#dog mod

[filkyeahfilk]

Gotta say, thank you SO much for running this blog. I’ve discovered so much music I love from you guys, thank you so much.

Thank you for listening!! I started this blog to help share more filk with the good people of tumblr, and I’m so happy when it actually works

[filkyeahfilk]

Hi! Sorry if this is a stupid question, but do you think poetry could be considered filk too? Because I wanna try writing some filk stuff, but I'm terrible with music, and even changing the lyrics of already existing songs so that it still works with the music seems like a bit too big challenge to me (especially in English, since it's not my first language), but I can write poems. Not very good poems, I have to admit that, but poems anyway.

Definitely!  I’ve heard a few people read poetry at filk events.  Sometimes it’s a song they don’t feel confident enough to sing but want to share anyway, and sometimes because they found or wrote a very filkish poem that was never intended to be sung.

Go forth!  Write things!!  And there’s always a chance that someone else will be able to set something you write to music later!

[filkyeahfilk]

Hey so you seem like exactly the person to ask: I was struck with the desire to write a comparative paper about filk/folk treatment of the collapse of society, but I mostly listen to filk through my housemate playing it when I'm in the room, and the only artists I know of who do songs about that are Leslie Fish and Talis Kimberley. Can you recommend me other singers who do songs/other songs on a similar theme to like, Serious Steel and World's End? Thank you for your time, great blog!

Ooooooh man now this is a good question.  Fish is definitely your best place to start, since she’s the only one I can think of who did a full ALBUM of post-apocalyptic (and pre-apocalyptic) filk, AND THEN SOME.

Me and the brain mod went through and came up with as many as we could think of, besides everything on that album:

“No Hurry,” by Vixy & Tony

“Apocalypse Ballade,” by Araxie Haldane

“All the Birds Are Gone,” by Talis Kimberley

“Post-Apocalyptic Blues,” by Dr. Mary Crowell

“We Protest the Robot Occupation,” Kari Maaren

“A Lonely Christmas Out Here,” Kari Maaren

Two (x, x) Seanan McGuire songs, though one’s unfortunately unrecorded and the other is on an album that’s out of print

“What are We Doing,” by Alexander James Adams

“Freedom of the Snow,” by Leslie Fish

“Mount Tam,” by Leslie Fish (about trading one disaster for another)

“Survivor’s Song,” by Julia Ecklar

“Tribbles,” by Julia Ecklar LOOK THIS IS DEFINITELY AN APOCALYPSE

As always, everyone can feel free to add!  I’m sure there are dozens more, at least.

[filkyeahfilk]

I just noticed we got 25 NEW FOLLOWERS in the past WEEK which is huge for a pretty small blog, especially considering...we haven’t posted much at all recently.  So welcome, I’ve loaded the queue for a while in all of your honor, here’s hoping we can keep it up!

Feel free to bother us with “why haven’t you posted x yet” or “do you know any songs about y!”  Sometimes we need to be poked.

[filkyeahfilk]

What I don't see much of is kids in college or just out of college doing it. Maybe they've moved on to anime.

Frank Hayes, interviewed about filk music by Alanna Nash

This is hilarious to me (despite being one of the sad truths of Filk These Days), because on one hand I think the (to my mind, at this point artificial) divide between science fiction and anime actually has distanced older fans from younger ones, and on the other hand it recalls the joke that never gets old, pointing at any given thing and saying “is that anime”

[filkyeahfilk]

If submitting our own songs is kosher, I wrote and posted an ode to the Christmas Tree Nebula, which might count as astronomy and/or holiday filk.

- @sophus-b

it is ABSOLUTELY accepted and ENCOURAGED, thank you and Merry Christmas from one of the mods who’s not Jewish!

[filkyeahfilk]

Do you think the song "Pioneers Over c" by Van Der Graaf Generator could be considered filk? It's prog rock rather than folk, but it is about the first astronauts to surpass the speed of light, who then find themselves sort of disconnected from time. I suppose it's more like speculative fiction in song form than science fiction fandom, though. Idk, that's why I'm asking y'all.

It is if you want it to be!  Because definitions are made up and only exist as long as they are useful to us.  I definitely thing filk is a genre doesn’t ever need to sound folk-ish, it just often does because 1) it evolved out of the 60′s folk movement and 2) it’s an easy style to write and perform in for amateur musicians.  But heck, there’s rap filk, there’s no reason there should be prog rock filk…except that prog rock typically requires at LEAST six musical instruments and electricity, and so is more conducive to staged concerts than song circles.

….but there’s plenty of filk on concert stages, with electric instruments, with the extensive arrangement, rehearsal, and setup you get in prog rock.  I saw a prog rock band at a con, and while it wasn’t billed as filk, being at a con makes you basically filk.  

As for whether it’s science fiction fandom music - if you’re in the science fiction fandom, and feel like it’s relevant, and you like it, it’s science fiction fandom music.  That’s why songs about cats and Shakespeare are considered filk, even though they have heck all to do with science fiction.  They might be pretty far removed from Star Trek, but a whole bunch of people like all of those things, and that unites them.  Fandom is about the people, more than the content, in the end.

Anyway, I’d say a case can be made for calling it filk, and if you want to make that case that’s fine by me.  It’s a few steps removed from what I might suggest as some kind of archetypal filk song, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t one.  It’s like how a dachshund and a wolfhound are both dogs.  They’re just very different dogs, and you just have to be aware that traits of most dogs do not necessarily apply to these dogs.  If filk had a real dictionary definition it would have a dozen subdefinitions, and one of those would probably say “songs about science fiction concepts” and that’s this!

[filkyeahfilk]

I believe that was probably Terence Chua, who is from Singapore 

(in reference to this post)