‘Woke Folk’? What A Joke! The Guardian/Observer Shows How Out Of Touch It Really Is

In their latest quest for relevance, the staff at The Guardian-Observer (its the same paper, no matter how much they pretend otherwise) have decided to do what the music press (remember them, grandparents?) tried to do and start telling ‘the kids’ what’s the next big trend in music.

It appears that ‘woke folk’ is where it’s at with today’s Momentumed Millenials and bearded hipster scum. It must be true – The Observer says so!

Coming from a newspaper which treated the Quality Street tin Victoriana kitch of The Unthanks as cutting edge, it’s all too easy to be cynical.

That their cover star – Grace Petrie – is a feminist vegan lesbian socialist who sucked up the Guardian’s arses by writing a song about them and providing cliché copy whining about ‘white, Telegraph-reading folk-club regulars’ (in her narrow world you’re not allowed to like music if you’re not politically correct enough) shows that no matter how hard they try, the Guardian/Observer can no more escape their own ludicrous backward stereotype than The Sun, Daily Mail or any of those other rivals it despises – stuck in their own little timewarp of what constitutes an ideal world fifty years past the point the world has long since moved on.

‘Here are bands confronting the legacies of abortion rights; the oppression of women, homosexuals and other minority communities’ they gush, ‘the loss of minority language; the refugee crisis; and stories of people who have stood up to hate.’

You’d think Fairport Convention never happened: the band who almost single handedly resurrected British Isles folk, broadened its horizons and are partly to blame for the monster of modern music known as ‘the experimental side project’. Nor for that matter The Pogues (whose guitarist Phil Chevron was gay and who were notorious for their lyrics on politics and the darker side of life) and of course the most ‘woke’ of them all, The Men They Couldn’t Hang who spawned a multitude of copycats worldwide – the most famous of all being Floggin’ Molly.

Even a certain bunch of professional ‘wokesters’ – Chumbawamba – crashed into folk with a whole album of old folk protest songs, before doing some a lot newer with folk icons The Albion Band.

Folk has enjoyed peaks and troughs of popularity ever since Richard Thompson, Ashley Hutchings gathered assorted collections of talented oddballs to their various standards over the decades. To the cry of ‘let a thousand initiatives bloom’, what was the quaint but dying music of yokels retained its relevance to audiences old and new by constant reinvention.

Even then, they were doing no more than the Beatles in their more thoughtful moments had also done when John Lennon made friends with Donovan – whose honey and walnut voiced protegy Vashti Bunyan was to make an album ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ copied by every folk musician if they were honest ever since.

Every time The Guardian-Observer opens their mouth about popular culture, they demonstrate their real interest is controlling it to fit their rigid vision of an ideal society, the wet dreams of Soviet style utopias comfortable middle class suburbanites are prone to in their sillier moments after one glass of cheap Waitrose wine too many.

PS. It gets funnier if you read the Comments section below the article. Their readers are even more stupid than they are.

Roger Daltrey becomes Johnny Rotten, and Jarvis Cocker is now the lead singer of Blur. Brilliant! Garath Treadwell ought to do the Guardian’s weekend supplements for them on a Saturday if they can only get him to find his inner wokeness.