A folk age

This old blog's been hobbling along for some time now. For a year or so, in both this music blog and the sport blog, I've been feeling a little dissatisfied and wanted to come up with something of a bit more substance.

The times I've had a structure and an idea to work through have been the most fulfilling, and lately I've just been either making lists of songs or finding ever more elaborate ways of giving my underqualified opinion on something or other.

All well and good, but the vanity in me has wanted to come up with something I can take a little pride in.

At the very start, the blog involved lists of songs and poems based around the same subject, with varying degrees of success. That finished in 2010, and, coincidentally or otherwise, I haven't written many poems at all since.

But, in relation to the blog, the idea to write something solid and fitting has been growing on me. I decided I wanted to write something quite long, something of the mini-epic, and to take in various subjects I've written about in the blog. Going from there, I decided I'd have to write in iambic pentameter. I've written in pentameter before, but back then I never really felt it was my friend, that it was too limiting, but for this new task I felt I needed that discipline.

I determined to write with more discipline than I had before. I never took more than a couple of hours to write a poem when I was younger, and only occasionally edited. It was a young person's way of writing, a haphazard call for occasional inspiration with mixed results.

This time, whatever the result, I wanted to have a more adult approach.

So, this is what I've done. I've taken as a starting point the words that most commonly are used to describe my taste in music (he likes folk, he likes indie), thought around the meaning of those two words, and come up with this.

A folk age

A folk age of scarce skill and little fire

Crept, in a strange hysteria, to screen

Disquieting these sombre missionaries

Returning weary, bloodied, to the hearth.

What land is this, that we left in safe mind

And cold hands? If it turned, it turned so slow, 

With cautious squint slipped over rose - scratch rose -

Sepia-tinted beige NHS frames.

Those eyes are weeping now. Weeping for what?

This mind persuaded far too easily

To heed the measured words of a sell-sword

Who led by dissembling he could be cut,

The first and gravest deal maker, thenceforth

Upgrading and outsourcing to no end.

We met to share before we’d made full count

Of what we were free and prepared to lose.

So, lost it’s been - for freedom and for shame,

So lost and safe to shed our privacy …

Or dignity, as if that were a ruse.

But how did we get here, you ask again,

Where folk songs find a new voice and create

The most unlovely karaoke stars

reshaping flames of lurid campfire storms,

where hieroglyphs of hate stunt, poison, mock

all hope of quietly impressive growth?

There were, of course, impasses, no, even more,

Outbursts of humour, harmony and harps

In bingo halls and country parks alike,

That strange uncertain union of glee

Released from shuffling feet and stumbling fast

O’er midnight branches laughing wildly at

The most unlikely icons newly framed

In sweating glade, afoot on burning lake.

They’ll say it’s gentrifying at its worst,

They’ll say, those miseries who made it so.

There is, of course, no way of knowing how

It could have made a difference far beyond

The natural footsoldiers left behind.

Perhaps we were waste, mere collateral,

An occupation for dissenting hearts –

To revel, not to fight, until too late.

And what to fight, and how? For most, half-blind,

Soft moving targets virtually cry out

To bear the declawed fury that just serves

As catnip for a foe now long escaped –

I see your virtue and I raise contempt.

Your so-called folk songs aren’t the people’s now,

Your protest is an empty selfish bawl.

The happy guilt of postcolonial bliss

Expired, a short-lived naïve liberal’s dream,

In patronising charitable frauds

And aid gifts that declined to decompose.

It’s hope, irrational hope, that breeds disgust

At calm pragmatic suited ex-firebrands,

It breeds the endless scuffling of the good

And their intent that good’s uncompromised

Or it’s no good at all.  In hope they live.

Reared into the great independent age

Of visionaries, proud of their mistakes,

First ghastly apparitions from the deep

Washed golden, then, by Olympian gods,

For brief but long-remembered glory days,

who ruined themselves for art, for Channel 4

Voxpops on documentaries way too late

To make the difference that they think they made,

Though it was beautiful, they do recount.

Exact timelines are harder to agree –

So many tribes, with valid claim to paint

Some key ekphrastic scene in what may be

The final epic worth a silver tongue,

Discount the other. How this story needs

A chronicler of independent soul,

Who’ll write and rewrite, true to their one task,

The grand expanding history of pop –

And how it never really stood a chance.

Nowadays, the people’s songs sound like they weren’t

Written by living people, at least not

The kind you’d dream of ever giving love.

Democracy moves further from the will

And the consensus of the feverish

Hive mind, all impotent petitions for

The daily stigmatising of some Christ-

Forsaken sniper, who’ll ascend in time.

So where did these Eumenides descend

From? Not one single tear was shed between

‘50 and ’97, then dams burst far

And wide at once, feeding the soil where sprung

In time, this wild poisoned incontinence

Of empathy, all sharing, caring more.

And not a single person died between

’45 and ’2001, then each

New death was marked by gathered epitaphs

Of deeply saddened sad machines, so quick

To tap out tides of grief; if not, then rage.

Some barbs, impossible now to delete,

Wound and affect more than the next last post

Aggrieved of Tunbridge Nowhere up-in-arms

Fired to eviscerate some long-way-down,

All shorn of poise, all decontextualized.

No trumpet lends such screeds new dignity,

No still small voice is heard above the storm.

No man or woman waits, ablaze in time

For pale blue origami promises

in airmail’s grand adventure, long withheld.

Oh time, how do you fill so easily?

I miss your tricks; now, I prostrate myself

Before the ticking strap, relentlessly

Informing and returning to the game.

I miss the doubts, not knowing what I thought

Or what I ought to think, or what the folk

Without coherent thought might know so well.

It is, in fact, a numbers game, just not

The one I planned for. X-hit wonders click

And click the clock to scattergun renown.

Those hard-earned stark statistics stand and fall

By show of thumbs, and those about to die

Have no direction nor an emperor to turn

to raise respectful yet resigned salute.

We loathe and glorify the fight at once,

We crucify dissenters, then deplore

The crucifixion. Numbers keep us safe,

But not as safe as remote solitude

Puts armour on this folk age chorus line.

And Dikaiopolis, this sleeper cell

Of jovial loathing, makes obtuse demands

revering some lost Angles’ language, claims

the common tongue is his and his alone,

this simpering rhetorician’s puppet toad.

And oh, the chorus howls and boos and laughs

And oh, it claims and counterclaims anew

And cites new sources, mobilised to stamp

Its modern expertise into the ground,

Promoting condemnation for its sins

While earmarking forgiveness to forget.

Redemption last was mentioned as a choice

On Christmas Day after Joe Strummer died -

Two ancient cultures held each other’s gaze

Just long enough for monsters creeping past.

Now, all the guys on t-shirts must be dead,

Can we recall their names? Erm, No We Can’t!

Can hope and change survive unspecified

Unrealistic, self-destructive cloud-

high expectation? Hell, no! No, it can’t.

Is music still impossible to tame?

Do songs still burst beyond all vain attempts

To break them into pieces and to chain

Them to campaigns and then to list all their

Devices and to judge precise demand,

To number them and edit them and tell

Them they’re not good enough, to playlist them

And subjugate them, wed them to a cause

Unwanted - one nation under a groove,

And two turntables and a microphone

And three chords and the truth, and four young men

From Liverpool who went and shook the world?

What was the last folk song? The last elite

Liberal folk song to take the world to task …

The last great anthem wide-eyed youths collect

To sing in protest at injustice? You might

Have missed it, look it up online. Alright,

So what, it’s not your music anymore –

These summer children scowling in defiance,

These skills you never learnt nor ever would.

This folk age may come to a bitter end;

Young punks are more alive than first assumed.

Fierce independence is now prized above

Those other values wasted on the age –

The most compelling hangover from hope

Might yet renew what looked to be expired.

So how did we get here? Someone explain,

Someone who’s not been two giant steps behind

At every turn, who saw it all the way

And welcomed progress out of more than fear,

Eventually, of being left in the dark.

My friend, it is, again, a numbers game,

A game that shifts one second to the next –

A sequence ever changing far beyond

a commentator’s poetry by rote.

I learnt a song when I was still a child,

Not quite a folk song, whatever they say,

I’m happy with its answers even now.