Devachan Music - Community Room

Adventures in The Boston
RadTrad (Radical Tradition) Scene: Part I

A Manifesto and a Moniker

(Note: The first in an ongoing series of musings and 'mini-raves' to keep my feverish little mind occupied during the cold winter months...)

When is it time for a new name for a genre? Bill Monroe had no idea when he named the Bluegrass Boys that he was, among other things, creating not only a style but a moniker that would live on as a legacy. (In fact, at first Bill was none too happy about his style being copied. He was delighted when Elvis recorded "Blue Moon of Kentucky" in his own rockabilly fashion... as a fellow songwriter I know just why he was so happy! ... but was furious when bands like the Stanley Brothers copied his arrangements—sometimes before he'd had a chance to record them himself!)

But look how powerful that name—bluegrass—has proved to be. Although it is in no way shape or form a definitive term, it is an evocative term upon which people were able to hang all the complex and fuzzy associations that went along with this new style of music. It found its way into countless band names, and has since sported a vile brood of coined-word progeny: newgrass, Jewgrass, Czechgrass, punkgrass, greengrass, you name it. At the right point in time, a new name for a style or genre is actually a critical crossing-over point for defining, naming, conjuring into being, a scene, a community, a shared history and destiny.

In a recent communication, Derek Sivers, the visionary entrepreneur who runs the wonderful independent on-line musician's store, CDBaby, has stated that he sort of hates the whole idea of genre names as labels, "bins" as it were for all of the wonderful unique music of the great unwashed masses of independent artists out there today. Well, I sympathize with him, and with all the hopefuls out there telling us earnestly that "our music is an ineffably scintillating and indescribable blend of blues, reggae, hip-hop, Burl Ives, obscure Petula Clark and Renaissance sackbutt music, all glossed over with a cute contemporary girl-group sheen..."—but let's face it: read too many of these well-crafted, well-spun marketing ploys and you start to glaze over, like the lonely nerd paging through the on-line personals realizing that every person who ever lived apparently spends all their time walking on the beach, drinking Merlot and watching romantic movies... and of course wants to do same wholesome activities with you and only you... and you and you and... Similarly, read the bios of all these bands and after a while you don't know what to expect or what you will like based on what you liked before.

New genre names help us, because they become a kind of shorthand that carries a whole raft of information along with it, until (approximately one week after they are christened) they become stale and useless has-been phrases which immediately brand one as a derivative, shallow wannabe. Such are the challenges of the modern music career.

Often when these names arise they are initially associated with some artist or band who forms the nexus, the exemplar as it were of the feel conveyed by the phrase. For example, yesterday I found out about "emo" for the first time, a style moniker associated with some band Hanneke Cassell mentioned whose name I've already forgotten... A quick Google search on "emo" (as the exact word I was looking for, to narrow the search) immediately brings me to a page that asks: "What the hell is "Emo" anyway?" Exactly the question I was asking! And I find myself at an amazing site which purports to inform me about all the SUB-genres (!) of the broader "emo" (for "emotional") category. We are told (fair-use quote here, I gave you the website after all):

Some notes on nomenclature. There isn't a real consensus on what "emo" and "emocore" are, or if they are even different. It's pretty clear these days what you're talking about with terms like "punk," "postpunk," "no-wave," "hardcore punk," "old-school/new-school," etc (although the difference between "hardcore punk" and "hardcore" is lost on a lot of people - "hardcore punk" is punk rock made heavier, faster, louder; "hardcore" is what happened after the hardcore punks realized they didn't have to sound like punk rock anymore - still heavy, fast, loud, but with a different foundation.) I hope to draw clear distinctions between my categories, assign them names, and use them consistently. That's all that language is." (Andy Radin)

I don't know about you, but I find this impressive. (And I admit it, before reading this I had no clue about the nuanced and subtle distinctions between "hardcore punk" and simple "hardcore"—the unwary musical explorer might have simply thought this a truncation of convenience, but no, stacks of vinyl and CDs are implicit in the distinction.) Further perusing this excellent site, I finally find (in Phase 4 of the historical review: "post-emo indie rock") the name of the band Hanneke mentioned—Jimmy Eat World:—and I am relieved to find that while they are of course part of the popularization phase and not really "emo" or "emo-core" or classic "hardcore emo" they are at least folks who played in the early days and not total Johny—er, Jimmy-come-latelies whom I should be ashamed to admit listening to (if, that is, I had actually ever heard of them before yesterday). Last but not least: 768,822 people had visited this site before me, just in case you're thinking that this particular genre-maker is a voice crying in the wilderness.

So—where is all this leading? Basically, I think it's time for a new genre name, a new moniker, to describe the sort of "radical traditional" or "rad-trad" fusion occurring in the early '00s Boston acoustic music scene (and elsewhere of course). In fairness, I think that the Mammals coined the phrase "rad-trad" (as in their motto "trad is rad!"); and also, in fairness, I doubt that's the final genre name we need. But something is happening, that involves musicians conversant to different degrees with Celtic, bluegrass, old-time, Scottish, Cape Breton and other fiddle traditions... but not just fiddle music... so should "fiddle" be in the name? World-fiddle? Ecch...

Musicians in this scene are writing tunes, writing songs, but they don't sound just like the acoustic singer-songwriter scene in the midst of which this new style is flourishing. They hang with jazz musicians but, to be honest, they are not generally hard-core serious jazz players. For example, those playing "gypsy jazz" are not quite part of this scene, in Boston anyway. (Down in Nashville it may be a different story...)

My need for a genre name arose in my attempt to be the local impresario of what started as an "old time music" night at Club Passim. Eventually I decided we needed to broaden the field, yet still distinguish the nights from the singer-songwriter fare of most Passim shows. I wrote:

"Every couple of months, Monday at Club Passim will become Possum Club - an evening's revue featuring the best of old-time, Celtic, bluegrass and other cutting-edge music, both root and branch, traditional and tradition-inspired originals. We're widening the Musicalia's format beyond strictly old-time, to capture the sizzling cross-pollination of genres and styles at the heart of Boston's new fiddling, singing, dancing and tunesmithing scene (genre-naming contest after the break...)"

Later I wrote of the results of the genre-naming contest:

"As you may recall from our last posting, what were the Old-Timely Musicalias at Passim have broadened in format, hence are now the "New Timely Musicalias": an evening's revue featuring the best of old-time, Celtic, bluegrass and other cutting-edge music, both root and branch, traditional and tradition-inspired originals. Last time we held a 'genre-naming' contest to capture what a local pundit has called "the sizzling cross-pollination of genres and styles at the heart of Boston's new fiddling, singing, dancing and tunesmithing scene..." (OK, that was me...) The evening winner by acclamation was the genre name "Henry"--which shows you either the typical results of participatory democracy or modern youth's inability to handle words of abstraction, depending on the depth of your cynicism. Personally I prefer Matt Glaser's suggested genre name--(coined in his "interview of himself" in a recent Rounder Roundup newsletter), "Waldo music," thereby nominating old Emerson himself as the forefather of our burgeoning neo-transcendentalist New England school of iconoclast trad."

Later that same joke (!), Peter Masters, contributor of "Henry" that evening, pointed out that Waldo = Ralph Waldo Emerson, then Henry = Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Whereas I was thinking = Henry David Thoreau. So there you have it, neo-transcendentalist genre-cookery at its most chaotic...

TO BE CONTINUED ...

Adventures in The Boston RadTrad (Radical Tradition) Scene: Part I

Adventures in The Boston
RadTrad (Radical Tradition) Scene: Part I