State Of The Filk
Sep. 2nd, 2008 07:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
filkertomIn the Pegasus ballot thread below, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alverant asked me:
A secondary change, spurred on by those same people, is that there are more and more professional-level musicians in the filk rooms. We've always worried about our chops, we've always practiced, but we're getting more and more people who really challenge themselves to be as musically tight and artistically creative as they can be. And it shows. I cannot speak for other cons -- yet -- but going to OVFF or FKO is like going to a mini folk festival. You will hear a lot of fantastic music, you will hear some promising newcomers, and you will hear a lot of enthusiastic support for the music and musicians. Just slightly more bizarre subject matter, is all.
The culture has become even more closely-knit than it was when I first got into it back in 1985. At the beginning of Homecoming: MarCon 2005, I call the audience "My people... my tribe... my family." I meant it then, and I mean it even more now. Audiences are audiences, but the filk community has become almost literally a big extended family, and I count nearly all of my closest friends among them. (And the rest of my closest friends are filk fans who just don't go to cons like they used to.)
Of course more people will perform. Can't stop the signal, and all that. More to the point, we are discovered by more people every day. Fanfic and fan art are very well-known outlets of expression, but people always seem surprised and delighted that there's fan music as well.
And of course there will be more "big names". We're getting musicians, singers, songwriters, every bit as good as the mainstream. Back in the day -- and it wasn't all that long ago -- you had to work pretty hard to "be discovered", launch yourself in the coffeehouse circuit, drudge through whatever. Now there are many more conventions that offer music; now there's the internet. People like Seanan, Lemon Demon, and many others can and do hawk themselves in multiple media every day. I maintain this page, my main page, a MySpace page, a Podsafe Network page, the iTom blog, and CD Baby pages (which, thanks to digital distribution, leads to over two dozen other outlets, including Amazon and iTunes). Heck, three months ago no one had heard of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. (That one does have the advantage of a stellar cast and the Whedonverse behind it, but still.) There are lots of ways to find filk, and the more people who find us, the more big names we will have. To mutilate Mr. Warhol, we might all be big names someday.
From here, the future of filk looks pretty darn bright.
Your thoughts?
alverant asked me:You've been in filk a while, how do you think the filk songs changed in the past 10 years? How about the filk culture?I think the most blatant change of the past ten years in filk songs is that they sound less "folky" than they used to. Not exactly mainstream, but way more diverse in style, much more experimental. I chalk this up to the influence of people like Barry & Sally Childs-Helton, Ookla the Mok, and (if I may toot my own horn a bit) me, not to mention the incursion of the dementia artists. e.g., my peeps in The FuMP, neo-folkies like the Brobdingnagian Bards (who would be hardcore folk except for, say, doing "Freebird" on an autoharp) and the Bedlam Bards (same thing, except almost all they sing are Firefly songs), and the alt-folk-rock stuff being cranked out by the wonderful Seanan McGuire and Vixy & Tony and Lady Mondegreen and Brooke Lunderville and and and. I could name a bunch more names; easiest way to see it in action is to come to OVFF and hear what it sounds like. All the traditional folk stuff is there, still respected and still loved -- at least I love it -- but there's also more of an edge, an energy, every year, and it carries over to filk rooms at other cons.
Where do you see things going in the future? Do you think more people will perform? Will there be more big names?
A secondary change, spurred on by those same people, is that there are more and more professional-level musicians in the filk rooms. We've always worried about our chops, we've always practiced, but we're getting more and more people who really challenge themselves to be as musically tight and artistically creative as they can be. And it shows. I cannot speak for other cons -- yet -- but going to OVFF or FKO is like going to a mini folk festival. You will hear a lot of fantastic music, you will hear some promising newcomers, and you will hear a lot of enthusiastic support for the music and musicians. Just slightly more bizarre subject matter, is all.
The culture has become even more closely-knit than it was when I first got into it back in 1985. At the beginning of Homecoming: MarCon 2005, I call the audience "My people... my tribe... my family." I meant it then, and I mean it even more now. Audiences are audiences, but the filk community has become almost literally a big extended family, and I count nearly all of my closest friends among them. (And the rest of my closest friends are filk fans who just don't go to cons like they used to.)
Of course more people will perform. Can't stop the signal, and all that. More to the point, we are discovered by more people every day. Fanfic and fan art are very well-known outlets of expression, but people always seem surprised and delighted that there's fan music as well.
And of course there will be more "big names". We're getting musicians, singers, songwriters, every bit as good as the mainstream. Back in the day -- and it wasn't all that long ago -- you had to work pretty hard to "be discovered", launch yourself in the coffeehouse circuit, drudge through whatever. Now there are many more conventions that offer music; now there's the internet. People like Seanan, Lemon Demon, and many others can and do hawk themselves in multiple media every day. I maintain this page, my main page, a MySpace page, a Podsafe Network page, the iTom blog, and CD Baby pages (which, thanks to digital distribution, leads to over two dozen other outlets, including Amazon and iTunes). Heck, three months ago no one had heard of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. (That one does have the advantage of a stellar cast and the Whedonverse behind it, but still.) There are lots of ways to find filk, and the more people who find us, the more big names we will have. To mutilate Mr. Warhol, we might all be big names someday.
From here, the future of filk looks pretty darn bright.
Your thoughts?
