April 2009

koop
Aside from a brief, Millennium-fueled day in the neon sun, electronic music has been the very definition of fringe. It has been the music of basement kids and mad audio scientists, as reliant on a compliment of equipment as garage bands are on raw enthusiasm. It’s not so much a scene as it is a consequence of technology, so it only stands to reason that the term “electronic music”, however general, refers to an approach more than a specific sound.

This philosophy has allowed countless fringe acts to apply the electronic sensibility to any number of genres. The subject of today’s Along The Edges has made a career of digitizing Golden Age Jazz.

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There is no genre of music more laden with racial politics than Hip Hop. In the past thirty years, regardless of who produced, performed or consumed it, Hip Hop has been labeled as "black" music. It's been perceived as music made by black people for the exclusive enjoyment of black people, while those non-black people who have been involved with its creation and consumption have been dismissed as "trying to act black". That's why it's so interesting that one of the longest-lived and most influential Hip Hop acts in history consists of three very white, very Jewish boys from New York.

That second descriptor is why The Beastie Boys weren't nearly as divisive in my household growing up as the Gangsta rap I covered last week. My folks grew up in Detroit, which in the 50's and 60's was a veritable melting pot of the Midwest. My mother has always been an especially big fan of the music branded "black music" of her own generation, namely Motown and other classic R&B.

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Folk musicians are an interesting lot. At least half of them seem like they don't even want to be recording artists. In a weird way, that makes a lot of sense. Folk is often the closest someone can get to just screwing around on an acoustic guitar without any thought applied to arrangement. Simple chords, even-paced picking and the balladeer's sense of repetition make folk what it is; the music of guys sitting on the couch and girls waiting for the kettle to heat up.

Earlier this week I wrote about Nick Drake, who in the above sense is something of an oddity. Most of his work is fairly complex for being folk music and his lyrics often go far beyond the themes of nature and childhood that have long been cliche in the genre. That's why I wanted to focus the second half of Folk Week on someone I would consider the quintessential traditional folk artist. Vashti Bunyan barely qualifies as a recording artist.

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Welcome to Folk Week on Artists Condensed. For no reason in particular, I've decided that this week I'll be showcasing a couple pleasant folk artists, one of them fairly well known and the other a tad obscure. While I don't really consider myself as well-versed in the granola crowd as I am in the likes of rock, electronic and charming people with pianos, I think that folk is pretty interesting on an academic level.

Of course, when I say "folk" I actually mean "United States Folk Pop" which isn't exactly deserving of the term "folk music". Compare it to, say, German Folk or even what one might call Chinese Folk and it becomes apparent that what we in America call our own folk music isn't really folk at all. Earthy people with guitars aren't really descriptive of American culture and when we present ourselves to other cultures or when other cultures interpret our own, the stuff we call folk isn't what comes to mind.

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There's a certain academic convenience to living in the Internet Age. Before the likes of iTunes, Rhapsody and Last.fm it was no small task to run through the catalog of a particular artist, double that if the artist was somewhat obscure. In a different time I would have had to hunt around dozens of record shops to find the complete solo work of Robyn Hitchcock because his early albums were hard to find even when they were first in print. While it would have been more personally rewarding to go on a potentially months-long scavenger hunt for Black Snake Diamond Role, the experience would have skewed my perspective of Hitchcock's development as an artist. Seeing him move from friendly, jovial pub-pop to a more lonely, introspective sound in five days instead of five months, or five years, allows for a certain amount of necessary detachment. People get attached to the sounds of their favorite artists and so they get angry at any deviation.

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Art is the vocation of weird people. For thousands of years, society has permitted those touched with an inspired sense of oddness to exorcise whatever topsy-turvy thoughts and feelings they've had in ways that may bring pleasure to the decidedly square majority. In exchange, the weirdos agree to live on the fringes and announce themselves whenever they visit the vast cloister of normality. Since the late 1970's, the captain of the good ship Goofy Surreal has been a Brit named Robyn Rowan Hitchcock. From The Soft Boys and beyond, Hitchcock has gone between deceptively deep solo albums and fulfilling collaborations, to experimental film projects and even a little philanthropy.

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For this introductory article in Pop Music Club's new feature, Along the Edges, I wanted to focus on something new. It would be easy to reach into the bag of obscure artists past to show how they've been influential or at least contextually interesting. But one of the most important parts of fringe music is that, of all pop, its attempt at outright newness is the most overt.

Listening to an artist like Natasha Khan aka Bat For Lashes definitely feels like something new. It's not that her influences are too oblique (far from it) or that she's using a lot of new technology (quite the opposite). Maybe it's just that it sounds unfamiliar.

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