FolkVsPop

I wrote the following many years ago.

I'm not 100% sure I still buy it.

In an era of AISlop and Playlistification you have to recognise powerful but subtle forces affecting music.

But I also don't reject it entirely. I think it's good to reject the knee jerk revulsion at new culture simple because older people hating on young people's music as without value, while the next generation to on to finding huge value in it, is such a cliche.

I don't believe in the difference between folk and pop. For me, they're the same.

But some people would argue that folk represents a pure popular form of music (with a popular vitality) while pop is degenerate, mass produced, commodity without value. The analogy is with the distinction between the object made by the craftsperson and the object made by machine in the factory.

I think this analogy breaks down. Recordings are made in factories, but music is still composed by the individual artists or small creative groups. (Or the general MusicalEcology I might add.)

Is there a real notion of industrially produced music? Yep, in the muzak, Motown, SAW type hit factories. But these are really small teams of craftspeople, organizationally more similar to other teams of professionals like lawyers or architects than Fordist mass-production.

Contrast :

• MusicPopulism

CategoryMusic, CategoryDesign