New Weird America
The term New Weird America (roughly: The New Weird America ) refers to a musical and popular cultural movement since the late 1990s, whose stylistic focus is on weird or psychedelic folk . The term was coined in 2003 by the Scottish music journalist David Keenan as part of a report on the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival in Vermont . Keenan was referring to Greil Marcus ' phrase "Old Weird America", which Marcus used in his book Invisible Republic for American folk music from the first half of the 20th century to the 1960s.
Style and artistic self-image
Stylistically, many of the performers subsumed under the term New Weird America are thus in the tradition of the folk and psychedelic bands of the 1960s and 1970s; the American Holy Modal Rounders or English groups such as the Incredible String Band , Donovan or Pentangle can be cited as precursors . Acoustic instrumentation based on guitar sounds, mostly in combination with modern rock elements and occasionally also with quotations from Asian music, are just as characteristic of the style as polyphonic singing and sometimes longer song structures. Groups like Six Organs Of Admittance , Espers , Animal Collective etc. a. continue this tradition. In many places, influences from free jazz , stoner rock , various metal genres and drone music can also be discerned. Furthermore, contemporary European folk artists like Current 93 are influential to some of the NWA performers. Popular artists such as Devendra Banhart or Joanna Newsom can be found in the follow-up to folk music around 1970, but less in the psychedelic area . However, since bands like Antony and the Johnsons and CocoRosie , whose music has only limited folk elements, are assigned to the movement, the purely aesthetic categorization can be put into perspective. Content-related aspects such as an outsider's being thematized in texts and gestures and the accompanying norm-critical implication also seem to be connecting elements. Overall, most of the musicians categorized under this movement can be attested to an independent status , both in terms of their own artistic self-image and in view of record sales. Some performers can be found on the border between underground and mainstream .
New Weird America as a media phenomenon
Many of the artists covered by the term do not see themselves as part of a movement, but have been classified as New Weird America in the music press. In the years after 2000 one can speak of a hype of some bands. In German-speaking countries, magazines such as Rolling Stone contributed to the popularity of many New Weird America acts, in the USA, apart from Pitchfork Media , the Los Angeles- based Arthur Magazine should be mentioned. The publication published the sampler The Golden Apples of the Sun compiled by Banhart , which had a lasting impact on the New Weird America canon .
Selected artists
literature
- David Keenan: Welcome to the New Weird America - Sunburned Hand of the Man are spearheading the groundswell of the US free folk revolution . In: The Wire # 234 (August 2003)
- Amanda Petrusich: It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music . London: Faber and Faber 2008. ISBN 0571234208