Revivalism in popular music is complicated, to say the least, and is rapidly becoming more complicated. Some people make music evocative of an earlier time because they have truly found a home in something that is past; some people use retro affectations to comment on perceived cultural deficiencies of the present; some people create a pastiche of a variety of older styles and tropes in order to make a new, satisfying whole. All of these tendencies and more can be combined with each other in a nearly infinite amount of configurations. The choices that musicians make about their work’s relationship with the past are not always ideological–they can be solely sentimental or completely and dryly arbitrary. As the world speeds up, and as the more rigid battlements between genres wobble, subdivide, and eventually disappear entirely, I can’t help but pay more attention to the myriad ways in which musicians choose to acknowledge or ignore the massive changes happening around them.
For my first two records, I think that I have more or less been in the “ignore” camp. There’s nothing wrong with this, per se–there is plenty of pleasant (and meaningful!) music being made that bears no real relation to the aesthetics of the present, and I would be remiss to imply otherwise. But now that I am alive in a big city, things are changing. My Vile Bodies EP was the first step in this direction. Since I am ostensibly a folk musician, I think that these changes are more ideological than they might be otherwise. To try and put it succinctly, I think that we are witnessing the “death rattle” of American folk music, and perhaps eventually of all folk musics. This isn’t a bad thing or a good thing; it just appears to be an inescapable truth to me, an aspect of supranationalism that, while perhaps happening a bit too quickly, should not be discouraged. This also probably strikes some people as unrealistic, especially given the healthy amount of music coming from folk revivalists in the last decade. How much of this music is actually folk music, though? I call myself a folk musician only because that is a title given to me, but how much of my own music has anything to do with a folk tradition? These are not rhetorical questions–the answer to both is “nearly none.” The high-minded and largely benevolent plagiarism of Pete Seeger, which was in itself a successful attempt to artificially lengthen the life of the “folk process,” ran its course decades ago, and in its place are so many incongruent strains of American music, from hardcore to hyphy, each documenting a tiny shard of the American experience. There may never be another body of message-based music which works in such broad strokes unless you generously count the focus-grouped pop music of the present and the future, music which has been bleached free of any discernible directives other than passive enjoyment.
With that in mind, my goal becomes to make music that is aware of its rootlessness, aware of its transience, but still capable of making a grasp at permanence. My goal is to make music which still makes use of folk idioms but which does not shy away from the sharp and the strange. My goal is to make music that does not lie about where it comes from, where it has been, and where it is going.