"Oddly enough, there's a song about that."

January 9, 2018 8:05 PM

In case you needed to pass on to your post-apocalyptic descendants a catchy folk song about piling stones and corpses on top of fallout shelter exits to make sure the demons stay in hell, here's the Digwell Carol by filk artist Leslie Fish.

(via this twitter thread)

bonus catchy post-apocalyptic folk song (weird-ass context)

posted by moonmilk (13 comments total)

Context: "Firestorm" is a whole album of folk-songs to teach survival skills for nuclear war survivors. The artist felt that it would be easier to remember complicated technical instructions if they were in lyrical form. That is a pretty wild premise for an album, as far as I am concerned, and it doesn't really succeed-- surprise you can't actually teach people enough in a five-minute song to successfully culture penicillin. But wow, it is weird and awesome anyway.

Leslie Fish is a performer completely without guile who has been a fixture in the filk community since at least the 1960s. I'm not sure how I feel about a low-info drive-by mocking here on Metafilter. She actually does have fans, I count myself among them. Her work is amateurish but heartfelt, and she has made a living doing what she loves for more than sixty years. I hope this gives a little more background to this real "folk" artist.
posted by seasparrow at 8:40 PM on January 9, 2018 [12 favorites]

Hey, my Grade 4 class learned our multiplication tables that way! There was a 45 record for each table, and they'd play in the background whenever we did quiet work.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:51 PM on January 9, 2018 [2 favorites]

This is amazing and seasparrow's context is amazing and you're amazing, MetaFilter. Was post-apocalyptic folk instructional a genre beyond this one album? I am utterly fascinated and would love to hear more.
posted by books for weapons at 10:49 PM on January 9, 2018 [3 favorites]

I caught the thread as it went by, and while I don't find the tune particularly catchy or the lyrics memorable I do enjoy spreading the meme of piling rocks on the exits to the fallout shelters of the rich, and piling corpses by the air intakes!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:48 AM on January 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I start singing bits from this song whenever any discussion of zombies and bunkers and shelters comes up, it rules to pour water on the narrative of the strong loner survivor types.
posted by Space Coyote at 4:08 AM on January 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Thanks, moonmilk and seasparrow. I thought we'd talked about Leslie Fish before on MF, but can't find anything substantial - there was this thread from 2013, with a couple of links to performances: Around the Worldcon.
posted by paduasoy at 4:36 AM on January 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

This is going right in my repertoire.
posted by rlk at 6:41 AM on January 10, 2018

fwiw i think this is cool and didn't get the sense at all that it was a "drive-by-mocking"
posted by capnsue at 7:27 AM on January 10, 2018 [5 favorites]

fwiw i think this is cool and didn't get the sense at all that it was a "drive-by-mocking"

Fair enough. I owe moonmilk an apology. I was premptively defensive for how I imagined sophisticated, urbane mefites would react to the little old lady who spent her life going to science fiction conventions singing her heart out about the things she loved, whether it was Star Trek, Beowulf, 9/11, reincarnated space shuttles or the moon landings.

And finally, because while many people tried over the years, it was a Leslie Fish song that finally got me to actually care about the characters in Buffy the Vampire slayer.
posted by seasparrow at 10:28 AM on January 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I posted this because I think the song is great and Leslie Fish is great! I’m glad you added more background info.
posted by moonmilk at 10:35 AM on January 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I love Leslie's music. My kids grew up with the "Firestorm" album; only some of the songs that are directly educational (Black Powder & Alcohol; Eyes of the Eagles; Blue Bread Mold; Rhododendron Honey off the top of my head) and the rest are more general attitude training - noting that survival in the face of disaster is more a matter of willingness to work with the available resources than relying on supertech or external help. And Still Alive is one of my absolute favorite getting-through-depression songs.

OTOH, I do not love Leslie's politics. She's an anarcho-libertarian who moved to Arizona in part because of the (lack of) gun laws, and she likes the current administration, or at least, hates a lot of its detractors.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:53 AM on January 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

Wow you're not kidding. The latest post on her blog is a big voter fraud truther rant. Pretty painful to read.
posted by Space Coyote at 1:22 PM on January 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

Finally, we have an explanation for the myths about elven royalty dancing and feasting "under the hill", or the warriors sleeping in burial mounds until their country should need them. They're obviously prefigured memories resounding backwards in time from the trauma of a nuclear holocaust.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:08 PM on January 10, 2018 [4 favorites]