Mumford and Sons

Last week I was in Prague, attending the 2013 CESRA Workshop; a super meeting, providing lots of fodder for future blog posts. Since I was co-leading one of the Working Groups there was little time for tourism but I was able to relax, in one of my favourite cities, for a while on Sunday. Passing the old Jewish cemetery I recalled the dark tale of the Golem, creature of dirt animated by arcane knowledge.

Back home I saw my brother, on Facebook, ask, "what do people like about Mumford and Sons?" I could reply only, "beats me". But I thought a bit more about Mumford and Sons.

You look so edgy walking down Byres Road in your Che Guevara t-shirt; but which shop did you buy it in? Who gets the money when you buy a Rage Against the Machine poster? All the symbols of protest and even the ideas behind them are vulnerable to commodification. Capitalism clasps its enemies to its breast and adds them to its product range. This is certainly one ingredient of the current "there is no alternative" mentality.

Since the 1950s popular music has been a mixed blessing for capitalism: a focus for dissent and a fabulous commodity at the same time. We see those tensions from day one in the desperate tale of Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker and Hill and Range (I've really enjoyed Peter Guralnick's two-volume Elvis biography, by the way). Music's never got very far out of control but it's been a troublesome little commodity from time to time, all the same. How much better if we could have the commodity without the possibilities for dissent, for "consciousness-raising" (sorry!).

My little theory is that this is where Mumford and Sons come in. Real folk music is risky. It deals in eternal truths, death, passion, archetypes. It makes you think about who you are and how you fit into the world (as long as you don't treat it as wooly-jumpered nostalgia); subversive stuff. How will we deal with this? We'll produce a bland, neutered commodity music that does none of this but has the visual trappings of folk music, clothes, acoustic instruments, and deals in a non-threatening sort of fake, overwrought emotion. We'll market it intensively and people will forget about the scary stuff. They'll feel cool because they're into "folk music", and they'll be happily surprised how little it distracts them from their roles as producers and consumers. This is what "folk music" will become, just as "rhythm and blues" has gone from John Lee Hooker to Beyoncé - who needs no weblink from me (a fact underlined as I type by the automatic appearance of the acute over her last "e"; BlogSpot has Beyoncé in its spelling dictionary!).

So I think this is how to understand Mumford and Sons: a sort of golem, animated by capitalism, set going to defend the established order from folk music. A Capitalist Folk Golem (and yes, isn't that a great band name? It's mine. You can't have it).

Of course this is nonsense. Capitalism doesn't "do" things, perceive enemies, animate golems. What on earth are we talking about? And while we're at it, could we really animate a man of mud in some moment of magic? Funnily enough I think the answers to these odd-looking questions might be connected, via ideas closer to my usual territory. Maybe we'll tackle those another day, if there is sense to be made of them.

Another, final little aside: the experimental music record label RER Megacorp is having a summer sale. Many of its titles are going for a fiver a shot. Do yourself a favour: take a chance on some of these, try some sounds like you never heard before, music permanently immune to commodification. Play them when you're doing other things around the house and see how these new sounds seep into your brain and what they do to you, happy in the knowledge that any profits are going to the musicians and the handful of people who keep the record label afloat.