On a bitter cold night in January, on the second floor of a rambling Victorian house south of Prospect Park, folk singers with guitars sang one after another, sotto voce, some entirely indistinct.
It was almost melancholy. There are no larger roles for these living room singers to grow into, no institutions for them to lead, no children for them to pass their way of life down to. All they have is their sincerity, which sometimes manifests as dry humor or irony, and yet, their music is true, it is true without being great or passionate, it is true because no one needs it but the singers themselves.
This is not the folk music of a distinct folk, music that passes a collective soul from generation to generation, nor is it the music of the 1960s American folk revival, which believed it could launch the collective soul into a new age. At most the songs reach out to one other person, and they reach out only to reflect upon the experience of reaching. The common refrain is that life is an unending, unedifying parade of sensations, and the music serves to capture as closely as possible what it feels like to feel, and to turn it into sound.
Today's songs are so subjective that they have no moral function.
Has this been the endgame all along? To strip away every external sense of meaning until there is nothing left except what is felt from moment to moment?
The guests who filled the dining room, the sitting room, the kitchen and the hall, holding beers and nodding their heads along to the music, despite living on a de-industrialized, over-educated, indebted, and atheistic prayer, were there among their own, and the atmosphere was warm. Yet the pervasive liberal relativism rendered opinions and criticism pointless, and there would be no discussion afterward of what was moving or difficult, because such music is born of the lull of one's own tender helplessness, a temporary emotional nostalgia. The effect of the music on the audience ends when the last notes are played.
If this is the music of the people, the genuine expression of America's largest class, its middle, it reveals a disconcerting reality: that we are a people completely unmoored. Not a word is spoken of action, of ideals or motivation, of anything beyond a given moment, as if there were nothing to life beyond one’s own immediate consciousness and no agency to influence or change anything.
None of the singers are to be blamed. In fact, this may be one of the last forms of spontaneous musical idiom to come out of America and will die with the generation that is now aging out of being young and fresh enough to perform. But this is it, these are the commoners of a cosmopolitan society, this is the folk—and this is all the folk experiences, this is all that they have to say.
