The Next American Music

The album’s unexpected success was curious, proving almost as quirky and anachronistic as the music itself. But lurking in the background of all the media hoo-ha was the vague sense that the record’s galactic reception was perfectly logical. In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that a soundtrack packed with old American folk songs would soar to the top of the pop charts during a year when nearly everything “American” was being challenged, threatened and rearranged. Chalk it up to snappy marketing, snowballing publicity or incessant NPR chat-ups, but something on that record (Its simplicity? Timelessness? Bold adherence to scrappy tradition?) sounded good to a significant number of people when nothing else in the cultural cookie jar (including the omnipotent Billboard stacks, which were piled high with prefab pop and snarly rap-rock) seemed capable of satiating the public’s cravings.

Almost all the contemporary artists included on O Brother—Alison Krauss and others—are well known (and generally acclaimed) keepers of the classic Americana flame, proudly maintaining the genre’s warm traditions and staunch rules of conduct. They are revivalists, permitting only marginal sonic updates, set on upholding Americana’s unspoken tenets of authenticity. Theirs is a noble pursuit, and yet it’s easy to be seduced by the organic glamour of old America, to spin kitsch into commodity, to rank banjos over synthesizers, general stores over Wal-Mart. It’s always been far simpler to wax nostalgic over the past than to work at re-imagining those sacred, spent traditions for an entirely new world—and to do so in an equally meaningful way.

Witness, then, a handful of pioneering musicians, settled comfortably at obscure or semi-obscure independent record labels, catering mostly to the twenty-something/T-shirt-and-Pumas set, but playing a new, weird kind of Americana, punctuated by twittering Moog synths and prickly classical guitar, harp strums and free-jazz sax wails. Like alt.country before it, nu-Americana (call it indie-folk, alt-alt.country, freak-folk, folktronica or something else entirely) is as concerned with the future as it is with the past, wholeheartedly and unapologetically embracing the strange synergy of the organic and the synthesized, the beautiful and the hideous, the real and the imagined. It is new highway and old mountain—together and at peace.

Obviously, subverting the acoustic doctrines of folk music is not an entirely new phenomenon. Craggy foundations of dissent were in place even before Bob Dylan blasted electric at Newport—avant-folk pioneers the Incredible String Band, British songstress Vashti Bunyan (who recently recorded a duet with indie-folker Devendra Banhart), bedroom saint Nick Drake, and the incomparable Captain Beefheart laid serious bricks in the 1960s, and contemporary acts like Sunburned Hand of the Man, Six Organs of Admittance, and the No-Neck Blues Band are currently twisting old folk habits into new (and sometimes unrecognizable) shapes. As Raposa explains, “It has to adapt if it is to remain true.”

In 2004, the Brooklyn-based Animal Collective released the mind-blowing Sung Tongs, a swirling collection of skewed psychedelia anchored by a pair of flailing, child-like voices and a sparkling acoustic guitar. Melodic and intense, Sung Tongs perpetually soars, as giddy and spastic as a three-year old’s birthday party. Lulling, folksy strums are constantly punctuated by hollers of “Meow!” or smatterings of tribal drums, successfully destroying notions of calm with sudden infusions of untempered glee.

Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox (who records as Panda Bear), embraces the idea of playing nontraditional folk songs that, while still intensely relevant to folk tradition, don’t always provide the expected strum-and-warble. “I feel like lots of people restrict folk music to acoustic guitars and yodeling and that sort of thing,” Lennox laments. “Hip-hop to me is very folkish. It may be a little exaggerated, but it’s still some secular shit. I try and keep my music and my words super-simple—I want to try and explain what’s going with me and mine in a direct and beautiful way. In that sense, I feel like I’m right in line with folk music.”

Along with Animal Collective, artists like Banhart, Iron & Wine, Joanna Newsom, Kimya Dawson, David Pajo, Will Oldham, CocoRosie, Castanets, Danielson Famile, Holopaw, Sufjan Stevens, and producer Brian Deck are pumping out music that feels instantly, gloriously intimate, familiar as it is strange. Collectively, they tend to avoid drippy folk clichés—banished are the closed-eye strum-solos, leftist pamphlets, crowd sing-alongs, helping hands. Despite almost oozing warmth, no one ever drifts too close to precious, consistently side-stepping rote sentimentality in favor of dark ruminations and sniggers. There’s sophistication, but no intellectual distancing, no ironic embraces, no evasive doodling. Instead: humor, sadness, poetry.