Yes sir, Yes, it was Me

Folk music in the 21^st century can feel like a dog whistle: the province of Christian girl autumn anti-vax New-England-nice white supremacists. Folk music often conjures a wayward nostalgia for some long-missing authenticity. I think there’s a slightly shorter time cycle in our age where every decade anything seemingly synthesized is slandered as sans-sincerity. EDM and the proliferation of dubstep and autotune pop were on one side and stomp n’ holler stuff on the other. (It’s mostly marketing, since it’s all digitally recorded pop music.) There was and certainly remains an ahistorical racist undertone: chicly scruffy white people in tealight lit barns held up as paragons of authenticity, in contrast to the crowded dance halls where people of color congregate. Forget that Black musicians codified techno and its many branches just as they did bluegrass and the roots of what we now call “folk”. Same old song and dance as the rest of American history.

In her novel No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood writes, “White people, who had the political educations of potatoes - lumpy, unseasoned, and biased towards the Irish - were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.”

I’ve noticed that people who really like folk music often hate Mumford & Sons. To purists, Marcus and His Large Adult Sons are just renaissance faire alt-rock wannabes. Read the Pitchfork reviews of their albums for some truly withering takedowns. I don’t really agree or disagree with the hate for this band. I like their first record because it came out when I was a teenager, and no one had yet told me you could say “fuck” while playing the banjo. My first love and I taught ourselves the most basic Irish dance step while listening to it.

The aspersion I see most often lobbed at Mum’s Fjord is “wedding music”, which I admit is a pretty funny insult. That said, you all must hate weddings. You know you don’t have to go to them, right? I think too of Lauren Clark’s excellent collection of poetry, Music for a Wedding, which explodes all the assumptions you might have about something named for such sonic accompaniment. Anyway, I see the point: inoffensive mass-appeal with overly earnest and easy lyrics. Pop music with a gloss of faux-profundity. Twee. Tiresome. Etcetera.

I’d like to invite you to listen to an album cut from their debut that Pitchfork panned in particular. “Dust Bowl Dance”, the album’s eleventh and penultimate track, is probably the most distinct from its brethren. Don’t worry, the plucky banjo still struts about, and the drama builds quiet to loud like the other tracks, though absent are the “har har har” vocalizations. Mumford himself began his career as a drummer, and he works his way behind the kit for the song’s crescendo. He’s not the flashiest percussionist but he keeps things moving.

The song tells the story of a lonely young man kicked off his land by an unnamed antagonist. Judging by the title, one assumes the setting is historical and deeply Americana, a little Grapes of Wrath sideshow.

As the second verse climbs, Mumford affects a ratty little snarl that’s a real entertaining shift from his usual sad-boy sap.

The threat comes next,

(During a recent live performance, they omitted the word “gun”.)

Perhaps it’s not the most convincing delivery, but I’d like to take this to the obvious next step. The narrator is the hero, and we understand his eventual violent recourse to be God-blessed. It’s a well-worn archetype. American audiences don’t really have a problem with Luke Skywalker blowing up The Death Star, nor do American and British listeners misconstrue the actions in this song. (At least, I suspect so. There are certainly dolts out there who think the Empire from Star Wars wasn’t that bad.) Not to be a plastic paddy, but to bring Lockwood back, I think a lot of Americans understand colonialism’s ravages when it comes to the oppression of the Irish, if only for the shared enmity towards the British. Replace Luke Skywalker, or the narrator of “Dust Bowl Dance” with an Indigenous character, or a Palestinian person, and the details suddenly ring all the more true, no? It isn’t “more complicated” than that, really.

It's a very American thing to do, to take the stories of the oppressed and turn them into our own. Consider Rival Sons’ 2012 two-part rager: “Manifest Destiny”, where they adopt the perspective of Indigenous defenders exacting their revenge after surviving a massacre. It’s not particularly clever, and perhaps less than compassionate, a pop music manifestation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian moralizing. But it is compelling to imagine yourself aggrieved and your retaliation righteous.

I don’t need an explainer as to why American sympathies don’t extend to the Palestinian people, or any other oppressed population. I understand well enough the bloody gears of imperialism, racism, and capitalism. A gaggle of white British arena rockers are not the vanguard of liberation, no more than a Mickey-Mouse-funded film franchise is a foundational decolonial text, but if we think about them for maybe two seconds, we can see the myths that manufacture consent for war, nationalism, and genocide, are diaphanous as dust.