A kung fu fighter in a disco

It seems from this extract that it might be OK in uncovering specific flaws or dodginesses but whether it could build those into an argument I don't know.

Authenticity has swung well back into fashion as a marketing idea currently. I agree it is always horribly vague.

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There's some serious smearing of the meaning of the word 'pop' which doesn't help either.

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thenipper.livejournal.com

I had an argument about this book last week with Bob Stanley!

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blue-russian.livejournal.com

Even without the subhead, I was uncomfortable in the first few grafs:

One of the main tasks folk song collectors have always faced is choosing which of the many songs their informants sing are folk songs and which aren't....But it's not always so clear, especially when informants claim that all their songs are traditional, which, since they are usually being paid per song, they usually will.

Conjures up imagines of men in spectacles with tape recorders grilling impoverished and grizzled old men with guitars.

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but isn't that what lomax and sharp did?

(i am not certain, but that was my understanding of how they did their field recordings)

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It is exactly what they did!

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Well, in the early days it was with pen and paper, but the point still stands.

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i found the whole thing a bit problematic. i must admit i didn't know about the r4cist/pureness angle, but it wasn't too surprising. I'm not sure that the Sharp/Lomax Snr definition of "folk" they give even means anything any more though, hasn't the guthrie/seeger wing has been the prevailing view for the last 40 odd years?

having said that, i'm still not sure that teenage boys playing green day/wasis/american pie etc on an acoustical gtr in back bedrooms at parties counts as folk, but i'm having trouble articulating why...

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Because it's the same stuff you can find buskers doing. Proper definition of folk = stuff you can't sing for money, because no-one would pay you!

Not sure about Sharp, but Lomax's name has definitely been back in currency since the O Brother explosion of interest in old-timey stuff.

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There are two Lomaxes (Lomaxi?) though!

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Yes, right, it's his son Alan that's got more of the publicity, I don't really know the difference.

(Actually of course the Lomax revival started at least slightly earlier, when Moby released Play)

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Yeah, there's a big tension between folk-as-genre and folk-as-means-of-distribution/performance here. Major parallels to the infamous late 80s indie chart problem.

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everything comes back to the 80s indie chart :)

i suppose (he says typing whilst thinking) that because these songs were not originally heard (composed?) as acoustical renditions that's why they don't "count", BUT is acousticalness a defining part of folk-as-genre?

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katstevens.livejournal.com

Acousticalness = more significant of poorer ppl who cannot afford recording studio/electricity/portability of anything more than guitar-on-back. Also, it is more spontaneous.

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hmmm, not sure there, can also signify pretending to be poor/downtrodden/surfbum. see jack jones...

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blimey, i read the conclusion almost exactly opposite to a few of you here. if you ignore the racism thing (which is interesting historically) :

"is there any way left to defend classifying some songs as one, and others as the other? Is there any such thing as a real folk song any more? Probably not. Let's jettison these old ideas of folk music, then. If we do, perhaps we can celebrate the inherent democracy of "pop junk",

has a lot to recommend it. the use of scare quotes around "pop junk" - isn't that trying to say "what you call junk, this is as important as your fetishised folk"

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It's the inherent democracy bit I didn't like!

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is strikes me that the core of this is about the process of creation once again. a quick modification of "they defined folk music not by the song, but by its performance method" takes us not to performance, but the genesis of the song.

and we're into manufactured v 'wild' pop. the manifest idea of folk is 'wild pop'.

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I like the idea of wild pop.

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why though?

isn't this just a way to talk about the songs that everyone likes, the first past the post 'what shall we sing on the terraces/round the bonfire'

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Because the word democracy elides the way those songs become popular, I guess.

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katstevens.livejournal.com

Or in the Brothers Bar field!

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bootlegging is nu-folk

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No the quotes are more precisely "please see earlier - this is the folkwrongica's term!"

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I think a problem is that the writers are using Lomax's fetishisation of racial difference to castigate the nuts-and-bolts of his project. Within the project of "collecting and preserving songs", having the criteria "I don't already know this song" is really quite sensible. It's like collecting football stickers - if you turn up with 100 that someone has already got and 1 that he doesn't, you can't really complain when they politely skip the 100.

Is there evidence of Lomax actually rejecting some *unknown* folk songs for not conforming to his 'what is folk' guidelines? The article doesn't make it clear.

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dubdobdee.livejournal.com

famously* the lomaxes time-managed so as to record lots of field hollers and prison songs but DIDN'T record charlie patton 500 yards down the road -- i think the grounds were implicit rather than explicit, that poatton, as a professional entertainer (albeit within the poor black milieu, and albeit also a key blues innovator), was less "proper folk"** than the field hollers

*famously since calt and wardlow made a big deal of it in their (very good) book on patton

**so here the lomaxes seem to have sidestepped the (local) market-of-pop to plug into the terrace-football-song level of music culture

(disclaimer: i am fairly rusty on all of this)

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The Willie McTell story strongly suggests it, though I know 0 about this whole area.

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http://www.amazon.com/Faking-Quest-Authenticity-Popular-Music/dp/0393060780

review

"by the end, Barker (a musician and songwriter) and Taylor (I Was Born a Slave) find the distinction between real and fake "[b]reaking down and becoming increasingly meaningless." It becomes clear that even seemingly obvious examples of authentic and inauthentic defy easy categorization when scrutinized. After all, is disco's well-intentioned alternate reality any less "real" than the violent, "mocking pretenses" of the Sex Pistols? Though the book's final conclusions are not revelatory, it offers an intriguing take on the development of popular music. "

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The 'democracy' thing is meaningless -- they are assuming that 'democratic' = against the idea of 'purity' which is a modern academic cliche. (n postcolonial studies everything is described as 'hybrid' (to avoid being called an essentialist), unless it happens to be white English writing in which case it is not of interest, or unless you happen to be a rigorous thinker in which case absolutely everything is hybrid, but you're then left to find something interesting to say since your argument has become so general as to be meaningless. So the idea of pop here just means 'music', but the writers say 'pop' instead to try and associate themselves with some kind of populist democratic impulse (combined with 'and aren't racists awful, we must therefore be nice people. Which does not necessarily follow).

But other than that this is interesting for its details, if old news conceptually -- this problem goes back to the C18th ballad collectors, for sure, although their conceptions of folk could not have been racialised in the same way since 'race' didn't exist as a category then as it did by the late C19th.

The attack on the idea of 'folk' or even 'pop' as ethnographic categories (i.e. the idea that there is an 'authentic' popular culture to oppose to commercial or high cultures) has been going on for a wild in cultural studies I think. There was a manifesto type book from Blackwell a couple of years ago on The Invention of Popular Culture or some such title.

The comments on the idealisation of the folk which goes back to the bros Grimm wash over the really interesting problem which would be: what were these ideas, how and why did they change over time, why is there a continuing demand for authenticity / purity i.e. we cannot simply dismiss it as 'ideology' or false-consciousness because it is clearly real to people, even if not from the writers' point of view.

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i get the feeling from the amazon review that yr last point might be exactly what they explore.

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they seem to be saying quest for authenticity is forlorn, and yet the quest is the quest (sorry, Tom) and that informs the development of popular music all the same.

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That seems quite sensible! I thought the book looked interesting, even if it will be guaranteed to irritate me for some reason, but that's just because I'm irritable!

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Also they will not analyse the problem in Hegelian terms.

(If they want to sell any books!)

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Also I don't know if the story can make any sense if it JUST looks at music -- this problem is as old as ? well that would be the question. Hence we need a DDR not just some music geeks!

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koganbot

The Dance Dance Revolution is not just for music geeks!

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piratemoggy.livejournal.com

Wtf kind of gathering do people spontaneously sing 'I Believe I Can Fly' at?

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THE BUS. (allegedly)

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piratemoggy.livejournal.com

I finally see a reason to learn to drive. :/

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umlauts.livejournal.com

These would be the same buses that the kids all sing MIA songs on, right?

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