Aside from the fact that they were probably playing songs that other people had written, does that make it better? And what were they playing/singing? Not Beethoven string quartets, I'm guessing.
> What rang false to a degree about 60s folk music was that it was an
>imitation of earlier forms by people who were by then thoroughly
>urbanized. The same can be said of romanticisms in general. The
>answer to commodification is not to go back to the good old days.
>But those days did contain possibilites that the triumph of the
>market precludes, and should be reintegrated into any non-alienated
>society of the future.
There are lots of people making their own music now - thousands of little bands no one has ever heard of except locals, indie record labels, sharing of laptop-mixed MP3s, etc. It's not all Britney.
Doug
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In rural Ireland, even down to the first decades of the twentieth century, the favorite activities during a damp afternoon were a) masturbating, b) composing a song. At Irish gatherings, a common form of socializing was to go round robin, with each person in turn singing a solo. In Wales it was choral singing. I'm sure similar traditions existed in the Mississippi Delta and the Ozarks. Sometimes music was taken from song sheets, and later, from records. But authorship was often anonymous, and lyrics were altered from person to person. This isn't a romanticization of the past. This is simply how people entertained themselves in pre-media times. This is a little different from going to a club, paying a cover charge, and listening to a band with all kinds of equipment, in a situation in which there is a strict dividing line between performer and audience, and the performers are hoping to be noticed and recorded on a commercial label. The closest thing we now have to a folk tradidion is gangsta rap.