Si tu (pa)tois a partir

DeVotchKa is so good it makes me embarassed for all the times I saw their name in magazines and wrote them off as a crappy metal band, because that's what I figured they were.

Something I think I want to explore later:

I listen to so much pseudo-folk music because I have no folk of my own and thus no folk music of my own heritage so I try to make up for it with the likes of DeVotchKa and Andrew Bird. Now, when I say folk, I mean it like Macon Dead II means people when he says he doesn't have any people. I have family, but I don't have any history. We're mutt people. Someone at some point in time emigrated from somewhere and eventually ended up giving birth to a relative of mine. Were they Irish? Well, they left Co. Cork, but they had an English last name, so they were probably Scottish shipped to Ireland to make it less 'wild' back in like 1200 so we're not really Irish even though that's like 650 years of intermingling with the Irish and if that doesn't make you from a country I just don't know what does, and according to Aunt Ann everyone in Co. Dingle looks like my great Aunt Margaret so maybe we're from Dingle originally and moved to Cork shortly before moving to the States? And then we might be Dutch, too. Probably Welsh because we were coal miners in Pennsylvania for a good long while. Italian on Gramma's side, but we don't talk about that so Fuck knows where we're from.

We're loose. We're islands. We have no long term roots. Most Americans don't. You give up some of that. The US is a weird amalgamation of countries, rather than a country. It isn't igneous or metamorphic, it's conglomerate. We don't form naturally over time--we flee somewhere or get thrown out of somewhere, move to a place we think is safer only to find out there's just as much persecution here as anywhere else, lose all of our history and culture and customs in order to assimilate and in the process cut down all of our roots so we form a straighter tree.

When is that dividing mark between being from the home country and the new one? My father's ancestors lived in Ireland for 650 years and were still outsiders because they were of Scottish ancestry. My mother's side has lived here for 350 years yet we still say we're English. The fact that we're virtually every other possible permutation of relation is of course totally irrelevant. We want roots. We want them so badly we do silly things like call ourselves English and French when we're American and listen to DeVotchKa because if we don't have any ancestral music, maybe we can fake it and listen to someone else's and no one will tell the difference.



Maybe someday I'll move back to one of the homelands, and 350 years from now my descendents will be saying "Well you see, I'm American and Irish and French..."

--WF
Explore later, huh?