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.
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