Punk Aesthetics and New Folk: Way Down the Old Plank Road

Joanna Newsom, Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie Prince Billy), and Devendra Banhart are perhaps the best known of a generation of independent artists who use elements of folk music in contexts which are far from traditional. New folk artists challenge our notions of finished product through their recordings, intrinsically guided by practices and rhetoric inherited from punk. Encarnacao provides detailed analysis of recorded works, underlining the point that the performative traces that define the immediacy of punk are equally present in folk, and find expression in the innovative and intuitive forms and sounds of new folk.