Hello! In this post I will be telling you about one of my interests, filk. I'm not very experienced filker, so I might be mistaken about some things. If you find any incorrect facts, please tell me in the comments!
So, let's begin. What is filk? There is no simple answer to it. You could say that it's folk music of the science fiction fandom. The thing is, it doesn't always sound like folk music, and it's not always about science fiction. Some people think poetry can be filk too, so it's not always even music! You could say that filk is any spoken entertainment that its creator calls filk. Except that definition doesn't cover so-called found filk, songs that are often sung in filk events but are not called filk by the original artists. For example some of David Bowie's songs could be considered found filk.
The origins of the filk are in the 1950s, where people in American science fiction conventions started changing the lyrics of folk songs to be about science fiction. Originally these songs were sung mostly in hotel rooms late at night after conventions. The word "filk" itself comes from a misspelling of the word "folk" in an essay written by Lee Jacobs about the topic. The essay was never published, but the word filk came to use from there.
Over time more and more people started making original music for filk songs, and many of the moat popular filk songs have original music. However parodiy is still a big part of filk today. Some filkers have even made parodies of other people's filk songs!
The first time I heard the word filk was in January 2017. I was at a meeting of The Finnish Tolkien Society Kontu. The meetings of Kontu are 3 to 4 days long events where you can meet other Finnish Tolkien-fans and spend a few days just hanging out and doing whatever you like. This time someone had brought booklets with lyrics to Middle-Earth -themed filks. They were all parodies of different songs, mostly in Finnish (it was an interesting experience to sing something about orcs and the Third Age to the tune of Suvivirsi). They had also brought some copies of an old filk-themed issue of Legolas, the society's magazine. Then I was taught filks were just fandom-themed parodies of songs.
Later that year, in August, I was in Worldcon. I mean, of course I was there, what else would I have done when the impossible happens and something so big is held in Finland? I think it was the first day, I'm not sure though, when I noticed that there was going to be a panel or something about filk. I recognized the word and decided to go, wanting to see what I would hear about the subject there. One thing I learned was that filk wasn't only parodies, and that it didn't have to be about fandom things, it could also be about kittens or computers or basically anything. In there I also heard Zander Nyrond's "Sam's Song", a filk song that apparently is or at least was popular in British filk events. A beautiful song, slightly sad, definitely nerdy, and I like it quite a lot.
I noticed that there were three hours long filk circles every night in Worldcon, one hour with certain theme and two hours free filking. It took some trying, but I convinced my parents to let me go to those. The only downside was that getting home well after 11pm when my train was 10 minutes late because of the storm and it's dark and wet and cold wasn't fun. Otherwise it was great. I heard a lot of filk songs, both classics like Fire In The Sky and Harry's Bar, and not as well-known ones (I'm still wondering if I can find somewhere the one about Cthulhu sung to the melody of The Internationale). I also heard non-filk songs, including Flower of Scotland, Jääkärimarssi, and what I later found out was the theme of Firefly. Mostly I just sat there silently and listened because I didn't know any filk songs yet, but I still enjoyed it.
Right now I'm kinda wondering if I should start doing filks myself, but I don't know. I'm terrible with music, I don't think I could even make proper parodies so that it would sound good. Maybe I could try poetry, but I don't really know... I can't get stuff to rhyme well enough so that I still keep the feeling and the story in, and I don't really care about poetry that doesn't rhyme and has no rythm. But the last time I tried writing anything that rhymes was my attempt to make a creepy-ish sad thing that would sound like a nursery rhyme, and even with looking online for rhymes for certain words, I couldn't do it...
I don't really know what the point of this post was, except maybe getting other people interested about this too. Anyway, I guess I'll end this one here, because I don't really have anything more to say.
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