To Touch the Stars: a 10 year retrospective on taking filk mainstream

[egoldberg]

This is the full copy of a retrospective on To Touch the Stars: A Musical Celebration of Space Exploration, which will be excerpted in Gary McGath's upcoming ebook on filk history.In 1997, I formed Prometheus Music. My goal was to take filk to a professional level, at a time in which filk albums were rarely as professionally produced as today. I

Comments

[patoadam]

Did the professionals who said that filk music sucks ever give constructive feedback? Did they ever say what filkers could do to improve their "uninspired" melodies and "amateurish" lyrics?

Someone once asked a filker, "Is that a real song or did you write it yourself?" Does the person who said that understand something that we don't?

The "Dog on the Moon" song doesn't stand out in my mind as a particularly wonderful song. IIRC it has a bridge and a key change, but is that such a big deal? What is Christine Lavin listening for that I am overlooking?

Or should I stop asking questions like these and just relax and enjoy filk music?

[egoldberg]

Replied privately by e-mail

[madfilkentist]

Mainstream hit songs so often have pointless, idiotic lyrics, if you can even tell what they are, so whatever these people said, high-quality lyric writing is not essential to a commercially successful album. The quote from Popular Science conveys zero information. Calling the songs "yowser-awful" conveys zero information. No matter how it's phrased or how much the writer is being paid, "I hate it" conveys no information beyond "I hate it."

Self-proclaimed "folk singers" who say to throw out your songs and substitute a new bunch by professional songwriters are phonies who are ignorant of what folk music is about.

I rarely listen to the album, but for me the problem is that the arrangements try to sound like the pop songs on the radio which I assiduously avoid. I agree that trying to pitch filk at a mainstream market was a mistake, but not because some connected idiot insulted the songs.

[egoldberg]

Hey Gary - love ya - but I think your comment perfectly captures a filk sensibility and the blind spot filkers have, that we had to learn about firsthand

[keross]

To Touch the Stars in one of my favorite albums. Note that I did not say Filk albums. It sits right next to my Benny Goodman and Carpenters collections on my shelf. It probably would have been worn out if it wasn't for putting my it on my ipod

[starcat_jewel]

Y'know, it occurs to me that "melodically uninspired and lyrically amateurish" is probably pretty close to how I'd describe most of the music that person likes. And I can say that with a fair degree of confidence because that's how I feel about the vast majority of commercially successful music; the music is bland and uninteresting, and the lyrics insipid where they're not actively offensive.

This is starting to sound to me like the "litfic vs. SF/F" argument couched in musical terms, and I rather suspect that some of the same factors may be in play -- namely, that a lot of people simply assumed that because it was done by science fiction people, it had to be awful, and so they listened and had their preconceptions confirmed.

[egoldberg]

Actually, the two main producers we got feedback from are much loved within filk as songwriters, with their songs both sung and recorded by filkers. One was a very active science-fiction enthusiast.

I think the use of the word 'mainstream' here is confounding. I don't mean 'mainstream' as in 'stuff that sells millions', I mean mainstream as just something that has any potential genuine appeal at scale to people beyond filk.

We didn't talk to people who made the pop music you hear on the radio, we talked to people whose albums have sold 100,000 or so copies a piece, who successfully targeted discernible niches -- just not microniches like filk.

[jonbaker]

100,000 copies today is insanely successful, like top pop singers. mp3 downloads aren't counted towards sales figures, and people rarely buy full albums any more.

[sffilk]

The important thing is, you tried.