#metafilk

“Take it Back” by Kathleen Sloan, the official opening song of Filk Ontario and an anthem for filkers and creators everywhere. Lyrics are available on the Filk Ontario website. 

The song was inspired by Barry & Sally Childs-Helton’s acceptance speech to the Filk Hall of Fame about communities of creativity and filk as a space where we are all welcome to participate.

As Kathleen sums up in the last verse,

Definitely!  I’ve heard a few people read poetry at filk events.  Sometimes it’s a song they don’t feel confident enough to sing but want to share anyway, and sometimes because they found or wrote a very filkish poem that was never intended to be sung.

So I made the mistake of listening to your whole “ose” tag over the last couple days at work. Shall we go with “One More Ose Song?“ 

It’s the voice that’s always breaking That never learns to scan. It’s the song of grim war-making The ever-crying man. It’s the one who won’t be cheerful Who cannot find the tune. And the fan, afraid of smiling Who sings of wreck and ruin.

“The Ose” by Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, a song for our favorite depressing filk genre.  

So tell me a story, aren't all stories true? Tell me a story and I'll tell it back to you There's always someone else there, up the river, up the river Got to find my own way up the river 

Frank Hayes, interviewed about filk music by Alanna Nash

“At its best, the filk room is a special locus in space and time, created for and by the community, and is a safe, encouraging place for individual and group play, support and, most of all, co-creation and collaboration. At its core is a heightened group experience, created by active participation and immersive intensity with the goal of giving all participants a feeling of creative satisfaction and belonging... In the filk room, and in other folk performance forms, co-created group experience arises from the manipulation and eradication of the performer/audience boundary.”

Long-time filker, professor, and ethnomusicologist, Sally Childs-Helton, recently published an excellent article about the nature of filk performance, with an examination of the differences between Millennials and older generations in fandom and what the future of filk might look like because of this.  I highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested in The State of Filk or fandom history in general.

If you download the article from this link, it gives the author some digital brownie points, so definitely do that if you can!

And if you don’t have the time or inclination to read academic articles on fandom (why not???  I guess some people are like that), I’ll leave you with a quote from the end of the article, from an interview with someone who had worked as a professional folk musician for years but was attending her first filk session, because I think it’s inspiring:

I usually prefer to get studio recordings when I can, if only to make it more likely that all the words will be intelligible but...this one is special.  They set out to create a geek anthem, and boy did they ever.

Michelle Dockrey said this about writing this song:

Background: this was commissioned by Tony, who wanted a geek anthem. I got partway through writing it and found myself blocked. Thinking of all the things still wrong, and things that were going on at the time both in and out of fandom-- harrassment, backlash over representation, lack of protections still for so many-- I just didn't see how I could write a song about how much it got better. I confessed this tearfully to Tony, who said, essentially, "write it the way you see it."