"AFKAP sez: Folk music is boring, corny and childish"
I'll be back with commentary
*start swipe*
I'm still struggling to "get" folk music, to be honest.
My interest in folk has always been largely anthropological in nature but for a range of reasons, I've never been able to forge an emotional connection with it.
Like, I can dig the Dylan strain and the post-rock stuff, but I just can't grab on to the Engish and Irish ballads and some of the traditional American songs. Probably because in the era in which I grew up (of course, I know you grew up in the same era).
I remember reading a Frank Miller interview in which he said he never felt a connection to the radical politics of the 1960s because around the time he was in high school, all his teachers were hippies or ex-hippies, so their whole culture to him felt like the establishment that he rebelled against.
For me, those songs are the tunes that came pre-programmed in your Fisher-Price toy phonogram... or they evoke for me dorky, beardy camp counsellors strumming acoustic guitars around the bonfire. Or worse yet, their melodies recall nursery rhymes (obviously they come from the same sources as most popular nursery rhymes). So somehow, the shit just feels childish to me.
I struggle to conceive of a time that playing and listening to this kind of music was at one point considered the extremely hip thing to do. I understand it on an intellectual level but I don't get it!
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