Musicwrite thought for the day

[meserach.livejournal.com]

Is the current folk revival thing we've got going on (Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons being the touchstones I'm thinking of here) a reaction to the Auto-tuned artificalness of late noughties music in the same way that the seeing out of authenticity from souls in the late eighties was a reaction to the artificiality of the early eighties?

Comments

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I think it's something of a timing coincidence, myself. Folk and country music have become substantially less uncool over the last decade, so they get written about more in bigger sources and the people in those scenes experience more visibility & success, while people not connected to those scenes are less put off from taking an interest.

Also, I suspect perennial flutters of revived interest in Bob Dylan (assisted in part by 'I'm Not There') have helped.

I definitely think it *could* have been seen as a move towards 'authenticity', but not in the late '80s way, because I see an overt recognition (in bands like Mumford) of the impossibility of recreating the authentic, so the 'authentic' aspects seem like period features, if that makes sense? It's a more serious way of doing the sort of thing that The Decemberists have been doing quite wryly for almost a decade now.

Great question!