Beware the definition - or not? (February 20, 2007)
When people put definitions on music and become religious about those definitions they tend to lose the essence of the music and become a tribe with no meaning. When you talk about folk in the broadest sense. You quickly find that some people are rigid about it others far more relaxed. You end up at two poles from the same place. “Fancy using detuned distorted electric guitars in a folk song?” - I heard that just recently. In truth does it matter?
Piers the Ploughman didn’t sit down to eat his packed lunch to write something that would last for 300 years - he wrote something to get it out of his head. It’s communicating and talking to people. That’s an overwhelming need of the folk song writer – the need to get something out of your head, to get a handle on what’s going on. We are living in the most over communicated society that has ever been – but there seems to be a famine of popular music that communicates. When people see the human condition they either identify with their own blankness or want to understand where they sit with other people.
That after all is the main way that groups of people define themselves - how they exclude other people. It’s as if we are doomed to define ourselves by excluding this or that. Then this or that becomes a threat and everyone is suddenly surprised. Many people like to identify with a certain group, whether it be one band, a whole genre, a fashion movement, an art school or whatever.
However, given sufficient exposure, I think most people can accept music in a variety of forms. The problem is that it is not fashionable to accept that which your group has 'defined out' - if you're not careful the same thing happens to you. Broadly, I suspect that seperate audiences do cross-fertilise to some extent - they just don't admit it. Click here to return to the News page
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