2025: The Year Filk Broke
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Industrial Workers of the World
16 min read
The article mentions Leslie Fish was backed by the house band for the Chicago branch of the IWW, and her song 'Wobblies From Space' references the union. Understanding the IWW's radical labor history and cultural influence provides essential context for Fish's political dimensions.
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American folk music revival
15 min read
The article references 'The Great Folk Scare' and Dave Van Ronk's Greenwich Village scene as the cultural backdrop that enabled filk to emerge. Understanding this 1950s-60s movement explains how participatory folk traditions shaped early fandom music.
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Kirk/Spock
13 min read
The article directly references fans concocting 'elaborate narratives about gay relationships' between Kirk and Spock, comparing this to modern Taylor Swift shipping. This Wikipedia article covers the origins of slash fiction and its role in early fandom culture.
Leslie Fish died last month. She was eighty-one. Fish was a militant shitposter until the very end, responding directly to her critics on Reddit even in the final months of her life. Artists are often described as having been “ahead of their time,” and in Fish’s case, you could probably calculate the exact differential without trying too hard. She was publishing erotic fan fiction about Star Trek characters decades before the World Wide Web existed. In a meaningful sense, she was living in what I understand to be the present day well before I was born.
Though Fish lived a long and storied life, she was best known to her public as a “filk singer.” The term “filk” is an inside joke that has been making the rounds at science fiction conventions since the fifties. It generally refers to the practice of writing folk songs about science fiction and fantasy franchises. Star Trek started airing in nineteen sixty-six, which is about the same time that what Dave Van Ronk called “The Great Folk Scare” was impacting suburban America after breaking containment and escaping from Greenwich Village. Though impromptu small-scale nerdcore hootenannys had already been taking place at conventions for some time, the arrival of Star Trek and Bob Dylan in mainstream pop culture brought a lot of new talent into the scene.
According to Gary McGrath, who wrote the book on filk, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s commitment to depicting diversity on-screen had an impact on the science fiction fan community. “This idea strongly resonated with science fiction fans,” he wrote. “And with filkers, who were different even among fans. It was an idea that begged to be expressed in song. At the same time, Star Trek brought in many ‘femmefans’ (but don’t use that word today!), including some first-rate songwriters.”
Leslie Fish was the cream of that crop. Her best-known compositions represent the pinnacle of the filk idiom both in theory and in practice. One is “Hope Eyrie,” a sober, self-serious ballad about the moon landing that aimed to push the same emotional buttons as Hans Zimmer’s score for Interstellar and probably succeeded more often than not back when the memory of watching it was still fresh in the minds of listeners. Another is “Banned From Argo,” a raunchy, rollicking banger about the sordid things she imagined the crew of the Enterprise might get
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