Bob Kanefsky interview cont'd

Filk

I guess there are several routes through which people get into filking, the main ones being either science fiction fandom or an interest in music, especially folk music. For me it was SF. I wasn't particularly interested in folk music, although I've grown to like it through osmosis. (For some people it's the other way around.) I was a longtime reader of SF, and some of my housemates brought me to my first Westercon. They also told me I had to try filking, maybe because I'd written a lot of computer parodies. I tried it grudgingly, and would probably never have gone back. But then one of my housemates played me a Leslie Fish tape, and that got me interested again, especially "Swamp Gas", her UFO song. So I kept going to filking at conventions once a year, and soon Minus Ten and Counting came out. I realized it was just what I'd been waiting for most of my life. Afterward, I started asking dealers if there were any other tapes like it, and they would say "No, but this convention tape has one space song on it", and pretty soon I had a large collection of filk tapes, and after listening to them I started liking the sorcerous vampire unicorn drinking songs too.

So I started listening to filk songs on my walkman all the time. Before discovering filk I used to listen mostly to Women's Music (music written and performed by women, about women, for women, but in the words of the Irish Spring commercial, I like it too). The turning point, when I decided I could survive on a steady diet of filk music, was when I heard Cindy's song "Black Lace and Midnight". Why listen to feminist music when I could listen to feminist vampire music?

Filking feels more like a community than any other group of people I'm part of, and belonging to a community for so long is an interesting feeling. Also, over and above the important contributions people make by serving on convention committees and the like, which happens everywhere, the contributions of those who write or perform are uniquely individual, which is sort of cool to think about. I also like the fact that filksings are egalitarian and everyone gets a chance; I like open filking better than concerts, in many ways. I can listen to professionally-done albums the rest of the year; when I go to conventions I like the informal stuff.