As mentioned in the previous entry, slightly scarce lately as my deadline on the first draft of Frail, the sequel to Dust, is mid-November, and there's really very little witty you can say when immersed in (battling, drowning in) a first draft of anything: There, that bit of the outline's done! Now some more! Eked out four paragraphs today! Any minute now! I drank Earl Grey tea when I finished Chapter Sixteen, now I've switched over to Yoo-Hoo! I can't think anyone actually cares so it stays under my hat. However, I did also recently finish reading a book I really liked, so let's talk about it instead: Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music.

(FTC disclaimer: This is an unsolicited review of a book I purchased myself. No money, gifts, etc. exchanged hands for it.)

I love music, and without it my creative brain goes on strike–ironic as I can't actually do the writing with music on as it's too distracting, but there we are. Having recently discovered Last.fm about six years after everyone else (you can visit me there if you like), I stumbled through a series of happy random-track accidents from a lot of repetitive, sterile, dreary post-punk–discovering in the process I didn't actually like Joy Division all that much, there's just that feeling you're supposed to (though I'll never give up The The)–over to huge treasure troves of British and American folk, acid folk, psychedelia, experimental and other things that felt far more interesting. (This is an expression of my own tastes, not some assertion of an objective truth. If you love Joy Division, don't take it personally.) Like many new-minted fans I went looking for more and more bands that might sound like what I'd just discovered I liked, and that led me to Rob Young's long, encyclopedic, idiosyncratic study of "visionary" British music.

"Visionary music," by Young's definition (I don't know whether the phrase is a deliberate callback to visionary/outsider art, but actual outsider music is, mostly, a different animal than this), incorporates trad folk, Marxist/left-wing protest folk, psychedelia, psychedelic rock, acid folk, folk-inspired electronica, experimental art-rock and neopagan music, just to name a few. Ultimately, though, it's about a state of mind, a uniquely British conception of psychic identity and escapism: Unlike the United States with its myth of the endless frontier, British looks inward to find itself, to an Edenic landscape that harkens continuously, to a greater or lesser degree, back to the past and to an ideal of Britain that, much like the politically contested "real America," arguably never existed at all.

This is a long, roundabout way of saying that Young, an editor at the excellent British music magazine The Wire, has written a highly interesting survey of twentieth-century British folk and folk-inspired music, starting with the folk music preservationist Cecil Sharp and the pastoral compositions of Delius and Vaughn Williams, progressing through the political folk of Ewan MacColl, trad revivalists like the Young Tradition, the high-water psych/folk/psych folk flowering of the sixties and early seventies (I was pleased to see him second my great like of the Incredible String Band)–and, following folk's self-indulgent decline and death at the hands of glam rock and punk, its sonic/psychic revival in artists as diverse as Julian Cope, Kate Bush, Aphex Twin and Current 93. The artists he mentions are mainstream as Donovan, the Beatles and Richard Thompson, and as obscure as Comus, Mellow Candle and Magnet (the one-off house band for one of my favorite and apparently visionary films, The Wicker Man). If you're new to this music and had no idea at all of the social or aural history behind any of it, as I didn't, it's fascinating reading.

If you aren't a newcomer to this school of music, however, or if you like your music criticism more objective and methodical, Young's book and his free-floating definition of "visionary music," exciting and inspirational though it was to me, might threaten to drive you crazy. There's a few arguments in the reviews at that Amazon link that are worth reading, as they go back and forth concerning Young's critical choices and the accuracy of some of his statements–I can't speak to any of that, being a newcomer as noted who still needs to read much more, but caveat emptor. If you're like me, though, and find the personalized Lester Bangs school of music criticism enthralling I predict you'll enjoy it.

Some readers also took issue with the book's chronological pattern, circling continually in each chapter back to the past and then forward again instead of strict linear progression. However, I think that was exactly the point. Young questions repeatedly, and with reason, the accuracy of any "traditional" British folk music or customs–musical, social, religious–noting how a single singer's changing the lyrics of a folk song to better suit himself means that pure oral preservation is a futile task. This, of course, is exactly why the work lasts: the introduction of diverse genetic strains strengthens and revitalizes the traditional, assuring it's not just a dead thing stuck in amber. The past influences the future, musically and culturally, and the future has echoes in the supposed past: Kate Bush may not be a folk singer by any strict definition, but songs like "Oh England My Lionheart" echo the British visionary picture of itself, a harkening backwards to a fantasy ideal that changes so continually to suit the times, the music, the individual that you can't even rightly call it nostalgic.

Or, as Young notes in the passage on Gerald Gardner's school of Wicca, does it really matter if it, or any particular piece of music, is "authentic" as long as it satisfies a certain psychic craving in those drawn to it? (Lord Summerisle himself, in The Wicker Man, acknowledged his great-grandfather made the Nuada-worship all up for ulterior reasons, but that hardly mattered to his descendants.) Ultimately, Young seems to suggest, everything we hold dear to our self-identity as a culture is ultimately just a state of mind.

This is a much longer review than I ever planned to write, but then I enjoyed the book greatly and the index alone is serving as an excellent new listener's primer (and a viewer's primer–he mentions several British films with a "visionary" or apocalyptic edge, including a very intriguing-sounding Alice in Wonderland telefilm, that I need to add to my list). To see more from Rob Young, and for some further bibliographic suggestions, visit the Electric Eden website. And now, I suppose I have to go back to writing my own book. Sadly I don't think I could convince my publisher that deadlines are a mere state of mind.

–JFT, 9/28/10