Anarchy 51/What have they done to the folk?

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What have they done
to the folk?

KEVIN McGRATH

One day you wake up and find that your minor­ity cult has mush­roomed. It may be your polit­ics, or your anti-polit­ics, it may be a place, it may be some activ­ity, a sport, a music. Do you re­joice at the ar­rival of the mil­len­nium? No, the chances are you don’t. More likely you feel re­sent­ment, per­haps you move on further out, trek into the wil­der­ness and re­store your minor­ity cult—until the crowd fol­lows on.   There is an in­trinsic self­ish­ness in most en­thu­si­asms—you may preach, spread the good word, but al­ways there is a part of you that takes pleas­ure in the very con­di­tion of cliquish­ness. Thus, where a cult

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sud­denly ceases to be a cult and turns into some­thing more like a cru­sade, there is re­sent­ment. It is partly a quite under­stand­able and jus­ti­fi­able pleas­ure in hav­ing things on the human, per­sonal scale. Pleas­ure in know­ing what is going on, who is who—and also in form­ing part of a move­ment or group, in which there is only rudi­ment­ary de­vel­op­ment of or­gan­isa­tional bar­riers—of bar­riers be­tween audi­ence and per­former, be­tween those whose tastes tend one way and those whose tastes tend the other.

  As things get big­ger, the bar­riers go up—there is an audi­ence to be enter­tained, and enter­tain­ers to do the job. And the bar­riers get in­sti­tu­tion­al­ised; you get in­ternal se­greg­a­tion de­velop­ing, clashes of doc­trine, al­most amount­ing at times to holy war. Where once eth­nik, folk­nik, pop­nik and r ’n’ b ex­po­nents could all go to the same club, and be aware of what they have in com­mon, now the dif­fer­en­ces come to the fore.

  As the next stage of the boom comes along, the pub­lic at large starts to take note—Bob Dylan is heard on House­wives’ Choice—gets a pro­file in Melody Maker—The Ob­server starts try­ing to pon­ti­fi­cate on the sub­ject in its cus­tom­ary switched-on (though not plugged-in) man­ner. Re­search chem­ists in the labor­at­or­ies of Ready Steady Go syn­thes­ize an er­satz Dylan. Folk pro­grammes pro­lif­er­ate on TV ran­ging from the ex­cru­ci­at­ing Hob Derry What-not (why don’t the Welsh Na­tion­al­ists do some­thing about it; like blow­ing up the studio) to the re­mark­ably good Folk in Focus. It be­comes pos­sible to buy folk-records (some folk-records) in ordin­ary local re­cord shops. If you are not run­ning a club, you find that you can­not get in any more, and you could not af­ford to any­way.