I don’t like the term “folk music” as it is generally understood. It carries with it a pejorative connotation of primitiveness, of music for commoners.
Plus, its meaning after the 1960’s became frustratingly muddled. Is the eleven-minute, verbosely cryptic “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” really supposed to be lumped in with “Goodnight Irene” and “You Are My Sunshine?”
I don’t think any one type of music is intrinsically better, or even that different from any another. Why would it be? We’re all human, and music (like class) is a product of a particular culture. An anthropologist, then, might regard ALL music as a sort of folk music, with different tribes of fans representing their respective sounds. I don’t know any anthropologists to confirm that anyone thinks this way, but I like this conceptualization, and I’ll run with it for now.
I’ve been trying to come up with an informative, parsimonious way to classify human music across cultures and history; to sort out the different types of “folk” music around the world without using specific cultural or historical labels, or even of technique or sound.
Here’s what I have, and feel free to offer feedback or suggestions for change.
Music, to me, can be divided into three very general categories. These categories are defined and distinguished by the role the musical performer plays with respect to his or her audience. These are the categories as I see them:
Campfire Music: Songs of this type can be thought of as encouraging an egalitarian relationship with artist and audience. They are often simple, accessible, and great for group sing-a-longs (or play-alongs for instrumentals).
Shaman Music: The artist as Shaman wants to impress the audience, and to gain their devotion, so songs/performances of this type usually showcase a skill that average people do not have, be it for voice, dance, or command of an instrument. By extension, Shaman music also exhibits much more of the artist’s individual personality than does Campfire music. The more the dominant ego of the Shaman is felt, the more listeners can be swept into his or her cult of devotees.
Pure Music: Songs of this last type are written with the intent of impressing an audience, but also find the artist receding into the background, as if the music was a pure evocation of emotion, enlightenment, or divine glory, rather than the performance of a mere mortal. Pure Music is often reverential in spirit, either to God, or simply to a certain feeling. You might even say that the true audience for songs of this type is the revered Abstraction Itself.
So now that the categories have been established, which artists would go where? It actually depends on the song in question. Most of the Beatles’ songs, especially their early output, would be easily filed under Campfire music. They’re simple, accessible, catchy, and damn fun for everyday people to song along to. Most music typically called “folk” (pre-Dylan, at least) would be Campfire music, as would most dance music, and lots of contemporary pop. D.C. hardcore is a great example of Campfire music: a stylistically unified, egalitarian tribe of warriors distancing themselves from the perceived sins of their surrounding culture, and cementing their solidarity in a rush of communal aggression.
As for Shaman music, this covers most music superstars we know: Your Divas, your Bad Boys, your guitar heros, your charismatic leaders, your impeccable soloists, your masters of show biz. All of that stuff is a Shamanistic display of their power over you. Think Aretha Franklin’s voice, Mick Jagger’s outrageous machismo, Eddie Van Halen’s lightning fast fret work, Mingus’ crazy arrangements, KISS’s image and stage shows. Later Beatles songs grew ever more shamanistic, for example “I Am the Walrus” and “Helter Skelter.” This makes sense, because the opposing pull of everyone’s expanding egos eventually ripped apart the once-famous group unity of the Fab Four. If people tend to worship the artist as an icon, it’s probably fair to say that a role as Shaman has been established.
Finally, there’s Pure music. Some examples include medieval liturgical chants, as well as most Western compositional pieces that prefer emotional or spiritual resonance over impressive showcases of technical skill (think Mozart’s Requiem rather than the Magic Flute). My Bloody Valentine is a more recent example of artists upstaging themselves as performers in favor of obtaining a perfect representation of feeling. Sound collages like Revolution 9 and most of “Kid A” are examples of established Shamans trying out some Pure music.
This categorization is not perfect, I know. Performers like Odetta and Thom Yorke can take a simple, catchy Campfire song (e.g. “Muleskinner Blues” and “Karma Police,” respectively) and turn it into a stunning display of Shaman superiority. And nowadays, our media-saturated and celebrity-obsessed culture has led to the fervent Shamanization of people whose music is Campfire-level accessible, even in performance (e.g. Moby). But I think this “music as social tool” approach has something to it, and seems to explain music’s affect on its creator as well as its audience. It doesn’t require any tedious or messy exploration of music “genomes,” it just explains the dynamics of a tribe when engaging in musical activity. In times before manifest destiny, colonization, globalization and the internet, these tribes were much more consistent and clearly defined. Now, they can change from song to song, which to some probably seems to reflect a flawed conceptualization on my part. While that may be true, I contend that technology and changing culture merely impose superficial variations upon an ages-old human culture machine, and that all this waxing about what is New Wave or No Wave, Grime or Dubstep, sophisticated or primitive, cool or uncool, it’s all arbitrary in the grand scheme of things.
“It’s all folk music, anyway.” Lester Bangs made my point years ago.
Haha dammit I was going to comment that all pop music is folk music, both in heritage and in spirit, but then you had to throw that Bangs quote at the end there and beat me to the punch.
ReplyDeleteAnyway if you're trying to make irrelevant the discussion of music 'genomes,' you're running the risk of pissing a lot of music nerds off. But then again, think of how simple AllMusic would be!
I do like the database of Moods that AllMusic has. I think that's much more helpful than the purely acoustic genomic units that Pandora relies on. Antony & the Johnsons and Randy Newman should not be linked in my playlists!!
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ReplyDeleteThese categories of folk offer an encouraging start, but I think in order to arrive at a clearer perspective on musical difference attuned to cultural biases, you ought to take into account how music is distributed between musicians and their cultures, and, at the same time, how that music is incorporated as a practice into that culture’s social life.
ReplyDeleteSo far, your analysis has classified form and content, and then has drawn conclusions about how such forms relate to audiences in different ways. However, it seems important to consider the actual, material circumstances of musical performance, listening, dancing, participation, appropriation, etc. in different contexts. When a music is considered Campfire, is it actually performed around a campfire? Is it part of a deliberate ritual? Does it arise from the sociality of improvisation? Or is it recorded, distributed, sold, purchased, and played as a unit during an individual’s busy day? That this last can be true of the Campfire, Shamanic, and Pure categories says a lot about the modern practices of experiencing music. Despite the range of musical forms you categorize, and despite live music remaining available in a range of venues, the recording of music (related but not reducible to commodified distribution) structures a culture’s relation to music and musicians in a very significant way. Although medieval liturgical chants might indicate a Pure folk experience, doesn’t our understanding of it change when taken beyond church performance and listened to as an MP3 file in a private dwelling? When broadcast onto the radio playing in a family’s home? Or played in the earbuds of a pedestrian riding in a subway car? That subway rider can appreciate the formal beauty of the recorded performance, but their relation to the music, to the musician, and to their larger society is quite different than if they were sitting in the pews of a church community. Of course live music is various and there are various venues for interacting with musicians, ranging from streets, to campfires, to pubs, to home concerts, to stages, to football stadiums, etc., with varying degrees of commodification, community, or intimacy. Granting these developments, recorded music introduces a more significant development, since its distribution has contributed to an acceleration of individualized, private, isolated, if rarefied interactions with music that in some ways levels all categories. Taken from the contexts of performance, music can seem like just so much form and content. (cont'd)
I think this point is especially important once you consider how music is incorporated as a social practice once distributed. This is the “folk” element of any music, since it is how music comes to be attributed to the people. If much hip-hop, club, and pop music is Campfire music because performative, danceable, and fun, it might seem to offer a very clear practice of music. But practice goes beyond immediate reactions like dancing, since music can offer shared cultural values, expectations, reference points, forms for interaction and socialization, and even modes of being in the world. One might not appreciate the emotional content of the majority of rap albums, but that evaluation doesn’t address whether or not the listener is part of a community that values rhyming as a social performance. Form and content of course play a role in how a music is taken up, and might go a long way explaining why some racist white frat guys listen to aggressive rap music recorded by black men; however, the point is that they don’t just listen. In some ways, they are enabled to interact with each other through their shared relation to the music. In this view, the digital revolution has helped blur the lines between distributer and consumer, but only by throwing into relief new practices of social participation.
ReplyDeleteLike the racist white boys, we all have our own circles with whom we share and exchange musical tastes; in a way, these can be our venues for practicing music. We are all performing in these exchanges whether we know it or not, even if it is not dancing or rhyming; sometimes it is just showcasing our own ability to discriminate between the values of musical forms. This blog is just such a space for mediated interaction and socialization. And the more music feels reducible to form and content, the likelier it is that sensitive discriminators will be drawn to classify and evaluate it, as their own strange and modernized form of folk practice. When evaluated apart from their contexts of performance, some forms do hold their own better; if Campfire singles remain catchy, they don’t have the self-conscious presentation of more Shamanic endeavors, which might include careful cross-referencing or complex expressiveness. However, if there is a debate to decide whether certain Shamans are revered merely for their marketed image or for their individualized artistry, it is important to recognize that each of these options is facilitated by the (often commodified) distribution of music, of “albums” by “artists.” Once The Odyssey and Iliad were written down, there was an abstract Homer to analyze and admire. Since music is recorded and marketed as units by particular performers, its distribution readily invites a similar folk practice of evaluation and criticism that appears as if removed from a social context, when in fact it is only removed to a new one.
This is not to say that formal evaluations of music are not worthwhile, but only that they serve a social function for particular circles in particular cultures that relate to their music in a very particular way. We shouldn’t forget how weird it is that we listen to music in the ways that we do, as if they were pure forms of music, when in fact they are complexly mediated, and part of a complex economic and social structure, quite removed from, but still consonant with, music played around the campfires.
I was toying with the idea of including actual contexts of experience in the post, since it is an important one, and even influences the formation of the labels I proposed; for instance, an artist's music enjoyed at a club by a group of friends could be that group's Campfire music, but the artist could be worshiped by that same group at a large concert.
ReplyDeleteBefore I would commit to anything, though, I'd have to take some time to really think about how to conceptualize it in a way that's parsimonious, because it can be a very messy dimension of the music experience.
As for your point on the establishment of music as belonging to and expressing the identity of an artist, I think that one of the appeals of hip hop, techno, and the mash-ups of recent years is the desecration, to some extent, of that sanctity of ownership, of that artistic purity. Hip hop artists knowingly sample songs both obscure and well-known, and quote lines and hooks from other popular rap songs, even recently released one. The Mash-up is a more extreme extension of this approach, with the dissonance of mixed genres supplying a sort of gleeful perversion of conventional taste, but each contributes to an attitude toward music in which the individual "creator" becomes less important, and each individual variation of a piece or hook is appreciated in its own right. In some ways, this can be paralleled to folk traditions that thrived before audio recording technology was available. It's no longer an oral tradition, and the artists are distributed as individual sources of music, but the recordings no longer hold as much symbolic permanence.
Perhaps this helps to explain why hip hop and dance artists have a much shorter shelf life than musicians in other genres; they do not gain a legacy for their creations, and unless they continue the process of varying interesting sounds, they'll soon be eclipsed by others offering their own variations of the moment.