Imaginary Worlds - Filk Fusion: Where Sci-Fi Meets Folk Music

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

In the 1950s, an article about the popularity of folk music among science fiction fans had a typo where “folk” was written as “filk.” From then on, filk music became a staple at grassroots sci-fi conventions. Filkers would either write parody lyrics to existing folk songs, or they’d invent entirely new speculative worlds in 3-4 minute songs. Filk has evolved beyond just being folk. It's gone electric and embraced other genres of music. But sci-fi fantasy fandom has changed a lot as well. Does filk still have a place in a more corporate fantasy world? Can it survive the competition from Nerdcore or social media? Can it transition from the boomer generation that started it? I talk with folklorists Sally and Barry Childs-Helton of the group Wild Mercy, Rand and Erin Bellavia of the group Via Bella, and Eric and Jen Distad of the group The Faithful Sidekicks about the past, present and future of filk. This week’s episode is brought to you by Hims and Remi Start your free online visit today at Hims.com/IMAGINARY Get up to 50% off your custom-fit mouth guard at https://shopremi.com/IMAGINARY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. After working on this show for 10 years, I am always on the lookout for new areas of science fiction or fantasy that I haven't explored yet. And typically when I discover something, it's relatively new. But I recently learned about a subculture that's been around since before I was born. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of it before.

But the more I delved into it, the more I realized why it's been off my radar for so long. It's a musical genre called filk. Barry Childs Helton is a member of the filk community and he's a doctorate in folklore. He says back in the 1950s, science fiction was becoming popular with young people. So was folk music.

There was bound to be crossover. Eventually it became popular enough activity amongst fans that two things started to happen. They started putting science fictional and fantasy lyrics to familiar folk tunes. The other thing was conventions started recognizing that some fans wanted to make this music. So they created spaces for them to play at sci-fi fantasy conventions. There was an article about this phenomenon called, The Influence of Science Fiction on modern American filk music.

But that was a typo. It was supposed to say modern American folk music. Somebody's finger missed a key and typed filk music. And by that point, it was becoming enough of a thing that the name accidentally stuck. And filk music became the music of science fiction fandom. A lot of filk is parody based, like this song by Maya and Jeff Bonhoeff, which sets Harry Potter to Led Zeppelin. in a hole neat the stairs. Now he's riding the railway to Hogwarts. There are original Filch songs about established sci-fi worlds, like this song by Julia Eklahr, which tells the story of Dune from the perspective of the character Paul Atreides. I learned the ways of Fremen, and I taught the miners well. We trained an army fiercer atradies.

There are filk songs where the music and the characters are both original creations. And there are novelists, like Mercedes Lackey, who wrote and performed filk songs where the music and the characters are both original creations. And there are novelists like Mercedes Lackey who wrote and performed filk songs about the characters in her own novels. Barry's wife, Sally Childs-Helton, is a professor emerita at Butler University in Indiana. She's a member of the Phil community and she studied it as an ethnomusicologist. Phil grew out of that grassroots fandom that was primarily literary fandom and that's where it got established and that's pretty much where it stayed. The idea of filk and commercial cons

have never really gone together. Sci-fi fantasy conventions have become more corporate, so it makes sense that I never came across a filk room at New York Comic-Con. Conventions have also splintered off into different sub-genres and fandoms. Filk began to have its own conventions.

They even have awards for best Filk songs, the Pegasus Awards, which have been around for over 40 years. And Filk conventions are held all over the world. Sally was at a convention in Ontario. There were eight of us at a breakfast table, and we were from five different countries. And that is not unusual. And people will save their money and travel. And it's like, this year, this is the only convention

I'm doing. But they'll go to Germany. They'll go to England. We're going to Germany. Rand and Aaron Bolavia perform under the name Viabella. When they went to a Philk convention in Germany. You know, so I've performed a lot and I have never performed in front of an audience that was more receptive than the Germans. I've never felt more like a rock star.

You know, like it would be like you'd finish a song and there would be like a two minute applause break after every song. It was crazy. Yeah, it was was really really amazing. And folk doesn't have to be folk anymore. It's expanded to other genres of music. It's gone electric. Like this song by Viabella which is called The Princess Who Saved Herself. It sounds like a song that Elvis Costello could write if he was into fantasy genres. But a lot of filk is still influenced by folk. Eric Distad is a filk performer, and he says there are many reasons for that. Folk has a tradition of story songs, and in some cases to be able to develop a good story

you need the time to do it. A lot of some of these other genres are kind of built around short, repetitive nature and whatnot where in like a folk idiom, things can take a bit more time to develop. The other part of it too, I think is in some cases, you can have layers of illusion and metaphor and reference that's common in more like introspective, folky type stuff that isn't as common in say, synth pop. Also, if you want to tell a story in speculative fiction, writing a four minute song takes talent,

but it is a more accessible form of self-expression than writing a novel or making a film. Again, here's Barry and Sally. It's fairly low entry because all you need is your voice. A lot of people sing a cappella. A lot of people will pick up instruments, especially guitar. All it really takes is being able to play three chords

just about and you're good to go. Because most folk music is essentially three chords. Just as I was learning about folk music, I also discovered that the community is at a crossroads. Everyone I talked with said they were concerned about the future of filk, whether it will still continue or morph into something else entirely. People value different things about their appearance. And if you're a guy who really cares about your hair,

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minoxidil and finasteride. Prescription products require an online consultation with a healthcare provider who will determine if a prescription is appropriate. Restrictions apply. See website for full details and important safety information. Before we get into the future of FILK, we need to learn more about the community. Barry Childs Helton was a musician long before he discovered Philk. He had been working by himself on a science fiction song cycle called Dream of a Far Light. I've been infatuated with space travel ever since I was two years old. Science-fictional motifs always creep into what I write. That's the frame of reference from which

I see the world in its most hopeful and visionary aspect. I try to write what somebody like Paul Simon would write if he were writing science fiction. No, I won't be a code to hack. So long. No, I won't be a shiny shoe. So long. I'll be a breath of life escaping through the chill. Barry and his wife Sally discovered filk in the early 1980s. They were at a science fiction convention in Indianapolis, and they were surprised to find a room full of people singing with guitars.

Barry brought his guitar, and Barry played one of his songs, and everybody in the room turned and looked at him and said, who is this guy? And then I realized that if I wanted to filk, I was going to have to haul drums in because at that point, I had never seen anybody else pull drums into a filk room. So we ended up joining a band called Wild Mercy. We started playing music as a band at conventions. And at that point, they realized that some of these songs that Barry had written were part of a song cycle. And they said, let's do the whole thing.

Outside the glass a plane sits silver with rain. Here on the ground the lightning's been raising cane. Are you stricken jagged too? Damn right. Around this time, there also began to be a generational transition. Before Rand Bolavia discovered Filch,

he and his friend Adam were in a group called Ukla the Mock. If you're not familiar with Ukla the Mock, he was a character from the 1980s cartoon show Tundar the Barbarian, which is a deep cut reference for Gen Xers. In 1993, a friend of Rand recommended that he should check out the Philk Room at a sci-fi convention in Ohio, so he brought his guitar. I tend to write songs that demand that you listen to them and, you know, people will

pay attention to you in a Philk circle. I got a response that we had certainly never gotten at a club or a bar in Buffalo. So could you also describe what your music was like back then that people listen, what were you doing that people listened to it and like you should go into folk? Oh it was purely the lyrics at that point because we were writing, you know, rock music and at that point in particular folk was, you know, rock music. And at that point, in particular, folk was, you know, pretty profoundly folk in its idiom. And so, you know, there definitely was a, I would say, you know, a bit of resistance to the music that we were doing, which is why, you know, we tended to strip it down, you know, and play with more acoustic guitars. And I think what my friends thought and what they were correct in thinking people would respond to was the lyrics, the fact that we were writing about

kind of nerdy topics and science fiction and comic books. Like, one of their albums was all about villains, and it featured a song called Bizarro World, folks go out of their way to smile as they have a terrible day in Bizarro World. These days, Rand is working more with his wife Erin in their group, Via Bella. He writes the music, they both work on the lyrics, and sometimes she comes up with a concept, like a song called Let's Not Fight About Star Trek. Yeah, it's this idea where people think that because they don't like something, it is therefore bad, and people who like it are wrong. And I'm very frustrated with that idea. And certainly, you know, it came into the form of a song about Star Trek because

of so much of the discourse about the new Star Trek shows and lots of people online just dismissing them as bad. And I'm like, I've watched these shows. They're not bad. You didn't like it. It's not the same thing. We rank something from the worst to the best. Angel of a spike, Kirk Sisko of pike. At this point, we've heard two couples who write and perform together. We're about to hear a third couple, Eric and Jen Distad. They perform as the faithful sidekicks. In the same way that an acoustic guitar

is an easy and affordable way to tell a sci-fi story, the couples that I talked with said, it's very convenient to have your romantic partner as your bandmate and travel buddy. And there are actually quite a few couples on the filk scene. And just like Rand and Barry, Eric had been writing nerdy songs for years without realizing that filk existed. Writing songs inspired by Lord of the Rings, of course, that's what I do. I also would not admit to it because I still remember being the kid shoved in lockers for liking Lord of the Rings, you know. But you're just making the references oblique in the song itself so you could, you know, quote unquote, hide your sources.

Yeah, it's almost like secret code to those who know kind of was the way I sort of portrayed it. But of course, nerds pick up on this thing. No matter how obscure you actually think it is, someone will get it. That is what we do. One thing I noticed about Filck is that the songs tend to fall into two camps, funny and earnest. And the earnest songs have a nickname, Ose, which is short for morose. But it doesn't seem like Ose is taken as an insult. Eric tends to, if he's left to his own devices all on his own, tends more towards the Ose. I am more towards the comedy. We found a balance.

So I had been doing like solo songwriters. Singer, serious singer-songwriter for like a decade and not making a lot of headway because it was pretty heavy stuff and the market for heavy stuff isn't always the most obvious. And I was hitting a point of just being discouraged and Jen was like, just write the silly stuff, just write the stuff that is funny. So I wrote a country song about red shirts from Star Trek called Be Me Up, Don't Be Me Down. enterprise I was happy as can be. Then came the day I would soon come to dread. When they gave out

assignments, turns out my shirt was red. Beam me up, beam me up, don't beam me down. It generated some buzz and people really liked it and I'm like, well, we had fun. We had a ton of fun doing it. So let's do more fun stuff. Interestingly, even our comedy songs as we've been progressing have underlying serious notes to them. Our Kind of Strange is a great example.

I really liked this song because it taps into a horror trope that freaks me out when a person you love is turned into a monster, but that freaks me out when a person you love is turned into a monster. But their approach is so humane. We're not looking to be normal, we feel no need to change. We love each one just as they are, because they're our kind of strength. That song is riddled with snark lines, riddled with punch lines. And yet it's actually a very serious topic ultimately. It's about inclusion, which we can't get enough of. When I talked with Sally Child-Telton, she was very enthusiastic about Eric and Jen,

because the community that founded Philk isn't getting younger. My biggest question, and I don't have a good answer for this, is if the old school fan run grassroots conventions should start dying off, and they are, because the baby boomers who founded them and are running them are not getting volunteers to come in and replace them. And it may be something that has a lifespan of maybe 100 years and then evolves into something else or just goes away.

It may be something that is so tied to its environment of grassroots fan run conventions that if and when those go by the wayside, don't go by the wayside, I have no idea. I asked Eric and Jen if they feel a lot of pressure to carry the torch for the next generation. Yes. Yeah. And it's one of the things that it can be a little overwhelming. So yeah, there were points early on when I felt a bit overwhelmed by the welcoming nature. I think it's a challenge to any older community when you have new people coming in to try and find how to welcome and incorporate them.

And I think the music circle is probably the best method for that in that music circle is if you show up at a circle and you want to sing, we are here for it. We are here to listen to anything you want to bring, no matter your skill level, no matter your idea. If you're here to make music with us, we are here to listen. But the circle is growing smaller, and that is not the only issue Filck is grappling with. If you have jaw pain or headaches after a night's sleep, there's a chance you grind or clench your teeth at night.

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slash imaginary. Use the code imaginary to save up to 50%. That's 50% off at shopremi.com slash imaginary with the code imaginary. Give your teeth a break without breaking the bank with Remy. Eric and Jen said, one of the biggest questions around Philk is a simple one. The ever present ongoing forever and ever debate that happens in filk and even slightly outside of filk

is what is filk? And there are purists who are very much, you know, this is filk and this is not. And there are others that, I don't know, whatever happens at Fil circle is is filk some of those definitions are not necessarily even the the people who are very Particular about the definition of what folk is as in like filk is only sci-fi Filk is only sci-fi or speculative fiction and for some people out there. It's well, it's parodies

that's filk there are purists who define Filch as folk music about science fiction that is acoustic-only, singer-songwriter that took place between 1965 and 1985. It can be a problem if you're too strict in your definition of Filch, It can be a problem if you're too strict in your definition of filk, but there is a danger to being too open. Sally and Barry said they've heard filk songs about every kind of topic. Their songs about cats and their songs about about fel romances and their songs that have nothing to do with science fictional topics. It's funny even though obviously I'm not part of the folk community, I've still

already in this research become a little bit of a purist. When I hear that there's filk that's not about sci-fi fantasy, I'm like, how dare you? This is supposed to be, and I'm like, I've already become one of those, like, that's not filk. I'm almost concerned it almost becomes too vague in a way. Then what is it? I mean, it does not folk, it's not sci-fi, it's whatever happens at a filk circle. If I start juggling, that's filk. It's totally natural when you have a community that serves all these deeply personal functions.

That you're gonna have folks who want, who also have an impulse to become gatekeepers, guardians, and to some extent, arbiters of taste, I don't know. Mostly, they want to preserve the safety of that space. They want to preserve the benefits and the delights that they've found within it. Among the people I talked with, it seems like I was the only person who was really bothered by the fact that some filk songs are not about sci-fi or fantasy.

They told me, well, there are some filkers who feel that way, but it's an ongoing discussion. It seems like no one wants there to be an official arbiter to create a strict definition of filk because that might turn some people away. They can't afford to lose anyone or splinter the community. In fact, Sally was proud to tell me that there's been a recent influx of professional folk musicians showing up at filk conventions.

Their music may not be about speculative fiction, but they're bringing a whole new level of talent to the filk circles. When trying to define filk, the phrases that I kept hearing were filk is what happens at a filk circle and filk is a community. So you could argue that the definition of filk is things this community cares about. This community happens to be full of nerds and geeks, so the majority of songs are about science fiction and fantasy. But the rest isn't random. Jen and Eric wrote a song called Spoons,

which is about what it's like to live with a chronic illness. That's a condition they both struggle with. We find that in fandom, there's a lot of people with chronic illnesses. And what we've been told time and time again is that song resonates with those folks because they see they, they feel seen. Yeah. Moment by moment, measure by measure, assessing each breath, count each endeavor, where others are running, our triumph is to stand.

The question of what is filk is even more complicated because of the competition. Nerdy music parodies have existed for a long time, like Dr. Demento's Radio Show or Weird Al Yankovic. And there are genres like nerdcore, which is hip hop about geeky topics. Again, here's Aaron and Rand. Aaron Norris Because of the internet, you know, you could write, you could listen to music that has science fiction topics written and performed by people that have never heard of the folk community. You know, so that's kind of worked against folk in some ways that you don't have to be a part of the folk community. So that's kind of worked against folk in some ways that you don't have to

be a part of the folk community or attend a folk circle to get music that has lyrics with these topics. Right. There are people who write and perform exclusively video game music. There's the whole wizard rock thing that came out of the Harry Potter fandom. I mean, like when we were the last time when this was Ukul the Mok when we performed at Dragon Con, you know, the band that played before us was like, you know, a band made up of guys that just like dressed up and like as Transformers. They were like in a giant robot costumes, somehow playing instruments. It was really impressive to see. Of course, they were the crowd loved them and they were doing, you know, fun songs and

all this. But like, I don't know if they'd doing fun songs and all this, but I don't know if they'd ever heard of Philk, but Philk has never heard of them. That taps into another question that some people are wrestling with, being a professional musician versus being a hobbyist. When you self-identify as a community, there's a size limitation or growth limitation inherent in that. Most musical subcultures, you know, want to grow exponentially. They want to grow as much as they can.

And Phil is not really interested in that. And so, you know, whereas maybe 25 years ago, Phil was, you know, a bit leery of people that were strained idiomatically for folk music. You know, I think now something focus remains leery of is people that are, you know, trying to grow Philk into a business. There's nothing wrong, of course, with making... If you make a record, you want to sell enough copies to not lose money.

And of course, if you can make some money, that would be great. But there's a lot of people that are kind of almost fiercely proud of it being a hobby. It's a hobby that they take very seriously. But the biggest issue is how to attract younger generations. They are there, just not in the numbers they need to be. I asked Rand if one of the problems is that filk is associated with folk and folk music is associated with the 60s and 70s boomer culture. Movies like A Mighty Wind have made fun of folk for being corny and overly earnest. Oh, absolutely. And they got, you know, there was a, if you remember the documentary Trekkies that came

out in the late 90s, you know, in that movie, they talked about filk and they interviewed and filmed the performance of one Filcker. And it was obvious that the, you know, whether it was their initial intention, the way that when they edited the footage, it was obvious that they were making fun of Filck. That Filck was this, you know, these people aren't very talented, they're not doing music that anyone really cares about. And they were kind of called to task on that. And when they did the sequel, Trekkies 2,

they actually interviewed a friend of ours named Kathleen Sloan and to kind of set the record straight a little bit. Historically, the word filk came from a typo of the word folk. It could have been a lot worse than filk as a typo, but luckily for us, it's just filk. Natasha Yar, what would your parents think if they saw you today? There's another problem in attracting younger people. So much cultural sharing is online.

I mean, you can sell your album on a site like Bandcamp, but the social media aspect is a big deal. I mean, that's what's allowed cosplay to thrive. Eric and Jen told me a story about a guy who showed up at a filk circle once, had a friend film him playing, passed out his business cards, and then he left, presumably to post the video online. It looked like he was much more interested

in the emoji reactions he could get than the reactions of the people in the room. I asked Eric if they could use that as a selling point. Filk is supposed to be IRL. I think it is. It should be if it's not already. Because quite honestly, I think we all know comparison is the thief of joy. If you live by likes and subscribes and all that sort of stuff, if you measure your art, your worth, your creative output based on what a random algorithm is shoving at you and the number of people who are giving you thumbs up,

you're gonna crash and burn eventually. Again, here's Rand. Several years ago, I was at a convention in Baltimore and we I was part of a panel on I think the title was growing the circle like, you know, and it was a panel convened to discuss this very topic. One of the things I kind of said without really having thought about it too much ahead of time, the idea was we were saying how during isolation, there were a lot of online FILC conventions, a lot of online FILC performances in circles, and there were a lot of people that

attended these things that were not people that were known in the FILC community. And so there was a lot of excitement, like, oh, all these online, these performances attracted new people to FILC. You know, how do we retain them or get them to come to cons? And what I said at this panel was, we consider that these people aren't newly attracted to filk, but what we're seeing here is part of the financial privilege of fandom. These are people that have always loved filk, but they've never had the money or the time or the physical ability to travel to attend FILK conventions. And so I suggested that we look into maybe offering mini grants to allow these people to attend a convention

if there is a financial barrier to the Matarina convention. And through an organization called InterFILK, we are now offering these mini grants. Basically, if you need money traveling to a convention or paying for the hotel or anything about the convention, basically it's like any other grant. You just let us know why you would like to attend that. If we offer you the grant, all we ask is that you report back to us. What did you learn?

What's the next step for you? I mentioned to Sally and Barry that I thought another reason to celebrate filk is because we're living in a time when AI is becoming a threat to human creativity. Chat GPT could write a filk song in seconds. Chat GPT tells me nothing about a friend who's just sung a song. It tells me nothing about them. When what I really want to know is what caused somebody that I know and care about to write this piece of music.

And what does it mean for their life? And what have they given me through that song? And when you see somebody get up there and take that risk of self-expression, if you're a member of the community, your first impulse is to just support the hell out of them. And that's what makes the context a safe space. The ethos of filk comes from the counterculture,

which rebelled against aspects of our culture that turned out to be very resilient, like commercialization and fierce competition. That's not the spirit of filk, but it is the world I see around me. What they're not lacking is human connection, a sense of community, and a passion for the art form. Those are sturdy values. If whatever happens in a filk circle is filk, then my prediction is that in the future, filk will become whatever filk becomes.

And if filkers still call it filk, then it's filk. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Aaron and Ran Balavia, Jen and Eric Dysdad, and Barry and Sally Childs Helton. I have links to all of their music in the show notes. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds.

It's a more casual chat show. It's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the last episode, I talked with the voice actress Veronica Taylor about playing the character Ash Ketchum in the English language dub of Pokemon. As it kind of was Americanized, you know, Ash was kind of a little more nasally or kind of here, and then he was allowed to get here and

sometimes he was gruffer and as time went on I was able to play with it and kind of flesh him out to be a full a real boy you know. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple podcasts. If you support the show on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you support the show on Patreon, at different levels you get free Imaginary World stickers, a mug, or a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at ImaginaryWorldsPodcast.org.