13.11.12

The New Folk Revival

No, I don't mean the current crop of earnest young beards singing the songs of the harvest. The digital folk revival can look and sound however it wants, because it's the revival of a tradition.

As mashup man Girl Talk mentions excitedly at the end of Good Copy, Bad Copy, the music industry is getting back to the old way of doing things. He remixes a Brazilian remix of Gnarls Barkley's 'Crazy' and marvels at how far the song has traveled, changing along the way, until the documentary ends on his unrecognizable loop of about a second of the chorus. Despite all the attempts at corporate control of the digital music industry, there seems only one way that the music industry will survive in the age of networked abundance, and that is by going back to how it was done before the big money balls took over.

This is what Lawrence Lessig calls the "read-write culture" in his TED talk 'How Creativity Is Being Strangled By The Law'. In the old days (before recorded sound was the main way of hearing music), sound was not a commodity. It barely mattered, and was barely known where songs originated, what mattered was the connections they made as they were taught and learned, adapted and altered continuously. A performer could sing for his supper, but there was no artifact, so business could not get involved. The widespread use of recorded, broadcast sound made music a "read-only" culture. You hear a song but you cannot do anything artistic with it. Playing it, singing it, changing it is all frowned upon because now someone owns the music, the mysterious song essence - a few chords here, a melody there - and they're damned if you can use it without paying obscene amounts.

There have been problems with copyright in the past. Musicians have long been accused of stealing other bands' ideas, courts squabbled over the grey area where 'artistic influence' meets plagiarism. But with the digital era of music, where infinite replication and transmission is the click of a button and the legal system vainly flaps to control and monetize media flow, things are undeniably "read-write" again. We've seen remix culture recontextualize and warp sounds made by others beyond all recognition. Then the remix gets remixed which gets remixed and every time the song changes, is given something new by an individual performance and sent out again for the enjoyment of all. Just like Dylan would take a bit of a blues song, a bit of a Woody Guthrie song, and yelp out his own words over the top.



To a lesser degree, most new musicians engage in a kind of folk culture now. They make their songs available for free online because they want to express themselves more than they care about 'making it'. Some use their freely available music to advertise events where they sing for their supper, others just do it because they love to, which is pretty important when it comes to art.

As Lessig says, "freedom actually drives a more vibrant, important economy than restriction and control". When the copyright enforcers are forced to relent, the folk tradition of music will actually make what's left of the industry flourish. The problem for the current system is that it's going to put a load of middlemen out of jobs. We won't miss them too much.

Freedom to listen and create can only encourage enthusiasm about music. No more months, years of finding a label, sorting out promotion, just make your sounds, send them out into the world. It's not like musicians will starve any more than they do now- people want to support musicians they like, certainly if it's a choice between that and them making less/no music. They'll do it through sites like Bandcamp which reduce middlemen hugely, or through going to gigs, and when they're rich they'll buy the 10 disc expanded reissue of an album they originally got for free. Or you've got innovative stuff like Beck's Song Reader, a release of sheet music which is about as literal a return to the folk model as you can get.

If there's any reluctance to pay for music it's not because we don't think it's worth anything or the musicians don't deserve to be paid, it's because we've got so used to a music industry which is renowned for being unfair to artists and fans. When copyright is relaxed to let the digital folk revolution take over, the distrust which has plagued the "read-only" system will be replaced by an enthusiasm and artist-consumer connection which is more intimate, engaging, liberating, and conducive to glorious sounds.

 

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