The problem with Anti-Folk is that it’s not really anti anything, and certainly not folk music. Jeffrey Lewis, the prominent Anti-Folk singer and cartoonist, feels this sense of genre confusion too, pronouncing that ‘no-one knows what it means, including me’.
The origins of Anti-Folk are said to have started in Greenwich Village, NYC, in 1984. Lach, a punk-folk troubadour, hitch-hiked up to New Yoik to play his own brand of scuzzy punk-folk, but was kicked out of the legendary, but sadly mainstream club Folk City for being too punk.
Indignant, he moved to the Lower East Side and opened an illegal after-hours club called the Fort, and from there began the first Anti-Folk festival as a backlash against the then corporate folk scene. Anti-Folk has been brewing since then and is now enjoying a resurgence, partly thanks to the release of the 2008 movie Juno, with its predominantly Anti-Folk soundtrack, including The Moldy Peaches’s movie-defining song ‘Anything Else But You’.
Another problem with Anti-Folk is that it has no true defining style: artists that fall under the label, like Regina Spektor, Beck, and The Moldy Peaches, all have seemingly different sounds. Its only central trait is an interest in unconventional song-writing.
Songs tend to focus on ordinary themes of daily life and its mundanity, but portrayed in a defamiliarising way which, if successful, can leave you looking at the world anew. Midtown Dickens’s song ‘Tetris’, for example, from the album Oh Yell!, is an ode to the procrastinative joys of Tetris, combining a childish beat and sing-song style with imagery of playing Tetris in your underwear and socks.
Nursery rhyme beats can be contrasted with references to bowel movements, explicit sexual acts or class A drugs. The Moldy Peaches are at the forefront of this style. Having begun life in 1999, the band released a self-titled album under the Rough Trade label in 2001.
A break followed in 2004, where the two lead singers, Adam Green and Kimya Dawson, went to pursue solo careers, Adam Green under Rough Trade and Kimya Dawson under the phenomenal indie label K Records.
K records, owned and founded by Calvin Johnson, the lead singer of low-fi indie rock band Beat Happening, goes under the motto ‘exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre since 1982′. If there is anything ‘anti’ in the genre, it probably lies in the anti-corporate viewpoint of K records, and its own humorous take on the everyday facts of reality.
Anti-Folk’s genre confusion lies in the fact that it’s just not against or anti folk music, it is folk music, based on the 1960’s movement but with an ironic, self-aware twist perhaps born of its initial reaction to ‘serious folk’. As a genre, it values storytelling, personality, political viewpoints over technical polish.
Raw and experimental sounds may be its hallmark, but the danger of musicians’ low-fi approach is that the label can allow for talentless oiks to get away with technically incompetent music. And that’s about the only anti folk thing about it.
