a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  1486 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 372nd Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately"

I have no problem with my wife singing Joan Baez to the kid. And yeah - this is from a 1941 Yiddish musical but you know what? Nobody saw that musical. They listened to Track 7.

This reflects my bias, this reflects my experience, this reflects my prejudice, this is not necessarily accurate to the rest of the world but I fucking hate folk music. Not because it's folk music but because 99% of it is Bob Dylan or The Chieftains or Peter Paul & Mary and what it is? What it truly is? Is a bunch of privileged 'boomer ex-hippies claiming their musical tastes are superior to mine because they've been filtered through a wokeness filter.

For People Of A Certain Age (who include my parents), all music is crap except music with "heritage." That "heritage" is invariably "one of my dirty hippie idols sang it back in the '60s." These are the people who booed Dylan at Newport, the ones who disavowed Denver when he went on the Muppets, who will tell you The Chieftains are "musicologists" while The Pogues are "noise" and Clannad is music while Enya is "new age dreck."

The argument "what is folk" permanently poisoned me to all things folk-related forever because it's so hypocritical. It's so disingenuous. It's an attempt to argue that one form of music is objectively better than another because of some trumped-up pedigree.

I sing my kid Waltzing Matilda and Molly Malone because they're jumped-up fake folk. Fuckin' Molly Malone wasn't even written in fucking Ireland. My main problem is most of the stuff I'd sing the kid has pauses for guitar solos; she got a fair amount of Jane's Addiction for awhile.