‘An everlasting fire burns among the cancer smoke’: What is anti-folk?
Genre is a tricky thing to pin down within the musical landscape. Once a method of sectioning off record stores, genre titles are now as numerous and obscure as musical artists themselves. ‘Anti-folk’ is one such genre, which has been banded around since the early 2000s without ever definitively laying out its inherent sound or conventions. Nevertheless, the scene continues to resonate with audiences to this day, leading many to question ‘what exactly is anti-folk?’.
You would be forgiven for assuming that the anti-folk scene acts in defiance of traditional folk. In reality, many of the artists that populated the anti-folk scene when it first emerged during the mid-1980s were disciples of legendary folk artists like Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan. However, pioneering anti-folk artists such as Lach and Roger Manning found themselves rejected from the traditional folk clubs of Greenwich Village, where the likes of Dylan once honed their craft.
In that sense, anti-folk began as a reaction against the increasingly elitist attitudes of mainstream American folk. Those early artists often used the techniques and conventions you might expect from folk musicians, blending them together with socially reflective, modern, and satirical lyrics. Artists usually took cues from the punk scene, which had blossomed in New York during the 1970s, establishing an attitude of ‘anything goes’ that was carried through into the anti-folk scene.
During that early period of the genre, the scene was incredibly niche and confined mainly to The Fort venue in New York’s Lower East Side. This was the venue credited with coining the term ‘anti-folk’, as its opening day coincided with the New York folk festival, culminating in The Fort declaring itself the ‘New York Anti-folk Festival’ – an event which went on to be held annually for decades. The venue provided a space for pioneering anti-folk artists like Roger Manning, Cindy Lee, and even Beck to hone their craft before being shut down by the NYPD in 1985.
Although that original venue was short-lived, the group of artists and organisers that had made it a haven for this endearingly DIY music scene continued to work throughout New York’s East Side. Eventually, anti-folk found a home at the SideWalk Cafe in 1993. This East Village staple became the spiritual home of anti-folk for the following decades, which saw the scene expand tenfold.
The SideWalk Cafe inspired the emergence of a new wave of anti-folk musicians, including the likes of Regina Spektor, The Moldy Peaches, and Jeffrey Lewis. It was during the early 2000s that this new crop of artists began to make an impact outside of New York City, finding a global audience for their DIY sensibilities and refreshingly honest lyricism. Lewis, in particular, has become a hero of the antifolk movement for his dedication to grassroots music and a DIY ethos.
Did anti-folk ever break into the mainstream?
Despite its DIY origins, anti-folk has also experienced its fair share of mainstream success. An obvious example would be Beck, whose experience in the New York scene is clear to see on his 1993 debut album Golden Feelings. Even his triumphant mainstream breakthrough, Mellow Gold, bears some unavoidable marks of the anti-folk education he gained in the mid-1980s.
Years later, Regina Spektor found mainstream success with her album, Soviet Kitsch, when it was reissued by Sire Records in 2004. Elsewhere, artists like Adam Green and Jeffrey Lewis have amassed dedicated cult audiences for their distinctly anti-folk sound, even if the artists themselves have long since grown tired of having to explain what exactly anti-folk means.
Lewis, for instance, wrote in 2015’s ‘Avenue A, Shanghai, Hollywood’: “An everlasting fire burns among the cancer smoke, like a journalist still asking ‘what is anti-folk?’” Well, we hope this article has helped to answer some of those questions, because the enduring relevance of anti-folk in the modern age means more and more listeners are flocking to the DIY sound year after year. The SideWalk Cafe sadly closed its doors in 2019, but the spirit of anti-folk lives on worldwide.
