The Death of the Second Folk Revival

1.

If you’ve heard Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, then you’ve heard the beginning of what I call the Second Folk Revival. Keep this under your hat, now, lest the adults find out: folk music isn’t just a style, it’s a method. It’s an honest-to-God philosophy. And that’s what Lester Bangs meant when he said, “It’s all folk music.” Springsteen and Nebraska and that wintry day in 1982 didn’t invent, but did transform, the folk philosophy, raising from its ashes — burned the day Dylan plugged in, according to some — the folk revival. (As with most things halfway original, the folk revival needed fewer adjectives and no capitalization.)

Strangely enough, this resurrection had a lot to do with a machine: the handy little Teac Portastudio 144. Proper nouns with numeric modifiers don’t normally conjure folkie images, but the oddball collection that is the body of American folk music has always been transmitted by way of recording devices. You can’t ignore it. No other means could build a one-way bridge from the rural folk who lived those songs to the city folk who decided to live in, or through, those songs. Roll ahead to the late ’70s and you’ve got the Teac, a compact four-track recorder that gave the musician immediacy and decent quality in a box small enough to tuck under the arm, plop on the bed, hitch to a mic, and unleash demons.

The power of recording was put into the musician’s hands, and this is why I draw the line at January 3, 1982, the day Springsteen recorded most of what would become Nebraska. In his New Jersey home, the Boss had Mike Batlin, his guitar tech, set up the Portastudio in a spare room (pun intended) and proceeded to lay down what he believed to be demos, tunes so bare and forlorn that Hank Williams would have been proud. Two tracks for the live recording of guitar and vocals, two more tracks for overdubs — a glockenspiel here, a siren’s harmonica there.

Of course, Bruce Springsteen was a world-famous, corporate-backed rock and roll star when he recorded Nebraska. (This, in fact, is largely why he recorded Nebraska — that conflict of market forces and artistic intimacy would foreshadow further developments, too, which I’ll get to.) Also un-folkie: part of Nebraska’s singular sound is due to an Echoplex, which gives the songs that reverbed, long-ago feel — a very conscious, crafted recreation of a sound. And though, to this day, critics trip over themselves to compare the songs to Alan Lomax field recordings, or the collection of tunes Harry Smith put together on the Anthology of American Folk Music, anyone with an ear can tell that the Nebraska songs are indebted, and perhaps spiritually dedicated, to Jimmy Rogers, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, and the ghosts of rockabilly legends gone to rest in their dreary hometowns, skulking about like adolescents on the empty streets that trap them once again.

If these things are true, why the hell does the Second Folk Revival begin here?

The method. That little machine. The apparently simple act of sitting down and firing up the Recorder of Dreams. Intimacy without any guile (because it’s harder to fool yourself when no one’s listening), and immediacy without the evanescence of a live stage show.

And the fact that every tired punk rocker and his sister heard Nebraska, and copied the approach for themselves, took it into their own hands. The method further refined the style, with the added bonus of not having to wait for some folklorist to come poking around your barn.

2.

Since then, the Second Folk Revival has bounced along pretty quietly, never entirely going away, and never really finding a place in the spotlight. Sure, we had a spate of unplugged authenticity tests, the height of which may have been Nirvana covering Leadbelly in sonic shackles that only exposed the core of Kurt Cobain’s beautifully tortured howl, but let’s face it, the minimalist fashion of the confessional singer-songwriter left us with spotty results. It never connected to history in the way Springsteen had on Nebraska, and for every outlier like Michelle Shocked’s The Texas Campfire Tapes or PJ Harvey’s Four-Track Demos, there was a centrist piece of fluff like Jewel’s “Who Will Save Your Soul?” and Poison’s appearance on Unplugged.

The folk process, though, became an integral part of the music industry, feeding the underground and challenging corporate structures. The rawness of a college band’s sloppy, noisy, poorly-mixed record was a hell of a relief from the polished glitz of FM radio, and that was possible only because recording became cheaper. So did producing, especially if you did it yourself. And so did reproduction. It’s maybe the word of our age — socially, politically, artistically — but here I mean a simple thing: you could get your tapes, then your CDs, reproduced for pretty cheap. College stations would stack your record next to the Pixies, and you would have the admittedly somewhat illusory belief that you belonged to this community of music. I mean, for God’s sake, look! A CD with your name on it! That was real.

In the spring of 1993, I was singing in my small liberal arts college’s choir, because…well, I’ve never really been sure why. At one rehearsal, a scrawny guy shuffled into the rehearsal studio with his drummer, who was also his band’s recording engineer. They played a song we’d learned the parts for the previous day, a song called “Pave,” the final track on what would become Ugly Stick’s first CD, Absinthe. The scrawny one — David Holm — went over the parts, while the drummer, a stocky guy named Bill Heingartner, worked up a portable reel-to-reel 8-track, and within an hour we’d recorded a choral, Beach Boys-esque backing track consisting of the words “I really wanna get to know ya.”

Sixteen years later, around Columbus, Ohio, Absinthe is something of a legend, for reasons far greater than “Pave” and especially the Bass II line that I sang. But that afternoon, no one was thinking of that. At least I wasn’t. What I was thinking was the real lesson of the folk philosophy: Even I — a bumbling son of a bitch if there ever was one — even I can do this.

3.

Digression:

Anything too big, too wide, too deep scares the hell out of us. What seemed to exist naturally as a new method — what had resulted from the fusion of folk and punk philosophies, fueled by technology — was eventually ordained, codified, and divorced from the method. It became an aesthetic. And like a word in one of George Carlin’s stand-up routines, “independent” came to mean something entirely different from, well, what it means. Instead of describing a process of recording and distribution, these days it signifies a sound, and maybe that’s why it’s reduced so often to “indie”. It’s all too common to hear major label bands described as “indie”. If nothing else confirms Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic, this does. Word meanings change and reflect that continual tug-of-war between forces; in this case, consumerism and the folk philosophy. It’s as if consumerism couldn’t stand the notion of its lesser cousin having a vitality all his own, and so absorbed him (bought him out?), calculated his cost efficiency and analyzed his language, and spit out an approximation suitable for car commercials.

That’s why it makes so much sense that Nebraska started all of this. Few other artists have pitted genuine populist sensibilities against the commercialized version of populism within their own songs (I give you “Badlands”). Springsteen’s entire career has sought meaning in this conflict, even on the most self-consciously “folk” of his records, like The Seeger Sessions, and I get the sense he believes it can never be resolved. After all, the release of Nebraska was an enormous fuck-you to the record industry from the man who then turned around and gave it Born in the U.S.A..

4.

Now, the increased availability of recording platforms means that every re-hashed Grateful Dead rip-off band and every self-indulgent singer-songwriter can put out an album. In the end, I suppose, we have to ask if that’s a good thing. If you’re politically sympathetic to democracy, you’ll probably answer, “Yes,” though chances are you won’t be buying that local band’s CD anytime soon.

But advances like the Teac also ushered in new challenges. Increased competition, for instance. An artist can theoretically reach more people via the Internet, so long as she can actually get someone to find her in the ocean of videos on YouTube featuring investment bankers in their rec rooms playing Zeppelin riffs. And maybe I’m just paranoid, but what does get noticed seems even more disposable. Whether the result of overall lackluster songwriting and performance, or a matter of the dangers of mass production, today’s songs seem transparently like what they physically are: blips of data, streams of electronic flotsam. Even those in the folk style. Playing a banjo will not save you.

The other day I was trying to introduce postmodernism to a class of freshman college students, most of them science majors, and I compared Barthes’s famous “death of the author” idea to legitimately and illegitimately free file sharing and mp3’s. Did the students look any differently on the songs they downloaded compared to the songs on a CD they’d paid for? Most of them said yes, and one kid put it beautifully: “When I think of the song, I don’t think of the artist. I just think of the song, and the friend who tipped me to it.”

Sounds familiar. Because I can’t for the life of me remember who actually wrote “The Coo Coo Bird”, one of my favorite folk tunes. Half of those songs have no authors. I do know that it’s because of Harry Smith that I heard the song at all.

Maybe there is a consumerist avalanche and the disposability that comes with it, but I’m beginning to get the feeling that we’re coming back around to the situation that existed at the start of the 1900s, when songs were well-known but no technology existed to impress upon us the pop star, or even an “artist” who’d written the songs. And maybe this is all as it should be. Maybe it was always a lie to believe that the immediacy of process would automatically lead to songs of worth, or to refuse to admit that those folk songs we hold dear — the ones Harry Smith collected, the ones every beatnik learned on Washington Square in 1956 — were sometimes flotsam, too. Maybe all we’ve done with what we call folk music is the same codification performed by the corporations with indie rock; we’ve gotten scared of how big it can get, how far-reaching and indefinable.

And maybe the good to come of this is a reorientation toward the benefits of a localized scene, the community of music which has always been at the root of folk music. Tunes were traded, stolen, lyrics lifted, transposed, tweaked, and what mattered most was that method, that dialogue. At least in a local community, it’s (a little) less about competition, and there’s a human face to ward off disposability.

5.

The folk philosophy has always been about a tenuous kind of equality, epitomized by the notion that at any moment, the performer could cede to the audience. And isn’t that precisely what I’ve described above? If the Second Folk Revival put the power of recording into the hands of the artists, what’s been happening these past five years or so has put that power into the hands of everyone: cell phones that record video, ProTools and Cakewalk, Movie Maker and MySpace.

The folk philosophy still lurks under the sheen and easy populism of pop music — the kind of populism couched in lame rosaries of “anyone can make it” provided they’re skinny and test well with the 13-18 market. It still runs against the current of those massive, multi-national corporations, just like it always has. And it’s going to test our beliefs about authority and ownership, for better or worse. It’s too early to say what will happen. Right now there’s a brewing dichotomy in American culture. The underground seems more accessible while American Idol keeps chugging along. Is this a new discussion? Not really. But the context has changed, and that change means the beginning of a new, unnamed folk philosophy, and the death of the Second Folk Revival.