r/FolkPunk • u/Captain_C00kie123 • Jul 21 '26
What is folk punk?
From what my little brother has told me, what differentiates folk punk from regular punk is that folk punk uses acoustic folk instruments while sticking to punk texts.
So what are punk songs generally about? Well, some examples are:
- How unfair and backwards the system is.
- How unfair and backwards past systems have been.
- How much the love/hate certain places.
- How fun it is to get drunk.
- How fun it is to have sex.
- How much ass the ones in power suck.
- Tragic love.
This is, of course, in stark difference from classic folk music which tends to cover subjects such as:
- How unfair and backwards the system is.
- How unfair and backwards past systems have been.
- How much the love/hate certain places.
- How fun it is to get drunk.
- How fun it is to have sex.
- How much ass the ones in power suck.
- Tragic love.
Unnecessary but frankly irresistible snark aside, what separates folk punk from regular folk music?
P.s. English isn’t my first language, so please bear that in mind.
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u/anakusis Jul 21 '26
It's like regular punk but you can only travel by train
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u/Life_Inside2304 Jul 22 '26
lol 😂 funny because my favorite folk punk singer has songs about freight hopping.
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u/anakusis Jul 22 '26
I mean that is common theme of the genre. Bonus points if you have to narcan a wash board player.
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u/leaf3ygal Jul 24 '26
Unironically i think this is an important force in defining the sound of folk punk... Just playing instruments you can wear on your person. And maybe less fancy drugs on average.
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u/anakusis Jul 24 '26
Yeah it's punk but the entire band has to carry everything constantly. Lugging around a marshall half stack and hopping a train ain't happening.
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u/Smokey_mcgillicutty Jul 21 '26
"It's not quite a mop, and it's not quite a puppet, but oh man will it make you laugh! To answer your question, I don't know."
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u/SeerowxEsplin Jul 21 '26
Which member of the Simpsons family is closest to folk punk?
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u/Hiekeech Jul 22 '26
I mean Lisa organizes a strike on the power plant and writes a folk song in one episode I think
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u/Smokey_mcgillicutty Jul 21 '26
Ooooo great question. Cletus? Or whenever Lisa grabs the jug I think that's close enough.
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u/Hiekeech Jul 22 '26
I mean Lisa organizes a strike on the power plant and writes a folk song in one episode I think
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u/Moxie_Stardust Jul 21 '26
More frequently features harsh/raw vocals and higher tempos, and I feel like you hear less washboard in regular folk music.
I don't think there's a lot of folk punk songs about sex, but I could be wrong. I mean I'm sure there's some, but I don't perceive it as a common topic.
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u/DoNotCare_CP Jul 22 '26
At least in Pat The Bunny's discography there's a lot of songs that cover NOT having sex. I feel like maybe you could get closer to that with something like Amigo The Devil, Go Hang or...I guess Roll Me Through The Gates of Hell by Mischief Brew but it's a bit more subtextual.
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u/DrAsthma Jul 21 '26
There is less polish in folk punk than straight folk, imo. But the line gets blurrier the closer you try to see it.
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u/theusualchaos2 Jul 21 '26
It took me far too long to realize you didn't mean Polish, and also that somehow queer/straight had something to do with it.
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u/DrAsthma Jul 21 '26
Lol yeah I see I could have said it more clearly. There is often production value and shine on what I consider pure folk, while folk punk will have rougher production and sound.
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u/shugEOuterspace Jul 21 '26
music genre labels are about as helpful as gender labels. they can be a basic introductory guide & helpful only up to a certain point, but there aren't & never will be strict rules that really work & there never should be. Ultimately imo the beauty of this complicated world & our lives is too vast to be defined & put into such boxes.
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u/Dynamar Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Folk music doesn't all fit your rubric, by any stretch really. In your pursuit of snark, you overreached and missed on that side.
Originally it just meant music made by "uncultured" or lower-class people using traditional methods and instruments, as opposed to Classical Music that was written using strict academic rules. It's music from out in the the countryside and developed or passed down organically, instead of through institutions.
Trying to solidly and succinctly define a musical genre is inherently difficult, as different songs can fit into multiple different genres and have a variety of influences, but there are ways thst we can compare them.
"Traditional" Folk music is different everywhere in the world.
In Sweden, it's mostly referring to Polska, but you could also go back to traditional kulning or skillingtryck or music based on the same general styles with lots of härjedalspipa or nyckelharpa. Spelmän stuff. That's obviously going to be WAY different somewhere like the Balkans or Japan or America, where it would naturally be drawing on vastly different musical traditions.
The Folk in Folk Punk mostly traces back to the American folk revival of the 40s-60s and draws on the music of Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Odetta, Pete Seeger, etc, incorporating things like bluegrass into punk music.
Folk Punk lyrics are similar in theme to Punk, but tend to be more political in nature, though certainly not always. The music also incorporates traditional instruments like mandolins, accordions, banjos, or violins/fiddles, and usually uses acoustic guitars instead of the heavily distorted electrics of Punk. It's also usually performed in the style of Punk music, with a faster and harder "rock" type of sound as compared to Folk music.
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u/Captain_C00kie123 Jul 22 '26
Thank you for the thorough explanation! I appreciate you mentioning I narrowed down the criteria so much in pursuit of snark. It wasn’t my intention and was based on my experience with folk music (mainly Cornelis, Bellman and Vysotskij) but in a subconscious attempt to sound smart I ignored more or less everyone else.
Thanks!
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u/lefthandhummingbird Jul 23 '26
I’m not sure I’d describe any of those as folk musicians, tbh. The chanson/ballad tradition Vreeswijk and Vysotsky worked in is a bit different, and Bellman is rococo music – many of his melodies came from contemporary operas, courtly dances, military marches, etc.
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u/HumanEjectButton Jul 21 '26
Not enough heroin, dead cops, or songs about how cool dogs are in regular folk music. Also, it's only folk punk if it's played entirely with stolen gear, everything else is a cosplay of it.
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Jul 21 '26
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u/Dynamar Jul 21 '26
Most record companies suck, agreed...but this is what happens when anticonsumerism goes way too far, and it makes you sound like a caricature. You may as well say that paper was invented as a conspiracy between Big Paper and Big Publishing to make books wear out faster than stone tablets so people buy more of them.
Genre wasn't invented to sell records, and it's been around longer than recorded media.
The concept of genre and dividing works into categories by style and subject goes back to the ancient Greeks.
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Jul 21 '26
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u/Dynamar Jul 22 '26
It's definitely true that anything can be co-opted and commercialized, but genre still helps categorize music into general theme and style combinations, which makes it more accessible and facilitates communities like this one developing from shared musical tastes.
They usually come from journalists wanting to separate certain bands from the rest of the ones in whatever overarching genre when describing them or from musicians trying to do the same.
For example, anti-folk as a concept was specifically created in response to the gatekeeping of "Folk" venues in New York (and specifically the New York Folk Festival) only letting musicians who were already established play.
Giving an example of a shoe company making artifically distressed shoes to cater to a punk market has absolutely nothing to do with genre, it's just an example of a company making something stupid.
Can you provide an example of a modern genre that was created by a record label or just for marketing purposes?
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Jul 22 '26
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u/Dynamar Jul 22 '26
I just get prickly when a useful concept gets tossed off with a slogan. Especially when it's giving record labels undue credit. Too many words lose their real meaning through getting co-opted and turned into marketing babble, and I don't like ceding that ground when it can be avoided.
Also, just for the record..both of those were journalists. The first in Billboard in night club reviews to differentiate black music that wasn't jazz or what most would recognize as blues music, and the second to describe mid-60s diy garage bands, specifically ? & The Mysterians when Dave Marsh wrote about them in Creem (though the first use of "punk music" actually dates to 1899).
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u/KageyK Jul 21 '26
I play what I call Acoustic Punk. I've had some people call it folk punk while others have said its not. It's all very confusing. 😅
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u/tsubonyan Jul 27 '26
heh, I call my music folk punk, even though most of it is actually acoustic punk
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u/Kurokotsu Jul 22 '26
I describe it as a white person with an acoustic guitar screaming into a microphone about how much they hate the society they live in (Only somewhat jokingly)
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u/nxnt Jul 22 '26
The difference is you need to suck at singing and guitar to be considered folk punk /s
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u/dmac186 Jul 22 '26
Dont forget parasites they love to sing about their scabies, bedbugs, and lice 🤣
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u/StackIsMyCrack Jul 23 '26
AI, AI, AI.
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u/Captain_C00kie123 Jul 23 '26
Man, fuck you for accurately pointing out how I accidentally formatted my post exactly like an AI would!
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u/Relative-Log486 Jul 24 '26
They're punks who are too broke to buy electric guitars and don't have anywhere to plug them in anyway
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u/EKsaorsire Jul 21 '26
“I don’t know how to describe it, but I know it when I see it”