3.
Print
Email
ShareDigression:
Anything too big, too wide, too deep scares the hell out of us. What seemed to exist naturally as a new method—what had resulted from the fusion of folk and punk philosophies, fueled by technology—was eventually ordained, codified, and divorced from the method. It became an aesthetic. And like a word in one of George Carlin’s stand-up routines, “independent” came to mean something entirely different from, well, what it means. Instead of describing a process of recording and distribution, these days it signifies a sound, and maybe that’s why it’s reduced so often to “indie”. It’s all too common to hear major label bands described as “indie”. If nothing else confirms Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic, this does. Word meanings change and reflect that continual tug-of-war between forces; in this case, consumerism and the folk philosophy. It’s as if consumerism couldn’t stand the notion of its lesser cousin having a vitality all his own, and so absorbed him (bought him out?), calculated his cost efficiency and analyzed his language, and spit out an approximation suitable for car commercials.
That’s why it makes so much sense that Nebraska started all of this. Few other artists have pitted genuine populist sensibilities against the commercialized version of populism within their own songs (I give you “Badlands”). Springsteen’s entire career has sought meaning in this conflict, even on the most self-consciously “folk” of his records, like The Seeger Sessions, and I get the sense he believes it can never be resolved. After all, the release of Nebraska was an enormous fuck-you to the record industry from the man who then turned around and gave it Born in the U.S.A..
4.
Now, the increased availability of recording platforms means that every re-hashed Grateful Dead rip-off band and every self-indulgent singer-songwriter can put out an album. In the end, I suppose, we have to ask if that’s a good thing. If you’re politically sympathetic to democracy, you’ll probably answer, “Yes,” though chances are you won’t be buying that local band’s CD anytime soon.
But advances like the Teac also ushered in new challenges. Increased competition, for instance. An artist can theoretically reach more people via the Internet, so long as she can actually get someone to find her in the ocean of videos on YouTube featuring investment bankers in their rec rooms playing Zeppelin riffs. And maybe I’m just paranoid, but what does get noticed seems even more disposable. Whether the result of overall lackluster songwriting and performance, or a matter of the dangers of mass production, today’s songs seem transparently like what they physically are: blips of data, streams of electronic flotsam. Even those in the folk style. Playing a banjo will not save you.
The other day I was trying to introduce postmodernism to a class of freshman college students, most of them science majors, and I compared Barthes’s famous “death of the author” idea to legitimately and illegitimately free file sharing and mp3’s. Did the students look any differently on the songs they downloaded compared to the songs on a CD they’d paid for? Most of them said yes, and one kid put it beautifully: “When I think of the song, I don’t think of the artist. I just think of the song, and the friend who tipped me to it.”
Sounds familiar. Because I can’t for the life of me remember who actually wrote “The Coo Coo Bird”, one of my favorite folk tunes. Half of those songs have no authors. I do know that it’s because of Harry Smith that I heard the song at all.
Maybe there is a consumerist avalanche and the disposability that comes with it, but I’m beginning to get the feeling that we’re coming back around to the situation that existed at the start of the 1900s, when songs were well-known but no technology existed to impress upon us the pop star, or even an “artist” who’d written the songs. And maybe this is all as it should be. Maybe it was always a lie to believe that the immediacy of process would automatically lead to songs of worth, or to refuse to admit that those folk songs we hold dear—the ones Harry Smith collected, the ones every beatnik learned on Washington Square in 1956—were sometimes flotsam, too. Maybe all we’ve done with what we call folk music is the same codification performed by the corporations with indie rock; we’ve gotten scared of how big it can get, how far-reaching and indefinable.
And maybe the good to come of this is a reorientation toward the benefits of a localized scene, the community of music which has always been at the root of folk music. Tunes were traded, stolen, lyrics lifted, transposed, tweaked, and what mattered most was that method, that dialogue. At least in a local community, it’s (a little) less about competition, and there’s a human face to ward off disposability.
5.
The folk philosophy has always been about a tenuous kind of equality, epitomized by the notion that at any moment, the performer could cede to the audience. And isn’t that precisely what I’ve described above? If the Second Folk Revival put the power of recording into the hands of the artists, what’s been happening these past five years or so has put that power into the hands of everyone: cell phones that record video, ProTools and Cakewalk, Movie Maker and MySpace.
The folk philosophy still lurks under the sheen and easy populism of pop music—the kind of populism couched in lame rosaries of “anyone can make it” provided they’re skinny and test well with the 13-18 market. It still runs against the current of those massive, multi-national corporations, just like it always has. And it’s going to test our beliefs about authority and ownership, for better or worse. It’s too early to say what will happen. Right now there’s a brewing dichotomy in American culture. The underground seems more accessible while American Idol keeps chugging along. Is this a new discussion? Not really. But the context has changed, and that change means the beginning of a new, unnamed folk philosophy, and the death of the Second Folk Revival.
