade as a full-time musician in the US has seen it getting harder and harder over the past few years to make a living. As the "Music Biz" has gotten bigger there has been less and less diversity in what is supportable in the market. Even though there is more and more money being spent in music, it is harder for anyone who isn't the new Brittney Spears or Backstreet Boys to make a living.

If you enjoy listening to an alternative type of music like folk, I would be willing to bet that it has become harder and harder to find live music in your town or neighborhood. The threat is that if you fail to generate market numbers that are significant, you will be washed away by those that do. We are being disenfranchised in the market. How you reverse a trend like this is not an easy question, but you have to start somewhere. When will we say "Enough!"?

Now I'm leaving my little soapbox in Bughouse Square and I'm going to work. Have a wonderful day and maybe we'll have a chance to talk later.

Bart

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: Jim the Bart
Date: 09 Feb 01 - 11:59 AM

I'm going to try to create a link to the article I mention above. It really is worth reading.

Click Here

Please excuse me if it doesn't work; I've never tried this before.

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: Roger in Sheffield
Date: 09 Feb 01 - 04:52 PM

works fine

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 09 Feb 01 - 06:51 PM

If you enjoy listening to an alternative type of music like folk, I would be willing to bet that it has become harder and harder to find live music in your town or neighborhood. The threat is that if you fail to generate market numbers that are significant, you will be washed away by those that do.

Actually that's not true in my experience. Largely because of the Internet it's much easier to find what live music there is. And there is probably actually more of it going on, at an informal non-commercial level.

Maybe we're being washed out of the commercial market, but so long as we can play the music and find enough other people who want to do the same, we'll get by. And alongside this, there is in the British Isles anyway, a semi-commercial scene around the festivals and clubs which makes it possible for a good number of great musicians to survive.

All right, I'm sure it's hard for them, and it must be galling for wonderful artists scraping a living to look at people making fortunes producing and selling junk (not all of it by any means, but most of it) - but there's a terrible price to be paid for that kind of thing.

There's a thread going on about Country Music at the moment - if you look at what's happened to Country Music, it makes you glad that the commercial predators aren't too interested in folk music.

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: Art Thieme
Date: 10 Feb 01 - 02:04 AM

Around here it's just too depressing to bother thinking about it too much. Better we just move on saying, "Que sera sera."

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: wysiwyg
Date: 11 Feb 01 - 01:08 AM

Wow! Interesting stuff.

~S~

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: Sorcha
Date: 11 Feb 01 - 01:11 AM

Honey, out here in the Western Hinterlands, we ARE the live folk/trad........We gots Kuntry Bands, and we gots PopRock bands........but if you want Irish, Old Time, blues, folk, well, we are IT.

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: paddymac
Date: 11 Feb 01 - 07:57 PM

Like most things, promotion of a particular art form requires: 1)performers (professional or amateur, experienced or beginners); 2) venues (wooded glens to back porch to concert halls); 3) promoters/performer-venue-coordinators-matchmakers (word of mouth to slick campaigns); & 4) audiences (even if only family, friends and other performers). Success in the marketplace is assuredly not the only measure of success, and some could well argue it is actually the antithesis of success. Lots of performers fantasize about riding one big hit to the economic promised land, but the odds are against it. So, to keep it alive, do it, and share it with friends and neighbors, and especially, your kids. With apologies, I will now climb down from my soap-box and head to the fridge for replenishment.

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: Art Thieme
Date: 11 Feb 01 - 10:37 PM

Recently I realized that I now know more dead people than live ones. About 50% of those dead people played music and did it the right way. (The others didn't care one way or the other--but they kept on doin' it.) Of those left over live people, about 50% play music --- but few have a clue what it is or was about. The facts of the situation -- the historical details -- the looking to the past and to tradition for knowledge and insights instead of to the blank page ahead that is the future-----a future that has no face yet.

The future will obtain a face----but only time will let us know whether that face was worth looking at or not.

And the audiences go nuts for whatever comes down the pike. WHY? It's the music of their wondrous youth ! That makes it enhanceable in the mind ---nostalgia after only 3 weeks on the chart. And the coffers are swollen with money...

Comes down to this folks:

If we keep on getting nostalgic about things that are more and more recent, pretty soon we'll be forced to live in the present !!!

ART THIEME

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: Jim the Bart
Date: 12 Feb 01 - 12:36 PM

Art - One thing that I took from your comments in the Country Music thread was that the invention of records. and more importantly radio broke down the regional nature of folk music. I think that this article shows how diversity in general is disappearing from what is slowly (but more rapidly every year) becoming a world culture. That might be a good thing if it meant everyone hearing everything. Unfortunately, it means more people hearing the same things. The economics are working against diversity - whatever isn't capitalized is marginalized. Today I find very little of the real pleasure in my life coming from the dominant culture. Yes I like "the Simpsons" but "Temptation Island?" Puh-leeze.

Yes, make your own music. But don't sit back resignedly while the cultural world in which that music was germinated becomes smaller and smaller. How many generations from now will hear your music except as curiosities and museum pieces?

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 12 Feb 01 - 02:33 PM

What I tend to think is that the eruption of what seems to me overwhelmingly crap mass culture, at all levels (the "high culture" as well as the "low culture") is a bit like a candle blazing up just before it goes out.

I believe that the age characterised by millions of people all doing the same things, and looking at the same films and listening to the same music, like so many sheep (except that sheep can tell good grass from bad) is going to be seen as a temporary phenomenon of the 20thy century, which won't last that far into the 21st century.

In place of that we're going to see fragmentation and diversification - and the technology that we are using here is just the beginning of that. I don't think we need to worry about the mass culture wiping out the specialised sub-cultures, but rather the other way round.

There's going to be a price to pay for that, because a fragmented culture is likely to mean an increasingly fragmented community. And I can't imagine what is going to hold the different sub-cultures together.

Subject: RE: The New Populism
From: Jim the Bart
Date: 12 Feb 01 - 06:42 PM

I tend to think that diversity requires, and in turn helps perpetuate, a state of mutual forebearance. I think that there is a commonality of interest that we feel at the genetic level that is periodically drowned out by a similar genetic urge to compete. I hope that you're right, McGrath, about what's to come in the next age.

I think the trick is to use the technology to gain your ends. There is a strong urge toward conformity; I intend to push toward the ragged edges. In my mind the real populism lives in the ditches, not the middle-of-the road.