The Fannish LIfe: Got Filk?

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The Fannish LIfe: Got Filk?
February 10, 2011
by Anne Morris
Airlock Alpha

The intention for this column was that it would be about filk. It still will be, but I’m taking a little detour before getting to my destination.

Everyone who writes occasionally hits a wall even though he or she has a good idea with which to work. This happened to me with my “Got Filk” topic. Oh, it’s a worthwhile topic and a good idea for a column, but after writing a few paragraphs, I found myself having lost my momentum entirely.

I took the approach to this that works for many people I know. I just filed it away and decided to see if the little me in my brain would work on it overnight while I slept.

Well, I guess the little me was not on the job because I woke on deadline day without any more spark than I’d left off with the day before. Oops!

This contributed to a somewhat grumpy mood that had been fed by something else that was annoying and I feared that I might just have to scrap what I had written and start over with a new topic. I didn’t know what that was going to be though and I wanted saving. Little did I know that my e-mail would provide exactly what I needed.

Right there in among the spam and other mail that I just don’t care about, was a message from Think Geek telling me I should use my geek points. Because nothing else was shaking, I read through the list of items they suggested one use geek points for and there it was! Canned Unicorn Meat. I laughed so much at the description of the product that tears squirted my glasses.

The product is funny all on its own but what made it even more so for me was that it triggered a memory that fit perfectly with “Got Filk?” Many years ago now, I wrote a song called “The Disenchanted Dinner Host” that mentions the use of unicorn meat. The verse where it appears is short enough to share with you here.

“We could dine on unicorn stew,
Or maybe some griffon pie,
Followed by a course of dragon meat loaf,
And pate’ of pegasi.

And that gets me back to my original starting point.

While I have not participated in a filk circle in quite a long time, this activity used to be one of my convention favorites. When I first encountered it, I was trying to navigate through the lobby of the hotel where I stayed during Noreascon II, the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention. My progress was impeded by a large group of people sitting on the floor singing science –fiction songs.

OMG! I had found my people. They welcomed me to the circle and it was a wonderful thing. For many years, I attended filk sessions at conventions and loved them.

Filk is a generic term for songs with science-fiction and related genre themes. The term “filk” originated as a typo in the title of an essay on folk music by a fan named Lee Jacobs, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music.” The essay was submitted for publication to Wrai Blair, editor of the Spectator Amateur Press Society but it was never published.

Apparently, it contained what would have been considered bawdy content and Blair was afraid he’d run afoul of the Post Office if he sent out a magazine with the essay in it. The typo amused him, however, and he mentioned it so many times that it memed its way into science-fiction culture.

Filk has been around since the early science-fiction conventions. In the late 1930s and 1940s, authors such as Frederik Pohl and Damon Knight -- who themselves would become science-fiction grand masters -- wrote filks and sang them. Circles of fans would gather late in the evening in a hotel room or the bar and sing.

The songs were mostly new lyrics to already existing tunes and this form of filk is still the most common type of filk.

With the advent of a crackdown by The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, or ASCAP, many lyrics sites on the Internet have shut down but there are still some filk lyric sites to be found. As is always true with the Web, you have to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I’ve done a little sorting for you. These three sources have quite a variety of songs.

* Swarthmore Warders of Imaginative Literature
* Computer songs and poems
* The Red Songbook of Westmarch (Tolkien)

A general resource for filk information is Filk.com

It’s fun to read the lyrics and maybe sing them to yourself, but it’s more fun to get together with others and sing loudly and joyfully.

So how do you find some people with whom to do this?

You could go to an all filk convention and listings for these can be found at When/Where’s the Next Filk Con? but I recommend getting your feet wet at a non-filk dedicated convention first to see if this activity really is for you.

You don’t have to be a great musician or even a good one -- or even a musician at all -- to join in a filk circle. You just show up where they are having one and sit in on it.

The best places to find filk circles are general science-fiction conventions, the kind that have authors and artists as their guests. If you are considering a convention that doesn’t list filking as one of the activities on its website, contact the organizers to find out if they have a filk room. It’s not always advertised.

Some speak disparagingly about filk, but it can be a lot of fun and it’s found throughout science-fiction fandom. It’s sometimes made its way across borders into the mainstream and found popularity there. It’s usually rebranded as song parody, but it’s still filk.

In 1981, I was in the dealers room of the Denver WorldCon when someone came up to me with a cassette recorder and asked if I wanted to hear something cool. Of course, I did. (When people at science –fiction conventions say they have something cool, they usually do.)

He played a song called "Yoda" that was sung to the tune of “Lola” by some guy named Al Yankovic whose stuff was used on the Dr. Demento show. We know what happened to that guy. He pretty much got started on his ever so successful career by writing a filk song.

So, Weird Al has got filk and I’ve got filk, and maybe you’ll want to have got filk too.

Till next time, take care and have fun and sing at least a little bit.