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Show of Hands / Country Life / Roots - what is it to be english?

I'm sure there is (there is everywhere), i'm saying this song might not fit in it though, might not be an example of it. It's more an example of people giving a shit.
 
Roadkill said:
Oh great. Ranty politco type takes songwriter to task for not chanting the same slogans as him...

It's a song, not a PhD thesis. Anyway, what's wrong with simply pointing out the problem? Would you take Bob Dylan to task because The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll didn't lay out a ten-point plan for ending racial discrimination in the US? :confused:

You've missed the point I think Knightley is making, which is that most of us don't value traditional music in this country. You only need think about the sneering directed at the folk scene from some quarters to recognise he might just have a point. Conversely, a lot of more recent arrivals here have retained a strong attachment to their music and are a lot more willing to participate in it and enjoy it ratrher than treating it as an eccentric pastime for people with long beards. Again, I don't think he's far wrong about that.

I'm minded to agree with you about the live version of Country Life on The Big Session, though: it's a superb performance.
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and this is a discussion forum where we do exactly what you say i should not do! lol

but his rant is political so it becomes a political discussion and i am sure bob dylan had HIS lyrics turned inside out a trillion times

so it is just a appeal for support for folk music? i am not sure if that is true .. SoH have major problems from and with much of the trad scene ( who think SoH are NOT folk!) .. no sorry but teh song seems to me to be making up stuff about what it is to be english .. and that sorry to me IS an issue at the cirrent moment ..

btw what about the Love will Tear Us Apart on that album!! awesome!
 
ericjarvis said:
I think the symptoms are being seen by several posters, but the cause is being missed.

There is no traditional English culture, at least not a single unified traditional English culture. There are many. Some of those traditions are still alive to at least some extent, in Liverpool or Newcastle for example. Elsewhere there are periodic attempts to graft a completely artificial generic English culture onto nothing very much. Not surprisingly this tends not to get very far.

I don't believe there are many people who could look for their roots and find anything real that is described accurately by the label "English". My own roots have to be more precisely described as Cornish, Cockney, and Lincolnshire. I don't feel any need to combine them into something bland and generically English. One song in my repertoire is about a place less than two miles from where I grew up, some others were taught to me by my grandparents and come from a completely different tradition. I have a real connection to these songs that I don't necessarily have to something dredged up from an early 20th century recording of some old geezer from Shropshire and recorded by a band from Norfolk.

In my view folk music tends to suffer from a completely unrealistic image, but not just from outside the genre, it also suffers from folk musicians looking for something that was never there in the first place. It also suffers from a basic misunderstanding of what folk music is. When the crowd at Anfield sings "You'll Never Walk Alone" that is folk music. It has become as much a part of the tradition of the area as Maggie May or Johnny Todd. When Richard Thompson sings something like "We Sing Hallelujah", a contemporary song in a traditional form, it's folk music. Just as when I do a folk style version of "Pretty Vacant" or a punked up version of "Horkstow Grange" it's also folk music. It's just music that ties us in to being who we are.
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agree
 
kyser_soze said:
Yes, and as a rule I personally find protest songs to be excruciating, including that. Sentiments like 'Our grandfathers won the war' I hear more usually grafted onto phrases like 'Why are there so many darkies?' and such a sentiment almost universally follows IME of living and growing up in 'the country'.

I grew up around farms and farming, have worked in dairies and an abbatoir, my mother (when she wasn't taking me to Reading) used to sing with a couple of Essex folk bands...sorry, but I don't simply 'write off' folk music, I write it off after years and years of listening to it and hating it.
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:)

what do you think of Afro Celt and the Imagined Village type stuff?
 
TomPaine said:
Can you give some examples of what they have made up?
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For 'Duelling Banjos', 'American Pie'
It's enough to make you cry
'Rule Britannia', or 'Swing low...'
Are they the only songs we English know?

When the Indians, Asians, Afro-Celts
It's in their blood, below their belt
They're playing and dancing all night long
So what have they got right that we've got wrong?

Seed, bud, flower, fruit
They're never gonna grow without their roots
Branch, stem, shoot
They need roots and

And everyone stares at a great big screen
Overpaid soccer stars, prancing teens
Australian soap, American rap
Estuary English, baseball caps

And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look, and the way we talk
Without our stories or our songs

How will we know where we come from?
I've lost St. George in the Union Jack
It's my flag too and I want it back

all the above is just rubbish imho .. yes lots of people have lost roots .. but gained new ones .. he thinks englishmess is ONLY expressed in the way he thinks imho
 
all the above is just rubbish imho .. yes lots of people have lost roots .. but gained new ones .. he thinks englishmess is ONLY expressed in the way he thinks imho
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I asked you to show me the bits they made up though. I'm familiar with this song and don't see anything that is obviously untrue?
Obviously they have a popular following though as a band judging by their gigs at the Royal Albert :).
 
butchersapron said:
So what? Where do they live?
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Come off it. Railing against Estuary English. Bewailing the fact that white folk (and let's face it, that's what they're talking about) don't have songs like those 'ethnics'.

This bit is particularly sus:

And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look, and the way we talk

Who does?


It's full of coded fucking narrow-minded shite as far as I'm concerned.
 
You didn't mentiion that, you just said that old peoples concerns should be fucked off because they're old.

I'm not agreeing with any of your interpretaions either. I've not looked at the lyrics.
 
butchersapron said:
Are dads and dads dads to be ignored? If so, why?
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It sounds like "somebody's dad" in the sense that it just sounds like reflexive whinging. Ooh, Neighbours, kids don't speak proper any more, baseball caps, they just watch the telly, what they need is a good sing-song round the old joanna, got to remember their roots. St George and the Union Jack? This is a stereotypical dad here, certainly mine wouldn't come up with that guff. Fake problems, fake solutions.
 
kyser_soze said:
How much they reminded me why I loathe and detest folk music/roots or whatever label you want to throw on it. Load of conservative, reactionary 'Oh what happened to the great land of ours' toss.
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Bollocks. Sorry, no politer way to put it.

Not talking about Show of Hands specifically - although AFAIK they're not at all happy about the nationalist following folk music tends to have - but to suggest that all folk/roots music is reactionary or backward looking is just nonsense.
 
Come off it. Railing against Estuary English. Bewailing the fact that white folk (and let's face it, that's what they're talking about) don't have songs like those 'ethnics'.

This bit is particularly sus:

And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look, and the way we talk

Who does?


It's full of coded fucking narrow-minded shite as far as I'm concerned.
Click to expand...

I think your looking for something that isn't there. Especially as the band said they had been wary of releasing the song because they where worried that right wing nutters might seize upon it.

Bewailing the fact that white folk (and let's face it, that's what they're talking about) don't have songs like those 'ethnics'
Click to expand...

That is a total projection in my opinion and pretty nasty to boot.
 
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