[extradego]

I have an opinionated view of American culture, and I'm daily surrounded by other musicians, artists. These are the topics we discuss. I am opinionated as a result.

In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless...

I grew up in the south. My father was literally a clogger. I'm no stranger to folk. But, I am extremely skeptical of a lot of it's history. The mid-century folk-revival era did a real number on our conception of what's really there culture-wise. Behind the curtain, I am honestly afraid it's mostly puritanism, shame, and self-conflict. It's interesting but I think calling it a cultural movement is mostly romanticism. In terms of music, we could delve into details for days, and break down the whole history of hip-hop and jazz, and I do encourage that. There's a lot of good music there. But, I'm afraid it serves essentially the same end in terms of culture; a terribly familiar story. Hip-hop exhibits the whole of the cultural dynamic fairly explicitly, and is internationally renowned. Folk is mostly replicated in parody.

EDIT: Another thing to add... I think most people would be surprised how many contemporary folk musicians (young ones) would actually agree with me. They eventually are challenged with contending with things like: Did folk come from slaves? Or the working class? Or the fraught relations between the two? And is it reconcilable? Where did country music come from?

[rainbowmverse]

>> "In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless..."

We may have fundamentally incompatible perspectives if you see culture and art as separate things. I grew up surrounded by hip-hop (Atlanta), but I know better than to sing along with the n word as a white person. This is because the experience of the music is inseparable from one's experience with its culture.

[extradego]

Culture generally has a parental relationship to art. The art is of the culture but the culture is not of the art. I think we agree on that, but I totally see where you're coming from here because I am suggesting something else with folk.

I am basically saying that the legacy of American folk is just too mysterious to nail down, and too precarious to draw conclusions from. I wonder if this would be the case without the mid-century folk revival, which amounted to a mass-commercialization of the white American south as a suffering working-class. The older field recordings in the Library Of Congress suggest the music was predominantly made by slaves. The old radio recordings from Nashville tell a slightly different story and seem to stitch together something of an art form, likely for the very first time. Then folk-revival was a massively commercial effort that made it all look very pretty. But the culture of it all still remains vague. Touring the south and studying it's history doesn't suggest much of any concern for culture in any higher sense. Literacy was surprisingly high but they mostly read the bible. Music seems to have occupied a space more like entertainment than cultural reflection. A likely theory is that it was very much a culture for slaves, but merely entertainment for white people. Hopefully this clarifies my comprehension. Hip-hop is a full embodiment in comparison; a whole new world of unmitigated expression.

[briandear]

Opinionated is one thing, inaccurate is quite another. Reductionist and insulting is yet another.