A few years ago, in my second year as Director of the Peterborough Folk Festival, I booked Canadian Hip-Hop artist and all-round good guy Shad K to play the festival’s main stage. In the months leading up to the festival, a lot of Folk music fans commented to me about it; none of them were impressed. ‘Rap at a Folk festival?!’ they’d say incredulously, ‘What are you thinking?’
I had a variety of reactions to that, from ‘Pssht, get over it,’ to ‘No, seriously dude: get over it.’ I know Hip-Hop and Rap have a low reputation amongst the Folk community, though I’d underestimated how reactionary and unwelcoming some people would be. I don’t have much patience with people who write off a whole genre of music, especially those who haven’t really given it a listen. You may hear that all Rap is about violence, drugs, and hos,* but if you actually like, listen to it, you’ll find that even when that imagery is in heavy use, there’s a lot of other stuff going on. “Rap music is the continuation of the Folk tradition,” I’d say, generally to raised eyebrows and shaking heads.
Which is why, watching one of last week’s episodes of The Colbert Report, I was so excited by and exchange between Stephen Colbert and Talib Kweli that I leapt up and danced around punching the air for a couple of minutes. You can watch the exchange (in Canada) by clicking here, but I’ve transcribed it:
Colbert “What is Rap, really?”
Kweli “Rap and… Hip-Hop… is a vehicle, it’s a tool for expression, and it’s more Folk music than Folk music actually is, because it’s speaking – ”
Colbert “It’s more Folk than Folk?”
Kweli “That’s right – because it’s speaking the language of regular folk. Y’know what I’m saying? When Folk music got popular, it’s ’cause it was stripped down, it was in the language of what people actually said; and that’s what hip-hop does very well.” Read the rest of this entry »
I get hundreds of submissions to the Peterborough Folk Festival every year, and this year I’ve decided to capture my favourites in a series of posts. You can read Part 1 here.
