#big|brave

GROOVES n jamsS.O.T.Y. 2021 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 35 ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

“Blackest Crow” by The Body and BIG|BRAVE

MG:

This might be a highly idiosyncratic note-to-self, or perhaps you, too, struggle with language, genre, and history, the way the three intersect in inherently limiting ways and how to bend those limitations to our use. I think it’s a shame we still mostly think of folk music the way we did when Bob Dylan recorded his first album. By the time he was on the Rolling Thunder Revue he’d already been cast out as rock music and we’re still careful to draw those same strictures around more modern records. It doesn’t limit artists, but it does limit the way we think about these genres and how we listen to music. “Blackest Crow” is a traditional Appalachian folk song, but as performed by The Body and BIG|BRAVE, it’s industrial, full of sawing strings and a fade-out dirge jam. This is but a tiny drop of the perverse directions folk music could travel, taking the original folk recipe and making it just slightly unpleasant. 

Why do I care so much about new frontiers in folk music? Because as much as we’re told that oral traditions, parables, and standards are designed to be lost to time, inherently weaker than something more conceptual, like, say, cloud storage, it’s clear that these are still the guiding values of many communities and that as powerful as the internet is, as a tool and as a space, it lacks the permissive boundaries of folk storytelling. “Blackest Crow” is folk, I don’t have to strain to make my case when the material is this old, but I think we’ve also seen enough interpolation and sampling of the amen break to call it folk music, as well. I can imagine “Blackest Crow” playing at a particularly mournful 19th century wedding or solstice festival, something where a town gathered to formally dance. These events are still taking place, as Homecoming dances and as warehouse raves. Maybe the Cha Cha Slide is also folk music. Maybe a 4/4 beat is folk music.

DV:

Latitudes isn't my style, so I didn't listen to every song.