Music on the concourse at Dragon*Con 2009: It can draw a crowd. (Courtesy Dragon*Con Photography (c) 2010 Dragon*Con/ACE)

I was listening to NPR’s “Says You!” on my way home from HowStuffWorks.com HQ on Friday evening, like I do. If you haven’t heard it, “Says You!” is a game show in which contestants try to bluff their way through made-up definitions for real words, among other things. For the first time ever, the contestants were making up definitions for a word I’d actually heard before: filk. I had one of NPR’s famed driveway moments as I waited to hear whether they were talking about the filk I know or some other filk.

I was on the right track, but the show wasn’t exactly. “Says You!” defined “filk” as something along the lines of “music in a science fiction movie or at a science fiction event.” Panelists talked a lot about the theremin and tried to mimic what sounded like a hesitant rendition of the “Doctor Who” theme. But defining “filk” as “music in a science fiction movie or event” is a little bit like calling a pizza “warm tomato-mozzarella salad on flatbread.” Those words are all more or less correct, but they don’t really add up to pizza.

But, to be fair, “filk” is hard to define. Filk, according to Dragon*Con, got its start in the ’60s as an accidental typo for “folk,” as in “folk music.” Today, it broadly encompasses both original music about science fiction/fantasy and parody songs … it’s sort of the music of fandom. But whether a song about sci-fi is filk largely seems to depend on whether the performers and the fans think it is. There are filk conventions that stand on their own, and Dragon*Con has its own filk track, which hosts performances and sing-alongs that run all through Labor Day weekend every year.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a bit from Georgia Public Broadcasting on filk.

(By the way, I’m relatively certain this episode of “Says You!” was a rerun, but it was new to me.)

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