Cheerful music...

[helen99]

I remember when there was a big flap about I Used to Love Her by Guns n Roses.

Then today I heard Knoxville Girl by the Louvin Brothers, about which there never was the slightest flap.

And then of course there is the Finnish band Värttinä, who wrote a song about a woman who ate her children, and another song with the following lyrics: "I throw off sparks, I tear from my tongue words as twisted as tree-roots. I poke the fire of hatred with my words, I hurl hate back at you. My mood blackens, blacker than the mind of any mortal. My loathing drips blood, my pain slashes, curses, drenches with pus."

Um, All-rightee then. So anyway.

It's funny that people singled out GNR's "I used to love her," when in fact much folk music worldwide (for example, music from Finland and Tennessee) goes where that song never dared to go.

Comments

[dancinglights.livejournal.com]

Similarly, I recently acquired a children's-story version of one of the Kalevala. Reading through reviews and the book itself, I kept thinking "wow, this really is more an anthropology footnote than any kind of kid's book! There's suicide and baby-abandoning and dying in the snow and all sorts of stuff spelled out plainly in here." And then, "wait, this is centuries-old fireside tale folk poetry already cleaned up! What sanitized crap have we gotten used to?"

It's funny what we overlook in traditional things we've grown used to, or can look back on as quaint carryovers from a less civilized time. Yet new bloody stories are controversy, or somehow generally accepted as "bad XTREME stories not suitable for most people". People are silly.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

> what sanitized crap have we gotten used to?

Hooray for reading the Kalevala and other unsanitized texts in all their multifaceted glory. I think some of the darker folk tales were created to scare girls into never going down to the Bonnie Brae (or the greenwood, or the foaming brine) with strange men. (Too late)...

Edit - Come to think of it, much of Varttina's music is inspired by or is taken from poetry in the Kalevala.

[quorpencetta.livejournal.com]

Hey, that Marc Gunn, I used to know him back in college. Sort of cute for an autoharp player.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Amazing. Those autoharp players are usually such a homely lot...

[lindsaybits]

It does amuse me that folks get themselves worked into such a tizzy about the scary/naughty/whatever lyrics in popular music, but they never really think twice about folk music. (And of course, now that i'm thinking about it, i can't come up with any examples.)

I think part of it is that we're less inclined to look closely at the things that we're familiar with.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

.. Or things that are historic in nature. I read all about people getting tossed into bogs in ancient Britain and it gives me the same uneasy feeling that hearing a dark folk song does, but it doesn't have the shock value of something that just happened.

The main examples I can think of are the Celtic song "The Two Sisters" and the Appalachian "The Butcher Boy". There's also a bunch of stuff involving Sweet William and Barbara Allen in which the protagonists always come to grief. Then there is invariably a "doleful ghost"...

[lindsaybits]

For that matter - fairy tales. The protagonist comes out good in the end, and the antagonist has their eyes pecked out by crows, or they're put into a barrel of tar and nails and then rolled down a steep hill into a river. Pretty gory stuff. Hardly Disney material.

That link, btw? Made of sheer awesomesauce. *bookmark*

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, fairy tales of all nationalities can be great horror. I was looking for a particular traditional tribal story but couldn't find it. I'll summarize it here --

Basically, dude is married to a lazy woman who doesn't pull her weight in the tribe, sits around doing nothing while everyone else works, etc. She enjoys going down to the lake to hang out and stare at the water. At some point a lake demon makes itself known to her, and long story short, they go at it. So.. Dude finds out, and beheads her. He doesn't want to upset his twins with this development, so he tells them she went away for a bit and serves "deer" stew for dinner that night. There are many variations of this theme in which children unwittingly consume a parent, and although it's usually not their fault, they usually suffer an ill fate because of their error... Not all tribal fairy tales are that ghastly, but most of them have some component of "do this and you're dead" to them.

Grimms Grimmest has some of the more popular dark fairy tales. I think there is a variation of this story in Grimms Grimmest.

[rangermorgiah.livejournal.com]

Well also, you're never going to hear that music on 98 Rock. I had never heard of the above before reading about it here. I think when something is widely distributed, and people from outside of that culture are exposed to it, then they freak out.

Of course, they still ignore the dark sides of their own cultural legacy, but Axel was just so very clear about it ;)

[helen99.livejournal.com]

No, no you're probably not going to hear the darker side of Folk on 98 rock. However, I did hear the Louvin Brothers song on 105.5 AM WAMU (listener supported Bluegrass), right there with the gospel and an occasional honkytonk... Sort of not what I expected. Listening to the song, my reaction was, omg, did I hear that right? What the hell is *wrong* with that songwriter?? It never occurred to me that they shouldn't play it though - I'm all in favor of playing any and all folk music uncensored - it's a historic thing!