Over the last week or so, I’ve had a bit of a squabble on a newsgroup on the Interpipes. The person in question – let’s call him Man de Ramparts – expressed some deep disappointment at the willingness of a particular folk media outlet to occasionally devote some space to an artist – let’s call him Rocky Kindapopster – who doesn’t really match the folk profile. I certainly agreed that Mr. Kindapopster didn’t match the folk profile particularly well, but I took umbrage at Mr. Ramparts’ apparent need to draw a big black line between “folk artist” and Mr. Kindapopster.
That is, for Mr. Ramparts, it wasn’t enough for Mr. Kindapopster to be less appropriate for this media outlet than, say, Woody Guthrie – Mr. Kindapopster had to be categorically inappropriate in some way. Katie bar the door, world’s going to hell in a handbasket, that sort of thing. Now, I tried to be nice. And those of you who know me will understand that, over a long correspondence with someone who’s just plain wrong, “tried” is the operative word. Let’s just say that I was a little less respectful of his inability to make a whole lot of sense than I should have been, and leave it at that.
Now, it should be clear to you, my faithful readers, why I’d take umbrage at this sort of thing: I, myself, am not exactly Woody Guthrie. And I’d like to think that this generous community doesn’t much care. But that still begs the question of exactly what was wrong with what Mr. Ramparts was trying to do, and I think the answer to that question is absolutely clear.
See, it’s all about the categories. Some categories have clear boundaries; some don’t. A square, for instance, is a 2-dimensional object with four equal-length sides and four right angles. If you lack any of those properties, you’re not a square. And each of those properties itself has a clear boundary: if one of the angles is 89 degrees rather than 90, it’s not “kind of” a square – it’s just not a square. Period. On the other hand, what’s the difference between a pile and a hill, or a hill and a mountain? We all know there’s a difference, but sometimes it’s hard to say. There are prototypes for the category – Bunker Hill is a hill, Mt. Everest is a mountain – but there are other things which are less good examples of hills and mountains, and some things which are kind of in-between.
Unfortunately for Mr. Ramparts, almost every category we encounter in the world is like hills or mountains. In fact, many of them are worse. They’re what Wittgenstein would call “family resemblances”: there are a range of properties which characterize the category, but none of them are necessary by themselves, even for the prototypes, and none of them are enough by themselves. Games are a good example of this. Some games require multiple players, some don’t; some games have a winner and a loser, some don’t; and so on. For just about anything you can think of that characterizes a game, you can come up with something that you’re willing to call a game – something which is a good example of a game – which doesn’t have that characteristic.
Folk music is unquestionably one of these “family resemblance” categories. Is it respect for tradition? Lineage back to folk royalty? Endorsement by major folk media outlets? Insightful lyrics? The particular topic? The chord structure, instrumentation, or arrangement? Depending on what kind of folk music you’re thinking of, or what folk artist you’re thinking of, any one of these things might loom as very important. But none of them are definitive. And as a result, folk music can be more or less prototypical – but it’s basically impossible to say that Rocky Kindapopster is absolutely not folk music.
Like Mr. Ramparts, you may not like this state of affairs. But then, most likely, you wouldn’t be reading this, because I’m probably another part of your worst nightmare, with my vaguely poppy rhythms and my distate for mining disaster songs. But more likely, like me, you’ve heard a lot of different music at folk venues, and as far as you’re concerned, we’re all just folks. Kinda.