Beatboxing and mashups are the new folk music

Thompson, Tok. Beatboxing, Mashups, and Cyborg Identity: Folk Music for the Twenty-First Century. Western Folklore, Spring 2011, 71-193.

Thompson’s provocative thesis is that folk music of the present is either produced entirely digitally, or is performed with the specific intent of imitating electronic sounds. Furthermore, the oral tradition intrinsic to folk music is now substantially taking place via the internet.

Thompson begins with a discussion of beatboxing, which began on the streetcorners of US cities, but has spread to every corner of the internet-using world, primarily via YouTube. Beatboxing may seem far afield from digital audio, since no form of music could be more “organic” or body-centered. But beatboxing began as a substitute for drum machines and samplers, and to this day, beatboxers strive to sound as much as possible like turntables, samplers and digital editing software.

Beatboxing enjoyed a brief and narrow popularity with hip-hop listeners in the 1980s, but since then it has vanished from the commercial landscape. For the most part, it is a form practiced and taught for creative gratification only. This satisfies Thompson’s requirement that a folk form be non-commrcial. While we traditionally associate folk music with specific regions, YouTube creates its own communities of shared musical vocabulary that transcend countries and continents. The best and most virtuosic beatboxer I’ve heard in many years was a young South Korean, visiting New York to busk the subways.

The mashup is Thompson’s other emblematic present-day folk form. Because of copyright restrictions, mashups are intrinsically noncommercial, and require a virtual word-of-mouth culture on blogs, filesharing sites and on YouTube (though there they are frequently removed for copyright reasons.) Mashups may one day move from the fringes into the commercial mainstream as artists like Girl Talk gain popularity. For the moment, however, mashups are produced more for their own sake than for any hope of financial gain. Whatever the law might say, most of us regard the sea of pop songs, jingles, movie and video game themes that we live in to be communal property. Mashups combine these communal materials in much the same way that blues and country songs were once fitted together from free-floating modular memes in the de facto public domain. As the software for producing mashups continues to become less expensive and more accessible, we can expect the deluge of mashups proliferating across the web to grow in volume. The video mashup is also becoming a formidable art form, though there the technical barrier to entry remains somewhat higher than in music.

Thompson convincingly argues his point that in vernacular music, the postmodern resembles the premodern, as nonprofessional musicians resume adapting the music around them for their own purposes. My major problem with Thompson’s otherwise exemplary paper is this sentence: “Mashups unselfconsciously turn the tide on the printing press regime, and usher in a new era of performance that has much in common with the old.” (Thompson 18) I specifically object to the word “unselfconsciously.” Mashup culture, like sample culture generally, is highly self-conscious, and irony is one of its defining modes. For example, underground rapper Sage Francis discusses his unauthorized use of the David Bowie sample that forms the basis for his song “Strange Fame:”

I ain’t clearin’ no sample for this song, I’ll just give it away
David Bowie ain’t my homie

You couldn’t ask for a better manifesto for the new digital folk music. The effortlessness of copying, remixing and distributing digital works, with or without permission, is the defining creative act of our time. Thompson is right to group beatboxing with these forms, as musicians strive to unite the sounds made on the newest high-tech instruments with the most ancient one, the human body.