Someone who I met on the last Defiance, Ohio tour sent me an e-mail today asking some questions for a ‘zine he’s making on folk-punk. He asked me about the first time I heard the phrase and what I thought it meant. “folk-punk” is a phrase that’s been bandied about so much lately that I can’t help but think about it. I feel like what I wrote back to him does a pretty good job of summing up my thoughts:
To answer your question about folk-punk, I think that I first heard it about two years ago when my friend Kevey said something about Bloomington and Pensacola being the two “meccas” for folk-punk music. At the time, I wasn’t really sure what the phrase meant. I sort of figured that it meant punk bands that made poppy, low-fi recordings.
I feel like now, most people think of folk-punk music as bands that come from the punk scene but who play punk music on traditional instruments (acoustic guitar, banjo, fiddle, etc.) or who play punk music that has elements of the style of singer-songwriters like Phil Ochs or Woodie
Guthrie, or maybe some country, old-time, or rhythm and blues influences. I think that this definition doesn’t do service to a word that has such powerful implications as “folk”.I’m not a music historian, but to me, it seems like what put the “folk” in folk music wasn’t the asthetics. The songs were just played with whatever instruments and styles happened to be around. The recordings were oftentimes low-fi due to the available recording technology. The thing that made them folk music is that they were sincere songs that spoke about the songwriter’s lives and also reflected a certain consciousness of things going on in the world that were affecting not only the songwriter, but their families, communities, and even countries. The
songs were simple and meant to be sung-along-to and shared. By these standards, I would say any kind of DIY punk whether it’s pop-punk or hardcore is “folk” music and that’s the important part.I don’t mind the term “folk-punk” and I think for show flyers or record reviews it can be a fairly descriptive term. However, it seems like increasingly there is the notion of a “folk-punk” scene with specific asthetics, politics, and ideas of what’s cool and isn’t cool. I hear of young kids setting out to start “folk-punk” bands, specifically. I think this is all kind of sad. I grew up in a town that was far too small to have genre-seperated punk scenes, and I always loved how a show would have a hardcore band, a ska band, a crust band, and a pop-punk band playing on the same bill. I loved that the first time I saw the members of my favorite local youth-crew hardcore band play, they were playing acoustic Indigo Girls covers. It was exciting and special to feel like people with such differing musical styles or fashion could be involved in the same
thing together.Our world is one of drawing arbitrary divisions between people – whether it’s on the basis of nationality, or spirituality, gender, class, sexual orientation, or a ton of other things that build barriers between people. Certainly, differing styles of music within punk-rock and “scenes” associated with them aren’t going to cause wars or discrimination, but I can’t help but feel that punk’s classifications and seperation is still really arbitrary and comes from that same stupid human desire to say “I am absolutely this, you are absolutely that, this is one way, that is another”. I’d like to hope that punks have a better chance of some day walking away from all that than the rest of the world.