Tag Archive: Folklore


Take a walk on the weird side

Filed under: Books, Health and fitness, Music, Poetry, Travel — Leave a comment
December 2, 2019

The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane (Penguin Books, 2013)
The Old Weird Albion by Justin Hopper (Penned In The Margins,2017)

Screen shot 2019-12-02 at 21.59.29If Robert MacFarlane were to say “I’m just poppng out for a walk”, chances are you wouldn’t see him again for days, weeks, even months. Not for him a gentle stroll in the park. We’re talking serious trekking here. He tells us nothing about the equipment or supplies he takes with him, but it’s plain that he sets off prepared to sleep rough and scavenge for food if necessary.

Being fully immersed in the natural world is what drives him and gives him sustenance. In ‘The Old Ways’ the writer wanders around England and Scotland and also roams abroad (Palestine,Spain and Tibet). Some of these adventures border on the reckless as he challenges himself against the elements or strikes out onto what he knows full well to be inhospitable terrain. MacFarlane regards “walking as enabling sight and thought rather than encouraging retreat and escape”. In other words, it’s a serious business and not just a gentle recreational pursuit. Continue reading →

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HYPNAGOGIC POP vs POPLORE

Filed under: Books, Music — Leave a comment
September 7, 2009

I like the letter to this month’s Wire magazine by Vivien Priestley of Walsington, UK who wrote in response to David Keenan’s provocative (and, I have to say, confusing) article on what he calls Hypnagogic pop. This is the name he gives to the strand of (mostly) American music which blends together elements of the nation’s old weird past and more recent pop culture. (It has already been nominated by some as the ‘worst genre created by a journalist’)

The letter points out that musicians like The Skaters, Pocahaunted & Ariel Pink  are “wrestling with various versions of the past and trying to get beyond a merely nostalgic revivalism”. The writer asks  “……has there ever been a moment in music before now where sound has been so completely soaked in traces of the past without actually sounding like anything other than the present, or the future?”

This question ties in well with a book I’ve been reading by Gene Bluestein on folk and pop in American culture called  ‘Poplore’ (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

It’s a study which looks at what we mean by these catchall terms ‘Folk’ and ‘Pop’ and, in part, also seeks to lay to rest the myth that the US has no authentic Folk tradition.

Continue reading →
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