D CDs #471: Nowt So Queer As Folk

This one was a bastard to write. I just don't get folk. 

Wait, no; that's not it.

I don't get my reactions to folk.

Part of this is the variance. The best folk is transcendent - a perfect alloy of history, politics and raw emotion so strong, you can fully believe what Woody Guthrie's guitar kept telling people. Bad folk is revanchist, ramshackle nonsense, endless self-indulgent variations of saying absolutely nothing. White people's jazz.

That the gap between best and worst can be measured in (bright) light years is true of every musical genre, naturally. What make folk unusual is how completely I can't get a handle on what makes the difference.

It's tempting to say a lot of it is just sticking "rock" on the end. In practice, though, that just seems to mean "a plug is involved". Which does help, yes, and it's vaguely amusing to me that it turns out I'd discounted the Newport Folk Festival hecklers as demonstrable fucking idiots years before knowing the details of who they were. That doesn't really get us anywhere, though; not when artists as diverse* as Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and (as a protean form) the Beach Boys all got to claim the term.

I want to take I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight as a case study. See if it can get us to a unified theory of good folk. It seems pretty clearly in the upper tiers of the genre, after all. Perhaps we can establish a yardstick here, and use it to beat the fash-loving banjo botherers unaccountably allowed to get famous on folk’s farthing.

So: reasons …Lights Tonight folk rocks.

• It knows the past was awful.

Nostalgia is a disease, and not one that only hurts those infected. Fuck folk that focuses its gaze at our great-grandfathers’ navels. …Bright Lights seems to make this mistake, on a surface reading, with the protagonist of  “End Of The Rainbow” lamenting the state of today’s world, compared to his childhood. The point though is that the narrator is obviously pathetic, unable to distinguish his own problems from that of a newborn baby. Bad news for you between breast sessions, mate; your sister’s a whore. Try not to find that too hideous a revelation.

No. This album’s soul resides not with an imagined dead rainbow, but with the poor little beggar girl, forced to make her money briefly distracting the rich dickheads she holds in contempt. 

If there's a romance to the past here, it's only in the sense we all know it; we didn't always know just how difficult it is to get through the years.

Speaking of which...

• It knows the present is awful.

Tossing coins to disabled beggars dancing in the street isn't something we see much of any more, but it's not like abasement to the rich as a survival mechanism has gone away.  Capitalism still kills us all by inches, until it chooses to kill us outright. Fascism escaped its just garrotting by Guthrie's guitar strings. "Withered And Died" tackles this head on; we emerge butterfly-like from our teenage years, and like butterflies, we're all too easily crushed.

But there's hope here, too. It's a canny move to follow "Withered And Died" with "I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight". We switch gears from the misery of what life has taught us, to how we might be able to set it aside. Yes, a night on the town is just a temporary solution, but they're all just temporary solutions.

This tug-of-war between existential melancholy and finding hope in revelry is critical to the first half of the album. It's right there in the opening track; "When I Get To The Border" suggests that if you can't go down fighting, the next best thing is to go down drinking while on the run. If the album seems balanced between its twin concerns, well, just remember which song got to be the title track.

• It’s clear-eyed about getting blurry-eyed.

Alcohol is a recurring concern of ...Lights Tonight, operating at various times as both an accompaniment to misery, and a way of warding it away. The narrator of the title track can't wait to enjoy "drunken nights rolling on the floor", while that of "...Border" tells the friends he's leaving behind that, when he eventually dies, they can basically assume it was drink that did it. 

Folk feels intimately connected with alcohol. Hang around any pub that prides itself on its collection of real ales (fake ales continuing to be one of the greatest crises Britain must face), and you run the constant risk someone will pull out a concealed mandolin, to fire crotchets at you without consent. I'm not sure what the link is between self-indulgent jam sessions, songs about hills, and people who get ludicrously snooty about their dipsomania, but it's definitely there.

...Lights Tonight touches on this as it closes out its first half. Once again, this is impeccable sequencing. "Down Where The Drunkards Roll" doesn't just round off the loose but undeniable thematic cohesion on Side A**. It follows directly from "...Lights Tonight" itself, showing us that song's narrator, and those like her, through the eyes of others. Kids looking grand until they get themselves fucked up. Lonely people who find comfort in the bottle because it eluded them everywhere else. People who crave the delusions drink delivers. There's no condemnation here, though. No simple desultory philippic, this. All we find is sympathy. An awareness of shared sadness; of wine that runs thicker than blood. They're all just temporary solutions. The lies come so easily because the truth is so terrible.

• It doesn't outstay its welcome.

This is a zippy platter (certainly, it's far less self-indulgent than this essay). Ten songs in barely thirty-five minutes. There's a tightness here that counts for a lot; the sprawling cycles of irrelevant variation that mars so much self-indulgent folk is nowhere to be found. It doesn't hurt of course that, the one time the album feels like it's sliding into jamland, it's with the sublime melee of solos that carries the opening track into the distance. 

The slimness of it all also helps with the one real criticism worth making here: it's a pretty front-loaded disc. None of the offerings in its back half are actually bad - "The Little Beggar Girl" in particular cuts plenty deep enough. Still, there's a noticeable slackening of momentum past the halfway mark, as a determined march through hope and horror slows and stumbles. You can feel the album bleeding its last energy out as it topples to the dirt just beside the finish post.

Still, I could never get endings right either. And another way to say ...Lights Tonight collapses in the final seconds is to say it left everything out on England's green fields.

Surely that's the capstone of the structure holding all this together. Surely that's folk as fuck.

Seven and a half tentacles.

*Within the already established narrow ethnic corridor, that is.

** Only "Calvary Cross" feels somewhat out of place here, though this could well be at least partially related to the extremely strong association I have with that song.