Myths abound these days. Especially, it seems, around SA new-folk. It hardly seems surprising, though, that a genre inclined towards storytelling, haunting atmospherics, and a tendency to transport the listener to distant realms of experience would acquire the odd myth about it. So, in the spirit of being appropriately mythical, allow us to make the following prophecy: Cape Town’s flagging electro scene will soon be superseded by folk.
After all, folk has quietly emerged dead-centre on the cultural horizon around the world (Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Laura Marling et al), and SA seems no exception. Everyone seems to be going folk these days, from Fuzigish’s Jay Bones to art-minimalist Righard Kapp.
But why stop there? (After all, flights of fancy ought not be curtailed by realism.) May I, therefore, suggest that folk is the tipping-point of popular culture into postmodernity? There’s something inherently mythical about folk. Any knowledge of the folk tradition will reveal that it has a haunting and ineffable Something at its core, a strange and indefinable essence, which, after five hundred years of getting beaten up by modernity, refuses to go away. And now popular culture has decreed that folk is the New Thing. But what a paradox! – the new is now identified with the traditional, the fresh with the timeless, iconoclasm with tradition. At last, modernity’s project of endless progress, invention, rationality and individuality finds itself embodying the very things it set out to supersede: tradition, nature, superstition and religion. We’ve come full circle, and have found that our old enemies are, in fact, us. And it’s in folk that these tensions are combined. Tradition is the New. Modernity embodies myth. Progress is circular. Our roots are branches. The avant-garde is folk.
This, therefore, is the myth of avant-folk: the hope of renewed holism, rediscovered innocence, and an appreciation that reality is, in fact, quite mythical. [Postmodernity teeters on its scaffolding, almost breaking free to float away into a strange new world…] What on earth will happen next?
Myths of Kenosis 