it seems like folk music became very popular after the pandemic. there's some logic in this. i'm not going to write an essay, but i don't want to pretend i don't get it. the borders shut down. they shuttered virtually all of the venues here for years. it opened up a vacuum, and this is the kind of thing that folk music is good at walking into as it creates a sense of "community". i think the reality is that this is a lot of bullshit, and drinking friends are not real friends (i've had too many...they surprise you periodically, but they don't give a fuck in the end), but it seems real enough in the absence of meaning, in the futility of existence, and i have no real prerogative to shatter the desperate delusions of people that have nothing else to live for. it's a closed loop, but it can sustain itself in the short run, until people start leaving and/or dying or more vibrant art starts to bomb it's way in. then, when real art needs a place to exist, you get the problem of trying to get rid of the folkies to open up space, and venues that are on your side or opposed to you. the folkies are like the kurds - they have no friends but the gutters. they always lose. but they never disappear.
my basic position is that folk music is boring and sucks, so it's a process of trying to find ways around it just for my own entertainment value and the maximization of my own self-interest and own utility function. i don't want to go to your folk show because i don't like folk music. it's kind of that simple. sorry. art scenes don't elevate themselves to folk scenes, they cave in and collapse into them. when all that is left is folk, your scene has hit rock bottom and needs to rebuild from scratch. but that also means trying to navigate around the 80s rock losers, who will invariably present themselves as the natural alternative, and are even worse. the dead dichotomy between boring 60s folk and cliched 80s rock is emblematic of the death of contemporary western culture and it's time capsuling in reagan v clinton. and, sure - you'd might as well just get a falafel and go to the festival at the mosque, instead. the messaging is borderline barbaric, and the politics are horrendous, but at least you're learning something about the world as it exists today, rather than getting lost in reliving the retro scenes of the past.
since we got unstuck in time in the 90s, art scenes everywhere have been fleeting, they come and go in short bursts. they're extremely fragile and subject to political whims and economic destruction, to inflation, to demographic shifts, to gentrification and to everything else in the ether. we can build temporary autonomous zones, and expect them to collapse.
detroit-windsor was actually doing pretty well until early 2020. the pandemic utterly annihilated the art scene here, and now all that is left is that boring dead dichotomy - 60s v 80s. death. emptiness. in windsor, the retro 60s folkies will always defeat the retro 80s rock losers. it's a union town. the hippies never died out, but they're at their end of life. and, then all that's left are the arabs, and whatever underground can eke itself out of the ooze.
my pandemic is just ending now, this spring. no shit. i had a false start in 2023, but my house got bought by these disgusting lesbians from toronto. i remain convinced that the sick lesbian perverts wanted to fuck the barbie doll tranny, and were shattered when i shaved my head in protest. in response, they tried to steal my gear and give it to some no-talent losers and failed. they tried to drug me with testosterone to actualize their creepy queer fantasies and failed. i had to lock myself inside for two two years, i move thrice to escape them and it cost me thousands of dollars that the broken court system has to this point failed to properly compensate me with. so i lost three further years on top of the three years lost in the pandemic.
this spring, everything is finally resolving itself. i have a new place that is way better. my financial situation is improving. my hormones are correcting and turning over. my hair has grown back. i'm almost ready to go.
what have i missed, since 2023, if not since 2020? the answer is not much, but folk. everywhere you look, it's folk; there's some 80 retro losers around still, and the arabs are more numerous than ever, but the local white culture is exclusively folk, now. everything else is gone - left, migrated, bankrupted, given up. venues are gone. people have left. it's a wasteland of apparent artistic emptiness that i'm going to have to rediscover from scratch and learn to renavigate. everything is gone. everything is new.
i know i missed some shows in detroit from 2020-2023 because the border was closed. i missed squarepusher, i missed son lux. that's the tip of it. but i had no option; there was no way to get back and forth. biden only re-opened the border in 2023, and i went over once in may, but then was forced to lock myself inside until march, 2025 due to the aggressive investors buying my rental and the vacancy rate n windsor being 0.5%. there was nowhere for rent at all, letalone anywhere to move that i could afford. i have spent the last year trying to rebuild, and twice evaded homelessness by a week via the seat of my pants, but they cancelled the tunnel bus, so i had no (affordable) way to detroit, anyways. i can't spend $200 crossing the border for a few hours of partying. that makes no sense for me to do.
in that time frame, promoters have disappeared and venues have closed and if i missed anything since 2023, i don't even know for sure what it was. all i can find in windsor is folk, which i think is boring and sucks. i've looked. unable to cross since they shut down the tunnel bus, i was actually largely unable to find much of anything worth going to in windsor. i skipped something here and there. there was a rave at the airport, apparently. i've largely been out of touch.
but i actually don't think i've missed so much.
i actually think the scene is d-e-d.
we're going to remember the 2020s as a lost decade, culturally. we didn't lose the 2020s because we were forced to by science, but because we decided to destroy our own economy. this self-inflicted wound will have consequences.
as it is, this region now has to rebuild, and it is different than it has been in previous eras. both detroit and toronto have historically been fertile artistic centres and what makes these cities - along with chicago, montreal, new york and seattle - different than los angeles has been the underground. detroit and toronto have not always been the center of mainstream north american society, but they have always maintained booming undergrounds - jazz, techno, punk, experimental, progressive/alternative, psychedelic, etc. you expect this here.
it's gone.
it must return and, when it does, it will need to reflect the demographic changes in the region. and this is a race against time. we need to westernize the immigrants before they despotize us.
so, i'm expecting to emerge like a phoenix this spring, but i'm walking into what is now a dead culture. detroit has nicer buildings than it used to, but that's a bad thing in terms of venues. the carnage is immense. i will document it as best as i can.
and as for windsor?
come to windsor.
book a show.
we need it.
right now, there's nothing here but a boring folk scene that i have no interest in except to continue to evade it.