Maybe All Music Is Folk Music

When you’re an aging fortysomething rocker, there is no narrative more tempting than “new music these days isn’t as good” or “the music industry is in decline”. These narratives just feel truthy when you’re my age. Even though you don’t have a systematic comparison—because you listen to 0.0002% of the new music coming out of the major labels—something just feels right about the idea that new music sucks, that the youth of today are starved for the brilliance and innovation you somehow blessedly enjoyed when you were 16.

There are a lot of Nirvana shirts on a lot of teenagers where I live, and seeing them vindicates this sense: see? The kids know what is good. I was so lucky. How blessed I am. Yeah, right.

However, it is a matter of historical record that around 2000 or so the big record labels, sensing the oncoming wave of destruction represented by digital music, clamped down on predictable profits by streamlining and tightening up their process. And famously, since them the charts have often been dominated by “retro” releases, Zeppelin and Johnny Cash re-releases sell more than almost every other working artist alive. This somehow feels wrong.

And to just give this cranky fortysomething spirit a little voice, here: it is hard to ignore that the 1990s witnessed an unusual explosion of creativity and innovation in the music world. This is when a huge variety of hip-hop styles went mainstream, when techno roared out of the underground clubs and on to the radio, when grunge actually did destroy old rock’n’roll cliches, when labels found themselves trying to follow what the young artists were doing, rather than lead their chosen artists towards more predictable profits.

There was even a renaissance in folk-punk, as Flogging Molly, the Murphys, Gogol Bordello and eventually Mischief Brew (2000) took the genre into new places. It is just a fact that in 2024 every band in our genre sounds extremely similar to one of those four groups. Us included.

But now, you should step back and ask a very important question: why is innovation so important? Why do we think that a person’s teenage years should be spent listening to something new, something that sounds different from what came before? Why do we worry so much about whether something is “Fresh” or “played out”? What is wrong with Johnny Cash on the charts in 2024?

And so this was the red pill moment I had recently: maybe nothing is wrong with it. After all, isn’t this idea—that the musical experience of young people needs to be different from that of their parents—the enemy of the spirit of folk music?

“Folk” is a weird category and we shouldn’t fall for the myth that there was this pristine time with no innovation where everyone just sang the same four religious chants every day until they died. But it is useful as a term that marks out a certain ethos of transmission: this music is rooted in our ways of life and so it is important that young people learn it. You can’t support this but also think that young people have to smash and remake everything that came before them.

That ethos of transmission, after all, is exactly what we are trying to revive by playing real, actual polka music at our shows, or by singing sea shanties to hordes of happy, bouncy 18-30 year olds.

So then why am I so attached to the idea that a 16 year-old should be listening to something that differs, radically, from the music of their ancestors?

And rejecting this idea leads us to a startling conclusion: maybe classic rock radio stations are folk music stations. Maybe Spotify’s “90s retro” channel is a folk channel. Maybe those Zeppelin re-releases are folk re-releases. Because… all music is folk music.

Let me illustrate. The 1990s saw the release of the incredible, sometimes silly but always rewatchable Forrest Gump. I grew up listening to that soundtrack—”For What it’s Worth”, “Fortunate Son”, “Hound Dog”—and the film was like a window into my parents’ youth. My mother talked about how she attended antiwar protests like those in the film, my dad talked about siting in his basement and endlessly practicing the riff from “Purple Haze”. This was a way of life, with many positive and important elements that need to be passed down. The music helps to do that. So it is folk music. So kids should listen to it.

I still maintain that the way we are now encouraged to experience music is problematic: music consumption is increasingly isolated and individualized, and for most it only becomes communal when the listener is expected to stand and stare, slack-jawed with their phone out, at a $100,000 light show that is illuminating a tiny figure prancing around beside some fireworks and singing to a backing track. Not great.

And there may be ways of life that should not be passed down; pop’s overwhelming obsession with romantic relationships arguably leads whole generations to believe that what matters most in life is gooshy bubbly romantic fee fees and not achievement, commitment, adventure or nurturing others. This, as any functional person over 35 will tell you, is a lie.

But still: who cares if new music isn’t all that new? Isn’t it kind of awesome that punk, for example, has this vast pantheon of heroic music ready for each new generation to discover? Isn’t it amazing that every 15 year-old can listen for the first time and be introduced to the scene, to the way of life, the mosh pit, the experimentation, the noise and the danger? Why do we have to innovate on that?

Literally right now, as he does his silly idiotic things, my small kid is marching around the house shouting various Sea Shanties, occasionally switching to his favorite punk songs (Bad Religion’s “Sorrow” and the Ramones “Rockaway Beach”). That’s transmission, man. That’s folk music. Oi. Oh. Let’s (Roll and) go.