It's always a "holy shit!" moment when I find evidence that people out in Internet Land actually read the things I send floating out there. So imagine my surprise to find bloggers over at Naturalismo used an interview I did with L.A. locals Winter Flowers for fodder to discuss what's real and what's fake in today's folk revival. You can read the original interview here, Naturalismo contributor Brandev's thoughts here, then Brooklyn Vegan picked up the thread here, not really adding much. The center of Brandev's argument is that Winter Flowers are bandwagoners hitching themselves onto a third wave of freak-folk that is much less genuine than the music created by pioneers like Devendra Banhart and Akron/Family.
If I have to way in on the debate (which is doubtful, but here goes), I have to say it was indeed hard to figure out how genuine or jokey the band members were being in some of their responses to my questions, since we went back and forth on e-mail, me never meeting them face-to-face. Some of their answers were quite long, and I wondered if they were being verbose just for verbosity's sake. In the end, though, I don't really understand why people are so up in arms about bands starting to copy the freak-folk mold. Like genre appropriation doesn't happen every single time a new genre catches on. For every Nirvana, there's a Stone Temple Pilots; for every Strokes, a Jet. If you're just now figuring that out, you probably also just learned what an earmark is to a congressman. Shit happens.