Take a good, hard listen to the Focal Point feature on Pittsburgh’s own public radio station, WYEP, half way through the morning every day of the week and tell me if it excites you.  The station’s format is folk-based but bloated with mediocre, adult contemporary singer/songwriters pawning off their tame and expected catalog with about as much fervor as my high school librarian quietly telling me that silence, for all intents and purposes, is golden.

I want my Folk to preach from the pulpits, all shaking fists and damnation, letting out throaty roars of radicalism saved for a world in which normalcy has mutated into a soma induced haze.  This shit used to be protest music, never static, constantly pointing out the winds of change to those of us who were just waking up.  The folk scene of the mid-20th century was an egalitarian community motivated by social change, intellect, and the fucking will of the human spirit.  It was the cultivation of constant progress. Continue reading →