Every time I listen to Will Oldham these days I have a little less pleasure. I don’t know who said it first, but there was a long discussion of him as class tourism and mobility, and fake authentic, and how all of this was a very bad thing. How if we wanted to listen to Alan Lomax, we should go back to the big red box.
I have no idea why I believed this shit. I Listened to him again today, and his voice was as dark and moving as ever, his feeling was as deep and wide. Whether he is attempting to be poor, or geographicaly different, or stranger is of little consequence.
There is a meme in certain circles, that Lomax deserves less points, because he chose the least commercially available, the weirder music, to make an ideological point.
Maybe Lomax thought that pop would ever always be pop, and we would always have the mainstream stuff, and the work that needed to be preserved was the oddities. Oldham seems the opposite, and I’m glad for it.