Don’t Oppress My People With Your White-Ass Folk Music
In crushed-by-niche-culture news:
A mere £1,485,400, since you ask. A gnat’s eyelash. For an issue of such fundamental importance to the turning of the world.
Whew. I was getting worried there.
Obviously, activities that are chiefly indulged in by white people – in this case, folk singing – must be deemed suspect and found problematic with great urgency, and then probed for hidden wrongness. At taxpayer expense.
And all this scholarly rigour ain’t cheap:
And – and – a word-association game.
Those interviewed – and subjected to this no-doubt-gruelling test of word-association – included “36 women, 21 men, and 2 non-binary people.” The researchers thereby deduced that “male associations are more prevalent than female ones.” By which they mean, members of their tiny, rather incestuous sample were slightly more likely to mention Bob Dylan than Joan Baez. And to mention “beards” slightly more often than “long dresses with red trim.”
Also, the word guitar was mentioned more often than tin whistles.
It’s Earth-rumbling stuff. Heaving with import.
However, given the puny sample size, the researchers concede that “it is hard to draw conclusions” from their academic toil.
Presumably, this limitation will be more than compensated for with further “systemic reflections” on “various notions of Englishness.” By Higher Beings who wish to “decolonise” folk music, on account of its “white-centricity,” and whose motives and impartiality will therefore be utterly beyond reproach.
Update, via the comments:
Oh, I think it’s understood quite well, thank you. Along with the kinds of people to whom such things most typically appeal.
Except for the “white-centric” bit, obviously.
That will have to go.
And behind this mannered waffle is the weird implication that devotees of folk music are somehow, simply by existing, excluding racial minorities. Shooing them away. Though, again, details on this point are neither obvious nor forthcoming. Still, perhaps we can look forward to an academic interrogation of classic car shows in Nottinghamshire as some heinous bastion of “white-centricity.” Another item on the list of Things That Must Be Decolonised And Morally Corrected.
Different audiences. Not the audience it actually has, mind, the one it attracts, and which is arrived at via choice and musical inclination. No actual barriers to participation are specified, of course. But the audience is nonetheless all wrong, apparently.
Update 2:
Following the quip about British classic car shows as another potential target for pointless academics, commenters svh and asiaseen caution against giving such people ideas:
That’s this photograph here. Do feel free to grip the arms of your chair.
Having covered quite a few of these “decolonisation” efforts, which generally rely on a fig-leaf of widening access and removing barriers, it’s remarkable just how rarely any meaningful obstacle to access is actually mentioned. Typically, the humdrum is depicted as gruelling and somehow agonising, and motes are inflated to the size of boulders.
We were told, for instance, that racial minorities are being “deterred” from visiting the British countryside “due to deep-rooted, complex barriers.” Barriers such as the fact that rock-climbing instructors are usually white. And apparently this unremarkable state of affairs, in a white-majority country, is something that needs fixing.
Though it occurs to me that if a person with brown skin were being deterred from trying rock climbing by the fact that the instructor is likely to be white, then it seems somewhat unlikely that said person is interested in rock climbing to any significant extent. And a person deterred by such things may also want to reflect on their own racial assumptions. But we’re not supposed to mention those, at least not in an unflattering light.
The monstrous yet invisible forces preventing racial minorities from walking down country lanes also include “a lack of culturally appropriate provisions,” though, again, details as to what these culturally appropriate provisions might be, or indeed why they should be provided, seemingly at public expense, remain something of a mystery. Perhaps we should throw a few more millions at clown-shoe academics.
As I said in reply,
And likewise, were I to complain about being prevented from participating in some Korean cultural activity due to the number of Korean people I’d have to encounter while doing it, you might think me dubious in other ways. You might even wonder why I’d moved there in the first place.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Crikey, three buttons. Use of which keeps this blog afloat.
Rhymes.
Good song. I have similar tastes.
But I think the views of academia and the public radio stations go beyond aesthetics into ideology. And some of the “authentic” blues songs I’ve heard on those stations were of rather limited artistic merit…but they were authentic or historically authentic.
Speaking of music, clown-shoe academia, and racial neuroticism, let’s not forget the exquisite agonies of listening to rap while woke and white.
Via which, we encounter the implication that one of the most hazardous of words to use, and from which All Decent Non-Racist People are expected to recoil, is simultaneously one to which All Decent Non-Racist People are obliged to be drawn. Say, when listening to rap. Failure to enjoy endless repetition of the word in question is, we were assured, “the silencing of intellectuals in music,” and, inevitably, evidence of racism.
And even worse, singing along.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Which I suppose raises the question of whether the self-styled scholars in question were merely incompetent and unable to see the obvious contradiction, or incompetent and racially spiteful.
Answers, postcard, etc.
‘All of the above’ works.
I’m not too sure why they’re doing this at all.
Isn’t folk music supposed to be coming from the ‘folk’? Creating an academic construct and framing your ideas on what ‘folk music’ is kind of goes against the spirit of folk music I would argue.
I really don’t have a dog in this hunt because I think folk music blows, but what they are doing is nothing more than a naked attempt to inject themselves into yet another aspect of our culture. No one asked them to do it, but here we are.
If there was a president of folk music, I would suspect that *he* would tell these pseudo academics to go pound sand. Unfortunately, like many other aspects of our culture, there isn’t a structure or hierarchy that can put up a defense to this sort of attack.
Most good things in life developed organically, over time, and with no oversight. Academics of this ilk seem to hate that.
Folk music will survive this critique no doubt and go on sucking in its own special way, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
*– “he” seems appropriate here since their own investigation determined that most folk music listeners think of folk music as a male pursuit. Again, I don’t care! 🙂
[ Pours gin and tonic, monitors lawn for squirrels. ]
Now remembering the day my brother-in-law dragged us to a classic car show. My interest in the carburettors and camshafts of yesteryear is pretty limited, practically non-existent, and I don’t think I came home any wiser. But he was very enthusiastic, tirelessly so.
And the lunch was good.
…I looked for Whitby gin but, no luck.
The Original Edition and Prince of Darkness are both very drinkable.
[ Sips gin and tonic. ]
Sigh.
[ Resists temptation to begin day drinking. ]
After a day of being a scintillating host, despite enduring 24°C weather, with 60% humidity, I think I deserve one.
[ Sips gin, fondles glass suggestively. ]
It’s even hotter and more humid here. Plus I’ve been dealing with the HOA member from hell. Day drinking is a temptation, but I don’t want to begin the downward spiral into wasting away in Margaritaville.
Now you’re just tormenting me.
[ Clink of ice. ]
[ Glares across the Atlantic. ]
despite enduring 24°C weather, with 60% humidity
That’s not even 80F! (Only reason I know that is in basic chem class we used 25C as standard temperature, and that’s 77F). You wouldn’t want to be in the American South right now then. Currently 98F and 40% humidity, with the overnight lows around 23C. Tomorrow is going to be worse, and I have field work to do. Going to try to get up with the farmers and get out there while it is only 24C. [ducks]
[ Dabs brow, wrings out handkerchief. ]
Insta-lanche.
[ Raises hands in futile attempt at conciliation. ]
[ Abandons attempt. Buys air tix to Dagestan where my efforts might actually bear fruit. ]
Quick! Hide the breakables and spread tarps!
[ Looks around. ]
Oh wait, that’s what David does every morning before opening.
In regards to 10/7 a leftist proclaimed “This is what decolonization looks like”.
I’ve not heard that disputed.
Well, offing all the Muslim colonizers would be a useful form of decolonization. . . .
You said a dirty word, choice. There neither is, nor should be, any such thing as choice. We are all pinballs in a giant Pachinko machine, merely banging around the socially constructed pins on our way to our ultimate fate. It is Plato’s golden children that are tasked with the distasteful but necessary labor of adjusting the pins, for our own good, of course. Be ever so grateful.
Here’s one you can somewhat easily do in your head, if you can do math in your head…which I am decreasingly able to do…but…learned from trips to Europe, etc…take the commie degrees (24 in this case), double it (48), subtract 10% of that number (4.8 but for ease of use round up to 5), subtract that number from the doubled value (48 – 5 = 43), and add 32 (43 + 32 = 75). In your lab example, 50 – 5 + 32 = 77.
I think non-white ethnic groups should quit appropriating the English language in their music. They should only use their own authentic language. Otherwise they’re obviously colonisers who are ripping of the indigenous poeple’s word resources.
The Original Edition and Prince of Darkness are both very drinkable.
Noticed a “Navy Strength” offering–not sure I want to know–I imagine it must be strong enough to endure a good buggering at sea.
…take the commie degrees…
Yeah, about that.
[ Tries to imagine a world where SNL is funny again ]
Finnish death metal and you will like it.
To be fair, Sabaton is awesome.
the italicised words are from the stirring ballad, The Coasts of High Barbary
I’ll just leave this here.
Musical fusion works well when the two genres share similar themes. The credit song from Justified mashes up gangster rap and bluegrass in much the same way the show mashes up Western gunslinger fiction and modern crime noir.
50 yrs ago I attended a bluegrass festival in North Carolina. Some of the musicians had come down out of the hills and were real bluegrass musicians, not TV ones. It was great. White but great. Bluegrass and other fold music led to modern country but also lots of rock and roll.
American gospel could be considered black “folk music” and it gave rise to lots of modern music.
During the pandemic when sea shanties hit the internet, some wag got some POC (US I believe) to listen to it and they loved it. (small sample of course)
In Kenya, there is a thriving country music scene, all native people playing country. hahahaha and it was their idea, the west didn’t even know much less cause it.
About that about that, see my reply on X there. Though perhaps you already knew that. Fahrenheit uber alles.
We attended a fiddler’s convention last week here in north GA. The banjo guy from the movie Deliverance lives in the next county over. My banjo playing barber knows him.
“practicing his lady moves” apparently white men still can’t dance even in a dress. who knew?
Neither a lady nor a gentleman.
‘Cause you’re not allowed to say “white and great”. Never forget that.
If that’s “18th century British Navy strength”, then it’s diluted with water and toxic chemicals. And with every case you get a box of weevil-y hard tack and wormy cheese.
An American ex-pat defends the British freak-out over warm temps.
Now, that’s just poor planning.
There’s not a lot to misinterpret. It’s anti-white bigotry.
As shown in the links in the post, the term decolonisation does seem to attract a high concentration of deeply obnoxious and dysfunctional people. The kinds of people whose abilities are unimpressive and whose motives are not benign.
As I said here, regarding noted decoloniser Ms Xahra Saleem:
I tend to think of “decolonisation” as a gleeful scorning and undermining, generally by moral inadequates, of a host society, its cultural institutions, standards, and so forth. A parasitic self-insertion process, a grift, via which, the undeserving acquire status and leverage, with which to browbeat others. A kind of catnip for the racially spiteful, and the racially neurotic.
And it’s not difficult to see why proponents of such pernicious woo might wish to conceal both their motives and the typical effects of their activities. At some point, presumably, the word will be swapped for something more modish and less contaminated.
See also “equity.” The practical results of which are illustrated quite vividly here.
Decolonization is an urge to purge, to purify the culture of a malign influence. The way the Nazis wanted to extirpate anything that wasn’t Teutonic.
Help me find a historic example of a purge being anything but disastrous. Mao’s fanaticism about purging China of the “four olds” led to possibly the biggest slaughter in human history.
Some of the proponents of “decolonization” think they’re being compassionate and empathetic, but all too many know exactly where purges lead, and they’re gunning for it.
It seems to me that enthusiasts of decolonisation are either credulous and hopelessly unrealistic, and therefore unfit for any kind of leverage over others; or simply resentful and malevolent, insatiably so. And therefore unfit for any kind of leverage over others.
In either case, the word should immediately trigger an alert for, at the very least, incoming horseshit.
First up against the wall.
That video is incredible. It’s fucking insane.
Well, yes. ‘Tis rather. But it does, I think, capture something quite important about the psychology in play. The root mindset of “decolonisation” devotees. And you really don’t want that shit on the carpet.
Now, imagine the kinds of people to whom that might appeal.
will folk music that came to Britain with other cultures also be studied for equally erroneous attitudes to white people? If not, then that study may not be good science, but skewed by the preconceptions of the researchers about the *intentions* of folk music of just one nationality.
Look, none of this matters. What matters is that the Vols brought home the NCAA World Series trophy to Rocky Top. Excuse me whilst I sit with great contentment at the outcome.
From a comment in the incoming horseshit link:
That was in 2016. Roughly eight years ago. It doesn’t look like the “to save the whole” is going to happen. The universities, (formerly) great ones like Columbia, Harvard, and even MIT are rotting. If you were told this was the inevitable path for said institutions eight years ago, would you have believed it? Or would the messengers of such news been run out of town?
Now you’re just screaming.