Epic Bardcore Rap

Sometimes all it takes to get the mental wheels spinning along new grooves is listening to a good mix. This was most definitely the case when I tuned into a three hour special of the radio show Do or DIY from Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us on WFMU this past Valentines Day. Her mixture of “pop and avant-garde side by side, sometimes on top of one another” has been a mainstay of my radio listening habits since somewhere between 2007 and 2009 by my best guestimation, though her archives for that particular aspect of her creative work go all the way back to 2003. There are hours and hours of great music there. Her shows always make me laugh and smile, and its refreshing to have humorous music on the air.

The episode in question was, “This Is Bardcore This Is Barcode This is the Pooless Flute.” The Pooless Flute bit is an in joke that goes back to what she called “pooey flute” –all the shitty cover songs done terribly by people on YouTube on purpose, though technically, I suppose some of it is recorder music. But who is keeping track?  This episode was unfortunately pooless, but it did have a few recurring motifs over the course of its very quick three hours. The first was from the bardcore microgenre. A microgenre might as well be called a meme, as Bennett herself put it that way. Often these microgenres function just as much as meme, with artists taking on a certain aesthetic with the use of graphics, phrasing, and other elements as new niches are carved out in what remains of the Internet’s digital playground. The bardcore songs tend to be renditions of popular music done in an electronic quasi-medieval style. 

​Sometimes the genre of bardcore is also called tavernwave, showing its kinship to other microgenres such as vaporwave and mallsoft. It shares the electronic aspect, as most bardcore is made using readily available computer software, as far as I can tell, though I could be wrong in this. Popular artists include Algal the Bard, who originated the style with their cover of a System of A Down’s track “Toxicity.” Hildegard von Blingin’ has been prolific with covers of “Creep” by Radiohead, “Jolene” by Dolly Parton and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” She distinguishes herself by singing over the medieval version, and by slightly altering the lyrics to resemble older forms of English. Beedle the Bard is another prolific bardcore artist. His cover of the Wu Tang classic “C.R.E.A.M.” is representative of the genre, and he has made quite a few covers of rap songs. Rap might even be the majority of what he has covered in his bardcore transformations.

​Another theme she returned to over the course of the show was various mashups, collages or remixes of the song “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve. That song came from their album Urban Hymns which has been one of the bestselling albums in UK history. Of the many tracks I loved in this mix was a rap by Ren Gill over the music of Bitter Sweet Symphony. Lyrically it was a cutting and heartfelt commentary on life in London and Britain from the view on the street. And though it was all about London, a city where I’ve never set foot, but traveled to in books, movies, TV shows, and the via the wireless magic of radio, the socioeconomic aspects of the words, juxtaposing not left and right, but top and bottom, resonated with me here in the Midwest. As I listened I felt a strong bond of kinship with my friends across the pond. As my mate One “Deck” Pete says, “Radio connects us all”.

After the show was over I went down a bit of a Ren rabbit hole, because I couldn’t get that rap out of my head. It turns out Ren Gill is an amazing guitar player and singular rapper with a gift for narrative. In essence, he could be considered a bardcore rapper. Not because his music makes use of quasi-medieval sounds, but because of his talent and skills of verbal execution put him in league with the lyrical masters of poetic narrative. The dude is a bard. His music is bardcore down to the bone.

            Plus, he is from Wales. You know, the place that gave us the famous bard Taliesin. Not that Wales has a monopoly on bards. Singing and storytelling are worldwide traditions (consider the griots of West Africa for one of many examples), but Wales was home to the Eisteddfod, the competitive meeting held between bards and minstrels first mentioned in the written record back in the day of the twelfth century. A bloke by the name of Lord Rhys first held the Eisteddfod in 1176 as a competition in poetry and music at Cardigan Castle. When the Wales was conquered by the Edwardians during their conquest in the 13th century, they closed down the existing bardic schools as part of the Anglicization of the countries nobles. Later the Eisteddfod was resuscitated by the Gwyneddigon Society, a group dedicated to Welsh culture, in the 18th century. Later the Eisteddfod was picked up as perfect vehicle for the Gorsedd Cymru, which was steeped in an eclectic alchemical mixture of Druidism, Philosophy, Mysticism and Christianity.
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            The Gorsedd Cymru was itself a revival. A Welshman by the name of Prydain ab Aedd Mawr, who was said to have lived one thousand years before the Christian era, had started the Gorsedd as a means to transmit the work of poets and musicians from generation to generation.  In 1792 the Gorsedd was rekindled as Gorsedd Beirdd Ynys Prydain the lovable Rapscallion best known as Iolo Morganwg, given name, Edward Williams. He based the Gorsedd Cymru on his imaginative ideas of Celtic Druidry. The Gorsedd made its first appearance at the Eisteddfod at the Ivy Bush Inn in Carmarthen in 1819, and its close association with the festival has continued since then.

I’m not sure at all if Ren has ever been to an Eisteddfod, or what his take might be on things such as Druidry and Celtic infused mysticism. What I do know is that he was born Ren Gill in Bangor, Gwynedd, Wales, on March 29th  1990 and was raised in Dwyran, on the isle of Anglesey (Ynys Môn in Welsh). Anglesey was the last refuge of the Druids before they got stamped out in the ancient times. The isle has long been esteemed as a place of mystical power. Ren had musical aspirations from an early age and after he got a guitar he taught himself how to play it by slowing down the songs of Jimi Hendrix to copy and learn how to play them. Starting with wanting to copy the music of  a master is always a good sign! Ren also made beats using the popular computer software Reason and hawked these CDs at the music festivals he wen to with his parents. Ren went to study music at Bath Spa University and while he was there he formed the indie hop-hop group Trick The Fox. From there, in 2009, he caught the eyes of the music industry and signed a record contract with Sony in 2010. He started working on an album but became too sick to complete it and moved back home to Wales. He was bedridden for most of the day due to the severity of his sickness. Thus began a run around between himself and the health system. Symptoms suggested autoimmune illness combined with a mental health crisis, but he was misdiagnosed. He did not in fact have bipolar disorder, he was not in fact psychotic. It took him awhile to get a correct diagnosis of Lyme disease in Belgium in 2016, but by then he had suffered from the treatments received for the wrong disease. In that time, despite his ordeal, he never lost the dream of making it as a musician, and he started working on music as best he could in his bedroom. The same year he got his diagnosis he released his debut solo album Freckled Angels, self released without any help from Sony. This had a bunch of material first used in Trick The Fox. 

​​Between 2016 and the time of this writing he has continued to release music. His viral hit “Hi Ren,” came out at the end of 2022 and is one example of why I consider his style bardic. It’s the guitar. It’s the narrative. It is the two points of view, that seemed to have come from him effortless, but are actually the product of his years of effort putting the time in honing his art.  

Listening to Ren got me thinking again on the topic of epic rap.

John Michael Greer has written about how he thinks rap is the seed of a future form of epic poetry. He writes:

“I’m not personally fond of rap, as it happens, but I can recognize a vibrant cultural upsurge when I see one. It’s a little dizzying to have a seat on the sidelines while a new tradition of bardic poetry is being born—for that’s what we’re talking about, of course. More than five thousand years ago, performers with a single string instrument for backup created rap numbers celebrating the events of their time; one of those, passed down from performer to performer, eventually got copied down on clay tablets by industrious scribes and titled Shutur Eli Sharri. We know it today as the Epic of Gilgamesh. The same process in other ages, with slightly different backup instruments pounding away to give emphasis to chanted words, gave us the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Song of Roland, Beowulf, and the beat goes on.”

Even if we are not at the point where rap is the means for transmitting a cultures epic tales, we are at the point where it is continuing to develop its potential for narrative storytelling. Ted Gioia has pointed out that there is currently a return to narrative in pop music. He writes that, “narrative song is especially well suited to the four-chord patterns that underpin so many current day pop hits. Those repeating harmonic cushions don’t offer much in the way of musical sophistication, but do create ideal vamps for supporting a story—not much different from the gusle drones used by Eastern European bards to underpin their epic tales.” He goes on to say that the reemergence of narrative centered music, after a time when popular songs were mostly lyrical or dance, implicates “a glimpse into an emerging movement in society at large.”

            When we talk about narrative songs, what we are mostly talking about is the ballad.

            Ren is another example of this trend. For my part I think a lot of it has to do with the way people crave story. We never got away from story. As postmodernism erupted in the 1960s and 70s, with its fractured and fragmented outlooks, we still had at least elements of narrative and vague outlines of action, even in the most esoteric tomes where it was often hard to pin down a point-by-point plot.
           
Of course the ballad never really disappeared to begin with. It was carried forth by such singers as Shirley Collins and others in the British Folk Revival. The ballad was documented by the likes of Alan Lomax and other song collectors in America. Recordings were transmitted from these collections, and on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. All this traditional songs went on to inform the Folk Revival happening in the United States and influenced Bob Dylan and company, and was championed by beatnik bards such as Allen Ginsberg, who had given us our own homegrown American Romanticism. Dylan studied these old songs like he was cramming for a PhD thesis. He learned to crib, copy and mimic these for his own great artistic purposes. The ballad also had a place in popular country music, which could be considered folk adjacent. The ballad lived on in the heavy metal music of the glam and hair variety in the eighties, where it became a sacharine staple with its sweet guitar solos. In rap, the murder ballad made a reappearance if in altered and different form.

Ren’s trilogy of songs The Tale of Jenny and Screech, make for an impressive case that rap really may be on its way to becoming the next form of epic poetry. These long form narrative efforts tell a conclusive story. Broken down into “Jenny’s Story,” “Screech’s Tale,” and “Violet’s Tale.” It’s the kind of thing that you might once have read in a penny dreadful and concerns many of the predicaments facing people today. Domestic abuse, mental illness, drug addiction. The timeless topics of love, incest and murder are also covered. It’s dark material. But so it ever was. The human species is drawn to the form of tragedy so that we may have a chance for catharsis.   
           
I’m hopeful that the next time I’m dragged to a renfest by my family, that that there will be more bardcore music being played in the background, quasi medieval versions of contemporary rap songs. With any luck there will be bards, inspired by the example of Ren, wondering around with their guitars, busking and delivering epic narrative raps.

            If not at a renfest in the coming years, than at some fair or festival held on the fairgrounds in the deindustrial dark age to come.