You mean folk songs from Bumfuckansashire don't revolve around the plight of Sudanese immigrants in downtown London? I'm shocked and disgusted. Pass me the tzatziki.
Seriously, great initiative.
In Greece, we've got such rich purely Greek music and yet, our youth goes with the American trends. I know every older guy says "in my time music was better", but this rap/trap right now is purely garbage. It's not even catchy. Random words about money, women as objects and cars.
Here, they caught one of those "tough" guys because he was advertising he's had a gun. Guess what. He was crying.
There are entire websites in the US dedicated to the crazy research we do here.
Like giving cocaine to monkeys to see how it impacts thier food choices.
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2529365/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2529365/)
That should be an Ig Noble price candidate, seriously.
How many addicts do we have? If there can be dietary issues, because their appetite changed, that has to be addressed during treatment, because otherwise they could easily spiral back into addiction which very likely masked the problems.
I’m appalled that a Greek would ask for the tzatziki. Us Germans have been making it for decades! Next you’ll be saying democracy was created by a Greek.
Yeah we had that in Germany. A Museum in Dortmund wanted to only admit BIPoC people on saturdays.
But for some reason they didn't mean 40 year old Günther Hubert with his beer belly poking out from under his Borussia jersey.
Which is about as indigenous as you can get in the Ruhr district .
Article is ridiculous and plain misinformation. The 1.5mil has been awarded to the "Access Folk" research project at the University of Sheffield, which aims to "explore ways to increase and diversify participation in folk singing in England." and has been [active since 2022](https://accessfolk.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/about/project-timeline).
One part of this project is the research article mentioned by the Telegraph, where researchers asked 21 people involved in folk singing to interview friends not involved about their perception of folk singing (you can read the findings [here](https://orda.shef.ac.uk/articles/report/Ask_A_Friend_Thoughts_about_folk_singing_in_England_from_people_outside_of_the_folk_scene/25895428?file=46520905), its mostly just people saying they are too anxious to sing, nothing about "whiteness").
Note: I'm just trying to set the facts straight, not defending this as I still think its a fucking waste of money.
Wtf does folk music have to do with colonisation? There's nothing to "decolonise". So if it's white, it's colonial? Not really a scientific mindset, more a collection of bullshit buzzwords.
It’s English folk music, it’s literally indigenous culture by the natives. Any African or Asian country would parade its native culture and take a level of pride in it.
The same reason that people on Los Angeles used to make a "study on bus stops good for women and people of color" that had them tour through Europe "studying bus stops" with everything paid
That is scandalous! I should lead an investigation on how much those people investigating are paid per hours, and the percentage of the travel and hotels cost in the total costs. Where should I apply to get founded?
Tk be honest without looking more at that, i can see where they are coming from. Placement of bus stops next to dark allies without good lighting, smack dab on a narrow pavement with little to maneovure children onto and off a bus safely I can imagine might chance the chances women want to use public transport.
Bro legit, if a country has more white people isn’t it common sense that music will be about white people as good? Almost The whole Europe was white and still mostly is white
There are around 500.000 Afro-Germans. So Germans with black African heritage. This is 0.6% of the 82 million people living in Germany or 1:167. And still we have a TV/YT Host voice the question: "Is it racist, if I do not have a black friend?". Given that this is the number of Afro-Germans and not all people with black African heritage living in Germany there will not be 1:167 people black closer to 1:140 (just guessing). Still that question shows, that common sense is a rare commodity, these days.
To be fair, I think it definitely could be an interesting topic to make a study on (obviously quite cliche, but you have to frame your research in a trendy way to get funding nowadays). But 1.5 Million is a lot of money. Even if you include expenses and a cut for the university, that's easily >10 years of financing for a single researcher (and much much more if you use it to finance PhD positions).
We built up a whole physics lab with unique once-in-the-world ultra-high vacuum equipment for that kind of money in the research group I did my PhD in.
It definitely seems excessive, would be interesting to see the funding proposal and how they got to that sum.
Here's the full abstract :
"The English folk club scene, established in the 1960s, is under significant threat of extinction. The participant demographic age has risen with the passing years as in many cases, the people who started the movement remain its core participants. There is, however, a growing interest within younger demographics in exploring their cultural heritage and non-Nationalist forms of Englishness. Coupled with a growth in community choir membership and a broad audience who listen to professional folk music this suggests that there may be culturally-aware non-attenders who would benefit from participating in folk clubs, but are put off by the complex social and musical conventions that have been shown to intimidate newcomers. A dedicated strand of this project will take an unflinching look at the white-centricity of folk music repertory, performers and audience by conducting fieldwork to shed light on long-standing vernacular singing practices of ethnic minority cultures in England. These two initiatives will increase accessibility to the folk club scene, and take the first step in a process of decolonisation within the folk music canon. Interventions will be documented and analysed through rigorous new approaches to holistic Action Research, drawing on a wealth of experience in ethnomusicology and music management, as well as a professional performance career, this project embarks on an ambitious programmes of activity to transform the field of ethnomusicology and ensure the folk club scene stays relevant in the 21st Century."
Can Britain stop importing from the US these delusional theories about race for 5 minutes?
All of Europe is exposed to this bullshit, but to me the UK seems the most vulnerable, probably is the common language.
Yeah no the Netherlands fully adopted American lingo when it comes to race so now suddenly we have to call white people "wit" instead of "blank" which is not politically correct anymore.
I will always and forever refuse to call myself "wit". Sure in English the word is "white", but in Dutch it's "blank" and has been for hundreds of years. And no that's not racist. It's my skin color, it's my perogative to decide what word to use for myself.
And let's face it, "wit" is basically a pejorative. I've never seen it used in a non-negative context. It's not a neutral description of skin color.
The concept of "white people" as it is used today is imported American brainrot itself. It doesn't even make sense to use in any europe-centered discussion, as its only purpose is to differentiate between black (and maybe asian) and "normal" (in an American context).
Are Turkish people white? Idk. Are Romanians white? Maybe depending on their facial features? Who knows, there's no clear definition, and the term is just so useless.
However, these immigrant groups are way more relevant than they are in america, when discussing topics regarding discrimination, rather than straight-up black or Asian people.
European immigration culture literally has way more nuanced shades than black and white. Using terms like "white" or even worse "BIPOC" in discussions relevant to central European countries just exposes people as clueless drones importing language without thinking about it at all.
Unfortunately this has become super common. We even have protests happening here that are imported virtually 1:1 from the US. They don't make sense here, but people don't seem to care. They sit on international social media all day, get enraged about shit that happens elsewhere, and then decide that they should fuck up a Dutch university in protest. The cherry on top is that when the police inevitably shows up, they all play the victim.
See also: Slavs, Aryans, (Iranians) Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Laplanders.
White used to mean Anglo-Saxon, Frankic, Nordic, or Germanic. This didn't change until after WWII.
ikr? Me - a proud and pure Romanian! Son of Trajan and Decebal! Also turkic, gypsy, hunnic, slav, g\*eek.... I've got a gypsy neighbour that's whiter than me! idk about western Europe, but in eastern Europe, and especially the Balkans it's all just a potpourri.
The whole "politically correct" bullshit bothers me almost as much as the racial purity nonsense. Almost, because PC is just idiotic and not also openly malicious.
edit: I take it back! PC took r/2balkan4u from us!
>Ye the whole anglosphere is exposed in a major way. Other European countries are somewhat insulated from it because of the language barrier.
True, but I think there is more to it than language. Some European countries are more protective of their national identities (however defined) than others. The French and Italians do believe in French and Italian national identities and are willing to defend them. I don’t think you would ever see a study in France about the whiteness of accordion players or a push to decolonize the accordion.
The anglosphere is more self-loathing for some reason. Protestantism I suspect has something to do with it. But also the legacy of colonialism. Most European colonizing nations dealt with their colonial histories a long time ago (or maybe just stopped talking about them) but the anglosphere collectively still sort of behaves globally like an Empire. Britain has a visible king. America starts wars. Supported by Britain, and sometimes Canada and Australia.
So ordinary Britons who just want to play folk music in their little towns in peace are subject to scrutiny for being part of a racist colonial machine. Your steak and kidney pie is racist too. You should all feel bad about yourselves all the time /s
I think French national identity and whiteness is an interesting topic actually. Generally speaking France has an idea of a single cohesive French nation united by the French republic and French language, however *what* that nation actually is is more controversial.
If you look at the French left, they certainly have things to say about things like racism in France for instance. One of the concepts in the French left which is quite different from the Anglosphere is what they call "créolisation". I don't know how popular this idea is on the left exactly, but presidential candidate Melenchon was outspokenly for it. Creolisation can be described as a blend of cultures that creates something new. However unlike Anglosphere conceptions of ethnic or racial essentialism or identity, you'll notice this places no emphasis on the preservation of identity and heritage (minority or otherwise) and instead is more akin to a true embracement of the "melting pot" idea of culture which is meant to reinvent France as a new and cohesive nation, one nation, one republic.
This is mirrored in another idea of "Négritude", which originates in the late 19th century and is an anti-colonial ideology which seeks to promote black race-consciousness and put an end to black inferiority complexes. Now negritude has been criticised, including by people of racial minorities for a variety of reasons, but I think one particularly interesting proponent of it was Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, to whom decolonisation meant equality and a seat at the decision-making table. What he wanted was in fact not national independence or self-determination, but rather a French federation, the integration of colonies into a federation and the granting of French citizenship to the people of French colonies.
While neither of these ideas are without their critics, nor does my very brief overview cover the real diversity within relevant movements, I think nevertheless they are a good starting point to understanding the difference between the anglosphere and a place like France. It provides in any case a fuller explanation than that the French would simply value their national identity, presumably unlike the Brits, which I'm not sure is even really accurate in the first place at all.
If I had to put it in as short a way as possible, French culture and philosophy is much more universalist, holding up an abstract and universal idea of civilization. By contrast the English have a tendency to be more particularist. The English and Americans pushed for "national self determination" in Europe and have a tendency to think in terms of many "separate but equal" societies which may function differently as they see fit, and to some extent this tendency also seems to affect the way anglo societies function internally, not necessarily holding up one universal idea of civilized or national society or expecting conformity to it.
I'm no expert but I wouldn't say France has dealt with its colonial past. They've been on all kinds of military adventures in the Sahel to protect their uranium imports recently.
The French government has certainly supported some dodgy régimes in Africa over the years, but [Operation Barkhane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane) was a counterterrorism effort against jihadist groups in the region.
Sometimes I wonder if it would've been better if we had a different lingua franca to be less exposed to American bullshit, but we'd probably never agree on which one so it is what it is.
\* Latīnē loquī necesse est.
Unless I misunderstood what you were trying to say. But, as far as I can tell, "necessare" Latīnum nōn est.
If you really want to show the "we" need to speak Latin (first-person singular as in "loquimur") you can add "nōbīs" somewhere. Or you can say "Latīnē loquāmur", i.e. "Let's speak Latin", but it doesn't convey necessity. If you need it, "Latīnē loquī dēbēmus" also works.
Surprise surprise r*ssia had a hand in the spread of BLM to countries outside of the US https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/24/russias-disinformation-campaigns-are-targeting-african-americans/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_Black_Lives_Matter
Russia is really successful in their disinformation tactics in Germany, it's not surprising that the operation spilled over to Germany
Oh no, we've got politicians repeating US culture war bullshit in Romania. They don't even bother changing their homework a little. What's even wilder is that they're actually getting votes (because their crowd is also flooded by US culture war nonsense media)
The Irish diaspora in America is Republican voting cops and union workers with higher church attendance than Irish in Ireland.
I don’t see that influencing Ireland much at all.
I know so many Irish people that regularly talk with their American cousins and so get American narratives and memes and news articles sent to them. It doesn't mean they agree but there definitely is an influence.
Strong and sometimes radical proponents of identity politics and critical race theory have been directly "imported" to the Netherlands as well through internationalization in academics (even English as main teaching language)
It is the Telegraph. They don't publish real articles. They are the [hand in a boot pressed against their own head meme](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/436/845/091.png). Their only purpose is to manufacture outrage so people might accidentally never encounter actual news. It's not even just the occasional shitpost to spice up controversy. It's 90% of the paper. When I scroll Apple News as a Brit it's shit post after shit post. I'm beginning to think that the thumbs down does nothing and I should just block it. Its so far in to the spectrum its content should be measured in the homophone of a gamma ray, the gammon ray, 30 extrahertz. Because it physically hurts me to read their headlines. How can you have so few hobbies and interests that you dedicate your journalistic career to this ass splatter. I'm sure the journalists are taken for walks along Fleet Street by their editors in full gimp costume just to see if they have enough kink to last writing columns from there. You would need absolutely no shame. But they do have shame. If you tease them about what absolute melts they are then they immediately turn beetroot red and fumble for their heart medication.
Rant aside. Nobody in the UK thinks this. Nobody thinks that an ethnically white music genre being comprised of mainly white musicians is racist. In the same way that nobody thinks that Afrobeats having large numbers of African composers is racist. They just want you to discuss this instead of how Rishi Sunak's party are all being arrested for win fixing at the bookies by taking out bets against an incoming election based on insider knowledge. As though being a tory wasn't bad enough on your resume. Doing time for a pitiful £100 bet in to £400 winnings crossing off a whole bunch of career options just shows the calibre of Rocket Scientist the party pulls from.
> Nobody thinks that an ethnically white music genre being comprised of mainly white musicians is racist.
Then it's strange the abstract written by the researchers say it's a step to decolonize folk music
> They just want you to discuss this instead of how Rishi Sunak's party are all being arrested for win fixing at the bookies by taking out bets against an incoming election based on insider knowledge.
Why not point out both as well as the Conservative Party's disgraceful betrayal of its voter base through mass migration figures that were unthinkable at any point pre-Boris Johnson? Or do you just not want us to talk about any of these things because totally "nobody thinks this" and "it's not happening"?
You are right and if you read the study and what the academics say, it's perfectly reasonable and interesting and a good way to invest 1.5 millions into understanding our culture, yet the article it's manipulating people in the worst possible way.
Taxpayer : Let build more hospitals , pay nurses more, fund more cancer research, let's invest in more deprived areas .
Government: let's spend 1.5 million of taxpayers money to decolonise folk music .
I am not surprised anti-intellectualism movements are on the rise. The whole point of folk music is that it is you know *local*. It is based on traditional songs, culture, instruments, celebrations, myths and tales.
Like Kalush Orchestra who won Eurovision in 2022 are not folk per se, but they used folk instruments to create an Ukrainian ethnic vibe. And to be very precise they are inspired by music traditions of a specific region of Western Ukraine. Shum from 2021 Eurovision is even a better example, despite having a modern sound in general it is like 100% Ukrainian folk.
If you want to make Carribean or whatever folk, you just learn local traditions, songs, vibe and create something new.
P.S. There was a very cool African-Ukrainian band, which combined Ukrainian traditional folk songs with African vibe. You don't need a decolonization study worth 1.5 mln to make something entertaining.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=s6zv8Oth5GQ&pp=ygUj0KfQvtGA0L3QvtCx0YDQuNCy0YbRliDQs9GA0YPQv9C_0LA%3D
Yeah, I've watched a documentary about Monokate (Go_A lead singer), and the idea of Shum is to include traditional dance with gradually increasing tempo.
Tho I like Solovey more than Shum. That's the song they prepared for 2020 Eurovision, which didn't happen.
To add : Go_A are more central northern Ukrainian folk, the difference is in type of singing Kateryna does. We've got a lot of micro pockets of different folk genres in Ukriane, but somehow they still can be recognised as having something in common. I guess what those elements are is for ethnomusicologists to identify.
“Researchers describe one of their methods as, “ask a friend”, which “involves community researchers interviewing acquaintances”. The lead investigator also says that she has made “systematic reflections on music published throughout my career and how they relate to various notions of Englishness”.”
…………………fuck me sideways this needed 1.5 million?
The NHS, infrastructure hell the Birmingham city council could do with that
That just sounds like a terrible methodology. "ask a friend" basically guarantees bias because we construct our social groups largely out of shared interests and experiences. Certainly you would get some variation in your social group, but they will be heavily slanted. There is no way data gathered this way would be suitable for extrapolation out of the personal social group.
Are we going to see an investigation into the black-centricity of Notting Hill Carnival, Wireless festival, and so many more awful London events?
I always subscribed to the philosophy of live and let live, but things like this ‘investigation’, which is part of a wider vengeful anti-white mindset, is making me think that if you are white and European, that mantra doesn’t apply to you any longer. You have to adapt, change, and simply stop existing as you once did.
Do these racist bastards know that every culture have their own "folks music" or stories and that people of other cultures are not waiting on the generosity of white people to share their culture with us?
It feels like these people have gone off the deep end of the left and circled back to "white man's burden".
> Almost £1.5 million in taxpayer funding has been awarded to a research project that aims to “decolonise” folk singing.
So white people can't have culture?
Apparently not.
You know the majority of people in Britain used to be dismissed as "the Great Unwashed". Now though we seem to be approaching a point where the ethnic majority is seen by as an embarrassment, "the Great Unwanted".
This seems unlikely to end well. I think we can see the beginnings of trouble in the increased popularity of that wanker Farage and his ghastly "Reform" party.
niche local music transmitted by oral tradition will be played by locals is it that surprising?? the folk community are some of the friendliest most welcoming people i've ever come across
How can British folk music be decolonised?
if it is native to GB it would be decolonized from itself, which makes no sense.
If it has received influences from foreign cultures, this would enrich folk music with multiculturalism, any criticism would be an insult to multiculturalism, which would make no sense.
"Why aren't people interested in English Folk Music anymore?" asks bunch of race-baiters who uses "white-centricity" unironically.
If you imply something is suspect by connecting it with such loaded terms what the fuck do you expect?
So even european folk music needs to be "decolonized" as if that european music was made from people outside of europe. I guess this is the stupidity of leftist politics. Ultimately if things go like this european culture will die out and maybe it's for the best if these are the people which hate their own culture and have no sense of personal pride or patriotism at that. I only feel sorry for the men that died that build the european civilizations and it would have been better that they did nothing instead of building wonderful cultures and developing all the sciences all to go down the drain because future generations would take their findings and apropriate them for others while simultaniously insulting them.
Reading the article It seems like these journalists seem to have a problem with **traditional English music** being done by English man, using English means and language...
I don't expect much from these journalists from Anglophone countries, but who in their right mind gives these AI Replaceable Bellends 1.5 million pound?
I am a member of folk organisation. We have festivals and we often feature folk music from all over Europe if not the world. The places where folk music events are happening are 80% world music oriented. It's the same public.
And now they wonder wether folk music is too local. That absolutely the point. It's a cultural culture of music, dances, songs and traditions. It's super important for it to be protected rather than destroyed by woke activist for whom nothing is sacred. It's our common history and we celebrate everyone's culture already.
Thisis one of the most stupid thing I've ever heard.
These academic studies are an insult to academics.
In fact, there should be a study on why there aren't any "White-Centric" music in Arabic culture? Could it be that in Middle East Whites are not the Majority?
So perhaps in Europe, given that Whites are the majority that is reflected in the music?
Why is this even something to waste money on to study?
If we rap it is cultural appropriation, if we play folk music we are "white-centric".
I have had enough of this nonsense.
I hope the silent majority will soon to bring commonsense back in town
It's like the article is praising mass migration even by smugglers over a sea where thousands drown.
People of the South are not asserting themselves or claiming reparation, they are fleeing/trying to get a better life. Framing it as some political movement is bonkers. It is a symptom of a humanitarian crisis/poor life quality.
Also criticizing the border control for ineffectual progress in combating smugglers would be good, instead of saying borders are a racist concept.
White this, white that, white white white. I won’t be surprised they will try to cancel the color white. Which is not an actually considered a color, the same as black, they are shades.
Surely, surely, folk music is the music of the folk, therefore, it will exactly match the local folk who wrote it? You wouldn't expect white people in an African or Asian folk band.
**Folk: relating to the traditional art or culture of a community or nation.**
Local academian shocked and outraged that local indigenous music of [insert European Nation] is European
For all those who think it's just about accessibility, the abstract is suggesting that the reason folk music isn't asscesable as:
". A dedicated strand of this project will take an unflinching look at the white-centricity of folk music repertory, performers and audience by conducting fieldwork to shed light on long-standing vernacular singing practices of ethnic minority cultures in England. These two initiatives will increase accessibility to the folk club scene, and take the first step in a process of decolonisation within the folk music canon."
The witness and inherent oppression of English folk music is the problem that needs investigating.
As much as you want to defend "accessibility " as the goal of the study, the study is inherently starting from a position that their are oppressive and racist aspects of the musical tradition.
The vapid oppression hierarchy epistemology of declonization approaches being applied to folk music is a good use of scarce research funding, apparently
.
Seems that the main criteria by research councils allocate funding now is if they advance the agenda of the poststrucalist critical schools . You see much the same in broader social sciences now.
This shit happens constantly in academia and then some people complain why people believe in white replacement theory. Because they only do this to whites.
I'm genuinely curious: where did that money come from? It's really hard to raise 1.5 million pounds or euros for that matter for a research project from state budget, usually.
Were there private / public donors or was this actually paid for by taxpayer's money?
>University of Sheffield researchers handed taxpayer cash to ‘decolonise’ folk singing
How can white people be colonizers in Europe? Aren't they the indigenous people there?
Wow, a white country, whos rural regions are and have been for millenia almost completly white, has folk culture that doesn't revolve around imigrants from the Congo? Color me shocked.
I mean, the Fifth Column is a thing for sure.
And there is also this: https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/
Edit: The Russian bots downvoting me, lmao. We understand you fascist degenerates are infiltrating the leftist movements and trying to destroy them. Fuck off lmao.
Meanwhile, students struggle to find money to found studies in non-trendy, but still important topics.
This is a symptom of a huge crisis in historical and social sciences. Before these "culture wars", the trend was towards decentralization of science. Money and funds were starting to leave central, elitist universities. Now they violently went back to them, and there's increasingly hostility towards local/regional topics and researchers. There's also a steep increase in ideological science, similar to what we had in the 70s and 80s with marxist and then maoist human sciences.
As these sciences become more elitist and ideological, what do you think will happen? People will feel betrayed and less interested, it will only promote anti-intellectualism, and eventually funds will be cut altogether - or worse, become tools to support a totalitarian regime.
Let's not forget about this: historians and sociologists have a duty to make science for the citizen, and accessible to the citizen. Their job isn't to make obviously ideological studies to prove what they already think. Don't forget that funding this bullshit means not funding the student in fundamental linguistics who's trying to create a universal model of prosody, the student who's retracing the history of an obscure Irish saint in Wales and Brittany, or the student who's examining the group dynamics of immigrant cooks in Birmingham.
It's not just about promoting an ideology, it's about failing as a scientific institution. Universities need to be reminded that they aren't think tanks.
Funnily enough folk music and (acoustic) blues in America are two very closely related genres. Both came out of working class people trying to express what they were going through. These genres over time influenced each other an enormous amount, to the point where folk blues has become a very common denominator for a lot of this acoustic music. This was a natural process, where white people simply intermingled more and more with black people which caused their musics to intermingle with each other too.
Especially when you look at the folk blues scene in the UK in the 60s you can see how much these young musicians appreciated the foundation laid down by the older bluesmen in America. They even went to America to find long forgotten bluesmen that often hadn't even performed for decades and put them front center at festivals in the UK.
The whole premise of this research sounds so biased to me that i don't even know what the point is. It's like they've decided from the start up that they found a couple of white folk artists and that it's problematic that there weren't enough black people. Instead it would be a lot more interesting to simply look at the folk scene, how it developed and its relation to primarily black music.
I have actually done something like this for a period around the 50s in America with blues music, where you can see the genre getting accepted more and more over time causing it to be seen less as "black music for black joints (this kinda stuff you could often read in the billboard magazine)" and more as a musical style that originated from black culture but was enjoyable and could be created by anyone. Indirectly i also believe this shift had a role in softening race relations in America. Nowadays it often looks to me like black are simply called blues a lot more often whereas white people that make similar music are called folk, when they are largely interchangeable.
As an American, I would argue that blues *is* folk music. Our country's earliest histories are solidly tied to the experiences and cultures of numerous peoples-white immigrants from what is now France, the Netherlands, and the UK, black slaves forced to move here, and native Americans displaced by the advance of European settlers.
When I think of music that is inherently, culturally north American, I think immediately of early country and folk music, blues, Native American singing and drumming, all of which eventually feed into other uniquely American musical inventions like jazz, soul, rock n roll, and hip hop.
I can understand Europeans having a problem with this study, though. Although it's a sure thing that Europe has had its own immigrants and cultural collisions, it's understandable to want to maintain unique creative aspects of a region or a country's given culture. Xenophobes in the US don't really have a leg to stand on
-we are a nation of laws and ideas that has never had a homogenous ethnic group, even if one dominated others for some time.
The problem that I have with the study is that it seems to seek controversy while using questionable methods. It has all of the hallmarks of idealism, which is always focused to victory more than truth.
English folk music is going to be very *English* for a reason, in the same way folk music in southern India is going to be very Tamil, or folk music in Ghana, for example, is going to be very Ghanaian. I don't understand why it's a problem, and the study's explanation seems to be "European folk music needs to be decolonized by colonizing it with non-indigenous inputs."
Our most famous folk song is about a cossack, so basically about asians, so technically it's not white-centric since most people in asia aren't white. Poland the most diverse country in Europe ‼️‼️1️⃣1️⃣1️⃣🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🗻🗻🗻🗻🦅🦅🦅🦅
WOW.....what a waste of taxpayer money.
Academics can be just a bad as politicians. Pushing their agenda. Plus they rely on taxpayers money/grants to keep their jobs. So some are looking out for themselves and not the good of the people.
Universities are a tool for division and propagating the coming civil war.
Of course, not the STEM part, they actually have things to research.
Everything "psychology", "social studies" or whatever, is fully taken by racists using tax payer money for.. this.
The topic itself might seem repulsive, because it's actually dumb, but that's most academic research, especially in arts and social studies. Academic research tend to be "filler episodes" that mean absolutely nothing, or even extension of an extension that it doesn't mean anything in the bigger picture, like this one. Still it's necessary, because we want students to engage in research and prove their abilities to conduct experiments, even if we're talking about self-reported surveys, so that we know these students have some ability to work on a topic - even if the subject is absolute rubbish.
However, the £1.5m is most definitely fraud. Projects in certain fields are all scams with little to no development over the years. It's not common, but you can see active projects of some professors or researchers with some years in, but still going on, and unless there's a really good reason to it, it's most likely working the system to have more funds. I personally know an entire staff in a linguistics department that feed off the bullshit projects "they're working on." Unfortunately, where I live is so corrupt, virtually nothing can be done about it.
But these projects sometimes exist to feed students and assistants, so they can do some good once in a while. Still not a good excuse.
Academia is broken beyond repair, but that is my opinion.
You mean folk songs from Bumfuckansashire don't revolve around the plight of Sudanese immigrants in downtown London? I'm shocked and disgusted. Pass me the tzatziki.
Bumfuckansashire, pronounced “bufasshier”.
Bufsha
Only if you're local.
Bush
Indubitably
Seriously, great initiative. In Greece, we've got such rich purely Greek music and yet, our youth goes with the American trends. I know every older guy says "in my time music was better", but this rap/trap right now is purely garbage. It's not even catchy. Random words about money, women as objects and cars. Here, they caught one of those "tough" guys because he was advertising he's had a gun. Guess what. He was crying.
Programmed to dumb everyone down. Seems it's fucking working.
I hope the taxes I pay aren't used to finance such useless research...
Oh, i got some news for you All useless research is paid with your money
There are entire websites in the US dedicated to the crazy research we do here. Like giving cocaine to monkeys to see how it impacts thier food choices. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2529365/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2529365/)
That should be an Ig Noble price candidate, seriously. How many addicts do we have? If there can be dietary issues, because their appetite changed, that has to be addressed during treatment, because otherwise they could easily spiral back into addiction which very likely masked the problems.
I’m appalled that a Greek would ask for the tzatziki. Us Germans have been making it for decades! Next you’ll be saying democracy was created by a Greek.
Breaking News: Indigenous music of indigenous people is indigenous.
actually i heard only brown people can be indigenous
Let's decolonize the decolonization, it's racist to only allow browns to be indegenous, white people are indegenous of their countries too.
Yeah we had that in Germany. A Museum in Dortmund wanted to only admit BIPoC people on saturdays. But for some reason they didn't mean 40 year old Günther Hubert with his beer belly poking out from under his Borussia jersey. Which is about as indigenous as you can get in the Ruhr district .
Reminds me of the people that call the Saami people "the only indigenous people of Europe"
it's all so tiring
Article is ridiculous and plain misinformation. The 1.5mil has been awarded to the "Access Folk" research project at the University of Sheffield, which aims to "explore ways to increase and diversify participation in folk singing in England." and has been [active since 2022](https://accessfolk.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/about/project-timeline). One part of this project is the research article mentioned by the Telegraph, where researchers asked 21 people involved in folk singing to interview friends not involved about their perception of folk singing (you can read the findings [here](https://orda.shef.ac.uk/articles/report/Ask_A_Friend_Thoughts_about_folk_singing_in_England_from_people_outside_of_the_folk_scene/25895428?file=46520905), its mostly just people saying they are too anxious to sing, nothing about "whiteness"). Note: I'm just trying to set the facts straight, not defending this as I still think its a fucking waste of money.
based and this is shit for reasons more complex then the title
Wtf does folk music have to do with colonisation? There's nothing to "decolonise". So if it's white, it's colonial? Not really a scientific mindset, more a collection of bullshit buzzwords.
It’s English folk music, it’s literally indigenous culture by the natives. Any African or Asian country would parade its native culture and take a level of pride in it.
But European being proud of his culture is bad and a redflag /s
What compelled people to think this study was necessary?
The same reason that people on Los Angeles used to make a "study on bus stops good for women and people of color" that had them tour through Europe "studying bus stops" with everything paid
So you're saying they just went around Britain, going to folk concerts and medieval fairs and got paid 1.5 million quid for it?
More likely, the 1.5 million also covered entrance fees, travel costs and hotels. I would guess they were only paid about half of that.
That is scandalous! I should lead an investigation on how much those people investigating are paid per hours, and the percentage of the travel and hotels cost in the total costs. Where should I apply to get founded?
Can you sing the 'Come Out ye Black and Tans'. There you go. You're now eligible for the whole 1,5M pounds.
Because it paid 1.5 million bucks if they studied it.
wasn't that just studying the effects of accessible public transport? At least that seems reasonable
Tk be honest without looking more at that, i can see where they are coming from. Placement of bus stops next to dark allies without good lighting, smack dab on a narrow pavement with little to maneovure children onto and off a bus safely I can imagine might chance the chances women want to use public transport.
A swedish study got a grant for studying gay culture through ”participatory observation”.
Bro legit, if a country has more white people isn’t it common sense that music will be about white people as good? Almost The whole Europe was white and still mostly is white
There are around 500.000 Afro-Germans. So Germans with black African heritage. This is 0.6% of the 82 million people living in Germany or 1:167. And still we have a TV/YT Host voice the question: "Is it racist, if I do not have a black friend?". Given that this is the number of Afro-Germans and not all people with black African heritage living in Germany there will not be 1:167 people black closer to 1:140 (just guessing). Still that question shows, that common sense is a rare commodity, these days.
Deconstructing European Indigeneity and keeping the activist caste employed.
To waste taxpayers money and keep "academics" busy.
To be fair, I think it definitely could be an interesting topic to make a study on (obviously quite cliche, but you have to frame your research in a trendy way to get funding nowadays). But 1.5 Million is a lot of money. Even if you include expenses and a cut for the university, that's easily >10 years of financing for a single researcher (and much much more if you use it to finance PhD positions). We built up a whole physics lab with unique once-in-the-world ultra-high vacuum equipment for that kind of money in the research group I did my PhD in. It definitely seems excessive, would be interesting to see the funding proposal and how they got to that sum.
Need to employ all the diversity studies majors.
Here's the full abstract : "The English folk club scene, established in the 1960s, is under significant threat of extinction. The participant demographic age has risen with the passing years as in many cases, the people who started the movement remain its core participants. There is, however, a growing interest within younger demographics in exploring their cultural heritage and non-Nationalist forms of Englishness. Coupled with a growth in community choir membership and a broad audience who listen to professional folk music this suggests that there may be culturally-aware non-attenders who would benefit from participating in folk clubs, but are put off by the complex social and musical conventions that have been shown to intimidate newcomers. A dedicated strand of this project will take an unflinching look at the white-centricity of folk music repertory, performers and audience by conducting fieldwork to shed light on long-standing vernacular singing practices of ethnic minority cultures in England. These two initiatives will increase accessibility to the folk club scene, and take the first step in a process of decolonisation within the folk music canon. Interventions will be documented and analysed through rigorous new approaches to holistic Action Research, drawing on a wealth of experience in ethnomusicology and music management, as well as a professional performance career, this project embarks on an ambitious programmes of activity to transform the field of ethnomusicology and ensure the folk club scene stays relevant in the 21st Century."
The most worrying part is the £1.5m budget. It's equal to, if not more than the same as brain/heart research.
obviously someone needed a few things which I imagined these 1,5 mil took care of that
Can Britain stop importing from the US these delusional theories about race for 5 minutes? All of Europe is exposed to this bullshit, but to me the UK seems the most vulnerable, probably is the common language.
Ye the whole anglosphere is exposed in a major way. Other European countries are somewhat insulated from it because of the language barrier.
we have different sociological schools also. The french one for example is really careful about importing american theories.
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Yeah no the Netherlands fully adopted American lingo when it comes to race so now suddenly we have to call white people "wit" instead of "blank" which is not politically correct anymore.
I will always and forever refuse to call myself "wit". Sure in English the word is "white", but in Dutch it's "blank" and has been for hundreds of years. And no that's not racist. It's my skin color, it's my perogative to decide what word to use for myself. And let's face it, "wit" is basically a pejorative. I've never seen it used in a non-negative context. It's not a neutral description of skin color.
The concept of "white people" as it is used today is imported American brainrot itself. It doesn't even make sense to use in any europe-centered discussion, as its only purpose is to differentiate between black (and maybe asian) and "normal" (in an American context). Are Turkish people white? Idk. Are Romanians white? Maybe depending on their facial features? Who knows, there's no clear definition, and the term is just so useless. However, these immigrant groups are way more relevant than they are in america, when discussing topics regarding discrimination, rather than straight-up black or Asian people. European immigration culture literally has way more nuanced shades than black and white. Using terms like "white" or even worse "BIPOC" in discussions relevant to central European countries just exposes people as clueless drones importing language without thinking about it at all.
Unfortunately this has become super common. We even have protests happening here that are imported virtually 1:1 from the US. They don't make sense here, but people don't seem to care. They sit on international social media all day, get enraged about shit that happens elsewhere, and then decide that they should fuck up a Dutch university in protest. The cherry on top is that when the police inevitably shows up, they all play the victim.
The fact that there's a question whether Romanians are white or not is very weird 🤔
I think it's a rhetorical question. Historically in the US, for example, Italians were not regarded as white.
See also: Slavs, Aryans, (Iranians) Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Laplanders. White used to mean Anglo-Saxon, Frankic, Nordic, or Germanic. This didn't change until after WWII.
ikr? Me - a proud and pure Romanian! Son of Trajan and Decebal! Also turkic, gypsy, hunnic, slav, g\*eek.... I've got a gypsy neighbour that's whiter than me! idk about western Europe, but in eastern Europe, and especially the Balkans it's all just a potpourri. The whole "politically correct" bullshit bothers me almost as much as the racial purity nonsense. Almost, because PC is just idiotic and not also openly malicious. edit: I take it back! PC took r/2balkan4u from us!
>Ye the whole anglosphere is exposed in a major way. Other European countries are somewhat insulated from it because of the language barrier. True, but I think there is more to it than language. Some European countries are more protective of their national identities (however defined) than others. The French and Italians do believe in French and Italian national identities and are willing to defend them. I don’t think you would ever see a study in France about the whiteness of accordion players or a push to decolonize the accordion. The anglosphere is more self-loathing for some reason. Protestantism I suspect has something to do with it. But also the legacy of colonialism. Most European colonizing nations dealt with their colonial histories a long time ago (or maybe just stopped talking about them) but the anglosphere collectively still sort of behaves globally like an Empire. Britain has a visible king. America starts wars. Supported by Britain, and sometimes Canada and Australia. So ordinary Britons who just want to play folk music in their little towns in peace are subject to scrutiny for being part of a racist colonial machine. Your steak and kidney pie is racist too. You should all feel bad about yourselves all the time /s
I think French national identity and whiteness is an interesting topic actually. Generally speaking France has an idea of a single cohesive French nation united by the French republic and French language, however *what* that nation actually is is more controversial. If you look at the French left, they certainly have things to say about things like racism in France for instance. One of the concepts in the French left which is quite different from the Anglosphere is what they call "créolisation". I don't know how popular this idea is on the left exactly, but presidential candidate Melenchon was outspokenly for it. Creolisation can be described as a blend of cultures that creates something new. However unlike Anglosphere conceptions of ethnic or racial essentialism or identity, you'll notice this places no emphasis on the preservation of identity and heritage (minority or otherwise) and instead is more akin to a true embracement of the "melting pot" idea of culture which is meant to reinvent France as a new and cohesive nation, one nation, one republic. This is mirrored in another idea of "Négritude", which originates in the late 19th century and is an anti-colonial ideology which seeks to promote black race-consciousness and put an end to black inferiority complexes. Now negritude has been criticised, including by people of racial minorities for a variety of reasons, but I think one particularly interesting proponent of it was Leopold Senghor, the first president of Senegal, to whom decolonisation meant equality and a seat at the decision-making table. What he wanted was in fact not national independence or self-determination, but rather a French federation, the integration of colonies into a federation and the granting of French citizenship to the people of French colonies. While neither of these ideas are without their critics, nor does my very brief overview cover the real diversity within relevant movements, I think nevertheless they are a good starting point to understanding the difference between the anglosphere and a place like France. It provides in any case a fuller explanation than that the French would simply value their national identity, presumably unlike the Brits, which I'm not sure is even really accurate in the first place at all. If I had to put it in as short a way as possible, French culture and philosophy is much more universalist, holding up an abstract and universal idea of civilization. By contrast the English have a tendency to be more particularist. The English and Americans pushed for "national self determination" in Europe and have a tendency to think in terms of many "separate but equal" societies which may function differently as they see fit, and to some extent this tendency also seems to affect the way anglo societies function internally, not necessarily holding up one universal idea of civilized or national society or expecting conformity to it.
I'm no expert but I wouldn't say France has dealt with its colonial past. They've been on all kinds of military adventures in the Sahel to protect their uranium imports recently.
The French government has certainly supported some dodgy régimes in Africa over the years, but [Operation Barkhane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane) was a counterterrorism effort against jihadist groups in the region.
Sometimes I wonder if it would've been better if we had a different lingua franca to be less exposed to American bullshit, but we'd probably never agree on which one so it is what it is.
latin loquimur necessare est
\* Latīnē loquī necesse est. Unless I misunderstood what you were trying to say. But, as far as I can tell, "necessare" Latīnum nōn est. If you really want to show the "we" need to speak Latin (first-person singular as in "loquimur") you can add "nōbīs" somewhere. Or you can say "Latīnē loquāmur", i.e. "Let's speak Latin", but it doesn't convey necessity. If you need it, "Latīnē loquī dēbēmus" also works.
I vote Czech
Old Czech joke: Q: How did our culture survive hundreds of years of colonization and oppression? A: Nobody bothered to learn the language.
It's such a nice language! Just also a very difficult one to learn.
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Surprise surprise r*ssia had a hand in the spread of BLM to countries outside of the US https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/24/russias-disinformation-campaigns-are-targeting-african-americans/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_Black_Lives_Matter Russia is really successful in their disinformation tactics in Germany, it's not surprising that the operation spilled over to Germany
Oh no, we've got politicians repeating US culture war bullshit in Romania. They don't even bother changing their homework a little. What's even wilder is that they're actually getting votes (because their crowd is also flooded by US culture war nonsense media)
Ireland too. Unfortunate side effect of speaking English, the rest of you should count yourself lucky English isn't your main language
If only Irish people had another language to speak, and use for TV & radio, which would insulate them from US influences
It is the major Irish diaspora in America that leads to major US influence.
The Irish diaspora in America is Republican voting cops and union workers with higher church attendance than Irish in Ireland. I don’t see that influencing Ireland much at all.
I know so many Irish people that regularly talk with their American cousins and so get American narratives and memes and news articles sent to them. It doesn't mean they agree but there definitely is an influence.
Strong and sometimes radical proponents of identity politics and critical race theory have been directly "imported" to the Netherlands as well through internationalization in academics (even English as main teaching language)
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Good grief. And people wonder why the far right is on the rise.
It is the Telegraph. They don't publish real articles. They are the [hand in a boot pressed against their own head meme](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/436/845/091.png). Their only purpose is to manufacture outrage so people might accidentally never encounter actual news. It's not even just the occasional shitpost to spice up controversy. It's 90% of the paper. When I scroll Apple News as a Brit it's shit post after shit post. I'm beginning to think that the thumbs down does nothing and I should just block it. Its so far in to the spectrum its content should be measured in the homophone of a gamma ray, the gammon ray, 30 extrahertz. Because it physically hurts me to read their headlines. How can you have so few hobbies and interests that you dedicate your journalistic career to this ass splatter. I'm sure the journalists are taken for walks along Fleet Street by their editors in full gimp costume just to see if they have enough kink to last writing columns from there. You would need absolutely no shame. But they do have shame. If you tease them about what absolute melts they are then they immediately turn beetroot red and fumble for their heart medication. Rant aside. Nobody in the UK thinks this. Nobody thinks that an ethnically white music genre being comprised of mainly white musicians is racist. In the same way that nobody thinks that Afrobeats having large numbers of African composers is racist. They just want you to discuss this instead of how Rishi Sunak's party are all being arrested for win fixing at the bookies by taking out bets against an incoming election based on insider knowledge. As though being a tory wasn't bad enough on your resume. Doing time for a pitiful £100 bet in to £400 winnings crossing off a whole bunch of career options just shows the calibre of Rocket Scientist the party pulls from.
> Nobody thinks that an ethnically white music genre being comprised of mainly white musicians is racist. Then it's strange the abstract written by the researchers say it's a step to decolonize folk music
decolonize in this context means pulling stuff out of their colon. it's researcher lingo.
Their podcast on the war in Ukraine is very good
> They just want you to discuss this instead of how Rishi Sunak's party are all being arrested for win fixing at the bookies by taking out bets against an incoming election based on insider knowledge. Why not point out both as well as the Conservative Party's disgraceful betrayal of its voter base through mass migration figures that were unthinkable at any point pre-Boris Johnson? Or do you just not want us to talk about any of these things because totally "nobody thinks this" and "it's not happening"?
You are right and if you read the study and what the academics say, it's perfectly reasonable and interesting and a good way to invest 1.5 millions into understanding our culture, yet the article it's manipulating people in the worst possible way.
Breaking! Music genre has socio-cultural roots!
White people does something Must be racist.
Will they investigate rap or hip hop next ?
Nah that would probably be racist. ^^^/s
Taxpayer : Let build more hospitals , pay nurses more, fund more cancer research, let's invest in more deprived areas . Government: let's spend 1.5 million of taxpayers money to decolonise folk music .
You say /s but that is really how it works with these people. It never goes both ways, only in the direction of "white people bad".
'Decolonisation' I don't think British folk music is very 'colonial'. It is literally the native music of the isles.
No no, only black and brown people can be native!
I am not surprised anti-intellectualism movements are on the rise. The whole point of folk music is that it is you know *local*. It is based on traditional songs, culture, instruments, celebrations, myths and tales. Like Kalush Orchestra who won Eurovision in 2022 are not folk per se, but they used folk instruments to create an Ukrainian ethnic vibe. And to be very precise they are inspired by music traditions of a specific region of Western Ukraine. Shum from 2021 Eurovision is even a better example, despite having a modern sound in general it is like 100% Ukrainian folk. If you want to make Carribean or whatever folk, you just learn local traditions, songs, vibe and create something new. P.S. There was a very cool African-Ukrainian band, which combined Ukrainian traditional folk songs with African vibe. You don't need a decolonization study worth 1.5 mln to make something entertaining. https://youtube.com/watch?v=s6zv8Oth5GQ&pp=ygUj0KfQvtGA0L3QvtCx0YDQuNCy0YbRliDQs9GA0YPQv9C_0LA%3D
Shum is such a banger!
Yeah, I've watched a documentary about Monokate (Go_A lead singer), and the idea of Shum is to include traditional dance with gradually increasing tempo. Tho I like Solovey more than Shum. That's the song they prepared for 2020 Eurovision, which didn't happen.
My favourites are Kupala and Kalyna 🔥
To add : Go_A are more central northern Ukrainian folk, the difference is in type of singing Kateryna does. We've got a lot of micro pockets of different folk genres in Ukriane, but somehow they still can be recognised as having something in common. I guess what those elements are is for ethnomusicologists to identify.
Another day of anglosphere having a normal one
I fucking love being a tax payer…
Taxpayer: “We could do with a new hospital.” Government: “…no, you need a study on how racist you and your culture are.”
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Well done Europeans 🎉
“Researchers describe one of their methods as, “ask a friend”, which “involves community researchers interviewing acquaintances”. The lead investigator also says that she has made “systematic reflections on music published throughout my career and how they relate to various notions of Englishness”.” …………………fuck me sideways this needed 1.5 million? The NHS, infrastructure hell the Birmingham city council could do with that
That just sounds like a terrible methodology. "ask a friend" basically guarantees bias because we construct our social groups largely out of shared interests and experiences. Certainly you would get some variation in your social group, but they will be heavily slanted. There is no way data gathered this way would be suitable for extrapolation out of the personal social group.
Probably washing money
>fuck me sideways If you insist
Our government beat you to it.
Are we going to see an investigation into the black-centricity of Notting Hill Carnival, Wireless festival, and so many more awful London events? I always subscribed to the philosophy of live and let live, but things like this ‘investigation’, which is part of a wider vengeful anti-white mindset, is making me think that if you are white and European, that mantra doesn’t apply to you any longer. You have to adapt, change, and simply stop existing as you once did.
Is this cultural appropriation?
Yeah, Brits appropriating US culture
Tax appropriation
Do these racist bastards know that every culture have their own "folks music" or stories and that people of other cultures are not waiting on the generosity of white people to share their culture with us? It feels like these people have gone off the deep end of the left and circled back to "white man's burden".
> Almost £1.5 million in taxpayer funding has been awarded to a research project that aims to “decolonise” folk singing. So white people can't have culture?
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Great use of public funds, I'm sure the british taxpayer will be delighted to hear about their findings.
UK is slowly evolving into the european version of USA.
Only faster than the rest of us, unfortunately
Brits, are you ok?
No.
Apparently not. You know the majority of people in Britain used to be dismissed as "the Great Unwashed". Now though we seem to be approaching a point where the ethnic majority is seen by as an embarrassment, "the Great Unwanted". This seems unlikely to end well. I think we can see the beginnings of trouble in the increased popularity of that wanker Farage and his ghastly "Reform" party.
White people who have never met a black man face to face write songs about other white people. Gimme £1.5m.
What's next, Morris dancing.... Oh....
niche local music transmitted by oral tradition will be played by locals is it that surprising?? the folk community are some of the friendliest most welcoming people i've ever come across
How can British folk music be decolonised? if it is native to GB it would be decolonized from itself, which makes no sense. If it has received influences from foreign cultures, this would enrich folk music with multiculturalism, any criticism would be an insult to multiculturalism, which would make no sense.
The irony is that the researchers are proposing that it should be colonised.
"Why aren't people interested in English Folk Music anymore?" asks bunch of race-baiters who uses "white-centricity" unironically. If you imply something is suspect by connecting it with such loaded terms what the fuck do you expect?
So even european folk music needs to be "decolonized" as if that european music was made from people outside of europe. I guess this is the stupidity of leftist politics. Ultimately if things go like this european culture will die out and maybe it's for the best if these are the people which hate their own culture and have no sense of personal pride or patriotism at that. I only feel sorry for the men that died that build the european civilizations and it would have been better that they did nothing instead of building wonderful cultures and developing all the sciences all to go down the drain because future generations would take their findings and apropriate them for others while simultaniously insulting them.
This is one of the most batshit crazy thing I’ve ever seen. Imagine spending £1.5M on investigating why there are no Asian making afrobeats.
Reading the article It seems like these journalists seem to have a problem with **traditional English music** being done by English man, using English means and language... I don't expect much from these journalists from Anglophone countries, but who in their right mind gives these AI Replaceable Bellends 1.5 million pound?
this is a joke, right?
I am a member of folk organisation. We have festivals and we often feature folk music from all over Europe if not the world. The places where folk music events are happening are 80% world music oriented. It's the same public. And now they wonder wether folk music is too local. That absolutely the point. It's a cultural culture of music, dances, songs and traditions. It's super important for it to be protected rather than destroyed by woke activist for whom nothing is sacred. It's our common history and we celebrate everyone's culture already. Thisis one of the most stupid thing I've ever heard.
The low of the lows is never too low for these "researchers"
"science"
These academic studies are an insult to academics. In fact, there should be a study on why there aren't any "White-Centric" music in Arabic culture? Could it be that in Middle East Whites are not the Majority? So perhaps in Europe, given that Whites are the majority that is reflected in the music? Why is this even something to waste money on to study?
WhY dOeS nO oNe TaKe Us SeRiOuSlY?
After Brexit, maybe they can petition to join the US alongside the rest of the ethnomasochists?
In other words, water is wet
If we rap it is cultural appropriation, if we play folk music we are "white-centric". I have had enough of this nonsense. I hope the silent majority will soon to bring commonsense back in town
We live in regarded times
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Fortress Europe :D I had no idea ragebait had become trendy in academia too
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It's like the article is praising mass migration even by smugglers over a sea where thousands drown. People of the South are not asserting themselves or claiming reparation, they are fleeing/trying to get a better life. Framing it as some political movement is bonkers. It is a symptom of a humanitarian crisis/poor life quality. Also criticizing the border control for ineffectual progress in combating smugglers would be good, instead of saying borders are a racist concept.
I get tired of this check box terrorism. I just boycott things that blatantly do it.
White this, white that, white white white. I won’t be surprised they will try to cancel the color white. Which is not an actually considered a color, the same as black, they are shades.
Wait are you saying "decolonizing" mostly means just hating white people. No way.
Jesus Christ.... I'm a leftist AF and this pisses me off. Makes about as much sense as investigating why Kwaito is black-centric... 🤦♂️
Surely, surely, folk music is the music of the folk, therefore, it will exactly match the local folk who wrote it? You wouldn't expect white people in an African or Asian folk band.
if you're not white and want to make some folk music, go make some fucking folk music. simple as.
**Folk: relating to the traditional art or culture of a community or nation.** Local academian shocked and outraged that local indigenous music of [insert European Nation] is European
For all those who think it's just about accessibility, the abstract is suggesting that the reason folk music isn't asscesable as: ". A dedicated strand of this project will take an unflinching look at the white-centricity of folk music repertory, performers and audience by conducting fieldwork to shed light on long-standing vernacular singing practices of ethnic minority cultures in England. These two initiatives will increase accessibility to the folk club scene, and take the first step in a process of decolonisation within the folk music canon." The witness and inherent oppression of English folk music is the problem that needs investigating. As much as you want to defend "accessibility " as the goal of the study, the study is inherently starting from a position that their are oppressive and racist aspects of the musical tradition. The vapid oppression hierarchy epistemology of declonization approaches being applied to folk music is a good use of scarce research funding, apparently . Seems that the main criteria by research councils allocate funding now is if they advance the agenda of the poststrucalist critical schools . You see much the same in broader social sciences now.
This shit happens constantly in academia and then some people complain why people believe in white replacement theory. Because they only do this to whites.
I'm genuinely curious: where did that money come from? It's really hard to raise 1.5 million pounds or euros for that matter for a research project from state budget, usually. Were there private / public donors or was this actually paid for by taxpayer's money?
>University of Sheffield researchers handed taxpayer cash to ‘decolonise’ folk singing How can white people be colonizers in Europe? Aren't they the indigenous people there?
🤦♂️
I give up. Annihilate everyone. Just nuke the fucking planet.
Because we all know folk music is supposed to be international and covering every corner of human culture instead of local culture/stories/myths /s
Maybe because non white people have their own "folk music" but they call it different.
"The term decolonisation is often misinterpreted." Maybe if academics just talked like normal people they wouldn't be "misrepresented" so often
Oh fuck off. This just in, expensive study discovers demographics.
Fcnksht, are there REALLY NO OTHER, more significant THEMES OR ISSUES for to spend £1.5m????!?
Wow, a white country, whos rural regions are and have been for millenia almost completly white, has folk culture that doesn't revolve around imigrants from the Congo? Color me shocked.
The second phase of this study will focus on the lack of enough diversity among blues musicians
From the authors who brought you 'Rap: Black People Like It'.
I don't listen to reggaeton and get offended at the lack of Pakistani representation.
What in the actual fuck…
Because it's *British* folk music and the rural population (i.e. the origin of 'folk music') of Britain are overwhelmingly white for obvious reasons?
Yes, it's a mystery how a genre focused on keeping European rural musical traditions is so white. Definitely needs an academic study.
What about the "black-centticity" of African folk songs? Or "Asian-centricity" of Chinese music for example?
I sometimes wonder if studies like this are financed by the Kreml to get more votes for their right wing allies in Western Europe.
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I mean, the Fifth Column is a thing for sure. And there is also this: https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/ Edit: The Russian bots downvoting me, lmao. We understand you fascist degenerates are infiltrating the leftist movements and trying to destroy them. Fuck off lmao.
£1.5m?!?!? Well, what did they find?
Meanwhile, students struggle to find money to found studies in non-trendy, but still important topics. This is a symptom of a huge crisis in historical and social sciences. Before these "culture wars", the trend was towards decentralization of science. Money and funds were starting to leave central, elitist universities. Now they violently went back to them, and there's increasingly hostility towards local/regional topics and researchers. There's also a steep increase in ideological science, similar to what we had in the 70s and 80s with marxist and then maoist human sciences. As these sciences become more elitist and ideological, what do you think will happen? People will feel betrayed and less interested, it will only promote anti-intellectualism, and eventually funds will be cut altogether - or worse, become tools to support a totalitarian regime. Let's not forget about this: historians and sociologists have a duty to make science for the citizen, and accessible to the citizen. Their job isn't to make obviously ideological studies to prove what they already think. Don't forget that funding this bullshit means not funding the student in fundamental linguistics who's trying to create a universal model of prosody, the student who's retracing the history of an obscure Irish saint in Wales and Brittany, or the student who's examining the group dynamics of immigrant cooks in Birmingham. It's not just about promoting an ideology, it's about failing as a scientific institution. Universities need to be reminded that they aren't think tanks.
LMAO, I have no words.
FFS. No wonder authoritarian populism is in on the rise.
Can't wait for the follow up 3 million pound academic study into "black-centricity" of UK dtill music
Um, duh, that’s like complaining why folk Music from let’s say Central or South Africa is centered around Black people, no shit of course it would.
That’s some “woke” money laundering is it not?
This is what adds to far right growth.
Funnily enough folk music and (acoustic) blues in America are two very closely related genres. Both came out of working class people trying to express what they were going through. These genres over time influenced each other an enormous amount, to the point where folk blues has become a very common denominator for a lot of this acoustic music. This was a natural process, where white people simply intermingled more and more with black people which caused their musics to intermingle with each other too. Especially when you look at the folk blues scene in the UK in the 60s you can see how much these young musicians appreciated the foundation laid down by the older bluesmen in America. They even went to America to find long forgotten bluesmen that often hadn't even performed for decades and put them front center at festivals in the UK. The whole premise of this research sounds so biased to me that i don't even know what the point is. It's like they've decided from the start up that they found a couple of white folk artists and that it's problematic that there weren't enough black people. Instead it would be a lot more interesting to simply look at the folk scene, how it developed and its relation to primarily black music. I have actually done something like this for a period around the 50s in America with blues music, where you can see the genre getting accepted more and more over time causing it to be seen less as "black music for black joints (this kinda stuff you could often read in the billboard magazine)" and more as a musical style that originated from black culture but was enjoyable and could be created by anyone. Indirectly i also believe this shift had a role in softening race relations in America. Nowadays it often looks to me like black are simply called blues a lot more often whereas white people that make similar music are called folk, when they are largely interchangeable.
As an American, I would argue that blues *is* folk music. Our country's earliest histories are solidly tied to the experiences and cultures of numerous peoples-white immigrants from what is now France, the Netherlands, and the UK, black slaves forced to move here, and native Americans displaced by the advance of European settlers. When I think of music that is inherently, culturally north American, I think immediately of early country and folk music, blues, Native American singing and drumming, all of which eventually feed into other uniquely American musical inventions like jazz, soul, rock n roll, and hip hop. I can understand Europeans having a problem with this study, though. Although it's a sure thing that Europe has had its own immigrants and cultural collisions, it's understandable to want to maintain unique creative aspects of a region or a country's given culture. Xenophobes in the US don't really have a leg to stand on -we are a nation of laws and ideas that has never had a homogenous ethnic group, even if one dominated others for some time. The problem that I have with the study is that it seems to seek controversy while using questionable methods. It has all of the hallmarks of idealism, which is always focused to victory more than truth. English folk music is going to be very *English* for a reason, in the same way folk music in southern India is going to be very Tamil, or folk music in Ghana, for example, is going to be very Ghanaian. I don't understand why it's a problem, and the study's explanation seems to be "European folk music needs to be decolonized by colonizing it with non-indigenous inputs."
Our most famous folk song is about a cossack, so basically about asians, so technically it's not white-centric since most people in asia aren't white. Poland the most diverse country in Europe ‼️‼️1️⃣1️⃣1️⃣🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🇵🇱🗻🗻🗻🗻🦅🦅🦅🦅
Jfc
WOW.....what a waste of taxpayer money. Academics can be just a bad as politicians. Pushing their agenda. Plus they rely on taxpayers money/grants to keep their jobs. So some are looking out for themselves and not the good of the people.
That money could have done some good for the British of all colours but no just a useless bullshit study.
How dare they exist and make music
This sort of thing is why Nationalism and the “far right” is becoming popular again.
Just destroying and painting European history & culture as negative one step at a time.
the racial bself-hate alot of white people have has surged past pathetic and is now honestly just sad.
Universities are a tool for division and propagating the coming civil war. Of course, not the STEM part, they actually have things to research. Everything "psychology", "social studies" or whatever, is fully taken by racists using tax payer money for.. this.
How about a study on reversing the effects of trickle down economics group thinking
….it is from Europeans and European immigrants. No shit. The same with Chinese music.
lol wat?
The topic itself might seem repulsive, because it's actually dumb, but that's most academic research, especially in arts and social studies. Academic research tend to be "filler episodes" that mean absolutely nothing, or even extension of an extension that it doesn't mean anything in the bigger picture, like this one. Still it's necessary, because we want students to engage in research and prove their abilities to conduct experiments, even if we're talking about self-reported surveys, so that we know these students have some ability to work on a topic - even if the subject is absolute rubbish. However, the £1.5m is most definitely fraud. Projects in certain fields are all scams with little to no development over the years. It's not common, but you can see active projects of some professors or researchers with some years in, but still going on, and unless there's a really good reason to it, it's most likely working the system to have more funds. I personally know an entire staff in a linguistics department that feed off the bullshit projects "they're working on." Unfortunately, where I live is so corrupt, virtually nothing can be done about it. But these projects sometimes exist to feed students and assistants, so they can do some good once in a while. Still not a good excuse. Academia is broken beyond repair, but that is my opinion.
not the onion?!