The musical genre invented by Kevin Bacon: “I came up with that”
Countless musicians have no doubt dreamed of pioneering a brand new genre and being remembered by the history books for blazing a trail, so you have to wonder how they felt when Kevin Bacon strolled in from Hollywood and concocted a bespoke style of music all by himself.
That said, he’s not one of those Hollywood types who became consumed by ego and decided that because they think they’ve got what it takes to make a record and they had the money to live out their fantasy, they’d go ahead and do it regardless of whether they could play a note or carry a tune.
There have been far too many of those, but Bacon is genuinely passionate about his music. He knows that when he’s on tour with his band that there will always be a portion of the audience who’ve bought tickets specifically because they know him from the movies, which is probably why The Bacon Brothers usually end their set with a rousing cover version of ‘Footloose’.
The siblings have never aimed for the mainstream, and there’s probably a large number of people out there who’ve been watching the star pop up everywhere in film and television for decades who’ve got no idea he’s written, recorded, and released ten albums since 1997.
What kind of music do they play? Forosoco, naturally. It was even the name of their first full-length album, just to hammer the point home that Kevin and Michael are, in fact, practitioners of forosoco music. What the fuck is forosoco, you ask? It’s The Bacon Brothers’ signature sound, of course, which the Apollo 13 and Mystic River favourite coined himself.
“I came up with that,” he informed the Boston Globe. “Because everybody says, ‘What kind of music do you play?’ And the implication is, ‘What bin will you be in in the record store?’ Back when we had record stores and bins. I said, ‘Well, it’s kind of folk, rock, soul, country: forosoco.'”
His older brother was on board with being one-half of the world’s first forosoco band, but he wasn’t quite as sold on the prospect of the duo calling their debut album Forosoco, mostly because, and with very good reason, it was a nonsense word that didn’t make any sense, and one that nobody would recognise.
“If you want a great marketing tool, come out with your first record that nobody knows how to pronounce,” he chimed in, making a good point. Not that they’re in it for the money, seeing as Kevin has done pretty well for himself financially after almost 50 years as an actor, even if things did hit a snag when he lost most of his money to Bernie Madoff’s nefarious schemes.
As for Michael, he’s been a professional musician for even longer, so what’s a little forosoco between brothers? If you combine folk, rock, soul, and country, you get the band’s sound. It’s not what you’d call groundbreaking or pioneering, but since nobody bothered their arse to give it an official moniker before then, the point still stands: Kevin Bacon invented a genre.
