A Roomful Of Elephant Calls

[koganbot]

A call to skyecaptain, freakytigger, petronia, and anyone else who inhabits the worlds where Rockwrite and anime-and-videogame and Fanfic worlds overlap. I claimed, while conversing with arbitrary_greay on the wallpaper-music-as-the-elephant-in-the-center-of-the-living-room thread, that:

Geekdom and video games and anime have enough cachet that the music that attaches to them is not going to end up in the category "We So Don't Pay Attention To This Stuff That We're Actually Hearing Quite A Lot Of That We Don't Even Notice That We Don't Write About It" in the way that AC does, but rather'll get written about by critics more and more as time goes on.

I can't say I'm the one to make the argument, though, so I hope you all might care to comment, on this or on what AG says.

And I'm linking Bob Dylan — not as an example of BGM but 'cause I assume "Ballad Of A Thin Man" is what first shot the words "freak" and "geek" into the culture as positives. 1965:

http://vimeo.com/52383325

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i had literally never heard this term till I read it here (repeat LJ outage ensuring i didn't say so sooner)

i am less convinced that there is crossover -- i suspect the absence of good old-time examples on wikip means that it existed at very much at a below-the-radar amateur level, visible in SF communities (maybe at cons? and niche clubs on campus) but *not* emerging onto the actual folk coffee-shop circuit, let alone onto the touring stage or any kind of professionalism

one thing indie means is the professionalisation -- and established routes of discussion-group mediation -- of layers of performance that would have been amateur and (relatively) under-explored back in the day. In other words, while the performance back then certainly happened, it only "mattered" to those watching it; it didn't enter a wider discourse so much (except perhaps retroactively); and I think there's a bit of ex post facto rejigging going on

(which I'm not against; but I think "crossover" is possibly a misleading way to look at it)

[koganbot]

Might "spillover" be a better term, for not implying a particular direction? According to Wikip the term originates as a typo in the title of Lee Jacobs' early '50s unpublished article, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music." My objection to "influence" in this title isn't our usual one but that it implies that the direction is from sf to folk. Whereas, if in the '50s and '60s a lot of sf fans are folkies and a lot of sf writers listen to folk, similar themes and references are likely to show up in both, e.g. gibes at conformity taking the form in each of a depiction of a conformist, dystopian near future.

But I wasn't knowledgeable or perceptive enough back then to identify actual spillover,* if there was any, and I surely don't know if there's now interplay and spillover between filk and folk and indie and fandom. There obviously are fans of sf who are fans of "folk" in its modern, quasi-"indie" form (Paul Krugman sometimes mentions sf on his blog, citing Asimov's Foundation trilogy as one of his original inspirations for going into social science and also giving kudos and references to Charles Stross and Iain M. Banks; meanwhile, on Fridays he posts Friday Night Music videos which lean towards fun but staid indie folk of the Civil Wars ilk). I wouldn't be utterly surprised were there folkies who participate in fandom who participate in filk who participate in indie who participate in folk, but I don't know this.

(Unfortunately, I sometimes forget to save my comments to my clipboard before hitting submit, and lj has been sabotaging me a lot in the last few days — though perhaps the sabotage has been to my benefit, by forcing me to continually rewrite.)

*Or maybe I was informed and perceptive enough and the reason I didn't identify it was that it wasn't there in a very big way: my peak of listening to folk and my peak of reading sf were more or less at the same time, ages 8 to 12, 1962 to 1966. Fwiw I think the Kingston Trio hold up better than do Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov, who at my age 13 began to seem psychologically too shallow for me. I should reread John Wyndham; I'm one of the maybe-not-so-few who knows the passage in Wyndham's Chrysalids that Paul Kantner is quoting in "Crown Of Creation." (A favorite Jefferson Airplane moment comes on 30 Seconds Over Winterland when, right after Paul Kantner and Grace Slick intone "In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our minds," a (possibly sotted) Grace interrupts herself to say, "I can't either.") —My mentioning the Jefferson Airplane here is something of a tangent, since I wouldn't say that they were ever folk-rock, even though I've read some people claiming that that's a reasonable assessment of their starting point. Kantner was obviously into sf, and I wonder if he's subsequently participated at all in fandom.

[koganbot]

(Not that the Winterland version of "Crown Of Creation" did the song justice. Btw, The Chrysalids stands at an angle from the ideas presented in the particular passage that Kantner reverently lifted from. In the novel, they're uttered by someone from a distant, rescuing civilization. To the main character they sound too much like a creed, and it's creeds he's fleeing.)