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In the car today I started singing. I wanted to soothe myself. I'd just driven past a truck crammed full of swaying and shaken pigs and I knew that they were on the way to the abattoir, their soft, sensitive flesh poking out of the gaps in the grills. I couldn't help tears, and most people would think it ridiculous that someone should be upset about pigs. Myths are invented about pigs - e.g., they are dirty and lazy - in order to make slaughtering them an easier thing to bear. But the brains of pigs are as smart as toddlers according to any scientific, human-centred measurement, and I have met many pigs, and they are beautiful and curious creatures who feel pain and look at you in the eyes and make noises you cannot ignore.
So I was upset. And I was thinking that if ever I wanted to forfeit my ordinary life I would make it my mission, somewhat like a Somalian pirate, to plague the highways and stop the trucking of abattoir animals and shut down the horrible business once and for all. But that's dreaming for which no one can prosecute me.
But I had to get along the road, so I began to sing. Normally I'd sing myself plain song and pretend that I am a calm Gregorian Monk. Instead I sang a folk melody, a Celtic one, full of tears and sounds of oppression.
At some point I got kind of frustrated with this, and decided to up the ante on the tune and add some swear words. Then, in addition, I started to scream out the end of lines like a punk. For sometime, singing this way, and making up lyrics according to the feelings that were welling up in me, between folk and punk, I started to like what I heard. I even began to think: what if I could sing this for real, in front of an audience, and tell it like it is?
At the back of the truck I'd caught the sign that ordinarily is a safety measure on all large trucks. My song began:
"If you can't see my mirrors, I can't see you",
Said the Trucker to the Pig.
My song would be called, What is to be Done?, and my lyrics began to explore everything that was wrong in the world, according to me:
Damn horse racing and how does it end?
With broken legs and guns to heads.
And out it would go from pigs to horses to humans to wars to economic delusion to bays of pigs and so on like any old, raw punk song.
And because the punk was directing the sad tune, I decided to call my style PUNK FOLK.
I really thought I was onto something, but then of course I couldn't resist the temptation to do a search, because I knew I am ignorant about much of music history. And the term Folk Punk did appear, so originality was not the virtue of my new style of music. You can read about Folk Punk via the Urban dictionary, or listen to it on last.fm.
Wikipedia also shows me that the symbol for Folk Punk is a love-heart over an anarchy symbol:
But Folk Punk doesn't sound like my song, "What is to be Done?". Folk Punk is a different fusion from what I would call my own, Punk Folk, or maybe I am just an idiosyncratic lump who has no music background.
Yet still I know what I like to hear and I want the soft melodic nature of Folk to be the base and give some kind of different precedence to the Punk and to the explicitly political and rage-filled lyrics.
So I am sticking with Punk Folk. Of course I'll never be a Punk Folk singer, but it's nice to dream and no one can prosecute me for that.
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