The New Folk Music Movement

Rap is dying. Country is dying. Folk music will rise. The pendulum swings.

The Bard doesn't often make predictions about pop culture, but this is barely a prediction. I am only observing obvious fact.

At this time rap is sooo old, so worn out, so repetitious, so overwhelmed with electronic call and answer, so numbing. It's hanging on, but like country music it began dying about the same time and for the same reasons: Boobs, bling, beer bashes, and blondes belting out boyfriend songs for "tweens." And like a 15 year old girl getting drunk on wine coolers, too much of a sickly sweet drink can cause a horrific reaction. Rap and country are pink and blue drinks with minty and sugary flavors sucked through a skinny straw. There's only so much one can take before they decide to go back to the beer and whiskey, no straw.

The time is here, upon us. I can smell it in the air like unbathed pits and stinky feet in leather sandals. The time will strike, calling the unwashed masses to the socialist preacher with the guitar and plaid shirt. The masses will feel enlightened, enervated, intelligent, and ready to create a global utopia. They will attempt sustainable living, and try to halt time's rapidly increasing speed. They will use their weight to hold the pendulum back, strum-strumming, hum-humming slower.

Yes, Rap and Country will survive, but as arms of the folk music movement. They will adopt a bohemian flair.

There will be folk music everywhere, beckoning, beckoning to battle. Unlike the folk music of the past, which was mainly Marxist, this time we will see anti-Marxist folk music as well.

Warning! Stop your ears! Remember Odysseus and his crew when they had to pass by the sirens. He had his crew mates stop their ears with wax, and securely tie him to the mast so that he could not give into temptation when he heard the sirens singing the folk music. Unlike rap and country, folk music's goal is to seduce one into action through emotion and preaching.

Rap was good before electronic and materialistic influences strangled it, making it into a tool for numbing and dumbing club goers and kids hooked on cigarettes, I mean cell phones (same difference). It served the pop culture controller's purposes for a time, as did country, music, which from a Marxist point of view would be ideologically identical to rap.

But now, is the time to activate the mind-numbed ones, and the switch that will do the trick is folk music. Stop your ears, unless you like being preached at and told what to believe by a sweet voice. Don't jump in after the sirens, or death will waste you. Time can't be stopped, it's not sustainable.

Oh, yeah, and folk music is "green" because it doesn't generally require electricity to play the instruments. It's eco-friendly music! Man, I love sustainability.

image: Whistler