Keris's Filk Page

Last updated on 2000-03-21 at 10:05 GMT

What is 'filk'? Ask a dozen filkers and you'll get 50 or so answers! Here's one from J. Spencer Love, another from Minstrel, and one from M.A.S.S. F.I.L.C.

This one is mine, and I don't claim that it's one that's accepted by all (or even most) filkers:

Filk (noun) is the indigenous music of the subculture known as "Science Fiction and Fantasy Fandom". In other words, it is music created by and for that group of people and appealing to their interests. That's not to say that it doesn't appeal to people outside that group as well, I was enjoying filk music long before I discovered fandom. And people outside that group can write filk as well without knowing that 'filk' is what we call it - a number of filkers were writing songs about SF, science and technology, etc. before they ever heard the word 'filk'.

'To filk' is also a verb, and is used both transitively and intransitively. As an intransitive verb, it refers to the creating or performing filk music, as in "I'm filking tonight". As a transitive verb its meaning is a little more restrictive, it refers to parodying someone else's song (which may be a commercial or 'pop' song, a 'traditional' song or even (often) another filk song). It's not uncommon to hear phrases like "I've just filked all of Mike's new tape", for instance.

The actual style of music represented by filk is almost unlimited. If it can be sung, played, chanted or even spoken someone has probably written a filk in that style. For instance, there are filks in the style of folk songs, Gregorian chant, popular music from the 1800s to last week, rock, Heavy Metal, and even rap. Filk is defined not by style but by content and community.

The content too is not limited to just SF. There are, of course, a lot of songs based on or about SF books, movies, TV shows etc., and then there are songs about fandom itself (SF conventions, well-known people in the community, etc.), and then there are the ones about other common interests of fans. Real World science and technology, of course (space flight, computers, atomic physics, mathematics...). And cats. It is not known why so many fans have or at least like cats above any other animal (although wolves are popular as well), but there are dozens - probably hundreds or even thousands - of filk songs about cats. And of course other subjects dear to the hearts (and other organs) of fans - food, drink, chocolate...

One of the problems which has faced filkers (among others) is how to send songs to each other without having to send copies of sheet music (which is difficult by e-mail). This has resulted in several ways of writing down melodies so that they can be sent over Internet or bulletin boards and are still readable (and hopefully can be converted fairly easily back to normal notation if you want). Here are links to some ASCII (text) systems for notating music. None are perfect, but they are usable. There are others, and eventually I'll add links to them as I find out about them.

Links to the "Filker's Bardic Ring" have been removed. It has been brought to my attention that the site which runs the webring now 'suggests' that new people joining the ring give the administrators the usernames and passwords for the joining website so that the administrators can do the edits. This is an incredibly dangerous practice, since doing that would give the webring administrators full access to personal websites, to do anything they might want. On many general purpose web hosting systems it could give the -- basically unknown -- webring administrators access to email and even other net tools.

Anyone who asks for the password to an unrelated site can be assumed to be either wanting it for criminal intent or very careless about security and privacy. Many cases have been seen where sites use that information to spam other people, often using contact information they find on the violated site and impersonating the actual owner. Even if their intentions start off good they can change ownership or employ someone who misuses the information.

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