Wolfe tones: Traditional music or Traditional Crap?

Growler, I agree wholeheartedly with your posting. I lived in Australia for a year, and before going over knew precisely no rebel songs. However, I frequented an Irish pub in Sydney where rebel music was played regularly with fervour, and being a Guitar player, inevitably ended up picking up many of these songs over the year.

For me, singing these songs in Irish Sydney pubs was 90% drunken fun, nothing more than an excuse to get riled up and reaffirm your nationality whilst on the other side of the world. But some of the songs were also poignant, and should not be construed as frivolous mechanisms to subscript impressionable minds to the IRA. They are ballads, mapping our history of rebellion and dissent.

I wont lie. There were times when I may have been at one of these rebel sessions with an English friend or two and shared their awkwardness at the Anti-English sentiment of much of the lyrics. But should our relatively recent history be consigned to the realm of unspeakable because of the less honourable direction the Republican movement took in the latter half of the 20th century? The Irish Civil War is already a skeleton in the closet that is not discussed, for obvious reasons. But what else will our new affluent, politically correct refined citizenry render taboo? The 1916 Rising? The War of Independence? Should all of these events and the heroism of Pearce, Collins, Connelly et al be brushed under the carpet for the crimes of the drug-dealing, murderous latter day IRA?

Rebel songs are part of our heritage. I learned dozens of them over the course of a couple of years, in synchronicty with non-rebel ballads. Whilst some rebel songs are more potent in their hatred than others, I make no distinction between songs such as 'Streets of New York' and 'Black and Tans'. True, one is a rebel song about a band of butchers assembled by the British to crush dissent to their rule of Ireland, whilst the other is a non-rebel song about immigration. And yet both are inherently, indelibly entwined in our history.

I'm not saying go out and sing rebel songs at the top of your lungs to a crowd of English people. There should be a sensitivity about where potentially inflamatory songs are sung. Nor am I saying go and buy the albums of 'The Wolftones', whom I think are absolutely sh*te. But get off your PC, sanctimonious high-horse, and leave people who prefer to proliferate songs about our very-recent past alone. Don't brand them all Celtic-jersey wearing, hate fuelled red necks. This is a generalisation.

I could just as easily generalise that all of those people who would gladly banish to oblivion all songs that refer to our past problems with Britain, are the same bland, trendy new Europeans, devoid of any discernable trait of culture, who prefer to spend their freetime posing in one of the City Centre's disgustingly sterile, zero atmosphere new-age cafe bars. Will any of you be recycling the affectations of your posts here to friends over 5-euro pints of Heinekin in Cafe En-Signe, Four Dame Lane or A.K.A this weekend? I find these kind kind of people just as embarassing as the hate-fuelled, anti-English celtic jersey wearing rednecks. I would hate to see either be regarded as representitive of Irish culture.