The Anthology Of UnAmerican Folk Music
by Marisa Anderson

From MadhattanJack 05/26/2026 05:28 | #314600 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

In researching the material for this album, Marisa Anderson studied folk music traditions of countries that have been involved in wars (and other military conflicts) with the United States — Russia, Vietnam, Yemen, Iraq, and so on — and chose pieces she considered exemplary. There's no singing on any of these tracks though, and the instrumentation is fairly conventional, using acoustic guitar, violin, and other common traditional (mostly stringed) instruments, so most American music listeners who hear the album will just experience it as pleasant traditional folk music, not realizing the intent of the collection unless they read this short comment you're reading now. Unfortunately for you, now that you've read this comment you can't "unread" it, so if you live in the United States (like me), you'll just have to accept the fact that the people who composed these folk songs probably aren't all that fond of you. But if you're a zero-empathy narcissistic sociopath (also like me, and like America's political leadership), you might not care about things like that. It's a bit of a quandary, I'm afraid. The best thing to do is probably to forget about international folk music traditions altogether and listen exclusively to "skinny-tie" new wave bands from the late 1970s, since skinny-tie bands of that era were almost universally inoffensive. (Edited)