At the beginning of the month, I attended a Falling In Reverse concert at Stage AE as part of their headlining tour, “The Thug In Me Is You.” I normally don’t listen to much post-hardcore music, as it’s one of those genres that I tend to only seek out through particular artists. In fact, I appear to be one of the least likely candidates to go to a concert of this nature, taking into consideration the music I tend to play on my radio show. I will admit that this was my first post-hardcore concert experience and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. My primary interest was the chance to see Enter Shikari live since they rarely pass through the U.S. at my convenience.
The performance opened up with letlive., a group from Los Angeles that I wasn’t familiar with at all until the day of the show. They were… entertaining, at best. Jason Aalon Butler, the lead singer, was utterly incoherent and I would have needed closed captioning to understand what he was attempting to convey to the audience. It was like watching a bunch of circus monkeys, with Butler performing destructive stunts that resulted in a blown out speaker. I especially liked it when he grabbed the metal barricade, violently threw it down towards the floor, wrapped his hands around the bars like he was trapped in a prison, and then repeatedly attacked it. At the conclusion of that song, he explained that his act was representative of “breaking down the barriers of society” and I lost any remaining respect I had for them as a band.
Thankfully, Enter Shikari proceeded to take the stage to make up for letlive.’s mediocre efforts. They began the set with some songs from their latest album, A Flash Flood of Color, which was released in January. A friend of mine had only good things to say about Enter Shikari’s stage presence, but both of us felt that they were a bit lacking. I later came to the conclusion that I probably felt this way mostly due to the concert repertoire for the evening: It was predominantly material from their earlier years, which I didn’t recognize as much. Nevertheless, I will give them credit for selecting tunes that meshed better with letlive. and Falling In Reverse’s styles. Even though I was a bit disappointed, I would love to see what Enter Shikari could do as a headliner.
Before Falling In Reverse took the stage, they decided to test the audience’s patience by playing a silly cat video to lighten the mood followed up by an introductory video that satirized Ronnie Radke, the lead singer, as the president of the United States. The entire venue erupted into cheers and screams when they finally came into view, bringing with them an incredible energy that I have never before encountered in all of the other concerts I have been to.
Let me be frank: I was floored. Something that really stuck out to me was Falling In Reverse’s ability to connect with their fans. For instance, Radke pulled out a Terrible Towel and swung it around as he cheered for the Steelers, an action that definitely made the night that much more memorable. Although Falling in Reverse is a fairly young band, all of its members have had prior experience in other groups, which adds to the overall musical skill of the band. They succeeded in reeling me in to wanting more and they have raised my expectations for future concerts. I walked out of there knowing that this first post-hardcore concert was definitely not my last.
Something deeply embedded in American culture is the movement of people, traveling. The history of our families and forbearers is emigration, riding the railroad, vacations, road trips, going to college. Furthermore, it’s extremely prominent in storytelling and music tradition.
One of the earliest tunes in American music is the “The Wayfaring Stranger.” Not surprisingly for the early 19th century America, it is a Christian spiritual. The singer is the “poor wayfaring stranger” wandering through this world in search of a heavenly home.
This song is still reordered and fairly popular after nearly two centuries of song writing. Rather than being a joyous religious song, it’s slow and somber. The hardship of traveling overshadows the happiness of religious salvation. What’s reflected is how “home” is a place people long for, especially while traveling in the unfamiliar. This song still resonates because this dichotomy of the happy home vs. the strange world still has lived on through every generation of people.
Much of our western cannon of storytelling from Homer’s Odyssey to AMC’s The Walking Dead are stories centered on people traveling. Our most entertaining stories when we return to our families during the holidays are recounting where we’ve been and what we’ve done.
That said, for all the blue traveling songs there are as many that capture the adventure of living on the road. In American culture you’ll find legends, like the cowboy, immortalized for their work. Musicians are prime examples travelers, particularly when your livelihood depends on touring. One of the better and more famous examples is “Jack Straw” by the roots-inspired Grateful Dead. The song encompasses is a story of survival on the road but the song could be about anyone traveling the road. And finally, there are some who are just not content to sit around so they finally up and move.
Welcome to the Three River Revival! This blog is an attempt share with you, dear listeners, my appreciation for traditional and folk music.
This being the inaugural post, let me lay the ground work for entries to come. My goal: I’d like to explore the question, “what is traditional music?” Rather than summing it up in a concise answer (Wiki it, the answer is not so concise) this blog will take a thematic approach that looks into traditional music from the U.S. and around the world. I want to explore what threads connect the music of the past with the music of today.
To start, there are a few generalizations I will make to make defining traditional music easier.
Simply by definition, traditional music is the root of all styles that succeed it. But it’s silly to assume that nothing exists before traditional music. “Traditional” can be assigned to a particular people (even a single person), instrument, style, region, event, etc. and it is born of a culture. More often than not a classification will be the result of a few of these cultural variables: Give a banjo to a man in New Orleans and he will give you a Dixieland rhythm. Give a banjo to a girl in Galax, Va. and suddenly you have a bluegrass picker. Find Woody Guthrie in the middle of unionization and you get “1913 Massacre.” Find Dylan in the middle of the Civil Rights era and you get “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.”
Another assumption I’d like to make is that this music has significance within its culture of origin. This can mean purpose but it can also mean popularity. Traditional music can aid in the storytelling, passing, and propagation of a culture. Basically, it found an audience willing to embrace it and also to recreate it while transforming it into new styles, rendering the old “traditional.”
I write because I love the folk tradition and I believe it has much to offer those who want to understand music and its relationship to people. Modern music has its place. I can lie down on my couch, close my eyes, chill out of the B-side of The Avalanches or Neat Beats, and tell you how meta it is to smash pop culture to pieces and then rebuild it. But unique to traditional music is it still provides a sense of identity, in some cases even when the heyday of its style is long past. Look, there are still people blowing alpine horns for no apparent reason other than to party at the top of mountains.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for future installments of Three River Revival.
