A Little Anarchist Night Music

Seattle's Folklife is an old and impressive folk music festival here. I hadn't meant to go, but I found myself walking downtown of a Saturday afternoon, and stumbled in back to the heart and soul of music.

Tens of thousands of people enjoying free folk music from innumerable traditions and genres in downtown Seattle is not only a Republican nightmare, but a restorative and resonant celebration of song-making, beyond money-grubbing, beyond the need to dominate competitively, and way beyond branding. So there were probably a few too many hippies around.

But I was touched. It really was music for music's sake, at a big scale, like there is a still a heart beating in American culture. This really was America alive: a thousand different traditions, people digging for the strength of their own cultural traditions but mixing it all up furiously in big old soft-hearted, folk smoothie (which tastes like democracy: blackberry, flax oil, and mangoes.)

I have to give special regard to a grubby little band of anarchists from Olympia called Hail Seizures, playing unamplified in bare feet fast as any speed metal, singing in group call and response, channeling the Pogues and Billy Bragg, practiced and tight and righteous, and if they were drunk on fantasies of revolution, it was the right revolution, the politics of a naked heart.

(A video link is here, but unfortunately, these are anarchist sound production values, and it barely captures the sense of it.)

Rock and roll may be dead as powdered rat bones, but music lives.