Innovative Contemporary Folk Music That Doesn't Suck:
(Confessions Of An Ex-Punk Rocker)

OK, I admit – I HATE FOLK MUSIC. Don't get me wrong. I love live Bluegrass/Old Time music, and I love authentic Scotch/Irish music. I even like James Taylor and early Joni Mitchell. What I don't like is Woody Guthrie-Joan Baez-"Blowin' in the wind"-hippy peace music. (Yes, this includes early Bob Dylan.) Nor do I like neo-country-Nanci Griffith-Indigo Girls-purportedly thoughtful acoustic music. I don't like it because it's boring. The production is boring; the tunes are boring. To quote Johnny Rotten from Sid and Nancy, "Boring, Sidney. Boring. Exterminate! Exterminate!" More often than not I'd rather just hear some fame-less hacking locals play a remote mountain clogging festival. But before you stone me to death with Teva sandals and protest banners, we should probably get into the sticky, unavoidable examination of what "folk music" actually is...

FOLK MUSIC DEFINED IN TWO PARAGRAPHS

For centuries, British folk music has been comprised of well-written songs emotionally performed by commoners for commoners. I don't know when folk music got to be about acoustic instruments, hot guitar licks, and anti-war lyrics. In olden times (back when folks said "ye" and "hey nonny nonny" a lot), there were two kinds of music: court music and folk music. So folk music has more to do with amateurism than it has to do with acoustic instruments. Think of folk music as what westerners now call "world" music. Folk music is merely the indigenous "world" music of the British Isles. Jamaican folk music is called reggae. North American folk music is called blues (or Hopi sweat lodge chants, depending on your PC quotient). British folk music is called, well, folk music.

For the sake of argument let's broaden the folk genre to include all original singer/songwriter music in the Scotch/Irish/English vein. Furthermore let's require folk music to be more about the song than about its performance. (Many a lame modern folk singer has taken this last requirement to intense extremes, rendering insufferable hours of MIND-NUMBING BOREDOM!) And finally, a folk song has to be singable by ordinary folks. Otherwise, how can it be passed down from one troubadour to another? So John Denver writes folk songs; Led Zeppelin does not. Get it?

BACK TO THE POINT

If you hate contemporary folk music as much as I, this article is for you. If you worship contemporary folk music, I still think I have something to offer you, namely... Innovative Contemporary Folk Music That Doesn't Suck! "Contemporary" simply means these artists aren't from the 1600s. "Doesn't suck" means these artists don't suck (sheesh). Prepare thyself, therefore, gentle wistful tenderheart. Within half a paragraph you will meet four true heirs of the troubadour foolscap. This chummy brotherhood includes two suicides, one mental patient, and one pop star from Memphis who's not Elvis. Yes! I'm not promising 100% acoustic arrangements, and I'm not promising a smooth ride. But I am promising ingenious, plaintive, pastoral enchantment. And you're guaranteed not to exclaim, "This sounds just like Sarah McLachlan, I mean Enya!"

A CURSORY INTRODUCTION TO FOUR NON-SUCKY CONTEMPORARY FOLK ALBUMS
1. Nick Drake – Pink Moon (1972)

Clocking in at just under twenty-nine minutes, Pink Moon is Nick Drake's last complete album before he killed himself at age twenty-six. Granted, Pink Moon is not exactly upbeat, but its overwhelming beauty makes its own despondence seem almost whimsical. Drake grew up in Tamworth-in-Arden near Coventry, England. He dropped out of Cambridge to pursue his music, recorded three CD's on Island records that few people bought, then offed himself. But his surviving music has influenced artists from Elton John to Dinosaur, Jr. Of our four contemporary troubadours, Nick Drake most closely resembles the genuine article. His lyrics read like William Blake poems, and his tunes are easily the best of the late ‘60s "folk Baroque" era. Drake was no stranger to the Romantic poets, and his melodies sound like distilled Keats – enchanting, melancholy, and full of suggested meaning.

Whereas Drake's previous album, Bryter Layter, featured a full band, strings, and even horns; Pink Moon is just Drake and his acoustic guitar. For Nick things never did get brighter later. Consequently, Pink Moon is pretty dark. It's also lovely and pastoral and eloquent and poignant, but none of those things keep it from being dark. Drake is an accomplished and innovative acoustic guitarist, but you might never notice. His guitar work rarely intrudes. On songs like "Horn" (click title to hear song) and "Know" his guitar is barely even there. Drake's strange alternate tunings and unorthodox strumming patterns ingeniously support his muted, sustained vocals. Throughout Pink Moon Drake's guitar is essential, honed, and wise. Pink Moon's sparse production accentuates its already stark loneliness. It's like Drake is singing to no one, and we are just listening in.

Lyrically, while his contemporaries were striving earnestly to pen the next "Yesterday," Drake was dutifully chronicling his own emotional evaporation. Pink Moon begins with a lighthearted ditty about death's inevitability, and down we go. By the second song we've already slipped into deep regret: "And I was strong, strong in the sun/I thought I'd see when day was done/Now I'm weaker than the palest blue/Oh, so weak in this need for you." By the eighth song we've hit rock bottom: "Take a look you may see me on the ground/For I am the parasite of this town." All these lyrics are set to tunes of wistful melancholy and sung with chilling detachment. Taken as a whole Pink Moon lures its listeners into a moodscape of intense and wondrous resignation. Unless the motions of your spirit are dull as night, you'll get sucked in too, and gladly. Pink Moon is one terse, haunting, bittersweet pill. Profound music, folk or otherwise.

If Nick Drake is our lovelorn crier, then Syd Barrett is our village idiot. After founding and fueling London's Pink Floyd (yes, that's THE Pink Floyd), Barrett's LSD consumption became a little too regular for his mortal mind to process, and he was forced to leave his own band (due to his inability to function, even by rock star standards). That was 1968. In 1970 Barrett eked out The Madcap Laughs before totally losing his mind and holding up in his mum's basement, where he crouches to this very day. That's the legend anyway.

The Madcap Laughs is, in a word, weird. Upon hearing it, diehard Pink Floyd fans often scratch their pot-baked heads and whisper, "Man, no, no. Put The Wall back on." Madcap Laughs is just Syd on his acoustic guitar, sporadically accompanied by members of the ambient art rock band Soft Machine. The musicianship throughout this album is meandering and psychedelic but not too distracting. Content-wise, Madcap Laughs is erratic. Songs like "Love You" (click title to hear song) and "Here I Go" are goofy vaudeville schlock. "Ice cream, 'scuse me, I seen you looking good the other evening." Wow, that's a brilliant romantic lyric! "This is a story about a girl I knew/She didn't like my songs, and that made me feel blue/She said a big band is far better than you." Oooh, well rhymed, Syd! So I'm admitting that some of the songs on this CD are inexcusably weak.

But songs like "Octopus" and "Golden Hair" (a James Joyce poem set to music) are positively riveting. Barrett's songs are strange, but, when they work, they engage and captivate. Plus, some of Syd's hallucinatory lyrics do attain a sort of mythic quality when accompanied by his disorientingly anthemic tunes. For example, "Madam, you see before you stand/Hey ho, never be still/The old original favourite Grand/Grasshopper's Green Herbarian Band/and the tune they play is 'In Us Confide.'" That could possibly mean something; you never know! Songs like "If It's in You," "Feel," and "Dark Globe" feature Barrett's seemingly wrong but actually quite catchy melodic excursions, and the album closes with "Late Night," a truly beautiful love song. "When you showed me your eyes/Whispered love at the skies/Then I wanted to stay with you." Not bad for a neo-Elizabethan acid derelict stranded in late ‘60s London. Madcap Laughs is on my list because it meets our literal folk music requirements – its tunes are eventually enjoyable, and it's guaranteed to be like no folk music you've ever heard before.

Alex Chilton began his bizarre musical career at age sixteen as the lead singer of The Box Tops (of "Lonely days are gone, I'm 'a goin' home. My baby, she wrote me a letter" fame). From thence he went on to found Big Star. After being continually dissed and exploited by the music industry, Chilton decided to throw commercial aspirations to the wind and take his already crumbling band on one last self-destructive musical joy ride. The metaphorical nose that Chilton cut off to spite his own metaphorical face has come to be known as Third/Sister Lovers.

Most of the songs on Sister Lovers would be playing on classic rock stations right now had they been "properly" recorded. Since they weren't, we're left with this wacky, bluesed out, heavily orchestrated punk folk album. Some songs like "Kizza Me," "Thank You Friends," and "You Can't Have Me" sound like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Jerry Lee Lewis on Jack Daniels accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Yet other tunes like "Nightime," "Blue Moon," "Stroke It Noel," and "Take Care" are timeless lullabies sung by a sad, wise nanny who wants to believe in the beauty of his own songs, even as he doubts you will. Chilton's voice is sometimes sarcastic, sometimes anxious, but always high, pure, and bare. At times, Chilton is a backwoods-wise skeptic: "Some people read idea books/And some people have pretty looks/But if your eyes are wide/Then all words aside/Take care, please, take care." At other times, Chilton is a romantic lover: "Let me be your one light/And if you'd like a true heart/Take the time to show you're mine/And I'll be a blue moon in the dark." Critics have interpreted Chilton's earnestness as irony. I disagree. Most of these songs are sung from the heart and demand to be considered on their own terms.

A few of Sister Lovers' arrangements are so unorthodox, one wonders how they ever emanated from mid-70s Memphis. The phased-out Quaalude groove of "Big Black Car," the dark proto-gothic heaviness of "Holocaust," and the arrhythmic feedback of "Kangaroo" have inspired REM, This Mortal Coil, Primal Scream, and a host of other tune-based alternative rockers. But I keep returning to Sister Lovers for the tunes themselves. I love these songs! They are classically beautiful, and all the more so because they were intentionally recorded sans the numbing gloss of pop radio production. Indeed, it's as if Chilton went out of his way to ensure that none of these songs would ever receive airplay. A strange blend of frustration, abandon, and joy; Sister Lovers documents intense levels of unfettered greatness, refracting wildly. (There's even some acoustic guitar in there too!)

"Wait a minute! You don't mean to say that Mr. Grunge Rock Idol Himself is a folk singer?" Yes, I do mean to say that. Now sit down and kindly don't interrupt me again, or I will have a nearby Billy Idol fan escort you from the airplane cabin a lá The Wedding Singer. Nirvana's songs are sung by a dude to an entire generation of other dudes. Substitute "folk" for "dude," and you get the idea. On Unplugged Nirvana's trademark distorted grunge is stripped away, exposing the two underlying reasons for the band's inordinate popularity: Kurt Cobain's songs and Kurt Cobain's voice. On this live CD with its sparse arrangements, cello parts, and silly inter-song rambling, Cobain comes across less like Jim Morrison and more like Buddy Holly. It's true! Many of the songs on Nirvana Unplugged have this weird "Peggy Sue"-like groove to them (doused in mud and soaked in bleach perhaps but "Peggy Sue"-like nonetheless).

Cobain proves himself an American troubadour by performing six cover songs that he considers standards. True, none were written any earlier than the 1920s, but can't a man choose his own standards? Cobain covers three Meat Puppets songs that were popular with the alternative college rock set back when Nirvana was getting started; and he treats them with great reverence, even as he is backed by the Meat Puppets themselves. David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" is spookily rendered as if it were one of Cobain's own peculiar compositions, adding a bit of sci-fi glitter to this alternative folk brew. Also notable is Nirvana's chilling version of the blues standard "Where Did You Sleep Last Night." Cobain's gritty voice finds your spine like a horror movie clip. (And well it should. The song is about decapitation, after all!)

The remaining Nirvana songs all sound fairly similar tune-wise. Cobain's lyrics are so stream-of-consciousness, they could mean everything or nothing. Undoubtedly, they hold deep meaning for his loyal devotees; but in troth, methinks they are more akin to the "hey nonny nonny" refrains of yore. "I think I'm dumb, or maybe just happy." So what's the big deal about this album? Well, the sustained passive/aggressive melancholy plea is the big deal about this album. Plaintive and minor-keyed, Cobain is singing the ballads of the "whatever/nevermind" generation, a generation so disconnected, they allowed themselves to be branded "X" without so much as a "wait a second!" There is an undeniably tragic/epic vibe resonating throughout Unplugged, and I'm not the only one who's felt it. This music is important, historically relevant, and surprisingly approachable in its unfuzzy format. The more I listen, the more I pray for God to intervene and rain down his mercy on us. Hear the last tongue-tied declarations of a generation too broken to declare. Definitely not boring.

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