What is anti-folk? To most people who have heard the term., it means Beck. More specifically, it means the song “Loser” by Beck. They don’t even really consider the rest of Mellow Gold to be anti-folk, even if “Whiskeyclone, Hotel City, 1997” and “Truckdrivin Neighbors Downstairs (Yellow Sweat)” might be better examples.
To keep this simple, let’s define it this way. Anti-folk was a musical genre that sprung up in NYC around 1990. It featured young singer-songwriters who often looked the part of old-school folk singers with scruffy hair and acoustic guitars, but whose music was informed by the punk era.
Of course, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs could have plenty of attitude, but these newer artists had an even coarser edge, and more profane sense of humor, to what they were presenting.
It was both and homage to, and the rejection of, the ‘60s coffee houses. It could be hard to tell if a trio like the Washington Squares were honoring or mocking Peter, Paul and Mary – and that was kind of the point of anti-folk. They congregated at the SideWalk Café in Alphabet City and never really played to huge crowds. But they moved the needle both in New York and on the national scene.
An intro to anti-folk
Beck cut his teeth in that community, though he wouldn’t achieve his fame until after he returned home to L.A. It was in New York where he met a group of like-minded musicians, who were willing to mix disparate elements into their baseline folk music. Punk, hip-hop. jazz – they all set down roots in the burgeoning anti-folk scene.
The singers were more apt to curse and talk about themselves than their antecedents had been. They had a far more cynical sense of humor as well.
And the best of them wrote sensational songs. Here is a playlist that can serve as an introduction to one of the best forgotten music scenes America has produced in the past 40 years.
“Damn, I Wish I Was a Man” by Cindy Lee Berryhill (1987)
She has a harmonica and a guitar and an odd vocal delivery. Had she been prowling around the Village twenty years earlier, she would have been called the female Dylan. As it was, Cindy Lee Berryhill had to content herself with simply being one of the best songwriters around.
“Damn, I Wish I was a Man” is an ironic, laugh-out-loud funny feminist anthem. It cuts to the heart of the matter with observations like
“I’d call guys wimps by calling them a woman.”
Two years later, on her follow-up album, she released a withering takedown of the modern American trashy rich. It was called “Trump.”
“The Lefty Rhetoric Blues” by Roger Manning (1988)
Manning was one of the original subway buskers in New York. His rapid, bluesy guitar fit well in the hustle and bustle of the passing trains. “Lefty Rhetoric Blues” from his self-titled debut is a classic of self-deprecating sarcasm, bashing all those lefties for being naïve idiots … who just happened to have been right about Viet Nam.
That album was released by prominent SoCal indie label SST, one of the most important promoters of punk rock in the ‘80s and ‘90s, further indicating the way anti-folk and punk were spiritually linked.
“Stephen Said” by Lach (1990)
Lach may have been the most instrumental artist in the anti-folk movement and his failure to ever hit it big is a classic story of bad luck and bad timing. It is easy – and at times misleading – to match up the ‘90s musicians with counterparts from the ‘60s. Hell, I just did it with Berryhill and Dylan.
But Lach could have been the new Lou Reed. The opening track from his debut album Contender, “The Edie Effect,” could easily be a late-60’s Velvet Underground song about Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. The final track, “Stephen Said,” mimics Reed’s penchant for writing songs like Reed's “Stephanie Says.” Only here it is about a boy, it is in the past tense, and it is far less forgiving, as in
“Stephen said … he was gonna quit
But we all know … that he's full of s**t.”
Alas, Lach’s record label folded almost as soon as Contender was released and mainstream success would never find him. But he was a fixture as both a musician and a promoter of the form for decades to come.
“Orange Ball of Hate” by The Mountain Goats (1994)
I don’t often see John Darnielle linked to anti-folk, and I suppose that’s fair enough. When he began recording under the Mountain Goats label, he probably was not very familiar with Lach’s impromptu shows at the Fort in New York’s lower east side. After all. Darnielle was three thousand miles away in California.
But his blend of acoustic simplicity and punk anger is part and parcel of anti-folk. He was developing the same impulse simultaneously. That was clearest on his first album, filled with dense poetry and lo-fi recording that didn’t really try to win fans. You can call it whatever genre you want, but “Orange Ball of Hate,” which, by the way, is a love song – is as anti-folk as it gets.
“Downloading Porn with Davo” by the Moldy Peaches (2001)
The Moldy Peaches – Adam Green and Kimya Dawson – met when Green came to the city as a wide-eyed teen from Westchester and met up with Dawson, ten years his senior, who took him under her wing and introduced him to the downtown music scene. You may know them from the quirky, dorky love song “Anyone Else But You” which was featured in the indie hit film Juno.
That song came from their debut album, The Moldy Peaches, as did this raucous, x-rated romp about sex and drugs in the form of rock and roll. It’s as if the sweet innocence of a suburban band like Beat Happening decided to make their parents blush. With lyrics about a 70 year-old hooker and a girlfriend with a penis (real or artificial – it’s up to you), this is anti-folk at its silly, childish best.
“Seattle” by Jeffrey Lewis (2001)
Lewis was a talented artist who could also write some of the cleverest songs of his era. Though perhaps “The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song,” which follows “Seattle” on his debut album, would be a better representative of the way anti-folk recycled its inspirations, I just love his comment on the modern grunge phenomenon.
“Chelsea Hotel” references Leonard Cohen and Sid Vicious and New York’s glorious past, but “Seattle” has the acoustic finger-picking of the classic 60’s folk tunes. It is a sweet homage and a sharp takedown at the same time.
“Scenesters” by AJJ (2005)
By 2005, anti-folk had come and gone and come and gone again. And it had spread its wings and left New York. AJJ came from Phoenix, and like Alice Cooper and Meat Puppets before them, it seems like something about that hot, flat land made their bands go a little crazy, defying previous genre expectations.
AJJ drifted toward the punkier, wilder side of anti-folk. As you might guess, “Scenesters” is another laugh-out-loud portrait of a scene where kids can remain righteous because “their hair gel isn’t tested on animals” and “cocaine is essentially vegan.”
That’s a start. Of course, you can listen to early Beck or Regina Spektor for other flavors of anti-folk. And, as a side note, when we were all going ballistic over the recent NYT “greatest living American songwriters” list, it dawned on me that none of these musicians were mentioned.
None were even mentioned as worthy replacements. And they should have been. They should have at least been represented. You cannot convince me that there are thirty living American songwriters better than Cindy Lee Berryhill.
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