2. 'Folk' Influences

Popular music is, of course, a wide and imperfectly defined area, and attempts to define the distinctions between ‘pop’, ‘rock’ and ‘folk’ have often proved problematic. The difficulties are, of course, intensified if and when theorists seek to apply definitions found helpful in one set of circumstances to all others, or similarly to eliminate concepts from current usage. Simon Frith and Richard Middleton, among others, express great difficulty in accepting the existence of ‘folk’ traditions. They argue that the concept of folk is a bourgeois nationalist construct, serving to ‘protect the ruling class from the threat and suffering of the proletariats by first exoticising them and then absorbing their cultures into their own’. Frith has suggested that, in identifying certain musics as folk, ‘we are reading as sociological facts what are in fact ideological experiences’, and he argues that ‘folk discourse... seems to rest on an essential self-deception’, since ‘that which is commodified is presented as communal’. Of course, to define folk as exclusively oral, rather than written, or as the exclusive possession of a certain class, or as only played on certain instruments or in certain situations, or in terms of its spontaneity or exclusive discourse, will be misleading; music like all arts is in a constant state of flux. But difficulties of definition do not imply that the phenomenon does not exist. Amnon Shiloah, for example, writing about Jewish and Muslim musicians of the Mediterranean, comments that ‘in the realm of performing practice, the folk poet-musician has a uniquely important position: both narrator and spokesman, he articulates the moods, values and aspirations of his fellow men’.

To make these distinctions between the Welsh and English experience is not to seek to set one culture above another - after all, as Raymond Williams points out, the Welsh people have been oppressed for five hundred years by the English state, but so have the English people.  Rather, it is to point out the danger of exporting concepts and exclusions beyond their native territory, and to demonstrate the untransparency of language. The reservoir of traditional forms, both musical and literary, both simple and sophisticated, that are most easily, if not exactly, defined in English as ‘folk’, are omnipresent in Welsh popular music, and to attempt to understand Welsh rock without references to those traditions, and the niches they open to similar strands from Brittany, Ireland, the Caribbean and the Appalachians, is to impoverish the analysis.

New musics of the nineties, such as dance and rave, are said by Will Straw to have not only crossed but even eradicated previous cultural, conceptual and national boundaries, replacing them with shifting patterns of taste and ‘alliance’. These alliances and rapidly evolving ‘scenes’, he argues, are replacing loyalties of place and class among the young, as well as of culture and nationality. His perceptions may be true of some of the people, in some places, for some of the time, but there is much contemporary evidence of very firm social affiliations, of one kind and another, being cemented by music, both in English-language rock cultures and outside them. (….)