The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture 9781501333699, 9781501333729, 9781501333712

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Popular music and youth culture
Part I Theory
1 The past, present and future of subculture (Ross Haenfler)
2 ‘The Post-Subculturalist’: Some critical reflections over twenty years on (David Muggleton)
3 Music scenes (Geoff Stahl)
4 The milieu culture of punk: Beyond the scene – a guide to thinking and researching culture (Pete Webb)
Part II Method
5 Ethnography, popular music and youth culture: An anthropologist’s account (Evangelos Chrysagis)
6 Youth, music and social network analysis (Nick Crossley)
7 Contributions for a quantitative approach to contemporary youth cultures and popular music: A case study from Southern Europe
8 ‘Images and words’: Textual analysis and its uses for metal music studies (Catherine Hoad)
9 Should we call it cine-cultural studies? Cineworlding popular music and youth studies (Michael B. MacDonald)
Part III History
10 Counterculture and youth culture: Definitions, drifts, events, music, echoes (Sarah Hill)
11 Glam rock: Youth culture, performativity and sexuality (Jon Stratton)
12 Time to DIY: A history of punk and indie (Matthew Bannister)
13 The dynamics of dance: An early history of electronic dance music (Alex van Venrooij and Rens Wilderom)
14 Under a groove: Rap, hip-hop and their glocalization (Stefano Barone)
Part IV Identity
15 Structure and historicity of youth music tastes: A brief overview of forty years of theoretical debates (Hervé Glevarec
16 ‘Hey girl, don’t bother me’: Gender, sexuality and (in)visible communities in popular music and youth culture (Sarah Rai
17 Beyond youth: Music scenes and ageing (Paul Hodkinson)
18 When we were young: Popular music, youth and memory (Ben Green)
Part V Media
19 Youth radio, music cities and the role of urban sociability: A case study of Radio KUT FM (Austin) and Triple R FM (Melbourn
20 Youth, zines and music scenes (Ash Watson)
21 Youth, identity and everyday sound environments in the age of digital technologies (Raphaël Nowak)
22 Popular music in a brand culture (Nicholas Carah and Kiah Hawker)
23 Singing and soundtracking identity: Youth, music and film (Scott Henderson)
Part VI Place
24 Youth, music and the city: A mapping of Leeds in five scenes (Brett Lashua and Gabby Skeldon)
25 Rural (un)cool: Alternative geographies of young people and music (Lisa Nikulinsky)
26 Music festivals and youth (Chris Anderton)
27 Music, youth and virtual spaces (Sian Lincoln)
28 Independent music and independent music scenes: From DIY-led collectives to individualized professionals? (Robin Kuchar
Part VII Music-Making
29 Youth and DIY music and media-making (Rosa Reitsamer)
30 Cultivating community on YouTube and expanding through social media (Christopher Cayari)
31 Home recording, production and young musicians working in the context of the ‘new’ music industry (Richard Frenneaux)
32 Youth culture, technology and tribute entertainment (Georgina Gregory)
Index

Citation preview

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

ii

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture Andy Bennett

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © Andy Bennett, 2023 Each chapter copyright © by the contributor, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xx constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Henrik Sorensen/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3369-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3371-2 eBook: 978-1-5013-3370-5 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.blo​omsb​ury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

Notes on Contributors  xi Acknowledgements  xx

Introduction Popular music and youth culture  Andy Bennett  1

Part I Theory 1 The past, present and future of subculture  Ross Haenfler  11 2 ‘The Post-Subculturalist’: Some critical reflections over twenty years on  David Muggleton  33 3 Music scenes  Geoff Stahl  53 4 The milieu culture of punk: Beyond the scene – a guide to thinking and researching culture  Pete Webb  71

Part II Method 5 Ethnography, popular music and youth culture: An anthropologist’s account Evangelos Chrysagis  87

vi

Contents

6 Youth, music and social network analysis  Nick Crossley  111 7 Contributions for a quantitative approach to contemporary youth cultures and popular music: A case study from Southern Europe  Paula Guerra  131 8 ‘Images and words’: Textual analysis and its uses for metal music studies  Catherine Hoad  151 9 Should we call it cine-cultural studies? Cineworlding popular music and youth studies  Michael B. MacDonald  171

Part III History 10 Counterculture and youth culture: Definitions, drifts, events, music, echoes  Sarah Hill  199 11

Glam rock: Youth culture, performativity and sexuality  Jon Stratton  217

12

Time to DIY: A history of punk and indie  Matthew Bannister  235

13

The dynamics of dance: An early history of electronic dance music  Alex van Venrooij and Rens Wilderom  257

Contents

14 Under a groove: Rap, hip-hop and their glocalization  Stefano Barone  281

Part IV Identity 15

Structure and historicity of youth music tastes: A brief overview of forty years of theoretical debates  Hervé Glevarec and Raphaël Nowak  307

16 ‘Hey girl, don’t bother me’: Gender, sexuality and (in)visible communities in popular music and youth culture  Sarah Raine and Eveleigh Buck-Matthews  327 17

Beyond youth: Music scenes and ageing  Paul Hodkinson  351

18 When we were young: Popular music, youth and memory  Ben Green  369

Part V Media 19 Youth radio, music cities and the role of urban sociability: A case study of Radio KUT FM (Austin) and Triple R FM (Melbourne)  Andrea Jean Baker  391 20 Youth, zines and music scenes  Ash Watson  411 21

Youth, identity and everyday sound environments in the age of digital technologies  Raphaël Nowak  427

vii

viii

Contents

22 Popular music in a brand culture  Nicholas Carah and Kiah Hawker  445 23 Singing and soundtracking identity: Youth, music and film  Scott Henderson  467

Part VI Place 24 Youth, music and the city: A mapping of Leeds in five scenes  Brett Lashua and Gabby Skeldon  491 25 Rural (un)cool: Alternative geographies of young people and music  Lisa Nikulinsky  511 26 Music festivals and youth  Chris Anderton  531 27 Music, youth and virtual spaces  Sian Lincoln  551 28 Independent music and independent music scenes: From DIY-led collectives to individualized professionals?  Robin Kuchar  567

Part VII Music-Making 29 Youth and DIY music and media-making Rosa Reitsamer  595 30 Cultivating community on YouTube and expanding through social media  Christopher Cayari  615

Contents

31

Home recording, production and young musicians working in the context of the ‘new’ music industry  Richard Frenneaux  635

32 Youth culture, technology and tribute entertainment  Georgina Gregory  659 Index  679

ix

x

Contributors

Editor Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He has written and edited numerous books, including Popular Music and Youth Culture (2000), Music, Style and Aging (2013), British Progressive Pop 1970–1980 (2020) and Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (2024) (co-edited with Richard A. Peterson). He is a Faculty Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, an Adjunct Researcher with the Institute of Sociology, University Porto, an International Research Fellow of the Finnish Youth Research Network, a founding member of the Consortium for Youth, Generations and Culture and of the Regional Music Research Group. He is also co-editor of the journal DIY, Alternative Cultures and Society and co-founder/co-convenor of the biennial KISMIF (‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast’) conference dedicated to DIY and alternative cultures.

Contributors Chris Anderton is Associate Professor in Cultural Economy at Solent University, Southampton, UK, where he also co-leads the Culture, Media, Space and Place Research Group. His research focuses on music business, music culture and music history. He is the author of Music Management, Marketing and PR (2022, with James Hannam and Johnny Hopkins), Music Festivals in the UK: Beyond the Carnivalesque (2019) and Understanding the Music Industries (2013, with Andrew Dubber and Martin James). He is also co-editor of the books Media Narratives in Popular Music (2022, with Martin James) and Researching Live Music: Gigs, Tours, Concerts and Festivals (2022, with Sergio Pisfil). Chris has also guest edited special issues of the academic journals Rock Music Studies and Arts & the Market (with Sergio Pisfil) and published in numerous edited collections and journals. Andrea Jean Baker is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Australia. She is recognized as a radio journalist and musicologist, specializing in urban music cultures, and has produced awardwinning national radio programmes for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and community radio. As the first academic representative on the City of Melbourne’s

xii

Contributors

Music Committee between 2013 and 2017, she helped to profile Melbourne as a global music city, and is a member of the US think tank Centre for Music Ecosystems. Andrea has published widely in relation to net-radio, college radio, music scenes and music cities. Her most recent book, The Great Music City (2019), was a finalist in the International Book Awards, Best Education/Academic Book at the American-based International Book Festival in 2019. Matthew Bannister is a musician and academic who works at Wintec (Waikato Institute of Technology) in Kirikiriroa/Hamilton, Aotearoa/New Zealand. His recent publications include works on Phil Lynott and the Black Atlantic, the influence of feminine ‘voices’ on John Lennon’s music, participatory musicking though ukuleles and New Zealand film/director comedian Taika Waititi. Stefano Barone is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. His research focuses on youth cultures and popular music in the Middle East. He investigates the fragility of youth culture–based social forms in the region, and how they relate to the local political, cultural and social dynamics. He is the author of Metal, Rap, and Electro in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia: A Fragile Underground (2019) and articles in journals such as Journal of Youth Studies, British Journal for Middle Eastern Studies and Politique Africaine. Eveleigh Buck-Matthews is a Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University, UK. She is Deputy Chair of the Participatory Geography Research Group and Co-convenor of the British Sociological Association Youth Study Group. Her research interests revolve around the social and spatial construction of youth communities, participatory methods and liminal spaces. Her published work explores recreational drug user narratives. Eveleigh is a co-investigator on the People and Dancefloors Project, exploring recreational drug user narratives, and is a director of Trans-States and editor of Monad: Journal of Transformative Practice. Nicholas Carah is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Arts and Director of the Digital Cultures and Societies Hub at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is an Associate Investigator in the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His research examines the promotional, algorithmic and participatory cultures of digital media platforms. He is currently working on research projects investigating machine vision and Instagram, and alcohol marketing on digital platforms. Nicholas is the author of Media & Society: Power, Platforms and Participation (2015), Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture (2016) and Pop Brands: Branding, Popular Music and Young People (2010). Christopher Cayari (he/they; Twitter & YouTube: DrCayari) is an Associate Professor of music at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. Christopher’s main research trajectory focuses on mediated musical performance, YouTube, informal music learning, virtual communities, video game music, and online

Contributors

identity. Their secondary research agenda addresses marginalized voices in music education, specifically sexuality- and gender-diverse individuals (LGBTQIA+) and Asian Americans. They work at blending traditional and innovative research methodologies, particularly working with internet inquiry, performance-based research, autoethnography, and case study. His work has recently appeared in Oxford Handbooks, Music Education Research, International Journal of Music Education, International Journal of Education & the Arts, and International Journal of Community Music. His research has been recognized through the 2015 Outstanding Dissertation Award and the 2021 Outstanding Emerging Researcher Award. They is an avid YouTube video creator who publishes online recordings, tutorials, vlogs, musical theatre performances, and podcasts. Evangelos Chrysagis is an anthropologist specializing in the ethnographic study of grassroots music and art practices. He holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Edinburgh, UK. His doctoral research explored the intersection of DIY music, ethics and politics in Glasgow, and his current research focuses on manifestos in contemporary cultural production. He is co-editor of Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance: Anthropologies of Sound and Movement (2017), a book that examines music and dance from a cross-cultural perspective. Evangelos’s recent publications include an article for the Journal of Cultural Economy, entitled ‘When Means and Ends Coincide: On the Value of DIY’ (2020), and the book chapter ‘Manifestos of Rupture and Reconciliation: Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Music Practices, Ethics and the Quest for Authenticity in the Cultural Industries’, in I. Kiriya, P. Kompatsiaris and Y. Mylonas (eds), The Industrialization of Creativity and Its Limits (2020). Nick Crossley is Professor of Sociology and Co-director/Co-founder of the Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis at the University of Manchester, UK. He has written widely on both music and social network analysis. In 2015, he published a book on the role of social networks in the generation of the UK’s earliest and best-known punk and post-punk music worlds, Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–1980. More recently he has published a theoretical text on the relational character of music entitled Connecting Sounds: The Social Life of Music (2020). Richard Frenneaux began his career as principal songwriter, frontman and producer of the band Red Light Company (Sony ATV/Columbia Records), achieving a number 13 album on the UK charts. He then moved into writing and production, which provided the opportunity to work with many artists, from remixing Lana Del Rey’s ‘Born to Die’ to working alongside artists such as Natasha Bedingfield and Laura Welsh, to creating the soundtracks of the movie Pan, to collaborations with producer Flood (U2, Depeche Mode). He recently obtained his PhD from Griffith University, with a thesis focusing on the competencies developed by artists in the new music industry.

xiii

xiv

Contributors

Hervé Glevarec is a sociologist and Professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, France. He conducts research on lifestyles, popular music, music tastes and cultural experiences, cultural heritage, TV series and radio stations. He has published numerous books, book chapters and refereed articles, including the recent L’expérience culturelle (2021), Séries (2021, with C. Combes), La différenciation culturelle (2019) and ‘Ma radio’. Attachement et engagement (2017). His work has also featured in journals such as Cultural Sociology, Cultural Trends, Media, Culture and Society, Museum and Society, L’Année Sociologique, Revue Française de Sociologie, Revue européenne des sciences sociales, Bulletin of Sociological Methodology, Sociologie et sociétés and Questions de communication. Ben Green is a cultural sociologist with interests in popular music and youth, including the relationship of musical experience to memory and identity. As a Griffith University (Australia) postdoctoral research fellow, he is currently investigating crisis and reinvention in Australian live music, building on previous research into live music scenes, policy and infrastructure. His first book is Peak Music Experiences: A New Perspective on Popular Music, Scenes and Identity (2021). Georgina Gregory teaches film, media and popular culture at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. Her research interests include identity and performance, Northern popular culture and music heritage. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles, and her recent publications include the monographs Boy Bands and the Performance of Pop Masculinity (2019) and Send in the Clones: A Cultural Study of the Tribute Band (2012). Paula Guerra is Professor of Sociology at the University of Porto, Portugal, and a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the same university. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Queensland, Australia, and founder/coordinator of the network All the Arts: LusoAfro-Brazilian Network of the Sociology of Culture and the Arts and of the KISMIF (‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast’; kismifconference.com and kismifcommunity.com). A member of the board of the Research Network of Sociology of Art of ESA, she coordinates several research projects on youth cultures, sociology of the arts and culture, co-creation, methodology and research techniques, and DIY cultures, among other subjects. Paula has supervised several master’s, PhD and post-doc projects in the aforementioned areas. She is a member of the editorial council of several national and international journals, as well as editor and reviewer of several articles and books on a national and international level. She is also co-editor of the journal DIY, Alternative Cultures and Society. Ross Haenfler is Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. His interests revolve around subcultures, music, social movements and subcultures, and his research focuses on how people engage in social change via lifestyle movements. He is the author of Subcultures: The Basics (2013), Straight

Contributors

Edge: Clean Living Youth, Hardcore Punk, and Social Change (2006) and Goths, Gamers, and Grrrls: Deviance and Youth Subcultures (2010). He has published in a variety of journals, including Social Movement Studies, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Studies in Symbolic Interaction and Cultural Sociology. Ross has also appeared in documentaries about straight edge and incels. Kiah Hawker is a PhD student in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research focuses on the ways augmented reality (AR) within mobile settings transforms everyday practices and representations of the self. Her work has been published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Scott Henderson is Dean and Head of Trent University Durham GTA, Canada, and a Professor in the Communications program. He received his MA and PhD in Film Studies from the University of East Anglia, UK, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Mannheim, Germany, Koblenz University of Applied Sciences, Germany, and the International Institute for Popular Culture at the University of Turku, Finland. His research examines the relationship between popular culture and identity, including a specific focus on the impact of new technologies and postindustrialization on local cultural industries. He has published on diverse subject matter, including YouTube and youth identity, gay and lesbian film, film soundtracks, Canadian cinema and popular culture, Frank Zappa and humour, and is co-editor of Comics and Pop Culture (2019, with Barry Keith Grant). Sarah Hill is Associate Professor of Popular Music and Fellow of St Peter’s College, University of Oxford, UK. She is Coordinating Editor of the journal Popular Music and has published on issues of popular music historiography, popular music and politics, and popular music and cultural identity, particularly as it relates to the Welsh language. Her most recent books are the monograph San Francisco and the Long 60s (2016) and the edited collection One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music (2022). Catherine Hoad is Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies at Te Rewa o Puanga/School of Music and Creative Media Production, Massey University, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Chair of the Australia–Aotearoa/New Zealand branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. Her research explores constructions of identity and community in heavy metal and hardcore scenes, practices and cultures. Paul Hodkinson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey, UK. His research interests centre on youth culture, adulthood and contemporary fathering. His books include Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture (2002), Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes (2007) (with Wolfgang Deicke), Ageing and Youth Cultures (2012) (with Andy Bennett), Sharing Care (2021) (with Rachel Brooks) and New Fathers, Mental Health and Digital Communication (2021) (with Ranjana Das).

xv

xvi

Contributors

Robin Kuchar graduated in cultural sciences and holds a PhD from Leuphana University, Germany. Currently, he works at the Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organization at Leuphana. His main fields of interest are popular music, underground music scenes and the relationship of culture and the urban space. He is co-editor of Music City: Musical Approaches to the Creative City (2014) and co-initiator of the Urban Music Studies Scholars’ Network (www.urbanm​usic​stud​ies.org). His PhD analysed trajectories of original DIY and underground music venues within the changing social environments of scene, city and the music industries. The related book Music Venues between Scene, the City and the Music Industries: Autonomy, Appropriation, Dependence was published (in German) in 2020. Brett Lashua teaches sociology of media in the Institute of Education, University College London. He has worked with schools, community centres, musicians and arts organizations in the United States, Canada and the UK to address questions of youth inequalities, racialized borderlands and urban place-making through music. His research is underscored by creative and collaborative methods, including participatory music-making, soundscapes, cultural mapping, documentary filmmaking and digital storytelling (as well as archival approaches). He is author of Popular Music, Popular Myth and Cultural Heritage in Cleveland: The Moondog, the Buzzard and the Battle for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2019) and co-editor of two volumes of Sounds and the City (2014, 2019). Brett’s most recent project is a co-edited volume on popular music heritage and histories in Leeds. Sian Lincoln is an independent scholar who has published widely in journals and written anthologies on aspects of youth culture. She is author of the monograph Youth Culture and Private Space (2012), co-author of Growing Up on Facebook (2020, with Brady Robards) and co-editor of two book series: Cinema and Youth Cultures (Routledge) and Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures & Popular Music. She is on the management group of the Interdisciplinary Network for the Study of Music, Subcultures and Social Change. Michael B. MacDonald is an award-winning filmmaker and Associate Professor of Music at the MacEwan University Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His films have been screened in more than forty film festivals, and he has won documentary and experimental film awards. He has published three books on music and youth culture, and his next three books will focus on cinematic research-creation: CineWorlding: Scenes of Cinematic Research-Creation, Make Your Own Damn Film! [diwyf] and Free Radicals & Posthumanography’s Poetics: Improvising & Anarchiving in Minor Cinema. Michael is a member of the programme committee for KISMIF (‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast’), an international conference on DIY culture, a member of the scientific committee for combArt, an active member of the International Council of Traditional Music Study Group on Audiovisual Ethnomusicology and the co-founder of the Justice4Reel Media Advocacy Free School.

Contributors

David Muggleton is Senior Lecturer in Sport Social Science at the University of Chichester, UK, where his research interests lie broadly in the sociocultural history of sport and leisure cultures. He has published widely in the area of youth subcultures, including Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style (2000) and The Post-Subcultures Reader (2003, co-edited with Rupert Weinzierl), and was one of several academics instrumental in the development of what become known as post-subcultural theory. He also writes books and articles on pubs and breweries and other aspects of local history and is a member of both the Drinking Studies Network and the Brewery History Society. Lisa Nikulinsky is a UK-Australian youth culture researcher hailing from Somerset, UK, before she immigrated to Wadandi Country, Southwest Australia, in 1999. Lisa completed her PhD at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science. Her PhD is an ethnographic investigation into how rural youth experience, consume and produce music in their day-to-day lives. Accordingly, her thesis explores the impact of music on rural young people’s ongoing identity work and mental health narratives and chosen scene affiliations. She combines her love of youth cultural research with clinical practice as a psychotherapist/ clinical social worker. Within her private mental health practice, supporting people within a local, state and international context, Lisa positions creativity, identity, music and culture at the centre of her preferred therapeutic modalities. With an unwavering passion for electronic music, hip-hop and deep techno, she continues to apply music as medicine in her own daily life practices. Raphaël Nowak is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York, UK. His research is in cultural sociology and specifically explores issues regarding the contemporary distribution and consumption of music, cultural taste and practices, and cultural heritage. He is the author of Consuming Music in the Digital Age (2016), co-editor of Networked Music Cultures (2016, with Andrew Whelan) and co-author of Curating Pop (2019, with Sarah Baker and Lauren Istvandity). His work has also been featured in journals such as Cultural Sociology, European Journal of Cultural Studies, British Journal of Sociology, Popular Communication, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Young, International Journal of Heritage Studies and Leisure Sciences. Sarah Raine is a Research Fellow in Ethnomusicology at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her published research considers issues of gender and generation, authenticity and identity, and the construction of the past and present in popular music scene and industry. She is the author of Authenticity and Belonging in the Northern Soul Scene (2020) and co-editor of Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry (2019, with Catherine Strong) and The Northern Soul Scene (2019, with Tim Wall and Nicola Watchman Smith). She is also the co-managing editor of Riffs and acts as a book series editor for Equinox (Music Industry Studies/Icons of Pop Music) and editor for Jazz Research Journal (alongside Nic Pillai).

xvii

xviii

Contributors

Rosa Reitsamer is a sociologist and professor, and Head of the Department of Music Sociology at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria. Her research interests include the sociology of higher music education and music labour markets, valuation practices at higher music education institutions and intersectional perspectives on music, gender and social inequalities. In 2021, she received the Austrian Gabriele Possanner State Award for Gender Studies. Gabby Skeldon is currently completing a PhD at Leeds Beckett University, UK. Her work focuses on gender, sexuality and drag, exploring how drag performance and drag identities can help unpack societal gender norms. She is also a trainer on the Global Professional Award (GPA) at the University of Huddersfield, UK. Geoff Stahl is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Te Herenga Waka/ Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. His research interests include scenes and subculture, urban culture and semiotics. His publications include Understanding Media Studies (2009), Poor But Sexy: Berlin Scenes (2014), Made in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (2018) and Mixing Pop and Politics (2022), as well as numerous articles on scenes and subcultures in Berlin, Montreal and Wellington. Jon Stratton is an Adjunct Professor in UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia. He has published widely in popular music studies, cultural studies, Australian studies, Jewish cultural studies and media studies. His most recent books are Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia (2020) and An Anthology of Australian Albums: Critical Engagements (2020, co-edited with Jon Dale and Tony Mitchell). Alex van Venrooij is Assistant Professor in Cultural Sociology in the Department of Sociology of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he studies the emergence and dynamics of cultural classification systems, especially in the field of popular music. Ash Watson is a research fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, based at UNSW Sydney, Australia. There she researches how automation and AI are imagined, designed and implemented across contexts of health and well-being. She is also interested in the digital-material spectrum of zine cultures, and queer digital archival practices. She is author of the sociological novel Into the Sea (2020), creator of So Fi Zine (sofizine.com) and fiction editor of the Sociological Review. Pete Webb is a writer, lecturer and musician who specializes in research in popular and contemporary music, subcultures, politics and social theory. He is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Western England, Bristol, UK. Previously, he worked within an independent record label from 1990 to 2002 as an artist and

Contributors

tour manager, the physical theatre companies Blast Theory and Intimate Strangers and the film company Parallax Pictures. He is the owner and creative director of the publishing company PC-Press, which has published books about Test Dept, Killing Joke and Massive Attack. Pete is currently making music with a project called New Brand. Rens Wilderom is a PhD candidate at the Sociology Department of the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where his dissertation is titled ‘Genres, Webs of Fields, and Institutional Change: The Development of Dance in the US, UK and the Netherlands, 1985–2005’. His research focuses on how the interplay between changeseeking movements and established actors shapes processes of innovation. It uses both qualitative and quantitative methods and draws predominantly on the literature from cultural sociology and organization studies.

xix

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank the authors who have contributed to this handbook. It has been a great pleasure to work with you all, and I am indebted to each of you for the hard work you have invested in your individual chapters. I have personally learned a great deal from my editorial reading of the wonderful work you have produced. I am also heartened by the way in which you have gone the distance given the tumultuous events of the past few years. I would also like to offer my sincere thanks to Leah Babb-Rosenfeld at Bloomsbury for her unerring patience and understanding during several personal challenges that I have been confronted with during my work on this handbook. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their continuing love and support. Pete Webb’s chapter is dedicated to the memory of Jasper Beese – a true punk and Easton Cowboy.

Introduction Popular music and youth culture Andy Bennett

The relationship between popular music and youth culture took a critical form during the mid-1950s. Against the backdrop of post-war recovery and an economic boom, youth were targeted as one of a number of newly identified consumer markets. Popular music and associated items of fashion and style became key objects of cultural consumption for post-war youth, while popular music icons, including Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and later the Beatles, the Who and the Rolling Stones, served as cultural role models for their young fans. In the ensuing decades a proliferation of new popular music genres and scenes emerged in quick succession. During the early 1960s, beat music proved popular with youth, this evolving into the heavier and more experimental sounds of psychedelic rock during the mid-1960s. By the late 1960s, rock had further shifted into a more political form providing a soundtrack for a vibrant counterculture whose involvement in a variety of causes, including the civil rights movement and the anti–Vietnam War protests, signalled the emergence of more militant sensibilities among youth culture. During the early 1970s, the rise of glam rock presented its own challenges to mainstream society as artists such as David Bowie created a new androgynous form of identity that rejected mainstream representations of gender and sexuality. The early 1970s also saw the first stirrings of hip hop, a style and genre that would later emerge as a major global scene as young people across the world embraced the creative possibilities presented by rap, breakdance and graffiti. During the late 1970s, socio-economic decline in the West prompted new forms of dissatisfaction among youth providing the context for punk, a music and style that promoted a back-to-basics approach, embracing the rock and roll aesthetic of the 1950s and evolving a visual style that was designed to shock the parent culture and its establishmentarian values. Punk’s sonic engagement with the dystopian atmosphere of the post-industrial landscape also provided inspiration for the new wave, New Romantic and electropop styles of the early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, electropop had been displaced by a new style of electronic dance music (EDM). EDM and its various subgenres, including house and techno, were not driven by music-makers in the then conventional sense of the term, but by DJs who, having

2

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

perfected new forms of mixing using existing vinyl records and more recent bits of electronic technology such as drum machines, sequencers and samplers, were able to create new soundscapes primarily geared towards dancing. Although new genres, such as the punk-inspired grunge, continued to appear, by the early 1990s, popular music was entering a new era whereby a more self-referential approach was beginning to emerge, notably in Britpop, a loosely formulated genre of guitar-based bands, including Blur and Oasis, that drew unashamedly on 1960s guitar bands such as the Beatles, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones, while other Britpop artists such as Pulp also referenced electropop in their music. At this point references to popular music as heritage also began to be heard more frequently, and there was a rise in popularity of tribute bands and ‘classic album’ performances. In this context, new questions about the definition of youth culture began to be asked as the fact of ageing, both among the youth icon pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s and among their core audience, became increasingly evident. New questions also began to be asked about the importance of generational memory as a means though which to understand the cultural value of popular music. With the arrival of the digital era, and particularly the rise of Web 2.0, the vast audiovisual history of popular music was suddenly made more widely available and became inextricably bound up with the way that popular music is understood as a cultural form. Although youth music and youth icons continue to exist, much of this new popular music landscape pays homage to the popular music of the past in one way or another. Similarly, it is now common to see people in their teens and twenties expressing an interest in classic rock and pop, going to gigs by ageing artists and sporting T-shirts and other fan memorabilia for artists such as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. However, the digital era has also seen a new chapter in young people’s involvement with popular music. Whereas in previous eras there was a relatively clear distinction between music artists and fans, the advent of YouTube and digital musicmaking technologies has seen a larger number of young people becoming involved in the music-making process. For example, on YouTube it is possible to watch a great many videos of young people covering songs by their favourite artists or performing their own music. With digital audio workstations (DAWs), young people can now draw on a range of sounds and effects to produce music of a professional quality in home and ‘bedroom’ studios. As such, the idea of a music-making career is no longer tied to securing a recording contract and gaining access to a professional studio. This handbook is divided into seven parts. Part I, ‘Theory’, sets out some of the key ways in which the relationship between popular music and youth culture has been theorized in academic work from the 1970s onwards. This begins with Ross Haenfler’s chapter on subculture, a term that seeks to identify ways in which musicand style-based youth cultures are distinct from the parent culture. Haenfler’s review of the subcultural literature begins by looking at subculture’s conceptual roots in the work of the Chicago School and later the Birmingham-based Centre

Introduction

for Contemporary Cultural Studies, where it was cast as a class-based phenomenon. Haenfler then goes on to examine more contemporary representations of subculture that link it to a whole life perspective in both a macro and a micro context. This is followed by David Muggleton’s chapter, an abridged version of his highly influential essay ‘The Post-Subculturalist’ with a new preface. In his original piece, Muggleton critiqued the class-based interpretation of subculture on the basis that, in an era of postmodernism and reflexivity, subcultural style was more a matter of individual choice. In the preface accompanying the essay, Muggleton reflects on the impact of his work and also engages with some of the criticism that has been directed at post-subcultural theory. Geoff Stahl’s chapter on music scenes considers how the scenes concept offers new ways of understanding the relationship between music and youth. Beginning with a consideration of how the scenes concept was originally used to critique the limitations of subculture, Stahl then broadens his focus to examine how scene provides a conceptual basis for examining the various hard and soft infrastructures comprising scenes and how these demonstrate the myriad forms of participation, from musician, to producer, promoter, journalist and fan, that characterize music scenes in cities around the world. Finally, Pete Webb’s chapter focuses on milieux culture and their significance as an alternative concept to both (post)subculture and scene. As Webb explains, through their emphasis on the routines, competences and dispositions of individuals involved in communities of music-making and consumption, milieux cultures allow for a fine-grained understanding of the everyday networks and patterns of interaction underpinning the musical life of urban and peri-urban spaces. Part II, ‘Method’, examines the various methodological approaches that are used in the study of popular music and youth culture. Evangelos Chrysagis’s chapter focuses on ethnography, a methodological approach that has been used in the study of popular music and youth culture for many years. Drawing on his own experience of using an ethnographic approach in work focusing on DIY music practices in the city of Glasgow, Chrysagis discusses the value of this approach in enabling the researcher to deeply engage at an everyday level with research participants and to gain a detailed picture of the lifeworld they inhabit and how this informs their music-making and consumption practices. Nick Crossley’s chapter looks at social network analysis (SNA) and assesses the value of this approach in mapping connections between participants in music scenes and the networks that are produced as a result of this. Although less commonly applied in youth and music research, as Crossley observes, SNA provides critical insights that can be used to inform an understanding of youth-music interplay. Paula Guerra explores the value of quantitative analysis in the study of the relationship between popular music and youth culture. As Guerra notes, although research in this field is currently dominated by qualitative methods, a quantitative methodology allows for the use of large data and thus the ability to broaden the scope of youth and music research beyond case studies and qualitative interviews,

3

4

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

which typically involve much smaller sample sizes. Catherine Hoad’s chapter focuses on the use of textual analysis as a means of studying youth music scenes. Using the example of heavy metal music, Hoad examines how textual analysis can be used to uncover new layers of meaning in music as these emerge for audiences via the use of symbolism and imagery in album covers, song lyrics and so forth. In the final chapter of this section, Michael B. MacDonald introduces the term ‘cineworlding’ as a new means of examining the relationship between popular music and youth culture via the use of documentary-making. As MacDonald argues, through this approach the nuanced everyday settings of youth and their musicalized interactions can be captured and analysed in a way that also involves bringing an audiovisual aspect to the subjective opinions and actions of the participants themselves. Part III, ‘History’, features five chapters that focus on specific genres and eras of popular music and youth culture from the 1960s onwards. Sarah Hill’s chapter considers how the rock music of the late 1960s helped to shape countercultural ideology and how its influence persists to the present day, particularly via the concept of counterculture as a space of hegemonically opposed lifestyles, world-views and political beliefs. Jon Stratton’s chapter focuses on glam rock and looks at the genre’s contribution to challenging then-accepted notions and representations of gender and sexuality. Stratton also argues that, rather than being described as a subculture, glam in his view more effectively aligns with the post-subcultural concept of neo-tribe. Matthew Bannister’s chapter examines punk and indie as two genres connected by the concept of a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos. Bannister documents the early response to punk by the media as a moral panic before going on to chart the legacy of punk and latterly indie as styles that inspired a range of genres throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including hardcore and riot grrrl. In the following chapter, Alex van Venrooij and Rens Wilderom focus on the early history of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). They compare and analyse two competing narratives: one suggesting an organic growth of EDM from a small underground scene; the other suggesting that the EDM scene was developed via established media, including record companies and music magazines. Rounding off this section of the handbook is Stefano Barone’s chapter on the emergence and global development of hip-hop. Barone presents a detailed account of hip-hop’s origins in poor inner-city neighbourhoods in the United States before going on to look at the globalization of hip-hop through the emergence of local hip-hop scenes throughout the world. Part IV, ‘Identity’, examines the various ways in which popular music has been used as a cultural resource in the construction of identity. Hervé Glevarec and Raphäel Nowak’s chapter considers the relationship between music, taste and identity. Various conceptual models are examined in the chapter, notably homology, habitus, (sub)cultural capital, omnivorousness and eclecticism. In charting the development of this range of concepts, Glevarec and Nowak examine the shifts that have occurred in thinking about the significance of musical taste from something bound up with

Introduction

class background to the expression of a more reflexive form of identity. Sarah Raine and Eveleigh Buck-Matthews’s chapter focuses on the connections between gender, sexuality and music. Drawing on their own experience as female researchers, they examine forms of structural oppression inscribed in music scenes and music events, and how these act to proscribe forms of gendered participation. Utilizing two UK case studies, the queer fringe music festival and the Northern Soul scene, Raine and Buck-Matthews examine strategies though which queer and female participants seek to subvert normative expectations of gender roles as these are encountered in music festivals and music scenes. In the following chapter, Paul Hodkinson examines the phenomenon of music scenes and ageing. As Hodkinson observes, among many music scenes once more or less exclusively associated with youth, there is now an increasing incidence of multigenerational audiences. Moreover, as he goes on to document, with age comes an increasing array of responsibilities, including career and family, combined with the physical limitations associated with ageing bodies. Such factors necessitate that ageing individuals find new ways to participate in music scenes that allow for additional commitments and the realities of physical ageing. Ben Green’s chapter extends the discussion of ageing and music through a consideration of the role played by memory in allowing individuals to re-engage with key moments in their lives when songs were heard for the first time or took on critical significance through the attendance at a gig or festival when music and setting worked together to create what he refers to as a peak music experience. Just as music in the present can take on special significance for the listener, through individual and collective memory, music fans can relive important moments of musical experience that link the past with the present. Part V, ‘Media’, looks at various ways in which the mediatization of popular music enhances its cultural connections with youth. Andrea Baker’s chapter examines the significance of youth radio in the cities of Austin, US and Melbourne, Australia, each having been branded as ‘music cities’ given the vibrancy of their respective live music scenes. As Baker notes, through their role in helping to develop live music scenes in their city, KUT FM (Austin) and Radio Triple R FM (Melbourne) have earned iconicity as promoters of local live music. Ash Watson’s chapter looks at the cultural significance of zines for youth music genres. As Watson observes, there is now a long and significant history of zine culture in popular music with dedicated zines for many different genres of popular music, including punk, rave, riot grrrl and queer music scenes. Such zines, while focusing on the music and the artists who make it, also engage their readers in dialogues about themes such as politics, authenticity and liberation. As such, zines generate their own independent and alternative creative spaces. In the following chapter, Raphäel Nowak looks at the impacts of digital technology on the ways popular music is listened to and experienced by contemporary youth listeners. As Nowak explains, through digital technology, youth listeners are able to effectively take their music with them on the move. In doing so, they create their own sound

5

6

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

environments and also control and curate their own personalized experiences of music to a significant degree. Nicholas Carah and Kiah Hawker’s chapter looks at the role of media in the branding of popular music and the impact of this on the ways in which young people understand the cultural significance of popular music. Significantly, while the branding of music through product placement and similar strategies is designed to curate market-driven connections for young people between music, consumption and lifestyle, the result can often be that youth imagine lifestyles and identities for themselves beyond those which marketers attempt to sell them via the medium of music branding. In the final chapter of this section, Scott Henderson examines the way in which the relationship between popular music and youth culture has been represented in cinema. As Henderson notes, filmic representations of youth and music have functioned to shape popular perceptions of youth cultures over the decades. At the same time, observes Henderson, a strong economic imperative has governed the depiction of youth culture in films with a popular music soundtrack, as this form has proved appealing to youth audiences from the 1950s onwards. He also notes that as generations have aged, the appeal of films that nostalgically portray the past with reference to a popular music soundtrack have similarly gained significant appeal. Part VI, ‘Place’, looks at ways in which the significance of popular music for youth culture is frequently inscribed within space and place. Brett Lashua and Gabby Skeldon’s chapter focuses on the city of Leeds in the UK. With reference to a mapping of Leeds’ music scene engaged in by the authors, an account is presented of how visits to a number of the city’s key venues in a single night allowed for an assessment of the ways in which different genres of music allow the young people who follow them to position themselves in the urban environment. By contrast, Lisa Nikulinsky’s chapter focuses on youth music scenes in the small town of Margaret River in Western Australia. As Nikulinsky notes, although regional and rural locations are frequently overlooked in studies of youth and music, they often contain vibrant music scenes that include a mix of youth from established communities as well as those from recently settled ex-urban families. Moreover, just as urban settings may be characterized by alternative, underground and DIY scenes, similar traits can usually be found in regional settings, where new spaces of youth cultural practice manifest – often in natural settings such as a beach or a forest. Chris Anderton’s chapter examines the long-standing relationship between music festivals and youth culture. As Anderton notes, while early examples of youth music festivals are often associated with romantic imagery of countercultural liberation, such events also became key drivers of moral panics during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Moreover, Anderton questions whether increasing moves towards commercialization and professionalization in twenty-first-century music festivals have decreased their capacity for youth rebellion or whether new spaces for such subversive action have been created in contemporary festival spaces. Sian Lincoln focuses on the significance of virtual spaces for new

Introduction

expressions of music and youth. As Lincoln notes, through the blurring of the public and the private, digital platforms such as Facebook create new ways in which musical identities can be made and articulated. Digital technology can also be used by young people to share musical experience with their peers as it unfolds, for example, in the venue or festival setting. Finally, Robin Kuchar considers how DIY and alternative music scenes respond to neoliberalism and the gentrification of urban scenes. Drawing on the example of three different scene-based music venues in the city of Hamburg, Germany, Kuchar compares the strategies employed by each venue to preserve a sense of independence and thus continue to earn a reputation for authenticity among scene followers. Part VII, ‘Music-Making’, examines different ways in which young people involve themselves in and benefit from new, technology-driven forms of music-making practices. Rosa Reitsamer’s chapter on youth, DIY music and media-making looks at how the spirit of DIY, as it has been embraced by punk, hip-hop and EDM scenes, remains a vital element in youth music-making practices today. Indeed, as Reitsamer notes, given the impact of post-industrialization and associated shifts in the labour market, participation of music-makers or associated modes of creative labour forms part of an increasing DIY landscape of creative practice which is now regarded by many as an alternative pathway from education to employment in late modernity. Christopher Cayari’s chapter examines one such aspect of DIY career pathways in music, specifically young people’s use of youtube as a means of promoting themselves and their music and generating an audience. Cayari uses the example of Carlos Eiene, who has built a music career and fan community via youtube. Richard Frenneaux’s chapter discusses the digital context of young musicians working in what he refers to as the ‘new music industry’. As Frenneaux discusses, through the use of digital audio workstations (DAWs), young musicians are able to create and produce professional-sounding music without the need to hire a professional recording studio. Furthermore, via youtube, Facebook and dedicated music platforms such as Bandcamp and Spotify, young musicians can now disseminate their music online without a record label. At the same time, the sheer amount of content now available on these platforms has made it increasingly difficult for music artists to monetize their product, necessitating a diversification of revenue streams. In the final chapter of this section, Georgina Gregory looks at how new technologies are allowing for the preservation of the history and heritage of live popular music performance. As Gregory notes, technology-enabled tribute bands and other innovations such as hologram performances are now appealing to an increasingly intergenerational audience. She also suggests that technology offers the opportunity for monetizing popular music of the past for future audiences, including youth, who will be able to experience digitally recreated performances of classic rock and pop audiences in a simulated live performance setting.

7

8

Part I Theory

10

1 The past, present and future of subculture Ross Haenfler

‘Subculture’ has been an important conceptual tool for generations of scholars, framing understandings of youth, deviance, leisure, resistance and social control. As such, subculture turns up in many studies of popular music and youth culture. Beyond the academy, the term has entered the popular lexicon, regularly deployed in mass media, where images (often caricatures) of goths, punks, skinheads and ravers grace the covers of newspapers and appear in big-budget movies. That participants in deviant communities often refer to themselves as a subculture reinforces the significance and durability of the idea. Common and overly broad notions of subculture refer to virtually any social group of relatively small size, shared ideas and practices and some distinction from an imagined larger culture. The result is a muddy concept lumping together disparate groups and identities – an ‘athlete subculture’ and the ‘punk subculture’ have more differences than similarities, even if some commonalities exist. Yoga practitioners may share some common knowledge, and some may cultivate a yoga identity, yet yoga rarely evokes the social stigma consistently directed towards graffiti writers or skinheads. References to class-based (e.g. ‘workingclass’) or race-based (e.g. ‘Latinx’) subcultures label anyone fitting certain socially meaningful subgroups as subcultural, inaccurately homogenizing people with vast differences in experience. A more precise definition of ‘subculture’ is ‘a relatively diffuse social network having a shared identity, distinctive meanings around certain ideas, practices and objects and a sense of marginalization from or resistance to a perceived “conventional” society’ (Haenfler 2014: 16; original emphases). Subcultures differ from more stable, formally organized groups; they have shared identity, but porous boundaries with little in the way of codified rules. Yet subculturists create distinctive meanings, for

12

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

example, around music and body modification. They cultivate meaningful practices, such as collective dance styles and rituals, and imbue certain objects with special significance, as do Mods with their scooters, skaters with their boards and steampunks with a variety of homemade objects blending Victorian era and futuristic aesthetics. Subculturists tend to approach an imagined ‘mainstream’ or ‘normal’ society with a measure of disdain, though the extent to which they celebrate deviance varies. They feel either a degree of marginality from or resistance to their social surroundings and often both simultaneously. Politicians, religious leaders and the popular press ignore subculturists in some contexts while engaging in severe repression in others. Contemporary punks in the United States may raise eyebrows but relatively rarely provoke the outrage they once did. But punks in Indonesia’s Aceh province face persecution from a minority of fundamentalist religious authorities, their torn clothes and rebellious hairstyles symbolizing their questioning of dominant institutions (Budiman et al. 2012), even as many punks are tolerant of religion or are themselves religious (Wallach 2014). Again, as a theoretical construct, subculture does not describe just any social subgroup; some sense of marginalization, resistance and/or deviance separates skinheads and punks from dinner clubs, athletes and trophy hunters. Subculture is not the most productive conceptual framework for analysing librarians, foodies or political parties, although such groups may feature subcultural elements and broader theoretical insights – such as around authenticity, hierarchy and identity – may be useful across such groupings. Subculture remains a useful organizing framework through which to study and theorize popular music and youth culture. After outlining a brief history of subculture and mapping the major theoretical schools, I discuss significant themes within subculture studies and argue for the continuing significance of subculture. In my view, the exciting present and promising future of the concept lie in an explicitly intersectional approach to marginality and resistance; taking a ‘whole-life’ perspective, exploring subcultural connections to other spheres of social life, whether politics and resistance or family and work; and linking the micro and macro, the local and global and the physical and virtual by locating subcultures within larger social structures.

Subculture studies: From past to present Prior to the development of deviance and subculture studies, early scholars, religious authorities and some social reformers painted criminals and other deviants as mentally, morally and spiritually deficient (e.g. Burt 1925). In general, both laypeople and experts in the United States and UK commonly viewed deviance as individual

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

and collective pathology (Blackman 2014), often rooted in biological difference and deficiency. Gradually, social scientists developed more social theories of deviance that lay the groundwork for subculture studies later in the twentieth century. While Chicago School theorists of the early twentieth century did not use the term ‘subculture’, they influenced subcultural studies in several significant ways. Departing from pathological, individualistic understandings of deviance, they theorized crime and social disorganization as social problems emerging alongside rapid urbanization and immigration that disrupted the natural equilibrium of communities. Gangs and other delinquent youth often arose amongst marginalized groups living in poverty, experiencing social dislocation and racial and ethnic discrimination (Thrasher 1927; Whyte 1943). Deviance resulted from blocked status opportunities; denied legitimate paths to culturally valuable goals such as wealth and prestige, low-status youth turn to unconventional means to achieving success. Cohen (1955) saw ‘delinquent’ subcultures as collective solutions to problems such as unemployment, poor housing conditions and income and wealth disparities. Marginalization and the resulting status frustration prompted a ‘reaction formation’ in which youth reversed middleclass values, for example, by devaluing education. Music subcultures were central to some of the early theorizing of deviance. Becker (1963) demonstrated how jazz musicians saw themselves in opposition to the larger culture of ‘squares’, those who generally followed social rules and led mundane, predictable lives. ‘Outsiders’, including many musicians and music fans, often experience marginalization and engage in resistance. Becker famously observed that deviance is not an objective quality but a result of a labelling process: Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’. The deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label. (1; original emphasis)

Subculture studies continues to benefit from the basic insight that deviance is a social construction (rather than an objective truth) and that the difference between deviance and ‘normalcy’ involves social power.

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies In the 1970s and 1980s, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham (also called the Birmingham School) made subcultures a vital part of youth studies, many of which featured strong connections to music. Phil Cohen ([1972] 2011) suggested that subcultures emerge especially from the working

13

14

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

class as a form of agency against class domination. Mods and rockers confronted marginalization via their style and how they collectively occupied space in scooter or motorbike gangs. Each of these groups developed distinctive musical tastes and dance styles. While the CCCS acknowledged that subcultures served as collective ‘solutions’ to shared problems, they also highlighted subcultural resistance to class inequality, foregrounding an explicitly political understanding of subcultural youth. Subcultural resistance was largely symbolic, expressed via shocking (but meaningful) styles rather than traditional forms of collective protest. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige (1979) described a series of working-class youth groupings – teddy boys, mods, rockers, rude boys, skinheads and punks – distinguished by their style, engaged in a sort of semiotic warfare as they disrupted the status quo. Subversive style signalled a ‘refusal’, as participants combined the menacing (e.g. leather and spikes) and the mundane (e.g. safety pins) into a bricolage of new, countercultural meanings. Stuart Hall, a pivotal figure in the development of cultural studies, and Tony Jefferson (1976) edited Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain, a central text solidifying conceptions of subculture as working class, mostly male youth engaged in ritualistic resistance. In addition to their emphasizing social class, Hebdige, Hall and other CCCS theorists noted the influence of West Indian youth on British subcultures as Black and white youth interacted. Skinheads, for instance, adopted reggae and ska music from Jamaican immigrants. Feeling the threats of privatization, gentrification and declining extended family, the skins sought to recover their ‘lost sense of working-class community’ in part by copying West Indian ‘mannerisms’, ‘curses’ and styles: ‘Here was a culture armoured against contaminating influences, protected against the more frontal assaults of the dominant ideology, denied access to the “good life” by the colour of its skin’ (Hebdige 1979: 56–8). Importantly, the CCCS (and others such as Becker, cited above) also modelled a critical examination of authorities’ responses and efforts at social control. The classic Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers (Cohen [1972] 2011) demonstrates how news media and policymakers fuel moral panics. A moral panic describes a situation in which people believe a group or practice constitutes a significant threat to the social order, usually based on incomplete or sensational information, exaggerated and caricatured by the mass media, politicians and religious authorities (Cohen [1972] 2011; Goode and Ben-Yahuda [1994] 2009). The perceived threat generally outweighs the actual risk, with subculturists often serving as useful scapegoats for larger social problems. A variety of panics have linked music to social problems, including heavy metal to suicide and rap music to violence. Moral entrepreneurs engage in deliberate campaigns to further their own agendas, often creating and enforcing new rules (Critcher 2003). Politicians sensationalize crime to justify intensive law enforcement (Hall et al. 1978).

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

Neo-tribe/post-subculture/club culture The CCCS conception of subculture quickly came under fire for a variety of reasons. The emphasis on class and on subculturists occupying a class-subordinate position seemed misplaced as middle-class youth were also deeply invested in subcultural activities, including, from the outset, punk (Laing 1985). Likewise, the exclusion of girls’ and women’s perspectives (with the exception of Angela McRobbie) offered a one-dimensional portrayal of subcultural youth. Further, the CCCS offered too heroic a take on youth cultures, of marginalized youth engaged in righteous conflict with an oppressive parent culture. These criticisms prompted some theorists to offer alternatives in the form of post-subcultural theories around the concepts of scene and neo-tribe. Post-subculture theorists questioned the very idea of distinct, relatively stable, class- and style-based subcultures (see also Chapter 2 in this volume). Hebdige’s lineage of working-class subcultures did not seem to match diverse, fluid and often temporary scenes such as clubbing, rave and, later, ‘scene kids’ (see Redhead, Wynne and O’Connor 1997). Perhaps aside from metalheads and the occasional punk, few people make a commitment to any distinguishable subculture. Even the basic juxtaposition of an adversarial youth culture against a conformist parent culture assumed too much homogeneity and too strict boundaries (Muggleton 2000). Postsubcultural theorists emphasized individual experiences, agency and individuality rather than structural opportunities and constraints (Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004). Social class was no longer the defining characteristic of youth culture as young people mixed across classes and reflexively crafted identities via consumption choices (Bennett 1999). Alternatively, scenes (see also Chapter 3) bring people together into diverse, temporary, leisure-oriented gatherings (Kruse 1993; Shank 1994; Straw 1991). Participants may privilege pleasure over developing a coherent political ideology and may blend a variety of styles. Similarly, neo-tribe theory builds on Maffesoli’s (1996) concept of tribe (see Hardy, Bennett and Robards 2018). Maffesoli also sees identity as fluid and unstable but contrasts individualistic rationalism and emotional/affective neo-tribalism. Where Giddens sees a reflexive, rational individualism, Maffesoli sees diffuse, temporary groups connected by emotions, the feelings of being together – clearly applicable to music communities. Rather than strongly identifying with and participating in stable, consistent subcultures, people shift allegiances or forego strong commitments entirely as they explore various ‘modes of personal expression’ (Bennett 1999: 607). In this post-subcultural context, Sarah Thornton’s (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital became a central text. Thornton adapts Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to show how youth in dance and club scenes distinguish

15

16

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

themselves from the ‘mainstream’ but also construct hierarchies of taste and authenticity among themselves via fashion, slang, scene experience, insider knowledge and other symbolic markers such as record collections. Subcultural capital ‘can be objectified or embodied’ but is ‘not as class-bound as cultural capital’ as ‘class is willfully obfuscated by subcultural distinctions’ (12; original emphases). Just as the CCCS spawned a host of concerns, the post-subculture perspective quickly drew criticisms. First, class, race and gender inequalities still profoundly shape the lives of youth (Shildrick 2006). Relatedly, post-subculture theory privileged individualistic accounts of subculture at the expense of structural contexts shaping experience (Bennett 2011). And while many scenes overlap and participants may cycle through and/or blend a variety of identities, many subculturists still create relatively stable, ongoing music communities such as goth, straight edge and Juggalo. Further, while the CCCS may have overemphasized subcultures’ potential political significance, post-subculture theorists may have too quickly dismissed their subversive potential (Williams and Hannerz 2014). The now decades-long critique of the CCCS account of subculture and the ensuing alternatives has led some to prefer the term ‘(sub)culture’. The parentheses indicate the lack of clear boundaries between such groupings and a larger/parent/hegemonic culture while acknowledging some degree of coherence in subcultural identities, as well as questioning any implication that (sub)culture is secondary to or less-than so-called high culture – the art, music and literature most esteemed amongst society’s elites.

Where do we go from here? The present and the future Given the rich history of subculture studies I outlined above, how might the concept continue to be relevant? What might we build upon? In the remainder of this chapter, I explore three broad themes that encapsulate the most exciting and productive work scholars are presently doing under the larger rubric of subculture studies, but also themes that I feel could and should inform such studies in the future.

Intersectionality and resistance Early critiques of subculture studies as overly (though not exclusively) focused on the experiences of young, white men have led some scholars to adopt a more intersectional approach. Building on activists’ practice (and praxis), Black feminists and critical race scholars theorized intersectionality, revealing how multiple forms of inequality – by race, gender, sexuality, ability, class and so on – intersect in a ‘matrix of domination’, compounding oppression, curtailing opportunities and

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

enforcing constraints (Crenshaw 1989; Hill Collins 2019). Given how profoundly these identities impact life experiences, life chances and sense of self, an accounting of intersectional identities is arguably crucial to understanding any social grouping. Music subculturists’ positionality profoundly impacts their ‘opportunities to engage in particular cultural practices’ (Woodman and Wyn 2015: 43). Structural position may not determine taste and consumption (cf. Bourdieu), but race, class, gender and ability certainly shape experience and opportunity. For example, women and nonbinary people often face greater pressures or constraints around how they embody their subcultural identities; Black youth face greater scrutiny from police than their white counterparts; and some underground musicians have greater resources allowing them to tour and/or work towards full-time musicianship. A progressive intersectional critical theory informs and is informed by efforts to change scenes, challenging interpersonal and structural inequalities.

Intersectionality and music subcultures In the case of music subcultures, an intersectional approach requires seeking and including the voices of a diversity of participants, especially those commonly marginalized or forgotten. Such a commitment also suggests an analysis of power and hierarchy even in the midst of groupings ostensibly opposed to hierarchal relations. A starting place – and one rooted in contemporary subculture studies – is examining how subculturists disrupt and reinforce dominant social hierarchies. Nguyen (2013) demonstrates this in a study of riot grrrl, showing how participants – mostly white, heterosexual, women – challenged sexism, patriarchy and sexual assault while too often marginalizing women of colour and other less-privileged people across the gender spectrum. Schippers (2000: 748) does something similar, employing queer theory to examine the intersection of gender and sexuality in an alternative rock scene, treating gender and sexuality as separate but ‘mutually reinforcing’ systems of power. She finds that as participants challenged compulsory heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity via their talk, practices and interactions, they also ‘reproduced a heterofocused binary of [stable] sexual identities’ (759). They somewhat successfully challenged gender hegemony while simultaneously reinforcing sexual hegemony. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer (2016) examines how young Muslims engage with Blackness via hip hop, showing the complex and contested relationships between race, gender, nationality and religion. In addition to considering intersectional disadvantage, we would be wise to acknowledge intersectional advantage, privilege and entitlement. Some groups – for example, male-dominated subcultures such as incels (involuntary celibates) – emerge from a sense of ‘aggrieved entitlement’, perceived threats to the expectations afforded one’s privileged status. In many music contexts, white, heterosexual, middle-class men enjoy greater access, legitimacy and freedom than their less-privileged counterparts.

17

18

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

These advantages can serve as a shield against stigma, surveillance and religious and state repression. In the United States, white supremacy means that whites are far less likely to be arrested, prosecuted and convicted of crimes (The Sentencing Project 2018). Class confers similar advantages. For example, authorities label the largely working-class Juggalos a gang while treating middle-class straight edge punks more leniently, despite the similarly violent tendencies of a minority of each group (Linnemann and McClanahan 2017). Juggalos – the community surrounding the hardcore rap group Insane Clown Posse – evoke caricatures of irresponsible, hedonistic, lower-class drug users who enjoy bad music with violent and sexist overtones. In contrast, the puritanical, clean-living morality of straight edge and their largely middle-class standing aligned with police and the ongoing drug war.

Resistance and reinforcement Resistance has been and continues to be among the most important topics within subcultural studies and a contentious point of debate. What does resistance look like? What, if anything, do subculturists attempt to resist? And do they, in the end, accomplish anything meaningful? While offering temporary spaces of subjective fulfilment, perhaps commercialization and co-optation make music subculturists more a consumer category than reflexive, anti-hegemonic resistors. While it is important not to overemphasize or naively celebrate subcultural resistance, significant evidence suggests that many subculturists do engage in deliberative resistance, even if their influence remains mixed. Resistance can be passive or active, micro- or macro-oriented and overt or covert, depending on participants’ intentions, their targets and their reception by outsiders (Williams 2011). They can be ‘a salient source of political socialization; for many young people, subcultures are the means by which they initially come to voice’ (Paris and Ault 2004: 405), as has often been the case with punks (Worley et al. 2015). Queer subculturists also intentionally use music to disrupt and reimagine identity, ageing and desire (Taylor 2012). At times, subcultures connect directly with social movements, often through music (Rosenthal and Flacks 2012; Street 2012). Music can help recruit participants, frame grievances, guide emotions and build solidarity (Drott 2015); Britain’s Rock Against Racism protests arose in the mid-1970s and early 1980s to oppose the growing power of the right-wing National Front (Goodyer 2009). Bands from a variety of contemporary genres, including hardcore (e.g. Racetraitor) and metal (e.g. Neckbeard Deathcamp), support antifascist (‘antifa’) activities and activists, even as white supremacists attempt to co-opt the music for their cause (Moynihan 2019). Participants across the political spectrum connect music subcultures to larger political projects. Neo-fascist movements have co-opted black metal, punk rock, hardcore, skinheads and straight edge using a global network of musicians, record labels and online forums to spread white power ideologies (Dyck 2017).

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

Some music subcultures serve as lifestyle movements, ‘loosely bound collectivities in which participants advocate lifestyle change as a primary means to social change, politicizing daily life while pursuing morally coherent “authentic” identities’ (Haenfler, Jones and Johnson 2012: 14). For example, Portwood-Stacer (2013: 45) notes that ‘the consumption of punk music … is a common factor in many anarchists’ introduction to radical political ideologies and organizing efforts’. Anarchists’ anticonsumption lifestyles, grungy self-presentations and polyamorous relationships constitute ‘lifestyle activism’, having personal, identificatory, moral, social and activist motivations, all of which map onto many subcultural groupings. Similarly, Stewart (2017) demonstrates that straight edge hardcore may constitute an ‘implicit religion’, forming a meaningful, moral community that guides conduct without necessarily centring a belief in the divine.

Critical approach Questions of the existence and efficacy of resistance remain so central to subculture studies because they speak deeply of subcultures’ significance. A critical approach to resistance demands a thorough, empirically driven account of subcultures’ influence while avoiding a cynical reading that negates participants’ often profound experiences of pleasure and liberation. Such an approach must account for how subcultures foster new possibilities as well as their contradictions – the gaps between ideology and practice. Individuals and groups may activate subcultural meanings and spaces alternately (and/ or simultaneously) as leisure spaces and vehicles of resistance. As in social movements research, it is better to focus on influence rather than success (Amenta 2013). Subcultures exist against a backdrop of larger structural forces and collective behaviours (as I discuss below). Economic changes, globalization, social movements, technological innovations and mass-mediated popular culture all impact the intersecting constructions of race, class, gender and sexual identity. Yet people enact, challenge, resist and reproduce those constructions at the micro and meso levels, navigating the effects of structural forces – white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, capitalist exploitation – in their daily lives, their local idiocultures, their intimate relationships. Subcultures – similar to workplaces, sports teams, civic clubs and leisure spaces of all sorts – become microcosms of experimentation, of dialogue and usually of simultaneous resistance to and reinforcement of structural inequalities. Further, subcultures do not only respond to larger changes, pressures and discourses from the ‘outside’. Collectively, these idiocultures, or ‘tiny publics’, may influence those larger conversations in their own right (see Fine 2012), as was the case with riot grrrl (even if its influence was eventually filtered through capitalist co-optation). No study can effectively ‘do it all’, but intersectional analyses of subcultural communities will produce more rigorous empirical accounts and, I think, more robust theory applicable beyond specific music scenes.

19

20

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Whole-life perspective While for the CCCS and post-CCCS theorists subculture typically implied youth subculture, some participants persist well into adulthood and many subcultures have been intergenerational all along. A ‘whole-life’ perspective accounts for subcultural participation across the life-course and investigates how participation and identities interweave with other spheres of life (Pilkington and Omel’chenko 2013). Even as direct participation declines for many older subculturists, scene values and experiences can profoundly impact leisure, politics, friendships, and work and career well into adulthood (Bennett 2013; Bennett and Hodkinson 2012; see also Chapter 18). Participants from the formative years of skinhead, punk, post-punk, hip-hop, metal, goth and other music subcultures have aged into their fifties and beyond. Many de-emphasize ‘spectacular’ styles in favour of living out scene values, while others express their longevity and commitment by openly demonstrating their affiliations (Haenfler 2012). Some eventually reject the scene, moving on with their lives. Still others find ways to creatively and authentically incorporate their subcultural affiliations into ‘adult’ life (Davis 2006).

Intergenerational scenes Belying the popular notion of generational conflict – the ‘generation gap’ – many subcultures have increasingly become intergenerational. Ageing b-boys and b-girls mentor younger dancers, sharing artistic knowledge but also life experience (Fogarty 2012). Older riot grrrls put on rock camps for girls, teaching musicianship and zinemaking based on an implicitly feminist agenda (Giffort 2011). Many hardcore bands popular in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Agnostic Front) continue to perform, giving younger fans their first chance to see the bands and providing older scenesters an excuse for a family reunion of sorts. Older subculturists run established DIY record labels (e.g. Deathwish, Bridge9) and organize music festivals (e.g. Wacken Open Air). Subcultures can influence parenting, and having children clearly impacts involvement in music scenes. Rather than automatically serving as a point of strife, music subcultures can bond parents and kids. Parents who love rock music may use it – and associated stories, ephemera, records and instruments – ‘as a child-rearing technique and a “technology of ” mothering’ (Grácio 2016: n.p.). Some goth parents take their children to goth music festivals, in the process encouraging the scene to accommodate ageing participants and their families (Hodkinson 2012). Studying music scenes over time offers opportunities to observe how subculturists of different generations respond to structural changes via music/musicking. Changes in the reception of music also signal larger cultural shifts; as more people participate

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

in a ‘deviant’ subculture, deviance may be ‘defined down’, normalized so as to avoid widespread stigma (Durkheim [1895] 1982). For example, thrash metal band Slayer, variously accused of Satanism, harbouring Nazi sympathies and encouraging suicide and murder, won several Grammy awards in the mid-2000s.

Work and career A whole-life perspective might explore subculturists’ work and career, a pressing and ongoing concern amongst scholars studying youth transitions and emerging adulthood (Hodkinson 2015). Assumptions of subcultural participation as somehow counterproductive to successful employment may be misplaced. Some straight edgers choose careers reflective of values developed in DIY hardcore scenes. Others learn and practice specific skills – web design, music production, business management – and cultivate entrepreneurial dispositions such as self-reliance, confidence and adaptability (Haenfler 2018). Youthful participation in music subcultures may prove advantageous to certain careers, including work that has little or nothing to do directly with music. For those who do pursue music, either full- or part-time, Ramirez (2018: 190) finds that ‘subcultural participation in music allows for a more fluid experience in life … more open ended, variable and less rigidly structured than those of standardized careers’. Yet the young indie musicians in his study still find themselves constrained by normative expectations of adulthood – especially true in the case of women and those without the benefit of a middle-class upbringing and resources.

Ageing bodies Music and music subcultures constitute embodied experiences in a variety of ways. Raced, classed and gendered bodies inform subcultural participation, as alluded to above. Participants engage in ‘embodied resistance’ (Bobel and Kwan 2011), intentionally shaping, marking and altering the body often via tattoos and piercings. Music subculturists and other observers interpret ageing bodies in ways that impact authenticity, inclusion and exclusion. For example, ‘alternative women’ challenge emphasized femininity by defying dominant beauty rules (Holland 2004). Playing and enjoying live music also entails certain expectations around the body; participants must demonstrate ‘body competency’ to be perceived as authentic (Driver 2011). Ageing influences all of these processes. Moshing, stage-diving and raving all night might not only become more painful in ageing bodies but also be perceived as somehow inappropriate. Yet music subcultures can also be sites to challenge ‘appropriate’ or successful ageing, even queering the successful/unsuccessful ageing dichotomy (Taylor 2012).

21

22

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Linking daily life with larger social contexts, agency and structure CCCS scholars considered subcultures as responses to larger social changes, but in their macro-theorizing sometimes lost sight of the empirically grounded microcontexts where subculturists actually do their identities. The ‘post’ theories brought vital attention back to the subjective, micro-level, lived experiences of subculturists, moving away from more deterministic, class-based, structural models associated with the CCCS, but sometimes neglected the macro forces in which they were embedded. Music subcultures mediate between individual and small group action and larger structural forces. An analytically useful conception of subculture must account for ‘both the complexity of social structure and the collective, creative agency of subcultural participants’ (Jensen 2018: 411). Being attentive to the larger social-economic-political context has taken and could take many forms. For example, subcultures may be strategic responses to shifts in political economy (e.g. accelerating neoliberalism), especially in opportunities for young people (e.g. increased student debt, declining expectations of quality of life). Social movements (e.g. Arab Uprisings, Umbrella Revolution, #MeToo, neo-fascists, Black Lives Matter) may also influence subcultural participation and ideology. Political shifts (e.g. polarization and the resurgence of the far-right in many countries) may do likewise. And technological changes (e.g. social media) produce new possibilities for subculturists. Each of these cases suggests ways to explore relationships between the micro and macro, the local and global and the physical and virtual.

Subcultures and political economy Individuals exercise considerable agency and reflexivity in constructing identity at the micro level, but do so in a field of opportunities and constraints related to structure, privilege and political economy. Hollingworth (2015) calls for a return to more structural analyses in subcultural studies, and a number of scholars have done so. Worley (2017) demonstrates how economic, political and social upheaval contributed to the emergence and shaping of punk in 1970s Britain amongst both middle- and working-class youth. Allaste (2006) notes how the re-emergence of political democracy and a capitalist economy in post-Soviet Estonia profoundly influenced the emergence of club/rave scenes and their concurrent drug cultures. Moore (2010: 62) offers a compelling analysis of the political economy surrounding a variety of subcultures, suggesting that punk, metal, riot grrrl, ‘retro’ and alternative scenes emerged in a post-Fordist era characterized by economic instability and a ‘crisis of meaning and affect’. Deindustrialization, privatization and the increasingly anarchic qualities of ‘unrestrained capitalism’ provoke subcultural responses and forms of resistance (18).

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

As the CCCS suggested, lack of jobs, poor educational opportunities and the resulting social problems can form the backdrop of subcultural participation. While class is not the defining feature of subculture, macroeconomic forces differentially impact people; music and music subcultures can become strategic resources used differently by working- and middle-class participants. The declining youth labour market creates a context for DIY careers, as discussed above. Many contemporary subculturists have experienced accelerating neoliberalism and austerity with concurrent privatization, migration and individualization. ‘Around the world, with a different tenor in different places, a generation of young people is living and indeed has no choice but to live different lives to those that their parents have lived’ (Woodman and Bennett 2015: 5). Yet individuals navigate these macro-processes primarily in the context of small groups, including music scenes. Returning to the concept of resistance, music subcultures can become an ideological resource whereby individuals and small groups question and push back against macroeconomic forces via a combination of leisure/pleasure and activism/politics. Many underground and DIY bands lose money as they tour but do so for love of the experience and making and sharing art. Often inspired by punk, anti-capitalist anarchists and DIY scenes may create smallscale, cooperative economies, rejecting (as much as is possible) the logic of markets and profits in favour of other values.

Local and global The global diffusion of many music subcultures requires that we see the global in the local and the local in the global. Bennett and Peterson (2004) demonstrate that scenes have local, translocal and virtual manifestations – not separate ‘layers’, but interconnected spaces and relationships. Herein lies another opportunity to explore micro/macro connections via small groups. Music subcultures provide excellent sites to study the relationship between global cultural forms and local iterations. While the West may have disproportionate power and influence over global music cultures, participants in music subcultures exercise agency at the local level (O’Connor 2003). Unite Asia offers ‘Punk/Hardcore/ Metal News from around Asia’ via a website and Facebook and Instagram feeds, showcasing, for example, a progressive metal band from India, a Korean hardcore band and a screamo group from the Philippines. These bands and other young people around the world adapt global music subcultures to their local interests and needs. Rap did not gain legitimacy in Kenya until rappers sang in a local street dialect called Sheng, incorporated samples from Kenyan culture and expressed ‘concerns that were politically or culturally rooted in the happenings in Kenya’ (Kidula 2012: 174). Moroccan rappers share critiques of oppressive power structures with their mainstream US counterparts but focus on religious values and the global problems

23

24

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

of Islamic people while avoiding sexist motifs (Gintsburg 2013). While multinational corporations wield tremendous power over the global cultural industry, subculturists do not consume cultural texts uncritically. They may encounter punk through large, mainstream record labels or YouTube but adapt and do punk differently relative to their local circumstances (Wallach 2008). Subcultures allow study of the processes of cultural transmission somewhat outside the conventional corporate avenues controlled by economic and cultural elites. Studying punk in Indonesia, Wallach (2014: 149) observes how punk there ‘developed independently of direct intervention of foreigners’ and rather ‘emerged primarily as a result of autonomous local interpretations of important artefacts’ such as zines and records. ‘Indieglobalization’ occurs via informal networks focused on identity, community and an alternative ideology, contrary and/or parallel to profitmotivated corporate capitalism. Globalization may insert new consumer goods (e.g. music, books, television programmes) into local arenas, but local populations cultivate scenes relevant to their interests, values and needs (149).

Physical and virtual The rapid growth of digital communication, social media and information technologies profoundly impacts subcultural experience. Bands can more easily organize DIY tours via text and email, collectors can purchase records without ever entering a record shop and fans around the world can watch their favourite bands on YouTube, provided they have access to the necessary technologies. Considerable – perhaps even most – subcultural interaction takes place on social media and other digital spaces. In some cases, newer digital spaces play a pivotal role in emerging music subcultures, as is the case with the alt.country scene (Lee and Peterson 2004) and more recently with ‘SoundCloud rap’ (also called mumble rap or emo rap), a contemporary iteration of underground hip-hop (Caramanica 2017). These rappers distribute their music primarily via the free streaming service SoundCloud but bring fans together in raucous live shows. Rather than considering the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ as dichotomous, fruitful scholarship explores the relationship between the two. Studying parkour, Kidder (2012) notes that interaction with/on digital platforms positively impacts traceurs’ embodied practice, as they share and learn skills via YouTube that they subsequently try out in the city. Digital information and communication technologies foster local and global connections as ‘diffuse, globalized interactions become realized in specific locales by unique social actors’ (230; original emphasis). YouTube offers ‘on-screen pedagogy’ relative to a variety of music subcultural practices: aspiring death metal and hardcore vocalists can learn to safely scream, guitar players can practice new chord progressions and DJs can get tips on perfecting their sampling and scratching. The ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ are dialectical, not dichotomous, producing new possibilities through their interaction.

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

Digital interactions and spaces raise many questions around community, commodification and authenticity. Online networks, social media and fan sites create ‘imagined communities’ where participants often form ongoing, meaningful connections, despite the lack of embodied co-presence. Even in an alternative sport like roller derby, online interactions and identities become just as important as playing the sport, as ‘derby grrrls’ share online how they reimagine gender and find empowerment through overcoming pain (Pavlidis and Fullagar 2012). Music streaming services and other digital platforms make discovering, enjoying and sharing music easier than ever, but also enable capitalists and subcultural entrepreneurs to appropriate, market and ‘defuse’ underground innovations. Social media in particular provokes subculturists to debate authenticity as ‘influencers’ monetize their subcultural interests, motivated to constantly create ‘content’ that may or may not reflect important subcultural ideas and practices. New media ‘may even be seen as post-spatial as digital media break down the significance of space and place-based identities entirely’ (Williams 2011: 163). The centrality of virtuality to subculturists’ experience of music and community makes further research into these digital/embodied connections vital to future scholarship (see Whiteley and Rambarran 2016).

Future theoretical foundations … from the past Despite the challenges posed by post-subculture and neo-tribal theories, subculture has proven a durable concept, continually – but critically – applied by numerous scholars in a variety of settings, including those connected to music and youth culture. I have argued that the concept is most useful when we: (1) embrace an intersectional analysis of participants, especially emphasizing resistance to and reinforcement of existing social hierarchies; (2) adopt a ‘whole-life’ perspective that disentangles subculture from youth, style and other ‘spectacular’ elements of scenes; and (3) link subculturists’ daily lives to larger social forces by connecting and exploring the micro and macro, local and global and physical and virtual. In this final section, I make the case that a symbolic interactionist perspective – alongside feminist, queer and critical race theories – offers an especially useful foundation for pursuing these themes. As Blumer (1969) suggests, we know and act towards things by the meanings we have towards them, and we create and change those meanings via social interaction. Repeated patterns of meaning become durable definitions of the situation over time, such that individuals exercise agency and create meaning within structures of opportunity and constraint. On this foundation, interactionists have theorized the self, emotion, performance, authenticity, identity, stigma, labelling, deviance and

25

26

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

social control and the construction of social problems, all of which are relevant to subculture studies. The same year that Hebdige published his foundational book, Fine and Kleinman (1979) offered an interactionist theory of subculture, noting that subcultures are not stable groups with clearly delineated boundaries, values and practices, but rather fluid networks that spread through communication interlocks or the variety of social connections (friends, media, music) that transmit ideas. Subcultures consist of networks of groups sharing ‘common interests or background’, ‘a bounded network of groups with a shared, if diffuse, culture’ (Fine 2012: 143– 4). Building on this foundation, Patrick Williams (2011: 39) sees subcultures as ‘culturally bounded, but not closed, networks of people who come to share the meaning of specific ideas, material objects and practices through interaction’. For Williams, scene and subculture are complementary concepts; a ‘scene’ describes the social network and interactions of participants situated within certain contexts while ‘subculture’ refers to the continually negotiated cultural meanings surrounding these things. Even prior to Hebdidge and Fine, David Arnold (1970) argued for a ‘process’ model of subcultures, cautioning against reifying subculture and confusing participants with the culture they share. Symbolic interactionists’ concern with the self and identity provides a useful framework to consider intersecting identities and the reproduction of inequality. We ‘do’ gender, race and so on in interaction (e.g. West and Zimmerman 1987), including in music scenes where participants both resist and reproduce dominant meanings. Long before the protracted debates around sub- and post-subculture, interactionists recognized that identities are fluid, interactional accomplishments rather than structurally determined, stable categories. Of course, critical race theory reminds us that racial formations and systemic racism fundamentally underlie social relations and social structures. Queer theory questions the very concept of ‘normalcy’ and ‘normalizing regimes’ while centring sexuality, important particularly to a variety of music subcultures. And intersectional feminism highlights the matrices of domination that gendered, classed and racialized meanings create. Symbolic interactionism accounts for individual subjectivity and the fluidity of identity without minimizing the ongoing significance of race, class and gender to participants’ experience. Reflexive self-making occurs across the life-course. Rather than simply natural, embodied processes, age and ageing are themselves social constructs, interpreted through various lenses. Music subculturists must negotiate their involvement and their subcultural identities, in the context of other demands and other idiocultures. Transitions to adulthood occur within a larger political economy, but how people experience and ‘do’ ageing – around bodies, work, parenthood – is also an interpretive process. In addition to these fruitful lines of inquiry, a whole-life perspective also allows us to avoid being mired in discussions of subcultural boundaries as participants’ identities and experiences will manifest differently, with greater or lesser salience, at various moments and in different spheres of life.

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

Regarding linkages between micro/macro, virtual/embodied and local/global, subcultures offer fascinating meso-level possibilities to examine the connections between social processes and institutional forces (Stolte, Fine and Cook 2001). Summarizing thirty years’ thinking across a variety of empirical studies, Fine (2012: 1) argues that small groups, or ‘tiny publics’, become ‘not only a basis for affiliation, a source of social and cultural capital and a guarantor of identity, but also a support point in which individuals and the group can have an impact on other groups or shape the broader social discourse’. Subcultures are not ‘things’, nor are they equivalent to their participants. They are patterns of doing and participants’ understandings of that doing, situated in various contexts. In prioritizing contextualized meaning and doing, symbolic interactionism offers a useful perspective for understanding how scenes around the world ‘do’ music subcultures in their local settings, as well as which communication interlocks facilitate their spread.

References Allaste, A.-A. (2006). Drug Cultures in Estonia: Contexts, Meanings and Patterns of Illicit Drug Use. Tallinn: Tallinn University Press. Amenta, E. (2013). ‘Failure Is Not an Option’. Mobilizing Ideas website. Available online: https://mobi​lizi​ngid​eas.wordpr​ess.com/2013/12/02/fail​ure-is-not-an-opt​ion (accessed 20 February 2022). Arnold, D. O. (1970). The Sociology of Subcultures. Berkeley, CA: Glendessary. Becker, H. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. London: Free Press. Bennett, A. (1999). ‘Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste’. Sociology, 33(3): 599–617. Bennett, A. (2011). ‘The Post-Subcultural Turn: Some Reflections 10 Years On’. Journal of Youth Studies, 15(5): 493–506. Bennett, A. (2013). Music, Style and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Bennett, A., and P. Hodkinson, eds (2012). Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity. Oxford: Berg. Bennett, A., and K. Kahn-Harris, eds (2004). After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave. Bennett, A., and R. A. Peterson, eds (2004). Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Blackman, S. (2014). ‘Subculture Theory: An Historical and Contemporary Assessment of the Concept for Understanding Deviance’. Deviant Behavior, 35(6): 496–512. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bobel, C., and S. Kwan, eds. (2011). Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

27

28

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Budiman, M., Y. D. N. Mangoenkoesoemo, P. A. Wardhani and N. A. Utami (2012). ‘New Enemy of the State: Youth in Post-New Order Indonesia’. In W. Hofmeister (ed.), Youth: Future Agents of Change or Guardians of Establishment? (pp. 51–68). Singapore: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. Burt, C. (1925). The Young Delinquent. London: University of London Press. Caramanica, J. (2017). ‘The Rowdy World of Rap’s New Underground’. New York Times, 22 June. Available online: http://www.nyti​mes.com/2017/06/22/arts/music/sou​ndcl​ oud-rap-lil-pump-smo​kepu​rrp-xxxte​ntac​ion.html?login=smartl​ock&auth=loginsmartl​ock (accessed 15 March 2019). Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent Boys. New York: Free Press. Cohen, S. ([1972] 2011). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers. London: Routledge. Crenshaw, K. (1989). ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’. University of Chicago Legal Forum, special issue: Feminism in the Law: Theory, Practice and Criticism. University of Chicago Law School, pp. 139–68. Critcher, C., ed. (2003). Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the Media. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Davis, J. R. (2006). ‘Growing Up Punk: Negotiating Aging Identity in a Local Music Scene’. Symbolic Interaction, 29(1): 63–9. Driver, C. (2011). ‘Embodying Hardcore: Rethinking Subcultural Authenticities’. Journal of Youth Studies, 14(8): 975–90. Drott, E. (2015). ‘Resistance and Social Movements’. In J. Shepherd and K. Devine (eds), The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music (pp. 171–9). New York: Routledge. Durkheim, É. ([1895] 1982). The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. Dyck, K. (2017). Reichsrock: The International Web of White-Power and Neo-Nazi Hate Music. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Fine, G. A. (2012). Tiny Publics: A Theory of Group Action and Culture. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Fine, G. A., and S. Kleinman (1979). ‘Rethinking Subculture: An Interactionist Analysis’. American Journal of Sociology, 85(1): 1–20. Fogarty, M. (2012). ‘Breaking Expectations: Imagined Affinities in Mediated Youth Cultures’. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 26(3): 449–62. Giffort, D. M. (2011). ‘Show or Tell? Feminist Dilemmas and Implicit Feminism at Girls’ Rock Camp’. Gender & Society, 25(5): 569–88. Gintsburg, S. (2013). ‘Yo! I’ll Spit My Rap for Y’all … in Darija: Local and Global in Moroccan Hip Hop Culture’. In M. Benítez, C. Miller, J. de Ruiter and Y. Tamer (eds), Evolution Des Pratiques Et Des Représentations Langagières (pp. 189–206). Paris: L’Harmattan. Goode, E., and N. Ben-Yahuda ([1994] 2009). Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Goodyer, I. (2009). Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock against Racism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

Grácio, R. (2016). ‘Daughters of Rock and Moms Who Rock: Rock Music as a Medium for Family Relationships in Portugal’. Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 109: 83–104. Haenfler, R. (2012). ‘“More Than the X’s on My Hands”: Older Straight Edgers and the Meaning of Style’. In A. Bennett and P. Hodkinson (eds), Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity (pp. 9–23). Oxford: Berg. Haenfler, R. (2014). Subcultures: The Basics. New York: Routledge. Haenfler, R. (2018). ‘The Entrepreneurial (Straight) Edge: How Participation in DIY Music Cultures Translates to Work and Careers’. Cultural Sociology, 12(2): 174–92. Haenfler, R., E. Jones and B. Johnson (2012). ‘Lifestyle Movements: Exploring the Intersection of Lifestyle and Social Movements’. Social Movement Studies, 11(1): 1–20. Hall, S., and T. Jefferson, eds (1976). Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. London: HarperCollins. Hall, S., C. Critcher, T. Jefferson, J. Clarke and B. Roberts (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Methuen. Hardy, A., A. Bennett and B. Robards, eds (2018). Neo-Tribes: Consumption, Leisure and Tourism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Hill Collins, P. (2019). Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hodkinson, P. (2012). ‘The Collective Ageing of a Goth Festival’. In P. Hodkinson and A. Bennett (eds), Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity (pp. 133–45). London: Berg. Hodkinson, P. (2015). ‘Youth Cultures and the Rest of Life: Subcultures, PostSubcultures and Beyond’. Journal of Youth Studies, 19(5): 629–45. Holland, S. (2004). Alternative Femininities: Body, Age and Identity. Oxford: Berg. Hollingworth, S. (2015). ‘Performances of Social Class, Race and Gender through Youth Subculture: Putting Structure Back in to Youth Subcultural Studies’. Journal of Youth Studies, 18(10): 1237–56. Jensen, S. O. (2018). ‘Towards a Neo-Birminghamian Conception of Subculture? History, Challenges and Future Potentials’. Journal of Youth Studies, 21(4): 405–21. Khabeer, S. A. (2016). Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. New York: New York University Press. Kidder, J. (2012). ‘Parkour, the Affective Appropriation of Urban Space and the Real/ Virtual Dialectic’. City & Community, 11(3): 229–53. Kidula, J. N. (2012). ‘The Local and Global in Kenyan Rap and Hip Hop Culture’. In E. Charry (ed.), Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World (pp. 171– 86). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kruse, H. (1993). ‘Subcultural Identity in Alternative Music Culture’. Popular Music, 121: 31–43. Laing, D. (1985). One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Lee, S. S., and R. A. Peterson (2004). ‘Internet-Based Virtual Music Scenes: The Case of P2 in Alt.Country Music’. In A. Bennett and R. A. Peterson (eds), Music

29

30

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual (pp. 187–204). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Linnemann, T., and B. McClanahan (2017). ‘From “Filth” and “Insanity” to “Peaceful Moral Watchdogs”: Police, News Media and the Gang Label’. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 13(3): 295–313. Maffesoli, M. (1996). The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage. Moore, R. (2010). Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music, Youth Culture and Social Crisis. New York: New York University Press. Moynihan, C. (2019). ‘Heavy Metal Confronts Its Nazi Problem’. New Yorker, 19 February. Muggleton, D. (2000). Inside Subculture: The Post-Modern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Berg. Nguyen, M. T. (2013). ‘Riot Grrrl, Race and Revival’. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 22(2–3): 173–96. O’Connor, A. (2003). ‘Anarcho-Punk: Local Scenes and International Networks’. Journal of Anarchist Studies, 11(2): 111–21. Paris, J., and M. Ault (2004). ‘Subcultures and Political Resistance’. Peace Review, 16(4): 403–7. Pavlidis, A., and S. Fullagar (2012). ‘Becoming Roller Derby Grrrls: Exploring the Gendered Play of Affect in Mediated Sport Cultures’. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 48(6): 673–88. Pilkington, H., and E. Omel’chenko (2013). ‘Regrounding Youth Cultural Theory (in Post-Socialist Youth Cultural Practice)’. Sociology Compass, 7(3): 208–24. Portwood-Stacer, L. (2013). Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism. London: Bloomsbury. Ramirez, M. (2018). Destined for Greatness: Passions, Dreams and Aspirations in a College Music Town. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Redhead, S., D. Wynne and J. O’Connor, eds (1997). The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell. Rosenthal, R., and R. Flacks (2012). Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Schippers, M. (2000). ‘The Social Organization of Sexuality and Gender in Alternative Hard Rock: An Analysis of Intersectionality’. Gender & Society, 14(6): 747–64. The Sentencing Project (2018). ‘Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System’. Available online: https://www.senten​cing​proj​ect. org/publi​cati​ons/un-rep​ort-on-rac​ial-disp​arit​ies (accessed 4 December 2019). Shank, B. (1994). Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. London: Wesleyan University Press. Shildrick, T. (2006). ‘In Defence of Subculture: Young People, Leisure and Social Divisions’. Journal of Youth Studies, 9(2): 125–40. Stewart, F. (2017). Punk Rock Is My Religion: Straight Edge Punk and ‘Religious’ Identity. London: Routledge. Stolte, J., G. A. Fine and K. Cook (2001). ‘Sociological Miniaturism: Seeing the Big through the Small in Social Psychology’. Annual Review of Sociology, 27: 387–413.

The Past, Present and Future of Subculture

Straw, W. (1991). ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music’. Cultural Studies, 5(3): 368–88. Street, J. (2012). Music and Politics. Malden, MA: Polity. Taylor, J. (2012). ‘Performances of Post-youth Sexual Identities in Queer Scenes’. In P. Hodkinson and A. Bennett (eds), Ageing and Youth Cultures: Music, Style and Identity (pp. 24–36). Oxford: Berg. Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity. Thrasher, F. (1927). The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wallach, J. (2008). ‘Living the Punk Lifestyle in Jakarta’. Ethnomusicology, 52(1): 98–116. Wallach, J. (2014). ‘Indieglobalization and the Triumph of Punk in Indonesia’. In B. Laushua, K. Spracklen and S. Wagg (eds), Sounds and the City: Popular Music, Place and Globalization (pp. 148–61). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. West, C., and D. Zimmerman (1987). ‘Doing Gender’. Gender & Society, 1(2): 125–51. Whiteley, S., and S. Rambarran, eds (2016). The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality. New York: Oxford University Press. Whyte, W. F. (1943). Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, J. P. (2011). Subcultural Theory: Traditions and Concepts. Malden, MA: Polity. Williams, J. P., and E. Hannerz (2014). ‘Articulating the “Counter” in Subcultural Studies’. M/C Journal, 17(6). Available online: https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.912. Woodman, D., and A. Bennett (2015). ‘Cultures, Transitions and Generations: The Case for a New Youth Studies’. In D. Woodman and A. Bennett (eds), Youth Cultures, Transitions and Generations: Bridging the Gap in Youth Research (pp. 1–15). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Woodman, D., and J. Wyn (2015). Youth and Generation: Rethinking Change and Inequality in the Lives of Young People. London: Sage. Worley, M. (2017). No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worley, M., K. Gildart, A. Gough-Yates, S. Lincoln, B. Osgerby, L. Robinson, J. Street and P. Webb. (2015). ‘Introduction: From Protest to Resistance’. In The Subcultures Network (ed.), Fight Back: Punk, Politics and Resistance (pp. 1–10). Manchester: Manchester University Press.

31

32

2 ‘The Post-Subculturalist’: Some critical reflections over twenty years on David Muggleton

Following this new introduction is an abridged version of ‘The Post-Subculturalist’ (hereafter TPS). The full original essay was first published as a theoretical chapter contribution to The Clubcultures Reader (1997) and was subsequently adapted for my book Inside Subculture (2000; hereafter IS). The latter is widely regarded as one of several texts instrumental in laying the foundations for what became known as post-subcultural theory (hereafter PST);1 hence, the critical reception of TPS can be properly understood only through its relationship with both IS and PST. I shall argue in this introduction that critiques of PST were either misplaced or mistaken in regard to TPS and IS and that two main causes underpinned such flawed reasoning. First, that general critiques of such a diverse body of work as PST risk lacking relevance to those specific texts, such as IS, at which they were directed – a cumulative effect of what Bennett (2011: 500) called ‘the danger of drawing universal messages … on the basis of isolated case studies’. Second, that specific critiques of IS misunderstood the ideal-type methodology that underpinned its analysis, even to the extent that the theoretical model constructed through TPS was conflated with the empirical reality it was designed to clarify and test. The Clubcultures Reader, in which TPS debuted, was edited by Steve Redhead with Derek Wynne and Justin O’Connor. All three had been associated with the Manchester Institute of Popular Culture (MIPC) at Manchester Metropolitan University, and my connection with them and their institute was not entirely serendipitous. I was at that time a postgraduate student not so many miles away in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, undertaking my doctoral dissertation ‘Crossover Counterculture: Postmodernism and Alternative Style’. TPS had been composed in

34

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

early 1993 as an entirely theoretical component to that thesis. It synthesized ideas from contemporary theories on postmodern culture to formulate a statement of the possible features exhibited by a postmodern subculture, should such a phenomenon exist. TPS as a title was indebted to Steve Redhead’s (1990) use of Iain Chambers’s concept of the ‘post-subcultural’, and in late 1993 I instigated a meeting with Steve at MIPC, where he was then co-director. I took with me a paper copy of TPS (this being in the days before digital copies of academic papers were easily produced), about which Steve was very positive, promising to include it in one of the future MIPC publications. This, the first of numerous visits to Manchester, also led to fruitful crossfertilization of ideas between me and MIPC postgraduates, and I went on to present a paper on subculture at the MIPC ‘Shouts from the Street’ international conference on popular culture in September 1995. That era was, significantly, the tail end of the ‘Madchester’ scene: an MDMA-fuelled indie rock, dance music and football fandom crossover-counterculture, which had germinated from Factory Records and the Hacienda Club in the late 1980s. The first book in the MIPC Popular Cultural Studies series was appropriately entitled Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture (1993) and comprised papers that had been inspired by a postgraduate research seminar. Steve Redhead, as editor of this collection, was attempting to produce a postmodern version of Resistance through Rituals (1976). That seminal text had first appeared in 1975 as a collection of working papers, mostly by postgraduate students in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, and formed part of what I termed ‘the CCCS approach’ to youth subcultural analysis.2 Although Rave Off and the subsequent publications in the Popular Cultural Studies series did not, in themselves, achieve the academic impact of Resistance through Rituals or other works in the CCCS canon, most notably, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Hebdige 1979), Manchester fashioned one further force in the growing post-subcultural alliance that was to successfully challenge the hegemony of Birmingham. The year 2000 saw an amended but clearly recognizable version of TPS incorporated into the third chapter of IS. This book arose out of my doctoral thesis, revised firstly to accentuate its reliance on Max Weber’s concept of the ideal-type as a deliberately onesided focus on social phenomena, and secondly to take account of recently published studies that had demonstrated affinities with my own, all of which were regarded as taking a postmodern or post-subcultural turn towards youth cultures and club cultures. Names in connection with that burgeoning body of work, and with whom I had been in contact, included Sarah Thornton (1995), who remobilized Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital as ‘subcultural capital’ to appreciate how clubbers subjectively create forms of distinction between what they regard as authentic and inauthentic forms of dance music; Ben Malbon (1999), who undertook an ethnographic study of clubbing underpinned by Michel Maffesoli’s concept of the fluid ‘neo-tribe’; and Steven Miles (2000), who preferred

‘The Post-Subculturalist’

to conceptualize youth in terms of ‘consumer lifestyles’. All three authors in their different ways thus took issue with the theoretically driven, conceptually rigid and commerce-free presentation of authentic subcultural resistance in the CCCS approach. From my attendance at a ‘Post-Subcultural Studies’ conference in Vienna in 2001 came The Post-Subcultures Reader, co-edited with conference host Rupert Weinzierl and published in 2003. The following year saw the emergence of another closely aligned edited volume, Andy Bennett and Keith Kahn-Harris’s After Subculture, the inspiration for which – a British Sociological Association Youth Study Group seminar of 1999 – had run parallel to but separate from my own involvement in the field. And so out of this disparate confluence of ideas and wide-ranging networks was born the new paradigm of PST. Soon afterwards began a series of sharp skirmishes between its defenders and detractors, mostly played out in the United Kingdom in the Journal of Youth Studies. I was at the time satisfied that IS had served its intended purpose, but not because the book had exhausted all possible avenues of inquiry; on the contrary, as a specific case study with a small data set (Bennett 2011), it provided a deliberately limited response to a specific, localized target: the aforementioned 1970s CCCS approach. The Post-Subcultures Reader, on the other hand, with its international focus and consideration of issues of class, race, youth politics and protest formations, had so far expanded the academic parameters as to problematize my construction of any coherent response to a set of critiques that positioned both texts under the same paradigmatic label. This led to my subsequent statement (Muggleton 2005a) that PST was far less clearly defined by what it was than by what it was a reaction to – the work of the CCCS. The CCCS approach has, in turn, been asserted by its advocators as ‘never a unified set of ideas’ (Griffin 2011: 245). Paul Hodkinson (2016: 632), although in partial concord with Griffin on this issue, argues nonetheless that ‘diverse bodies of work can retain clear prevailing orientations whose critique remains a legitimate exercise’. I would concur with this point in principle. Yet Bennett (2011: 496) posits the question as to whether PST is a ‘fragmented discourse’, and I would suggest that it is one to the degree not only that some charges against it can appear ‘broad-brush’ (Hodkinson 2016: 635) but that certain critiques could be considered misplaced. The suggestion that PST overlooks questions of youth politics, protest and power (Blackman 2005), for example, is one that should have its validity measured against the inclusion of those very issues in The Post-Subcultures Reader. Such assessments not only depend ‘on what does or does not count as “post-subcultural” ’ (Hodkinson 2016: 635) but require a clarification of what is entailed by the term. We then risk creating general formulations that can lack precise application to specific texts written for quite particular purposes and so render the whole operation problematic. It is therefore not my intention in the remainder of this introduction to revisit the PST debate as a whole; I will instead focus on two particular critiques of the paradigm in order to demonstrate their misplaced or mistaken status as they specifically

35

36

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

pertain to TPS and IS. The first is that PST marginalizes questions of how material and structural inequalities impact upon youth cultural formations (Shildrick and MacDonald 2006). I shall then examine one further aspect of this: what has been termed ‘the troubled relationship with class’ (Griffin 2011: 251) exhibited by many post-subcultural researchers. The second critique is that the emphasis placed by PST on the fragmented, fleeting and hybrid nature of contemporary youth subcultures has led to the elevation of individual creativity over the social group to the extent that the resultant analyses are ‘a celebration of isolation’ (Blackman 2014: 507). I shall then engage with the related claim that this problem is symptomatic of post-subcultural researchers being too eager to reject the concept of subculture for alternatives such as neo-tribe. That PST pays less attention to social divisions than its detractors would wish is unsurprising given that it is firmly predicated upon postmodern cultural concepts that place emphasis on consumer reflexivity rather than the structural features of labour markets. However, I would agree with Bennett (2011) that, despite this core assumption, there is nothing intrinsic to PST that inhibits an investigation into social structures, and I did not deny that material factors are implicated in the development of subcultures. This was not, however, the remit of IS, where a calculated decision was made to ‘ideal-typically’ bracket such matters out of the equation so as to focus on the cultural sensibilities of its subcultural sample. The argument by Shildrick and MacDonald (2006: 129) that such an absence ‘weakens the case’ for the credibility of the establishment of a field of youth studies therefore rests upon their misrecognition of the explicit role of the ideal-type, particularly given their claim that a combined focus on structure and culture would enable ‘a proper, holistic understanding’ of the topic (126). For while such an undertaking might broaden one aspect of youth research in the direction of the interests of the researchers, it is not possible to be holistically exhaustive because ‘whatever event or situation we may investigate, its infinity ensures that we must always ignore certain of its features as not pertinent to the values in question’ (Hindess 1977: 32). Not examining material inequality in IS was not therefore an unconscious bias of the ‘boys’ own blinkers’ type (Griffin 2011: 248) that led the male researchers of the CCCS to marginalize females by placing males at the centre of their youth subcultural theory.3 Hence, to imply that IS was improper in not giving the desired prominence to material factors is not unlike criticizing a car for not being able to fly despite the manufacturer’s explicit warning that it was not designed for such a purpose. Nor was IS ‘ready to ignore any potential influence of class background on youth subculture’ (Shildrick and MacDonald 2006: 129; original emphasis), although my conclusions on the relationship between subcultural membership and social class were cautious and limited, largely because the majority of respondents did not hold clear, specific subcultural affiliations, while some were also visually difficult to classify in semiotic terms. Information on the backgrounds of some

‘The Post-Subculturalist’

participants was also not detailed enough to allocate them to precise social classes, while those who were unemployed or in casual and part-time work tended to have relatively high reserves of cultural capital. Nonetheless, IS did at least offer up an empirical assessment of a mixed-class background of youth subcultures, this being in favourable contrast to the general lack of first-hand empirical data in the CCCS approach, which led it to theoretically impute a pure working-class subcultural membership. The only ‘trouble’ I had in my relationship with class in IS was therefore the difficulty in correlating it to subcultural affiliation, but the issue of the majority of my research participant sample resisting unambiguous subcultural identifications brings me to the second of the two critiques. This goes beyond the first critique in that not only is PST seen to divorce structure from culture but the postmodern concepts favoured in such analyses understand subcultures to have been transformed from stable, meaningful and authentic forms of youthful resistance to fluid, fragmented, amorphous entities characterized by superficiality, individuality and consumer hedonism. It was obviously necessary that subcultures, or more accurately post-subcultures, were portrayed in TPS through this latter set of postmodern features, for TPS was constructed as a theoretical model to generate two sets of ideal-typical subcultural traits – one modern, the other postmodern – to enable an empirical examination as to which set an actual sample of subcultural members more closely approximated. The relationship of TPS to IS was that the case study chapters of the latter were a test of the hypotheses generated by the former. And the empirical analysis discovered that the most hyperbolically extreme of the postmodern hypothesized traits – that subcultures were defined by depthless and free-floating styles with no rules and no authenticity and were subject to rapid change – were found to be invalid. As a review of IS put it, the ‘readiness to throw out hypotheses that fail to match with the interviews is refreshing’ (Booker 2001: 112). This precise relationship between theoretical conjecture and empirical data was also meticulously outlined in an A-level textbook summary: ‘Muggleton rejects more extreme versions of postmodernism because he found no evidence that subculturalists had a superficial attitude … or frequently changed identity’ (Haralambos and Holborn 2008: 780). Yet critics of PST were more often than not confused about this crucial connection between theory and findings. Blackman (2005, 2014) was culpable in quoting passages from IS, originally in TPS, on the aforementioned extreme – and ultimately falsified – postmodern traits as if they were factual assertions on my part rather than ideal-typical formulations.4 By this means he then argues that ‘it is not a case of no rules as Muggleton suggests’ because the mods and punks in the case studies ‘conform to precise subcultural regulations’ (Blackman 2005: 10). Yet he presents this as an implicit disjunction or contradiction in the book rather than an explicit outcome of its empirical testing of theory. Having nonetheless drawn attention to the fact that subculturalists in IS fail to demonstrate certain of the postmodern traits that

37

38

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

he mobilizes as a critique of PST, while further acknowledging that some members identify with rule-bound named groupings, Blackman then states that IS ‘insists on an individualistic appreciation of subcultures’ (11). Likewise, Gelder (2005: 13) claims that in IS, ‘fragmentation and diffusion are talked up to such an extent that sociality is all but lost’. These invalid critiques, however, bring us to the debate over the continuing use or not of the concept of subculture. In order to combat what was regarded as the static and homogeneous connotations of the concept of subculture, some post-subcultural researchers (e.g. Bennett 1999) turned to alternatives such as neo-tribe, lifestyle and scene. Such terms, it was claimed, could better capture the fluidity and reflexivity that arguably characterize contemporary youth movements. Although IS included a limited acknowledgement of such terms, its analysis depended on the continued use of subculture and the associated concept of counterculture but, crucially, mobilized as ideal-types. It is certainly the case that the participant sample interviewed for the book had ways of emphasizing their ‘distinctive individuality’, but this was no isolation from or dissolution of their social bonds, as was explained at length in pages 63–9 of IS, and this was only partly because some identified as punk, mod or gothic. For though the tendency was to qualify, negotiate or even resist such specific affiliations, those who did so could nonetheless express commitment to some form of socially shared identity even if to a ‘liminal subculture’ (e.g. ‘punk-ish’) or a ‘crossover counterculture’ (e.g. ‘alternative’). This brings the sample closer than critics have been willing to acknowledge to certain indicators of group ‘substance’ devised by Paul Hodkinson (2002) to demonstrate those ‘collective features’ of youth cultures ‘not accounted for by an emphasis on post-subcultural fluidity alone and broadly coherent with … facets of subcultural theory’ (Hodkinson 2016: 634). It is indicative that Hodkinson, defender of subcultural substance, contributed to both After Subculture and The Post-Subcultures Reader. It might be instructive to add that in stressing the lack of unification in either the CCCS approach or PST, academics are engaging in a process analogous to how subcultural members resist rigid, homogeneous identifications. This does not, however, entail a negation of the latter’s wider subcultural networks, liminal or otherwise, any more than the aforementioned protestations of academics mean that the CCCS never existed as a specifically located named collective or that a corpus of work that took a post-subcultural turn could not be broadly identified. If any irony was present in my suggestion that ‘the future of the subcultural concept is rather more secure than has often been suggested by those seeking to (over) state the postmodern case’ (Muggleton 2005a: 217), it was not in the way that Shildrick and MacDonald (2006) interpreted it, for it was merely a reassertion of arguments already clearly present in IS but which its critics failed to apprehend. Nor therefore was it an attempt ‘to bring about consensus within the subcultural debate’ as Blackman (2014: 507) thought, although such a move would

‘The Post-Subculturalist’

not have been unwelcome and admirable attempts at reconciliation have been made by Bennett (2011) and Hodkinson (2016). TPS facilitated the following finding: that while subcultures were decidedly more fluid and less rigid than had been theorized in the CCCS approach, they did not exhibit any of the more extreme, overblown postmodern features theoretically attributed to them. It is difficult to see how such a ‘balanced’ (Bennett and KahnHarris 2004: 12) and, frankly, unsurprising conclusion attracted so much controversy and misplaced critique.

The Post-Subculturalist What follows is the abridged version of the chapter originally published in S. Redhead, D. Wynne and J. O’Connor’s The Clubcultures Reader. It explores the implications of the postmodern for spectacular subcultural style and is in large part a review of other writers’ assertions followed by my own deductions about possible occurrences made on the basis of such arguments. As noted above at the start of the new introduction, TPS was written and published prior to my book IS, in which many of the theoretical claims below were empirically tested through interviews with spectacular stylists.5

The paradoxes of modernity: ‘From modern styles to postmodern codes’ Despite those theories (Bell 1976) that stress the contradictory relationship between a rational economy organized on the basis of efficiency and a hedonistic culture ruled by the principle of self-gratification, it is possible to posit puritan-rationalism and romantic-hedonism as contrasting cultural traditions of modernity locked together in a symbiotic relationship; for according to Campbell (1987: 227), ‘The cultural logic of modernity is not merely that of rationality as expressed in the activities of calculation and experiment; it is also that of passion, and the creative dream born of longing.’ While the sphere of modern hedonistic consumption obtains its dynamic from pietistic puritanism, romanticism and an ethic of sensibility, the origins of modern production lie in ascetic puritanism, founded upon rationalization, utilitarianism and regulation. The rational precepts of production thus appear Apollonian in character compared to the Dionysian dynamics of consumption. As Berman (1987) realizes, it is a paradox which is the key to the understanding of modernity, for every set of concepts contains within itself the germination of its opposite. It is this sense of paradox which allows us to comprehend how a unificatory, rationalist and foundationalist Enlightenment modernity could provide the driving forces of disintegration which lie behind modernization – the growth and

39

40

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

development of industrialization, science, technology and urbanization associated with unprecedented levels of rapid social change and the sweeping away of traditional economic and cultural structures where ‘all that is solid melts into air’. The series of contrasts implicated here, between stasis and dynamism, unificatory and fragmentary, rationalist and aesthetic, puritan and hedonistic, are particularly pronounced within the paradoxical phenomenon we call fashion. On the one hand, such upheavals and dislocations, the rapid pace of change in both the spheres of production and consumption, have defined an insecure epoch of modernity in direct opposition to the stability, certitude and predictability of traditional society. As Wilson (1985: 10) puts it, ‘The colliding dynamism, the thirst for change and the heightened sensation that characterize the city societies particularly of modern industrial capitalism go up to make this modernity, and the hysteria and exaggeration of fashion well express it.’ But, on the other hand, if Wilson sees a congruence between this ‘aesthetic modernity’ and the phenomenon of fashion, there is the other modernity: a modernity of certainty, universalism and immutability built upon bedrock principles of rationality, science and technological progress, and opposing the pre-modern ‘irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition’ (Harvey 1991: 12). It was this ‘Enlightenment modernity’ which was the provider of the dominant conceptions of modern fashion in the period from the late nineteenth century until the 1960s. Yet it is precisely this dominant conception of Enlightenment modernity from which the postmodern is said to herald a break. For when viewed from the perspective of a paradoxical modernity, postmodern dress articulates its increasing detachment from Enlightenment precepts, while displaying an intensification of those traits which characterized aesthetic modernity along with its burgeoning consumer culture, and which stretched to embrace the alternative history of modernism. In contrast to a modernism of purity, functionality and utilitarianism, to be fashionable in postmodernism is therefore to involve oneself in aesthetic play, with the focus on hedonism, pleasure and spectacle, ‘a return to ornament, decoration and stylistic eclecticism’ (Connor 1991: 191). Wilson (1985: 11), in agreement, acknowledges how ‘fashion does appear to express such a fragmented sensibility particularly well – its obsession with surface, novelty and style for style’s sake highly congruent with this sort of post-modernist aesthetic’. Contemporary debates have also cited the development of flexible forms of technology and the associated shift from Fordist to post-Fordist production techniques as responsible for an increasing acceleration in the emergence of new fashions; turnover time in consumption has speeded up correspondingly as consumers have eagerly availed themselves of this ever-expanding emporium of styles. Yet, in addition to expansionism, the decline of Fordism also entails the fragmentation of mass identities (Lash and Urry 1988) – the paradoxical proliferation of disintegration characteristic of aesthetic modernity. With the advent of specialized consumption and market segmentation, lifestyle enclaves are said to be losing their correspondence

‘The Post-Subculturalist’

to, and indeed superseding as a basis for social stratification, modernist grids of class, gender, age and ethnicity (Crook, Pakuliski and Waters 1992; Evans and Thornton 1989; Nixon 1992). ‘Modernist styles’, once firmly structured along these traditional lines of demarcation, become ‘postmodernist codes’ (Jameson 1991) available for the pleasure of the (apparently ironic, reflexive and knowing) postmodern consumer who wishes to construct his or her own identity through the wearing of stylistic ‘masks’ (Jameson 1985: 114). The prevailing mood of the times is best captured through the slogans of Ewen and Ewen (1982: 249–51): ‘Today there is no fashion, only fashions’, ‘No rules, only choices’, ‘Everyone can be anyone’. As evidence of these changes, Evans and Thornton (1989: 59) chart how ‘since the decline in the 1960s of a seasonal “look” of which women could be sure, mainstream fashion has deliberately constructed itself as a variety of “looks”. But in the 1980s the turnover of looks speeded up hysterically’. Connor (1991: 191) also views the 1960s as being something of a watershed, citing ‘the abundant multiplicity of styles and accelerated rhythm of fashion from the prosperous years of the 1960s onwards’. Similarly, for Wilson (1990: 223), ‘the “confusion” that so puzzled fashion writers in the 1970s, the apparent ending of the orderly evolution of one style out of another, is explicable once it is seen as part of postmodernism’. Kaiser, Nagasawa and Hutton (1991: 183) claim that now even the last bastions of puritanism are susceptible to a decorative impulse: The tendency towards a breakdown of conventional rules may be found in a much more limited extent in the American business world … Even in some professional contexts, in a subtle manner within conventional bounds, men as well as women seem to have more freedom (if they are so inclined) to experiment with color and accessories (for example, braces or suspenders for men, brightly colored suits for women).

Our views of modern mainstream fashion consumption tend to be defined negatively against what is perceived to be the active consumer of postmodernity. Certainly, given the dominant conception of modern fashion as uniform, massified and predictable, it is easy to understand how it might be consumed passively: that is, for outfits to be taken over wholesale without the need for much symbolic creativity by consumers. One might think here of the mass-produced ready-to-wear suit or the costume with matching accessories. Of course, the aesthetic tendencies of modernity imply a potential over time for increased complexity of arrangements and changes in the meanings attached to particular clothing constructs, and one suspects that, in practice, consumers often fulfilled this potential. If we persist, however, in an ideal-typical analysis, then modernist appearance-management would tend towards the uncomplicated, the utilitarian and the functional. In semiotic terms, the codes associated with particular forms of dress would be relatively unambiguous and tied unproblematically to particular contexts: in other words, the mode of signification would be realist. ‘Postmodern capitalism, however, problematizes this flight’

41

42

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

(171). This problematization has at its root what might be termed the postmodern expansion of eclecticism: a wider variety of styles now travels at a faster rate than ever before, giving active consumers greater scope for their creative and aesthetic outlets. The result is ‘a promotion of do-it-yourself style’, where ‘postmodern appearance management may be compared with the formal technique of collage’ (173–4). While the decoding of modernist style was facilitated by its univocality – a limited availability of signifiers and a stable anchorage in a particular time-space context – it was also assisted by the firm demarcation of specific social groups, each with its own style boundaries, for modernity was an era of clearly differentiated, yet internally homogeneous, collectivities. Postmodernity, however, appears to entail the inverse of this process; internal fragmentation has reached such proportions that the boundaries between established cultural collectivities appear to be breaking down – this is what Lash (1990) has referred to as ‘de-differentiation’, a reversal of the modernist tendency towards the differentiation of cultural spheres. Perhaps this de-differentiating movement is responsible for what some observers claim is a tendency for designer, retail and street/subcultural styles to merge: a contemporary use of fashion which pays no heed to the once firm and established divisions between high, mainstream and low (Evans and Thornton 1989). This, if true, is a useful example of how a surfeit of signs and a breaking down of boundaries might problematize the way in which social groups use style as a means of classification and demarcation – a point made by Featherstone (1992). As differentiated unities are replaced by a similarity of difference, appearance perception becomes a hazardous undertaking, an ever-increasing number of interpretations being possible. If modern mainstream fashion is ‘readerly’, then Kaiser, Nagasawa and Hutton (1991: 174) would appear to see postmodernist style as analogous to Barthes’s (1975) ‘writerly’ text, where ‘signifiers, it seems, hold a certain privilege over what is signified’.

Subcultural style: From the grand narratives of modernity to hyperfragmentation in the postmodern global village At the visible level of spectacular style, the studies of youth subcultures that came out of the ‘Birmingham School’ (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; Mungham and Pearson 1976; Willis 1978) stressed the subculture’s active appropriation and transformation of signs through the subversive act of bricolage, contrasting this by implication with the passive consumption of mainstream fashion and, hence, dominant identities by conventional youth culture. Thus, although the wholesale adoption of modern mainstream fashion seems to be defined in contrast to the active and creative postmodern consumer, it also provides the norm of passive conformity to dominant modes against which the acts of bricolage by modern youth subculturalists

‘The Post-Subculturalist’

were a form of resistance. Before considering the implications of the postmodern for youth subcultural styles, it is therefore necessary to emphasize how there is much about this neo-Marxist theory which is derived from the precepts of an Enlightenment modernity: its emancipatory metanarrative which claims to provide a scientific analysis of society – hence its assumed authority to speak on behalf of the excluded Other rather than trust the voices of the subculturalists themselves; its totalizing conception of the social formation within which the specific element under study must be reinstated; the sense of linear time along which these successive subcultures are seen to unfold; the portrayal of subcultures as externally differentiated yet internally homogeneous collectivities, existing in clear opposition to each other and to conventional style. Yet while this modernist neo-Marxist paradigm is predicated upon a depth model of the social formation from which a whole host of subcultural oppositions were derived – essence/appearance, unobservable/phenomenal, production/consumption, authentic/manufactured, style-as-resistance/styleas-fashion, subcultural/conventional, value/image and so on – postmodernity collapses these oppositions. In particular, it undercuts them by problematizing the distinction between representations and reality. For while Marxism was concerned to stress the misleading character of appearances, what is privileged in postmodernity is the absolute power of image. One might begin here with Jameson’s (1991: 48) reference to ‘a society of the image or the simulacrum’, then consider Lash’s (1990) contention that communication in postmodernity is becoming increasingly figural as opposed to the discursive nature of modernity, before arriving at our final destination, the wholly artificial yet all-encompassing, hermetically sealed, computer-generated world of virtual reality, prophesied by Kroker and Cook (1991) as the logical conclusion to the encroachment of the visual into the province of the real. The increasingly central role of the visual media as an image bank from which knowledge of fashion is derived has not gone unnoticed by sociologists and cultural commentators alike (McRobbie 1989; Savage 1989; Willis 1990). Television (particularly MTV), video and style magazines – ID, Blitz and the Face – which are primarily visual rather than textual in their impact, are most usually quoted as the postmodern paradigm case. As Evans and Thornton (1989: 60) tellingly comment, ‘At the heart of the new magazines was the idea that identity (ID) is forged by appearance.’ Here, we might discern the homogenizing impulse of such a scenario: the progressive obliteration of cultural difference following the weakening of local powers of resistance to the inexorable stylistic globalizing processes of the mediascape. Yet an aesthetic, fragmentary tendency is clearly detectable in Jameson (1985: 27), particularly his use of Lacan’s notion of schizophrenia to express a form of postmodern sensibility, ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’. Such an emphasis fits well, claims Harvey (1991: 285, 291), with the ‘ephemerality’, ‘instantaneity’, ‘disposability’ and volatility which are said to typify postmodern ‘fashions, products

43

44

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

[and] production techniques’. Therefore, what faces us is not necessarily the stifling of change by an all-encompassing ‘astral empire of signs’ but rather the paradox of a McLuhanian global village of ever-fragmenting fashions, ‘an eclectic blend of cross-cultural commodities’ (Kaiser 1990: 406), which forces into prominence the proclivities of consumers to become sartorial bricoleurs. As commodity production, exchange and creative appropriation intensify, signs travel towards the point at which they become irrevocably divorced from their original cultural contexts. Style is now worn for its look, not for any underlying message; or rather, the look is now the message. As the above discussion has indicated, narrative meaning is also intimately bound up with questions of temporality. Lyotard’s grands récits are a testament to the optimism of the Enlightenment project with its progressive notion of history. At an individual and personal level, the deferment of gratification and the construction of lifelong narratives are equally symptomatic of this same modernist confidence, investment and faith in the future. It is therefore easy to associate the postmodern fragmentation of these ongoing, linear narratives with the move from the rationality of clock time to instantaneous time where a projection into the future appears neither possible nor desirable. Rather than wait for an empty promise, we are said to ‘want the future now’ (Lash and Urry 1994). Or perhaps, in a postmodern, postindustrial urban wasteland where the atmosphere is heavily charged with apocalyptic fears, hearkening back to a past golden age will always be preferable to existing in a crisis-ridden present. Hence that remarkable surge of contemporary fascination with nostalgia, its visible, stylistic manifestation being that accelerating tendency in the 1980s to ransack history for key items of dress, in a seemingly eclectic and haphazard manner. This instant recall on history, fuelled by the superfluity of images thrown up by the media, has produced a non-stop fashion parade in which ‘different decades are placed together with no historical continuity’ (McRobbie 1989: 23, 40). Such changes have important and far-reaching implications for spectacular stylists. Once, youth subcultures were able to effect ironic transformations of the most unique, visible and excessive aspects of post-war conventional style, only to see these ritualistic responses rendered harmless by their stylistic and ideological incorporation into the mainstream. But as each successive resolution of this dialectical movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis hastens the effacement of the mainstream-subcultural divide, the excessive (now commonplace) no longer retains its power to shock; stylistic heterogeneity has been pushed to its utmost limits as the outward appearance of rebellion becomes merely another mode of fashion. At the point when a sartorial norm no longer exists, subcultural attempts to criticize an existing order through the employment of stylistic parody are likely to miss their mark. This is surely Jameson’s (1985: 115) world of pastiche, ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’.

‘The Post-Subculturalist’

With nothing progressive left to say or do, subcultural stylists draw from and feed off each other in a cannibalistic orgy of cross-fertilization, destroying their own internal boundaries through the very act of expansion. Alternatively, postmodern youth can indulge in what appears to be a form of nostalgic revivalism of a particular style: the teddy boy, mod, skinhead, hippie and punk styles have all made their reappearances in the years since the original punk rock explosion of the mid-to-late 1970s. One must also mention in this context the apparently renewed interest in second-hand dress or retro-style (Carter 1983; McRobbie 1989). And, as a virtual bricolage, a Burroughs cut-up of previous subcultural styles, punk really does seem to have been the historical turning point here. With its inclusion of retro-style elements, its complex clothing collages, the analogy with the poststructuralist writerly text (Hebdige 1979), punk style defies interpretation, ‘refuses meaning’ and is said to herald the subcultural break from modernity to postmodernity. Yet if the post-punk stylistic revivals really are examples of pastiche, then, as Jameson (1991) would have it, they are merely ‘simulacra’, representing nothing more than our ‘pop images’ and ‘cultural stereotypes’ about the past, for the peculiarity of postmodern time has now and for ever more precluded any possibility of subcultural originality. The concept of authenticity must likewise be expunged from the postmodern vocabulary. The all-encompassing power of the contemporary mass media has ensured that there can no longer be a sanctuary for the original, pure, creative moment of subcultural innovation which preceded the onset of the contaminating processes of commercialization, commodification and diffusion. Redhead (1991: 94) appears to be a proponent of a weak version of this thesis, where ‘post-punk subcultures have been characterized by a speeding up of the time between points of “authenticity” and manufacture’. McRobbie (1989: 39), however, proposes a stronger version, whereby ‘the “implosionary” effect of the mass media means that in the 1980s youth styles and fashions are born into the media. There is an “instantaneity” which replaces the old period of subcultural incubation’. Modernist subcultural originality and authenticity are defined in terms of an attempted solution to real historical contradictions, and if postmodern theory is taken at face value, there no longer exists outside of the media any province of the real for subcultural styles to be a cultural response. Following the logic of Baudrillard (1983a, 1983b), if we are indeed no longer consuming commodities but signs, while, furthermore, the referents to which these signs supposedly refer are themselves increasingly comprised of representations, then subcultural styles have become simulacra – copies with no originals. By inscribing visual signs upon their bodies, postmodern youth subculturalists simulate the simulation of the media, becoming mere models themselves. In this implosive move from subcultural production to reproduction, from use-value (authentic-modern) to exchange-value (manufacturedmodern) to sign-value (postmodern), subcultural simulacra not only take on the qualities of the real but become hyperreal as reality is eclipsed. If, following Harvey

45

46

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

(1991), styles become subject to time-space compression, a dislocation from their original temporal-spatial origins, then in the wake of the irrevocable loss of these referents we can no longer experience the real, but ‘live everywhere already in an “aesthetic” hallucination of reality’ (Baudrillard 1983b: 148).

The post-subculturalist? If we do grant complete acceptance to the full implications of the postmodern, then today’s subculturalists are characteristic of Urry’s (1990) figure of the postmodern ‘post-tourist’. In fact, it is probably apt to talk of postmodernity as the era of the postsubculturalist and the fashion tourist. Post-subculturalists no longer have any sense of subcultural authenticity, where inception is rooted in particular sociotemporal contexts and tied to underlying structural relations. Indeed, post-subculturalists will experience all the signs of the subculture of their choosing time and time again through the media, before inscribing these signifiers on their own bodies. Choosing is the operative word here, for post-subculturalists revel in the availability of subcultural choice. While, for example, modernist theory stressed a series of discrete subcultural styles unfolding in linear time up until the late 1970s, the postmodern 1980s and 1990s have been decades of subcultural fragmentation and proliferation, with a glut of revivals, hybrids and transformations, and the coexistence of myriad styles at any one point in time and individual subculturalists moving quickly and freely from one style to another as they wish; indeed, this high degree of sartorial mobility is the source of playfulness and pleasure. They do not have to worry about contradictions between their selected subcultural identities or agonize over the correct mode of dress, since there are no longer any correct interpretations. This is something that all post-subculturalists are aware of, that there are no rules, that there is no authenticity, no reason for ideological commitment, merely a stylistic game to be played. If modern subcultures existed in a state of mutual opposition, with members maintaining strong stylistic and ideological boundaries through expressed comparisons with other such groups, then in postmodernity the need for boundary maintenance becomes negligible as the lines of subcultural demarcation dissolve. We should as a result expect to discover that subcultural followers, who exemplify ephemeral attachments to a variety of styles, find it problematic to make strong comparisons with out-groups. Following the logic of Kellner (1992), we can therefore understand postmodern subcultural identities to be multiple and fluid. Constituted through consumption, subcultural style is no longer articulated around the modernist structuring relations of class, gender, ethnicity or even the age span of youth. Instead, these modernist looks become recycled as free-floating signifiers, enabling subcultural identity to be constructed through the succession of styles that followers try on and cast off.

‘The Post-Subculturalist’

But perhaps the very concept of subculture is becoming less applicable in postmodernity, for it only maintains its specificity with something to define it against. When one compares styles from the periphery of the spectacular and the mainstream, it is, of course, still possible to distinguish visibly subcultural and conventional style. But what happens as we move towards the central meeting point where boundaries erode, and where hyper-differentiation in each of these stylistic spheres produces de-differentiation both of the subcultural and conventional and of once-distinct subcultural styles? For if it is ‘the communication of significant difference’ that is the point of spectacular style (Hebdige 1979: 102; original emphasis), then, as Connor (1991: 195) realizes, ‘such an analysis encounters difficulties when faced with the fact that this visibility of diverse and stylistically distinct groups is part of the official or dominant mode of advertising and the media in the West. Under these circumstances, visibility and self-proclamation may have become a market requirement rather than a mode of liberation’. As Beezer (1992: 113) concludes, ‘Without this surface difference, subcultures slip from view, to the point where their existence can be thrown into question.’ While the postmodern spectacularization of style may eclipse subcultural visibility, is there still an analytical distinction to be drawn? It would appear not. For as we have seen, if modernist subcultures were defined in terms of a series of theoretical oppositions to non-subcultural style, then postmodernity dissolves such distinctions. It might even be the case that the postmodern fragmentation of collective identities has advanced to the point at which spectacular stylists, situated on de-differentiating boundaries, begin to espouse an individualistic rather than a subcultural identity. For a proponent of an optimistic postmodernism, subcultures are just another form of depoliticized play in the postmodern pleasuredome, where emphasis is placed on the surface qualities of the spectacle at the expense of any underlying ideologies of resistance. For post-subculturalists, the trappings of spectacular style are their right of admission to a costume party, a masquerade, a hedonistic escape into a Blitz Culture fantasy characterized by political indifference. I would like to conclude by first reiterating that the traits I identify as constitutive of the postmodern are, by and large, not novel. The view that the genesis of the postmodern can be found in strains of aesthetic modernity directly informs my analysis of subcultural style. While the aesthetic remains largely unexamined in the modernist paradigm as a whole, a more complete analysis would necessitate a focus on the dynamic processes of stylistic and ideological transmission, transformation and fragmentation. A very different picture would then emerge to challenge the modernist paradigm’s prevailing view of subcultures as ‘static’, ‘ahistorical essences’ (Clarke 1982; Waters 1981), captured in their first, ‘pure’ moment of inception. Redhead (1990: 25) in fact wishes to go further by suggesting that subcultural time has always been cyclical rather than linear; his contention is that ‘ “authentic” subcultures were produced by subcultural theories, not the other way around’, and I suggest that

47

48

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

if we talk to some of these pre-punk subculturalists of the past, they might remember a change of subcultural allegiance and a degree of stylistic fragmentation which is only (theoretically) accorded to today’s postmodern youth. This brings me to my most important recapitulation: that much of this chapter is theoretical speculation. Although a useful starting point, it is my firm belief that the major criterion of theoretical adequacy is that it should be amenable to empirical evaluation. Much has been made of the inadequate third level of analysis in the Marxist paradigm: the level of biography, of phenomenology, of how the subculture is lived out, experienced and interpreted by its members (Clarke 1982; Cohen 1980; Dorn and South 1982; Waters 1981; Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1990). What is now required is an approach where the subjective meanings and perceptions of the subculturalists themselves constitute the first, privileged level of analysis. These data should be used to test existing theory and to construct further hypotheses which again become subject to empirical examination. Faced, therefore, with the inadequacies of the previous, modernist subcultural paradigm and the predilection of many contemporary writers merely to hypothesize about the implications of the postmodern, I can think of no more fitting a finish than the following words of wisdom from Mike Featherstone (1992: ix): ‘There is nothing wrong with high level speculative theory, except if it becomes presented and legitimated as having surpassed or succeeded in discrediting the need for, empirical research.’

Notes This chapter is dedicated to Steve Redhead (1952–2018). 1 Or ‘post-subcultural studies’ or ‘the post-subcultural turn’. Although not exactly synonymous, the terms tend to be used interchangeably. 2 A corpus of work generally undertaken from a neo-Marxist perspective. It is not my intention to outline its precepts in this introduction for it is dealt with in detail in many of the sources cited here and also referred to as ‘the Birmingham School’ in the abridged version of TPS that follows. 3 See Muggleton (2005b) on this process of marginalization, a chapter that itself demonstrates how a supposed post-subcultural researcher is not inhibited from analysing social divisions based on gender. 4 This despite the forewarning in IS that ‘lest I be misunderstood, let me make it clear that I am not in this chapter providing an opinion as to whether the changes to which I refer [from modern to postmodern subcultures or post-subcultures] are actually taking place, nor am I claiming that subcultures necessarily have the characteristics that can be inferred from these changes’ (Muggleton 2000: 34; original emphasis). 5 The interviews took place between September 1993 and January 1995, and the findings were subsequently published in IS.

‘The Post-Subculturalist’

References Barthes, R. (1975). S/Z. London: Cape. Baudrillard, J. (1983a). In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, J. (1983b). Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e). Beezer, A. (1992). ‘Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style’. In M. Barker and A. Beezer (eds), Reading into Cultural Studies (pp. 101–18). London: Routledge. Bell, D. (1976). The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. London: Heinemann. Bennett, A. (1999). ‘Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste’. Sociology, 33(3): 599–617. Bennett, A. (2011). ‘The Post-Subcultural Turn: Some Reflections 10 Years On’. Journal of Youth Studies, 14(5): 483–506. Bennett, A., and K. Kahn-Harris (2004). ‘Introduction’. In A. Bennett and K. KahnHarris (eds), After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture (pp. 1–18). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Berman, M. (1987). All That Is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso. Blackman, S. (2005). ‘Youth Subcultural Theory: A Critical Engagement with the Concept, Its Origin and Politics, from the Chicago School to Postmodernism’. Journal of Youth Studies, 8(1): 1–20. Blackman, S. (2014). ‘Subculture Theory: An Historical and Contemporary Assessment of the Concept for Understanding Deviance’. Deviant Behaviour, 35(6): 486–512. Booker, W. (2001). ‘Review of “Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style”’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(1): 111–13. Campbell, C. (1987). The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Blackwell. Carter, A. (1983). ‘The Recession Style’. New Society, 63(1052): 65–6. Clarke, G. (1982). ‘Defending Ski-Jumpers: A Critique of Theories of Youth Culture’. Stencilled Paper, 71. Birmingham: CCCS. Cohen, S. (1980). Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 2nd ed. Oxford: Martin Robertson. Connor, S. (1991). Postmodernist Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Crook, S., J. Pakuliski and M. Waters (1992). Postmodernization: Change in Advanced Society. London: Sage. Dorn, N., and N. South (1982). Of Males and Markets: A Critical Review of Youth Culture Theory. London: Centre for Occupational and Community Research: Middlesex Polytechnic. Evans, C., and M. Thornton (1989). Women and Fashion: A New Look. London: Quartet. Ewen, S., and E. Ewen (1982). Channels of Desire. New York: McGraw Hill. Featherstone, M. (1992). Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage. Gelder, K. (2005). ‘Introduction: The Field of Subcultural Studies’. In K. Gelder (ed.), The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed. (pp. 1–18). London: Routledge. Griffin, C. (2011). ‘The Trouble with Class: Researching Youth, Class and Culture beyond the “Birmingham School”’. Journal of Youth Studies, 14(3): 245–59.

49

50

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Hall, S., and T. Jefferson, eds (1976). Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. London: Hutchinson. Haralambos, M., and M. Holborn (2008). Sociology: Themes and Perspectives, 7th ed. London: HarperCollins. Harvey, D. (1991). The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hindess, B. (1977). Philosophy and Method in the Social Sciences. Hassocks: Harvester. Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford: Berg. Hodkinson, P. (2016). ‘Youth Cultures and the Rest of Life: Subcultures, PostSubcultures and Beyond’. Journal of Youth Studies, 19(5): 629–45. Jameson, F. (1985). ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Culture’. In H. Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (pp. 111–25). London: Pluto. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Kaiser, S. (1990). The Social Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Appearances in Context, 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan. Kaiser, S. B., R. H. Nagasawa and S. S. Hutton (1991). ‘Fashion, Postmodernity and Personal Appearance: A Symbolic Interactionist Formulation’. Symbolic Interaction, 14(2): 165–85. Kellner, D. (1992). ‘Popular Culture and the Construction of Postmodern Identities’. In S. Lash and J. Friedman (eds), Modernity and Identity (pp. 141–77). Oxford: Blackwell. Kroker, A., and D. Cook (1991). The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyperaesthetics. London: Macmillan. Lash, S. (1990). The Sociology of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Lash, S., and J. Urry (1988). The End of Organized Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Lash, S., and J. Urry (1994). Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage. Malbon, B. (1999). Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London: Routledge. McRobbie, A. (1989). ‘Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Rag Market’. In A. McRobbie (ed.), Zoot-Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music (pp. 23–49). London: Macmillan. Miles, S. (2000). Youth Lifestyles in a Changing World. Buckingham: Open University Press. Muggleton, D. (1997). ‘The Post-Subculturalist’. In S. Redhead, D. Wynne and J. O’Connor (eds), The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies (pp. 185–203). Oxford: Blackwell. Muggleton, D. (2000). Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Berg. Muggleton, D. (2005a). ‘From Classlessness to Subculture: A Genealogy of Postwar British Youth Cultural Analysis’. Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research, 13(2): 205–19. Muggleton, D. (2005b). ‘A Critique of Female “Marginalisation” in Youth Subcultural Studies’. In L. Suurpää and T. Hoikkala (eds), Masculinities and Violence in Youth Cultures (pp. 149–74). Helsinki: Finnish Youth Research Network. Muggleton, D., and R. Weinzierl, eds (2003). The Post-Subcultures Reader. Oxford: Berg.

‘The Post-Subculturalist’

Mungham, G., and G. Pearson, eds (1976). Working Class Youth Culture. London: Routledge. Nixon, S. (1992). ‘Have You Got the Look? Masculinities and Shopping Spectacle’. In R. Shields (ed.), Lifestyle Shopping (pp. 149–69). London: Routledge. Redhead, S. (1990). The End of the Century Party: Youth and Pop towards 2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Redhead, S. (1991). ‘Rave Off: Youth, Subcultures and the Law’. Social Studies Review, January: 92–4. Redhead, S., ed. (1993). Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Aldershot: Avebury. Redhead, S., D. Wynne and J. O’Connor, eds (1997). The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell. Savage, J. (1989). ‘The Age of Plunder’. In A. McRobbie (ed.), Zoot-Suits and SecondHand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music (pp. 169–82). London: Macmillan. Shildrick, T., and R. MacDonald (2006). ‘In Defence of Subculture: Young People, Leisure and Social Divisions’. Journal of Youth Studies, 9(2): 125–40. Thornton, S. (1995). Clubcultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity. Urry, J. (1990). The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Waters, C. (1981). ‘Badges of Half-Formed Inarticulate Radicalism: A Critique of Recent Trends in the Study of Working-Class Culture’. International Labor and WorkingClass History, 19: 23–37. Widdicombe, S., and R. Wooffitt (1990). “‘Being” versus “Doing” Punk: On Achieving Authenticity as a Member’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 9(4): 257–77. Willis, P. (1978). Profane Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Willis, P. (1990). Common Culture. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Wilson, E. (1985). Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London: Virago. Wilson, E. (1990). ‘These New Components of the Spectacle: Fashion and Postmodernism’. In R. Boyne and A. Rattansi (eds), Postmodernism and Society (pp. 209–36). London: Macmillan.

51

52

3 Music scenes Geoff Stahl

The term ‘scene’ has become a central concept in the study of musical cultures over the past three decades. Although not restricted to music-making alone, it has become one of the preferred ways to frame the spaces, places and times where musical activities, and the social worlds associated with them, unfold. It has come to populate much of the literature around music-making, overshadowing subculture, a term that, since the mid-1970s, has been the dominant concept for many scholars analysing the socio-musical experience. Scene’s move to the centre of popular music studies comes courtesy of its migration through different disciplines, from sociology, geography, as well as cultural, media and communication studies. It gained its currency through its conceptual flexibility and its applicability across a disparate range of spaces, practices, activities and cultural (musical and otherwise) experiences. Consequently, scene circulates now with a certain kind of promiscuity. Not surprisingly, it has also been subject to different sorts of scrutiny, sociological and otherwise, prompting debates as to its conceptual utility. This has, in part, to do with scene not occupying a definitive theoretical space in the same way as subculture, about which more will be said below. By way of laying this out further, the aim in what follows is to map out the term’s emergence, in part as a conceptual foil to subcultures but more so as a complement, as well as how it has acted as a prompt for debates into its analytical usefulness in relation to music-making and the socio-spatial worlds associated with (primarily) urban musical cultures.

Setting the scene Scene resonates with several prosaic meanings and associations that precede its ingratiation into scholarly discussions, some of which have carried over from its everyday usage. It has been a long-standing theatrical and filmic term, used to describe the temporal and spatial framing of a discrete moment in a play or a movie,

54

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

where some notable action or incident takes place. In this sense, it is a form of staging and element of performance and plotting, where characters, lighting, backdrops, music and dialogue are arranged in such a way as to effectively tell a part of the larger story. The scene acts to advance the narrative, provides some insight into character and/or produces a desired atmosphere. In another context, people can talk about the scene of a crime, where a more salacious act has been committed. Here, the scene is a zone mapped out to be scrutinized and deciphered, a locus of semiotic analysis, cordoned off in such a way as to contain clues as to what kind of heinous event has occurred therein. Elsewhere that signifying power registers differently. To be on the scene, for example, is a mark of a certain kind of vanguard status, an index of ‘cool’, a demonstrable, perhaps ostentatious, individual or collective commitment to something new and exciting, marking a willingness to be ‘in on the action’, in advance of that thing or event becoming commercialized or mainstream. In this capacity, scenes are also most often associated with young people, or, more broadly, youthfulness, and the desire to appear current or on the cutting edge, and they can refer to any number of cultural or social activities, from music to theatre to bars to cafes to queer scenes. As a counterpoint to these usages, the term ‘scene’ can also be used as a pejorative, to dismiss something as frivolous, ephemeral, a distraction, a folly of youth not worthy of prolonged consideration or deeper analysis. By extension, someone who appears to grasp onto fads and fashions is often referred to, negatively, as a ‘scenester’. One can also ‘create a scene’, a disruption that draws attention to the individual, group or the event in untoward ways. In these latter cases, where it is often understood as the domain of (petulant) youth, scene is doubly disparaged. Scene understood in its more everyday senses, then, has multiple valences: as performance, a signifying event and semiotic prompt, a distinctive time and place that delineates itself as ‘out of the ordinary’, an enchanted time and space marked by a discrete/discreet sort of activity secreted away from the routines of the everyday and/ or a measure of social status and privileged belonging that has the mark of exclusivity. Many of these different dimensions migrated with it when it started to appear in scholarly literature focused on the spatio-temporal aspects of music-making, a crosssection of which will be explored in more detail below. By way of setting up that discussion, it is best to first map out the context that allowed the term ‘scene’ to emerge at the time and place it did in popular music studies, moving then to some uses of and debates around the term, sociological and otherwise.

Socio-spatiality and music-making In the field of popular music studies, analyses of the spatial dimensions of musicmaking have led to a number of significant discussions about which kinds of

Music Scenes

descriptive categories can best account for certain socio-musical experiences. There have been various points in time where terms such as ‘art world’ and ‘bohemia’, associated with creative worlds more generally, have been used to demarcate musical spaces and practices (e.g. Becker 2008; Lopes 2002; Stahl 2001; Toynbee 1993). While these terms are still in use in literature associated with music-making, they have generally faded from view. In their stead, two other terms have come to dominate as preferred descriptors: subculture and scene. The first of these, subcultures, has a wellestablished history, extending as far back as the work done by the Chicago School around gangs (Thrasher 1926) and taxi-dancers (Cressey [1932] 2008), among other groups, that sat outside the dominant culture. In this early characterization, it was a way of reframing notions of delinquency and deviancy as a means of mapping out other social worlds that function according to different patterns of belonging, fashion alternative moral universes, as well as generate their own symbol systems and semiotic codes that bind them together and help to position them as ‘Other’ or different. The term evolved over the ensuing decades, predominantly within and across American and British sociological traditions. By the early 1970s, it morphed into its most lasting incarnation, courtesy the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), at the University of Birmingham, through the work of Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, Dick Hebdige and Angela McRobbie, among others. Within the confines of British cultural studies, subcultural theory would flourish and become one of the key social categories to take root in popular music studies, a place it still holds for many. However, more recently it has ceded its privileged place to the notion of ‘scene’ for a variety of reasons, some of which are outlined below.

Subculture versus scene Scene began to be taken up by a selection of scholars in the early 1990s, as a concept deemed better able to capture certain socio-spatial dimensions of musical activity that subcultures tended to exclude or obscure. Subcultural theory at the time was still indebted to the work of those at the CCCS, with an emphasis placed on style as a form of semantic disorder and reordering (Hebdige 1979), and resistance as a stylized means of mapping out social difference (Hall and Jefferson 1976), all of which was bound up in classed structures of social distinction (see also Chapter 1). As a longstanding theoretical touchstone, subcultural theory, in its CCCS incarnation, is an important lens through which one can take account of power, ideology, hegemony and inequality in social relationships, many of which have as their axes of differentiation class, age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and so on. In this model, personal identity finds its social analogue through like-minded/-disenfranchised others, with subcultures becoming a means for establishing, cementing and sustaining forms of belonging and creating or ‘winning space’ as part of a counter-hegemonic struggle for meaning

55

56

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

and legitimacy (e.g. Cohen 1972). This tends to lead to a more coherent, cohesive identity, a solidarity founded upon shared musical tastes, language, style and spaces, which, when consolidated, tend to stress the ‘sub’ in ‘subculture’ and place increasing value on its oppositional or resistant position in relation to a dominant culture (an axes of differentiation drawn between them and middle- or upper-class culture, or, given the emphasis on post–Second World War youth in the CCCS studies, their parents’ generation). Subcultural theory by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s had become the subject of renewed debate and discussion, where it was seen by some scholars that an emphasis on the spectacular nature of subcultures tended to obscure, rather than illuminate, the complexity of current cultural practices around music-making, more so if they are seen as constituent elements of an increasingly translocal or global cultural economy itself being transformed through the appearance of and access to computer-mediated communication, such as the internet (Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004; Muggleton and Wienzierl 2003). An emphasis on axes of differentiation along the lines of class, race and gender for some scholars tended to distil cultural practices into uncontaminated homologies (Thornton 1996), resulting in studies leaning towards romanticizing subcultures and their strategies of resistance, bringing the discussion back to ‘sub’ in ways that did not easily account for a plurality of sociomusical experiences which, under more scrutiny, were much more intersectional. As Sarah Thornton (1996: 168) notes of this move away from resistance in rethinking subcultural practice, ‘Rather than de-politicizing popular culture, a shift away from the search for “resistance” actually gives fuller representation to the complex and rarely straightforward politics of contemporary culture.’ There were at the time, and afterwards, a number of attempts to refashion and rethink this model, borrowing from the likes of Pierre Bourdieu, through the use of (sub)cultural capital and different forms of media (Thornton 1996); Jean Baudrillard, in a postmodern move towards post-subcultural studies (Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003); and Michel Maffesoli’s notion of neo-tribes (Bennett 1999, 2005): a detailed summary of these can be found in Stahl (2003), Bennett (2004) and Hodkinson and Deicke (2007). Out of this interrogative moment, scene began to appear more frequently in popular music studies, leading to the current moment where it appears to have eclipsed subculture as a preferred conceptual prism through which to view popular music studies.

Setting the scene Scene moved to the fore as a concept that, for some, better captures the range of activities and the diverse spaces associated with music-making, and displaced the term ‘subcultures’ (but not without its detractors, as will be seen below). In the early

Music Scenes

1990s, Barry Shank (1994), Holly Kruse (1993), Sara Cohen (1991, 1995) and Will Straw (1991), among others, had begun to posit the idea of the scene as another social form associated with music-making. Subcultures and scenes were often discussed interchangeably at the time (e.g. Kruse 1993), and subcultural theory still maintained its relevance alongside some of these early uses of scene. Shank (1994: 122), for instance, offers a concept of scene as a space and time marked by a distinctive semiotic valence, social energy and affective power: A scene itself can be defined as an over-productive signifying community; that is, far more semiotic information is produced than can be rationally parsed. Such scenes remain a necessary condition for the production of exciting rock’n’roll music capable of moving past the mere expression of locally significant cultural values and generic development – that is, beyond stylistic permutation – toward an interrogation of dominant structures of identification, and potential cultural transformation. The constitutive feature of local scenes of live musical performance is their evident display of semiotic disruption, their potentially dangerous overproduction and exchange of musicalized signs of identity and community. Through this display of more than can be understood, encouraging the radical recombination of elements of the human in new structures of identification, local rock’n’roll scenes produce momentary transformations within dominant cultural meanings.

The kind of over-signification, the semiotic excess born out of socio-musical activity, is what sets the scene apart from the everyday (while also making it difficult to analyse in terms of deciphering its meaning and value, as Shank suggests). Shank’s elaboration of it here positions the scene as an echo of subculture’s disruptive and counter-hegemonic play of signifiers, that semantic ‘noise’ Hebdige attributed to punk. It has, as subcultures did prior, a somewhat romantic or heroic cast with regard to real (or imagined) resistance to a dominant or mainstream culture, positioning the scene as an alternative space of meaning and value. However, as an early attempt to frame the Austin music scene in such a way, some rigour to the more quotidian understanding of the term scene starts to emerge. The most developed and sustained engagement with scenes emerges through Will Straw’s ongoing exploration of social forms in relation to the cultures of the city. At various points over the past three decades, Straw has revisited the term, expanding and recalibrating it in ways that further refine its conceptual borders. With his initial exploration of the tension between musical communities and scenes, published in 1991, Straw lays the groundwork for a significant shift in the way scholars could engage with socio-musical experiences. For Straw, communities and scenes have different relationships to time and place. Musical communities, for example, tend to be relatively stable over time, and their ‘exploration of musical idioms [is] said to be rooted within geographically specific historical heritage’ (Straw 1991: 373). For Straw, this means that ‘the sense of purpose articulated within a musical community depends on the affective link between two terms: contemporary musical practices

57

58

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

and musical heritage rendering which allows the current musical activity to make sense in relation to what’s come before’ (373). A scene, however, is a ‘cultural space in which range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within variety of processes of differentiation, according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization’ (373). In contrast to musical communities, Straw suggests, in scenes ‘the sense of purpose is articulated within those forms of communication through which building of musical alliances and drawing of musical boundaries take place’ (373). Communities and scenes make manifest ‘two countervailing pressures within spaces of musical activity: one towards stabilization of local historical continuities, and another which works to disrupt such continuities, to cosmopolitanize and relativize them’ (373). The scene has a different relationship to the musical worlds outside the local and tends to adopt and localize those things that grant it up-todate-ness, thereby giving it a sense of dynamism and an attractive social energy (also why some scenes can be dismissed for being ‘trendy’ or ‘faddish’). This is in part how the ‘logic of change’ within music-making functions in relation to both these social forms, determining how certain local or global musical trends get absorbed or discarded (for an early critique of this version of scene, see Olson 1997). It should be noted that this thinking regarding generic shifts remains an underexplored aspect of Straw’s work, where the logic of change in the very title is rarely considered. Ensuing studies used the term ‘scene’ as a trope to focus primarily on the spatial contexts of music-making, overlooking the key spatio-temporal ratios otherwise at work as twinned organizing principles of music-making and how they respectively shape generic change. As Straw (2004: 413) continues to engage with the term, scene becomes a signature social form associated with music-making in the city, a significant hallmark of collective life of the city: The most commonly identified scenes are those associated with music, for a variety of reasons. The production and consumption of music lend themselves more easily to a mobile urban sociability than does involvement in other cultural forms. Antoine Hennion has noted the intimate relationship of music to multiple forms of social mediation: ‘musical activity inscribes itself within bodies, within collectivities, within ways of doing things, within movement’ … Music provides a pretext for being out in the city, for consuming culture in moments of collective interaction which are embedded in the more diffuse public life of cities, in drinking and in public, collective conversation.

Straw has formulated scene as a distinctive urban form, one that is tied to the kinds of cultural spaces cities enable and encourage. This is not to suggest that scenes are only urban phenomena (on suburban DIY punk scenes, see Culton and Holtzman 2010; and on rural and regional music scenes, see Bennett et al. 2022) but rather

Music Scenes

that the city is prone to producing more of them in specific arrays. There is a level of performance and display that cities generate, and here Straw (2004: 412) recalls Lewis Mumford’s formulation in 1937 of the city as a kind of theatre: Scene is one way of speaking of the theatricality of the city – of the city’s capacity to generate images of people occupying public space in attractive ways … Scenes is not merely the name we give to informal ways of organizing leisure, however, as if one stepped into a scene from a radically different sphere of work or commercial exchange. Scenes emerge from the excesses of sociability that surround the pursuit of interests, or which fuel ongoing innovation and experimentation within the cultural life of cities … Scenes are elusive, but they may be seen, more formally, as units of city culture (like subcultures or art worlds), as one of the event structures through which cultural life acquires its solidity. Scenes are one of the city’s infrastructures for exchange, interaction and instruction.

In this characterization, scenes sit alongside art worlds and subcultures in the city, a recognition that these other social forms are still a vital part of the urban mosaic but are distinct from scenes. However, all three exemplify certain types of collective life found in the city, with each taking on a complementary role in giving shape to urban culture. Straw’s (2015) triptych, ‘exchange, interaction and instruction’, evolves further in a later take on scenes, where he catalogues some things that a ‘scene may be’. These include: collectivities, marked by some form of proximity; spaces of assembly where different sorts of cultural phenomena are brought together; workplaces that are involved in the transformation of materials; ethical worlds where behavioural ‘protocols’ are worked out; spaces of traversal and preservation where certain cultural energies and flows are fixed or allowed to pass through at particular speeds; and, lastly, spaces of mediation which render cultural activity more or less visible. This more recent formulation of scenes further cements its salience to the study of urban culture imagined quite broadly, which still includes music, but easily applies to any number of sociocultural formations found in the city (and which can be, and often are, intertwined with music scenes). There is still the emphasis on the manner in which temporal and spatial logics are intertwined, with the added dimensions of circulation and mediation (on urban scenes, see Lussier 2014; in relation to genre, see Nowak and Whelan 2018). Notably, Straw’s work draws attention away from the more resistant aspects attributed to the scene by Shank and others by formulating scenes in the plural, as made up of a diverse array of cultural spaces where a number of activities transpire and can often intersect and overlap. In this way, the notion of scene gains a different kind of purchase as a descriptive category, whereby a wider constellation and interplay of musical and extra-musical practices can be taken into account. The different spatio-temporal aspects of the scene – its suggestion of flexibility and transience, of temporary, ad hoc and strategic associations, the allusion to the

59

60

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

paradoxical structure of a world notable as much for its restricted as for its porous sociality, connotations of flux and flow, movement and mobility – indicate that the significance of musical life should be seen as occurring within a complex intersection of spatial and temporal logics and social praxis; in other words, a diversity of conditions which might then be examined according to the terms of a cultural space constituted and inflected as much by local circumstance as it is by translocal demands and desires. Scene used as an interpretive tool can more effectively allow for the diversity of cultural spaces that to contribute music-making. In this capacity, it allows a richer analysis of the interlocking, overlapping nature of city’s creative worlds, replacing the standard subcultural model with its stress on stricter notions of homology that delineate harder social and structural borders. Taken in its broadest sense, as Straw’s expansive, if somewhat elastic, notion encourages scholars to do, scene can also include institutional contexts and industrial affiliations such as those found in bars, clubs, art galleries, radio and so on, which can then be analysed to better lay bare the social, spatial and temporal mechanics associated with musicmaking, allowing for a fuller account of the dynamic forces affecting the kind and degree of collective expression found in the city. A scene becomes spatially embedded across and through social, industrial and institutional networks, all of which operate at local and translocal levels. We can read a scene as one node in a broader network then, where certain translocal flows pause, or, to borrow a metaphor from Lacan, where certain points de capitons (Straw 1991) draw various scenic elements together. Scenes are both centripetal in terms of what they pull together inwardly and centrifugal in terms of what they radiate outwards. Thus, the relative success and continued vitality of many scenes are determined in part through the identification and dexterous manipulation, or management, of the economic, political, cultural and social vectors shaping local circumstance and those local restrictions which can only be ameliorated by extending market and imaginative horizons beyond the insularity of city-specific musical activity. Any contemporary scene is the locus where various flows (regional, national and international) come together in a complex fashion. It is around these flows that music-makers attempt to fix their practices, generating a range of discourses and practices in response to the movement of people, places, things and ideas. Musical scenes are marked by the symbolic and material dimensions of a scene inflected through practices which are oriented to both here and there. Earlier iterations of subcultural theory have tended to localize subcultural practices by referring to a much more bounded notion of territory, often speaking of neighbourhood pubs or clubs as the primary locus of activity. The spatial relations which characterize cultural practices and activities in music scenes are anchored locally but can also be understood in terms of geographic dispersal and are thereby less aligned with a narrowly delineated notion of place. Along these lines, Andy Bennett and Ian Rogers (2016: 25) have catalogued local, translocal and virtual scenes:

Music Scenes

The local scene is very much the province of Barry Shank. Trans-local scenes tend to broaden out from local scenes, and include a variety of ‘widely scattered local scenes drawn into regular communication around a distinctive form of music or lifestyle’ … With the trans-local, we are often focused on Will Straw’s more sweeping approach, charting broader genre-based movements, sounds, careers and ideology. Finally, virtual scenes incorporate the study of scenes created with little or no physical interaction. Predominantly a product of online digital culture, virtual scenes both draw in isolated individuals and create their own virtual terrains of meaning and practice.

In this expanded version of scene, there exists grounded musical practices that are bound to one place – for example, Luckman et al. (2008) on Darwin, Australia, or Martin-Iverson (2012) for an examination of an Indonesian indie scene – and other scenes that are much more invested in reaching across geographical boundaries – such as the case of Islamic popular music in Turkey described in Erol (2017) – but still in physical space, and lastly, virtual scenes, which have at their core computermediated communication networks and, more recently, social media platforms and their infrastructures and algorithmic imperatives (see also Bennett and Peterson 2004). Paolo Magaudda (2020: 38) expands on this latter notion of infrastructure, which he argues has been under-theorized in the study of scenes: The infrastructural processes supporting music circulation can be summed up into three relevant dimensions, characterizing how digital technologies unfold their influence on today’s music organization: the role of digital platforms, the organization and management of data, and the emergence of new music formats, for instance those based on blockchain technology. These are just three examples of how infrastructural affordances and constraints can contribute to the reshaping of the conditions under which music scenes are articulated, as well as the same logics of existence of music scenes based on a distinctive local identity.

This insistence on an infrastructural approach is a feature of scenic research that further points to aspects of music-making that subcultural theory is less able to reckon with (see also Stahl 2004). In this stress on infrastructures, Magaudda notes that the embeddedness of music production, consumption and circulation in overlapping communication networks (real and virtual) necessitate a perspective more inclined to look across music-making activities and roles to better discern these networks. A more recent variant of this approach can be found in Madis Järvekülg and Martin Wikström’s (2021) study of the scene in Estonia. They analyse who promotes music scenes, who gets to serve as legitimate cultural custodians and how social media platforms are used effectively and by whom. They consider musicians and audience members, but also include social influencers, a new gatekeeping persona bound up in social media platforms, as an element deemed necessary for a certain kind of not-uncomplicated success in the Estonian scene. For more on music networks and networking cultures, see Schoop (2017), Kruse (2010) and Barna (2018); for a

61

62

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

consideration of the role played by these networks during the Covid-19 pandemic, see Rendell (2021). Enmeshed in dense networks and circuits made up of a variety of industrial, institutional affiliations and affective alliances, scenic practices can often be more practically oriented collaborations aligned towards a ‘project’, as Blum (2003: 174) suggests – Straw’s notion of the workplace-as-scene is just one example of this. Scenes can inscribe themselves into urban space in a deliberate (and deliberative) fashion, doing so in a way which is moored to more established, concrete circuits and alignments, and where a distinctive ethos of commitment can be manifest along with a sense of purpose, however inchoate that may be. There is in the scene a moment of ‘mutual recognition’ (172), where one needs to be seen to be on the scene in order to demonstrate to be seen, as ‘in’. The ways in which musical activity coheres around certain practices, individuals and sites lend the scene a meaningful sense of dynamism, and this gaze creates a locus of social power with an attendant buzz. This can draw those so inclined in, while also keeping others out, giving scenes their atmosphere of exclusivity, their ‘tribal hegemony’ or ‘specialised solidarity’ (175; see also Montano 2011; Parkes 2017; Taylor 2008). In this respect, scenes might be seen to disavow anything that looks subcultural, as scenes can often be very ostentatiously visible, being ‘private in public’ (Blum 2003: 180), committed to an aspirational ethos that looks decidedly upwardly mobile and far removed from anything counter-hegemonic. Scenes can also be less coherent and may lack a precisely formulated goal. Instead, they can be characterized by a range of strategies deployed in such a manner that they lend it a situationally functional unity that often temporarily mitigates an apparent aimlessness. They tend towards spread and have a more rhizomatic form, temporary assemblages of interests, cultural practices and cultural products clustered around unique times and places – for example, see Saldanha (2005) on Goa’s trance scene. In this way, a scene can be understood to be very localized – intensely focused around a bar, pub or performance space, for e­ xample – or it can be expanded to refer to a cultural precinct or event, or briefly encompass an entire city. In both the deliberate and inchoate forms, the scene functions as a vehicle through which the city’s resources are identified and utilized in order to cultivate and mobilize a diversity of people and places that can strategically accommodate the current demands and desires of music-makers (and other stakeholders). Many of these aspects are finely detailed in Ruth Finnegan’s Hidden Musicians (1989), which explores the play and tensions between visibility and invisibility in local amateur music-making as etched into Milton Keynes’s musical pathways. This means claiming sites such as bars, performance and rehearsal spaces, utilizing industries like community or campus radio, as well as extra-musical spaces such as cafes and restaurants, which, while vital to the continued functioning of the scene, are often seen as secondary to the preferred reading of scene as a phenomenon based primarily

Music Scenes

around performance. These sorts of behind-the-scenes activities, music-making’s backstage aspects, make its directionality difficult to ascertain, its motivations more nebulous and its lack of visibility, as Straw suggests, one of its appeals (for more on this, see Rochow and Stahl 2016). The urban imaginary gains some of its affective purchase courtesy of the attributes associated with music-making spaces. For scenes, the fact that they come and go – they adopt and adapt to certain trends and discard others – lends them a rhythmic structure, one that occurs according to an internal logic but is also buffeted by external forces. Through these rhythms, the links forged between specific times and specific places, the cycles of the city are brought together in a manner which imparts to the place of music-making its affective and symbolic depth and nuance. Bars, performance spaces, places of work, home, rehearsal spaces and so on are not only physical nodes but also carry affective charges which resonate with music-makers as providing the emotional charge that confirms their commitment to both the city and music-making (Rochow 2019). Those background experiences form the critical infrastructure for that gig or event that then comes to matter: We then note the thematic running throughout this imaginative structure that connects space to time through the idea of making it an occasion. This occasioning of the space is part of what we mean by its emplacement, its making space into place. The desire for the scene plays off the collective concern for eventfulness in ways that highlight as a part of the urban experience, the search for renewal through the critical moment. Nothing apocalyptic is implied here for the scene appears integral to the imaginative structure of the city as it strives to make this present a memorable moment, and thus, part its ongoing and revisable biography. (Blum 2003: 32)

The celebratory and performative aspects of the scene, occurring as they do in particular places at particular times as ‘an occasion’, are central to how it then relates to the city. It has a powerful imaginative charge which lends the experience of place a meaningful shape and imbues it with a deeper value, and at root of the communal ambience of the scene is perhaps a more aspirational vector, that this moment, regardless of duration or durability, matters more than others. In fact, in this regard, the scene can be used in such a way to imagine the cultural value of the city as an archive of events and memories, but a vibrant scene can serve as an index of a certain vitality that may well be mobilized by municipal governments and their marketers to promote and brand the city. This has been principally true in relation to the framing of so-called creative cities where scene as an urban buzzword appears in cultural and urban policy (Cohen 2017; Stahl 2011). Berlin, among other cities, has been the subject of numerous studies as to how the scene as urban brand is deployed to translate cultural capital into economic capital, often in fraught ways (see e.g. Stahl 2014; Lange and Bürkner 2013; Lange 2015; and for a comparison of Berlin and Paris around the packaging of their night-time economies and related scenes, see Picaud 2019). In some

63

64

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

of these cases, scenes appear as media spectacles – a phenomenon outlined in Kirsten Schilt’s (2004) examination of riot grrrl in Olympia, Washington, and Washington, DC. Here different scales of media, from niche forms such as zines to more mainstream types, are critical to the local and translocal scene, but, in the case of more mainstream media, fatal to the scene. Similarly, scenes may well be harbingers of more unsavoury developments such as the further commodification of culture (‘selling out’), as Bethany Klein (2020) discusses in her book-length study of selling out, most pointedly in her chapter dedicated to Seattle’s grunge scene. More alarmingly, scenes may well lay the groundwork for the gentrification of neighbourhoods that then drive out the very creative energies, and cultural spaces, that made them inviting and invigorating spaces in the first place – for example, on New York’s Bowery District, see Holt (2013); or on Rome’s Pigneto neighbourhood, see Schmisek (2020).

Conclusion The scene is the fundamental ambiguity which its name and connotations arouse in collective life. This is the symbolic order of the scene. And the scene is the myriad course of action directed to solve the problem released by such ambiguity, including the ethical collisions of forms of collectivization which it inspires. This is the imaginative structure of the scene. The scene is both symbolic order and imaginative structure, a locus of collectivization and a catalyst of problem solving. (Blum 2003: 33)

The scene exists as a kind of urban social puzzle that is not easily solved. Yet its very inscrutability appears to act as its primary organizing principle and is what makes it a locus of attention from many different quarters. Within its imaginative structure, the scene allows a kind of resolution, a way of solving problems and ameliorating tensions and ‘ethical collisions’ found most often in cities (anonymity, loneliness, social difference, the ‘Other’, gentrification, etc.) and in this sense is not far removed from the ‘magical solutions’, ‘making’ or ‘winning space’ that was introduced by subcultural studies nearly five decades ago. However, descriptions of the sociomusical dimensions of the city require the looseness of the term ‘scene’ to encourage those doing the examining to consider music-making’s many presences, absences and valences, as well as the struggle over its social and cultural value. The notion of scene moves the discussion of socio-musical experiences beyond the strict attention paid to a neatly bounded social form, such as subculture, by widening the scope of analysis to consider the broader networks of affiliations and narratives, the material and symbolic resources, required to support musical activity. Music-making in the city is hardly an impenetrable object, but at times it does require that more attention be paid to the extensive latticework of its social and spatial networks if one is aiming to tease out its deeper structures.

Music Scenes

Scene does not occupy a well-defined theoretical or robustly debated space in the social sciences the same way subculture does. The latter has a much more established pedigree in the social sciences, where, from its first appearance in the 1920s in studies of deviancy and delinquency, subculture’s various iterations in the ensuing decades filtered through functionalism, symbolic interactionism, postMarxism, structuralism and post-structuralism. It has worn and weathered those as it has circulated around the globe during that time, and matured in such a way that it has accumulated a great deal of its sociological gravitas. Scene, however, has not enjoyed a similar sort of sociological trajectory, not becoming steeped in debates and discussions in the same way, leading to a thinner history that underpins accusations of its conceptual fuzziness. This, for some, is one of its virtues, as it points towards possibilities that can make it a more useful analytical conceptual device, which better captures more of the informal, porous aspects of musical cultures. For others, its looseness, or ambivalence, is one of its weaknesses, a conceptual ambiguity that makes it a contentious term that is seen to ignore, exclude or gloss over structural inequities, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, that are also crucial aspects shaping music-making (for a detailed critique of the term, see Hesmondhalgh 2005; for a response, see Bennett 2005). For both these reasons, the term ‘scene’ remains an important if contentious term in the study of popular music. The expanding volume of scholarly work that employs the term, favourably or critically, is a clear indicator of this. Even considering this mounting body of work, however, it would be difficult to refer to anything like ‘scene theory’, contrary to claims made otherwise (e.g. Bennett and Rogers 2016). There is not the coherence or even shared agreement as to what constitutes a scene among popular music scholars. A database search of the past four years, for example, reveals that it is deployed to delineate as a music scene sociomusical forms at vastly different scopes and scales. These include festivals (Mall 2020; Guibert and Turbé 2021), prisons (Hjørnevik and Waage 2019), urban electronic scenes (Darchen, Charrieras and Willsteed 2021), Latin-American regional scenes (Hutchison 2017; Mendívil and Espinosa 2015; Vik 2018), ethnicity in urban scenes (Rivera-Rideau 2019), identity in DIY trans scenes (Carella and Wymer 2019; Pearce and Lohman 2019), archives and urban scenes (Long et al. 2017; Lutz 2021), live music scenes (Hassan 2021; Laing 2017; Whiting 2021), genre and virtual music scenes (Whelan 2020), heritage strategies and scenes (Reitsamer 2018; Strong 2018), national indie scenes (Arriagada and Lavín 2021), national cumbia scenes (Vila et al. 2011), national music scenes generally (Apard 2020; Hyder 2017), music careers in scenes (Tarassi 2018; Bennett 2018), and music scenes and the Covid-19 pandemic (Brunt and Nelligan 2021; Gu, Domer and O’Connor 2021; McLeese 2021; Quader 2021). As this disparate and cursory list suggests, scene remains very much a conceptat-large, elusive and allusive, operating through divergent foci and scopes and not wedded to any one theoretical paradigm, school or orthodoxy. That gives it a certain

65

66

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

capacious utility but also points to its limitations. Exactly how does one operationalize it as a sociological tool? And while Hesmondhalgh (2005: 29) refers to the concept as ‘downright confusing’, there is something about its vagueness and vexatiousness that allows – indeed, almost encourages– it to persist. Arguably, as it has been laid out here, scene as a concept offers a prismastic view of musical cultures and the kaleidoscopic worlds associated with them, widening and simultaneously refracting the analytical spectrum regarding what constitutes socio-musical experience in ways that will no doubt continue to animate further debate and discussion.

References Apard, É. (2020). ‘ “Rapping Islam”: The Nigérien Music Scene and the Challenges of Religious Reformism’. In É. Apar (ed.), Transnational Islam: Circulation of Religious Ideas, Actors and Practices between Niger and Nigeria (pp. 95–116). Leiden: African Studies Centre. Arriagada, A., and M. Lavín (2021). ‘Social Media in Chile’s Indie Music Scene: Crossing Local and Global Boundaries’. In C. Ballico (ed.), Geographically Isolated and Peripheral Music Scenes (pp. 97–115). Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. Barna, E. (2018). ‘Birth of an Underground Music Scene?’ In A. Bennett and P. Guerra (eds), DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes (pp. 171–81). London: Routledge. Becker, H. S. (2008). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, A. (1999). ‘Subcultures or Neo-tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste’. Sociology, 33(3): 599–617. Bennett, A. (2004). ‘Consolidating the Music Scenes Perspective’. Poetics, 32(3– 4): 223–34. Bennett, A. (2005). ‘In Defence of Neo-Tribes: A Response to Blackman and Hesmondhalgh’. Journal of Youth Studies, 8(2): 255–9. Bennett, A. (2018). ‘Youth, Music and DIY Careers’. Cultural Sociology, 12(2): 133–9. Bennett, A., D. Cashman, N. Lewondowski and B. Green, eds (2022). Popular Music Scenes: A Regional and Rural Perspective. New York: Palgrave. Bennett, A., and R. A. Peterson, eds (2004). Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Bennett, A., and K. Kahn-Harris, eds (2004). After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. London: Palgrave. Bennett, A., and I. Rogers (2016). ‘Scene “Theory”: History, Usage and Influence’. In A. Bennett and I. Rogers (eds), Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory (pp. 11–35). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blum, A. (2003). The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Brunt, S., and K. Nelligan (2021). ‘The Australian Music Industry’s Mental Health Crisis: Media Narratives during the Coronavirus Pandemic’. Media International Australia, 178(1): 42–6.

Music Scenes

Carella, K., and K. Wymer (2019). ‘“You Want Me to Surrender My Identity?” Laura Jane Grace, Transition and Selling Out’. Punk & Post-Punk, 8(2): 193–207. Cohen, P. (1972). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: Routledge. Cohen, S. (1991). Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, S. (1995). ‘Sounding Out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20(4): 434–46. Cohen, S. (2017). Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. London: Routledge. Cressey, P. G. ([1932] 2008). The Taxi-Dance Hall. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Culton, K. R., and B. Holtzman (2010). ‘The Growth and Disruption of a “Free Space”: Examining a Suburban Do It Yourself (DIY) Punk Scene’. Space and Culture, 13(3): 270–84. Darchen, S., D. Charrieras and J. Willsteed (2021). ‘Place-Bound Attributes in Music Scenes: Evolution of the Independent Electronica Music Scene in Brisbane since the Mid-1980s’. Continuum, 36(1): 150–63. Erol, A. (2017). ‘The Glocality of Islamic Popular Music: The Turkish Case’. In A. C. Gedik (ed.), Made in Turkey (pp. 107–11). New York: Routledge. Finnegan, R. (1989). The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gu, X., N. Domer and J. O’Connor (2021). ‘The Next Normal: Chinese Indie Music in a Post-COVID China’. Cultural Trends, 30(1): 63–74. Guibert, G., and S. Turbé (2021). ‘La Belle Endormie Awakened by Hellfest Open Air? A Study of the Nantes Metal Music Scene’. In B. Bardine and J. Stueart (eds), Living Metal: Metal Scenes around the World (pp. 210–26). Bristol: Intellect. Hall, T., and T. Jefferson, eds ([1976] 1989). Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. London: Routledge. Hassan, N. (2021). Metal on Merseyside: Music Scenes, Community and Locality. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2005). ‘Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above’. Journal of Youth Studies, 8(1): 21–40. Hjørnevik, K., and L. Waage (2019). ‘The Prison as a Therapeutic Music Scene: Exploring Musical Identities in Music Therapy and Everyday Life in a Prison Setting’. Punishment & Society, 21(4): 454–72. Hodkinson, P., and W. Deicke, eds (2007). Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes. New York: Routledge. Holt, F. (2013). ‘Rock Clubs and Gentrification in New York City: The Case of the Bowery Presents’. IASPM Journal, 4(1): 21–41. Hutchinson, S. (2017). ‘Cumbia! Scenes of a Migrant Latin American Music Genre’. Ethnomusicology, 61(3): 549–54. Hyder, R. (2017). Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK Music Scene. London: Routledge.

67

68

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Järvekülg, M., and P. Wikström (2021). ‘The Emergence of Promotional Gatekeeping and Converged Local Music Professionals on Social Media’. Convergence, 0(0): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/135485​6521​1032​376. Klein, B. (2020). Selling Out: Culture, Commerce and Popular Music. New York: Bloomsbury. Kruse, H. (1993). ‘Subcultural Identity in Alternative Music Culture’. Popular Music, 12(1): 33–41. Kruse, H. (2010). ‘Local Identity and Independent Music Scenes, Online and Off ’. Popular Music and Society, 33(5): 625–39. Laing, D. (2017). ‘The Three Woodstocks and the Live Music Scene’. In A. Bennett (ed.), Remembering Woodstock (pp. 1–17). New York: Routledge. Lange, B. (2015). Die Räume der Kreativszenen: Culturepreneurs und ihre Orte in Berlin, vol. 4. Berlin: Transcript Verlag. Lange, B., and H. J. Bürkner (2013). ‘Value Creation in Scene-Based Music Production: The Case of Electronic Club Music in Germany’. Economic Geography, 89(2): 149–69. Long, P., S. Baker, L. Istvandity and J. Collins (2017). ‘A Labour of Love: The Affective Archives of Popular Music Culture’. Archives and Records, 38 (1): 61–79. Lopes, P. (2002). The Rise of a Jazz Art World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luckman, S., C. Gibson, J. Willoughby-Smith and C. Brennan-Horley (2008). ‘Life in a Northern (Australian) Town: Darwin’s Mercurial Music Scene’. Continuum, 22(5): 623–37. Lussier, M. (2014). ‘Scène, permanence et travail d’alliance: Le cas de la scène musicale émergente de Montréal’. Cahiers de recherche sociologique, 57: 61–78. Lutz, C. A. (2021) ‘Making a Scene: A Scenes Approach to a Local Music Archive’. American Archivist, 85(1): n.p. Magaudda, P. (2020). ‘Music Scenes as Infrastructures: From Live Venues to Algorithmic Data’. In E. Barna and T. Tofalvy (eds), Popular Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem: From Cassettes to Stream (pp. 23–42). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mall, A. (2020). ‘Music Festivals, Ephemeral Places, and Scenes: Interdependence at Cornerstone Festival’. Journal of the Society for American Music, 14(1): 51–69. Martin-Iverson, S. (2012). ‘Autonomous Youth? Independence and Precariousness in the Indonesian Underground Music Scene’. Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 13(4): 382–97. McLeese, D. (2021). ‘Mayday Music: Response and Renewal amid the Pandemic Lockdown’. Rock Music Studies, 8(1): 7–25. Mendívil, J., and C. Spencer Espinosa (2015). ‘Epilogue: Reconsidering Music Scenes from a Latin American Perspective’. In J. Mendívil and C. Spencer (eds), Made in Latin America: Studies in Popular Music (pp. 161–4). New York: Routledge. Montano, E. (2011). ‘Festival Fever and International DJs: The Changing Shape of DJ Culture in Sydney’s Commercial Electronic Dance Music Scene’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2(1): 63–89.

Music Scenes

Muggleton, D., and R. Weinzierl, eds (2003). Inside Subculture. Oxford: Berg. Mumford, L. (1937). ‘What Is a City?’ Architectural Record, 82(5): 59–62. Nowak, R., and A. Whelan (2018). ‘“Vaporwave Is (Not) a Critique of Capitalism”: Genre Work in an Online Music Scene’. Open Cultural Studies, 2(1): 451–62. Olson, M. (1997). ‘ “Everybody Loves Our Town”: Towards a Materialist Ethnography’. In T. Swiss, J. Sloop and A. Herman (eds), Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory (pp. 269–90). London: Basil Blackwell. Parkes, A. (2017). ‘Discriminate Me: Racial Exclusivity and Neoliberalism’s Subcultural Influence on New York Hardcore’. Punk & Post-Punk, 6(1): 81–96. Pearce, R., and K. Lohman (2019). ‘De/Constructing DIY Identities in a Trans Music Scene’. Sexualities, 22(1–2): 97–113. Picaud, M. (2019). ‘Putting Paris and Berlin on Show: Nightlife in the Struggles to Define Cities’ International Position’. In G. Stahl and G. Bottà (eds), Nocturnes: Popular Music and the Night (pp. 35–48). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Quader, S. B. (2021). ‘How the Central Sydney Independent Musicians Use Preestablished “Online DIY” to Sustain Their Networking during the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Journal of International Communication, 1: 90–109. Reitsamer, R. (2018). ‘Gendered Narratives of Popular Music History and Heritage’. In S. Baker, C. Strong, L. Istvandity and Z. Cantillon (eds), The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage (pp. 26–35). London: Routledge. Rendell, J. (2021). ‘Staying In, Rocking Out: Online Live Music Portal Shows during the Coronavirus Pandemic’. Convergence, 27(4): 1092–111. Rivera-Rideau, P. R. (2019). ‘Reinventing Enrique Iglesias: Constructing Latino Whiteness in the Latin Urban Scene’. Latino Studies, 17(4): 467–83. Rochow, K. (2019). ‘Home Economics: Fusing Imaginaries in Wellington’s Musical Underground’. In A. Bennett and P. Guerra (eds), DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes (pp. 89–100). London: Routledge. Rochow, K., and G. Stahl (2016). ‘The Scene and the Unseen: Mapping the (Affective) Rhythms of Wellington and Copenhagen’. Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 7(2): 124–41. Saldanha, A. (2005). ‘Trance and Visibility at Dawn: Racial Dynamics in Goa’s Rave Scene’. Social & Cultural Geography, 6(5): 707–21. Schilt, K. (2004). ‘Riot Grrrl Is: Contestation over Meaning in a Music Scene’. In A. Bennett and R. A. Peterson (eds), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (pp. 115–30). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Schmisek, J. (2020). ‘This Must Be the Place: Venues and Urban Space in Underground Music Scenes’. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 7(1): 41–57. Schoop, M. E. (2017). Independent Music and Digital Technology in the Philippines. London: Routledge. Shank, B. (1994). Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Stahl, G. (2001). ‘Tracing Out an Anglo-Bohemia: Musicmaking and Myth in Montreal’. Public, 21/22: 99–121.

69

70

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Stahl, G. (2003). ‘Tastefully Renovating Subcultural Theory: Making Space for a New Model’. In D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl (eds), The Post-Subcultures Reader (pp. 27–40). London: Berg. Stahl, G. (2004). ‘“It’s Like Canada Reduced”: Setting the Scene in Montreal’. In A. Bennett and K. Kahn-Harris (eds), After Subculture (pp. 51–64). London: Palgrave. Stahl, G. (2011). ‘ “DIY or DIT!” Tales of Making Music in a Creative Capital’. In G. Keam and T. Mitchell (eds), Home, Land and Sea: Situating Music in Aotearoa New Zealand (pp. 145–60). Auckland: Pearson Education. Stahl, G., ed. (2014). Poor, but Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes. Bern: Peter Lang. Straw, W. (1991). ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music’. Cultural Studies, 5(3): 368–88. Straw, W. (2004). ‘Cultural Scenes’. Loisir et société/Society and Leisure, 27(2): 411–22. Straw, W. (2015). ‘Some Things a Scene Might Be: Postface’. Cultural Studies, 29(3): 476–85. Strong, C. (2018). ‘Popular Music and Heritage-Making in Melbourne’. In S. Brunt and G. Stahl (eds), Made in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (pp. 59–68). New York: Routledge. Tarassi, S. (2018). ‘Multi-tasking and Making a Living from Music: Investigating Music Careers in the Independent Music Scene of Milan’. Cultural Sociology, 12(2): 208–23. Taylor, J. (2008). ‘The Queerest of the Queer: Sexuality, Politics and Music on the Brisbane Scene’. Continuum, 22(5): 651–65. Thornton, S. (1996). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Thrasher, F. M. (1926). ‘The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago’. PhD thesis, University of Chicago. Toynbee, J. (1993). ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning Up Grunge: The Music Press and Generic Change in British Pop and Rock’. Popular Music, 12(3): 289–300. Vik, A. (2018). ‘“José María Arguedas Is My John Lennon”: Arguedas as Cultural Hero in Lima’s Independent Music Scene’. Iberoamericana–Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 47(1): 83–93. Vila, P., P. Semán, E. Martín and M. J. Carozzi (2011). Troubling Gender: Youth and Cumbia in Argentina’s Music Scene. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Whelan, A. (2020). ‘“Do You Have a Moment to Talk about Vaporwave?” Technology, Memory, and Critique in the Writing on an Online Music Scene’. In E. Barna and T. Tofalvy (eds), Popular Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem (pp. 185–200). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Whiting, S. (2021). ‘The Value of Small Live Music Venues: Alternative Forms of Capital and Niche Spaces of Cultural Production’. Cultural Sociology, 15(4): 558–78.

4 The milieu culture of punk: Beyond the scene – a guide to thinking and researching culture Pete Webb

The idea on which this chapter is based – milieu cultures – is one I developed through my research and writing work and in response to the problematic nature of the terms ‘subculture’, ‘scene’ and so on (see Webb (2010, 2020) for more on these concepts). This chapter attempts to outline the theory of milieu cultures and to show how it can be a guide to research, providing direction regarding the sorts of information we should be looking for when trying to understand a music milieu and those aspects associated with and central to it.

Defining milieu culture I first became familiar with the term ‘milieu’ through the work of Jorg Durrschmidt (2000) and discussion with him when we worked together at the University of the West of England in the late 1990s. ‘Milieu’ as a term was described by Durrschmidt thus: According to Rabinow, in its original notion the term ‘milieu’ is the French equivalent for ‘ether’ or ‘medium’, as used in Newton’s (1642–1727) Mechanics (‘Optics’): the medium through which light causes a contraction of the human eye. In this physical sense ‘milieu’ became a metaphor for any exterior environment through which the body of an organism can be affected, and conversely, through which the organism can move and ‘extend’. For D’Alembert and Diderot in their ‘encyclopedie’ (1751–1780), water, for instance, is the milieu in which fish move. (Durrschmidt 2000: 126)

72

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

This analogy of a medium or ether, or even the idea of an organism being affected by the exterior environment through which it moves, is important for my development of the term. In relation to music cultures or milieux as I call them, when researching them I have always tried to start with the idea that the environment of punk or grime or hip-hop is specific to those people who are connected in a milieu and identify with those groupings. As we will see, there are three main levels to the milieu idea as I have developed it. The first is the personal/individual/close community of people who are a part of, for example, a punk milieu. So if we are looking at Bristol, this would be that group of people who identify as punk and have a history and relationship with the space of the city and surrounding areas that have affected their perception of what their version of punk is. So, for example, in Bristol during the late 1970s there were bands such as the Pigs, the Cortinas, Social Security, the Numbers, Glaxo Babies, the X-Certs, amongst others. From 1979, a different version of punk emerged from Bristol: Vice Squad, Disorder, Lunatic Fringe, Amebix, Chaos UK, Court Martial and so on. Certain record labels emerged: Riot City, named after the St Pauls riots, Heartbeat Records. All of this plus the venues, pubs, squats, records shops and spaces where punks used to gather formed a part of the specific milieu that punks living in Bristol experienced and that affected them. So for each group of punks around the UK, their city has a different set of references, geography, locations and expressions of punk. Therefore, each has to be researched in its specificity. So, when developing his understanding of milieu, Durrschmidt drew on phenomenology and the ideas of Schutz (1970) and Scheler (1980), describing a milieu as a relatively stable configuration of action and meaning in which the individual actively maintains a degree of familiarity, competence and normalcy, based on the continuity and consistency of personal disposition, habitualities and routines, and experienced as a feeling of situatedness. (Durrschmidt 2000: 18)

This emphasizes the routines and competences and dispositions that we have due to ‘personal’ experience. You feel relatively situated in these types of behaviour that have been developed over time through your upbringing with family and peers, the places where you went to school and worked, and your local community. Durrschmidt, drawing on Scheler, then suggested that there were two elements to a milieu: milieu structure and momentary milieu. Milieu structure is the relatively stable set of ideas, dispositions, understandings and competences that an individual has. They are fairly certain and known by the individual. Momentary milieu is ‘the current and transitory content of the actual environment, which is practically relevant at any one moment and things are filtered through the individual’s “order of values” ’ (31). Momentary milieu in our punk example could be the interaction of a group of punks with housing law and the owners of the properties where they squatted. They are not fully aware of the legal framework around squatting houses, and they filter

The Milieu Culture of Punk

the idea of it through their ‘order of values’, which is supportive of people taking direct action and utilizing empty homes. Others forming a different milieu would have a different opinion on that. Sometimes momentary milieu becomes a part of milieu structure – for example, when squatting laws are more important to know and understand, and the rights of squatters are a part of the wider society’s legal framework, then some punks make it something they need to know about and become more familiar with resulting in it becoming a part of their milieu structure. Milieu structure depends a lot on what Schutz (1970) calls ‘relevancies’, that is, ‘the ordering of the individuals environment into spatio-temporal segments that are relevant practically to the individuals varying tasks at hand’ (Durrschmidt 2000: 19). These relevancies, typifications and the dispositions we have guide the plans, ideas and ways of approaching things that we employ. Schutz says our relevancies function in a number of ways: 1. They determine selectivity in facts and events. 2. They transform unique individual actions into typical functions. 3. They act as a scheme of interpretation and orientation which constitutes a universe of discourse among the actors. 4. The scheme of orientation and interpretation has a chance of wider recognition if it is standardized or institutionalized. 5. A socially approved system of relevancies and typification provides a common field through which individual members live and through which they order their lives. (Schutz 1970: 82) For point 1, as we shall see later in this chapter, when a music culture and lifestyle becomes a part of your milieu structure you start to see why certain types of facts and events become common in the punk milieu – for example, considering certain events very important: 1976 in the UK, the Queen’s Jubilee as a point of conflict (‘God Save the Queen’ by Sex Pistols); the Bill Grundy Show as a point where punk hit the national British consciousness. For point 2, you start to act in certain ways and certain acts become part of your typical functions – for example, rebellious questioning, a similar look and disposition to other punks (spikey hair, a certain style of dress or stylistic codes), interest depending on your version of punk in situationism, anarchism, veganism, animal rights or fashion, art graphics. This also applies to punk history, depending on which version of punk you became attached to and adapted to: anarcho-punk, the punk of 1976 onwards, hardcore punk or any combination of these. For point 3, if you were attracted to the more political side of punk, then the Clash and the album Sandanista may well have led you to think about and have ideas about the politics of South America; Crass may have directed you towards anarchism. Therefore, the debates among punks were always interpreting and orienting their ideas in relation to those expressed by punk bands

73

74

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

or fanzines or key figures in the milieu. For point 4, the standardization of some key punk ideas, aesthetics and interests has sometimes been institutionalized, starting with the fashion from high street shops in the late 1970s selling punk-type gear to Vivienne Westwood (fashion designer, partner of Malcolm McLaren and co-owner of the shop SEX) being awarded an OBE and being accepted into fashion’s hierarchy in the world. Danny Boyle’s latest Disney biopic of Steve Jones’s book Lonely Boy could also be a version of punk being institutionalized. For point 5, it is interesting how many punks and ex-punks are in caring professions: one of my interviewees runs a successful ethical food co-op distribution business and many have been a part of organizations that want change or focus on the way punks live their lives, notably always questioning and not accepting the mainstream political or social/cultural narrative. Finally, Durrschmidt added the idea of an extended milieu to account for the processes of globalization that were impacting people’s lives through flows of technology, immigration, finance, ideas and media, and of course this has been heightened dramatically since Durrschmidt wrote this in 2000. Our current social configuration could be described as part of the fourth industrial revolution (Schwab 2016), an era of interconnection via the internet of things, robotics, artificial intelligence and a shift in the velocity, scope and systems of the economy, culture and technology. This all means that the global impacts and elements that extend beyond our immediate cultural/political and social existence have and can have a major influence on us. These processes have been there through the twentieth century, but in less immediate ways. For the punk milieu, they became aware of the importance of American garage rock bands, of the New York Dolls, of Iggy Pop of the MC5 and the Ramones, but also of Punk magazine, a fanzine created by cartoonist John Holmstrom and the ‘punk’ writer Legs McNeil in 1975. Since the 1970s, a huge matrix of punk bands, promoters, fanzines, webzines and activists have created a global network that feeds onto and back on itself. Many UK punk bands have benefited from touring these places, and many Bristolian punks expanded their understanding of the world and repertoires by touring them. For example, Chaos UK and another Bristol band named Disorder heavily influenced Japanese hardcore punk after touring there. Japan also had a big influence on them in return (Terminal Sound Nuisance 1997). So milieu, according to Durrschmidt, has these three levels: milieu structure, momentary milieu and extended milieu. I would argue that milieu structure should itself be split into two levels. The first is a biographical milieu structure that reflects the relevancies, typifications and dispositions that have developed for you as an individual in your growth as a child, and through your family, schooling and communities of which you were a part, as this is very personal and has an impact on all types of behaviour, psychology and approaches to the different elements of life. The second is a cultural milieu structure that reflects all the areas – or, as Bourdieu (1993) puts it, ‘fields’ – of culture of which you are a part. Here I am using ‘culture’

The Milieu Culture of Punk

to reflect social, political and economic areas of life, as well as the traditional ideas of culture, within the term ‘culture’ to emphasize the interactive and changeable nature of these areas depending on the groups involved in their operation. This separation is because there needs to be a distinction between the milieu structure someone has developed from birth and the milieu structure that one develops related to their cultural engagement and cultural life. These need to be separated theoretically just to understand the different levels of effect that these areas have on an individual’s life and the community of individuals that I am calling a ‘milieu’. Another important element of this is that people can move from one cultural position or cultural milieu to another. They can disavow their punk past, for example, and become a Buddhist. This would mean a change to their cultural milieu structure and their biographical milieu structure, but this change would not necessarily be as big as the effect on the cultural milieu structure. So all this gives us a layered and fairly systematic approach to the idea of researching and understanding cultural groups, lived experience and the ways people interpret, understand and have competencies in various areas. This approach forces us to really dig deep into the layers of experience people have to really get to grips with how they affect a situation and how those situations and experiences affect them. Punk, like many music-based cultures, is varied and has many reference points and politics, which have often been a part of the branding and categorization of these varieties of punk. For example, anarcho-punk is different from Oi or street punk. There are variations of punk that again have different references and often politics, such as straight edge punk, gothic punk, EMO, post punk, hardcore punk, crust punk and so on: all these variations have their own varieties of references, typifications, aesthetics and knowledge bases. We will now look in more detail at how the milieu culture of punk can be analysed at a national UK level, at the local Bristol level and through the voices of the individuals I interviewed as part of a project for a book on the lived experience of punk lives. Punk appeared and spread rapidly in the UK at the end of 1975 and through 1976. Many have documented this process, and over the years there have been many attempts to examine and dissect the minutiae of the cultural shock that punk was (Glasper 2004; Gray 1995; Laing 1985; Marcus 1989; Hebdige 1979; Reynolds 2005; Savage 1991, amongst many others). We can periodize punk into three main groups. In 1975–8, the first UK wave of punk emerged initially in London around the group of bands and individuals that made up the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Banshees, Adverts and the Damned; it then spread quickly to all the other major cities, with bands developing and communities emerging that each had their own reference points locally but were also tapping into the national reference points. The ideas, the fashion and the anti-authority elements of punk affected the milieu of each community that developed. There has been some work done on this, and if we look at each project – for example, Martin Ryan’s Friend of Mine: Punk in Manchester 1976–1978 (2018) or Gareth Ashton’s Manchester: It Never Rains … a City Primed for Punk Rock (2019) or

75

76

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

any of Ian Glasper’s books about UK punk (2004, 2021) – we see the importance of the interrelated national punk scene and how it interacted with and had an impact on the local scene. One example is the arrival of the Sex Pistols in Manchester and the importance of that event for inspiring a whole set of musicians and idealists to start their own bands. Warsaw (later to become Joy Division) and the Buzzcocks were already developing, but Magazine came soon after, as did the Smiths, writers like Paul Morley and Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records. All these people had a relationship with punk and the national milieu, but started to develop and shape the Manchester version of that in ways that were very particular to Manchester. From 1978 onwards, there were new waves of punk music and punk-inspired music that developed and opened up the milieu to further influences and ideas. Public Image Ltd emerged from the implosion of the Sex Pistols and brought a whole series of musical references to the punk milieu that previously had been hidden or unknown to many who were a part of this milieu. Lydon, Wobble, Levene as PIL brought the worlds of dub, Kraut rock and experimental industrial sounds to the milieu. The whole period after 1978 is full of experimental and new hybrid-sounding music. Simon Reynolds charts this very well in his Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978–1984 (2005). He presents the morphing and emerging experimentalism of music in this period that had originally sprung out of punk and its milieu. Added to this was the development of a punk milieu that took the ideas in the lyrics of songs such as ‘Anarchy in the UK’, ‘God Save the Queen’, ‘Career Opportunities’ and ‘White Riot’ more seriously and had started to develop a strong DIY and more overtly political and philosophical outlook. The work of Crass, the record label it set up, Crass Records, and the emergence of the anarcho- and hardcore punk scenes added a slightly different layer to the punk milieu. The aesthetics were different but still had a punk core to them. Hardcore punk developed this idea but with a more limited musical palette than the music that Crass and others associated with their label were producing – Rudimentary Peni, the Mob, D and V, Annie Anxiety, Poison Girls, Zounds, Flux of Pink Indians, the Cravats and so on. Hardcore punk and its development from around 1980 linked in with anarcho-punk but had some differences of musical sound; however, the lyrics were equally as political and scathing as those of Crass. Discharge, GBH, the Exploited, Disorder and others were key players in this milieu. The artwork, lyrics and sound all expressed the dissatisfaction with the UK, fear of nuclear war and a determination to do something about this. From 1984 to the present day, there has been a global expansion of punk and a continuing development of the sound, aesthetics, lyrics and causes in which punks involved themselves. This has been charted by many writers, but Ian Glasper does a great job in The Scene That Would Not Die: Twenty Years of Post-millennial Punk in the UK (2021). So these three phases of punk in terms of the music and aesthetics have all had an impact and, of course, have been central to the cultural milieu of many punks up and down the country.

The Milieu Culture of Punk

Case studies I now want to delve deeper into the milieu and look at the voices of some of those who went through these different periods of punk and how it affected their cultural milieu structure and their biographical milieu structure. The data is taken from a series of interviews I conducted as part of a larger project on the lived experience in punk lives. J was a young man who grew up in Knowle West, a sprawling, predominantly working-class estate in the south of Bristol. He first heard of punk at the age of eleven. He discovered the Sex Pistols and the Clash and started to find out more about punk. Throughout the 1970s, he got more and more into punk and started to meet likeminded kids outside of his school and area orbit. He would venture into the city centre and hang out with other kids who looked like punks. During this time, he would meet and befriend people who were from different class backgrounds and who had totally different lifestyles. But they came together under the banner of punk. He talked about two examples. One kid lived in Redland, a very middle-class area of the city. He had left school and was working at Rolls Royce in Bristol and had been threatened with the sack for having spikey hair and looking too punk. The other was a lad from a mixed-ethnicity background who lived in Easton in Bristol, which was a very mixed-ethnicity area: PW: That class thing is one thing I wanted to talk about because … was it really obvious to you at that point that there were these kids like Pete from very different backgrounds or did it not seem that they were that different from you? J: Well it wasn’t, not at the time. It didn’t seem that obvious because we were all into the same thing.   But then when you delved a little bit deeper his parents had this huge house in Redland and I’d never been in a huge house in Redland. [Laughs] Do you know what I mean?   I didn’t know. I didn’t move in them circles. You know, I was from a housing estate … the furthest I got out of Knowle West was going on the bus into town, and then meeting these people. And … yeah, going to Easton and St Pauls was a little bit different. You were a little bit, not nervous but anxious and wary … cautious about going to gigs and these kinds of things. So we used to go Stonehouse and the Western Star Domino and Trinity and Ajax’s (late night illegal drinking bar run by one of Bristol’s Jamaican community) and places like that. And like you’d get a really nice reception. There was never any trouble.

So J was starting to see middle-class life that he had never seen or experienced before. He was also starting to see the life of Bristol’s immigrant community and a part of the city that he had never set foot inside before – the areas of St Pauls and Easton. This opened up his cultural milieu structure to the sounds of reggae, to the communities of Bristolian Jamaicans and Pakistanis and to the middle-class of Bristol and a lifestyle that he had never understood.

77

78

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

As his life with punk developed, J found that the interesting elements of bands such as Crass and the Clash were the pamphlets and fold-out sleeves that came with Crass records, the fliers and information sheets that he picked up at gigs, the links to animal rights issues, vegetarianism and veganism, housing co-ops and squatting, making your own bread – which for a working-class boy he had not seen anyone do before – South American politics of Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Panama, Cuba – the Sandanista, the Contras, the Zapatistas, the Chiapas Area and the Mexican struggle – anarchism in the UK through the Angry Brigade, the Anarcho Syndicalists and eventually class war. All of these references became a part of J’s milieu structure due to his involvement with punk and its community. As J developed, he got involved with Class War, went on Stop the City marches in London, got involved in the anti-poll tax campaigns and eventually got together with a group of other punks in Bristol to set up a sports and social club. This club then led to his working to raise money for cookers and a water irrigation scheme to help the Zapatistas and support their struggle. When J got involved in the Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls Sports and Social Club, he was still learning about these issues. The idea of the club was to be a sports club but also to have an anti-racist and political outlook. This is the club’s statement of what it is about: We are a community sports and social club based at The Plough Inn, Easton, Bristol. Beginning with the formation of a football team in 1992, The Cowboys and Cowgirls now includes six men’s and a women’s football team, three netball teams, a club for kids and families (Cowboys & Cowgirls Kids Klub, or CACKK) and a whole legion of ex-players and non-sporting members (Legends & Supporters). We are also in the process of setting up a casual cricket team, after our previous league team (now the fabulously named Easton Cuttlefish Cricket Club) set out on their own due to constitution differences. We’re not just about the sport. Players, supporters, and friends of the club organize regular social events, tournaments, and trips abroad. The ECCSSC have become not only a large sporting organization, but also a social club who play and party with likeminded clubs all over the world. We value our social lives and ethos as being as or even more important than our sporting activities. Ideas and commitment are the lifeblood of our community. We think big and act on it. Over the years we’ve visited and played in Belfast, Glasgow, Hamburg, Hanover, Antwerp, Brussels, Stuttgart, Berlin, Amsterdam, California, France, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Morocco, Palestine, Argentina and Brazil. In addition, we’ve held and been part of numerous events in the UK. Although each section of the club is run for, and by, its members, every player and supporter has a voice and a vote in the wider club. We hold ‘Full Club’ meetings twice a year to discuss issues that affect everyone and all club positions are elected. We also come together to play in tournaments, get involved in local and international solidarity, party at our home pub The Plough and celebrate our successes (or commiserate our losses). Everyone involved in the Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls is welcome to come to all club events. The club is run for and by its members, so we encourage and expect all

The Milieu Culture of Punk

our members to get involved by attending meetings, volunteering (e.g. helping to run an event or organize matches) or taking on a specific role in the club. ALL MEMBERS OF THE ECCSSC SHARE THE FOLLOWING CORE VALUES: The ECCSSC is anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-fascist, anti-homophobic and anti-transphobic. We respect the rights, dignity and worth of every person and will treat everyone equally regardless of age, ability, gender, race, ethnicity, religious belief, sexuality or social/economic status. We are committed to everyone having the right to enjoy club sports and social activities free from the threat of intimidation, harassment and abuse. We aim to promote and foster participation in sport to benefit individuals, the community and wider society. We aim to oppose discrimination and repression in a positive way, through sport and social activities locally and with other clubs nationally and internationally. We seek to further mutual understanding and respect for all people and to challenge discrimination.

So the ethos of the club and its outlook very much builds on the cultural milieu of anarcho- and hardcore punk and its commitment to social, cultural and political issues and a sense of equality and fairness. Punk often railed against the absence of this in mainstream society. J found this community and then developed as an individual. He ended up becoming a part of the organization that is now called Essential Wholefoods. This is a food distribution company that does everything in a completely ethical fashion, is run as a true co-op and became the main focus of J’s work and life. Again we can see the milieu structure of ideas and ways in interpreting things being played out by J and the organizations with which he became involved. For Essential Wholefoods, the co-op ethic is important: paying your workers a living wage, not selling to mainstream supermarkets, having food stocks delivered by ship instead of plane. All of this fits very neatly into J’s love of Crass and the ideas that were presented and acted upon by the members of that groups and all around them (Berger 2006; Dines and Worley 2016; Ignorant 2010; Rimbaud 2014). Below is the statement from the Essential Wholefoods website that explains its values: Essential Trading prides itself on doing things differently. When you buy from Essential you are supporting an alternative to the large corporations who damage our environment and show little regard for the people who make their products. We aim to do things better: • A worker co-operative: Essential is owned and operated by its members. We make decisions democratically to ensure everyone has an equal say in how the business is run. • Vegetarian: we are opposed to the exploitation of animals. All of our products are vegetarian and largely plant-based.

79

80

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

• GMO-free: where possible, all available products are free from any sort of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), a policy we’ve had since the mid-1990s. • No air freight: we attempt to minimize our impact on the environment as much as possible. All of our products are shipped by land or sea, never by air. This was a precedent we set from the first day of trading. • Support independents: you won’t find any of our products in the supermarkets! We have made an ethical decision not to work with large corporations, instead choosing to support independent shops and suppliers. • Natural energy sources: our warehouse is fitted with solar panels that generate clean, green energy. Any additional energy needed to run our sites comes from 100% renewable sources. We even have a carbon-neutral website hosting service! • Packaging: we strive to minimize packaging and use ecological variants wherever possible. We have introduced paperless invoicing for our customers and any paperwork that does require printing is done so on recycled paper. The shrink wrap we use to bind our products for delivery is made of recycled plastic and reducing plastic for our retail packs remains an ongoing project. • Produce: we are constantly reviewing and increasing our range to support zero waste strategies. We do our very best to ensure any food that is fit for consumption but that we cannot sell, for whatever reason, is directed to charities, foods banks and community centres in Bristol and the wider South West.

This account demonstrates a huge commitment to vegetarianism, the co-op ethic, GMO free, no air freight, support for independent companies, natural energy sources, packaging that does not harm the environment or is difficult to recycle. All of this and the central ideas of the DIY community and the support and valuing of the workforce can again be seen as drawing on the ethos and ideas that the anarchopunk community espoused, but also the ideas that could be found in the wider punk movement – in the Clash, for example. Another example from my interviewees is R, who again found himself growing up in a working-class estate in Bristol and found punk a little earlier than J. In 1978 he was fourteen and finding excitement and wonder in the bands he was hearing on the radio – especially on the John Peel Radio Show, but also on various TV shows; seeing the Sex Pistols perform ‘Pretty Vacant’ on UK television chart show Top of the Pops was especially impactful. R started to go into the city centre and get involved with the wider punk community and, in the same way as J, met people from a variety of social backgrounds, experienced reggae music for the first time, started going to gigs and getting involved in the punk milieu that attended gigs and developed a political outlook. As the 1970s moved into the 1980s, R became more and more political. The miners’ strike of 1984 got him involved in collecting money for striking miners and seeing bands such as Crass do benefit gigs for them. He also saw the industrial leftist band Test Dept, which toured with a choir of striking miners in 1984 and 1985. This politicization led him to develop an interest in anarchist politics, and

The Milieu Culture of Punk

he got involved with Class War and various anarchist groupings. Again, he became heavily involved with Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls and the anti–poll tax campaign; then in 2006 he became part of a group from the Cowboys and Cowgirls who wanted to set up a radical history group. The Bristol Radical History Group (BRHG) was formed and started producing pamphlets and books about the history of Bristol, but also the wider history of the UK from below. The ‘about us’ statement on the group’s website is really instructive. It sums up the values and interpretations of a certain section of the punk milieu, and these ideas have been translated into an active and many-headed organization. The group’s projects and campaigns have had international reach, especially the campaign around English slave trader Edward Colston and trying to educate people about his legacy in the city of Bristol and to remove his statue. Events overtook the group when the statue was torn down by protestors in 2020. The BRHG had produced a book, From Wulfstan to Colston (2020), which outlined and discussed the history of Colston and his part in the slave trade and the formation of various societies in Bristol that developed his name and legacy. The group also produced a campaign and book about the Eastville Workhouse. After studying an old ordnance survey map of the Ashley down and Eastville area of the city, members from BRHG saw an area marked ‘disused’ in 1902. This area was eventually found to be the site of the unmarked graves of over four hundred men, women and children who had worked in the Eastville Workhouse at 100 Fishponds Road. The campaign eventually led to a memorial being erected and a plaque placed on the house that stood on the site of the workhouse. This campaign and others like it continue to be a part of the BRHG’s work, and when we look at the origins of the group and the connection to the Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls, there is a strong thread that links the individuals involved in this project back to the punk milieu of the late 1970s and early 1980s. R’s involvement in this and his activity since have been very much rooted in the punk milieu of his youth, and the ideas that he encountered there are still present today in his biographical and cultural milieu structure. Simon Reynolds (2005) suggests: Perhaps the best way to think of post-punk is not as a genre but as a space of possibility, out of which a range of genres emerged – Goth, industrial, synthpop, mutant disco, et al. Because it’s a space – or maybe a discourse about music, rather than a style of music – what unites all this activity is a set of open-ended imperatives: innovation, wilful oddness; the jettisoning of all things precedented or ‘rock’n’roll.

He was correct to say that post-punk, but also I would say punk, was a space of possibility where many directions and trajectories could be realized. Other authors have tried to express their take on punk and post-punk – or indeed on popular music in general – and have described it as a practice or assemblage of music production, lyrical composition, music performance (live and recorded), visual interpretation

81

82

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

(through video and film), audience reception and consumption, as a creative engagement with the themes the artist presents and the reflexive interpretations of their own work. As Becker (1982) described art worlds as collective endeavours, so the sociology of music has recently described musical Worlds (DeNora 2003; Finnegan 1989; Frith 1998) as sites of experience and semiotic significance. Sarbanes (2006: 3) describes it in this way: Music links the individual and the collective via modes of action, feeling, and embodiment, forms of relating capable not merely of reflecting existing social structures, but of generating forms of interaction that exceed and contest those structures.

It is important here to realize that the punk milieu was not just about music but also about creating fanzines, exploring ideas, evolving fashion, being DIY. When we look at the constellation of resources that emerged during the punk era, it is huge and varied. Unlike many other music milieu – apart from maybe hip-hop, reggae and twotone – punk was a global news channel, an artist and creative zone that encouraged people to move beyond the mainstream and do things themselves. When we look at the fanzines Vague, Ripped and Torn, Sniffin Glue and Panache, for example, or the American magazine/fanzine Research, they provided much more than commentary on the music: they also wrote about Situationism, William Burroughs, the Red Army Faction, J. G. Ballard, the politics of anarchism – Proudhon, Bakunin and Bookchin. These fanzines were an education in themselves, and were often produced and contributed to by individuals who were also self-taught and learning as they went. The individuals I have discussed are just two examples, but they are examples of the power of the milieu of punk.

Conclusion I contend that milieu theory can help us understand and trace the knowledge, motivations, dispositions, understandings and actions of groups, communities and individuals. Personal troubles and public issues are interwoven as processes that need locating and identifying. Milieu theory can help with that and also orient the way we research these milieu and the information we try to gather about the individuals and communities we are interested in researching. In terms of the punk milieu, we can say that punk unleashed a set of cultural legacies that were to do with the initial rush of anger and antagonism, but those feelings were built upon with the more politicized versions of punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those involved in punk have ended up with very interesting and often progressive views, outlooks, work ethics and practices, as well as cultural understanding – as illustrated by the case studies of J and R discussed in this chapter.

The Milieu Culture of Punk

Such trajectories need charting more extensively, as they demonstrate that the legacy of punk is continuing and not fixed, and that it moves in and out of many musical genres but has at its root a strong, self-motivated creative and often democratic and humanist activity. I hope this chapter can play a role in getting researchers and writers to think about milieu culture as a theory and a guide to research, but also to think about the wide trajectories of punk and how they are still evolving.

References Ashton, G. (2019). Manchester: It Never Rains … a City Primed for Punk Rock. Manchester: Empire. Becker, H. S. (1982). ArtWorlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berger, G. (2006). The Story of Crass. San Francisco: PM. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity. DeNora, T. (2003). After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dines, M., and M. Worley (2016). The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Punk, Politics and Music. London: Minor Compositions. Durrschmidt, J. (2000). Everyday Lives in the Global City. London: Routledge. Finnegan, R. (1989). The Hidden Musicians: Music Making in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frith, S. (1998). Performing Rights: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glasper, I. (2004). Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980–1984. London: Cherry Red. Glasper, I. (2021). The Scene That Would Not Die: Twenty Years of Post-millennial Punk in the UK. London: Earth Island. Gray, M. (1995). The Last Gang in Town: The Story and Myth of the Clash. New York: Fourth Estate. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Ignorant, S., with S. Pottinger (2010). The Rest Is Propaganda. London: Southern Records. Laing, D. (1985). One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Marcus, G. (1989). Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press. Reynolds, S. (2005). Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978–1984. London: Faber and Faber. Rimbaud, P. (2014). Shibboleth: My Revolting Life. New York: Exitstencil. Ryan, M. (2018). Friends of Mine: Pun in Manchester 1976–1978. Manchester: Empire. Sarbanes, J. (2006). ‘Musicking and Communitas: The Aesthetic Mode of Sociality in Rebetika Subculture’. Popular Music and Society, 29(1): 17–35.

83

84

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Savage, J. (1991). England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber and Faber. Scheler, M. (1980). Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Schutz, A. (1970). On Phenomenology and Social Relations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schwab, K. (2016). The Fourth Industrial Revolution. World Economic Forum Press. Terminal Sound Nuisance (1997). ‘UK84, the Noise Ain’t Dead (Part 6): Chaos UK “Just Mere Slaves” 12’. Available online: http://termin​also​undn​uisa​nce.blogs​pot. com/2021/12/uk84-noise-aint-dead-part-6-chaos-uk.html (accessed 2 May 2022). Webb, P. (2010). Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures. New York: Routledge. Webb, P. (2020). “Resuscitating the Subcultural Corpse: A Reflection on Subculture as Lived Experience and the Importance of Class and Ethnicity’. In K. Gildart, A. Gough-Yates, S. Lincoln, B. Osgerby, L. Robinson, J. Street, P. Webb and M. Worle (eds), Hebdige and Subculture in the Twenty-First Century: Through the Subcultural Lens. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 51–69.

Part II Method

86

5 Ethnography, popular music and youth culture: An anthropologist’s account Evangelos Chrysagis

I cannot recall the first time I visited Glasgow. It must have been sometime in late 2005 when I arrived in Edinburgh to take up a master’s degree in social anthropology. As my familiarity with Glasgow and its music deepened over the following years, certain questions emerged. Why would many touring bands visit Glasgow and not Edinburgh? Why, out of the whole of the UK, would certain bands play in, say, London and Glasgow only? How does a medium-sized British city sustain such a wealth of musical activity? Why do certain affluent Glasgow bands continue to reside in the city rather than relocating to London? The Social Anthropology Department at Edinburgh graciously approved my PhD research proposal in 2008 to conduct an ethnography of popular music practices in Glasgow; to the best of my knowledge, there was no ethnographic study of popular music that focused exclusively on Glasgow or Scotland more widely. Thus, I did not embark on this long and laborious process out of some personal whim. Rather, my main motivation was to answer anthropologically significant questions and attempt to address the identified gap in the ethnographic literature. During my first year as a PhD student I attended compulsory ‘research methods’ courses. Having the opportunity to chart the field of social research methods was indeed useful and rewarding in many respects, but, in retrospect, the best advice I received on ethnographic methods came mainly from two other sources: first, from reading ethnographic monographs, some of which included a chapter or section on ‘methods’ (e.g. Finnegan 1989; Fonarow 2006); and, second, from informal discussions with senior colleagues, who prompted me to ‘get to the field as soon as possible’. The latter was at odds with the task of having to write and defend an

88

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

extended, speculative research proposal just before embarking on fieldwork. This was challenging owing to the lack of a formal, detailed ‘how-to’ guide for ethnographers that would be relevant to every field situation, and it was exacerbated by the relative lack of anthropological studies of popular music. Social anthropologist Sara Cohen (1993: 123), one of the leading proponents of an ethnographic approach to the study of popular music, notes: Ideally, that approach should focus upon social relationships, emphasising music as social practice and process. It should also be comparative and holistic; historical and dialogical; reflexive and policy-oriented. It should emphasise, among other things, the dynamic complexities of situations within which abstract concepts and models are embedded, and which they often simplify or obscure. The social, cultural and historical specificity of events, activities, relationships and discourses should also be highlighted.

This chapter aims to address several of these points by embedding the discussion of ethnographic methods within the social, cultural and historical specificity of my own fieldwork on popular music practices in Glasgow in 2010–11. With special reference to a band, a live music promoter and a record label, my fieldwork focused on do-ityourself (DIY) cultural production as a form of ethical practice, based on the ideas and activities of DIY music practitioners in Glasgow. While I already had a fairly broad experience of the city’s music, the specific focus on DIY emerged while I was in the field. When I started my fieldwork in January 2010, I was determined to enlist one or two local bands in my project, but it soon became obvious that I had to make a swift decision regarding the musical form I wanted study. Owing to the pluralism and complexity of music practices in the city, this was not an easy task. Nevertheless, a random event led to the shift of my focus from music genres and classifications to practices, processes and modes of conduct. A contact at Glasgow University provided me with a copy of a feature that had recently appeared in the music magazine New Musical Express (NME) (Dosanjh 2009). The one-page feature contained information about Glasgow’s ‘nae wave’ scene and included excerpts from an interview with a band called Divorce. The NME journalist had attempted to draw a link between the musical and aesthetic elements of nae wave and those of late 1970s New York’s no wave, which had spurred an array of influential bands, such as Suicide and Sonic Youth.1 Despite the feature’s attempt to label and pigeonhole the nae wave ‘sound’, the avant-garde sensibilities of no wave – which as a music/art crossover was informed less by a specific sound and more by an ‘approach’ – were indeed present in ‘nae wave’. NME described nae wave as a ‘community’ comprising ‘not so much like-sounding but like-minded individuals’ (21). As Alistair, the drummer from Divorce, put it, ‘I think the aesthetic behind it is just more sorta people with a similar attitude than a signature sound’ and, therefore, ‘a band from London can be nae wave’ (21).

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

One of my contacts in Edinburgh was acquainted with the Divorce drummer through their mutual involvement in the Edinburgh club scene, and soon I would have my first meeting with Alistair. Alistair, who was living in Edinburgh before relocating to Glasgow halfway through my fieldwork, subsequently introduced me to the rest of Divorce’s members as well as other ‘like-minded’ actors, such as the promoter Cry Parrot and the record label Winning Sperm Party (see Chrysagis 2016, 2017, 2020). The latter were mentioned in the NME feature as ‘releasing all that is glorious and new in Scotland’ (Dosanjh 2009: 21). All three actors featured extensively in my research and became the three case studies discussed in my PhD thesis. They operated under the rubric of what I identified not as ‘nae wave’ but as DIY, following my interlocutors’ rejection of the former term and loose identification with the latter. In what follows, I discuss ethnographic methods in the field of popular music and youth from an anthropological perspective. In doing so, I build on Andy Bennett’s (2002) call for a critical and reflective analysis of ethnography and other qualitative research methods in sociological studies on youth and music. To this effect, I trace the emergence of ethnography as a sine qua non of ethnomusicological research, before turning to anthropology and the study of youth culture and popular music to discuss landmark ethnographies that paved the way for subsequent ethnographic work in this field.2 While I focus on anthropology, my fieldwork has also drawn on other disciplines where ethnography is prevalent in the study of popular music and youth, such as sociology, cultural studies and popular music studies. Therefore, the following section discusses the interdisciplinary appeal of ethnography in the study of popular music and how insights from other disciplines have influenced my own research. The final section outlines the methodological aspects of my own ethnographic research on DIY music practices in Glasgow. My reflective account aims to make intelligible the mundane nature of ethnography, the pluralism of methodological tools available to the ethnographer studying popular music among young people, but also highlight its unpredictable and improvisatory dimensions. Ultimately, my account seeks to highlight the value of ethnographic research for our understanding of popular music practices as an important site for the articulation of meaning among the young cross-culturally.

Ethnography and popular music Martin Stokes (1994: 5) writes that ‘music is socially meaningful not entirely but largely because it provides means by which people recognize identities and places, and the boundaries which separate them’. Ethnicity and nationalism are therefore two themes that have attracted considerable ethnographic attention (Regev 2004; Szemere 2001), while the local/global distinction and the appropriation of popular

89

90

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

music forms by youth are themes addressed by scholars in studies about Indonesia (Baulch 2007) and Japan (Matsue 2009), among other sites. Gender has been a recurring theme in ethnographies of popular music (Leblanc 1999; Walser 1993), as have deviance (Becker 1963; Redhead 1993) and style (Hodkinson 2002), among a range of other topics. The existing corpus of culturally diverse ethnographies exemplifies the complexity of the nexus between music and social life. In their analyses, ethnographers have engaged the practico-material circumstances that facilitate and sustain music-making, as well as the social and cultural values that mobilize various actors and make music possible. As Christopher Small (1998: 9) argues, ‘musicking’ comprises anyone engaged in any capacity in a musical performance. While my own ethnography did not explicitly deal with Scottishness or local identity, spatial, musical and, above all, ethical boundaries were pertinent to my interlocutors’ connections to other local and non-local actors. A nuanced account at the crossroads of popular music, place and identity formation is Barry Shank’s Dissonant Identities (1994). A participating musician, Shank studied the rock’n’roll music scene in Austin, Texas, from a Lacanian perspective. Through a historical overview of local music traditions, he demonstrates how the creative appropriation of musical forms by Austin’s university students had become the fundamental means for the articulation of identity. Austin transformed into the ideal site for the exploration of new identities and the proliferation of the musical production of subjectivity, a process which, according to Shank, music’s commodification seems to withhold. Another topic that was relevant to my research was the close interaction between performing musicians and audiences. Charles Keil (1966) has documented the intense communication between blues performers and audiences. In doing so, he has demonstrated the crucial role of audiences in symbolically expressing ideas important for the Black community. As Keil has shown, apart from the apparent disintegration of the boundary between performers and audiences, the interaction that takes place in music events embodies and disseminates certain values and meanings. The dissolution of the boundary between musicians and spectators was readily observable during my fieldwork, in the sense that, quite frequently, various audience members were also performers, while in many instances the spatial boundary separating stage and audience area was virtually non-existent. The pluralism of music genres associated with the DIY network in Glasgow also translated into the lack of distinctive ‘styles’. Clothing did not play a role in signifying status or generating a sense of belonging. This contrasts with a good deal of research in musical ‘subcultures’, such as Paul Hodkinson’s (2002) ethnographic study of goth, a particularly spectacular form. My research participants showed no interest in style as an identifier of a musical or ‘subcultural identity’ (Kruse 1993). They did, however, pay attention to the visual elements and the overall sensory qualities of music-making and occasionally dressed up for specific performances.

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

My interlocutors set themselves apart from other commercially minded music practitioners, yet they did not constitute a group of ‘outsiders’ (Becker 1963). Rather, they opted to appropriate the models of the music industry and use them on their own terms. After all, Howard S. Becker contends that ‘deviance’ is a label applied retrospectively, while such a label is ambiguous in that it fails to account for what ‘outsiders’ themselves define as deviance (8–18). For example, the jazz musicians in Becker’s ethnography employed the term ‘square’ to convey their idea of what constituted an ‘outsider’ and a set of attitudes that were opposed to their own values. Likewise, in her translocal study of dance and rave culture, Sarah Thornton (1995) draws on Bourdieu’s work and coins the term ‘subcultural capital’ to explain issues surrounding opposition to the ‘mainstream’. Such a form of resistance, however, largely mediated and constructed through media representations, does not reflect a sharp distinction between creativity and commercial aspirations. This reveals the risks of applying distinctions as hard and fast realities upon lived experience, the nuances of which evade pre-formulated social-scientific frameworks. It also opens the way to consider whether additional distinctions can be reformulated, such as the binary between professional and amateur musicians. The formation and function of amateur musical groups or bands have been chronicled in an ethnographic study by H. Stith Bennett (1980), while the conventions and constraints of professional music worlds in London have become the ethnographic focus of Stephen Cottrell (2004). A conceptual distinction fails to capture the musicians’ own definitions of professionalism and amateurism. For example, professional musicians may derogatorily describe music of which they disapprove as ‘amateur’ (Cottrell 2004: 10). The problem arises from the connotations of status and livelihood associated with professionalism. Yet in an essentially non-profit operation such as DIY music-making, this constitutes a category error. It is telling that my interlocutors almost never spoke of ‘professionals’ or ‘amateurs’. When they were prompted to contextualize their ideas in those terms, they provided definitions that stressed ethical dimensions rather than financial reward (Chrysagis 2020: 751). The supportive environment of DIY music-making privileged rather than dismissed participation. However, male musicians still outnumbered female ones (Leblanc 1999), and there was a shared belief and acknowledgement that the music industry promoted masculine ideals by marginalizing women (Cohen 1997). As Lauraine Leblanc (1999: 8) puts it: ‘Girls in male-dominated youth subcultures such as punk continually confront ideologies of gender that remain largely invisible, perhaps even tacitly accepted, in many young women’s everyday lives.’ Being a female musician could make a difference in how audiences evaluated performances or how male technical personnel behaved towards them, while female audience members confronted practical challenges stemming from the conduct of male audience members. Yet female presence was quite strong among my interlocutors. Divorce, for example, included several female members; I attended various gigs by all-female

91

92

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

bands, and I interviewed several women active in music; female musicians organized and promoted gigs and club nights; and they designed and produced posters and album covers. That female participants were actively engaged in DIY music-making and were treated as equals by most of their male peers does not mean that gender was irrelevant. By and large, however, male domination and, conversely, female subordination seemed to be non-issues for my female interlocutors, as opposed to music cultures such as heavy metal that have been known to promote gender inequality (Walser 1993).

Music in culture and music as culture Although popular music ethnographies have grappled with important theoretical questions, an anthropological approach has been quite modest (Mahon 2000: 467– 8). Undoubtedly, treating music as an abstraction and an idealized form rather than an embedded and widespread cultural practice has inhibited the flourishing of anthropological research on the topic, and this was recognized early on (McLeod 1974: 107). Yet, while the ethnographic initiation of popular music into anthropology was slow to emerge, the neighbouring discipline of ethnomusicology introduced anthropological methods into music. It was not until ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam published his influential book The Anthropology of Music (1964) that the academic study of music turned to the examination of music as social practice and process. Merriam suggested that an anthropological apparatus could illuminate cultural aspects and meanings hitherto underplayed or obscured by the established practices of abstracting musical works from their social settings and human behaviour, and by treating music as ‘product’. He defined ethnomusicology as the study of music in culture and devised a multilayered approach through a simple threefold model, involving ‘conceptualisation about music, behavior in relation to music, and music sound itself ’ (32). Merriam’s groundbreaking contribution paved the way for scholars without musical backgrounds and successfully outlined the ways in which music could fit into the project of anthropology. A more dynamic approach is demonstrated by ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger’s Why Suyá Sing (1987), an ethnographic account of the Suyá Indians in Mato Grosso, Brazil, and specifically of their performance of the Mouse Ceremony. The ceremony lasts fourteen days, during which notions of space and time, as well as human relationships, are enacted and rearticulated through singing. This marks a radical shift from Merriam’s formulation of music in culture to the study of music as culture. Rather than music being perceived as part of the culture in question, a ‘musical anthropology’, Seeger suggests, ‘studies social life as a performance’ and conceives music as a fundamental process, which not only reflects pre-existing

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

contexts, structures and values but also generates and affects society and culture (xiii–xiv). Music cannot be separated from its various social functions, which are always culturally sensitive. As such, it would be inappropriate to attempt a definition of music that disregards indigenous or emic categories.3 The Western definition of music ‘as any communicational practice which organizes sound in terms of pitch, duration, timbre and loudness’ (Stokes 1996: 383) can be predicated upon ethnocentric definitions and assumptions because it fails to address how music is practised and experienced in everyday life. In other words, it conceals the diverse social relationships and practices that music constitutes and which give rise to it. An ethnographer’s definition of music should not depend on its formal elements but on how it is used. Whether ethnographers address music in or as culture, they cannot lose sight of the overlapping levels of meaning that frame music-making.4 Some of the best anthropological treatments of popular music testify to this. In what follows, I explore in greater detail two ethnographic monographs by social anthropologists who have examined the everyday practices of musicians in two urban locations in the UK.

Music-making in Liverpool and Milton Keynes Ruth Finnegan’s (1989) study of amateur musicians in Milton Keynes and Sara Cohen’s (1991) account of post-punk bands in Liverpool are widely considered as major anthropological contributions to the empirical study of popular music and youth. Both ethnographies belong to the 1980s shift towards an anthropology ‘at home’ (Cole 1977; Jackson 1987a; Messerschmidt 1981a) and consist of attempts to foreground and describe events and practices that were widely taken for granted in their social and cultural contexts, to the extent that they were rendered ‘invisible’ to insiders and outsiders alike. Although the legitimacy and/or the possibility of insider research has been debated within anthropology, the efforts of Anthony P. Cohen are considered crucial in the development of an anthropology of Britain (Rapport 2002: 4–5). According to Donald A. Messerschmidt (1981b: 13), the diverse terms in the literature that describe anthropology ‘at home’, such as ‘insider’ or ‘native’ research, ‘auto-ethnography’, ‘indigenous’ anthropology and so on, reflect its phenomenal growth. The emergence and proliferation of doing ethnography in one’s own culture was initially related to practical aspects of the profession (Cole 1977: 355–8; Jackson 1987b: 8–9; Messerschmidt 1981b: 9–12). However, the concurrent critique about the limits of ethnographic objectivity and representation, and the relationship between self and ‘other’ cannot be disregarded (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986).

93

94

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Finnegan’s monograph exhibits remarkable breadth by comparing and contrasting the music practices of people of various ages in several music genres, such as classical music, jazz and folk, as well as musical theatre, country and western, rock and pop. Cohen’s (1991) study of Liverpool bands is more modest in scope but richer in ethnographic detail. Cohen followed, observed and described the practices of two young post-punk bands, as well as the values underpinning their music-making. Finnegan’s and Cohen’s contributions are substantial. Their textured descriptions are invaluable ethnographic records of grassroots music practices in British urban environments and constitute exemplary contemplations of the profound value of music in social life that is irreducible to any particular cultural context. Apart from providing much needed ethnographic detail about previously underplayed cultural practices, these monographs also address issues that encompass broader methodological concerns in the ethnographic study of music and youth. An overarching argument in Finnegan’s Hidden Musicians (1989) is that local musicians take their practices for granted, to the extent that they themselves are often unaware of many other forms of music-making taking place simultaneously; hence Finnegan’s characterization of amateur music activity as ‘hidden’, but not secret (4). Finnegan is aware of the impossibility of providing accurate numbers and covering all aspects of music-making in Milton Keynes, not least because of the ephemeral nature of much musical activity, the variable definitions of ‘music’ and ‘music groups’, and the shifting identification of ‘the local’, both geographically and musically: it was simply impossible to map all the activities of overlapping and extended networks of individuals engaging in myriad music practices (342). Finnegan appends a detailed statement on methods (342–7) where, among the various data collection techniques employed, she discusses her own role as a researcher but also an ‘insider’: a Milton Keynes resident with musical inclinations. The issue of over-familiarity with local music activities was thus common for both the ethnographer and ‘informants’ – as many anthropologists call their research participants – and Finnegan notes how moving in and out of different music words and adopting a comparative approach provided her with much needed detachment. Rock Culture in Liverpool (1991) does not devote a separate section to the discussion of methods, but Cohen’s ethnographic account is interspersed with invaluable insights about her role as a researcher. As Bennett (2002: 455–6) has noted, gender features prominently in Cohen’s reflections on her status as a female ethnographer, which comes as no surprise considering her participants’ perception of women as a threat to their creativity. Cohen (1991: 1) further demonstrates the emergent nature of ethnography as well as its spatiality: her fieldwork revolved mainly around a specific studio (Vulcan Studios) with which her two case study bands were associated. The book also includes a postscript replete with revelations and personal reflections about the repercussions of ethnographic research. There, Cohen recounts the comments she received from research participants on the manuscript draft – with

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

one of them saying that the book had altered his views on women – and takes the opportunity to write about certain relationships in the field that did not work, while acknowledging the impact of the written ethnography: ‘It cannot be easy to read about oneself and one’s relationships in such an unexpected context’ (228). Both ethnographies have had a decisive impact on my own fieldwork practice. It is safe to say that had it not been for Cohen’s and Finnegan’s path-breaking studies, I would not have embarked on fieldwork in Glasgow. Methodological reflections are important not least because ‘a reflective, self-analysis of the researcher’s relationship to both the research setting and those within it would provide very useful insights to those beginning such work’ (Bennett 2002: 461). The following section is my own contribution to the methodological apparatus of aspiring ethnographers of popular music and youth.

Reflections on an ethnographic experience My research on DIY music practices in Glasgow shares key similarities with Finnegan’s and Cohen’s studies. For example, it focused on young individuals and groups operating at a grassroots level.5 My interlocutors did not think of themselves as either amateurs or professionals, while the commitment, energy and effort they invested in music-making correspond with both Finnegan’s and Cohen’s findings. Like Cohen’s case studies, my research participants operated within a DIY framework and within similar financial constraints. I also encountered identical claims of egalitarianism and democracy during my fieldwork, while the contingent nature of various bands gave rise to similar patterns of conflict and rupture. The at once collaborative, competitive and ‘cliquey’ atmosphere was also present; finally, producing music that was ‘original’ and the avoidance of musical pigeonholing were common traits. The musical diversity in Finnegan’s study was reflected in the variety of music genres within the DIY network in Glasgow, while the interpenetration of music and the city was also a recurring theme in my research. There are also important differences and lacunae that my study sought to address. First, while both ethnographies mainly scrutinized musicians and their practices, my research equally considered individuals and groups that allowed music to happen, including audiences, promoters and record labels, which played an important role in music dissemination. Second, as opposed to the struggle of Liverpool bands to ‘make it’, none of the musicians I interacted with in Glasgow demonstrated such a desire that could be framed in terms of ‘struggle’. For sure, the historical circumstances and technological means were quite different, and my interlocutors privileged flexibility above and beyond any immediate financial benefits; yet most of

95

96

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

them did cherish the possibility of making a living from music. Third, Cohen and, to a lesser extent, Finnegan do not directly confront the meaning of locality – less as a bounded space and more as an open-ended entity – and by extension the notion of the ethnographic ‘field’, even though the spatialization of music production is evident in both works. For example, Cohen’s ethnography demonstrates a strong identification of music with the city, and the experience of music is presented as part and parcel with the locality (although Cohen does discuss the bands’ various trips to London and Manchester in relation to their music activities). Finnegan (1989: 305–7, 323) acknowledges the ambiguous nature of ‘the local’, and she devises the notion of ‘urban pathways’ to convey the porous boundaries of places. The analytical and empirical importance of Finnegan’s ‘pathways’ for our understanding of ‘local’ and urban contexts, as well as urban life in general, is indisputable. But the methodological importance of the shifting boundaries of ‘the field’ needs further consideration.

Entering the field and ‘going native’ I conducted my fieldwork over eighteen months between January 2010 and June 2011. For the whole period, I was residing in Edinburgh, commuting to Glasgow by train. My ‘non-full-time involvement’ (Finnegan 1989: 344) was dictated by the subject matter of my study: most of my research participants were making music in between their other commitments (the reverse may be truer), such as work or studies. In other words, there was no need for me to ‘be there’ during the day (Watson 1999), since the activities relating to my research took place in the evening. Nevertheless, I did find myself in the city on several days for the purposes of interviews, daytime talks and events and to visit places of interest, such as record stores and art and cultural centres. It is useful to bear in mind that residing in Scotland since 2005 had allowed me to get to know Glasgow long before I decided to embark on fieldwork there, something that greatly facilitated my ‘entrance’ to the field. In many ways, it was as if a part of my personal life had become an object of study. It was not only I who lived outside Glasgow during the period of my fieldwork but certain key research participants too, while others had arrived in Glasgow from elsewhere in Scotland, England, as well as abroad. For them, music-making represented the means to integrate within the locality. According to Bennett (2000: 52), the term ‘local’ is applied in two ways in the study of popular music. Sometimes the term ‘locality’ is used to denote a musically homogeneous national context, while others employ the term to analyse more limited areas of music practice, such as urban and rural settings. For Bennett, both applications are problematic, because they presuppose a ‘fixed’ spatial and cultural territory, whereas any locality is a contested place. My fieldwork attests to that: I conducted interviews in Edinburgh

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

and Rosebank, I followed Divorce on a UK tour and constantly monitored virtual spaces relevant to DIY practices in Glasgow. Hence, the ethnographic imperative of ‘being there’ gradually became ‘being there … and there … and there!’ (Hannerz 2003; see also Marcus 1995) and raised questions about ‘being … where?’ (Coleman and Collins 2006). Being ‘in’ Glasgow, then, entailed links to other places, which alerted me to the problematic notion of ‘the local’ and, by extension, of ‘the field’ (see also Amit 2000). This was intensified by the urban nature of my research. The urban landscape affords diverse, even contradictory interpretations and representations of a place. The inevitable asymmetry of the ethnographic focus in the effort to capture at least some of this diversity exacerbates this issue. Consequently, in urban ethnography the subtlety of ethnographic description might be outweighed by issues of representativeness due to the partiality of the undertaking (Jackson 1985: 170; Jacobs 1993: 828). The dispersed creativity I encountered while in the field rendered my ethnographic focus a challenging affair. At different points in the process my attention was focused on different individuals, practices and events. My conscious choice to focus upon specific music actors inevitably created issues about generalization and typicality. Paying attention to three case studies allowed for a deeper examination of the conventions and constraints involved in music-making in the city but raised the question of how typical these actors were within the particular context and whether it was possible to do meaningful generalizations (Cohen 1993: 125, 2007: 233). As a result, my ethnography revealed a more nuanced, kaleidoscopic representation of popular music practices, as well as the city and its inhabitants. Being able to distance myself from the field daily provided the necessary space and time to produce the building blocks of my ethnography through the uninterrupted writing of fieldnotes (see below). It further ensured that I would avoid the trap of becoming ‘too much of an insider’ (Finnegan 1989: 343). Even though ‘going native’ is more of an idea within anthropology than common practice (Hannerz 2006: 34; Sluka and Robben 2007: 14), and although the insider/outsider distinction is in reality a continuum (Narayan 1993), certain characteristics of my identity both inhibited and facilitated my fieldwork. For example, originating from abroad and having a non-British accent seemed to be an advantage. This mattered not because I avoided classification in terms of ‘class’ (Fonarow 2006: 16), but because I presented myself and behaved as I was: a sympathetic outsider who showed an acute interest in learning what people were doing and listening to what they had to say about their music activities. Indeed, I was told that researchers of non-British nationality in similar fieldwork contexts seemed to be obtaining a wealth of data (Sara Cohen, personal communication). On the other hand, due to issues of etiquette, a single male in a music venue was not readily approachable to strangers, especially female participants who represented a

97

98

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

large segment of the DIY network. However, problems of accessibility rarely emerged because, as I noted in the Introduction, a ‘snowball effect’ took hold soon after I formally entered the field. The close-knit nature of the DIY network meant that especially my key interlocutors became aware of my identity as a researcher from early on, which eased my transition and shifted my status from an outsider to an ‘insider’. As mentioned, the reality of fieldwork contested the definition of ‘the field’ as a bounded locus or as being neatly separated from my everyday life and my previous knowledge about the city. Therefore, I could not distinguish between the informal data collection before and during the preparation stage, the more intensive ethnographic ‘immersion’ and subsequently the writing phase – the consensus among anthropologists is that ‘ethnography’ refers to both fieldwork process and end product, written or otherwise.6 Doing fieldwork is only one part of the process, and it is well established that the pre-fieldwork period is equally important (Shore 1999: 26; Watson 1999: 1). Entering and leaving the field and turning from an outsider to an insider and back to an outsider are overlapping processes and outcomes of a gradual transition rather than specific, momentary events. My previous knowledge notwithstanding, maintaining a ‘balanced naivety’ (Bernard 2006: 366–8) that would motivate research participants to share detailed information certainly helped. However, a sympathetic approach was not peculiar to the researcher: university education and awareness of what social research entailed meant that some of my interlocutors were already familiar with ethnographic conventions. The first time I met with the members of one of my case studies, they declared that, because I was a social anthropologist, they knew I had to ‘get the feel for it’ and that this was the reason why I had to attend numerous DIY music events. Likewise, a local independent promoter stated to me that she preferred interviews with anthropologists rather than journalists because ethnographic questions were ‘more interesting’ to her. This reversed conventional anthropological wisdom whereby ethnographic subjects tend to suspect participant observers of being ‘spies’ of some sort (Hammersley and Atkinson 1983: 77; O’Reilly 2005: 85). It further engendered a dialogical and collaborative approach (Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017). As George Marcus (2008: 7) puts it: Once the ‘reflexive’ subject is now the only kind of subject the anthropologist encounters, and where the reflexivity of the subject exists in, or overlaps with, the same intellectual universe that informs the researcher (necessarily making the subject his epistemic partner, so to speak, in the conduct of research), then ‘collaboration’ replaces the trope of ‘apprenticeship’ (or its alternatives) as defining the ‘scene’ of fieldwork encounter.

‘Reflexivity’ – or ‘reflection’ as I prefer to call it7 – was intrinsically related to my own conduct, too, and I was particularly careful about the ways in which I presented

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

myself in the field by paying attention to similarities as well as differences, equalities but also inequalities (Cohen 1993: 134). Reflection further played a role in deepening my understanding of the conflicting interpretations of DIY practice I encountered in the field, and the different conceptualizations of music and the city enacted in my research participants’ everyday lives.

Collecting ethnographic data The data collection techniques and strategies that ethnographers employ during fieldwork vary greatly. Indeed, it has been argued that the defining characteristics of the ethnographer are ‘shameless eclecticism’ and ‘methodological opportunism’ (Suttles, cited in Jackson 1985: 169). My fieldwork consisted of a combination of intensive participant observation, unstructured/semi-structured interviews, online research and the use of visual and written documentary sources. Observations and interviews would normally take place in the evening, and I would spend the day at home writing up fieldnotes, analysing and reflecting on my findings, browsing the videos and pictures I had taken the night before and obtaining further information online. The bulk of my ethnographic data were collected through participant observation, but the term requires clarification. Arguably, participant observation ‘is an oxymoron, a form of paradox which generates meanings as well as permitting different – indeed contradictory – interpretations’ (Tonkin 1984: 216). ‘A participant observer’, I have argued, ‘oscillates between the two poles of participation and observation, while most ethnographers would situate themselves somewhat ambiguously in the middle of the spectrum’ (Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017: 11). Wolcott (1999: 48–9) contends that ethnographers should participate as little as they have to in order to obtain their data. This is what I attempted to do. Clearly, becoming a ‘fly on the wall’ is hardly possible, and I did ‘participate’ in several instances: briefly helping on the door at music events, carrying music equipment and other paraphernalia, and other basic tasks. However, I never took part in musical performances by playing an instrument, despite being asked to do so. This was partly owing to my lack of music knowledge. As I have noted elsewhere (Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017: 3, 12), while playing a musical instrument can ease the process of ‘building rapport’ with interlocutors, it can also have the opposite effect. Michelle Bigenho (2008: 29) writes: Even though maintaining the idea of music participation as a special realm of ethnographic work may have its benefits, such framings also have significant drawbacks. … Emerging from very powerful ideologies about music in Western society, the awe factor cuts two ways – amazement at the imagined talented colleague who ‘does music too’, and a tendency to assume that one cannot fully understand work on music without being a musician.

99

100

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Other forms of ethnographic engagement should not be disregarded, because fieldwork relationships are mainly dependent on the personal qualities and characters of both researcher and participants: Michael Agar (1996: 138) argues that ‘rapport’ has a variable definition and concludes that ‘maybe we should read the social psychological research on personal attraction’. Because the DIY network was mobilized and gathered around music events, it is within these contexts that I focused my ethnographic attention. Gigs and the practical processes culminating in and following music events were the most valuable sources of first-hand information on a wide range of musical and extra-musical activities. Other practices, such as the communications pertinent to the organization of music events or the production of records, were not readily observable. For example, most gigs were booked over email, while vinyl and CD pressings would be outsourced to other individuals or companies at home and abroad. Music events were also germane to social interaction, and it was in these contexts that I was first introduced to most of my interlocutors. DIY gigs normally took place in intimate, relaxed environments and in a convivial and friendly atmosphere. Yet the perception according to which doing ethnographic fieldwork in popular music means that one has ‘too much fun’ is simply false. As Bigenho (2008: 31) and Michael Herzfeld (2001: 312), among others, succinctly point out, such an association tends to question the legitimacy of engagement with media forms and is seen as diminishing the ethnographer’s potential to contribute anything of use theoretically. Besides, ethnomusicologist Luis-Manuel Garcia (2013) explains that ‘nocturnal’ ethnographers often confront distinctive challenges, including issues of etiquette, adverse conditions (lack of light; heat; noise), the costly nature of such fieldwork (tickets; door charges) and building ‘rapport’ with individuals that seek to have ‘fun’ and ‘let go’, as well as the profound interference with the researcher’s circadian rhythms, among others. Although my competence as an observer and my ‘explicit awareness’ (Bernard 2006: 364–6) were gradually sharpened as the fieldwork unfolded, my memory was only one data collection depository during participant observation sessions. I also had to rely on what is referred to as ‘scratch notes’, a mnemonic word or phrase that would later be transformed into fuller notes (Sanjek 1990: 95–9). Depending on the circumstances, I would use my train journey back to Edinburgh to outline the structure of my fieldnotes on my mobile phone, to be written the following morning using my laptop (Emerson, Fretz and Shaw 1995; Sanjek 1990; Sanjek and Tratner 2016). Fieldnote-taking provides ethnographers with the space to record facts, reflect upon them, but also communicate personal thoughts. The use of fieldnotes formed the main material for my post-fieldwork analysis. However, it is rarely the case that a comprehensive ethnographic account of music performances could be based exclusively on fieldnotes, except if the ethnographer can repeatedly witness the same performance. Popular music performances, though, tend to differ every time due to their less rigid character. For that reason, I made

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

an extensive use of visual recording techniques. Photography and video enabled me to capture aspects of the action and a level of detail that my memory and scratch notes could not. Proponents of visual research methods (e.g. Banks 2001; Pink 2001; Pink, Kürti and Afonso 2004) have stressed their practical importance but also their inherent ability for detailed cultural representation. My use of visual media was geared towards enriching the detail of my descriptions, rather than still and moving images becoming objects of research in themselves. Taking notes, as well as photographs and videos, was dictated by the event at hand and my personal judgement as to whether my actions would impose a breach of etiquette. Visual documentation was complemented by regularly collecting posters, flyers, fanzines and other local publications; vinyl records, CDs and cassette tapes; and tickets (where applicable), pins, t-shirts and other relevant materials. The importance of the material manifestations of popular music activity has been stressed (Bennett and Rogers 2016). Yet, as I have shown (Chrysagis 2016), while materials and ‘micro-media’ (Thornton 1995: 137–51) were prevalent in DIY music-making and constituted technologies of publicity, they simultaneously and rather paradoxically contributed to the invisibility of my research participants. Apart from the invaluable informal discussions I had before, during and after music events, I also had the opportunity to follow up specific points and converse extensively with my interlocutors in the context of ‘interviews’. I have placed the word in quotation marks to convey the fact that, although these discussions were pre-scheduled, audio-recorded and subsequently fully transcribed, I neither prepared a list of specific questions nor sought to consciously direct the discussion. Finnegan (1989: 344) notes that she conducted only a few ‘deliberate interviews’ during her fieldwork among amateur musicians in Milton Keynes. Although she distinguished these from ‘the many informal conversations’ she had, she was still reluctant to label them as ‘interviews’. But the opposite can be true as well: if we conceive of everyday interaction and discussions in the field as a type of interviewing, then the ethnographic process is transformed into a prolonged interview. Many of the ‘deliberate’ interviews I conducted were agreed upon in person, but some were arranged over email or text messages. The most useful information I obtained through interviews was the result of follow-up questions, which could not be prepared beforehand (Rubin and Rubin 1995: 151). Probing was employed to extract additional information, and I made use of an open-ended form of questions out of the various types available (see Kvale 1996: 133–5). These conversations took place in an informal and open way, with no specific topics to be covered. Some of my key interlocutors were interviewed twice in this manner. I did not manage to interview a handful of individuals, as they did not respond to my messages, but for the most part they turned out to be peripheral to my project because they rarely attended DIY music events.

101

102

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Employing an informal and open-ended approach to interviewing was deliberate for three reasons: first, I wanted to make my interviewees feel at ease with my presence and provide us with the opportunity to get to know each other better. Second, my goal was to gain an understanding of the ideas that informed their music practices, and therefore every detail was important – at least initially. Third, during the first few months in the field I attempted to discover the right questions to ask in a socially and culturally informed manner to avoid distortion (Cohen 1984: 225; Spradley 1979: 83–4). By employing a strategy of ‘deep hanging out’ (Rosaldo, cited in Wolcott 1999: 14), I opted to let the relevant themes emerge in due course.

Online ethnography The nexus between virtual technology, sociality and popular music has caught the interest of several anthropologists (e.g. Condry 2004; Giesler and Pohlmann 2003; Kibby 2000; Luvaas 2012; Lysloff 2003). As my fieldwork unfolded, I increasingly became aware that a great deal of my interlocutors’ practices had an online dimension, especially relating to communication. Therefore, online information was not only useful to me as background knowledge about Glasgow and its music but also necessary, in the sense that social media were the primary means of promotion of DIY music events (see Chrysagis 2016: 300–2), several of which were announced very close to the day of the event or even on the same day. As such, I felt compelled to join social media to be kept updated about the diverse and multiple events taking place, and sometimes I would attend more than one event on a single evening. Apart from the promotion of music events, virtual technology played an important role in the dissemination of recorded music. For example, the record label Winning Sperm Party operated a free-download service via their own dedicated website. These examples illustrate what Christine Hine (2000: 8) argued in her pioneering book Virtual Ethnography, namely that ethnographic research can help us ‘develop an enriched sense of the meanings of the technology and the cultures which enable it and are enabled by it’. A great deal of information was collected from my interlocutors’ websites and social media, but I did not directly communicate with them online. Therefore, I would hesitate to claim that my fieldwork partly consisted of an ‘online ethnography’. And while my interlocutors appreciated digital media for their functionality, they did not talk extensively about their place in DIY music-making. Sarah Pink et al. (2016: 10) argue that ‘to understand how digital media are part of people’s everyday worlds, we also need to understand other aspects of their worlds and lives’. What the online component of my research demonstrates is ‘how the digital has become part of the material, sensory and social worlds we inhabit, and what the implications are for ethnographic research practice’ (7). In an increasingly digitalized world where music is produced and consumed online (Prior 2018), the digital emerges as an intrinsic

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

dimension of ethnography in youth culture and popular music. Yet the digital should not be perceived as a separate realm of ethnographic inquiry but rooted in everyday life and thus susceptible to the same research principles as conventional ethnographic methods.

Conclusion: From an anthropology of ethics to the ethics of anthropology My interlocutors’ views on what constituted ethical music practices were neither uniform or consistent nor coincided with the ideas of other music actors in Glasgow. Although I obtained a wealth of material through attending music events organized by non-DIY promoters, and where a host of different bands performed, I did not seek to examine the views and practices of individuals who were not closely related to the DIY network. The sheer diversity of music practices in the city made it impossible to pay credit to the wide range of opinions about music-making. This limited the scope for comparison, but it allowed me to carefully engage with ideas and practices under the rubric of DIY. The ethical questions revolving around music-making unavoidably brought the ethics of my own practice as an ethnographer into sharp focus. While on fieldwork, I sought and obtained informed consent at all times and, where possible, this was audio-recorded. However, I did not seek my interlocutors’ consent to use information that was publicly available, such as posters, flyers and details that were accessible online. Obtaining informed consent was confined to individuals with whom I had more than a brief encounter, but in all cases I ensured that people became aware of my identity as a researcher, being careful not to intimidate them by immediately declaring my status. Following my fieldwork, in the PhD thesis and all subsequent publications I have sought to address ethical concerns about anonymity and confidentiality by changing the names of all the individuals that appear in them. However, I have not changed stage names, institutional names or venue names – band names, especially, deserve a detailed discussion owing to their whimsical, quirky and sometimes extravagant nature. Many of my interlocutors were happy for me to use their personal names and ‘spread the word’ about DIY. For example, Alistair was surprised to see that his name had been changed and wanted to know if that was ‘deliberate’. All three case studies had the opportunity to read and comment on the PhD thesis and subsequent publications in which they featured. Agar’s (1996) cogent metaphor of the ethnographic process as a ‘funnel’ that narrows down as the ethnographer gradually reaches ‘saturation’ neatly matched my experience in Glasgow. Yet there are constraints in the production of ethnographic knowledge in relation to fieldwork on popular music and youth culture. For example,

103

104

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

the shaping of popular music practices and ideas is largely contextual and the outcome of socio-historical circumstances, while to which extent it is affected by different stages in one’s life-course is difficult to discern (Chrysagis 2020: 754). As Finnegan (1989: 316–17) notes, musical pathways are ‘something essentially self-chosen’, but there are also various ‘patterns of constraints and opportunities that – sometimes partly outside the actors’ own awareness – help to draw individuals towards or away from particular paths, or shape the way they tread them’. It needs to be acknowledged, therefore, that ethnographic research is merely a snapshot in time and of our research participants’ lives, albeit one that can also entail a commitment towards long-term engagement. R. F. Ellen (1984) aptly subtitled her edited volume on ethnographic research methods as ‘a guide to general conduct’. Although the book covers every formal aspect of ethnographic fieldwork, it suggests practices, techniques and strategies that fieldworkers may or may not choose or need to follow. I have outlined my fieldwork experience and described how ‘methods’ have contributed towards reaching my goal. Yet ethnography is fluid and emerges dialogically and on the spot; it is a matter of thorough preparation as much as improvisation because it is adventurous and quite unpredictable. For this reason, it is almost impossible to describe ethnographic methods in painstaking detail; in many ways, these are the characteristics that make ethnography most attractive. A successful ethnographer is one who enjoys doing it. As Karen O’Reilly (2005: 127) argues, you must ‘try to think of fieldwork as one long conversation with someone you are fascinated with’. I have certainly enjoyed taking part in the conversation.

Notes 1 For an overview of no wave, see Masters (2007), Moore and Coley (2008) and Reynolds (2005: 50–72). In reality, nae wave was a linguistic joke based on a local idiom. In The Complete Patter, Munro (2007: 113) explains that ‘-nae or -ny’ literally means ‘not’, and it ‘is a negative suffix common enough in Scots, as in cannae, willny, etc. It is used on its own by local children to contradict the last thing said to them’. 2 Owing to the geographic focus of my fieldwork, this discussion revolves around relevant ethnographic works exploring music practices in the UK. 3 For example, certain forms of speech, such as the Maori haka, are considered music, while in Middle Eastern contexts, the chanting of passages from the Qur’an is never classified as ‘singing’ but as recitation, because ‘music’ and ‘song’ connote immorality (Stokes 1996: 384; cf. Hirschkind 2006: 35). 4 On the problematic nature of ‘culture’ and the associated connotations of rigidity, homogeneity and stability, see Kuper (2000).

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

5 Most of my interlocutors were in their early to mid-twenties; a small number of individuals were in their thirties. 6 For a critique of the idiom of cultural immersion in ethnographic fieldwork, see Helmreich (2007). By ‘experiencing’ and ‘inquiring’ (Wolcott 1999: 46), the ethnographer normally stays in the field until they reach cultural ‘saturation’, when no more new or important data can be acquired. 7 Here, I follow James Laidlaw (2014: 502), who writes that ‘ “reflex” implies an automatic or uncontrolled response to a stimulus’, while reflection ‘denotes the dialogical self-constitution of the subject in social relations, rather than either mechanical responses to external stimuli or a quality or capacity that might be imagined as internal to the individual’.

References Agar, M. H. (1996). The Professional Stranger: An Informal Introduction to Ethnography. New York: Academic. Amit, V., ed. (2000). Constructing the Field: Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Contemporary World. New York: Routledge. Banks, M. (2001). Visual Methods in Social Research. London: Sage. Baulch, E. (2007). Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Becker, H. S. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press. Bennett, A. (2000). Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. London: Macmillan. Bennett, A. (2002). ‘Researching Youth Culture and Popular Music: A Methodological Critique’. British Journal of Sociology, 53(3): 451–66. Bennett, A., and I. Rogers (2016). ‘Popular Music and Materiality: Memorabilia and Memory Traces’. Popular Music and Society, 39(1): 28–42. Bennett, H. S. (1980). On Becoming a Rock Musician. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Bernard, H. R. (2006). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Bigenho, M. (2008). ‘Why I’m Not an Ethnomusicologist: A View from Anthropology’. In H. Stobart (ed.), The New (Ethno)musicologies (pp. 28–39). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Chrysagis, E. (2016). ‘The Visible Evidence of DiY Ethics: Music, Publicity and Technologies of (In)visibility in Glasgow’. Visual Culture in Britain, 17(3): 290–310. Chrysagis, E. (2017). ‘A Sense of Togetherness: Music Promotion and Ethics in Glasgow’. In E. Chrysagis and P. Karampampas (eds), Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance: Anthropologies of Sound and Movement (pp. 139–60). Oxford: Berghahn. Chrysagis, E. (2020). ‘When Means and Ends Coincide: On the Value of DiY’. Journal of Cultural Economy, 13(6): 743–57.

105

106

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Chrysagis, E., and P. Karampampas (2017). ‘Introduction: Collaborative Intimacies’. In E. Chrysagis and P. Karampampas (eds), Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance: Anthropologies of Sound and Movement (pp. 1–24). Oxford: Berghahn. Clifford, J., and G. E. Marcus, eds (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, A. P. (1984). ‘Informants’. In R. F. Ellen (ed.), Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct (pp. 223–9). London: Academic. Cohen, S. (1991). Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon. Cohen, S. (1993). ‘Ethnography and Popular Music Studies’. Popular Music, 12(2): 123–38. Cohen, S. (1997). ‘Men Making a Scene: Rock Music and the Production of Gender’. In S. Whiteley (ed.), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (pp. 17–36). Abingdon: Routledge. Cohen, S. (2007). Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cole, J. W. (1977). ‘Anthropology Comes Part-Way Home: Community Studies in Europe’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 6: 349–78. Coleman, S., and P. Collins, eds (2006). Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Condry, I. (2004). ‘Cultures of Music Piracy: An Ethnographic Comparison of the US and Japan’. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7(3): 343–63. Cottrell, S. (2004). Professional Music-Making in London: Ethnography and Experience. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dosanjh, A. (2009). ‘Nae Wave’. NME, 17 October. Ellen, R. F., ed. (1984). Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct. London: Academic. Emerson, R. M., R. I. Fretz and L. L. Shaw (1995). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Finnegan, R. (1989). The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fonarow, W. (2006). Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Garcia, L.-M. (2013). ‘Guest Editor’s Introduction: Doing Nightlife and EDMC Fieldwork’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5(1): 3–17. Giesler, M., and M. Pohlmann (2003). ‘The Anthropology of File Sharing: Consuming Napster as a Gift’. In P. A. Keller and D. W. Rook (eds), Advances in Consumer Research, vol. 30 (pp. 273–9). Valdosta, GA: Association for Consumer Research. Hammersley, M., and P. Atkinson (1983). Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Routledge. Hannerz, U. (2003). ‘Being There … and There … and There! Reflections on Multi-Site Ethnography’. Ethnography, 4(2): 201–16. Hannerz, U. (2006). ‘Studying Down, Up, Sideways, Through, Backwards, Forwards, Away and at Home: Reflections on the Field Worries of an Expansive Discipline’.

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

In S. Coleman and P. Collins (eds), Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology (pp. 23–41). Oxford: Berg. Helmreich, S. (2007). ‘An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography’. American Ethnologist, 34(4): 621–41. Herzfeld, M. (2001). Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Hine, C. (2000). Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage. Hirschkind, C. (2006). The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford: Berg. Jackson, A., ed. (1987a). Anthropology at Home. London: Tavistock. Jackson, A. (1987b). ‘Reflections on Ethnography at Home and the ASA’. In A. Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home (pp. 1–15). London: Tavistock. Jackson, P. (1985). ‘Urban Ethnography’. Progress in Human Geography, 9(2): 157–76. Jacobs, J. M. (1993). ‘The City Unbound: Qualitative Approaches to the City’. Urban Studies, 30(4–5): 827–48. Keil, C. (1966). Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kibby, M. D. (2000). ‘Home on the Page: A Virtual Place of Music Community’. Popular Music, 19(1): 91–100. Kruse, H. (1993). ‘Subcultural Identity in Alternative Music Culture’. Popular Music, 12(1): 33–41. Kuper, A. (2000). Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kvale, S. (1996). InterViews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. London: Sage. Laidlaw, J. (2014). ‘Significant Differences’. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1): 497–506. Leblanc, L. (1999). Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Luvaas, B. (2012). DIY Style: Fashion, Music and Global Digital Cultures. London: Berg. Lysloff, R. T. A. (2003). ‘Musical Life in Softcity: An Internet Ethnography’. In R. T. A. Lysloff and L. C. Gay Jr (eds), Music and Technoculture (pp. 23–63). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Mahon, M. (2000). ‘The Visible Evidence of Cultural Producers’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29: 467–92. Marcus, G. E. (1995). ‘Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of MultiSited Ethnography’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: 95–117. Marcus, G. E. (2008). ‘The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropology’s Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition’. Cultural Anthropology, 23(1): 1–14. Marcus G. E., and M. M. J. Fischer (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Masters, M. (2007). No Wave. London: Black Dog.

107

108

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Matsue, J. M. (2009). Making Music in Japan’s Underground: The Tokyo Hardcore Scene. New York: Routledge. McLeod, N. (1974). ‘Ethnomusicological Research and Anthropology’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 3: 99–115. Merriam, A. P. (1964). The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Messerschmidt, D. A., ed. (1981a). Anthropologists at Home in North America: Methods and Issues in the Study of One’s Own Society. New York: Cambridge University Press. Messerschmidt, D. A. (1981b). ‘On Anthropology at Home’. In D. A. Messerschmidt (ed.), Anthropologists at Home in North America: Methods and Issues in the Study of One’s Own Society (pp. 3–14). New York: Cambridge University Press. Moore, T., and B. Coley (2008). No Wave: Post-punk. Underground. New York. 1976– 1980. New York: Abrams Image. Munro, M. (2007). The Complete Patter. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Narayan, K. (1993). ‘How Native Is a “Native” Anthropologist?’. American Anthropologist, 95(3): 671–86. O’Reilly, K. (2005). Ethnographic Methods. Abingdon: Routledge. Pink, S. (2001). Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research. London: Sage. Pink, S., H. Horst, J. Postill, L. Hjorth, T. Lewis and J. Tacchi (2016). Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: Sage. Pink, S., L. Kürti and A. I. Afonso (2004). Working Images: Visual Research and Representation in Ethnography. London: Routledge. Prior, N. (2018). Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society. London: Sage. Rapport, N. (2002). ‘“Best of British!”: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Britain’. In N. Rapport (ed.), British Subjects: An Anthropology of Britain (pp. 3–23). Oxford: Berg. Redhead, S. (1993). Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Aldershot: Avebury. Regev, M. (2004). Popular Music and National Culture in Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reynolds, S. (2005). Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984. London: Faber and Faber. Rubin, H. J., and I. S. Rubin (1995). Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Sanjek, R., ed. (1990). Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sanjek, R., and S. W. Tratner (2016). eFieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology in the Digital World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Seeger, A. (1987). Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shank, B. (1994). Dissonant Identities: The Rock’n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, published by University Press of New England.

Ethnography, Popular Music and Youth Culture

Shore, C. (1999). ‘Fictions of Fieldwork: Depicting the “Self ” in Ethnographic Writing (Italy)’. In C. W. Watson (ed.), Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology (pp. 25–48). London: Pluto. Sluka, J. A., and A. C. G. M. Robben (2007). ‘Fieldwork in Cultural Anthropology: An Introduction’. In J. A. Sluka and A. C. G. M. Robben (eds), Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader (pp. 1–28). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Spradley, J. P. (1979). The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Stokes, M. (1994). ‘Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music’. In M. Stokes (ed.), Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (pp. 1–28). Oxford: Berg. Stokes, M. (1996). ‘Music’. In A. Barnard and J. Spencer (eds), Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (pp. 383–6). London: Routledge. Szemere, A. (2001). Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity. Tonkin, E. (1984). ‘Participant Observation’. In R. F. Ellen (ed.), Ethnographic Research: A Guide to General Conduct (pp. 216–23). London: Academic. Walser, R. (1993). Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Watson, C. W., ed. (1999). Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology. London: Pluto. Wolcott, H. F. (1999). Ethnography: A Way of Seeing. Lanham, MD: AltaMira.

109

110

6 Youth, music and social network analysis Nick Crossley

The link between youth and music has been theorized in different ways. The classic approach during the 1970s and 1980s focused on youth subcultures, particularly as characterized by members of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) (Clarke et al. 1993; Hebdige 1988). This concept remains influential, but it came under increasing criticism during the 1990s and a number of alternatives were proposed, including ‘club culture’, ‘scene’ and, drawing on the work of Maffesoli (1996), ‘neo-tribe’ (Bennett 1999; Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004; Bennett and Peterson 2004). In my own work, drawing on Becker (1974, 1982), I have proposed a further alternative: ‘music worlds’ (Crossley 2015, 2020; Crossley, McAndrews and Widdop 2015). While there are important differences of emphasis between each of these concepts, they converge in their focus on the collective dimension of musical engagement amongst young people; the ways in which music draws young people together, sometimes thereby separating them from older people and constituting them as a bounded social group (‘youth’); and the ways in which enjoyment of music, for many, is fused with the pleasures of sociability and the sense of belonging which collective ‘musicking’, to borrow Small’s (1998) term, can engender. Advocates of each of the approaches referred to above often make reference to ‘networks’ in their discussion of this collective dimension. However else they may think about the collectives involved in the music-related activities they are researching, whether they theorize them as subcultures, scenes or something else, the idea that young music lovers form networks is commonly invoked. Such references are generally casual, and they are not further elaborated. It is possible to elaborate further on the concept of networks, however. There is a long tradition of formal ‘social network analysis’ (SNA) in sociology and an emerging interdisciplinary ‘network science’, involving a growing and increasingly sophisticated set of research methods which allow us to gather, visualize and analyse networks and relational data more

112

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

generally; that is, data not, or at least not exclusively, focused on individual actors and their attributes, as typically elicited in academic surveys and interviews, but rather on relations between actors, be those actors human beings or corporate entities such as economic firms, trades unions and governments (Borgatti, Everett and Johnson 2013; Scott 2000; Wasserman and Faust 1994). In this chapter, I introduce and briefly discuss this more explicit and technical perspective regarding networks, considering its potential significance for the understanding and empirical investigation of youth and music. The first half of the chapter is largely methodological. I discuss how networks are defined in SNA; some of the different types of network that might be analysed; network measures; and the rationale for a network-focused approach. Where possible, however, I use examples from music-based research in these discussions, with the aim of also introducing the idea of ‘musical networks’ and illustrating network ideas in a way that is conducive to those with an interest in music. In the second half of the chapter I introduce a number of key ideas, associated with the SNA literature, which are relevant to studies of youth and music; in particular, homophily, foci and social space. This is intended to demonstrate how a reflection on networks might inform one’s understanding of the youth-music interplay in a more substantive fashion. The graphs presented in the chapter were drawn using the UCInet software (Borgatti, Everett and Freeman 2002).

Defining networks A network comprises a set (or sets) of nodes and a set (or sets) of ties between various pairs of those nodes. Anything can be defined as a node from the point of view of SNA, as long as it is capable of engaging fully in the type(s) of tie involved in the network. However, criteria for inclusion must be carefully chosen in the context of particular studies if the results of those studies are to be meaningful. Likewise, anything might count as a tie as long as all nodes are capable of being connected to others by means of it and, again, as long as it is meaningful and makes good sense to define it as a tie in the context of a particular study. Reference to networks often conjures an image of groups of friends, linked by way of their friendship, and this is a common focus, but SNA might equally be used to analyse: trading relations between nations; alliances between political parties; patterns of migration between countries; patterns of violence (who attacks whom) in primate societies or any of a huge number of other possibilities. SNA is a formal method with a very wide range of potential applications. That said, my primary focus in this chapter will be musicrelated friendship and interaction between young people. Ties within a network can be either directed or undirected, and either binary or valued. A directed tie is a connection which can be conceived in terms of a

Youth, Music and Social Network Analysis

sender and a receiver, and which is not necessarily reciprocated. ‘Liking’ is a good example. John may like Jennifer. She is the recipient of his liking. But this does not necessarily mean that she likes him. She may but she may not. When we are dealing with directed ties every combination of two nodes within a network is in one of three states: either there is no tie between them, there is a reciprocal tie between them or there is an unreciprocated tie from one node to the other. Undirected ties, by contrast, are reciprocal by definition and do not flow from one node to another. ‘Living with’ is an example of this. If John lives with Jennifer, then she necessarily lives with him. The tie does not flow from him to her but rather binds them as a pair; they live together. Connections are binary when we treat them as either existing or not (coding them either 1 or 0). Sometimes, however, we may measure ties in either an ordinal or an interval fashion, such that they have a value. We may use a Likert scale, for example, asking individuals to rate their liking for each other on a scale of 0–5, or we may observe interaction, counting how many times people interact and/or the duration of contact between them. For any single set of nodes, moreover, we may record multiple types of tie, capturing the fact that the same two individuals may be, for example, friends and gig buddies and neighbours and colleagues and so on. When two nodes are tied in a number of different ways we say that their tie is multiplex.

Types of network Networks come in different types, according to the way in which we gather data. I will briefly introduce three types here, beginning with a ‘whole network’. To gather whole network data we identify a population of nodes and seek to ascertain, for every possible pairing of nodes within that population, whether or not a tie of the relevant type exists. Much of my own work on music worlds has been of this kind. In my work on early punk and post-punk (Crossley 2015), for example, using archival and secondary sources for the period 1975–80, I identified the pioneers of early London punk1 and looked for evidence of collaboration on musicrelated projects between them, linking them where I could find such evidence. I also did this for punk and post-punk in Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield, respectively (Crossley 2015). In Figure 6.1, drawing from a further ongoing project, I visualize the whole network of key protagonists involved in the two-tone music world in the UK between 1978 and 1982. Nodes, represented as squares, are individual participants – mostly musicians or what Becker (1982) calls ‘support personnel’ – and ties, represented as lines connecting the squares, are relations of cooperation on a music-related project during the stated period. Names of individuals could be shown, but I have deleted them here as they make the graph messy and obscure its structure.

113

114

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Figure 6.1  Britain’s two-tone music world, 1978–80.

It is obvious that this network has a structure. Nodes appear to form distinct clusters, for example, and one cluster in particular appears to be the common link between all of the others. Part of what SNA does, as I explain further below, is to provide us with a set of mathematically based measures for describing such structural properties. There are many of these properties, and they vary between networks. They are important because, as many network studies have shown, they create opportunities and constraints for the social actors who comprise and are embedded within the network, thereby affecting what can happen within it. How a set of actors are ‘wired up’ as a network affects what they can do, both collectively and individually. It may, for example, affect their capacity to create a vibrant music world or scene, or indeed to create and become involved in any kind of scene at all. An alternative to whole network analysis is ego-net analysis. An ego-net is the network that forms around a particular individual (Crossley et al. 2015). My egonet, for example, comprises all of the people with whom I enjoy a particular type of tie (my alters) and any ties of that same type which exist between my alters. In some respects a whole network comprises multiple interconnected ego-nets. In the network in Figure 6.1, for example, we have information for each of our nodes about each of the others to whom they are connected and any ties between those others. Whole network data is typically restricted to ties within a particular domain, however – for example, my ties, as a participant in a particular music world, with other participants in that world. Ego-net studies allow us to look beyond individual domains of interaction, capturing all of the many domains or social circles in which an individual is involved (although ego-net studies have limitations too, which are overcome in whole network studies, so they are not always preferable (Crossley,

Youth, Music and Social Network Analysis

McAndrews and Widdop 2015)). Figure 6.1 captures Jerry Dammers’s2 relation to fellow two-tone protagonists, for example, but it does not include his family and nonmusical friends, who may have been influential on his life and activities both within and outside of music. The significance of this is demonstrated in Bayton’s (1998) work on female rock musicians. Bayton found that, in order to become a rock musician, females typically had to overcome resistance and attempts at control from partners and family who felt that playing in a band was inappropriate for a young woman. In addition, they did not get the same support from these ties that young male musicians typically received. The women she interviewed had all managed to become musicians in spite of this resistance, but it is widely observed that females are underrepresented in the rock world and it is reasonable to suppose that such resistance and lack of support is one reason why. This is a network effect (individual behaviour is affected by relations with others), but it is one more likely to come to light by way of an egonet study, which explores the networks of particular individuals across a range of their social circles (particularly family and romantic relations), rather than a whole network study which focuses on the population of actors already involved in the activity – although Cohen (1997) points to considerable marginalization of women within networks of musicians, so that too is a factor and one perhaps best captured with a whole network approach. Ego-net analysis more easily captures external (to music) relations because, as the hypothetical example in Figure 6.2 illustrates, it centres upon particular individuals rather than a specific domain of interaction (e.g. a scene). In addition, it has the advantage that it allows us to sample from a population (this is not possible with whole network analysis), which in turn allows us to analyse networks across populations which are too big to capture by means of whole network analysis. We cannot capture the whole network linking every young person in a national population or even an average sized city, for example. Such populations are too big to capture in their entirety. However, we might get the information we need by sampling ego-nets from such populations. Bigger national surveys, including those sometimes used in studies of musical taste, often include basic ego-net measures. The third type of network I will briefly outline is a two-mode network. A twomode network has two different types of node and a type of tie which crosses these two types. A typical example is a network involving events of some kind and participants at those events; the two node types (‘modes’) are events and participants, and the tie is participation. Each participant participates in some but usually only a fraction of the events, and each event involves some but usually only a fraction of the participants. I have been involved in four music-related studies using this approach. One focused on folk singers in Sheffield in the UK and the various folk-singing events in which they participated (Hield and Crossley 2015). One focused on audiences for underground heavy metal gigs across six UK cities

115

116

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Figure 6.2  A hypothetical ego-net.

during a three-month period (Emms and Crossley 2018). The other two focused on artists and the festivals at which they play; one was based on big commercial festivals in the UK and the other on university-based festivals in Turkey (Crossley and Emms 2016; Crossley and Ozturk 2019). Figure 6.3 visualizes the underground heavy metal network. The white circles represent audience members, and the black squares represent the gigs they attended. Two-mode networks can be analysed in their two-mode format. Commonly, however, they are decomposed into two single-mode projections, which are analysed separately – and which should ideally be ‘put back together’ in the final stage of analysis (Everett and Borgatti 2013). In the metal study, for example, we were able to generate: (1) a network of events (gigs and festivals), linked where they share one or more participants; and (2) a network of participants, linked where they attended one or more of the same events. Ties in these networks were valued. Two participants who went to seven of the same events had a tie strength of seven, for example, whilst those who attended only one event in common had a tie strength of one. There are many reasons to analyse two-mode networks and many structural properties one might look for. In much of my own work, however, I have tended to be interested either in patterns of clustering, which point to different ‘camps’ of enthusiasts within a music world or, drawing on ideas regarding ‘core-periphery structures’ in SNA, to a separation between core events and participants on one side and peripheral events and participants on the other, and to the various factors which appear to influence whether or not a participant or event ends up in the core or the periphery. In the abovementioned study of Turkish music festivals we found that events were very much more likely to be ‘core’ when hosted in larger cities, whilst artists were more likely to be ‘core’ when signed to a major record label and when

Youth, Music and Social Network Analysis

Figure 6.3  Underground heavy metal gigs and their audiences.

they were rock musicians as opposed to traditional, pop or jazz musicians (Crossley and Ozturk 2019).

Network structures As I have already noted, networks, as conceptualized in SNA, have a range of formally defined, measurable and sociologically significant properties; that is, properties which affect the social processes, such as diffusion of culture, information and innovations, which play out across them, and which create opportunities and constraints for the social actors embedded within them (Crossley 2011; McLean 2017). In this respect networks and network structures are social structures. This is not the place to explore the many structural properties identified and defined in SNA (see Borgatti, Everett and Johnson 2013; Scott 2000; Wasserman and Faust 1994). It must suffice to note that, in relation to whole networks, these properties exist at three levels: (1) the whole, (2) subgroups and (3) individual nodes. Amongst other things a whole network has an order, density and diameter, for example, and can be more or less centralized and more or less clustered. It might

117

118

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

contain subgroupings of various kinds, defined either endogenously, by reference to patterns of ties (e.g. components, cliques, core-periphery divides or structurally equivalent blocks), or exogenously, by reference to social status or node attributes (e.g. gender, ethnicity, age, size, wealth), and those subgroupings, in turn, have structural properties which we may wish to measure and compare. Finally, individual nodes have varying positions within the network. In particular they can be more or less central to the network, and SNA identifies a number of different ways in which nodes can be central. Centrality is often conceived as an advantage in SNA, a position which confers opportunities upon a node. It may also entail constraints, however, and the balance is not always in favour of opportunities. The significance of these measures and the structural properties which they measure, to reiterate, is that both the available empirical research and various competing sociological theories suggest that they make an impact upon social life, generating opportunities and constraints for action, both individual and collective, and shaping the social processes, such as diffusion of culture and innovations, which are embedded within them (Crossley 2011; McLean 2017). In my own work on early punk and post-punk in the UK, for example, I found that, whatever its other conditions and influences, UK punk was born and took shape within a relatively cohesive and compact network between a critical mass of would-be musical innovators, and I argued that the network, its cohesion and its compactness were crucial both for the translation of aspirations into (collective) action and, via the process that Durkheim (1915) calls ‘collective effervescence’, the cultivation and shaping of new ideas and aspirations. In addition, I showed that recruitment to the early punk world was often by way of existing network ties, as was the early diffusion of punk culture. Other studies have used SNA to explore the formation of the jazz canon (Phillips 2013), the chances of a record making the charts (Rossman 2012), the rise and structure of Brit Pop (Millward, Widdop and Halpern 2017), collaboration between francophone rappers (Hammou 2015), the organization of feminist music worlds (O’Shea 2015), geographical inequality and clustering in online electronic music networks (Allington, Dueck and Jordanous 2015), success and influence in British classical music (McAndrew and Everett 2015a, 2015b) and the social structure of the British jazz world (McAndrew et al. 2015), to name only a selection. The effects of the structural properties of networks cannot be understood mechanically, at least not in relation to human, social networks. Their precise effect is dependent on the exact nature of ties, wider contextual factors and the agency of the social actors who constitute a network’s nodes. Structural properties enable and constrain actors but do not determine what they do. For this reason network analysis often works best within the context of a mixed-method (qualitative and quantitative) approach which, in addition to mapping and measuring a network, allows the researcher to investigate the ways in which its nodal actors make sense of and respond to their position within it.

Youth, Music and Social Network Analysis

Selection, influence and homophily A key focus in many network studies is homophily; that is, the tendency for individuals to be disproportionately connected to others who are similar to them in some salient respect. The salient respect in question might be social status, including, for example, one’s age group, gender, ethnicity, social class, sexuality and so on. In this case we speak of ‘status homophily’ (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1964; McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook 2001). I return to status homophily in the next section. First, however, I want to briefly discuss ‘value homophily’; that is, the tendency for individuals to be disproportionately linked to others with whom they share a salient belief, attitude, value, taste or behaviour. Much of the research on the social networks of young people has been focused on behaviours and, in particular, smoking and illegal drug use (e.g. Kirke 2006; Pearson and West 2002; Mercken et al. 2009). For our purposes, however, musical taste is a more useful focus. There is good evidence pointing towards homophily of musical taste (Lewis et al. 2008; Mark 1998, 2003; Steglich, Snijders and West 2006). Our tastes are more similar to those of our friends than would be expected by chance. Value homophily comes about in one or both of two ways: selection and influence. ‘Selection’ entails that nodes share a taste prior to the existence of any tie between them and that the formation of a tie between them is influenced by their shared taste (Lizardo 2006, 2011). This might happen for either structural or psychological reasons. On a structural level, Feld (1981) has pointed to the influence of ‘foci’ on the formation of homophilic ties. This entails that individuals’ tastes draw them towards particular spaces or events (‘foci’), where they meet other people with those same tastes, who in some cases they form ties with. In my work on the early London punk network, for example, I found that many of the very early pioneers met and formed ties in or around the outré clothes shop which Malcolm McLaren and Vivien Westwood ran on Kings Road in Chelsea (the shop changed names several times but was called ‘SEX’ during punk’s embryonic development). The shop was a magnet for young (and a few older) Londoners who had an interest in provocative and challenging styles of dress, and as McLaren enjoyed an association with the New York Dolls, with edgier forms of music too. It put like-minded individuals in touch with one another by drawing them into a common orbit. It is significant in this respect that it was a shop where people could hang out. There was a sofa and a jukebox, and punters would spend an hour or so chewing the fat with whoever else happened to be there. This made it an ideal place for proto-punks to come into contact, form ties and hatch plans. Later in its development, after the Sex Pistols had formed and begun gigging, their gigs replaced the shop as punk’s main focus. Most of the first wave of pioneering punks who did not meet via the shop met at Sex Pistols’ gigs. It seems unlikely that

119

120

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

the Sex Pistols themselves were the cause of the attraction, initially, because most people had not heard of them at this point. It was more likely the venues they played (art colleges and pubs on the pub rock circuit) which tended to attract a particular type of punter and served thereby to bring such types together. However, as the Sex Pistols’ reputation grew, a process which itself took place within and by means of a network, they very clearly became the attraction that drew like-minded individuals together at gigs. Selection may operate on a more psychological level too, however, with individuals finding those with similar tastes to them easier to get on with because they have shared interests which they can talk about and pursue together, and therefore becoming more often and more closely bonded with those others. Individuals who ‘have nothing in common’ may struggle to make anything but the most superficial of relationships work. Alongside selection, similarities in taste between friends and associates is often an effect of mutual influence (Becker 1996; Mark 1998, 2003). This may be a matter of exposure and heuristics; we learn about songs, artists and styles from our friends and steer our way through the overwhelming amount of musical choice available today by following their example. It may be a matter of education and instruction; others inform us what to listen for in a song, how to frame particular pieces in our appreciation of them or how to ‘use’ them such that we enjoy and find value in them. Alternatively, it may be a matter of status seeking; we initially claim to like certain forms of music in order to impress or win the approval of our friends, only later acquiring a genuine liking as an effect of prolonged exposure and learning. Whatever the precise mechanism, however, there is good evidence to suggest that our musical tastes are shaped by a process of influence within our friendship networks (Lewis et al. 2008; Mark 1998, 2003; Steglich, Snijders and West 2006). The collective nature of much musical engagement adds a further dimension here. We often discover, listen and dance to music in sociable contexts, such that our experiences of it are shared and our judgements negotiated. In this way music is woven within the fabric of our relationships, adding to and also drawing meaning and value from them. The ‘our song’ phenomenon, whereby a couple identify a piece of music as a symbol of their relationship, usually because they listened to it together at an early stage in their relationship, is one example of this (Kotarba 2013). On a more general level, however, enjoying and engaging with music together helps to cement ties whilst simultaneously forging associations which add meaning and value to whatever we are listening to. Selection and influence are sometimes framed as mutually exclusive alternatives and in some very specific cases they may be. Within broader segments of our everyday lives, however, there is no reason why both cannot be in play simultaneously and every reason to suppose that they are. Our musical tastes shape our networks and our networks shape our musical tastes. A number of network-related studies, often

Youth, Music and Social Network Analysis

focused on young people, have sought to explore these processes, in some cases employing longitudinal designs which make it possible to parse out the respective roles of selection and influence (Lewis et al. 2008; Mark 1998, 2003; Steglich, Snijders and West 2006).

Status homophily In addition to value homophily network analysts have pointed to the importance of ‘status homophily’; that is, the tendency for individuals to be disproportionately connected, at least in terms of friends, to others with whom they share one or more of a number of salient social statuses – for example, age, gender, social class, race, sexuality and so on (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1964; McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook 2001). This is generally a matter of selection rather than influence. Whilst statuses are mutable to an extent and some involve an element of indeterminacy, affording the individual room for choice, they are typically more fixed than tastes. If most of my friends are, like me, white, middle-class and middle-aged, this is most likely because our similarities have in some way drawn us together. It is much less likely that we have acquired any of the above statuses as a consequence of mutual influence in our interactions. I have not become white by interacting with other whites. However, as with value homophily, selection may involve both structural and psychological aspects. Structurally, status-related factors such as income and wealth will affect where we live and therefore who we have as neighbours. They will affect where our children go to school, therefore which parents we meet at the school gates; whether our children go to university and therefore the proportion of their friends that are highly educated and so on. Who we know and form friends with is in some part of a function of what Giddens (1984) calls our ‘time-space trajectories’; we form ties with those with whom we come into contact, when our trajectories intersect; and time-space trajectories are, in turn, strongly conditioned by social statuses. This is particularly pertinent in relation to ‘youth’ because young people typically spend a high proportion of their time in school or college with other young people. The majority of people they come into contact with are young too. Moreover, as the CCCS argued many years ago, young people often seek out their own leisure spaces because they feel unwelcome or out of place in ‘adult’ spaces (Clarke et al. 1993). Young people have a higher than average probability of coming into contact and therefore forming bonds with (other) young people. On a psychological level, individuals often find it easier and therefore preferable to interact with others of a similar status to themselves, as status differentials can be a cause of awkwardness and embarrassment, and often make it more difficult to find a common ground on which to base a relaxed and sociable engagement. Moreover, in some cases tie formation might be shaped by prejudices regarding ‘the other’,

121

122

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

such as racism. In relation to youth, the greater authority of adults, the suspicion and stigma that attaches to friendships across age divides and awareness that adults are often distinctly ‘uncool’ in the eyes of youth may all conspire to make friendship with adults difficult for young people. In addition, differences in life stage and living conditions make the likelihood of finding common ground on which to base a friendship remote. This is important because it suggests that ‘youth’ is not merely a category or a matter of individual attributes but rather denotes a real social group. Society is divided along lines of age (or age group) in the respect that individuals tend to disproportionately associate with others of a similar age to themselves. There is a clustering in patterns of association based on age; a network-based age or generation gap. This is important for our purposes because there is good reason to suppose that ‘youth’ and their relations with music are mediated by these network patterns. In what follows I explore this idea by way of Blau’s (1974, 1977) conception of ‘social space’.

Youth and music in social space In early work which has been taken up more recently by network scholars, Blau (1974, 1977) uses the widely evidenced fact of status homophily to theorize social structure and what he calls ‘social space’ (McPherson 2004; Mark 1998). Drawing on a tradition which stretches back via Nadel (1969) and Radcliffe-Brown (1969) to Durkheim (1964, 1952), he envisages society as a vast network, equating the structure of this network (whose properties are captured and measured by SNA) with ‘social structure’. And he further argues that some connections within this network are much more likely, statistically, than others. To stick with friendship and sociable relations for present purposes, geographical proximity is an obvious factor which affects this probability. I am much more likely, all things being equal, to make friends and socialize with others who live close to me, in the same city or neighbourhood, than those who live at a greater distance, because our time-space trajectories are more likely to intersect, bringing us into contact and facilitating the formation of ties. Indeed, various research projects conducted over many years suggest that even within the relatively narrow spatial confines of offices, university campuses and halls of residence, relative proximity has a significant impact on the likelihood of tie formation (Newcomb 1956; Preciado et al. 2011). In addition to geography, Blau (1974, 1977) argues that the likelihood of a tie forming between any two individuals is conditioned by their respective social statuses. As noted above, I am much more likely to enjoy ties of friendship with others of a similar age, education, income, race and sexuality as myself (gender is an interesting complicating factor because, in the heterosexual case, romantic partners are of the opposite sex, but I am not going to pursue this here due to limitations of space). The

Youth, Music and Social Network Analysis

effect of status homophily, Blau continues, is that society’s constitutive network tends to be clustered according to both geography and social status. Which statuses make a difference will vary across societies and within the same society across time and is always an empirical question, but in contemporary developed societies there are typically a number of statuses which manifest a homophily effect. This, in turn, is sociologically significant. The greater the homophilic effect of various statuses, the more divided society is. Moreover, the greater the effect on social processes which play out across society’s constitutive network. This latter idea is nicely demonstrated by Milgram’s famous ‘small world’ studies (Korte and Milgram 1970; Milgram 1967; Travers and Milgram 1969). Milgram ran a series of studies in the United States in which randomly selected ‘starter’ individuals were given a package which was to be delivered to another ‘target’ individual, often in another state somewhere else in the country. The starter could not send the package directly to the target, however. They could only pass it to somebody whom they knew on first name terms, who received the same instructions, and so on until the package eventually reached the target. One of Milgram’s aims in doing this was to see how many times, on average, the package would be passed on before it reached the target, giving him a measure of the average ‘path length’ of the constitutive network of US society. The answer to that question was six, giving rise to the now widely cited claim that any two citizens of even a huge country such as the United States are, on average, at a mere ‘six degrees of separation’, a claim that has been a source of great excitement amongst physicists and mathematicians working in the field of complexity science in recent years (Newman, Barabási and Watts 2006; Watts 1999, 2004). What Milgram also found, however, which is more important for present purposes, is that packages seemed to traverse geographical space more easily than they traversed what Blau and others call ‘social space’. In particular, whilst packages seemed to pass between towns and states quite quickly and without difficulty, when they were required to cross a race line they often appeared to circle for some time before doing so, suggesting that those involved did not know another person of a different race sufficiently well to pass the package on. The ‘distance’ between races was more difficult to traverse than geographical distance, and Milgram found a similar but weaker effect for gender. What Milgram finds in relation to race is true of other status divides too. Social space is, as Blau (1974, 1977) argues, multidimensional. Race is one dimension and gender another, but it is reasonable to expect that age, social class and sexuality, to name only the most obvious, manifest a homophily effect too and therefore form distinct dimensions of social space. Individuals can be closer or more distant to one another in relation to a number of statuses, each impacting on the likelihood of meaningful sociable contact between them, and Blau argues that every status which manifests an independent homophily effect constitutes a separate dimension of social space. There are as many dimensions as there are statuses manifesting a homophily effect. And every individual within a given population has a place within this space,

123

124

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

by virtue of their various statuses. This idea has a number of important sociological implications. Here I will focus specifically on its implications for understanding the articulation of youth and music. It is widely recognized that musical taste varies in accordance with social statuses, with age in particular being a significant factor in this variation (Bennett et al. 2009; Chan and Goldthorpe 2007; Mark 1998; Peterson 1992; Peterson and Kern 1996). This is sometimes understood in essentialist terms. It is supposed that there is something about young people, about conditions of working-class life or whatever that makes individuals more or less likely to like this or that type of music. However, sociologists working in the network tradition have taken a different view. Which social groups are attracted to which musical styles is, in the final analysis, arbitrary, a result of historical contingencies, from this point of view, as evidenced by the fact that associations between particular statuses and genres vary both across societies and time. Nevertheless there are associations and these are explained by the fact that: (1) musical taste is shaped by mutual influence within social networks, and (2) social networks tend to be homophilous in terms of status. Tastes ‘catch on’  and  diffuse through the social body as an effect of meaningful interpersonal contact and influence, on this account, but like Milgram’s packages they diffuse more easily within status groups than between them (Mark 1998; McPherson 2004; Shibutani 1955). Indeed, crossing status divides is even less likely than Milgram’s experiments suggest because there is no target individual on the other side of such divides to whom a package is supposed to be passed. Individuals have no incentive to engage with others outside of their immediate circles. As a consequence the taste for particular types of music tends to become concentrated within what Mark (1998) calls ‘niches’. A particular taste might thrive within a particular socio-demographic niche but fail to diffuse beyond that niche because of a lack of meaningful interaction between members of different niches through which the taste could pass. Or there may be, as Jones (2002) says of the appreciation of jazz and blues in black and white communities in the United States during the mid-twentieth century, a ‘lag’. White tastes in jazz tend to emulate black tastes, according to Jones, but they are often a step or two behind on account of the aforementioned distances in social space. Relative lack of meaningful and appropriate contact between Blacks and whites reduces the pathways through which taste and influence can pass. Much of this research predates the birth of the internet and social media, and the effect of these technologies remains, to some extent, an under-researched and thus open question. However, what research there is tends to suggest that the situation has not changed to any great extent. Online activities and contacts are often extensions of, rather than radical departures from, offline activities and contacts. Moreover, though the internet opens up a huge amount of musical content to most of us, its sheer enormity requires that we apply selective filters, often derived from offline contacts, and indeed that we know what is there to be found; knowledge which again

Youth, Music and Social Network Analysis

often derives from offline contacts. As Prior (2018) argues, there is little evidence to suggest that digital technologies have had any significant impact on the social, statusrelated structuring of musical taste to date. This is not only a matter of basic patterns of preference. As McPherson (2004) argues, different groups may attach a different meaning to the same object and thereby express a preference for that same object for very different reasons. The meaning of the object for members of the group is shaped within their in-group interactions, but due to a lack of meaningful interaction between groups that meaning does not travel and other groups make sense of the object in a different way. In the context of music such ‘meaning’ is not only a matter of understanding what a song is about but also of the ways in which it is used, the significance attached to it and its role within members’ identity work. I am often struck, for example, by the way in which audiences for certain bands (New Model Army come to mind) have their own specific dances, rituals and ways of responding to songs at gigs. Similarly, attending a gig by a band for the first time, one can become aware, even if one has listened to their recordings many times, that one lacks the know-how which their core audience brings to the gig. And talking to hard-core fans of a particular band one sometimes learns of background knowledge which casts their work in a different light and gives it a different affective charge. Those ‘in the know’ approach and appreciate the music differently, and being ‘in the know’ comes about by interacting with others who are. Approaching this from the other way round, Ronald Reagan’s campaign team for the 1984 election famously chose Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ as their campaign song, taking it to symbolize and celebrate the patriotism they were seeking to tap into and seemingly unaware that for Springsteen and his fans it was a critique of US society and particularly of the latter’s treatment of Vietnam veterans. The equivalence that the CCCS identifies between ‘diffusion’ and ‘defusion’ can be understood in these terms (Clarke et al. 1993). As an originally subversive style diffuses beyond the boundary of its original ‘niche’ (not their term), they argue, not least by way of the channels of the mass media, its subversive meaning is often lost and replaced by something less challenging. This argument is perhaps a little romanticized and may underestimate the positive contribution of the media in relation to subcultural formations (Thornton 1995). However, many musical pioneers protest that the meaning of their innovations gets lost in the process of diffusion and the basic idea makes good sociological sense. If, following Mead (1967), meaning is an effect of interaction, then the same object is likely to take on different meanings within different contexts of interaction; that is, different clusters within a network. Young people tend to have different musical tastes and passions to older people, on this account, because the interactions which shape their tastes and passions are typically age-homophilous. Parents may enjoy some exposure to ‘youth music’, but they are unlikely to enjoy the kind of interaction necessary to fully develop a taste. They will not have the animated conversations with their children that their

125

126

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

children are having with other young people, which are shaping the frames, tastes and practices that structure their children’s experiences of music (though they may have such conversations with their own (older) friends). Note the non-essentialist definition of ‘youth’ employed here (see also McPherson 2004; Shibutani 1955). Youths are of a similar age but most of the characteristics they take on and share are contingent rather than necessary and are shared by virtue of patterns of interaction (status homophily) which constitute them as a distinct cluster within society’s wider network. The members of this cluster are shaped by mutual influence within their cluster and differ from older adults by virtue of their patterns of interaction, not by virtue of essential characteristics which define them as a group. At the same time, moreover, Blau’s (1974, 1977) theory of social space leads us to expect that ‘youth’, as a network cluster, will be further cross-cut by class, race and other status, as well as geographical divides. Students, for example, form a different cluster to other young people who do not go to university; the two groups tend not to mix; and we would expect to observe differences between them as a consequence. Mark (1998, 2003) tests and finds support for the idea of niche-based musical tastes in the US General Social Survey, which captures selected broadly defined and mainstream musical genres. We may not need others to introduce us to mainstream artists, but he argues that we have limited resources (e.g. time, money and energy) to devote to the pursuit of music, which requires us to choose, and what we choose is influenced by the choices of our alters. This may be so, but I suspect that the idea works even better for more esoteric genres and subgenres which individuals are unlikely to hear on major radio stations or otherwise come across in the course of their everyday lives. Most people are likely to be aware of grime today, for example, at least in its more mainstream forms. However, as recently as fifteen years ago this music and the culture which embeds and is embedded by it was the exclusive preserve of working-class, predominantly Black youths in certain areas of London. If you were not young, Black, working class and living in selected areas of London, your chances of hearing about it were close to zero. As this suggests, these processes apply to the ‘subcultures’, ‘scenes’, ‘neo-tribes’ and ‘worlds’ with which I began. Indeed, though the CCCS used a (mostly) different language, much of what they argued can be couched in terms of networks and social space (see also Fine and Kleinman 1979). Whether writing about white workingclass youths, Black youths or women, their narratives typically focus on processes of group and cultural formation amongst social actors thrown together and cut off from much of the rest of society by virtue of their status; that is, status homophilous network clusters. We are not quite back where we started, however. SNA makes a contribution to these debates and ideas by virtue of the methodology, concepts and measures it affords for capturing and analysing the processes described above empirically. Status

Youth, Music and Social Network Analysis

and value homophily are not only ideas or vague observations, for example. SNA affords a number of methods for measuring their extent within a network, or some part of a network, and for tracking their further effects (see especially Borgatti, Everett and Johnson 2013). Likewise influence and selection, and as I have already said, the broader, more general idea of a network or network cluster itself.

Conclusion The underlying argument of this chapter has been that debates about youth and music make reference to structures and processes which can be rendered empirically researchable and therefore testable by way of SNA and that using SNA would afford us the opportunity to refine and further develop our understanding of these processes and structures. My aim has been to provide an introduction to SNA and its potential uses and value for research on youth and music, discussing some of the substantive literature which demonstrates this value whilst also offering a very brief introduction to the methodology for researchers who may be thinking of adopting it. My key contention has been that ‘youth’ is sociologically important, not least in relation to music, because ‘youths’ gravitate together, forming bonds, influencing one another and thereby generating their own cultures. SNA is important because it is method which allows us to map, track and measure these processes.

Notes 1 These comprised artists, key audience ‘faces’ and what Becker (1982) calls ‘support personnel’, that is, the many roles other than artist and audience involved in making music, such as sound engineers, promoters, managers, producers and roadies. 2 Dammers was the keyboard player with the Specials and a key ‘mover-shaker’ in the two-tone world.

References Allington, D., B. Dueck and A. Jordanous (2015). ‘Networks of Value in Electronic Music’. Cultural Trends, 24(3): 211–23. Bayton, M. (1998). Frock Rock. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Becker, G. (1996). Accounting for Tastes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Becker, H. (1974). ‘Art as Collective Action’. American Sociological Review, 39(6): 767–76. Becker, H. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, A. (1999). ‘Subcultures or Neo-Tribes?’ Sociology, 33(3): 599–617.

127

128

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Bennett, A., and K. Kahn-Harris (2004). After Subculture. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. Bennett, A., and R. A. Peterson, eds (2004). Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Bennett, T., M. Savage, E. Silva, A. Warde, E. Gayo-Cal and D. Wright (2009). Culture, Class, Distinction. London: Routledge. Blau, P. (1974). ‘Parameters of Social Structure’. American Sociological Review, 39(5): 615–35. Blau, P. (1977). ‘A Macrosociological Theory of Social Structure’. American Journal of Sociology, 83(1): 26–54. Borgatti, S., M. Everett and L. Freeman (2002). Ucinet for Windows. Harvard, MA: Analytic Technologies. Borgatti, S., M. Everett and J. Johnson (2013). Analysing Social Networks. London: Sage. Chan, T., and J. Goldthorpe (2007). ‘Social Stratification and Cultural Consumption: Music in England’. European Sociological Review, 23(1): 1–19. Clarke, J., S. Hall, T. Jefferson and B. Roberts (1993). ‘Subcultures, Cultures and Class’. In S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals (pp. 9–79). London: Routledge. Cohen, S. (1997). ‘Men Making a Scene’. In S. Whiteley (ed.), Sexing the Groove (pp. 17–36). London: Routledge. Crossley, N. (2011). Towards Relational Sociology. London: Routledge. Crossley, N. (2015). Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and PostPunks Musical Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield 1976–1980. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crossley, N. (2020). Connecting Sounds: The Social Life of Music. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Crossley, N., E. Bellotti, G. Edwards, M. Everett, J. Koskinen and M. Tranmer (2015). Social Network Analysis for Ego-Nets. London: Sage. Crossley, N., and R. Emms (2016). ‘Mapping the Musical Universe: A Blockmodel of UK Music Festivals 2011–13’. Methodological Innovations, 9. Available online: https:// doi.org/10.1177/20597​9911​6630​663. Crossley, N., S. McAndrews and P. Widdop (2015). Social Networks and Music Worlds. London: Routledge. Crossley, N., and T. Ozturk (2019). ‘Music, Social Structure and Social Networks: The Case of University Music Festivals in Turkey’. Miscellanea Anthropologica et Sociologica, 20(2): 192–210. Durkheim, E. (1915). Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, E. (1952). Suicide. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1964). The Division of Labour. New York: Free Press. Emms, R., and N. Crossley (2018). ‘Trans-locality, Network Structure and Music Worlds: Underground Metal in the UK’. Canadian Review of Sociology, 55(1): 111–35. Everett, M., and S. Borgatti (2013). ‘The Dual Projection Approach for Two Mode Networks’. Social Networks, 35(2): 204–10.

Youth, Music and Social Network Analysis

Feld, S. (1981). ‘The Focused Organisation of Social Ties’. American Journal of Sociology, 86: 1015–35. Fine, G., and S. Kleinman (1979). ‘Rethinking Subculture’. American Journal of Sociology, 85: 1–20. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity. Hammou, K. (2015). ‘Between Social Worlds and Local Scenes’. In N. Crossley, S. McAndrew and P. Widdop (eds), Social Networks and Music Worlds (pp. 104–21). London: Routledge. Hebdige, D. (1988). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Hield, F., and N. Crossley (2015). ‘Tastes, Ties and Social Space: Exploring Sheffield’s Folk Singing World’. In N. Crossley, S. McAndrew and P. Widdop (eds), Social Networks and Music Worlds (pp. 279–92). London: Routledge. Jones, L. (2002). Blues People. New York: Harper. Kirke, D. (2006). Teenagers and Substance Abuse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Korte, C., and S. Milgram (1970). ‘Acquaintance Networks between Racial Groups’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 15: 101–8. Kotarba, J. (2013). Baby Boomer Rock’n’Roll Fans. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Lazarsfeld, P., and R. Merton (1964). ‘Friendship as Social Process’. In M. Berger, T. Abel and C. Page (eds), Freedom and Control in Modern Society (pp. 18–66). New York: Octagon. Lewis, K., J. Kaufman, M. Gonzalez, A. Wimmer and N. Christakis (2008). ‘Tastes, Ties and Time’. Social Networks, 30: 330–42. Lizardo, O. (2006). ‘How Cultural Tastes Shape Personal Networks’. American Sociological Review, 71(5): 778–807. Lizardo, O. (2011). ‘Cultural Correlates of Ego-Net Closure’. Sociological Perspectives, 54(3): 479–87. Maffesoli, M. (1996). The Time of the Tribes. London: Sage. Mark, N. (1998). ‘Birds of a Feather Sing Together’. Social Forces, 77(2): 453–85. Mark, N. (2003). ‘Culture and Competition: Homophily and Distancing Explanations for Cultural Niches’. American Sociological Review, 68(3): 319–45. McAndrew, S., and M. Everett (2015a). ‘Symbolic versus Commercial Success among Female British Composers’. In N. Crossley, S. McAndrew and P. Widdop (eds), Social Networks and Music Worlds (pp. 61–88). London: Routledge. McAndrew, S., and M. Everett (2015b). ‘Music as Collective Invention’. Cultural Sociology, 9(1): 56–80. McAndrew, S., P. Widdop and R. Stevenson (2015). ‘On Jazz Worlds’. In N. Crossley, S. McAndrew and P. Widdop (eds), Social Networks and Music Worlds (pp. 217–43). London: Routledge. McLean, P. (2017). Culture in Networks. Cambridge: Polity. McPherson, M. (2004). ‘A Blau Space Primer’. Industrial and Corporate Change, 13(1): 263–80. McPherson, M., L. Smith-Lovin and J. Cook (2001). ‘Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks’. Annual Review of Sociology, 27: 415–44. Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, Self and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

129

130

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Mercken, L., T. Snijders, C. Steglitch and H. de Vries (2009). ‘Dynamics of Adolescent Friendship Networks and Smoking’. Social Science and Medicine, 69(1): 1506–14. Milgram, S. (1967). ‘The Small World Problem’. In G. Carter (ed.), Empirical Approaches to Sociology (pp. 111–18). Boston: Pearson. Millward, P., P. Widdop and M. Halpern (2017). ‘A “Different Class”?’ Cultural Sociology, 11(3): 318–36. Nadel, S. (1969). The Theory of Social Structure. London: Cohen and West. Newcomb, T. (1956). ‘Prediction of Interpersonal Attraction’. American Psychologist, 11(11): 575–87. Newman, M., L. Barabási and D. Watts (2006). The Structure and Dynamics of Networks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. O’Shea, S. (2015). ‘Embracing Difference in Feminist Music Worlds: A Ladyfest Case Study’. In N. Crossley, S. McAndrew and P. Widdop (eds), Social Networks and Music Worlds (pp. 122–44). London: Routledge. Pearson, M., and P. West (2002). ‘Drifting Smoke Rings’. Connections, 25(2): 59–76. Peterson, R. (1992). ‘Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore’. Poetics, 21: 243–58. Peterson, R., and R. Kern (1996). ‘Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore’. American Sociological Review, 61(5): 900–7. Phillips, D. (2013). Shaping Jazz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Preciado, P., T. Snijders, W. J. Burk, H. Stattin and M. Kerr (2011). ‘Does Proximity Matter? Distance Dependence of Adolescent Friendships’. Social Networks, 34: 18–31. Prior, N. (2018). Popular Music, Digital Technology and Society. London: Sage. Radcliffe-Brown, A. (1969). ‘On Social Structure’. In A. Radcliffe-Brown (eds), Structure and Function in Primitive Society (pp. 188–204). London: Cohen and West. Rossman, G. (2012). Climbing the Charts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, J. (2000). Social Network Analysis: A Handbook. London: Sage. Shibutani, T. (1955). ‘Reference Groups as Perspectives’. American Journal of Sociology, 60(6): 562–9. Small, C. (1998). Musicking. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Steglich, C., T. Snijders and P. West (2006). ‘Applying Siena’. Methodology, 2(1): 48–56. Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures. Cambridge: Polity. Travers, J., and S. Milgram (1969). ‘An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem’. Sociometry, 32: 425–43. Wasserman, S., and K. Faust (1994). Social Network Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, D. (1999). Small Worlds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Watts, D. (2004). Six Degrees. London: Vintage.

7 Contributions for a quantitative approach to contemporary youth cultures and popular music: A case study from Southern Europe Paula Guerra

Historically, youth studies has sought to provide answers to the way young people live their lives. Likewise, the field has responded to the social changes affecting young people’s lives in areas such as education, the precariousness of the transition to the labour market and the importance of communication technologies. Yet, while the field of youth studies has grown in importance (Cieslik and Simpson 2013), paradoxically, the methodological issues in the field (Heath and Walker 2011; Woodman and Bennett 2015) have barely been addressed. In addition to this relative emptiness, another notable issue is the low propensity of youth studies towards the utilization of quantitative methods – which is odd given the advances of the internet and the availability of statistical software such as SPSS, Stata, Matlab, MAXQDA and NVivo, among others (Toepoel 2016). If we analyse the importance of quantitative and qualitative methods in youth research since the beginning of the millennium, we soon realize that the qualitative methods represent the vast majority of research in the field (Feixa, Leccardi and Nilan 2016; Pais 2020). Additionally, the importance of participatory investigations (Mitchell, de Lange and Moletsane 2018) is evident in the emphasis given to ethnographic work, and recently to netnography. This chapter1 argues that the quantitative approach allows youth studies to stand beyond the analysis of unique case studies with few respondents. This latest trend leads qualitative approaches to the error they so often attribute to qualitative

132

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

methods: that of abusive generalizations (Payne 2013). Likewise, in recent years we have seen a theoretical approach that postulates the waning of hard ‘socio-economic variables’ – in particular, social class – thus defending a youth studies focused on a smorgasbord of style that juxtaposes and nullifies (illusorily) class differentiations and economic inequalities (Polhemus 1997), despite them remaining and even becoming more acute, particularly in the societies of the Global South. We believe such analyses would be more robust if they had a quantitative dimension. In this way, such studies would not offer supposedly innovative postulates from the point of view of the narratives of the self, but would instead be anchored in the effectively lived experience of individuals (Savage et al. 2013) – in a nutshell, they would be based on Marxian structural determinations. In this chapter, we seek to offer the reader a brief analysis of the use of a quantitative approach in the field of youth studies, and to then present a case study based on the application of a quantitative profile approach adjusted to a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), with which we set out in detail all the steps taken and thus elaborate a set of standard profiles that best characterize, both longitudinally and diachronically, (sub)cultural youth participation in Portuguese punk. The selection of this case study from Southern Europe was based on the sociological principle that the social position occupied by actors influences both their actions and their perspectives of the world (Guerra 2020). The extensive analysis of this social positioning therefore allows the development of a detailed understanding of the Portuguese punk scenes and the variations that have occurred throughout the history of Portuguese punk and beyond, enabling them to be seen as local, translocal and global, and as social, cultural and symbolic manifestations.

Current methodological approaches in the study of youth cultures and popular music As stated, qualitative methods have dominated the field of youth studies. This is partly because quantitative methods are removed from the object of analysis, which tends to devaluate them and deprives them of importance. Usually, in participatory research, quantitative methods are left out because they have been collected from a constructivist logic and/or grounded theory. There is also the perception that quantitative methods – with their generalizations and abstractions – are oppressive for minorities, since they are based on a positivist philosophy of knowledge; in other words, social observations should be treated as entities in a similar manner to the way scientists treat physical phenomena. At the same time, it is considered necessary

Contemporary Youth Cultures and Popular Music

to use qualitative techniques, such as life history, to apprehend subjectivities and to give voice to the oppressed and stigmatized (Denzin, Lincoln and Smith 2008). This emphasizes multiple realities, where the absence of generalizations regarding time and context is neither desirable nor present, making it impossible to fully differentiate the causes and effects, and also the knower from the knowledge. It is important to realize that for every negative example that can be found, it is also possible to find positive cases, so we should not see the usage of methodological strategies in either a moralistic or an essentialist way. Still, a project depends on the hypotheses and questions it aims to answer, rather than on the methodological tools used, and that is what we intend to address when analysing quantitative methods here, as well as examples of investigations that have resorted to this methodological strategy. Furthermore, it is necessary to clarify that a quantitative methodological approach does not underestimate the use of qualitative data-collection techniques, such as interviews and life stories, which is a very frequent – although erroneous – understanding. What are quantitative methods? In a simplified way, we can say that they are a set of means used to obtain observations about the social world in a numerical form. Then we use data-analysis methods to study and explore these numbers and thus respond to the hypotheses we have raised about the social world. In any quantitative investigation, this implies the use of graphs, tables, dendograms and so on throughout the data systematization. In a very general way, we can say that quantitative methods study patterns and regularities, while qualitative methods analyse nuances. The former is more appropriate for macro studies, since they are not limited to case studies but instead the covariance between different realities, contexts and/or phenomena. Qualitative methods, however, are frequently used to study the micro, and so are closely linked to an individualistic tradition, in which reality is analysed from the point of view of the individual (Vogt 2011). Moreover, when we have an infinite population that cannot be analysed in its entirety, we must weave together sampling options. The excessive costs in time and resources do not allow a full analysis of a population, so we must opt for different sampling models, whether probabilistic (where all members of the sample have the same probability of integrating the sample); non-probabilistic (which is the opposite of probabilistic); intentional (very similar to non-probabilistic, depending on the objectives postulated by the researcher); or, finally, an unintentional sampling (which is governed by convenience criteria such as the availability of the investigated) (Kraemer and Blasey 2016). The main reason for using quantitative methods in an investigation is that it allows for a more extensive analysis. Let us imagine that we seek to study the relationships existing in a given context: if we analyse it only through qualitative data, we quickly become overwhelmed with data. It therefore becomes difficult to follow the relational line coherently. Crossley (2010) states that even if we studied a small group of ten people, this would imply the possibility of ninety direct relationships and forty-five indirect relationships. How can we document this?

133

134

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Interrelatedly, a quantitative approach allows us to analyse the main links and relations between members of a given musical scene, but there are simultaneously less obvious relationships that arise only if we use techniques that allow us to analyse a much more extensive set of data and the relationships between the data. This is where serendipity occurs, when we discover realities we would never have considered, which allow an advance in our analysis beyond the obvious. Furthermore, the sociological approach is imminently comparative. In addition, authors such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber used comparative analysis as a specific field of knowledge, as a form of explanation of social reality as well as generalization. Thus, to carry out a systematic comparative analysis with musical scenes from other countries, it is necessary to use quantitative data collection (Mahoney 2004). Finally, when an investigation is exposed, it is necessary that we make it readable, and in that sense quantitative analysis – perhaps best exemplified by figures, images and graphs – allows us to represent and simplify the complex reality of relations and interactions in a given group. It is not by chance that Max Weber postulated ideal types and Karl Marx analysed capitalism in several historical phases: they intended to make reality feasible to the point where all complexity was simplified to a degree that made scientific analysis possible (Hughes, Sharrock and Martin 2003). Quantitative methods certainly have their limitations (as indeed do qualitative and even mixed methods approaches). For example, thinking about emotions, we can say that these are far from able to be assessed by quantitative analysis. In a quantitative analysis of musical scenes, emotions – which are sometimes fundamental factors of (sub)cultural belonging – are absent, and hence the need to combine qualitative methods with subjective concerns of analysis that arise. A case in point here is that of Crossley (2015), who turned to social network analysis to study the genesis of the punk movement in the UK. Crossley relies on this methodology to be able to abstract itself from prosaic and everyday events, allowing him to focus on the patterns of links and their specific properties. These links are no longer just numbers that represent actors, bands, labels and so on; they are units of analysis. When this happens, it is necessary to associate this with a sociological framework. The aim here is the diachronic study of the bonds that exist in a certain social context: the relational music worlds of punk. Earlier, we discussed how a social network analysis – when it has the actor as a unit of analysis – needs a sociological framing. In his analysis, Crossley (2015) is indebted to the work of symbolic interactionists, who are very aware of the importance of networks in the lives of individuals. The sociologist who most influenced him was Becker (1982), because of his approach to the social and art worlds – given that he stated the ways in which the creator is not understood as an isolated actor, but rather as a part of a network of cooperation that is essential to the result of the artwork. Here we have a combination of the quantitative part of social network analysis, which aims to examine structure, and the use of symbolic interactionism, which comprises

Contemporary Youth Cultures and Popular Music

the content at its base. Bourdieu (2010) rejects the social network analysis approach, giving priority to the search for connections between actors and institutions. The Bourdieusian model used by authors such as Humeau (2011), Thornton (1996) and Guerra (2016) focuses on the use of polyhedral data analysis. This has been a widely used model to study artistic fields, particularly in Southern European countries, but it has not been widely implemented in the field of youth studies. Simply put, in a table that crosses ‘individuals’ with ‘properties’, the results are two-point clouds: one of individuals and another of properties. The interpretation made is based on the analysis of both. To understand this method, it is important to understand that Bourdieu was an apologist for the relational spatial vision of society, believing it was necessary to emphasize the material support of social relations in a physical space (Le Roux and Rouanet 2004), which is why he opted for a spatial representation of data, calculating the differences and similarities between individuals. Bourdieu (2010) characterizes a social agent in three dimensions: economic, cultural and social capital. This results in a global cloud of social agents – that is, upper, middle and popular classes – which have as their main axes the volume and the structure of capital. This allows Bourdieu to go beyond a sociology of variables concerned with postulating independent and dependent variables, especially because he seeks to analyse many variables and their categories through spatial measurements, such as Euclidean distance and dispersion along the main axes (Rouanet and Le Roux 2010). It is a relational logic that implies social practices have no meaning by themselves – that is, they acquire meaning only in contrast with or relation to others. The logical conclusion is that it does make sense to inquire about the actual social positioning of the protagonists of musical scenes, not to explain the dynamics of each scene merely based on the information of each individual, but rather to better understand the interaction with other relevant traits of the societal milieu, highlighting a fruitful dialogue between Crossley’s (2015) and Bourdieu’s (2010) perspectives. In the next section, we provide an exemplar case of a research project conceived and operationalized in this way in the Portuguese punk scene.

The different ways of being punk: A methodology for the establishment of typological profiles in the social space of Portuguese punk Between 1926 and 1974, Portugal was under the rule of a dictatorship. In 1974, the revolution brought democracy to the country, and from that time onwards Portugal began racing to catch up with other countries in social, economic and

135

136

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

cultural dimensions. In Portugal, punk emerged simultaneously with the punk movements in the UK and the United States (Guerra and Bennett 2021), and the April Revolution worked as a catalyst since the post-revolution social ambiance was favourable to the emergence of punk in the country. While punk was not yet a unified movement, the first Portuguese punk groups appeared in the late 1970s as an artistic reaction to the aesthetic status quo. These groups were linked to the emergence of alternative rock in Portugal, thus assuming a central role in the history of rock music in the country (Guerra 2016). This genesis took place in Lisbon among small groups of young people of the middle and upper classes who, through trips to the United States and UK, encountered the new sounds and aesthetics of punk. In these early days of punk in Portugal, the focus was not on class divisions but rather on the affirmation of a universal change of values that intended to expose Portuguese youth to new music, new aesthetics and new forms of sociability. From the 1980s, during what may be termed a second wave of Portuguese punk, the movement showed signs of major invigoration in Portugal. Punk was not only a symbol of cultural and musical resistance but also an expression of an urban movement focused on music, fashion and a bohemian lifestyle. We can highlight the main reasons for this change: the opening of the country to influences from abroad, which materialized in the arrival of records, clothes, magazines and news; the emergence of successful Portuguese bands and venues that hosted concerts of international punk and post-punk bands; and the increasing urbanization and emergence of spaces of youthful sociability in the main Portuguese cities (Guerra and Bennett 2021). In the 1990s, punk expanded geographically from the urban centres to the outskirts of cities and other regions. It was a very vibrant time for hardcore punk. Nowadays, the importance of punk as a movement, a scene and a lifestyle in the Portuguese context continues to be of great relevance for two major reasons. First, the lingering context of economic crisis has accentuated the role of punk as both a word and a praxis regarding everyday forms of livelihood linked to the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement. Second, there has been a strengthening of punk movements that turn towards political struggle – notably from the 2008 post-crisis – and the defence of the city (Costa, Guerra and Neves 2017). Our analysis was based on 214 in-depth interviews,2 conducted between 2012 and 2016 with individuals of different social backgrounds, geographical locations, ages, professional categories and genders. Interviewees were selected based on a snowball sampling method, following an initial database referenced by the research team. The selection was intended to be as broad as possible in terms of generation, gender, space, role and punk subgenres (Abreu et al. 2017). The 214 interviewees in the project have in common a past or present participation in the Portuguese punk scene, namely as musicians, promoters, editors, critics and intermediaries, or as consumers. The interviews were oriented by a script with fifty category entries and transcribed and

Contemporary Youth Cultures and Popular Music

subjected to classical content analysis and/or other discourse analysis treatments – both quantitative and/or qualitative.3 Thus, we proceeded with the application of an MCA, which allowed us to interpret and clarify the relational structure that characterized the intervening variables in the process of establishing the profiles of the members of the Portuguese punk scene. Through the MCA, we were able to define four profiles of individuals characterized by a set of variables representing the most frequent types of characteristics. It is this relational perspective provided by MCA that, according to Bourdieu (2010), explains the intensive use of this technique to the detriment of multiple regression analysis. MCA is particularly interested in revealing the polarizations and affinities in a given social space, as well as the projection of the agents’ social positions. The importance of MCA in this work is not so much a statistical approximation in the strictest sense, but rather a proposal for structuring the information that assists its organization and interpretation (Le Roux and Rouanet 2004). Before analysing the four types of profiles that were found, it is necessary to explain the aggregation of categories by size. First, let us look at the two dimensions of the analysis. Dimension 1 refers to external conditions of individuals, being influenced by categories such as ‘origin of social class’ of the respondents, parental education, and condition and situation in the parental profession. We can thus say that this dimension portrays the socio-economic origin of the interviewees. Dimension 2 focuses on the individual and portrays the current socio-economic status of the interviewees. In that sense, it is influenced by categories such as age, marital status, condition and status in the profession, place of residence, current class and number of projects and bands. What can be identified in our first analysis? First, dimension 1 makes it possible to understand that the interviewees have different family origins and that there were several conditions that encouraged the participation of these actors in the Portuguese punk scene. A historical perspective indicates that the participation of our interviewees occurred due to parental social privilege – which translates into greater ease of access to information and acquisition of the necessary means to be part of the punk scene – yet those participants whose parents came from a less-privileged social class also had reasons/justifications to be part of the punk scene. Second, the participation of some interviewees in the punk scene seemed to greatly depend on the qualifications of their parents rather than on their position in the social class hierarchy; in this group, parents’ literacy levels were high and the participants’ class positions corresponded with those of liberal professionals, intellectual and scientific specialists, middle-level technicians and other professionals4 (class positions that require higher literary qualifications). Dimension 2 suggests the relevance of the interviewees’ positions in life. When interviewees were younger and single – when they did not have the worries that come with the working world and maintaining a family – their involvement in the

137

138

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

punk scene was greater. The number of projects and bands was larger, and the type of profile they assumed revealed greater involvement in the scene (they were musicians and mediators). However, as the interviewees grew older, acquired jobs and formed family units, their involvement with the punk scene tended to fade. The numbers of projects and bands were reduced or were non-existent, and the role they assumed in the scene was often as a mediator or just a fan. Through the MCA, we established the existence of four typological profiles of Portuguese punk. The first typology, the advanced connoisseurs, comprised 39.7 per cent of the sample (n = 189) – that is, 75 elements. It was the most usual profile in the Portuguese punk scene. The second profile, the resilient entrepreneurs, made up 20.1 per cent – that is, 38 individuals. The third profile, the experienced pioneers, was the least usual in the Portuguese punk scene, constituting just 14.8 per cent – that is, 28 individuals. The final profile, the hopeful neophytes, corresponded to 25.4 per cent of the sample – that is, 48 individuals.

Blank Generation, white-collar punks and cosmopolitanism: A platform of advanced connoisseurs This first punk profile5 – advanced connoisseurs – was the most common in the Portuguese punk scene. It consisted mostly of men aged between thirty-one and forty-five years (64 per cent). This is not surprising, given the masculinization of the Portuguese punk scene. However, this was a profile in which a relatively high percentage of women were found (17.3 per cent). Although the values were not the highest for female participation, they revealed a slow but noticeable change in Portuguese society regarding gender and the roles reserved for women. This age group in Portugal in the 1990s experienced an intense journey in hardcore and in the straight edge and riot grrrl scenes. Through the new bands that emerged during this phase, the lyrics began to reflect a staunch defence of gender equality and to criticize the sexism that was prevalent in the punk universe, serving as a catalyst for female participation. In certain social spaces, women had moved away from the passive roles they had played since the first wave of Portuguese punk – that of a musician’s girlfriend and/or friend – to become active elements that have a band or a fanzine. Geographically speaking, Lisbon predominated in both place of birth (52 per cent) and place of residence (56 per cent). As we will see with the profiles, punk is characterized as an urban and/or suburban phenomenon, especially due to its territorial representation. This is not a Portuguese specificity: it is a reality also found in other countries (Crossley 2015; Humeau 2011), for a very simple reason: in

Contemporary Youth Cultures and Popular Music

large cities (especially in small countries) it is easier to find different and diverse lifestyles and cultural forms. It can be said that the capitals of these small countries are associated with the arrival of cosmopolitanism and diversity (Guerra 2017). Participants tended to have a higher level of education than the average Portuguese,6 with most profiles having the highest proportions at the secondary and university levels. For the advanced connoisseurs – as for the experienced pioneers – university education was the most common level (62.7 per cent). The same holds true for the parents’ level of schooling. In both cases, the value is higher for the variable related to university education: 57.3 per cent. The proportion of mothers with higher education assumed a fundamental role in distinguishing these profiles from others. Besides being established at the educational level, they were also established at the professional level: they were employed by others (66.7 per cent) and were working in the liberal, scientific and technical professions (70.7 per cent). Regarding a sense of belonging to the Portuguese punk scene, the advanced connoisseurs most commonly assumed the condition of musician/fan (17.3 per cent). Accordingly, a high percentage of individuals were engaged in musical projects (bands, music publishing records and such): 48 per cent had more than two projects, and 33.3 per cent were involved in one or two projects. Regarding the number of bands, the proportion of these profiles was better distributed among the categories: 42.7 per cent had more than two bands; 30.7 per cent had one or two; and 26.7 per cent did not have any bands. A relevant characteristic – which provides an interesting contrast with the experienced pioneers’ typology – is that being employed by others does not cause an erosion in participation in the punk scene. The experienced pioneer’s profile – where there was a predominance of self-employment – was associated with a withdrawal of active participation in the punk scene. The opposite might initially seem to be logical; however, this shows how precarious self-employed jobs often have far longer working hours. Advanced connoisseurs – who work for others and have well-established schedules – are free from this problem and can deal better with the balance between work and social life. We now turn to an analysis of issues related to social class. When we examine the variable ‘social class position of interviewee’s family’, it is observed that the great majority (88 per cent) are in the category ‘liberal professionals, intellectual and scientific specialists, middle-level technicians and other professionals’. The same can be said for the ‘social class position of the interviewee’: 70.7 per cent of the members of this profile maintain the social class position of the family. This should not surprise us for two reasons: first, because the Portuguese class structure is characterized by a strong degree of inertia (d’Uva and Fernandes 2017); second, as mentioned above, because Portuguese punk has been characterized by small groups of urban middle-/ high-class youngsters, the white-collar punks. The revolt felt by those involved in the first wave of Portuguese punk cannot be associated with a class struggle; rather, it

139

140

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

was linked to a desire for the arrival of cosmopolitanism and modernity (Abreu et al. 2017; Guerra 2016). Another issue that emerges in relation to this analysis is the polyvalence of roles played by members of the punk scene. They are musicians, mediators, fans and sometimes all of these at the same time. This plurality of roles is associated with the specific dynamics of the punk scene, namely the influence of the DIY philosophy (Bennett and Guerra 2019). However (and here we find a specificity regarding Portuguese punk), it also refers to constraints felt because of the reduced size and marginal nature of the punk scene. Therefore, it is understood that the actors involved must take on multiple roles along their trajectories – sometimes simultaneously – to keep the local scenes operating.

Another world, DIY careers and punkariart: Strategies of resilient entrepreneurs In a primary demographic analysis, this second profile was similar to the previous one: mostly male, native or living in Lisbon and between thirty-one and forty-five years of age (despite a considerable percentage – 28.9 per cent – being over forty-five years). Regarding education, 47.4 per cent had completed secondary education, while 13.2 per cent had completed the basic level of education. Together with typology 4, this is where we find higher values and what turns out to be an important variable for the typology specificity; however, it is a long way from the values obtained for secondary education. What also characterizes this profile and distinguishes it from the other profiles is the employment situation. The majority (52.6 per cent) were self-employed – an atypical situation compared with the overall Portuguese reality (INE 2018). The situation is even more atypical if we consider that this profile is not the one with the highest percentage of self-employment. Similarly, it is in this profile that we find the largest proportion of entrepreneurs, owners or managers (26.3 per cent). Paradoxically, it is also here that we find the second largest proportion of workers or unqualified employees in the services sector (26.3 per cent). These particularities derive from a peculiarity of this profile: the importance of the categories ‘industrial workers, sales and services personnel’ (42.1 per cent) and ‘self-employed workers, small agricultural owners’ (39.5 per cent) at the level of the social class position of the family. However, for the variable ‘social class position of interviewee’, we found that the lowest proportion of respondents worked in liberal, scientific and technical professions (44.7 per cent), and the highest proportion were entrepreneurs, owners or managers (26.3 per cent). At the same time, this profile

Contemporary Youth Cultures and Popular Music

had the second largest proportion of respondents who were workers or unskilled employees in the services sector (26.3 per cent). In the previous profile, we saw how the intergenerational class reproduction was processed; this reproduction is naturally less intense when the protagonists come from lower social classes. First, it refers to changes in Portuguese society, particularly regarding the expansion of the education system and democratized access to higher education, which have served as strong enablers of social mobility and the enlargement of the middle class. Second, the option of a DIY ethos leads agents to opt for self-employment and thus become entrepreneurs, owners or managers. It is a profile that introduces more nuances into the Portuguese punk reality, and this cannot be understood as a simple dichotomy between the working class and new urban middle classes. Concerning participation in the punk scene, the members of this profile largely stand out in the category of musician/mediator (50 per cent). This profile had more individuals with a greater number of projects: 76.3 per cent had more than two projects and 21.1 per cent had one or two projects. Identical behaviour could be identified regarding the number of bands: individuals with more than two bands comprised 55.3 per cent. This profile is unique in the punk music scene. The most relevant age groups are thirty-one to forty-five years and forty-five years plus. Until recently, older participants were analysed very rarely – indeed, they were most often seen as adults resisting social ageing (Bennett 2006; Thornton 1996). The results of this profile prove their assertions, and the old idea that the subcultures are an exclusively young phenomenon has been called into question. Despite their age, these members remain very active in the punk scene, and the characteristic polyvalence of Portuguese punk is most clear here. One would expect to find these values in the youngest and neophytes, with few professional and family commitments, not in someone with professional responsibilities who are mostly married or in non-marital partnerships (52.6 per cent). This can only be explained by the profound impact that subcultural socialization has had on the lives of these individuals. This profile is close to that postulated by Davis (2006), which he calls ‘career punks’. There is a participation in the scene allied to more adult practices such as marriage and children – in other words, a DIY career (Bennett and Guerra 2019). An important note is imposed: we call this profile punkariart – joining two words: punk and precariousness. And why? Because the ethos should not be understood only as a strategy used by young people to cope with scarce resources; the punk ethos found at its base is activated when making decisions about professional careers – that is, decisions of individuals who reject the standard trajectories in favour of creative modes of existence – no doubt more precarious (Threadgold 2018). It is interesting to remember that participants of club cultures – which are defined by their possession of ‘subcultural capital’, as noted by Thornton (1996) – have been able to obtain jobs as artists, disc jockeys and producers in the music business, as well as store clerks in subcultural environments. In the same way, the manifestations of the DIY subcultural

141

142

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

capital of Portuguese punk are visible in careers and jobs in this environment (Guerra 2018).

Wait for the blackout: Male domination and ageing – experienced pioneers The third profile was the least usual in the Portuguese punk scene. Individuals were older when compared with other profiles: 75 per cent were over forty-five years of age. Although there was a masculinized profile of individuals coming from Lisbon, we found the highest percentage of women: 25 per cent. It is appropriate at this point to address the issue of gender in Portuguese punk: female participation is limited. It is a situation that crosses all the realities studied (Leonard 2007), yet there are specificities in the Portuguese reality that have made (and still make) this participation more complex, so how does this situation reconcile itself with the nonconformist, libertarian and egalitarian ideals of punk? The first reason for the reduced participation of women is related to the role that women had and in many cases continue to have in the Portuguese society, and crystallizes the behaviours and attitudes that confine them to the domestic space and to the position of girlfriend/mother/wife. A second reason, intimately related to the first and hypothetically more comprehensive from the point of view of male symbolic domination in society, is related to the greater presence of men in movements that imply greater audacity and demarcation in relation to society, catapulting men to leadership roles in social and cultural movements. A third reason focuses on the social expectations related to feminine images and aesthetics. In fact, the departure of women from punk also has aesthetic and corporal causes: society aesthetically condemns the anti-femininity present in punk. As in the previous profiles, we note the prevalence of self-employed workers. As reported, this cannot be dissociated from the importance of the DIY ethos for these individuals. If the national average in 2017 was 19.6 per cent of the national population (INE 2018), in this third profile the numbers reached 64.3 per cent. The main explanation for these high values of independent work is grounded in the importance of subcultural capital in the lives of these individuals. We are talking about people marked by a long trajectory in the punk scene, which implies the acquisition of subcultural capital that can be converted into resources to be mobilized in the labour market, as stated in the last profile. In this one, the most accentuated class position (46.4 per cent) is ‘entrepreneurs, owners and managers’ and ‘liberal, scientific and technical professionals’. From this we can conclude that these individuals have come from families whose class positions are situated very high in the social structure (Guerra 2021). There is some correspondence with what

Contemporary Youth Cultures and Popular Music

we have said previously: these members are part of the first wave of Portuguese punk, which was characterized by a high percentage of young urban middle-/upper-class people (Guerra 2020). In their participation in the punk scene, we find two situations that make this profile different from the others: it is here that the largest proportion of fans (39.3 per cent) and mediators (25 per cent) are involved. However, experienced punks hold the fewest projects. The proportion of those without any project has the highest value: 32.1 per cent. The same can be said about bands: this profile appears as the most inactive because 57.1 per cent of experienced punks have no band and 25 per cent have between one and two bands. Mauger (1995) speaks of youth as an age of ‘weightlessness’. The opposite claim can be made about ageing. During the trajectory in the punk scene, several ‘weights’ begin to emerge. This is precisely what we see with the experienced pioneer punks: they have the least projects and bands and are most likely to consider themselves fans and mediators. These are individuals who, after having participated in bands or musical projects, end up realizing that it would be impossible to build a professional career. If we add up the family and professional circumstances, we understand why many individuals prefer to leave the scene completely, remaining just as fans, or instead betting on mediation roles that do not consume so much of their spare time (Bennett 2013). The exception is the rare professionalization, although this must be compared with the reality of the second profile. The same situation arises with age: there is the same predominance of self-employment. Despite that, the participation in the punk scene is very active. The fact that we get higher numbers of women here can influence this participation. The responsibilities of adulthood are more pressing for women. Responsibilities also affect men, but less so, and the result is visible in the greater proportion of men who remain in the subculture as they age (Gregory 2009).

Brave new world: Globalization, insurgent citizenship – hopeful neophytes This last profile type, which corresponds to 25.4 per cent of the sample, is characterized by the predominance of young men: 93.8 per cent of the individuals are men and 45.8 per cent are in the fifteen to thirty age group. We are in the presence of a generational renewal in the Portuguese punk scene – this is not only generational but also geographical. A major divergence from the other profiles is the residence and birthplace of the individuals: these hopeful neophytes are usually from the north of the country (45.8 per cent). There is a geographical diversity here: if 37.5 per cent live

143

144

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

in Lisbon, we also note that 16.7 per cent live in the central region. As already noted, a fundamental aspect of Portuguese punk is its territorial distribution – that is, the preponderance of punk scene participants in the two main cities of the country (Porto and Lisbon), but mostly Lisbon. With this new generation of punk neophytes, we can visualize the attenuation of the macrocephaly that affected the punk movement. In an earlier study, we found that the explanation for this decentralization lies in the cross-referencing of the growing diversity of young people’s social conditions with the speed of dissemination of information and the relevance of DIY production (Guerra 2021). The emergence of scenes located in small/medium cities away from Lisbon and Porto is clearly influenced by the DIY philosophy, which is a form that is used to overcome specific limitations of isolated social and musical contexts, with scarce resources at the level of places of performance, equipment and participating members. Among the hopeful neophytes, the basic level of education (14.6 per cent) and the high school level (43.8 per cent) were the most predominant school conditions. This is not strange if we consider the youth characteristic of this typology. It is also due to the relatively young age of this profile that we find very reduced percentages of self-employment or employees for hire. Given the age of the individuals concerned, these were mostly students. It is possible to find other significant differences in this profile, especially when we analyse the class position. If, in the previous typologies, it was common to find family class positions located in the categories that placed Portuguese punks in the new urban middle/upper classes, in this profile we find a strong percentage of parents whose social class positions are in the category ‘industrial operator and employed executives’ (56.3 per cent). While at the level of the interviewee class position, the most significant are the ‘liberal’ and ‘scientific and technical’ professions (54.2 per cent), in this profile we find the largest proportion of respondents dedicated to ‘industrial work and services’ (33.3 per cent). It is interesting that in this generational renewal of Portuguese punk, there is a workingclass shift, with more members coming from that social class. Above all, attention must be focused on the deep social changes that have marked Portuguese society and its democratization. In the 1970s and 1980s, and into the 1990s, access to cultural goods and information about the newest cultural and musical trends from abroad was not available to all young people. In the late 1990s and in the twenty-first century, with the democratization of the internet, a parallel democratization of the access to cultural goods also occurred (Pais 2003). This partly explains the recent workingclass shift of Portuguese punk. In this profile, we find the highest proportion of musicians (43.8 per cent) and the second-largest proportion of musician-mediators (43.8 per cent) – figures only surpassed by the second profile. There are also high values for the number of projects: 68.8 per cent had more than two projects and 29.2 per cent had between one and two projects. A similar behaviour is evident regarding the number of bands – the

Contemporary Youth Cultures and Popular Music

hopeful neophytes appear to have been the most active: 60.4 per cent had more than two bands. According to Bourdieu (1994), youth should not be understood either in the biological sense or as a social unit of common interests, but rather as a biographical trajectory. Above all, this serves to clarify our findings about subcultural participation in the Portuguese punk scene. Punk is a multigenerational scene, which means there are differences in the practices and meanings that each age group attributes to music and style (Bennett 2006).

Conclusions As we have seen, quantitative research must come out of the methodological purgatory in which youth and music research have put it. This area of science can only benefit from the application of methods that allow a more extensive and finegrained analysis of reality. It is not an easy methodology because it also provokes fear in the social researcher due to its reliance on mathematics and statistics in general. Whether with the application of the Bourdieusian model through the MCA or the social network analysis model, what we wanted was to build a connection between micro and macro perspectives in sociology (Freeman 2004; Raub, Buskens and van Assen 2011). It is not intended to make an orthodox apology for the quantitative method, as the positivists did, but rather to develop a sociology that is established in both fields: one that studies the structure, but at the same time understands what is at the basis of this structure, such as values and emotions – in short, the definition of the situation constructed by each individual. This is reflected in the four profiles presented in this chapter. This methodological way of working has allowed us to face realities that would have escaped us in a less rigorous analysis. For example, the levels of participation between profiles 2 and 3, despite the same age group and the same position before the work, are significantly different. With this analysis, we see that this difference corresponds to the high percentage of women in profile 3. We thus understand the difficulties faced by older women wanting to maintain their (sub)cultural participation. This is partly due to the pressures of motherhood and employment, but it equally involves old prejudices and demands to tone down their subcultural signifiers and activities. Men do not feel these issues so soon or so intensely, so it is possible that their participation will continue (with qualitative and quantitative changes) throughout their lives. However, we analysed the different levels of subcultural participation. As in certain profiles, individuals manage to transpose their subcultural capital into the labour market, generally through DIY careers, and with this they have the possibility of earning a living (better or worse) in the scene to which they have devoted so much of their free time. The participation of some individuals is more ‘linear’: an active and polyvalent participation in their youth (with bands and projects) that, with the advancement

145

146

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

of years and the inherent difficulties experienced by many, moves towards a more measured participation as a fan. In addition, when we analysed the class issue, we found that the majority of the participants belonged to the middle/upper classes, associated with liberal professions and intellectual work. In this way, the Portuguese case – except for the fourth profile – corroborates the rejection of the idea of punk as a movement of the working class. But we would fail to understand its wealth if we simply reduced it to a single category. It would be incorrect to say that punk is a working-class (sub)culture, just as it would be wrong to say that it is a middle-class (sub)culture. The key feature is the crossing of diverse, and sometimes contradictory, trajectories and social conditions such as class reproduction, upward mobility trajectories through the conversion of subculture capitals into the labour market and certain cases of downward mobility, usually associated with a premature school dropout. The most interesting aspect of MCA was its revelation of the polarities and affinities in the Portuguese punk scene, as well as answers to questions that at first seemed to be counter-intuitive.

Notes 1 The publication of this chapter was supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) within the scope of UID/SOC/00727/2019. 2 This study was conducted within the project ‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! Prolegomenons and Punk Scenes: A Road to Portuguese Contemporaneity (1977– 2012)’ (PTDC/CS-SOC/118830/2010) (KISMIF), funded by FEDER through the COMPETE Operational Program from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal. 3 Details of the project ‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! Prolegomenons and Punk Scenes: A Road to Portuguese Contemporaneity (1977–2012)’ (PTDC/ CS-SOC/118830/2010), known as KISMIF, and its results can be found at http:// www.punk.pt. The information with which we work here is the result of semistructured interviews with 214 individuals who have/had strong links to the Portuguese punk scene in a variety of different ways. 4 In creating the social classes, we followed and adapted the MCA matrix under the guise of three principles: first, we confronted interviewees’ professions with the 2010 version of Portuguese Classification of Occupations (INE 2011); second, we examined the situations of individual pluriactivity, which are relatively frequent among our interviewees; third, we defined the class category of families, according to the highest level by either spouse (rather than that of the male spouse). Class categories are identified by crossing the ten professional groups in the 2010 classification with the professional situation of interviewees (Abreu et al. 2017). 5 Album by the band Richard Hell & the Voidoids, released in 1977. 6 More than half (52 per cent) of the current Portuguese population do not have secondary schooling (Pordata 2018).

Contemporary Youth Cultures and Popular Music

References Abreu, P., Guerra, P., Silva, A. S., Oliveira, A. and Moreira, T. (2017). ‘The Social Place of the Portuguese Punk Scene: An Itinerary of the Social Profiles of Its Protagonists’. Volume!, 14(1): 103–26. Becker, H. S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, A. (2006). ‘Punk’s Not Dead: The Continuing Significance of Punk Rock for an Older Generation of Fans’. Sociology, 40(2): 219–35. Bennett, A. (2013). Music, Style and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Bennett, A., and P. Guerra, eds (2019). DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1994). Sociology in Question. London: Sage. Bourdieu, P. (2010). Distinction. London: Routledge. Cieslik, M., and D. Simpson (2013). Key Concepts in Youth Studies. London: Sage. Costa, P., P. Guerra and P. Neves, eds (2017). Urban Intervention, Street Art and Public Space. Lisbon: UrbanCreativity. Crossley, N. (2010). ‘The Social World of the Network. Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Elements in Social Network Analysis’. Sociologica, 1: 1–34. Crossley, N. (2015). Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Davis, J. R. (2006). ‘Growing Up Punk: Negotiating Aging Identity in a Local Music Scene’. Symbolic Interaction, 29(1): 63–9. Denzin, N. K., Y. S. Lincoln and L. T. Smith, eds (2008). Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. d’Uva, T. B., and M. Fernandes (2017). Mobilidade social em Portugal [Social Mobility in Portugal]. Lisbon: Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos. Feixa, C., C. Leccardi and P. Nilan, eds (2016). Youth, Space and Time: Agoras and Chronotopes in the Global City. Leiden: Brill. Freeman, L. C. (2004). The Development of Social Network Analysis. Vancouver: Empirical. Gregory, J. (2009). ‘Too Young to Drink, Too Old to Dance: The Influences of Age and Gender on (Non)Rave Participation’. Dancecult, 1(1): 65–80. Guerra, P. (2016). ‘Keep It Rocking: The Social Space of Portuguese Alternative Rock (1980–2010)’. Journal of Sociology, 52(4): 615–30. Guerra, P. (2017). ‘“Just Can’t Go to Sleep”: DIY Cultures and Alternative Economies Facing Social Theory’. Portuguese Journal of Social Sciences, 16(3): 283–303. Guerra, P. (2018). ‘Raw Power: Punk, DIY and Underground Cultures as Spaces of Resistance in Contemporary Portugal’. Cultural Sociology, 12(2): 241–59. Guerra, P. (2020). ‘Iberian Punk, Cultural Metamorphoses, and Artistic Differences in the Post-Salazar and Post-Franco Eras’. In G. McKay and G. Arnold (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

147

148

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Guerra, P. (2021). ‘So Close Yet So Far: DIY Cultures in Portugal and Brazil’. Cultural Trends, 30(2): 122–38. Guerra, P., and A. Bennett (2021). ‘Punk Portugal, 1977–2012: A Preliminary Genealogy’. Popular Music History, 13(3): 215–34. Heath, S., and C. Walker, eds (2011). Innovations in Youth Research. London: Palgrave. Hughes, J. A., W. Sharrock and P. J. Martin (2003). Understanding Classical Sociology: Marx, Weber, Durkheim. London: Sage Humeau, P. (2011). ‘Sociologie de l’espace punk indépendant français: Apprentissages, trajectoires et vieillissement politico-artistique’. PhD thesis, Université Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens. INE (2011). Classificação Portuguesa das Profissões 2010 [Portuguese Classification of Occupations 2010]. Lisbon: INE. INE (2018). ‘72.5% dos trabalhadores por conta própria em Portugal não têm pessoas ao serviço’ [72.5% of the Self-employed in Portugal Do Not Have Any Persons Employed]. Available online: https://www.ine.pt/xpor​tal/ xmain?xpid=INE&xpgid=ine_de​staq​ues&DES​TAQU​ESde​st_b​oui=304549​ 052&DESTAQ​UESm​odo=2&xlang=pt (accessed 27 April 2019). Kraemer, H., and C. Blasey (2016). How Many Subjects? Statistical Power Analysis in Research. London: Sage. Le Roux, B., and H. Rouanet (2004). Geometric Data Analysis: From Correspondence Analysis to Structured Data Analysis. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Leonard, M. (2007). Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mahoney, J. (2004). ‘Comparative-Historical Methodology’. Annual Review of Sociology, 30: 81–101. Mauger, G. (1995). ‘Jeunesse: l’âge des classements’. Revue des politiques sociales et familiales Année, 40: 19–36. Mitchell, C., N. de Lange and R. Moletsane (2018). Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change, Community and Policy. London: Sage. Pais, J. M. (2003). Culturas Juvenis [Youth Cultures]. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda. Pais, J. M. (2020). Jóvenes y creatividad: Entre futuros sombrios y tempos de conquista [Young People and Creativity: Between Dark Futures and Times of Conquest]. Madrid: Ned Editions. Payne, G., ed. (2013). Social Divisions, 3rd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Polhemus, T. (1997). ‘In the Supermarket of Style’. In S. Redhead (ed.), The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies (pp. 148–51). Oxford: Blackwell. Pordata (2018). Retrato dos Homens e das Mulheres [Portrait of Men and Women]. Lisbon: Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos/Pordata. Raub, W., V. Buskens and M. van Assen (2011). ‘Micro–Macro Links and Microfoundations in Sociology’. Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 35(1–3): 1–25. Rouanet, H., and B. Le Roux (2010). Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Contemporary Youth Cultures and Popular Music

Savage, M., et al. (2013). ‘A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment’. Sociology, 47(2): 219–50. Thornton, S. (1996). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Threadgold, S. (2018). ‘Creativity, Precarity and Illusio: DIY Cultures and “Choosing Poverty”’. Cultural Sociology, 12(2): 156–73. Toepoel, V. (2016). Doing Surveys Online. London: Sage. Vogt, W. P., ed. (2011). Sage Quantitative Research Methods. London: Sage. Woodman, D., and A. Bennett, eds (2015). Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations: Bridging the Gap in Youth Research. London: Palgrave.

149

150

8 ‘Images and words’: Textual analysis and its uses for metal music studies Catherine Hoad

Dialogue about music’s meanings and effects has long been used to frame encounters with, and opinions and evaluations of, popular music as a cultural domain. Language, in its myriad forms, and the textual containers through which it emerges have been central to the ways in which musicians, producers, marketers and audiences alike both create and respond to popular music. However, the analysis of such texts has often been considered as a subsidiary of popular music studies, and the methodological approach itself has often met with suspicion and critique as to its viability (Middleton 2000: 1). Nonetheless, textual analysis – which I define here as a methodological approach to research that examines the content, structure, functions and meanings generated by a text and its interrelated connections with an audience – has a significant history within popular music studies, and is a methodology that continues to yield important insights into the symbols and discourses which shape and constitute the various fields of popular music performance, materials and cultures. In this chapter, I explore the critical applications and uses of textual analysis in the study of popular music and its resonances with youth and post-youth audiences. More specifically, in drawing on my own research background, this chapter focuses on textual analysis as a means through which to explore the function of texts in heavy metal scenes, communities and cultures, where the significance of metal’s textual imagery within youth and post-youth cultures has long been a source of interest for scholars. Here I explore texts as both bearers and makers of meaning, the boundaries of which are fluid and changeable, with varied messages that are always socially and culturally situated. The chapter offers an overview of textual analysis as a popular music research methodology, particularly as it has emerged in the context of metal music studies,

152

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

and the potentialities of its future in a rapidly changing music industry and communicative environment. In the first section, I discuss the meaning, background and uses of textual analysis as a form of academic analysis. I then look to the history and applications of textual analysis within popular music, as well as the centrality of texts themselves to popular music’s political economies and social functions. Here I note the criticisms which have accompanied the uses of textual analysis in popular music, and how researchers using this approach have diversified and further advanced the method to account for such critiques. In the second section, the focus turns to heavy metal as an exemplar site for the applications of textual analysis. In this section I examine the history of textual analysis as it has been applied in metal music studies, which in the early years of the field relied on very literal content analysis of lyrics. Here I offer interrogations of the applications of textual analysis to heavy metal texts, noting the uses of such a method for engaging with the paramusical and extramusical dimensions of metal and its political entanglements. In the third and final section, I consider the power dynamics entrenched within the production of texts, mapping the importance of fan-made materials within applications of textual analysis in music scenes. This final section leads towards further investigations by considering the implications represented by the internet in the production and reception of texts, and the complications and opportunities that the digital age represents for reconfiguring the meanings and boundaries of texts as sites of analysis. Textual analysis is, in many ways, immutably shaped by textual ‘readers’ themselves. The consumption of texts, as both Henry Jenkins ([1992] 2012) and Stuart Hall (1973) suggest, is never passive; rather, such consumption is always mediated by social, political and cultural contexts. For Jenkins, moreover, resources drawn from commercial cultures are reworked by audiences to serve alternative interests. The result for textual analysis and its interrelated fields of critical discourse analysis, reader response theory and reception studies is that meaning can never be wholly generated within the text itself, but rather crystallizes and pluralizes in the interfaces between the producer, the text and the audience. My interest in textual analysis is thus informed by this understanding that a singular meaning cannot be inherent in a text itself; instead, meaning is generated through the relationship between text, audience and context. In the context of my own studies of metal, I am interested in texts produced by fans. Such material can seemingly join text with reception and potentially blur the traditionally parasocial relations between producers, performers and audiences. Fans consume texts, but they also generate their own, which contribute to a wider repository of discourses, symbols and meanings; fans both shape and generate narratives and practices of heavy metal. Fan texts also offer sources of meaning that operate beyond the institutional frameworks of ‘official’ texts – commercially released albums, promotional material, autobiographies and so on – a do-it-yourself (DIY) context that further reveals the possibilities and

‘Images and Words’

applications of textual analysis as a tool for engaging with the interpretation of social and cultural meaning. These issues of shifting meanings, agency and authorship underscore my exploration of textual analysis as it unfolds in this ­chapter – much in the way texts themselves are fluid and unbounded. I would argue that so too is textual analysis – a method whose techniques are constantly being renegotiated and whose principles are frequently reconstituted.

Textual analysis: A history Textual analysis takes as its central characteristic the content, structure, functions and meanings generated by a text. A ‘text’, in this sense, is understood as any object that can be ‘read’ – that is, analysed, interpreted and capable of transmitting or generating meaning. Traditionally, as Paul Ricoeur (1981) notes, the text has been taken to be literary – that is, written. However, as Ricoeur contends, understanding of texts as ‘any discourse fixed by writing’ is inadequate in approaching the plurality and diversity of texts. Roland Barthes, in Image-Music-Text (1978), notes that ‘text’ has often been deployed within literary paradigms, being used to refer to literature or literary works, to the extent where he observes that ‘text’ and ‘work’ have increasingly been used interchangeably. However, Barthes makes a distinction between the ‘text’ and the ‘work’: the work can be held in the hand, but the text is ‘held in language’. Certainly, Barthes has woven a complex and often abstract theory out of defining what a text is, and how the idea of text relates to interpretation, structure and meaning. For the purposes of this chapter, it is sufficient to remember that when referring to something as a ‘text’, we call into focus its characteristics and/or structure, or the signs that convey meaning and allow interpretation for creator and ‘reader’ alike. Furthermore, ‘language’ must then not be conceived as being constituted entirely by the written word but also by the visual and the spoken – and, in the domain of music, what can be heard, performed and, as Rosemary Overell (2012) has shown in the case of extreme metal, felt. Secondary to this question of where or what the text ‘is’ has been the quandary of why texts matter, and indeed why textual analysis is a valuable form of critical scholarly engagement. In mapping the contemporary uses and importance of textual analysis methods, Norman Fairclough’s (1995) account gives a definitive overview of the continued significance of text-based research. Fairclough’s account of the uses and value of textual analysis lists four primary reasons why the method is valuable, and to some extent necessary, in approaches to social and cultural contexts, and the practices contained within them. Fairclough’s typification – theoretical, methodological, historical and political – continues to provide a useful schema in approaching not only the applications of the method but also the value of texts themselves to social and cultural formations. His approach is summed up thus by Urpo Kovala (2002: 4):

153

154

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

The theoretical reason is that the social structures which are the focus of attention of many social scientists, and texts, in turn, constitute one very important form of social action. Further, as language is widely misinterpreted as transparent, the precise mechanisms and modalities of the social and ideological work that language does in producing, reproducing or transforming social structures, relations and identities, is routinely overlooked. The methodological reason is that texts constitute a major source of evidence for grounding claims about social structures, relations and processes. The historical reason for the importance of textual analysis is that texts are sensitive barometers of social processes, movement and diversity, and textual analysis can provide particularly good indicators of social change. Finally, the political reason relates to social science with critical objectives especially. Namely, it is increasingly through texts (visual texts included) that social control and social domination are exercised. Textual analysis can therefore be a political resource as well.

Fairclough’s schematic demonstrates the value of the ‘text’ to social and cultural phenomena, drawing the older principles of the hermeneutic tradition of philosophy – interpretation and understanding and, later, the influence of sociocultural context – into contemporary forms of textual analysis. With the advent of mass communication, textual analysis emerged as a key method through which to engage with media content and its social, cultural and political effects. To this end, Harold Lasswell (1948) theorized core questions in the late 1940s, which provided the foundation of much text-based media studies to follow – who says what, to whom, why, to what extent and with what effect? Such an approach was nonetheless later criticized as straightforward content analysis, which seeks to systematize and categorize the content of a text, rather than textual analysis, which seeks to attend to the meanings produced by such content and their varying, contextually influenced interpretations. Along with, and as a consequence of, this development, the traditional view of seeing reading as the passive adoption of the meaning of one single text became suspect (Kovala 2002: 2). Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy ([1957] 2007) added a crucial new condition to textual analysis by arguing that the development of critical literacies among all members of a society was foundational in understanding how texts influence understandings of the world and, furthermore, how being critically literate could allow audiences to engage with texts and form opinions that acted to counter homogenization. Paulo Freire ([1968] 2018) further extends this critical approach in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, examining how institutional oppression is reproduced through texts, and how critical literacies can challenge this intergenerational marginalization through the creation of new, transformative texts. The rightful suspicion of the notion that a text could have a single meaning, which is passively consumed by a reader, was also accompanied by a shift in emphasis from content to context in the 1980s. Janice Radway (1984), for example, examined the everyday contexts of reading but also looked at aspects of production and at the texts read. This entanglement of creator, audience, context and materialism indicates an

‘Images and Words’

instance of the kind of ‘integrated approach’ to cultural meaning generated through texts for which theorists such as Janet Wolff (1988) advocate. Given this ‘integrated approach’ to textual analysis, which emphasizes context alongside content and meaning, I point here to a basic ontology of textual analysis provided by musicologist Richard Middleton (2000). Middleton’s ontology has shaped my own research, and I consider it a highly useful starting point for any analysis of a text: What is the text? Where is it located? What kinds of things does it do? (2)

This intersection between where the text is located – physically, temporally, geographically, ideologically – and the kinds of things the text can ‘do’ (and, indeed, what can in turn be done to the text) have thus been at the core of my approach to textual analysis, and one that is particularly useful in the context of popular music studies. However, textual analysis has had a troubled history within wider academic attempts to devise a central methodology for the study of popular music (1). These tensions I espouse below, along with how popular music studies can draw on the longer history of textual analysis methods as a means to gain insights into the symbols and discourses that shape and constitute the various fields of popular music performance, materials and cultures.

Textual analysis in popular music studies Richard Middleton begins Reading Pop (2000: 1) by noting that while interpretative comments on pop singers, records, and concerts are commonplace in the public sphere, textual analysis as a mode of inquiry in the field of popular music studies ‘has been marked by methodological hesitations which suggest deep-lying doubts about the viability of the enterprise itself ’. Underpinning this state of affairs, argues Middleton, is an anxiety over what the inculcation of ‘pop’ into the academy meant for the particular histories of musical scholarship, and the cultural rift between ‘elite’ and ‘vernacular’ values (1) in analysis that may be seen to be undermined by interrogations of popular music. The early histories of popular music studies marked the subsequent development of textually oriented work. Formative popular musicology, Middleton observes, drew on ‘modes of descriptive and structural analysis, and of rather speculative hermeneutics’ (2) – methods that were familiar from existing musicological traditions, where they had been applied to classical repertoires. Such modes struggled to grasp popular texts as they were understood within the context of the cultures in which they were produced. Developments in ethnomusicology (cf. Keil 1966) also pioneered themes and perspectives that diversified the methodological tools for ‘new’ musicology. The sudden prominence

155

156

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

of British cultural studies also offered new methods to the analysis of the texts of popular music: the semiotic approach of Dick Hebdige in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) is a commonly cited – and critiqued, as Michelle Phillipov (2013b) notes – example of this trend. Nonetheless, Middleton (2000: 3) suggests, these analyses gravitated towards forms of ‘consumptionism’, which prioritize the contexts of production and use, wherein ‘the specificities of sound shrink’. Many of the tensions that have accompanied the uses of textual analysis in popular music studies then have their roots in more abstract ontological questions of where or what the text ‘is’. For Simon Frith (1996: 158), the ‘song’ is taken as the locus of the ‘text’ and generative meaning. ‘Most contemporary popular music,’ he argues, ‘takes the form of a song, and most people if asked what a song “means” refer to the words’ (158). Examining the meaning of music texts in terms of their ‘words’, for many theorists, equates to a very straightforward content analysis of the lyrics. The tradition of content analysis, which Frith argues was still ‘faithfully followed’ in the mid-1990s, has meant that arguments about popular music’s social and political value are ‘more likely to refer to pop words than pop sounds’ (159). Moreover, in examining what words ‘do’ or what words ‘mean’, we may fall back on the obvious strategy of treating songs as literary objects that can be analysed entirely separately from music (159). The popularity of lyrical analysis, and the centrality of words to musical meaning, nonetheless demonstrates that words matter to people – that they are central to how popular music is heard and evaluated, and indeed, as this chapter goes on to discuss in the context of metal, how music is moralized, spoken about and potentially censored. In extending the possibilities of engaging with the ‘words’ of music beyond reducing the lyrics to a literary object removed from the music, Frith then encourages us to engage with the plural dimensions of words, rhetoric and voices: words appear to give songs an independent source of semantic meaning; rhetoric allows those words to be used in a musical way which draws attention to features and problems of speech; and voices, or words being spoken or sung in tones which are themselves meaningful, are signs of persons and their presence (159). Approaches such as Frith’s assert that words are valuable to textual analysis in popular music, particularly when they are treated not in isolation – as standalone literary objects – but rather formulated and analysed as part of an integrated whole. Richard Middleton’s notion of the ‘musical code’ is hence a useful tool for further approaching these questions of where the musical text ‘is’, and the interconnected works, features and instances which can substantiate textual meaning. The ‘musical code’ may be explained as the aspect of musical communication that describes the relationship of the semantic system to the syntactic system – that is, the relationship of content to expression (Brackett 1995: 9). Middleton’s ‘musical code’ is therefore a useful way of theorizing the connections between musical ‘sound’ and extramusical factors such as media image, biographical details, mood, and social and historical associations. This approach is particularly significant for textual analysis because it

‘Images and Words’

draws the meaning of the text outside the musical work, which is not treated here as a consolidated whole, but rather an instance in a wider meaning-making system that is also informed by factors such as style, convention and ideology. Middleton proposes five ‘general codes’ as a tool through which to map the relationships and dynamics that shape texts: norms, or mainstream conventions governing the period of popular music; sub-norms, or the conventions associated with a particular era; style, for example, Tin Pan Alley pop or Motown soul; idiolect, or the style traits associated with particular performers; and works and performances, as categories to describe particular recordings or instances. Within these general codes, Middleton also notes a number of secondary signifiers that can be drawn in to analysis – for example, the intended connotations of particular structural or thematic effects; emotive connotations, or the affective implications of certain styles or performances; and axiological connotations, or the moral and political evaluations of musical pieces, styles or genres (Middleton 1990: 232). The moral and political dimensions of textual analysis, as they have emerged in popular musicology, add another layer to the applications and implications of the method. Popular music is always socially and discursively entangled with what Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944] 2006) referred to as ‘the culture industries’, a ‘corporatised and industrialised mode of meaning-making’ (Louw 2001: 37). It should follow, then, that popular music studies also draws on means of analysis that have accompanied the ubiquity of mass culture or mass media. The intertwining of artefacts, political economies, and social and cultural formations can be a particularly productive combination within the context of popular music. As Eric Louw (2001: 2) argues, the mutually supportive arrangements of a ‘cultural studies approach’ and a ‘political economy’ approach can yield useful analysis for researchers. Within a cultural studies approach to textual analysis, he argues, the focus is on ‘deconstructing texts and coding systems as a way of denaturalizing the communicative process and stripping away the opaqueness and taken-for-grantedness of meaning’. Here, for Louw, a cultural studies–based analysis of Madonna would look beyond the music dimension and explore what she communicates about contemporary attitudes towards femininity. An analysis of Madonna and her fans could become a study of how the female body, sexuality, and gender relationships are understood (‘constructed’) within conventional and alternative subcultures. (2)

The ‘political economy’ approach thus focuses on how meaning is made by people within a productive process. Louw asserts that this involves exploring the social positions people occupy and the relationships between them, and struggles over meaning-production within organizations (2). Applying this political economy approach to Madonna could mean analysing the relationship between content produced by Madonna – music videos, songs, albums and so on – and the fact of her ongoing high-profile and commercial success in the industry. Such analysis would

157

158

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

take into account how these constructions of contemporary femininity are mediated through her record company and wider modes of capitalist distribution. These two critical approaches, as Louw shows, are complementary and can be applied jointly for maximum deconstructive effect. Louw’s (2001: 2) notion of looking ‘beyond the music dimension’ and critically engaging with the cultural and economic dimensions that shape texts and their reception is a fruitful way of drawing musical applications of textual analysis beyond the purely ‘musicological text’, in the sense of hard numbers and bar charts. Such approaches have been criticized for over-textualization, for turning subject matter into text deprived of any or most of its contextual determinants (Kovala 2002). Contemporary textual analysis in popular music studies thus turns towards the social significance of music and its political implications. However, when taken to its extremes, this disregard for ‘the musical dimension’ is vulnerable to accusations of over-contextualization, wherein the text itself becomes lost. In short, contextfocused textual analysis methods are seen as fundamentally reductionist enterprises that privilege some context or contexts over text and textual analysis, where such approaches prioritize contextualization to the extent that they neglect the specific properties of texts and genres. Certainly, this is a valid concern for popular music studies, where the near-exclusive focus on context over text can result in sidestepping any examination of the musical elements of a text – meter, timbre, melodic lines and harmonic sequences – and the capacity of these to carry meaning. Such concerns are a useful reminder of Philip Tagg’s (2006) famous lamentation that popular musicology was struggling to bridge the dichotomy between ‘music as music – the text’ and ‘everything except the music – the context’. In taking a slightly different tack, this sidestepping of the musical, towards focusing on lyrics as the meaning of the text (Frith 1996: 158), or pure content analysis of visual signifiers, has had particularly problematic implications for the uses of textual analysis in the context of heavy metal.

The uses of textual analysis in metal music studies In my wider research, I have sought to draw textual analysis into studies of heavy metal music scenes and practices, particularly as a means through which to critically engage with the relationship between language, identity and community, as it emerges within metal scenes. In my work, this approach has ranged from examining album liner notes as narratives of identity and verbal markers of place in Australian heavy metal (Hoad 2015); the dialectical functions of the Afrikaans language in the lyrics of South African metal bands (Hoad 2014); and the proliferation of fan fiction about heavy metal performers, largely written by young women and posted

‘Images and Words’

in dedicated online spaces (Hoad 2017). Textual analysis is central to my research and has long been a feature of discussions of metal; it has, however, often occupied a difficult position within the field’s methodological repertoire. The texts of metal are rather conspicuously absent from early accounts of heavy metal, where studies of heavy metal were largely concerned with fans and situated uncomfortably within the traditional approaches of subcultural studies.1 Dick Hebdige (1979: 155), in one of the earliest (and particularly disparaging) critiques of the genre, has little to say on metal aside from characterizing it as inherently working class, a ‘curious blend of hippy aesthetics and football terrace machismo’ that attracted aficionados ‘distinguished by their long hair, denim and “idiot” dancing’. A slightly later piece by Will Straw (1984) again yields little insight into the musical texts of metal, instead exploring the ways in which heavy metal emerged during a period of commercialization of the music industry and its modes of distribution, and a particularly tense and fragmented period for rock criticism. While Straw does not dwell on individual texts, he offers an intriguing (if quite general) insight into heavy metal’s iconographic meanings and representations: The major stylistic components of Heavy Metal iconography may be inventoried as follows: long hair for both performers and audiences, denim jackets and jeans among audiences, smoke bombs as an element of stage performances, and the taking of depressant drugs. On album covers, one finds an eclecticism near the beginning, but the gradual cohering of an iconography combining satanic imagery and motifs from heroic fantasy illustration. The iconography of Heavy Metal culture, as it became more coherent by middecade, grew out of one particular strand within this overall tendency: that of heroic fantasy literature and illustration, most closely associated with fictional characters such as Conan the Barbarian. Dominated by an imagery of carnage, and mildly pornographic, the illustrative style which emerged around Heavy Metal may be seen as a masculinization of the fantasy elements present within psychedelic culture. As this iconography came to dominate within Heavy Metal culture there was a proliferation of fantasy and satanic imagery as elements of vehicle decor, pinball machine thematics, poster art, T-shirt and jean jacket illustration, and so on. (117–18)

I quote Straw at length here precisely because this passage on metal’s iconography – read by Straw through the bodies and clothing of fans and performers, album covers, posters and pinball machines – is demonstrative of the ways in which texts, and particularly extramusical texts, have long been taken as indicative of heavy metal’s identity, meanings and formations. Straw’s relatively simple appraisal of metal’s dominant codes as masculinity, Satanism, carnage and pornography (which he does situate within longer literary and musical traditions such as fantasy illustration, emphasizing the importance of intertextual readings to this form of analysis) should also be considered within the preconditions that led to the widespread public decrial of heavy metal in the United States in the mid-1980s (cf. Klypchak 2011). Such

159

160

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

decrial, crucially, took textual analysis as its main method of attack against the genre, a strategy that foregrounds the importance of critical reappraisals of how texts are understood, evaluated and moralized within not only metal music studies, but also wider public discourses about heavy metal. In his foundational study of the genre, Robert Walser (1993: 20) notes that heavy metal had ‘rarely been taken seriously, either as music or as cultural activity of any complexity or importance’. At best, he argues, metal is ‘controversial’, subject to ‘hysterical denunciation’ (20) and influential condemnations. Content analysis was a particularly popular form for engaging with heavy metal in this period, as Walser critiques, wherein dominant approaches had ‘[reduced] the meaning of a song to the literal interpretation of its lyrics’ (21). Such approaches assume a linear transmission model, where meaning is encoded in a text by the artist, then transmitted to listeners to decipher the intended meaning. Content analyses which enact this method have had particularly problematic implications within studies of heavy metal, where the earliest studies were framed by the assumption that the music of heavy metal was largely irrelevant, that images and words can be reduced to single, literal meanings and that such meanings exist in isolation from the contexts of their reception; or are indeed an unprecedented aberration in musical morality. Content analyses of metal texts were a key fixture in the influential condemnations of the genre which emerged in the United States in the mid-1980s, amidst the commercial ascent of metal. Tipper Gore, who Walser (1993: 137) has referred to as ‘the single most influential critic of heavy metal in the 1980s’, used literal content analyses of metal lyrics and album covers to underscore her position that heavy metal music represented ‘new extremes’ in the glamorization of explicit sex, alcohol, drug use and violence (Gore 1987: 50). Gore builds her argument on the literal description of contemporary heavy metal texts: W.A.S.P released an album of the same name that was replete with songs about sex and death. It included lyrics such as ‘Sex and pain is the same / They’re really the same’ … The cover of the W.A.S.P twelve-inch single record [Animal] F**ck Like a Beast shows a close up of a man holding his bloody hands on his thighs, with a bloody circular saw protruding from his genital area. (51–2)

Words and images form a key site of investigation for Gore, who has little to say about the contexts that frame the textual languages of metal. Moreover, Gore has similarly little to say on the music of metal itself, instead relying on the work of Joseph Stuessy, then a professor of music at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Stuessy proposes, and Gore accepts from him, a ‘hypodermic model’ of music’s effects wherein metal music is ‘pounded’ into impressionable listeners (for Gore, these audiences largely consist of adolescent ‘boys’ aged between twelve and nineteen). This hypodermic model of the transmission of metal texts was again taken up by Carl Raschke (1990: 274); he claims that ‘the strains of violence, fury, hate, insurrection, and

‘Images and Words’

primitive sex [in] heavy metal music cements a neural bond [with listeners]’, which facilitates violence and brutality. Raschke utilizes similarly reductive content analysis of metal lyrics and album covers to foreground his condemnation of the genre: Consider, for example, the number ‘Eat Me Alive’ by Judas Priest. The song hymns the florid sorts of ecstasies that should ensue from forcing a participant to have oral sex at gunpoint. Venom’s album cover of Welcome to Hell announces that the group is ‘possessed by all that is evil’ and that death of ‘your God’ is demanded. Great White and Motley Crue [sic] offer more than casual acceptance of rape in their lyrics, and the album covers themselves are lurid. Exciter shows a woman trying to stave off an icepick murderer, while Gravedigger displays a cross driven into a skull. (275)

Both Raschke and Gore enact a textual analysis insofar as they rely on very literal interpretations of metal lyrics, which assume an immediate correlation between the fantastical sexual and interpersonal violence enacted in the lyrics, and the lived realities of metal fans and musicians. This ‘transmission model’ of analysis positions metal musicians as socially deviant agents, and fans as passive consumers – both positions that are enabled by the commercialized flows of music and culture. Walser (1993: 144) is justifiably critical of the analyses enacted in this period, arguing that they ‘make fans into dupes without agency or subjectivity, without social experiences and perceptions that might inform their interactions with mass-mediated texts’. Content analyses of texts, such as those offered by Gore and Raschke, assume an immediate causal relationship between metal lyrics and imagery and social and interpersonal violence. Gore’s concerns over the explicit sexual violence articulated in metal lyrics are legitimate, as Walser (1993: 144) notes. Certainly, metal’s lyrical violence – particularly its gendered dimensions – has formed a core context for analysis throughout the history of the field and continues to produce rich and diverse scholarship (cf. Shadrack 2018). However, Gore’s analysis portrays such lyrical depictions as an aberration, rather than engaging with the material realities of violence and misogyny, and the underlying systemic influences that produce and reproduce violence against women in myriad forms: a contextual consideration that is conspicuous in its absence from Gore’s work. These early engagements with heavy metal thus reduce the value of the text to the literal meaning of its lyrics and album art, rather than situating metal’s texts within the social and cultural frameworks which made their meanings possible. Such accounts then underscore the troubled terrain of textual analysis within studies of heavy metal, particularly when elements of this method were used in the concerted attempts of Gore and her contemporaries to censor, or at least control, the sale of metal in the 1980s and early 1990s. Nonetheless, textual analysis should not be discounted in methodological approaches to researching metal, but rather regarded as a valuable method for engaging with the social experiences, commercial processes and power struggles that make metal texts available for scholarly interpretation, as

161

162

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

well as the social structures and tensions that shape the meanings of metal texts. To this end, Walser (1993: xiv) calls for a methodological approach to heavy metal that is both textually specific and culturally grounded. There is a ‘language’ of heavy metal, Walser argues, which produces a coherent body of signs and conventions that allow for its distinction as a genre (xiv). Metal, for Walser, is thus constituted as a ‘discursive practice’ – it is a ‘coherent, though always changing, universe of significant sonic options’ (xiv) (and, I would argue, in addition to Walser, linguistic and visual options). Walser’s work thus shows how metal’s uptake of textual analysis might be situated in a decidedly structuralist paradigm which allows for the analysis of its traits and units in ways which acknowledge their contextual significance: heavy metal is ‘a social signifying system rather than an autonomous set of stylistic traits, employing an approach to musical analysis that construes musical details as significant gestural and syntactical units, organized by narrative and other formal conventions, and constituting a system for the social production of meaning – a discourse’ (xiv).

Engaging with the extramusical texts of metal Textual analysis is hence a key means through which to position the music of metal – including its lyrics, performances and album art – as a cultural practice that is historically constituted and socially contested. Such musical texts are disseminated within a dialectical environment in which meanings are fluid, multiple and negotiated (Walser 1993: 21). Nonetheless, such approaches largely situate metal’s fields of meaning entirely within the music and its immediate dimensions. Moreover, such approaches also have curiously little to offer in terms of the analysis of language itself. In further reflecting on Walser’s notion of the ‘language’ of metal, I also advocate for an interrogation of the material realties of language in terms of dialect, where language is a signifier of a communal identity and bounded geographies. Lyrical analysis, as it has been enacted within metal music studies, has rarely broached the dominance of English within both modes of analysis and the texts themselves. When Walser’s foundational text was first published in 1993, the various subgenres of metal that have contributed to its cultural and linguistic diversity were largely not examined or even acknowledged in academic work. A more comprehensive understanding of metal’s local-global complexity has then developed only with the more recent emergence of metal studies. Language as a vernacular has begun to form a site of analysis for metal researchers: Michaël Spanu (2015), for example, observes the reservations of Francophone metal performers towards writing and singing in French for its connotations as a ‘feminine’ language, and thus as supposedly antithetical to the masculinist ethos of metal. Language use in metal is an oft-overlooked insight

‘Images and Words’

into the ways in which the gendered dimensions of the genre are symbolically and linguistically experienced. Analysis of language also yields important insights into how heavy metal texts serve as sites for political expression – for South Africa’s postApartheid metal scenes, for example, the decision of bands to write and sing lyrics in Afrikaans is an invocation of a contested dialect, which holds multiple ideological implications for its performers and audiences (Hoad 2014, 2019). As metal music studies has grown from these early pieces of scholarship into a consolidated field, so too has the reach and applications of textual analysis within metal. In my own research, I have seen cause to draw into metal a commitment to the study of what Middleton (2000: 24) terms ‘extramusical fields of association’ – the ‘play of codes within and between the style categories making up the musical field as a whole’. To this end, researchers have examined lyrics and album art within the context of their sociocultural situatedness and significance (cf. von Helden 2017; Vestergaard 2019). However, the need to engage with metal texts beyond music – Middleton’s ‘extramusical fields of association’ – has become vital in considering the wider practices and artefacts through which heavy metal meaning and identity are produced. Letters, comics, mosh pits, t-shirts, battle jackets, zines and fan fiction have all thus been drawn into metal’s application of textual analysis, where such pieces are all recognized as texts that are situated in dialectical arrangements, which both produce meaning and are shaped by it. This research has also been vital in diversifying the applications of textual analysis in metal music studies towards more interdisciplinary methods. Rikke Platz Cortsen (2015: 164), for example, has shown how comic strips and graphic novels can be analysed in terms of how specific aspects of comics such as style, line colour, visual elements and layout ‘underline and recirculate conceptions of metal’. Berg et al. (2015: 174) have examined metal t-shirts as examples of transmedia storytelling, where shirts ‘represent a fusion of music, identity and ideology’ and allow for the articulation of a visual identity and the mastery of communicative acts. Such examples highlight the uses of textual analysis in expanding conceptions of ‘cultural products’ within metal, and thus acknowledging the great variety of musical expressions within heavy metal as well as the diversity of its performances, fandom and the many practices connected to scenes. The more recent turn towards textual analysis of fan-produced content and other extramusical texts has been an important shift in where the authoritative ‘text(s)’ of metal lie. Fans consume texts, as noted earlier, but they also generate their own that contribute to a wider repository of discourses, symbols and meanings. Crucially, fan texts have also offered spaces through which metal’s dominant norms have been both enforced and contested. Letters written by women to the metal magazine Kerrang! form a primary site of analysis for Rosemary Hill (2010: 82), who examines how such letters both directly confront aggressive hypermasculine behaviour in metal spaces, yet also reinforce dominant codes of metal in order to gain access to the

163

164

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

community (Hill 2016). Fan writings have hence been a key research repository for insights into metal’s dominant discourses and how fans both promulgate and reject their meanings. The mobilization of community-based fan discussions away from older forms of physical scenic infrastructure such as letter-writing, tape trading, zines and pen pals (cf. Kahn-Harris 2007) towards online spaces such as message boards and social media networks has also represented a paradigm shift for textual analysis within popular music studies at large. In the context of metal, Karl Spracklen (2010: 82) utilizes critical analysis of posts on http://www.bla​ckme​tal.co.uk, a publicly accessible forum. Here Spracklen spent two ten-week periods observing and recording comments made on this forum, following methodological approaches that apply textual analysis methods to publicly available discourses online to establish how understandings and identities are represented and constructed. Online manifestations of metal discourse have nonetheless represented a tricky paradigm for researchers engaging with these spaces. The seemingly anonymous nature of online communication has meant that online discussions have provided platforms for the proliferation of extreme racism, misogyny and homophobia within such spaces. To this end, Kahn-Harris (2007) acknowledges the very real material implications of such discourses, but also points to a ‘performative’ aberration enacted by individuals, and the echo chambers that are created accordingly. The relatively transient nature of online communication can also represent a challenge for researchers, where, as Spracklen (2010: 90) observes, posts and content are often removed or edited. Furthermore, as I have noted elsewhere (Hoad 2017), such analysis, while useful for examining how metal communities have used online networks as spaces through which to assert identities – see, for example, Pauwke Berkers and Julian Schaap’s (2015) research analysing YouTube as a platform for gender expression and metal musicianship – online textual analysis also restricts the field of inquiry to those agents with internet access and multimedia communications literacy. Metal’s online texts, with their fluid boundaries, temporal existence and readily shifting ownership, hence reproduce for metal music studies the same issues that researchers engaging with online content have faced at large (cf. Janssen and Kies 2005). It remains pertinent for metal music studies, and indeed popular music studies, to further consider the implications represented by the internet in the production and reception of texts, and the complications and opportunities that the digital age represents for reconfiguring the meanings and boundaries of texts as sites of analysis.

Conclusion This chapter has focused on the value of textual analysis as a methodological approach in popular music studies by exploring its uses for the study of heavy metal. In considering

‘Images and Words’

the uses of textual analysis for heavy metal, such methods have emerged as a key means by which to position the music of metal – including its lyrics, performances and album art – as a cultural practice that is historically constituted and socially contested. However, textual analysis methods have also occupied a difficult position in metal’s history, where content analyses were key features of early public dismissals of the genre. Michelle Phillipov (2013a: 152) is nonetheless critical of dismissals of content analysis, where she argues that treating lyrics as purely performative, and the insistent distancing of metal from claims of violence – lyrical or otherwise – ‘misses an important opportunity to explore more complex connections between music and violence in the metal scene’. Criticisms of textual analysis within metal persist in contemporary settings, where researchers are charged with reducing the music itself as secondary to the visual and linguistic vernacular of metal, or ‘over-contextualizing’ at the expense of the structural dynamics and features of the text itself. Certainly, the ‘music’ of ‘heavy metal music’ remains an under-researched area, a factor which Walser lamented over twenty-five years ago. Contemporary research has sought to redress this gap (cf. Lucas 2015, 2019), but an opportunity exists for metal music studies as a field to engage with texts, and the sonic-social experiences they represent, in ways that might attend to or extend Walser’s observation that the ‘language’ of metal also, necessarily, operates through musical signs and conventions as much as it does words and images. Despite the criticisms that have accompanied textual analysis methods in the context of metal, and popular music studies more widely, both other scholars (cf. Phillipov 2013b) and I advocate the method and its ability to yield important insights into the symbols and discourses that shape and constitute the various fields of popular music performance, materials and cultures. Texts are key to the ways in which musicians, producers, marketers and audiences create and respond to popular music. Expanding the ontology of the text beyond musical products themselves – scores, recordings, performances, lyrics – towards engagement with extramusical texts acknowledges the great variety of musical expressions within popular music, as well as the diversity of its performances, its fans, its artefacts and the many practices connected to scenes. To return to Fairclough’s (1995) treatment of the ‘text’, popular music texts constitute a major source of evidence for grounding claims about social structures, relations and processes. Texts are also sensitive barometers of social processes, movement and diversity. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, it is frequently through texts (including visual texts) that social control and social domination are exercised. Engaging with texts in the current political paradigm – wherein music scenes and industries have increasingly become sites of heated debates over misogyny and abuse in the context of the #metoo movement; where censorship has been placed at the discretion of private corporations, as evident in Spotify’s banning of white supremacist music; and where music’s intersections with online communication has seen a rise in reactionary, far-right music – is a crucial way through which to map the uses of musical texts as political and ideological resources.

165

166

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

I have argued that texts are both bearers and makers of meaning, whose boundaries are fluid and changeable, and whose varied messages are always socially and culturally situated. Textual analysis itself, which I have defined here as a methodological approach to research that examines the content, structure, functions and meanings generated by a text and its interrelated connections with an audience, might itself be similarly understood as somewhat fluid and unbounded. Textually oriented work on popular music has accrued a range of working methods and constitutive dialogue, as Middleton (2000: 3) observes, but lacks a dominant organizing paradigm. Its techniques are constantly renegotiated, and its principles are frequently reconstituted, particularly as commercial and technological shifts in flows of communication change the ways in which we produce, consume and respond to texts. What remains vital for textual analysis, and for researchers in this area, is to foreground the dialectical environments in which texts are situated, yet in which we are also housed as researchers. In this sense, textual analysis is always contextual and thus cultural: ‘We are never not in a situation’, Stanley Fish (1980: 284) notes, and we bring personal and shared contexts to bear in reading and interpretation. Bringing this realization to bear on studies of popular music means to acknowledge that textual analysis is contextual, yet it also acknowledges the existence of multiple frames of interpretation within culture and the need to avoid reducing texts to any one of these ways of viewing, and indeed listening.

Note 1 This may, in large part, be due to the relative position of metal’s development in this period, where in the UK, bands that would now be considered foundational to metal’s canon – Black Sabbath, UFO and Whitesnake, for ­example – were largely thought of as ‘heavy rock’. The emergence of the ‘New Wave of British Heavy Metal’ towards the late 1970s was significant in crystallizing a coherent popular iconography for metal. Andy R. Brown (2003, 2011) has commented at length on metal’s relationship with, or ‘invisibility’ within, subcultural theory, and the development of metal studies.

References Barthes, R. (1978). Image-Music-Text. London: Macmillan. Berg, A., T. Gulden, V. Hiort af Ornäs, N. Pavel and V. Sjøvoll (2015). ‘The Metal T-Shirt: Transmedia Storytelling in Products’. In T. Karjalainen and K. Kärki (eds), Modern Heavy Metal: Markets, Practices and Cultures (pp. 174–840). Helsinki: Aalto University.

‘Images and Words’

Berkers, P., and J. Schaap (2015). ‘YouTube as a Virtual Springboard: Circumventing Gender Dynamics in Offline and Online Metal Music Careers’. Metal Music Studies, 1(3): 303–18. Brackett, D. (1995). Interpreting Popular Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, A. R. (2003). ‘Heavy Metal and Subcultural Theory: A Paradigmatic Case of Neglect?’ In D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl (eds), The Post-Subcultures Reader (pp. 305–26). New York: Berg. Brown, A. R. (2011). ‘Heavy Genealogy: Mapping the Currents, Contraflows and Conflicts of the Emergent Field of Metal Studies, 1978–2010’. Journal for Cultural Research, 15(3): 213–42. Cortsen, R. P. (2015). ‘By the Cake of the Dark Lord! Metal Cultures in Three Nordic Comics’. In T. Karjalainen and K. Kärki (eds), Modern Heavy Metal: Markets, Practices and Cultures (pp. 163–73). Helsinki: Aalto University. Dream Theater (1992). More Than Words. New York: Dream Theater. Frith, S. (1996). Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gore, M. E. (1987). Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. Nashville, TN: Parthenon. Hall, S. (1973). ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’. Paper for the Council of Europe Colloquy on Training in the Critical Reading of Televisual Language, Leicester. Available online: http://epap​ers.bham.ac.uk/2962/1/ Hall,_1973,_Encoding_and_Decoding_​in_t​he_T​elev​isio​n_Di​scou​rse.pdf (accessed 22 November 2021). Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. Hill, R. L. (2010). ‘“I’m a Metalhead”: The Representation of Women Letter Writers in Kerrang! Magazine’. In K. Spracklen and R. Hill (eds), Heavy Fundamentalisms (pp. 79–88). Oxford: Interdisciplinary. Hill, R. L. (2016). Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music. Dordrecht: Springer. Hoad, C. (2014). ‘“Ons Is Saam”: Afrikaans Metal and Rebuilding Whiteness in the Rainbow Nation’. International Journal of Community Music, 7(2): 189–204. Hoad, C. (2015). ‘Beer, Blokes and Brutality: Whiteness and Banal Nationalism in Australian Extreme Metal Scenes’. In T.-M. Karjalainen and K. Kärki (eds), Modern Heavy Metal: Markets, Practices and Cultures (pp. 300–8). Helsinki: Aalto University. Hoad, C. (2017). ‘Slashing through the Boundaries: Heavy Metal Fandom, Fanfiction, and Girl Cultures’. Metal Music Studies, 3(1): 5–22. Hoad, C. (2019). ‘Heavy Metal in South Africa’. In D. Horn and J. Shepherd (eds), Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume 12: Genres – SubSaharan Africa (pp. 194–7). London: Bloomsbury. Hoggart, R. ([1957] 2017). The Uses of Literacy. London: Routledge. Horkheimer, M., and T. W. Adorno ([1944] 2006). ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In M. Durham and D. Kellner (eds), Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (pp. 41–72). Oxford: Blackwell.

167

168

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Longman. Fish, S. (1980). Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freire, P. ([1968] 2018). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury. Janssen, D., and R. Kies (2005). ‘Online Forums and Deliberative Democracy’. Acta Política, 40(3): 317–35. Jenkins, H. ([1992] 2012). Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. Kahn-Harris, K. (2007). Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. New York: Berg. Keil, C. (1966). Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klypchak, B. (2011). ‘How You Gonna See Me Now?’ Popular Music History, 6(1– 2): 38–51. Kovala, U. (2002). ‘Cultural Studies and Cultural Text Analysis’. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 4(4): 1–7. Lasswell, H. D. (1948). ‘The Structure and Function of Communication in Society. Communication of Ideas, 37: 215–28. Louw, E. (2001). The Media and Cultural Production. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Lucas, O. (2015). ‘Kentucky: Sound, Environment, History – Black Metal and Appalachian Coal Culture’. In T. Karjalainen and K. Kärki (eds), Modern Heavy Metal: Markets, Practices and Cultures (pp. 555–63). Helsinki: Aalto University. Lucas, O. (2019). ‘“Shrieking Soldiers … Wiping Clean the Earth”: Hearing Apocalyptic Environmentalism in the Music of Botanist’. Popular Music, 38(3): 481–97. Middleton, R. (1990). Studying Popular Music. London: McGraw Hill. Middleton, R., ed. (2000). Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Overell, R. T. (2012). ‘Brutal Belonging: Affective Intensities in, and between, Australia’s and Japan’s Grindcore Scenes’. PhD thesis, University of Melbourne. Phillipov, M. (2013a). ‘Extreme Music for Extreme People? Norwegian Black Metal and Transcendent Violence’. In T. Hjelm, K. Kahn-Harris and M. LeVine (eds), Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures (pp. 152–65). Sheffield: Equinox. Phillipov, M. (2013b). ‘In Defense of Textual Analysis: Resisting Methodological Hegemony in Media and Cultural Studies’. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 30(3): 209–23. Radway, J. A. (1984). Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Durham: University of North Carolina Press. Raschke, C. A. (1990). Painted Black. New York: HarperCollins. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shadrack, J. (2018). ‘From Enslavement to Obliteration: Extreme Metal’s Problem with Women’. Paper presented at Keep It Simple, Make It Fast: Gender Differences, Identities, and DIY Cultures. University of Porto, Portugal, 3–7 July. Spanu, M. (2015). ‘Global Noise, Local Language: A Socio-anthropological Approach of Language Authenticity in French Metal’. In T. Karjalainen and K. Kärki (eds),

‘Images and Words’

Modern Heavy Metal: Markets, Practices and Cultures (pp. 122–30). Helsinki: Aalto University. Spracklen, K. (2010). ‘True Aryan Black Metal: The Meaning of Leisure, Belonging and the Construction of Whiteness in Black Metal Music’. In N. R. W. Scott (ed.), Metal Void: First Gatherings (pp. 81–92). Oxford: Interdisciplinary. Straw, W. (1984). ‘Characterizing Rock Music Cultures: The Case of Heavy Metal’. Canadian University Music Review/Revue de musique des universités canadiennes, 5: 104–22. Tagg, P. (2006). ‘Music, Moving Image, Semiotics and the Democratic Right to Know’. In S. Brown and U. Volgsten (eds), Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music (pp. 163–86). New York: Berghahn. Vestergaard, V. (2019). ‘Medieval Media Transformations and Metal Album Covers’. In R. Barratt-Peacock and R. Hagen (eds), Medievalism and Metal Music Studies: Throwing Down the Gauntlet (pp. 21–34). Binghamton, NY: Emerald. von Helden, I. (2017). Norwegian Native Art: Cultural Identity in Norwegian Metal Music. Zurich: LIT Verlag Münster. Walser, R. (1993). Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Wolff, J. (1988). ‘Production and Reception: Problems of an Integrated Approach’. In K. Eskola and E. Vainikkala (eds), The Production and Reception of Literature (pp. 9–16). Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä.

169

170

9 Should we call it cine-cultural studies? Cineworlding popular music and youth studies Michael B. MacDonald

Cinematic research-creation – what I call ‘cineworlding’ (MacDonald 2023) – has the potential to contribute a unique research practice to popular music and youth studies, areas of cultural life characterized by their openness to, and innovation with, new media. Realizing these opportunities means taking advantage of technology that is currently available. But there is an obstacle. Cinema production must be brought together with research. Traditionally, cinematic research methods, because of expense, difficulty in peer review and lack of institutional support, have not been widely embraced by the academy. Anthropology has done the most to develop cinematic research methods in the form of ethnographic film (Barbash and Taylor 1997; Crawford and Turton 1992; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009; Heider 2009). New developments in the digital cinema ecosystem have so far been largely unexplored. The digital cinema ecosystem, emerging since 2009, comprises relatively inexpensive digital cameras and audiovisually enabled smartphones, free professional-level digital editing platforms, a worldwide network of film festivals and the transformation of most arthouse cinemas to digital projection. This means that digital cinema produced on a laptop can be screened anywhere.1 There has never been a better time to make scholarly informed cinema, so why is cinema so rarely produced by scholars?2 Cineworlding is not new;3 it is as old as sound cinema. We may recognize that our ‘new’ innovations entangling social-science with art – called research-creation in Canada – have in fact been around for quite a long time. In music studies, questions about what ethnomusicological film is are just the type with which researchers have long grappled (Feld 1976). MacDougall (1998: 292) identifies ‘a shift from word-andsentence-based anthropological thought to image-and-sequence-based anthropological thought’ as being an important observation for the difference in method.

172

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Over the past fifteen years of making films, my approach has been to ‘develop alternative objectives and methodologies’ (MacDougall 1998: 293) that pay attention to challenges posed to disciplinary borders (Russell 1999, 2018). I once believed that an ethnomusicological film was a film made by an ethnomusicologist; however, I have abandoned this naive position, recognizing that a ‘critical cinema of music’ (Harbert 2018: 246) requires a specific engagement with the articulation of methodology, the elaboration of an appropriate method that realizes an appropriate form of cinema that can either stand as a document or, to use a Deleuzian term, a machine of expression. This chapter will explore the triangulation of methodology, method and cinematic work, and will sketch out a cinematic research-creation process so that students and researchers working in popular music and youth studies will be better equipped to decide when cinematic research methods are appropriate to their projects. I agree with Pink’s (2013: 10) suggestion that there is no essential hierarchy between mediums (print, film, photography) but only questions of appropriateness of methods.

Why cinematic research-creation for popular music and youth studies? Over the ten or so years that the digital cinema ecosystem has been emerging, there has not yet been a method book on digital cinema production methods. In 2018 Benjamin Harbert published American Music Documentary: Five Case Studies of CineEthnomusicology. His focus was on documentary film-makers primarily working in film with no section examining the possibilities of digital cinema production for ethnomusicology. In 2019, a pre-conference symposium was held at the Society for Ethnomusicology where no papers or presentations examined the specificities of digital production methods and only one activity focused on the materials of digital production. So while social science cinema is slowly emerging, it is perhaps necessary to reflect on Nietzsche’s warning that ‘some values are born old and from the time of their birth exhibit their conformity, their conformism, their inability to upset any established order’ (Deleuze 2001: 81), that the potentials of digital cinema production for cultural studies may treat digital cinema as if it was film production, with all of its forms and limits, while also remaining inside the ethnographic documentary form because it has been legitimated, without simultaneously recognizing that new materialism, process philosophy, posthumanism and the multispecies feminism of Donna Haraway have challenged the very subject of humanist documentary and ethnography, challenging both the tempocentrism (privileging the past and ethnographic present) and anthropocentrism (human exceptionalism) as a consequence of privileging the ethnos.

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

Research-creation on the other hand recognizes that making art is already research, and the outcomes of research are creative objects. Cinematic researchcreation focuses on research entanglements with a film’s planning, making and sharing. Each film becomes an event for the exploration of cinematic thinking to ‘question anew the relation between technics and sense, and to reassess this difference for the age of the technological condition’ (Hörl 2017: 5). Popular music and the youth cultures have always been entwined with audiovisual technology. Cinematic research-creation embraces fiction film, music video and documentary film forms as research process. This opens technological creative processes, youth and popular music technocultures, to something more than participant observation. Making films and music videos with youth makes direct contributions to youth skill development, extending pedagogical spaces, as well as an opportunity to follow the flows of creative works equally through the creative industries and youth and popular music undercommons. As Erin Manning (2016: 221) has pointed out, the undercommons is ‘a field of relation fabulated at the interstices of the now and the not-yet, the ‘event’ and the ‘minor gesture’4 which can provide cinematic researchcreation a way of thinking music, the becoming-music in popular music and youth culture. The relation between the undercommons and capitalism is an ethical and political issue that cinematic research-creation can explore from the inside to make a contribution to a critical pedagogy of popular music (MacDonald 2020b). Viewing popular music and youth scenes represented on the big screen, small screen and now very small screen is not new, but scholars have been hesitant to develop their own creative cinematic methods. Documentary film-makers and screenwriters have, for generations, been inspired by the look and sound of youth culture and for good reason. Generation after generation, youth culture has inspired social and cultural innovation manifested in styles of dress, discourse, presentation and ideology. Scholars have for their part contributed to a rich literature documenting the intersection of intangible and material culture in cultural studies.5 Screen production in cultural studies, however, has not developed. Instead, popular music and youth undercommons documentation has been left to profit-oriented media production companies.

From cine-cultural studies to cineworlding When I began writing this chapter, I originally titled it ‘Cine-cultural Studies’, but as I progressed I realized that I was holding on to a notion of culture that did not encapsulate the richness of research-creation. I do not want to contribute to the emergence of a new idea being born old. What is the word for an ethnographic process that reaches beyond the Ethnos, beyond the Anthropos, that simultaneously

173

174

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

makes a contribution to cultural studies? Perhaps ‘posthuman cultural studies’, or what I have called ‘posthumanography’ in Cineworlding: Scenes of Cinematic Research-Creation (MacDonald 2023). So while the main emphasis of this chapter is to forward a cine-cultural studies approach informed by ethnography, creativity and critical theory, I do not wish to do so without also providing a starting point which is also of this moment. The emergence of cine-cultural studies is occurring at the same time as posthuman scholarship (Berardi 2011, 2015a, 2015b; Braidotti 2013; Brier 2008; Fiol 2010), so what does that mean for cine-cultural studies? It seems at the very least that we are challenged to think about popular music and youth research methods that move beyond discourse, beyond the subject, beyond functionalism and phenomenology. My intention with this chapter is to begin to lay a foundation for an approach to digital cinema production for social science-art entanglement that is framed not by older ideas of culture, nor even exclusively with the textual analysis of critical theory, but by a production orientation or ‘ontogenesis’ of ‘worlding’ (Haraway 2016; Heidegger 1962), what I have begun calling ‘cineworlding’. From Heidegger to Haraway, worlding has moved through a variety of stages. First, an ecological model was presented that was concerned about an organism in its environment (Bateson, G. 1972, 1979; Bateson and Bateson 1987; Bateson, M. C. 1972). This model was followed by a second-order cybernetic model, which recognizes that the subject constructs models of itself within a system: it was not just understanding but understanding-understanding (Maturana and Varela 1987; Von Foerster 2003). It was concerned with autopoiesis, the self-making of the being, self-organization in an ecology of other systems. These models were ecological and oriented to an analysis of the individual subject, fitting well with the inherited models of individual subjecthood. New approaches suggest that the idea of a being and subject have always been immersed and cut through by other systems, that thinking about the human individual makes little sense. We are never truly alone. Sympoiesis (Haraway 2016: 58), the recognition that nothing makes itself, allows us to rethink the discourse-ideology-hegemony model that has long informed cultural studies. Sympoiesis ‘is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with’ (58). Haraway suggests holobiont as a word that signifies symbiotic assemblages ‘at whatever scale of space or time’ (60). Taking this kind of ecological orientation to youth and popular music studies may propose many new kinds of interactions as we begin to let go of ‘possessive individuals and zero-sum games’ (60). Sympoiesis expands the command and control ideas of older cybernetic ideas with a system perspective where information and control are distributed, systems are collectively producing that ‘do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries’ (60), making them open to evolutionary change. Sympoiesis is challenging and exciting because it produces all sort of assemblages, entanglements and knots, and moves by transmission, infection, ingestion and gestation. Cineworlding suggests we are not documenting but rather becoming-with.

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

New concepts allow researchers to move forward while also rereading the past. My notion of cineworlding was born of my desire to understand the cinematic research-creation model that I have been developing (MacDonald 2020a, 2020b). Cineworlding, as I will argue, is constituted by three assemblages: the territorial, production and screen. ‘Assemblage’ is used here in the Deleuzian sense, as being an emergent collection of objects and practices that expresses a style, an agencement. In this sense, the assemblages are not meant to be a method but a type of entangled technocultural plane of material for cinematic research-creation’s expression. The three assemblages propose an ecological and cybernetic location of screen production that dissolves many traditional binaries, most significantly the techne episteme binary that Steigler’s technics seeks to repair. Cineworlding is cinematic world building, which gets entangled in the world-building practices of youth and popular culture. It is cybernetic in the sense that it is recursive but beyond cybernetics in the sense that cineworlding does not look for systems of control. Cineworlding practice is eager to be involved in the emergences of creative practice, the expression of creative life, the livingness that is worlding. Cineworlding is technocultural worlding of the world.

Technoculture entanglements in cinematic research-creation of music What does all this talk about sympoiesis have to do with popular music and youth studies? I am particularly interested in understanding the kinds of worldings that audio-vision (Chion 2017) makes possible, and at the same time how musicking is the study of worlding practices. Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of musicking introduced Gregory Bateson’s (1972) ecology and cybernetic anthropology into ethnomusicology. Much more than just recognizing that music is not a noun, but a verb, musickings expanded the territory of music research off the page and off the performer, reorienting the gaze of music scholars to even the people stacking chairs and sweeping floors. Musicking blurs distinctions between performers, scenes, venues and media. Instead of seeing these as discreet units of analysis, musicking emphasizes that music-is-process, constituted by flows, entanglements and emergences. Donna Haraway’s (2016: 11) exuberant entangled worldings, ‘finished once and for all with Kantian globalizing cosmopolitics and grumpy human-exceptionalist Heideggerian worlding’. Worlding is ‘a particular blending of the material and the semiotic that removes the boundaries between subject and environment, between persona and topos. Worlding affords the opportunity for the cessation of habitual temporalities and modes of being’ (Palmer and Hunter 2018). Cineworlding follows flows and becomes part of the flow dissolving its distance. The music video, fiction film or documentary film becomes part of the scene it sought to analyse. The flow of the

175

176

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

research-creation outcome extends analysis becoming part of the musicking it set out to understand. When Musicking is read alongside the book Music Grooves (Keil and Feld 2005), two important concepts mix together. In Music Grooves, the authors recognized music as vibratory life. It becomes a dynamic field with thresholds, ecotones and heterogeneous mixtures of participatory discrepancies. Musics are vibratory events that fold-in memories, material cultures crossing species barriers. They are grooves that infect, leading to the emergence of new social species and new refrains (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 299–309). In this sense, audio recording and films do not document alone: they are infected agents, grooving ‘unimaginable deviants’ (Hebdige 1979: 19) that are carriers of musicking grooves. The grooves do not remain forms or audiotopias (Kun 2005); they disturb, they continue or, more specifically, vector sympoiesis and unexpected psycho-social mixtures emerge. Cineworlding does not just document; it incites emergence, intentional infection, its tentacles entangle concrete, fabric, technology, bodies of all kinds in forms of becoming-with, entangling also social science and art forms desperately trying to remain separate, autonomous, above it all. Cineworlding grooves in ways that vector the groove. We are implicated perhaps more deeply than we ever imagined. We can try to remain apart from the groove to protect our scholarly purity, or we can give in and begin practicing a ‘relation to a world and a self, suffused with otherness’ that just might lead to flourishing as an ‘in-process, syncretic, speculative fabulation, an improvisational engagement with emergence’ (Shotwell 2016: 9). The motivation to move towards flourishing is an activist orientation that recognizes that other worlds are not only possible but existing, and it begins with, just as Marx long ago identified, an ontological analysis of those worlds, not for the sake of speculation alone, but in order to understand change. Musicking’s grooves is not an ontology but an ontogenesis of flow and flux, a practice of process emerging. Cineworlding is therefore both a research practice and an infected socio-technological groove: These [social] science art worldings are holobiomes, or holoents, in which scientists, artists, ordinary members of communities, and nonhuman beings become enfolded in each other’s projects, in each other’s lives, they come to need each other in diverse, passionate, corporeal, meaningful ways. (Haraway 2016: 71–2)

While music video studies is increasingly embraced as legitimate (Arnold et al. 2017), ontological questions about the entanglements of music and music video production are often skirted.6 If we think about the sympoiesis of musicking recordings – the cross-infections of audio-recording and image-recording technologies with the entanglements of painting, dance, photography and ethnography – we might imagine something that is neither music nor film itself, something that grooves from these starting points and more. Why should there only be a film that music supports, or music supporting a film? I wish to rethink the relationship between music and film

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

so that we begin to see the emergent cineworlding made possible by entanglements with recording technologies as an object of analysis that supports, sustains and makes diverse these very worldings. Once we begin to see this as a possibility, we can begin, with a more open mind, to think about the social science art worldings that are possible to us in the digital cinema age, and our ethical role in producing cinemusicking, because these cineworldings are infectious.

Cineworlding plateaus To do this, I will visit a few historical examples before concluding with my approach to cineworlding music. These examples will do two things: they will provide opportunities for us to fix our gaze on examples of cineworlding that extend beyond currently accepted examples of ethnographic documentation, but that nevertheless continue worlding. The examples will allow us to think through approaches to cineworlding and see their entanglements, and we will see the ways cineworlding, as a screen assemblage, allows us new ways of thinking about research-creation. Perhaps we can think of these not as historical moments but as plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) that continue worlding in the process of our engagement with them.

Easter Sunday 1967: God respects us when we work but loves us when we dance On Easter Sunday 1967, Les Blank and Skip Gerson arrived at Los Angeles’s first Love-In, each with a 16-mm camera. There had been one previous Love-In recently held in San Francisco, and the two were interested in this new festival event. They approached PBS to get financial support to film the local event. Their proposed deal was that PBS could air an edit of their footage five times but that Blank and Gerson would own the original material. They had a plan to edit an independent film from the footage that they recorded at the event. This was to be Blank’s second attempt at directing a music film; the first, a few years earlier, was a circular film exploring Dizzy Gillespie’s approach to jazz (MacDonald 2019). He had worked as a cinematographer for an earlier music film directed by Terry Nowak which documented the second Renaissance Fair in California in 1963/64 (Berger 2011); he would later recognize this as having a relationship with the Love-In in that many of the same people attended both events. Blank’s approach to the Love-In is peculiar for a documentary. No one is interviewed, no one is identified, there is no voiceover narration and, apart from knowing where and when this is taking place, there is no further explanation. What

177

178

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

is Blank doing with this film? Perhaps there is a hint, in a moment of film reflection, where he remarked that ‘it’s something about this kind of art where people’s whole being is thrust into it, where art and life intersect and everything becomes expressing yourself ’ (Blank 2014). It is a twenty-minute film in what seems to be four untitled movements that I might label: arriving, getting high, meditation and community. The film was shot entirely without sound and scored live by a psychedelic rock band called Spontaneous Combustion (Berger 2011). Blank was often described as a documentary film-maker, a title which he felt did not fit him. He did not think he made documentaries. He considered his music films ‘more like operettas’ (Blank 2013). The subjects of these films were not necessarily the music that was being made but the worlding that music generated. Blank is an important contributor to cineworlding, and his work continues to inspire my practice. I want to start with Blank because his music films provide us with just the sort of entanglement of music, film and art-based inquiry that I propose as cineworlding.

Arriving In a style that would become characteristic of his approach, which emerged from his self-professed shyness, the opening movement begins with a shot, from a distance, of a black-haired woman dressed in red dancing in front of a collection of drummers holding yellow flowers in her hand. The dancing is erotic, and she seems to notice the camera and holds its unblinking gaze for a short time. In a sudden edit we begin to awkwardly wander around the park taking notice of so many people holding flowers, dancing to music, ever present love signage, with circles of people playing acoustic instruments. People in face paint, people in blazers, a motley mixture of adults and children that seems to defy any kind of specific characteristics. The park is full of diverse people from the city mixing together. The music is celebratory, and the montages of flowers, love signs, people playing instruments on and off the stage generates, over time, a feeling of arriving. It is notable that almost all documentary films about the 1960s use footage from this film and other films like Woodstock (1970) or Agnes Varda’s Black Panthers (1968).

Getting high The shots feel random and without direction until the camera settles on the face of a young woman finishing a joint, the only overt reference to drugs in the entire film. The music picks up its tempo, and the images become kaleidoscopic, now the flowers, musicians, instruments whirl, the dancers are ecstatic, bodies writhing in many new and unusual forms. The kaleidoscopic images whirl and dance, bodies, flowers, drums all begin to dance in circles rotating around the screen. This effect makes all things ecstatic, all things capable of ingesting marijuana and able to be grooved

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

by the music. Is the camera on drugs? Is it possible for the camera to be high? The camera seems to disappear, no one looks any more. The music, like the bodies and visual images, become dense and ecstatic, with notes and rhythms and flesh rolling over each other. Until suddenly and without expectation or musical sense, there is a cut to two bodies holding each other’s arms with eyes closed.

Meditation The meditation is a spectacle, ringed by onlookers. The music slows and becomes quieter, lighter, airier. Directly across from us, dominating the middle of the shot is a young man in a brown canvas wool-lined jacket, straw hat, green shirt with large light blue dots, smiling directly at the camera and chewing gum. It is hard to read him as he watches us and the meditators interchangeably. The rest of the people in the circle are either watching the meditation with seriousness and intent or have their eyes closed. A sea of pious faces with this one guy smiling, sarcastically maybe? His incessant gum chewing and crooked smile is provocative, condescending, disruptive. Is it patriarchal dismissal or discomfort hidden under a heavy duvet of nonchalance? It is impossible to know. Is he mediating on the meditators, or the spectacle of mediation, or the irony of mediation as a spectator event, or his own selfconsciousness of being caught by the camera too close to piety? We are drawn into a reflection on mediation, meditation on mediation. Again, a dramatic and awkward cut pushes us out of the meditation that we have slipped into.

Community A line of people hold hands and begin running together, tumbling over each other, forming lines and connections, and the music once again powerfully underscores the festival. Blank shows us families on blankets, people lying together, new lines of people hold hands forming lines of bodies that charge at each other, making piles of smiling bodies, adults playing like children and children watching adults play. In the midst of the games, we return to where we begin with a woman holding yellow flowers dancing to the sound of drummers. The film ends with a quotation from the Divyavadana: ‘What we have done will not be lost to all eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour.’

30 April 1999: Werner Herzog reads his Minnesota Declaration Werner Herzog remarked on Blank’s contribution to film: ‘When our children and great grandchildren look back trying to understand what America was about they will

179

180

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

do it through Les Blank’s films.’ Herzog understands Blank’s cineworlding and, like himself, sees in Blank someone who is interested in more than documentation. Herzog has, in his Minnesota Declaration, famously criticized the truth of observational documentary (cinema vérité – cinema truth). Cinema vérité, Herzog growls, does not contain any vérité, real Truth: it contains only ‘the truth of accountants’. Herzog’s ongoing appreciation for Blank’s work suggests that Blank engages in the ecstatic and illuminating truth that Herzog commends. Herzog for his part has been insistent on the need for ‘adequate images’ (Prager 2011: 10) if we are to avoid becoming extinct as a civilization. It has been recognized that Herzog ‘offers explanations that go beyond the prosaic and the rational and into the realm of the poetic’ (198) and that if his films document anything, it is the ‘constant search for a standpoint beyond conventional means of experience the world – and aesthetic standpoint’ (198). Herzog’s aesthetic standpoint informs his cineworldings that recognize the impossibility of us getting outside of ourselves in order to see ourselves. We therefore have to imagine that we can create ways of looking at ourselves ‘through eyes other than our own: eyes of the alien, or the animal’ (199). Perhaps Herzog sees in Blank’s work the intention to create new ways of seeing. The camera seems to have a subjectivity that it cannot possibly have, or can it? The camera has anxiety, the camera gets high, the camera meditates on meditation, the camera plays in community. But it is not just the camera, it is the screen, it is the viewer, it is the editor, it is the medium. Documentary and experimental film-makers since the beginning of cinema have suggested that the camera is more than technology. Vertov’s famous proto-transhuman description of the cine-eye and microphone-ear in the first articulation of film truth (kinopravda), transliterated into cinema vérité, where Jean Rouch (2003) postulated that the camera is not a passive observer but a provocateur, a trickster and instigating camera. The presence of the camera alters the social event, drawing out collective performativity and cinematic improvisation. Blank’s film does not hypnotize the audience but instead ‘calls our attention to the act of looking itself ’ (Ames 2012: 55). It has been noted that Herzog uses documentary film forms as a means of ‘grounding his vision of the world in the bodies of other people, who are in turn called on to testify on his behalf ‘ (266), and these worlding practices are not about documenting facts but providing something that is ‘good to think with’ (267), because it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with … what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Haraway 2016: 12)

Instead of treating Haraway, Blank and Herzog as beings separated by time and discipline, it is necessary, as Haraway herself suggests, to tie them together. Cineworlding brings together research and creation with a hyphen and asks not what research or creation can do, but what research-creation can do to blur the

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

distinctions between them. What can research do? What can art do? What can cinema production do? Cineworlding emerges from the hyphen, the interstices between research and creation, the motion and movement of research implicit in creativity, and creativity dwelling deeply inside research. The practice of cineworlding is the act of asking what kind of worldings cinematic research-creation can make possible in popular music and youth studies.

8 December 1929: Black and Tan Black and Tan is a nineteen-minute film featuring jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington, his orchestra and performer Fredi Washington. The musical short film was written and directed by Dudley Murphy, who used the same crew and sets as he did on St Louis Blues – another musical short film starring jazz singer Bessie Smith, released only one month earlier, on 5 November 1929. Murphy had been experimenting with musical films since 1921, exploring ‘visual symphonies and sound-image synchronization … researching lenses and camera technology at the Physics Department of Dartmouth College’ (Donald 2009: 31). It was during that study time that Murphy had developed a lens cover that produced ‘kaleidoscopic fragmentation of the image’ (32), the same technique that infected Blank’s Getting High scene. Murphy had already been involved in symbolist, cubist and dada movements. His film Ballet mécanique (1924), co-directed with French artist Fernand Léger, was made in collaboration with Man Ray and Ezra Pound with music written for the film by modernist composer George Antheil. Murphy is described as a film-maker who sought out ‘the music of images’ (Decherney 2008: 578). His artist impulse was to ‘meld music, dance, and the visual arts into “experimental” short subjects’ (Liebman 2006). It has been argued that it was during his time in Europe, rather than at home in California, that he began to develop a jazz aesthetic (Donald 2009). It is interesting to note, as Donald has, that while jazz deeply infected the style of Parisian modernism in the early 1920s, it was not without criticism, where proponents of the ‘good’ modernism of the European painters critiqued the ‘bad’ modernism of jazz in part because of its ‘impudence which finds its technical equivalent in syncopation: impudence which rags’ (26). Donald suggests that the ‘story of jazz modernism is largely a history of migrations and detours, the movement of ideas and influences as well as of people, between the U.S. and Europe and back again, as well as across racial borderlines’ (25). The connection between Ballet mécanique and Black and Tan seems rather curious. They both deal with images and music and are part of Murphy’s exploration of experimental film. Did European modernism infect jazz modernism, did it occur the other way or was it a combination of the two?

181

182

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Jazz modernism According to Donald’s description, as the 1920s progressed the original fascination that European artists, writers and intellectuals had with jazz was quickly disappearing. Ideological tracts began appearing, which hastened a return to classical arts as the musical world of Europe was becoming alarmed at its ‘racial problem’. Quoting Antheil, ‘Every time a White composer was caught consorting with Negro music he was promptly run off and musically lynched’ (2009: 45). The jazz aesthetic Murphy had experienced in Europe perhaps prepared him for what would become his two best-known works. Both St Louis Blues and Black and Tan were selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in the 2000s as being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’. I am interested in highlighting a number of things about Murphy, specifically the jazz modernist worlding that occurs with Black and Tan, the machine aesthetic continuity with Ballet mécanique and the use of the kaleidoscopic lens that infected Blank somehow and allowed for the Getting High sequence in 1967. With an eye towards developing our methodologies, it is interesting that these experimental music films have become recognized by the Library of Congress; however, an in-depth analysis of their methods has yet to be recognized by scholarship.

Jazz fiction but not fictional jazz The film opens with Duke Ellington seated at the piano explaining the score to cornet player Arthur Whetsel. The action cuts outside where two characters, one carrying a long piece of rope over their shoulder, enter the building. We learn that the two have arrived to take the piano back because Duke has not made any payment for months. Here, outside Duke’s apartment, we can see the set that was also used in St Louis Blues. The piano movers are interrupted when Fredi Washington arrives with exciting news about a dancing gig at a club and offers Duke a gig playing there, where she would ostensibly be the star and Duke’s orchestra the opener and her back-up band. Duke replies that because of Fredi’s heart condition, taking this gig would be dangerous for her. She disagrees and talks about the importance of this opportunity for them both. She changes the subject, wondering who the piano’s movers are. She offers to pay them off, and after they refuse she suggests having a drink (it is Prohibition era in the United States). They agree to the drink, take the bottle of gin and agree to tell the piano store owner that no one was home. With the crisis passed, Fredi asks about the new piece Duke is working on, and the three artists return to the piano. It is interesting to note that these three characters are playing themselves and using their own names. Washington was dating Ellington at the time, and Whetsel was the lead cornet player in Ellington’s orchestra. The film was made during the Harlem Renaissance, and the seriousness of the discussions about composition and

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

score interpretation between Ellington and Whetsel underscores the seriousness of African American art of the period. Perhaps it could be suggested here that Murphy, who wrote and directed the film, had decided to take an alternative position from the Europeans with whom he had just finished working. His decision to come back to the United States and to write screenplays about modern jazz can be seen as political, perhaps even antagonistic to his former collaborators who distanced themselves from Black music and culture. Murphy is creating a new film genre. Contemporary anthropologists and film studies scholars argue that ethnofiction begins with the celebrated ethnographic film-maker Jean Rouch in the 1950s (Grimshaw 2008; Henley 2009). Ethnofiction brings together ethnographic cinema with fiction film processes. It seems, however, that Murphy’s choice to work with actual people, playing themselves, performing original work in a fictionalized reality that shares all of the contemporary issues with the sociocultural realties in which they are working, should perhaps be understood as ethnofiction. But its orientation is different enough, it seems, to not be included in any discussion of ethnofiction. Does its implicit economic role in contributing to Ellington’s career keep it out of anthropological film discourse? It cannot be that the film-maker himself is not a trained anthropologist, as other non-academic filmmakers are included in the canon of ethnography. Perhaps it is the American location, its entanglement with popular music? It is not my intention to critique ethnography here, but instead to illustrate the beginning of a distinction that has already been made by anthropology. I see in this film an early form of cinematic research-creation. It provides for me a starting point for cineworlding inside popular music and youth studies. Cineworlding is not an academic intervention into youth and popular music culture, but an already existing, though as yet little acknowledged form of cinematic engagement with popular music scenes. The film moves from the apartment to the Cotton Club where we watch Ellington’s orchestra. This section of the film shows Murphy’s directorial hand. Five dancers enter in a tight formation, bodies so close that they become one dancing body ‘disavowing any individuality, these five bodies combine to create a dancing machine: a human train that offers a visual correlative to the sounds of Ellington’s streamlined locomotion’ (Donald 2009: 45). A mirrored floor duplicates the dancers, feet and legs extend, the inversion of the scene produces a disorienting experience. The scene cuts to Fredi in her dressing room, where she seems unwell and holds her head. We leave the objective subjectivity of the camera and enter Fredi’s subjectivity, whiling kaleidoscopic images, so familiar from Blank’s film discussed earlier, but this time instead of being high, Fredi is dizzy and unwell. Fighting the sickness related to her heart condition, Fredi takes the stage, dancing in front of and with the camera. The camera provides an impossible view of Fredi dancing above us, dancing wildly until she collapses on the stage. The third movement opens with a gospel choir and orchestra. Fredi is lying in bed, dying, surrounded by imposing modernist shadows.

183

184

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

She looks to Duke and asks him to play ‘The Black and Tan Fantasy’. At the end of the piece, Fredi dies, and in a haze, Duke weeps. At the conclusion of his article on Dudley Murphy, Donald (2009: 47) reminds the reader that what constitutes cinema is defined neither by photography nor by narrative … cinema is movement: the organization of movement over time, and so rhythm, and so choreography … what jazz and cinema had in common was that both were improvisatory, and both have remade the world by inventing new ways of dancing.

Both the films I have discussed have played some role in the community: the rhythmic, grooving worlding of the 1960s counter-culture, and the modern jazz era. These are not isolated cases, and it proposes an interesting position for reflection on the role of cineworlding for cultural studies. Reflexivity has tended towards trying to take account of the positionality of the ethnographer, but it seems that cineworlding might offer something more complex, something that entangles the cultural studies researcher into the groove of the worlding being studied. While these two examples are excellent, I do not think they are unique. Let me use one more example to make the point more strongly.

Rock’n’roll ethnofiction The 1956 film Let’s Rock is a story about a ballad singer who, after a few gold records, finds himself at the mercy of a record executive who wants him to release a rock’n’roll record. At the same time, he meets the writer of one of his songs, and eventually, over the course of the film, the singer and the writer fall in love – but not before the writer and the singer’s agent finally convince him to record a rock’n’roll record. He does this successfully, transforming his career. The film features a series of stars from the period who play themselves, much like Ellington did in Black and Tan. The main actors are all members of the music industry. Further, this is the only ‘fiction’ film that this particular director ever made; the rest were music documentaries. The cinematographer was a documentarian. In fact, the only parts about this film that are fictional are the names of the characters and the love story. So I think it is necessary to ask whether or not this ‘fiction film’ is really fiction at all, or documentarians telling a story that can only be told using the framing structure of fiction film.

Performativity In 1976, Steven Feld characterized a particular kind of confusion about ethnomusicological film. What is it that makes what we do distinct? He argued

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

that this confusion comes from our (ethnomusicologists) ‘inability to disentangle the manner in which one (ethnomusicologists) deals with audio-visual media in a humanist or social scientific context’ and how this differs ‘from the popular roles these media play in our larger cultural milieu’ (1976: 293). There are a number of reasons why this confusion may have existed in the late 1970s, not least of which would have been the development of humanist yet non-academic films that deal with reality in some way, from the Italian neo-realists, the French New Wave, not to mention the cinema vérité, direct cinema and observational documentary, all well documented in documentary studies (Kahana 2016) and ethnographic film (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009; Saunders 2007; Young 1975). In Feld’s survey of ethnomusicological film, he stays rooted in academic film-making. But is academic film-making different and special? Is it even possible to productively find a line that separates research and creative uses of media? Cinematic research-creation disregards this division and does not disregard performativity from scholarship.

2 February 2020: Cineworlding’s three assemblages Territorial assemblage Emerging from this context, I am developing a three assemblages approach to cineworlding (MacDonald 2020a, 2020b, 2020c). I have always been restless in the style of my music films, moving freely between experimental, ethnographic, ethnofiction and music videos. What has remained constant in my work is a cinematic orientation to critical youth studies and popular music, while always keeping one foot in critical theory and ethnomusicologically oriented ethnographic theory. I have used these different styles to reflect on the world in which I was engaged. I do not believe that one cinematic style is better suited for cinemusicking than another; I think different approaches are more or less appropriate based on the circumstances of the research and the style of research used. I use two emerging models, research-creation (Stévance and Lacasse 2018) and screen-production research (Batty 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Batty, Sawtell and Taylor 2016), and through these I think it is possible to articulate what makes scholarly cineworlding. Research-creation is bringing together a social science method (like ethnography) and an art practice (film-making). The goal is to use the art practice as a kind of laboratory, which allows the artist-researcher to develop new kinds of knowledge. Screen-production research, however, is more focused on the kinds of research that comes out of the screen production process. I use this orientation to study screenplay writing as a form of phenomenological or existential ethnography (Jackson 2005, 2017, 2018).

185

186

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Whether the work is in ethnofiction, ethnographic documentary or music video, it begins with the territorial assemblage. It is the process of immersing yourself into the vibratory groove that we call musicking. The process of understanding the musicking world is also a process of transformation. We become a particular kind of reflective member, participating in and trying to understand the musicking world as a social science researcher. We have discussions, draw maps, take photos, share music, drink coffee or beer or water, and sing and dance and stay up late. We may find our interests changing, or ways of presenting ourselves, the way we talk and socialize. We take lots of notes and have conversations with our new friends about what we are learning. In this process, we explain that we are researchers and start building relationships, and through these relationships we change. The autoethnographic process is critical to the territorial assemblage as it begins to give us the situations and themes, the affects and percepts, the entanglements and infections that provide the starting point for the next assemblage, the production assemblage.

Production assemblage In the production assemblage, I begin to make plans to film scenes. Usually, they are quite simple, with people who agree to be included in the film. This is the early exploration that helps both the film-maker and members of the community feel each other out and get used to this new character, the camera. I agree with Rouch that the camera is an instigator, and usually community members start to make suggestions about situations to film. As a researcher, it is vital to keep really good notes about this process because not only will they help you theorize later in your written essays but this content may also inform the film that you are making. At this point the researchcreation practitioner finds its subjectivities multiplying. Behind the lens one is both a cinematic artist and a social science researcher. These subjectivations are not separate from techniques of creation and techniques of research. There is no dialectical synthesis of the researcher-artist. There is always the hyphen and from many subjectivations fly off like sparks. Deleuze and Guattari propose a useful method in What Is Philosophy? (1994). For the artist, it is a question of the plane of material and its becoming into the plane of composition. Many times, I have made a note on a social function during a research conversation that will inform the context for a film scene. I may ask the participant to recount the story to the camera when they feel like it. Some of the most dramatic moments in my films come when the storyteller turns to the camera, quite unexpectedly, to recount the story. These moments are deeply satisfying and make for excellent filmic moments that move audiences. For the researcher it is about describing functions on the plane of reference. The writing process deals with the creation of concepts on the plane of immanence. The hyphen between research-creation therefore signifies a dense knot of relations. In cinematic research-creation, how many subjectivations are behind the

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

lens? How many narrative approaches are available? What use is the cinema camera in the proliferation of social functions? And how do these social functions propose innovations to narration, even going so far as to blur the distinction between real and fiction, ethnofiction/docufiction, neorealism and so on. The production assemblage is also technical and requires the film-maker to be aware of how to make films. One of the criteria of research-creation is that you are both an artist and a researcher. You are not using a camera without knowing how to make a film. So it is necessary to spend some time learning to make films before taking the camera into the world. Film-making is a skill no different from the skill of being a writer. While these skills are mutually enhancing, they are not interchangeable and there is no way to become a film-maker on the spot. It is necessary therefore to spend lots of time making films on your own. It is also good experience to begin to understand how digital cinema is different from writing. Musical events on film can re-present a musical event in ways that can vector the groove. Hugo Zemp (1988: 394) listed what he thought to be the most important elements of filming music: There are several technical possibilities for filming a music piece synchronously and in its entirety: 1. stationary framing; 2. panning; 3. zooming; 4. long sequence- shooting with moving hand-held camera; 5. several cameras, or multiple shooting with one camera.2 I used all of these possibilities, but of course all are not equally satisfactory in every circumstance from the cinematographic and the ethnomusicological point of view (both points of view can and should be convergent).

The production assemblage blurs to some extent the borders between ethnography and film production, especially when working in digital forms that allow much more freedom than film. In his article ‘The Art of the “Fieldwork Movie” ’, John Baily reflects on the impact of early digital cinema methods to his fieldwork practice: When I made Amir I set out with the intention of making a film. The shoot certainly involved a kind of fieldwork; it was a process of research, but filmmaking was the primary objective. The ‘fieldwork movie’, in contrast, is an adjunct to anthropological or ethnomusicological fieldwork. The camera is used as a research tool (replacing to a large extent the audio recorder), and some of the footage is in due course edited into a film, which becomes a kind of research report. There are some similarities with the so-called ‘road movie’; it is the record of a journey, both physical and experiential. (2009: 59)

I believe this process has changed again with the migration of HDV tapes to purely digital production. For instance, I have spent no time in this chapter talking about audio-recording technology because most contemporary digital cinema cameras have excellent audio-recording inputs. Pair this with a high-quality shotgun condenser microphone and you are ready to go. Digital production allows us to share an edited film with the touch of a button. Uploading an edit, made on your laptop over

187

188

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

coffee, and sharing it on Facebook Messenger with the community members creates immediate circuits of feedback that earlier film-makers could not have imagined, and with an immediacy that textual ethnographers would also find challenging.

Screen assemblage My films allow me to show community members how I see them, and the films wake me and others up to a unique worlding practice that we are making together. Worlding is the coming into existence of an event within four ecologies: psychic, social, technological and environmental. The event is the space of living, of worlding the world. I believe that films have the ethical, political and educational capacity to shake up perceptions about both the operations of reality and the fragility and temporality of these very same operations. Films seem to work best, that is, to be affective, when they involve the becoming of subjectivities (both collective and individual), as they work at blending or dissolving the binaries that still haunt our scholarship. They provide viewers with an opportunity to watch the becomings of subjectivities within this complex ecology, while they themselves, as viewers, may become part through their affective responses. Film-making can produce cartographies, maps of connections, that through filmmaking techniques such as the sequence shot or montage can provide an opportunity to blur social function and phenomenological orientations: Sequence-shots restore to the audiences something of the continuity of perception of an individual observer. They are also probably the key feature of a camera style which seeks to sever itself from the imagery of fiction and tie itself to the specific historical act of filming … It attempts to narrow the distance between the person who makes a film and the person who views it. There is no longer a compulsion to occupy an advantageous camera position at any cost; a ‘bad’ shot which nevertheless contains useful information. (Zemp 1988: 397)

Sharing early edits of the film-in-process blends the production and screen assemblage. In the screen assemblage the edited film-in process begins to reach its tentacles out to the viewer wrapping them into a cineworlding process, continuing the processes of reflection, and groove infection. Cineworlding becomes a shared recursive process in the screen assemblage.

Conclusion In this chapter I have begun to sketch out the emergence of a cinematic researchcreation method that I call cineworlding. Cineworlding is made more possible with the development of the digital cinema ecosystem and the increased

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

capacity of contemporary mobile phone technology, its high-quality audiovideo-recording capability and nearly free access to audiovisual editing. The technological availability however does not in itself ensure its use as a research tool. Cineworlding is a call to recognize an as yet little recognized audiovisual research-creation history within popular music, and the opportunities that currently exist to harness our available technology to an innovative way of co-working with popular musicians and youth. I have focused more and more on making film because I felt that there are immense subtleties in research-creation that I could not tease out in writing alone. I expect that the practice-theory of cineworlding will require the participation of many cinematic research-creation practitioners to understand its full implications to scholarship. Alongside this theoretical work, I have continued to make films regularly. Over the past decade, I have been producing a growing rhizome of films. Each film proposes a future film, makes connections to other films which surprise and delight me. It is my hope that as this rhizome grows, people will enter and flow along its many connections, which will perhaps have their own lessons for us. I do not think that a film is a finished work, but rather something that continues to resonate and connect. I expect that there will come a time when it may be possible to focus closer study on rhizomatic connections that hold the compiled work together. Finally, my films are made to challenge audiences, to be critical stories. Education scholar Henry Giroux pointed out that when students enter school (or a film screening), they are already educated by mass media; there is a public pedagogy just as surely as there is a school pedagogy. I begin my work recognizing that viewers are already educated, most often by capital interests. If we ever made research films separate from ideological context, we certainly cannot now. It is my hope that our cineworlding will emerge from the entanglements that we develop inside worlding practices and become infected agents spreading the groove as far as possible.

Notes 1 While many of the traditional obstacles to scholarly film have been quickly overcome, peer review remains a challenge. The Journal of Visual Ethnography was an early example of a peer review digital cinema platform, but at the time of this writing (November 2021) it seems to be offline. 2 The emergence of ethnographic film (Grimshaw 2008; Hocking 1975; Loizos 1993) and of cine-ethnomusicology (Harbert 2018; Feld 1976; Zemp 1988) has been slow to have much of an impact on their respective disciplines. Cine-cultural studies will no doubt also be embraced by a small number of researchers with the vast majority relying on traditional forms of print scholarship. While scholars like Sarah

189

190

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

3

4

5

6

Pink (2013) have led the way in recent years, in terms of showing the way visual ethnography and sensual ethnography can enhance research work, there certainly is not a large amount of cinematic scholarship being produced. Sarah Pink connects ethnography and art practice in Writing Culture (1986), where Clifford recognizes that ethnography is a literary style and a social science method. But as I will show later, it is much older than this. Pink argues, quite correctly, that visual ethnography must deal with embodiment and the senses and that reflexivity and institutional languages of visual ethnography are being impacted by digital media. One may get the sense that non-representational theories that diverge from cultural studies and youth studies methods are ‘part of this move towards a more engaged, participatory, collaborative and public form of visual scholarship (5). I want to frustrate the idea that there is a teleos from positivist to non-representational music cinema because, as I will show, these newer nonrepresentational methods (Del Rio 2008; Vannini 2015), including the cineworlding that I am forwarding, are emerging perspectives that allow us to see-hear older works in a new way. Erin Manning develops these ideas in Manning (2009, 2013, 2016, 2020) and Manning and Massumi (2014). At the core of this discussion is the development of Whitehead’s concepts of event and prehension which Deleuze deals with in ‘The Fold’ (1993). It is the event’s multiplicity and the dynamics of action at the molecular level, as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986), that brings Whitehead and Deleuze and Guattari together in what Manning and Massumi have often called a ‘speculative pragmatics’. The link between speculative pragmatics and research-creation is very close, in fact, so close that it is possible from a particular orientation to use the terms interchangeably. In cinematic research-creation, the cinematic production process when oriented by this discussion is always speculative in the sense that the cinematic research-creation is always exploratory and in my case improvisational, and pragmatic in the sense that one is always making something at every step of the cinematic process. For some examples of what I am thinking here, please see: Bennett and KahnHarris (2004), Hodkinson and Deicke (2007), Muggleton and Weinzierl (2003) and Steinberg and Ibrahim (2016). For a discussion of music and cultural studies, see Clayton (2008); Cohen (2012); Dornfeld (1992); Fiol (2010); Harper, Doughty and Eisentraut (2009); Ikoniadou (2014); Titon (1988, 1992); and Zemp (1988). For a discussion of the film-maker and subject, see Canet and Pérez (2016); Cumming and Norwood (2012); Gorski (2000); McIntosh (2006); and Pitts (2013). For a discussion of the film-maker and camera, see Grimshaw (2008, 2011); Møhl (2011); and Yakir and Rouch (1978). For a discussion about the film-maker and audience, see Bogue (2003); Boulé and Tidd (2012); Deamer (2016); Del Rio (2008); Deleuze (1984, 1986, 2013a,b); Jenssen (2009); Kennedy (2000); MacDougall (2006); Marks (2000); Pisters (2012); Powell (2012); Rizzo (2012); and Vannini (2015).

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

References Ames, E. (2012). Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Arnold, G., D. Cookney, K. Fairclough and M. Goddard (2017). Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media. New York: Bloomsbury. Baily, J. (2009). ‘The Art of the “Fieldwork Movie”: 35 Years of Making Ethnomusicological Films’. Ethnomusicology Forum, 18(1): 55–64. Barbash, I., and L. Taylor (1997). Cross-Cultural Filmmaking: A Handbook for Making Documentary and Ethnographic Films and Videos. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam. Bateson, G., and M. C. Bateson (1987). Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. New York: Macmillan. Bateson, G., D. D. Jackson, J. Haley and J. Weakland (1978). ‘Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia’. In M. M Berger (ed.), Beyond the Double Bind: Communication and Family Systems, Theories, and Techniques with Schizophrenics (pp. 3–28). New York: Brunner/Mazel. Bateson, M. C. (1972). Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Batty, C. (2015). ‘A Screenwriter’s Journey into Theme, and How Creative Writing Research Might Help Us to Define Screen Production Research’. Studies in Australasian Cinema, 9(2): 110–21. Batty, C. (2016a). ‘Screenwriting Studies, Screenwriting Practice and the Screenwriting Manual’. New Writing, 13(1): 59–70. Batty, C. (2016b). ‘Writing with/on/for the Screen’. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 9(1): 3–6. Batty, C., L. Sawtell and S. Taylor (2016). ‘Thinking through the Screenplay: The Academy as a Site for Research-Based Script Development’. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 9(1): 149–62. Bennett, A., and K. Kahn-Harris, eds (2004). After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Berardi, F. ‘Bifo’ (2011). After the Future. Oakland, CA: AK. Berardi, F. ‘Bifo’ (2015a). AND: Phenomenology of the End. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e). Berardi, F. ‘Bifo’ (2015b). Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. New York: Verso. Berger, S. (2011). ‘Ultimate Insider: An Interview with Les Blank’, 24 June. Available online: https://www.moma.org/expl​ore/ins​ide_​out/2011/06/24/ultim​ate-insi​der-aninterv​iew-with-les-blank (accessed 7 January 2022). Blank, L. (2013). ‘Interview with Ben Harbert’. Unpublished.

191

192

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Blank, L. (2014). Criterion Collection: Les Blank, Always for Pleasure. New York: Criterion Collection. Bogue, R. (2003). Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge. Boulé, J.-P., and U. Tidd, eds (2012). Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema: A Beauvoirian Perspective. New York: Berghahn. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Brier, S. (2008). Cybersemiotics: Why Information Is Not Enough. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Canet, F., and H. J. Pérez (2016). ‘Character Engagement as Central to the Filmmaker– Subject Relationship: En Construcción (José Luis Guerin, 2001) as a Case Study’. Studies in Documentary Film, 10(3): 215–32. Chion, M. (2017). Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press. Clayton, M. (2008). ‘Toward an Ethnomusicology of Sound Experience’. In H. Stobart (ed.), The New (Ethno)musicologies (pp. 135–69). Plymouth: Scarecrow. Clifford, J., and G. E. Marcus (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cohen, T. F. (2012). Playing to the Camera: Musicians and Musical Performance in Documentary Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. Crawford, P. I., and D. Turton (1992). Film as Ethnography. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cumming, G., and C. Norwood (2012). ‘The Community Voice Method: Using Participatory Research and Filmmaking to Foster Dialogue about Changing Landscapes’. Landscape and Urban Planning, 105: 434–44. Deamer, D. (2016). Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Decherney, P. (2008). ‘Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Will Card (Review)’. Modernism/ Modernity, 15(3): 578–80. Del Rio, E. (2008). Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2001). ‘Nietzsche’. In Anne Boyman (trans.), Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (pp. 53–102). New York: Zone. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1994). What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Delson, S. (2006). ‘Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card (Review)’. Modernism/ Modernity, 15(3): 578–80. Donald, J. (2009). ‘Jazz Modernism and Film Art: Dudley Murphy and Ballet mécanique’. Modernism/Modernity, 16(1): 24–49.

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

Dornfeld, B. (1992). ‘Representation and Authority in Ethnographic Film/ Video: Reception’. Ethnomusicology, 36(1): 95–8. Feld, S. (1976). ‘Ethnomusicology and Visual Communication’. Ethnomusicology, 20(2): 293–325. Fiol, S. (2010). ‘Dual Framing: Locating Authenticities in the Music Videos of Himalayan Possession Rituals’. Ethnomusicology, 54(1): 28–53. Gorski, P. (2000). ‘Filming You Filming Me: Highlighting a Multicultural, Self-Reflective Approach in Ethnographic Educational Filmmaking’. Multicultural Perspectives, 2(2): 41–4. Grimshaw, A. (2008). The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Grimshaw, A. (2011). ‘The Bellwether Ewe: Recent Developments in Ethnographic Filmmaking and the Aesthetics of Anthropological Inquiry’. Cultural Anthropology, 26(2): 247–62. Grimshaw, A., and A. Ravetz (2009). Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harbert, B. J. (2018). American Music Documentary: Five Case Studies of CineEthnomusicology. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Harper, G., R. Doughty and J. Eisentraut, eds (2009). Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview. New York: Continuum. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture the Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. San Francisco: Harper. Heider, K. G. (2009). Ethnographic Film, rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. Henley, P. (2009). The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herzog, W. (1999). ‘Werner Herzog Reads his Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema’, 30 April. Available online: https://walker​art.org/magaz​ine/ minnes​ota-decl​arat​ion-truth-docu​ment​ary-cin​ema (accessed 7 January 2022). Hockings, P. (1975). Principles of Visual Anthropology. Paris: Mouton. Hodkinson, P., and W. Deicke (2007). Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes. New York: Routledge. Hörl, E. (2017). General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm. New York: Bloomsbury. Ikoniadou, E. (2014). The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media, and the Sonic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackson, M. (2005). Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York: Berghahn. Jackson, M. (2017). What Is Existential Anthropology? New York: Berghahn. Jackson, M. (2018). The Varieties of Temporal Experience: Travels in Philosophical, Historical, and Ethnographic Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Jenssen, T. (2009). Behind the Eye: Reflexive Methods in Culture Studies, Ethnographic Film, and Visual Media, trans. and ed. P. I. Crawford. Copenhagen: Intervention.

193

194

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Kahana J., ed. (2016). The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Keil, C., and S. Feld (2005). Music Grooves. Tucson, AZ: Wheatmark. Kennedy, B. M. (2000). Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kun, J. (2005). Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Liebman, R. (2006). Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card (Review). Library Journal. com, 1 October (online). Loizos, P. (1993). Innovation in Ethnographic Film: From Innocence to Self-Consciousness, 1955–1985. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacDonald, M. B. (2019). Dizzy Gillespie, a Film by Les Blank, a review. Ethnomusicology, 63(3) Fall: 511–13. MacDonald, M. B. (2020a). ‘Thanks for Being Local: CineMusicking as a Critical Pedagogy of Popular Music’. In S. Steinberg and B. Down (eds), Handbook for Critical Pedagogy (pp. 1242–54). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. MacDonald, M. B. (2020b). ‘CineMusicking: Ecological Ethnographic Film as Critical Pedagogy’. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (ed.), Research Handbook on Childhood Nature (pp. 1735–52). New York: Springer. MacDonald, M. B. (2020c). ‘Unspittable: Long-Form Ethnographic Music Video as Cine-Ethnomusicology Research-Creation’. Visual Ethnography Journal, 9(1): 114–37. MacDonald, M. B. (2023). CineWorlding: Scenes of Cinematic Research-Creation. New York: Bloomsbury. MacDougall, D. (1998). Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacDougall, D. (2006). The Corporeal Image: Film Ethnography, and the Senses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Manning, E. (2009). Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manning, E. (2013). Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2020). For a Pragmatics of the Useless. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E., and B. Massumi. (2014). Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Marks, L. U. (2000). The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiments, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Maturana, H., and F. Varela (1987). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston, MA: Shambhala. McIntosh, J. (2006). ‘How Dancing, Singing, and Playing Shape the Ethnographer: Research with Children in a Balinese Dance Studio’. Anthropology Matters, 8(2): 1–17.

Should We Call It Cine-Cultural Studies?

Møhl, P. (2011). ‘Mise en Scène, Knowledge and Participation: Considerations of a Filming Anthropologist’. Visual Anthropology, 24(3): 227–45. Muggleton, D., and R. Weinzierl, eds (2003). The Post-Subcultures Reader. New York: Berg. Palmer, H., and V. Hunter (2018). ‘Worlding’. In New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/w/ worlding.html (online resource). Pink, S. (2013). Doing Visual Ethnography. New York: Sage. Pisters, P. (2012). The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Pitts, V. (2013). ‘Writing from the Body: Kinesthetics and Entrainment in Collaborative Screenplay Development’. Journal of Media Practice, 14(1): 61–78. Powell, A. (2012). Deleuze, Altered States and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Prager, B. (2011). The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. New York: Wallflower. Rizzo, T. (2012). Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction. New York: Continuum. Rouch, J. (2003). Ciné-ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rouch, J., J. Marshall and J. W. Adams (1978). ‘Jean Rouch Talks about His Films to John Marshall and John W. Adams’. American Anthropologist, 80(4): 1005–20. Russell, C. (1999). Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Russell, C. (2018). Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Saunders, D. (2007). Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. London: Wallflower. Shotwell, A. (2016). Against Purity: Living Ethnically in Compromised Times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Steinberg, S. R., and A. Ibrahim, eds (2016). Critically Researching Youth. New York: Peter Lang. Stévance, S., and S. Lacasse (2018). Research-Creation in Music and the Arts: Towards a Collaborative Interdiscipline. New York: Routledge. Titon, J. T. (1988). Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin: University of Texas Press. Titon, J. T. (1992), ‘Representation and Authority in Ethnographic Film/ Video: Production’. Ethnomusicology, 36(1): 89–94. Vannini, P. (2015). ‘Non-representational Ethnography: New Ways of Animating Lifeworlds’. Cultural Geographies, 22(2): 317–27. Von Foerster, H. (2003). Understanding Understanding: Essays on the Cybernetics and Cognition. New York: Springer. Yakir, D., and J. Rouch (1978). ‘“Ciné-Transe”: The Vision of Jean Rouch: An Interview’. Film Quarterly, 31(3): 2–11.

195

196

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Young, C. (1975), ‘Observational Documentary’. In P. Hockings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology (pp. 65–82). Paris: Mouton. Zemp, H. (1988). ‘Filming Music and Looking at Music Films’. Ethnomusicology, 32(3): 393–427.

Part III History

198

10 Counterculture and youth culture: Definitions, drifts, events, music, echoes Sarah Hill counter-culture, n: A radical culture, esp. amongst the young, that rejects established social values and practices; a mode of life opposed to the conventional or dominant.1 From its roots in the 1960s to the present day, the term ‘counterculture’ has been invoked to describe hippies, radicals, dropouts, eco-warriors and many other groups besides. As an idea it encapsulates ways of living at odds with received norms – communes, intentional communities, self-sustaining enclaves – and a rejection of capitalist structures. It is therefore difficult to insist that ‘counterculture’ equates to ‘youth culture’, or that it is used as a generational marker or as any singular thing. As I aim to show in this chapter, the relationship between age and countercultural identity is a complicated one, and the iterations of ‘counterculture’ over the past half-century have not always been aligned in either aesthetic or intention. I will first provide a brief overview of the term in its initial 1960s contexts, before showing the ways in which ‘the counterculture’ affected wider networks of popular cultures, the sites at which countercultural belonging was expressed and the longer lifespan of countercultural ethos.

Definitions The first definition of the term ‘counterculture’ in its modern sense can be found in Theodore Roszak’s 1969 study: What is special about the generational transition we are in is the scale on which it is taking place and the depth of antagonism it reveals. Indeed, it would hardly seem an

200

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

exaggeration to call what we see arising among the young a ‘counter culture’. Meaning: a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all, but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion. (42)

Here Roszak offers a blanket description of what then might have been called, more simply, a new Bohemianism:2 independence from the mainstream culture, collective and communal living arrangements, alternative social structures, a barter economy, liberated sexuality, consumption of hallucinogenic drugs and an embracing of non-Western spiritual practices. But this ‘new’ Bohemianism was not unprecedented; in fact, there was a direct precursor to this ‘generational transition’ in the beat generation of the 1950s. The 1950s beatniks were well represented in the public imagination, as embodied by writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The ‘beat’ aesthetic – iconoclastic, amphetamine-driven, ‘hungry for kicks’3 – emerged on the East Coast in stark contrast to the conformity of life in the 1950s United States.4 As a migrating species, they moved westward from Greenwich Village to the San Francisco neighbourhood of North Beach,5 home of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights bookshop.6 What enabled the beat generation to thrive in San Francisco was the city’s long-standing spirit of individualism.7 The coffee houses, strip bars and jazz clubs of North Beach became the natural beatnik habitat, and the neighbourhood soon earned a reputation as the seamy underbelly of genteel San Francisco society. The beatniks’ reputation for subversion – whether sexual depravity, drug use or psychosis – had a dangerous appeal. But North Beach was also an environment that nurtured political comedy, street theatre and freedom of expression, prefiguring the political movements across the bay in Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement and campus protests dominated the news in 1964, and in Oakland, where the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in 1966. More importantly, the beat community in San Francisco was intimately involved with the nascent hippie culture, contradicting Roszak’s suggestion that the counterculture was entirely a ‘young’ movement; the hippie counterculture in 1960s San Francisco might have been a ‘generational transition’, but it was notable for its age-inclusivity, from high-school students to middle-aged poets. As with most cultural formations, there was no single starting point to the psychedelic counterculture in San Francisco, no formal passing-of-the-torch from beatniks to hippies, but rather several signal movements to note. If one of the defining features of the counterculture was its enthusiasm for psychoactive drugs, it should be noted that the quest for heightened consciousness was part of the zeitgeist; works such as Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954) and Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen (1958) and The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (1962) already rested comfortably on the bookshelves of most ‘bohemians’ in San Francisco and elsewhere. As Huxley and Watts would attest, the recreational use of hallucinogenic drugs such as peyote, mescaline and psilocybin was not at all uncommon. But between the 1938 development of LSD-25 and its 1966 illegality,

Counterculture and Youth Culture

the psychotherapeutic potential of acid was the focus of extensive academic and governmental research, and the drug was ultimately consumed by innumerable people, hip and straight, young and old, whether for scientific or spiritual reasons.8 There were two sites in particular where the scientific became the spiritual: Harvard University and the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, just south of San Francisco. Two members of the Harvard Psychology faculty, Dr Timothy Leary and Dr Richard Alpert, conducted a number of controlled but non-clinical experiments into the effects of LSD. This resulted in their expulsion from Harvard, and so in 1963 they established their research operations in a psychedelic community at Millbrook in upstate New York. It was here that they wrote The Psychedelic Experience, their guide through the ‘journey to new realms of consciousness’.9 Leary’s talent for self-promotion and his unashamed proselytizing of the LSD awakening elevated him to near-guru status, with the occasional charges of charlatanism this entailed.10 He was at once a scientific oddity – a man who exchanged his academic robes for kaftans and love beads – and the public face of psychedelic enlightenment, advocating for a sensible acceptance of LSD and enabling untold thousands to embark on the quest for enlightenment themselves. Over on the West Coast, meanwhile, the Menlo Park experiments led to a different freedom of expression. While a student at Stanford University’s creative writing program, author Ken Kesey volunteered to take part in experiments being run at the Veterans Hospital on the properties of psychoactive drugs.11 His job as a night aide at the Veterans Hospital gave him access to a certain amount of LSD,12 which he decided to share with his friends at informal gatherings held around the greater Bay Area. These ‘Acid Tests’, held between November 1965 and Halloween 1966, were free-form, multimedia parties, notable for their purposeful dosing of both the willing and the unsuspecting, and for the soundtrack provided by a local band called the Warlocks, who later became the Grateful Dead.13 Because LSD was still legal until 1966, when police were called – as they often were – to investigate these unusual gatherings, they found no obvious intoxicants or any cause for arrest. As LSD became more widely known, if still widely misunderstood, Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters became the focus of more direct police attention and endless resource for column inches in the daily papers. But for a brief period, the appearance of the Pranksters’ multicoloured school bus (‘Furthur’) at parades, protests and rallies was the only visible suggestion to mainstream San Francisco society that people were behaving in unusual ways. An ‘Acid Test’, a ‘Trips Festival’, the notion of ‘Furthur’ meant nothing to those who were not already attuned to Huxley, Watts and Leary.14 There are important distinctions to be made between these two lysergic communities, East Coast and West, Leary and Kesey. The controlled environment and mindful approach curated by Leary at Millbrook stood in stark contrast to the more anarchic model of the Acid Tests, with their exhortation to ‘freak freely’. The two figureheads did meet in 1964, during the Merry Pranksters’ cross-country bus

201

202

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

trip, with Neal Cassady at the wheel. Allen Ginsberg arranged for a visit with Leary at Millbrook, but the result was less a meeting of the minds than a psychedelic culture clash.15 So whereas the two psychedelic spokesmen utilized the same tools and shared a certain perceptual freedom, their approaches affected intentionally different responses, though they each had a direct and long-lasting impact on the production and consumption of popular music.16 As I will show, acid was at the root of the developments in popular culture that created the aural and visual markers of ‘psychedelia’, but it was not the sole driving force sustaining the counterculture. As with Roszak’s ‘generational transition’, just as it can be said that not everyone affiliated with the counterculture was young, or that all young people in the 1960s were members of the counterculture, it is also true that not everyone who took acid before 1966 did so in any sustained way, nor continued to do so through the end of the decade. To some, the acid experience offered a subjective vision of the universe that fed into the countercultural way of life in communities both rural and urban, singular and collective, long beyond the natural lifespan of the initial hippie flowering. ‘The counterculture’ as a singular formation is therefore a difficult idea to sustain: The term ‘counterculture’ falsely reifies what should never properly be construed as a social movement. It was an inherently unstable collection of attitudes, tendencies, postures, gestures, ‘lifestyles’, ideals, visions, hedonistic pleasures, moralisms, negations, and affirmations. These roles were played by people who defined themselves first by what they were not, and then, only after having cleared that essential ground of identity, began to conceive anew who they were. What they were was what they might become–more a process than a product, and thus more a direction or a motion than a movement.17

It is worth returning to the site of that initial hippie flowering to understand the ways that this ‘unstable collection’ coalesced and emerged in the public consciousness as a singular culture, for it was in San Francisco that the patterns of creative expression within the hippie community provided the ‘motion’ outward.

Events There were several events that took place in the second half of the 1960s which embodied this ‘inherently unstable collection of attitudes, … ideals, … hedonistic pleasures, … and affirmations’, which I will briefly summarize here.

1965–6 The Acid Tests were movable parties hosted by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters,18 the first iteration of what became a shared cultural experience in San Francisco. They

Counterculture and Youth Culture

were in one sense a truly democratic idea:19 there was no hierarchy of performer and audience, and events evolved according to each individual. The sonic and visual components of an Acid Test would reflect, not direct, the mood of the room. This total sensory environment was anathema to the staid, reverent environment at Millbrook; an Acid Test was psychedelic experience as performance. It was also the platform for a type of free-form improvisation that became the trademark of the Grateful Dead – the ‘jam band’ aesthetic, maintaining the vibe of a room, extending brief musical ideas beyond any sense of natural length, reflecting the suspension of time inherent in the psychedelic experience.

Trips Festival The Trips Festival was held from 21 to 23 January 1966 at the Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco, to provide all the sensory experiences of an acid trip through lights and sound. Organized in large part by the Merry Pranksters and members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center,20 it was one of the first large-scale productions managed by Bill Graham and had a formative influence on the way that Graham produced rock concerts well beyond the 1960s.21 Unlike the Acid Tests, there was a structure to the Trips Festival, though the key ingredient remained experimentation – lights accompanying music, the spectacle in the audience exceeding the on-stage performances – and the free dosing of participants, willing or unwilling. The Trips Festival was also a platform for collaboration between local rock musicians and composers at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, who were also experimenting with recreational mind expansion. From this point onward, sonic experimentation was matched by the experimental nature of the live music environment, with lysergic echoes both aural and visual. And this template was soon implemented in sites such as the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin (1967–70) and the UFO Club in London (December 1966–July 1967), engendering psychedelic local histories across the globe. For example, London’s psychedelic scene was closely aligned with that of San Francisco: events such as the ‘All Night Rave’ and the multimedia Fourteen-Hour Technicolor Dream were similar to the Trips Festival in style and intent.22 Music was only one ingredient of the lysergic environment, illuminated by lights, projections and films and populated by poets, musicians and an organic mass of dancers weaving their way through the sound. The psychedelic environment created the psychedelic experience, regardless of whether LSD was involved or not; and although the bands associated with these London events – Soft Machine, Pink Floyd – became synonymous with sonic explorations into outer space, as did the bands associated with those San Francisco events – the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane – their basic material was still blues, rhythm and blues, and simple verse–chorus structures, spun into longer and more

203

204

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

complex improvisatory flights. As I will suggest below, the psychedelic effect was not inherent in the music but in its performance and consumption.

Love Pageant Rally The Love Pageant Rally was held on 6 October 1966, the day LSD became illegal in the state of California. It was announced via a Prophecy of a Declaration of Independence, distributed on handbills and published in the first issue of the Oracle, the city’s psychedelic newspaper.23 Although ‘the counterculture’ did not have a manifesto, the Prophecy serves as a good summary of the tenets for membership: When in the flow of human events it becomes necessary for the people to cease to recognize the obsolete social patterns which have isolated man from his consciousness and to create with the youthful energies of the world revolutionary communities of harmonious relations to which the two-billion-year-old life process entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind should declare the causes which impel them to this creation. We hold these experiences to be self-evident, that all is equal, that the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights, that among these are: the freedom of body, the pursuit of joy, and the expansion of consciousness and that to secure these rights, we the citizens of the earth declare our love and compassion for all conflicting hate-carrying men and women of the world. We declare the identity of flesh and consciousness: all reason and law must respect and protect this holy identity.24

The Love Pageant Rally was intended to be ‘the first translation of this prophecy into political action’: a claim to freedom from mainstream society. More significantly, perhaps, was the statement that ‘similar demonstrations will be held at the same time in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Amsterdam’, which recognized the existence and common cause of hip communities beyond the San Francisco Bay and suggested that isolated countercultural pockets were emerging, united in intent and spirit.25

Human Be-In – a Gathering of the Tribes The Human Be-In – a Gathering of the Tribes (1967) was the great event signalling what became known as the Summer of Love. An enormous party in Golden Gate Park, it provided the clearest link between the beatniks and the hippies: Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure among the poets; Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert communing with the Hell’s Angels; and every local band appearing at some point in the day. The local ‘acid king’, Augustus Owsley Stanley III, manufactured and distributed three hundred thousand hits of ‘White Lightning’ acid especially for the occasion.26 Footage of the event shows ecstatic dancing on the stage and on the field, and an audience age spanning at least six decades. It was a peaceful gathering that left

Counterculture and Youth Culture

no visible trace of itself at the end of the day but that forged the community, activist and pacifist alike, in a new bond. The intersection of ‘the counterculture’ and music has continued to resonate since this point. The attempts to erase references in popular music to the psychedelic impulse are well noted;27 but while the successful integration of the psychedelic aesthetic into both ‘hip’ and mainstream popular music warrants further consideration, it also demands discussion of contemporary perceptions of authenticity and appropriation. The clearest example of this tension is ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’, the song written in 1966 by John Phillips and recorded by Scott McKenzie.28 Ostensibly intended to promote the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, the song portrayed the hippie community of San Francisco as full of ‘gentle people with flowers in their hair’, promising that summer would ‘be a love-in there’. While this played into certain popular stereotypes and public perceptions about life in the Haight Ashbury, it also presented problems for the actual hippie community, who would soon be faced with an influx of young people travelling to San Francisco either out of curiosity or, more problematically, in search of meaning. The ‘free’ spirit of the hippie community was unable to accommodate every new seeker, and the Summer of Love is often seen as the point at which the hippie dream became untenable.29 The media hype leading into and out of the Summer of Love was largely responsible for the negative perception of ‘the counterculture’,30 and the popularity of ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’ was another step in the appropriation of an otherwise radical culture for base commercial gain.31

Monterey Pop Festival The Monterey Pop Festival was held from 16 to 18 June 1967 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, some two hours south of San Francisco. It featured performances by musicians across the spectrum of the ‘popular’ (among them, Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas & the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding, Ravi Shankar) and bands that had not yet broken through to the national or international audience (the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Who, the Jimi Hendrix Experience), who were treated to Owsley’s ‘Monterey Purple’ acid backstage. It was organized by music industry figures John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, producer Lou Adler and publicist Derek Taylor (known for his work with the Beatles) as the first pop festival of its kind; but the San Francisco scene existed proudly (albeit temporarily) apart from the Los Angeles–based music industry, and the Haight community expressed a certain level of mistrust for the whole enterprise. The Scott McKenzie song further solidified the hippies’ mistrust of the festival as merely an attempt to capitalize on the success of the San Francisco scene, to co-opt its innovations and sell it to the masses.32 And although the festival passed peacefully, questions surrounding its finances continued to be asked well into the 1970s.33

205

206

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

While expressions of countercultural belonging could be found in the underground newspapers of most major cities and university towns, the psychedelic turn was fully represented in the brief but influential run of the San Francisco Oracle, and FM-friendly bands acted as psychedelic messengers from one town to the next. Los Angeles held Be-Ins and Love-Ins throughout 1967; there was a Be-In on Easter Sunday of that year in Vancouver and in New York’s Central Park; Seattle’s first Be-In was held in April 1967; the International Love-In Festival in London was held at the Alexandra Palace in July. Yet while there are certain characteristics that bound disparate communities across vast geographical distances at roughly contemporaneous moments, pockets of countercultural activity were nonetheless inflected with local style and local histories. Sometimes the psychedelic message was rejected;34 at other times it was transformative. And whereas the initial flowering of 1960s countercultural ideology was rooted in the ideals of peace and love, the outward appearance of countercultural belonging also easily masked interlopers bearing sinister or exploitative intentions. The larger countercultural motion towards free expression and unity was embodied by the live music experience, the sensory environment of the concert hall and the larger ‘free’ events of the end of the decade. The ‘free’ aesthetic was difficult to sustain into the 1970s, however, as Woodstock (1969), the Isle of Wight Festivals (1968–70) and Altamont (1969) proved. Whereas the regular free concerts in Golden Gate Park developed organically from the Haight environment, the supposition that music should be free in all places because it was free in the Haight runs contrary to the fact that concert promotion was a big business in San Francisco from the time that Bill Graham secured a lease on the Fillmore Auditorium in 1966. His insistence that patrons pay the price of admission to concerts was one point of contention amongst the Haight hippies, but without his entrepreneurial spirit the dancehall scene in San Francisco would have had a much shorter lifespan.35 Of course, the acceptance of the business footing of the Monterey Festival did not extend to all of the music festivals in the ‘countercultural’ 1960s.

Woodstock The Woodstock Festival in 1969 was billed as ‘three days of peace and music’ in Bethel, New York. Featuring many of the same bands as Monterey Pop a scant two years earlier, Woodstock was a failed commercial enterprise – the barricades erected around the site were soon broken down and the festival became ‘free’ by default – but crystallized a moment at which the countercultural ethos merged with political protest, and psychedelic ambassadors from the San Francisco Bay Area met again with their East Coast and British counterparts. The Woodstock concert film has ingrained in our collective conscious an idea of ‘the Woodstock nation’: a combination of sights (mud, nudity) and sounds (Santana, Jimi Hendrix) as the peak of the 1960s

Counterculture and Youth Culture

counterculture.36 Here we had community caretaking (‘what we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000’),37 political activism (Richie Havens singing ‘Handsome Johnny’), eclectic programming (Joan Baez, Sha Na Na) and hippie ideology (Joe Cocker’s rousing version of ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’). The seductive myth surrounding Woodstock has been perpetuated by concerts commemorating its notable anniversaries, though it has proved impossible to recapture the same sense of magic of the 1969 original.38

Isle of Wight Festival The headline act at the 1968 Isle of Wight Festival was Jefferson Airplane, who were on their first tour in the UK. Spanning a single night, from 6.00 pm to 10.00 am over the August Bank Holiday, tickets cost £1.25, and despite attracting roughly ten thousand attendees, there were no problems reported, apart from the weather. The second festival, held over two days of the August Bank Holiday weekend in 1969, cost slightly more (£2.10), and although it held the same combination of contemporary folk and rock groups, it also featured many of the same headliners as the Woodstock Festival – the Who, Joe Cocker, Ritchie Havens – as well as the one notable Woodstock no-show: Bob Dylan and the Band were living near the site of the festival at the time, but that proximity was not enough to lure them to the Woodstock stage that weekend, despite the common unspoken assumption that they would make an appearance. Though the audience at the Isle of Wight had grown tenfold since 1968, there were no major problems with ticketing, security or accommodation, and the festival made a profit. The 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, however, was another matter. Due to protests from the local residents about another weekend of loud music, public nudity and long-haired freaks invading the community, the organizers of the 1970 festival found a new site, with potential for bigger capacity, more facilities and better security.39 But the new site was overlooked by a large hill, where ticketless patrons – some peaceful, some not – could hear the concert for free. That ‘free’ area, soon known as Desolation Row, became a cauldron of discontent. The reliance on the ‘free’ hippie ethos was at odds with both the commercial intent of the festival and the musicians’ expectation of adequate payment. The tensions between the vocal and destructive fringe of the festival, the promoters and the bands onstage ultimately resulted in a breaching of the barricades and the managerial decision to admit the ticketless. The echoes of Woodstock, logistically and musically, were clear: the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival was also a commercial disaster, but one that hosted indelible performances; the official film of the event presented a particular narrative and privileged some performances above others; and the overriding message was that the counterculture was political, not peaceful. This is a distinction between two ‘poles’ that Stuart Hall theorized at the time, the expressive and the activist. He suggests they

207

208

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

are not rigidly separated but rather are ‘manifestations of a common mood, critique, style and form of revolutionary activity’, around which nonetheless one can group apparently different clusters of ideas, feelings, concepts. The expressive includes the stress on the personal, the psychic, the subjective, the cultural, the private, the aesthetic or bohemian elements in the spectrum of political emotions and attitudes. The activist ‘pole’, by contrast, stresses the political, the social, the collective, the engagement or commitment to organizing, the public end of the spectrum. The expressive ‘moment’ gives emphasis to the development of a revolutionary style: the activist ‘moment; puts the emphasis on the development of a revolutionary programme of issues.40

The shift away from the purely expressive moment was similarly felt in the last month of the decade.

Altamont Festival The Rolling Stones always intended for the Altamont Festival (6 December 1969) to be a free event and announced it as such long before any arrangements had been made as to location or line-up. It proceeded as a free event and featured many of the San Francisco bands that had been on the local scene from its beginning. The disaster of Altamont, culminating in the murder of Meredith Hunter, was due to a number of factors, not least of which being endless clashes between the Hell’s Angels security, the musicians and the audience. The combination of drugs on offer at Altamont and the lack of basic services, compounded by a psychological and physical distance from the Haight, all complicate the historical record;41 but regardless of culpability, and immediately following the event itself, Altamont was seen as sounding the death knell of the counterculture.

Music These larger 1960s pop festivals featured a wide variety of artists, representing the hippies’ ‘progressive’ musical palate: a general incorporation of the hippie aesthetic into mainstream popular music, both musical and lyrical, ‘authentic’ and commercial. Some of the acts at Monterey and Woodstock, for example, embodied the counterculture outwardly and inwardly (Country Joe and the Fish, Jimi Hendrix), while others expressed a countercultural ethos musically if not personally. The potential for 1960s popular music to reach beyond the confines of the threeminute single was due to advancements in technology as much as with any personal experience with psychoactive drugs. In The Space between the Notes, Sheila Whiteley offers a sustained exploration of the ways in which production, performance, gesture,

Counterculture and Youth Culture

texture and lyrical allusions all contribute to the disruption of equilibrium redolent of the acid experience. But there are more subtle ways in which the hippie ethos was propounded in music, and it must be reiterated that the type of ‘psychedelic rock’ Whiteley analysed is not necessarily the music that accompanied acid trips in the 1960s: Progressive rock was of particular importance to the counter-culture, who saw it not only as a major source of communication but also as symbolically representing their own search for alternative cognitive and social modes beneath and outside the dominant culture. It was thought to have a message, to say things of political and cultural significance; it was experimental and focused on an immediacy of experience (which is reflected both in the apparent spontaneity in improvisation and the emphasis on live performance and festivals), and was often drug-centred (if not always druginduced) and offered heightened awareness of the world.42

The free-form aesthetic of FM radio perfectly mirrored the aesthetic of local concert promotion: it cultivated a focus on what was then called ‘progressive rock’, by which was meant not the ‘prog’ of the 1970s but rather a progressive sensibility – longer songs not intended for commercial AM radio, programming reflecting the taste of the station’s listeners, rather than any base promotional impulse.43 It is the eclectic nature of these platforms that complicates the definition of ‘psychedelic music’. If the soundtrack to the Acid Tests, to the Trips Festival and to FM radio was not restricted by genre, and if the meaning of the music was determined by the audience in the act of its consumption and in specific contexts, then I would suggest that ‘psychedelic’ music could be absolutely anything at all.

Echoes As with any challenge to mainstream societal norms, the 1960s San Francisco counterculture was the target of media scorn and unwanted police attention. The increase in intentional communities in the nearby counties of Sonoma and Marin, further down the coast in Santa Cruz and Big Sur, and further up the coast in Mendocino, marked the end of the initial hippie flowering in California. But it also showed that the lessons sought in the experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs had been learned; that it was possible to seek spiritual enlightenment without relying on psychotropic drugs; that it was possible to live peacefully and simply in alternative communities, outside of the mainstream and in contravention of capitalist structures. By this point the hippie sensibility had been commodified and sold to mainstream society: fashion, design, marketing lingo, chart pop, all bore the imprint of the counterculture, as hip critics were eager to point out:44 What’s most in trouble [in 1969] is the so-long-supposed ‘revolutionary spirit’ of rock – that schizophrenic dream of wishful thinking and self-hype … Take a closer look at

209

210

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

the Establishment. See, it’s made of rubber – it co-opts by expanding, by stretching a little bit further and absorbing all the freaky excesses and aberrations. Acceptance, that’s the real disarmament. The media canonize hippiedom, and soon Broadway’s Hair offers the flesh rather than the spirit. One of these days grass will be legal, and then what?45

That the counterculture was incorporated into the mainstream is not surprising; Stuart Hall predicted as much at the turn of the 1970s: In their present form … [the hippies] are doomed to disappear. So long as the dialectical trajectory of the movement lasts, these two poles, the expressive and the activist, will continue to appear and disappear, absorbing and taking forward those things incompletely defined in one ‘moment’ into the next. The subtle mutation of the pure Hippie style into the ‘mixed’ Yippie style in the year of the Presidential election is a regressive-progressive movement of just this kind. There will be more reversals to follow. The ‘meaning’ of the Hippies for the movement is not defined by their capacity to survive intact as a separate formation, but precisely their capacity to flow back into and through the fluid forms which revolutionary activity continues to take in this pre-revolutionary ferment. But, despite their tendency to break up under the pressure of events, they ‘project’ for the whole movement some future forms even from within and through the negative distortions and experience of the present.46

So what are the ‘future forms’ of the counterculture? How has the counterculture been subsumed into modern life? Beyond the fractal displays of the 1960s concert environments, how have we adopted countercultural experiences and values into today’s culture? There are certain obvious holdovers from the counterculture that are so commonplace as to have lost all subversive capital (organic farming, macrobiotic diets, veganism, meditation, yoga, New Age spiritualities). It is safe to say that these countercultural holdovers are not the reserves of ‘youth culture’, nor are they necessarily privileged by people at all points on the income scale. Similarly, entry to the great ‘countercultural’ events of today – the Glastonbury Festival, Burning Man – are beyond the financial reach of ‘youth’. The ‘expressive’ and ‘activist’ poles of the counterculture, in Stuart Hall’s formulation, have appeared and disappeared at various points over the past fifty years, as can be seen in climate activism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Occupy movement. And as with any lesson from the past, the extent to which we understand the roots of these familiar holdovers will determine our ability to ensure their continued fluidity.

Notes 1 ‘Counter-culture, n.’. OED Online. December 2018. Available online: http:// www.oed.com/view/Entry/42745?red​irec​tedF​rom=cou​nter​cult​ure (accessed 14 February 2019).

Counterculture and Youth Culture

2 Indeed, the San Francisco Chronicle continued to refer to beatniks and hippies as ‘Bohemians’ intermittently until 1969. 3 In On the Road (1957), Jack Kerouac describes the character Dean Moriarty as ‘a youth tremendously excited with life’ who ‘wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him’ (­chapter 1). Moriarty was based on Neal Cassady, whose role in the psychedelic culture of San Francisco has been equally mythologized as one of ‘the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars’ (­chapter 1). In addressing his own relationship with the beatniks at the dawn of the US folk revival, Bob Dylan (2011) wrote that ‘within the first few months that I was in New York I’d lost my interest in the “hungry for kicks” hipster vision that Kerouac illustrates so well … [Now] that character Moriarty seemed out of place, purposeless – seemed like a character who inspired idiocy. He goes through life bumping and grinding with a bull on top of him’. 4 Bob Dylan and other figures in the US folk revival may have drawn heavily from the beatnik experience, but the beats themselves were more aligned with jazz culture, particularly bebop. 5 There were other beat communities, of course; this is just to suggest a larger cultural trajectory in its broadest terms. 6 Ferlinghetti also ran City Lights press, notorious in 1956 for publishing Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. The ensuing obscenity trial absolved Ferlinghetti of all charges, elevated the profile of beat generation writers in the public consciousness and gave Howl enough free publicity to expand its readership by tens of thousands, almost immediately. For full details, see Morgan and Peters (2006). 7 This is a central theme of my San Francisco and the Long 60s (Hill 2016). 8 For a history of lysergic acid diethylamide, see Hoffman (2005). 9 Richard Alpert travelled to India in 1967, where he met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba (Maharajji), and began his dharmic life as Ram Dass. His Remember: Be Here Now (1971) became a central text in countercultural spirituality. 10 By 1967 Ralph J. Gleason, the San Francisco Chronicle’s jazz critic, was levelling charges of ‘commercialism’ against Leary. See Gleason (1967: 43). 11 It was later confirmed that these experiments were run as part of Project MKUltra, the CIA’s mind-control programme. 12 Ken Kesey’s experiences working at the Veterans Hospital inspired his novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). 13 For an eyewitness account, however unreliable, see Wolfe (1968). 14 There were other literary reference points for the counterculture, of course, such as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha ([1922] 1951). 15 The Merry Pranksters amassed hundreds of hours of film of this road trip, which were finally edited down and released commercially as Magic Trip (dir. Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, 2011).

211

212

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

16 The impact of The Psychedelic Experience cannot be overstated. Certainly its lyrical adaptation for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by the Beatles (Lennon/McCartney), from their album Revolver (Parlophone, 1966), was the clearest sign that the counterculture was a mainstream pop concern. Timothy Leary also figured in other popular music of the 1960s, notably ‘Legend of a Mind’ (Ray Thomas) by the Moody Blues, from In Search of the Lost Chord (Deram, 1968). 17 Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, ‘Introduction: Historicizing the American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s’, in Braunstein and Doyle, eds, Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & 70s (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 5–14 (p. 10). 18 In November and December 1965 there were Acid Tests in Soquel, San Jose, Muir Beach, Palo Alto and Portland, Oregon; in the first three months of 1966, there were Acid Tests in San Francisco, Portland and at various spots in the Los Angeles area; the Acid Test Graduation was held on Halloween 1966. Kesey had been arrested by the FBI and released on bail, ostensibly to return to the Bay Area to help convince his acid acolytes to stop using the drug. 19 This is a point that Jerry Garcia made in Grateful Dead: Anthem to Beauty (Rhino Home Video, 1988). See also Lesh (2005). 20 Among this group were Stewart Brand, whose Whole Earth Catalog (initially published 1968–72) was a fundamental resource for self-sufficient individuals and communities, and Don Buchla, whose Modular Electronic Music System (the Series 100 or Buchla Box) was developed in 1963 in conjunction with composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, prefiguring the development of the Moog synthesizer, which was so central to the sound and affect of progressive rock from the end of the 1960s onward. For more on this history, see Bernstein (2008) and Pinch and Trocco (2002). 21 Bill Graham’s influence as concert promoter, and his impact on live music in the Bay Area, is indisputable. He took the Trips Festival as a template for the production of concerts at his indoor venues into the 1970s (Carousel Ballroom, Fillmore East, Fillmore West), and the ‘free concert’ aesthetic nurtured at the mass hippie gatherings in Golden Gate Park as a ‘vibe’ to replicate at his long-running concert series, the Days on the Green, the all-day, multi-act festivals which were held at the Oakland Coliseum in the summer months between 1973 and 1992. His contributions to the organization of the US Festival, Live Aid and the Amnesty International tours in the 1980s were natural extensions of this work, though his business practices were often felt to be unnecessarily aggressive. For a complete history, see Graham and Greenfield (1992). 22 For more on psychedelic London, see Boyd (2006). 23 Twelve issues of the Oracle were published between September 1966 and February 1968. As a newspaper, it was designed to elevate ideas to the level of the experiential: multicoloured, visionary artwork, lavishly illustrated if entirely unedited text, addressing initially the psychedelic readership in San Francisco but soon reaching audiences as far away as New Zealand, India, Prague and Vietnam.

Counterculture and Youth Culture

24 25 26

27

28 29 30

31

32

33

34

The entire run of the Oracle is available on CD-ROM and in facsimile (CreateSpace Independent, 2011). Reproduction available online: https://1960s​hist​ory.files.wordpr​ess.com/2013/04/aproph​ecy-of-a-decl​arat​ion-of-indep​ende​nce.pdf. See also Oracle, issue 1 (1966). There is no record that events actually took place that day in New York, Los Angeles, London and Amsterdam, however. Owsley had his own disagreements with the mass dosing of the Acid Tests, and undertook the synthesis of LSD, alongside his then-girlfriend, chemistry student Melissa Cargill, with a mindfulness that gave his acid a purity that all others lacked, and that attracted the sustained attention of local and federal law enforcement. But it was his relationship with the Grateful Dead, and his design for their Wall of Sound, that elevated the sonic dimensions of the rock concert to the otherworldly. For a full account of Owsley’s relationship with the Dead, see McNally (2002). Controversies surrounding lyrical allusions to drug taking – for example, the Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’, Bob Dylan’s ‘Rainy Day Women #12 and #35’ with its refrain, ‘everybody must get stoned’, the Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ and the supposition that the title was a playful spelling-out of LSD – can now seem rather quaint. For more on the censorship of popular music, see Cloonan (1996). ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’ (Ode Records, 1967) was in the Billboard charts for twelve weeks, peaking at number 4 in July 1967. I cover this in great detail in San Francisco and the Long 60s (Hill 2016). See also Perry (1985). On 17 February 1967, Life magazine featured on its cover a picture of a long-haired and bearded New York hippie named Ed Sanders, with the tagline ‘Happenings: The Worldwide Underground of the Arts Creates the Other Culture’; the cover of Time magazine on 7 July 1967 advertised their feature on ‘The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture’; the 30 October 1967 Newsweek cover story was ‘Trouble in Hippieland’. Longer-form articles exploring the hippie lifestyle include Joan Didion’s cover story for the Saturday Evening Post, ‘The Hippie Generation: Slouching toward Bethlehem’, 23 September 1967, later collected in Slouching toward Bethlehem (Didion 1968). Scott McKenzie was not the only one singing about San Francisco in the summer of 1967, of course. Other odes to the hippie mecca include the Flowerpot Men’s ‘Let’s Go to San Francisco’ (Deram, 1967), Eric Burdon and the Animals’ ‘San Franciscan Nights’ (MGM, 1967) and Johnny Hallyday’s ‘San Francisco’ (Philips, 1967). The long catalogue of mistrust cannot be itemized here. For further information, see Hill (2006: 28–40) and Selvin (1992). For the LA perspective, see Kubernik and Kubernik (2011). Indeed, the lead story of the first issue of the San Francisco–based Rolling Stone magazine posed the question, ‘Where’s the Money from Monterey?’ See Rolling Stone 1 (November 1967). The ‘fish-out-of-water’ trope was well represented in the first years of Rolling Stone magazine: long-haired musicians meeting stony-faced hotel patrons in the Midwest, East Coast expectations of professional standards not reached by the more casual

213

214

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

San Francisco bands, harder-edged East Coast outfits derided as ‘boring’ by West Coast critics and so on. 35 Bill Graham’s closest competitor in dancehall promotion was the much-loved hippie Chet Helms, whose Avalon Ballroom was relatively short-lived but now almost mythical in stature. Bill Graham’s business survived because of his ruthless insistence that patrons pay their way; Helms’s business suffered because there were often more names on the guest list than paying customers on any given night. See Graham and Greenfield (1992). 36 See Andy Bennett, ed., Remembering Woodstock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 37 This is how Hugh Romney (Wavy Gravy) woke Woodstock on the first morning. As part of the Hog Farm Collective, Romney was speaking on behalf of the Pranksters and all the volunteers working the free kitchens at the festival, showing how the communal spirit was possible even in a difficult environment (‘there’s always a little bit of heaven in a disaster area’, as he said). See Woodstock (1970). 38 In January 2019, Woodstock co-founder and organizer Michael Lang announced plans for the fiftieth anniversary celebration, to be held in Watkins Glen, New York, featuring some ‘vintage Woodstock’ acts such as Santana, John Fogerty, Dead & Company and Canned Heat, alongside more recent chart acts such as the Killers, Miley Cyrus, Chance the Rapper, Imagine Dragons and Jay-Z. As clear an example as any that the idea of ‘counterculture’ is multigenerational, and difficult to sustain, this fiftieth anniversary iteration was nonetheless cancelled. See Bennett (2020). 39 Even the lowest estimation of the crowd size (600,000) exceeded that of Woodstock’s 400,000. 40 Stuart Hall, ‘The Hippies: An American “Moment”’, in Julian Nagel, ed., Student Power (London: Merlin Press, 1969), pp. 170–202 (pp. 198–9). Emphasis in original. 41 It is impossible to arrive at any consensus about Altamont. In San Francisco and the Long 60s (Hill 2016), I draw together contemporary accounts and retrospective commentary in order to present, as objectively as possible, events as they actually happened. Other points of view may be found in Cutler (2010), and in the Rolling Stones’ documentary film, Gimme Shelter (1970). 42 Whiteley (1992: 36). 43 It could certainly be argued that this is the aesthetic nurtured even now at college and independent radio stations around the world, or on a mainstream station such as BBC 6 Music in the UK. As San Francisco jazz critic Ralph Gleason noted in his Chronicle column on 16 August 1967, on local independent radio station KMPX, in the course of ‘an hour you are likely to hear tracks from the Decca album by Frankenstein, English albums not generally available in the U.S., advance dubs of U.S. groups, 20 minutes of Ravi Shankar, tapes by local rock bands, and other fascinating things. The Mainstream discs by Big Brother & the Holding Co. were introduced to the radio audience by KMPX and a whole new market for English LPs has developed out of the station’s plugging of Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Procol Harum and other packages’. See Hill (2016: 129–31) and Krieger (1979); for a summary of the many problems of genre definition in the 1960s, see Hill (2020).

Counterculture and Youth Culture

4 4 See Thomas (1997). 45 See Leimbacker (1971: 104). It is a fact that marijuana is now legal for medical use in all but three states in the United States, and legal for recreational use in ten. Reference also to Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, music by Galt MacDermot), which premiered off Broadway in 1967 before moving to Broadway in 1968 for 1,750 performances. The plot revolves around a group of Greenwich Village hippies, loving freely, dodging the draft, with songs at once celebrating flower power (‘Good Morning Starshine’) and mythologizing it (‘Aquarius’). The film adaptation (dir. Milos Forman, 1979) was not entirely faithful to the original play (and with much less nudity) but certainly serves to reinforce certain mediated stereotypes of the counterculture. 46 Hall (1969: 201; original emphasis). He references the 1968 US presidential election and the disturbances between Yippie demonstrators and the police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a full account of which may be found in Mailer (1971).

References Alpert, R. (1971). Remember: Be Here Now. New York: Random House. Bennett, A., ed. (2004). Remembering Woodstock. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bennett, A. (2020). ‘Woodstock 2019: The Spirit of Woodstock in the Post-risk Era’. Popular Music & Society, 43(2): 216–27. Bernstein, D. W., ed. (2008). The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press. Boyd, J. (2006). White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. London: Serpent’s Tail. Braunstein, P., and M. W.Doyle, eds (2002). Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & 70s. New York: Routledge. Cloonan, M. (1996). Banned! Censorship of Popular Music in Britain: 1967–92. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cutler, S. (2010). You Can’t Always Get What You Want: My Lie with the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and Other Wonderful Reprobates. Toronto: ECW. Didion, J. (1968). Slouching toward Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Dylan, B. (2011). Chronicles, Volume 1. New York: Simon and Schuster. Gleason, R. J. (1967). ‘Turn On, Tune In and Be Bored’, San Francisco Chronicle, 30 January. Graham, B., and R. Greenfield (1992). Bill Graham Presents: My Life inside Rock and Out. New York: Dell. Hall, S. (1969). ‘The Hippies: An American “Moment” ’. In Julian Nagel (ed.), Student Power (pp. 170–202). London: Merlin. Hesse, H. ([1922] 1951). Siddhartha. New York: Random House. Hill, S. (2006). ‘When Deep Soul Met the Love Crowd. Otis Redding: Monterey Pop Festival, June 17, 1967’. In I. Inglis (ed.), Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time (pp. 28–40). Aldershot: Ashgate.

215

216

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Hill, S. (2016). San Francisco and the Long 60s. New York: Bloomsbury. Hill, S. (2020). ‘Serious Writing about Rock’. In A. Moore and P. Carr (eds), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research (pp. 144–74). New York: Bloomsbury. Hoffman, A. (2005). LSD: My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science, trans. Jonathan Ott. Sarasota, CA: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Kerouac, J. (1957). On the Road. New York: Viking. Kesey, K. (1962). One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Viking. Krieger, S. (1979). Hip Capitalism. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Kripal, J. J. (2007). Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kubernik, H., and K. Kubernik (2012). A Perfect Haze: The Illustrated History of the Monterey International Pop Festival. Solano Beach: Santa Monica Press. Leary, T., R. Metzner and R. Alpert ([1964] 1993). The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. New York: Citadel. Leimbacker, E. (1971). ‘The Crash of the Jefferson Airplane [1969]’. In Conversations with the New Reality (pp. 103–19). New York: Harper & Row. Lesh, P. (2005). Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. New York: Little, Brown. Mailer, N. (1971). Miami and the Siege of Chicago. New York: Dell. McKay, G. (1996). Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso. McNally, D. (2002). A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. London: Transworld. Merry Pranksters (2011). Magic Trip, dir. Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney. Morgan, B., and N. J. Peters, eds (2006). Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression. San Francisco: City Lights. Perry, C. (1985). The Haight-Ashbury: A History. New York: Vintage. Pinch, T., and F. Trocco (2002). Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ramparts editors (1971). Conversations with the New Reality. New York: Harper & Row. Roszak, T. (1969). The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Selvin, J. (1992). Monterey Pop. San Francisco: Chronicle. Thomas, F. (1997). The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, F. (2006). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Warner, S. (2013). Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture. New York: Bloomsbury. Whiteley, S. (1992). The Space between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture. London: Routledge. Wolfe, T. (1968). The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Farrar and Giroux.

11 Glam rock: Youth culture, performativity and sexuality Jon Stratton

Glam rock is the name given to a youth subculture that originated in the UK around 1972, which lasted for four or five years. The earliest British discussions of glam rock argued for it as a conservative, class-based phenomenon or saw it as a platform for addressing issues related to sexuality and gender typing (Hebdige 1979: 59–62; Stratton 1986: 15–38; Taylor and Wall 1976: 105–23).1 In this chapter, I will examine the claim that glam rock was a youth subculture. We will see that glam rock functioned differently from earlier post–Second World War British youth cultures. Whereas youth cultures such as the teddy boys and mods coalesced around certain material goods and practices, and identified certain musical forms as their preference, glam rock evolved out of the stylistic and performing visions of certain artists. Glam rockers would dress in the style of the artist they preferred – especially when going to gigs by that artist. Indeed, dressing in that artist’s style outside of the gig was unusual and often resulted in ridicule or even, as we shall see below, being beaten up. In an important sense, then, glam rockers are better thought of as fans rather than as members of a youth culture. The most innovative artists were Marc Bolan of T. Rex, who is sometimes identified as the progenitor of the movement, David Bowie and Roxy Music. There was a secondary group of more pop-oriented artists, which included Gary Glitter, Slade and Sweet. Iain Chambers (1985: 114) writes, ‘In its sophisticated reaches (Bowie, Roxy Music, Lou Reed), glam rock offered an aesthetic prospective that was markedly different from that of progressive music.’ For Chambers, the artists identified as glam rockers were reacting against progressive rock’s virtuous attempts to distinguish musical art from the commercial artifice of pop. He goes on to argue that

218

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

the two were now indiscriminately mixed together on the same palate. In this fashion the objects of everyday life – the sense of music, of sex, of art, of pleasure – were disturbingly rearranged, and unexpected suggestions were able to emerge. Inside that process, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste were superseded by the disturbance of ‘kitsch’ and journeys towards the frontiers of excess: out there where ‘a-lad-insane’ (David Bowie, Alladin Sane, 1974), could continue a perverse research for new extremes. (114)

In most accounts of glam rock, two strands are identified – popular culture and high culture – with most attention being paid to those artists regarded as more sophisticated: Bowie and Roxy Music. The first thing to note here is that glam rock is the only movement identified as a youth culture that has these two aspects to it. It will be argued here that in fact the similarities between the two apparent strands are greater than the differences between them, and that glam rock marks a transformation in the experience of British youth.

Defining glam rock Unlike progressive rock or psychedelic rock, the more popular aspect of glam rock was a predominantly singles-oriented movement. For the more artistically sophisticated artists – most importantly, David Bowie and Roxy Music – albums remained their primary focus. At the same time, both Bowie and Roxy Music released non-album singles. Roxy Music had to be coerced into writing singles. ‘Virginia Plain’, the group’s first single in 1972 when it reached no. 4 on the chart, had its album release on the group’s Greatest Hits compilation of 1977. David Bowie’s most significant musical contribution to glam rock was the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, also released in 1972. This was to some extent a concept album introducing the Ziggy Stardust persona (Bennett 2020). Nevertheless, Bowie made successful singles such as ‘John I’m Only Dancing’, which got to no. 12 on the chart in 1972 and did not appear on an album, as well as ‘Jean Genie’, no. 2 in 1973, which was included on the Aladdin Sane album. A key aspect of glam rock is that much of the music was made for dancing and glam rock overlaps with the development of the British disco scene (Haslam 2016). Whereas albums with lengthy tracks, often in a deliberate order, were meant to be listened to as an organic entity, singles were predominantly designed to be bought and used as entertainment, most importantly for dancing either at parties or at discos. Marc Bolan, for example, who was a friendly rival of Bowie (Trynka 2011), had had some success as an album artist as the lead member of the duo Tyrannosaurus Rex, appealing to a cult hippie audience, who at gigs would often listen to the music sitting down. Rebranding his group T. Rex, he transformed his image and started making catchy, rock-based singles with a clear, danceable beat. He lost his old audience of mostly male hippies, but gained a new, younger audience of predominantly girls who were taken by his image and danced to T. Rex’s music.

Glam Rock

Two characteristics of the glam rock sound were an insistent and heavily emphasized beat and an anthemic chorus to which dancers could sing along. From this point of view, many of the songs associated with glam rock appear formulaic and a large number of the hit singles were written by the songwriting team of Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, known colloquially as ChinniChap. Many were produced by Chapman. Starting in 1971, the duo had hits with the Sweet, Mud, Suzi Quatro and Smokie, among other artists. Chinn and Chapman’s song for the Sweet, ‘Blockbuster’, utilized virtually the same riff as Bowie’s ‘Jean Genie’. Both were released in late 1972 and made the top 10 at the same time. What is clear is that both riffs probably derive from the Yardbirds version of Muddy Waters’ ‘I’m a Man’, and the similarity is a coincidence. The Sweet’s track climbed to no. 1 and Bowie’s to no. 2. What both tracks have in common, as a consequence of the driving riff, is that they were very popular to dance to. At the height of Chinn and Chapman’s success in 1973 and 1974 – key years for glam rock – they had nineteen top 40 hits. The music identified as glam rock was crucially important in the evolution of the British disco scene, and in, for example, Chicory Tip’s version of Moroder’s song ‘Son of My Father’, there are clear links with the Eurodisco movement and the evolution of early electronic dance music connected to the advent of synthesizers and drum machines. Glam rock is difficult to define as a movement. While the artists are central to the experience of glam rock, the music they played was diverse. Philip Auslander (2006: 39) argues that the music classified as glam rock ranges from the buoyant boogie of T. Rex to the sophisticated, self-conscious deployment of rock and pop styles by David Bowie and Roxy Music, to the straightforward hard rock of Kiss, to the simplistic, minimalist pop of Gary Glitter indicates that this rock subgenre cannot be defined purely in terms of musical style … Even more than most rock subgenres, glam rock was defined primarily by the performers’ appearances and personae, the poses they struck rather than the music they played.

We can see here how Auslander includes the American group KISS with the UK artists, assuming that because they are also concerned with performance they fit into the glam rock category. However, glam rock was a peculiarly British phenomenon. As David Buckingham (n.d.(a)) remarks in his discussion of glam rock: It may be that I am chauvinistically insisting on some uniquely British [original emphasis] quality of glam here – perhaps a kind of British theatricality. While there are some US stars who might comfortably be categorized as glam – especially Jobriath (who was almost unknown in the UK) – others don’t fit very easily.

Buckingham’s suggestion of theatricality as a distinguishing feature of glam rock in the UK signals again the importance of performativity in the genre.

219

220

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

That glam in the UK was a fundamentally different entity from what was happening in the United States is well demonstrated by looking at the lack of success of the key UK glam artists there. Here I will concentrate on Marc Bolan and David Bowie; however, the point that no British glam rock artist was successful in America can be similarly demonstrated for Gary Glitter, who had one hit in the United States (his first release); Roxy Music, which never had a hit in the United States during the glam rock era; and Sweet, which likewise never had an American hit during that time. Glitter’s achievement was with ‘Rock and Roll, Part 2’, the almost wordless track that was the instrumental B-side of his first single. Simon Reynolds (2016: 219) regards its success as being ‘thanks partly to early support on Black radio stations in Chicago and Los Angeles’. This would suggest that, as in the UK, it was understood as a dance track at a time when the disco genre was beginning to take off among African Americans. When Glitter went to the United States in 1975 and recorded the album released as G.G., it failed to attract an audience. Slade even relocated to America for about eighteen months in mid-1975 to try to gain a following there, but failed. In 1972, T. Rex had two no. 1s, three no. 2s and a no. 3 in the singles chart in the UK. In America in 1972, only one track by T. Rex, ‘Telegram Sam’, got as high as no. 67. In 1970, ‘Get It On’ reached no. 10 in America. Apart from this, no T. Rex single was more successful than ‘Telegram Sam’. The year 1972 was a very good one for T. Rex in the UK. It included the release of the film Born to Boogie, directed by Ringo Starr. The album The Slider was released in July. It climbed to no. 4 on the UK chart. In America, The Slider only got to no. 17. This album was the most successful of any T. Rex album in America. The previous album, Electric Warrior, reached only no. 32, while it was no. 1 in the UK. All other T. Rex albums failed to make the top 100 albums in America. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album, also released in 1972, reached no. 5 in the UK, but only no. 21 in the United States. No Bowie album reached the top 10 albums in America until Diamond Dogs in 1974, and this was after Bowie had abandoned his Ziggy persona and left Glam Rock behind. Even Diamond Dogs charted higher in the UK, where it reached no. 1, compared with America, where it only got to no. 5. In 1972 on the singles chart in the UK, Bowie had a no. 10, a no. 12 and a no. 2. In the United States in that year, Bowie had a no. 65, a no. 71 and a single that did not chart. Bowie’s first top 10 single in America was ‘Fame’, which reached no. 1 in 1975 well after his glam days. ‘Fame’, off Young Americans, which is known as Bowie’s plastic soul album, reached only no. 17 in the UK. Much of glam rock was dance music, but not African American dance music. In his autobiography, Leader, Glitter explained: What Mike [Leander] and I were really looking for was … a white disco sound – something … made in the UK … that could compete with the Americans’ [sic] – and

Glam Rock

win back the hearts and dancing feet of those British kids in the clubs. (Reynolds 2016: 215)

Reynolds’s comment here emphasizes the British history of dance, where dancing was primarily focused on the feet – hence the emphasis on a stomp in the music, rather than on the movement of the entire body (Stratton 2021). Buckingham’s suggestion about the cultural specificity of glam rock was founded in a sense of what he calls its theatricality, what I am describing more generally as glam rock’s performativity. Taken together, these two developments help us to understand why glam rock was a British phenomenon similar in some ways to, but in the end fundamentally different from, the American glitter rock of KISS and the theatrics of Alice Cooper. Alice Cooper was, in fact, the most successful of the American artists in the UK because tracks such as ‘School’s Out’ were so danceable and included anthemic choruses – much like the singles by Sweet, Slade, Bowie and many other British glam rock artists. ‘School’s Out’ reached no. 1 in the UK in 1972, followed by ‘Elected’, which reached no. 4. Both positions were higher than those the singles achieved in the United States.

Glam rock, youth culture and neo-tribes To understand what was different about glam rock as a youth culture, we can turn to Andy Bennett’s (1999) renovation of the concept. While there is earlier work such as George Melly’s Revolt into Style, published in 1970, British discussions of youth culture are best traced back to the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). In 1972, Phil Cohen published a foundational article titled ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community’. Cohen was interested in the tradition of what later came to be called spectacular youth cultures, those named as teddy boys, mods and skinheads. As the article’s title suggests, Cohen was focused on working-class young people – those youth cultures listed were all linked to the working class – and generated a class-based critical theory. Cohen (1980: 71) argues that ‘the latent function of subculture is … to express and resolve, albeit “magically”, the contradictions which remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture’. He explains that youth subcultures were ‘symbolic structures and must not be confused with the actual kids who are their bearers and supports’ (71). Each youth culture, he theorizes, is composed of four subsystems: two plastic, dress and music; and two infrastructural, argot and ritual. The difference is that where the infrastructural elements are generated out of the lived everyday lives of the young people, the plastic elements are made up of appropriated consumer goods. Where music is concerned, the chosen music of the youth culture does not evolve out of either the parent culture, as Cohen calls the working-class culture out of which youth cultures evolve, or the young people themselves, but is imported from the wider cultural order. Thus, for example, mod

221

222

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

culture included African American soul music and skinheads developed a liking for Jamaican ska. Later work by the CCCS theorized spectacular youth cultures more in terms of resistance to the dominant culture than in finding magical solutions to contradictions within working-class culture that were, to a great extent, a consequence of the functioning of hegemony (Hall and Jefferson 1975; see also c­ hapter 1). In distinction from the analyses developed by those authors associated with the CCCS, Bennett (1999: 602) argues for the greater importance of consumption and individual choice: It could rather be argued that post-war consumerism offered young people the opportunity to break away from their traditional class-based identities, the increased spending power of the young facilitating and encouraging experimentation with new, self-constructed forms of identity.

Bennett reworks the idea of the tribe as developed by Michel Maffesoli (1996). Bennett (1999: 606) tells us that ‘underpinning Maffesoli’s concept of tribes is a concern to illustrate the shifting nature of collective associations between individuals as societies become increasingly consumer oriented’. It is these loose associations, sometimes founded on the purchase of particular consumer goods, that Maffesoli describes as tribes. Bennett (1999: 605) translates this idea to youth groupings: ‘It seems to me that so-called youth “subcultures” are prime examples of the unstable and shifting cultural affiliations which characterize late modern consumer-based societies.’ Consequently, Bennett argues, what have been called youth cultures, or youth subcultures, are better described as neo-tribes – that is, loose groupings of young people brought together by their shared interest in, enjoyment of and purchase of particular consumer goods. Here, we need to remember that Maffesoli was making a historical argument about the impact of the increasing availability of consumer goods, what in Marxian terms we might describe as the shift from productionoriented capitalism to consumption-oriented capitalism. Bennett’s invocation of late modern consumer-based societies resonates with Maffesoli’s historical argument. We should remember Cohen’s two plastic subsystems: music and clothes. Cohen’s original article was published in 1972, looking backwards over the post–Second World War period. As he was writing, British society was undergoing radical change. Clothes were being reinvented for young people as relatively cheap high-street fashion (Chambers 1985). Popular music, which had been divided along the lines of commercialized pop and artistic rock, was becoming unified in a form that celebrated its commercial inauthenticity. Glam rock marks a break in the evolution of British youth cultures. This is the moment when Cohen’s plastic subsystems become always already integrated into the consumptionlead economy that Bennett identifies; the moment when, to remake the title of the CCCS’s book on youth cultures, resistance becomes ritualized as representation. Glam rockers were the first neo-tribe.

Glam Rock

David Fowler (2008: 11) argues that ‘a comprehensive history of British youth culture needs to deal not just with consumerism and fashion [among other things] but with individuals who have shaped British youth culture as a cultural movement’. Glam rock was precisely a phenomenon founded in consumerism and fashion. It was an expression of spectacle, and it was driven by artists who existed in the spectacle. The late 1960s in the UK saw a massive expansion in the availability of consumer goods. For example, while in 1956 only 6 per cent of households had a fridge, by 1971 this had increased to 69 per cent. Similarly, car and van ownership more than doubled between 1955 and 1970, by which time there were almost twelve million on British roads. There was a similar increase in television ownership, with 91 per cent of families having access to one by 1971 (Marwick 2000: 117). The BBC started broadcasting television in colour in 1967 on the minority BBC 2 channel. Regular broadcasting on BBC 1 and the commercial channel ITV began in November 1969. By 1976, the number of televisions in the UK that could access colour programmes surpassed the number that could only show programmes in black and white. A revolution was also taking place in fashion. Mary Quant had opened Bazaar, her first boutique for young women, on Kings Road, Chelsea, in 1955. John Stephen opened HIS Clothes, his first boutique stocking men’s fashion, on Carnaby Street in 1957 and by 1966 had fourteen boutiques on the same street, transforming it into a London landmark. Boutiques rapidly spread across the UK, making youth fashion easily available to young people for the first time. Biba was opened in 1964 as a mail-order boutique by Barbara Hulanicki. The first shop was on the Kensington High Street. It rapidly became very fashionable. On 1 May 1971, a date rich in revolutionary symbolism, it was bombed by the Angry Brigade, causing little damage. Showing their age, the group’s communique started by reworking a line from Bob Dylan’s lyrics: ‘If you’re not busy being born you’re busy buying.’ Jake Arnott (2006) comments: [The bombing] was an attack on consumerism and the exploitation of workers but most of all, it was a Situationist reprisal against the ‘spectacle of society’. Biba was an emporium of Art Deco decadence; retro and reactionary, it was the epitome of commodity fetishism. But what the bombers failed to grasp was that it was fabulous … The adolescent glitter rockers didn’t want to blow it up, they just wanted to shoplift from it.

Guy Debord had published The Society of the Spectacle in French in 1967. In it, he argued that ‘in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation’ (thesis 1). Debord’s idea was that society was being transformed by a combination of the spread of new media, which at that time meant most importantly colour television, and the avalanche of consumer goods. Representation was being privileged over what previously had been

223

224

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

taken for reality. (For a discussion of glam rock and the society of the spectacle, see Stratton (2021).) Arnott’s point is that the Angry Brigade, a anarchist revolutionary group influenced by the ideas of Debord and the activists with whom he was associated, the Situationists, were nostalgic for an era of production-capitalism and what were increasingly old-fashioned notions of revolution. The glam rockers were embracing the new society of consumption and the choices it offered. It was in the new boutiques, of which Biba was the most glamorous example, that they were able to buy the clothes and cosmetics needed to imitate their idols. In 1973, Biba moved to a renovated seven-storey building and became known as Big Biba; with its Art Deco stylings, a restaurant and an expanded range of fashionable consumer goods, it was even more fabulous. The building included a room, the Rainbow Room, where glam rock artists (among others) played, including Bowie, Roxy Music and Cockney Rebel as well as, notoriously, the American glitter rock group the New York Dolls. In 1976, Bryan Ferry, the founder of and singer with Roxy Music, made the video for ‘Let’s Stick Together’ in the Rainbow Room. Stylistically, Ferry and Biba were well suited.

Performance and the gay experience Display and performance were central to glam rock. Mike Leander, the producer who made the music behind the Gary Glitter hits, had this insight: Glam Rock was all about putting on a spectacle. The records were constructed to be seen … The glam audience became part of the show. They dressed up and it was like a party. (Napier-Bell 2002: 163)

I have already suggested that youthful glam rockers are better characterized as fans. Buckingham (n.d.(b)) makes the point that one striking and fairly unprecedented characteristic of glam fandom was that so many people in the audience (girls as well as boys) wanted to copy the performers’ appearance. While stars like Bowie were keen to set themselves apart from their audience, and to emphasize their otherness, it was as though their audience was nevertheless aspiring to become like them, to the extent of mimicking their clothing, make-up and hairstyles.

One way of understanding this is that the youthful audience, Bennett’s (1999) neotribes, were learning how to consume, how to make commodity choices by following the styles of the artists. We need to recognize that glam rock performers were predominantly male. It is often acknowledged that the only successful female glam rock artist was the American ex-pat Suzi Quatro. Georgina Gregory (2002: 51) comments that ‘Quatro appears

Glam Rock

to have been acceptable only because of her ability to play down her femininity by parodying instead the codes of heterosexual masculinity’. As we shall see, women were crucial in the development of the androgynous styles of Bolan and Bowie. Glam was centred on the problematic of the male performer as spectacle. These male performers were learning how to be icons of consumption. I have mentioned John Stephen’s pioneering male boutiques. Warren Gould moved from a stall in the Petticoat Lane street market to opening Lord John in 1963 on Carnaby Street. By 1970, there were seven Lord John shops. The connections between the new male boutiques and popular music go back to the mod era. The Small Faces and the Who both shopped at Lord John. The group’s mod followers also started frequenting the new menswear shops. As early as 1966, Ray Davies, who was becoming an incisive observer of English life, wrote satirically about the dedicated follower of fashion making his rounds of the boutiques of London Town. The Kinks’ ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ got to no. 4 on the UK singles chart, reflecting an increasing awareness of the kind of dandy described in the lyrics. Towards the end of the 1960s, men’s fashion became increasingly feminized as it became linked to display. One pioneer in this development was Michael Fish, who had worked for a number of traditional men’s outfitters before taking a position with John Stephen. He then opened his own shop, Mr Fish, in 1966 in Mayfair. There, among his other innovations such as the wide kipper tie, he pioneered men’s dresses. In July 1969, Mick Jagger wore a white one at the Rolling Stones free concert in Hyde Park. In 1970, David Bowie wore one along with long, flowing locks on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World. Bowie appeared in the same dress on the cover of the sexual liberation magazine Curious (no. 19) along with the out gay fashion designer Freddie Buretti, who called himself Rudi Valentino and who created some of the Ziggy Stardust costumes for Bowie. Quoting John Gill, Stan Hawkins (2009: 32) comments that these decades [the 1960s and 1970s] signified a major breakthrough in male representation where ‘young men sometimes willingly risked homophobic assault by dressing in the manner of their pop idol, even if they themselves were not homosexual’.

In Knuckle Sandwich, a book documenting life for working-class youth in the 1970s, David Robins and Phil Cohen describe how one evening on the Wall by Monmouth Estate, Tommy arrived looking like David Bowie, complete with make-up and streaked hair. Chorus of hoots, wolf whistles and jeers from the Wall gang. Then Mick, who used to be a close friend of Tommy’s but is now more involved with his motor bike, starts to have a go at him. ‘Where’s your handbag, dearie? Going out with your fella then?’ (Qtd in Chambers 1985: 136)

Tommy’s mistake was to take what was acceptable within the space of the glam rock gig and think it would be accepted in the world of everyday life. Gill (1995: 112) remarks that the development of glam rock ‘coincided with the burgeoning gay

225

226

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

scene, and the two worlds blurred into one another’. This was only true in certain circumstances. We need to return here to the importance of performance. Simon Napier-Bell (2002: 161), who was himself a gay manager of pop artists, writes in his memoir: Glam rock flirted openly with decadence. Sixties children had been brought up in a period steeped in the influence of gay pop managers. They’d been subjected to flower power, hippy lifestyle, pot-smoking and acid. From all these ingredients, they concocted their own style of music – glam rock – androgynous, theatrical and outrageous.

Moreover, the Sexual Offences Act, which legalized homosexual activity between males over twenty-one, had become law in 1967. The cautiousness with which this decriminalization took place can be gauged by its only applying to England and Wales and not including the armed services. Nevertheless, in societal terms the legislation was revolutionary. The gay managers to whom Napier-Bell refers included Brian Epstein, who managed the Beatles; the independent producer and manager Joe Meek; NapierBell himself, who had briefly managed Bolan and later Wham; Tam Paton, who managed the Bay City Rollers from 1967; and, most importantly, Larry Parnes in the 1950s and early 1960s. Before the legalizing of homosexual acts, gay men – of necessity – either had to pass as heterosexual or suffer prejudice, humiliation or worse. This remained true after the passing of the act but not to the same extent. In this context, performance was extremely important for gay men; they learnt to perform straightness. As managers, they were able to offer their music acts insights as to how to perform on stage, how to make themselves attractive to a female audience and how to make the image seem real. Reynolds (2016: 220) writes that Glitter remembered the English rock’n’roller Vince Taylor saying, ‘Image is everything.’ Taylor was also a model for Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. As spectacle became privileged, so image became what was real. Taylor had taken a stage name. His given name was Brian Holden. Larry Parnes was the foremost manager of the second half of the 1950s. One of his first managerial moves with any of his protégés was to change their names. He managed Vince Eager, Johnny Gentle, Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Georgie Fame. Given the importance of image, it is not surprising that many of the glam rockers took stage names. Marc Feld became Mark Bolan; not wanting to be confused with Davy Jones of the Monkees, David Jones became David Bowie; Bernard Jewry became Shane Fenton and, in his glam rock period, Alvin Stardust. Gary Glitter started life as Paul Gadd. He took a number of different stage names, including Paul Raven, over his early, failing career. Then, at a party [Michael] Aldred came up with the campy game of thinking up ludicrous names for the sort of fabricated British rock’n’roller that Svengalis like Larry Parnes foisted on the general public in the late fifties. Various candidates were tossed into the

Glam Rock

fray with much hilarity – Terry Tinsel, Stanley Sparkle, Horace Hydrogen – before Aldred came up with Gary Glitter, agreed by all as the winner. It soon became Paul Raven’s nickname. (Reynolds 2016: 214)

Aldred was a gay record producer and journalist who had worked as a presenter on the television music show Ready Steady Go! It seems he had used the nom de plume Gary Glitter for a few of his music journalism pieces. The name won because it was considered to be the most outrageous name the group could think of. It was foisted on Paul Gadd (who previously went under the artist name of Paul Raven), and he accepted it. It went with his tacky image, which was about to get even more kitsch, to remember how Chambers described glam rock artists.

The gaze and performance At this point, we need to think more about the relationship between artist and audience. The best approach is through a consideration of the gaze. In Laura Mulvey’s classic article about pleasure and Hollywood narrative film, perhaps not coincidentally written in 1973 and published in 1975, she argues, following psychoanalytic theory, that scopophilia, which Sigmund Freud claims is ‘one of the component instincts of sexuality’, is a key source of pleasure. Mulvey (1999: 835) explains: Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the construction of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object.

Further, in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so they can be said to connote to-be-looked-atness. (837)

This structure is repeated in relationships between performer and audience. The performer, as passive in the overdetermining sense that they are gazed upon, takes on a culturally ‘passive’ feminine quality. The audience, in the overdetermining sense of being the gazer, takes on a culturally ‘active’ male quality. As a desiring structure the performer is overdetermined as feminine and the audience as masculine. This means that in popular music the artist is feminized. Yet they perform for an often predominantly male audience. In traditional rock music, this structure is modified by the asserted similarity between the artist and the audience: using their own name, wearing the same clothes,

227

228

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

claiming similar experiences, speaking to the audience members as equals. At the same time, certain genres of music such as heavy metal work with aggressively masculine imagery. Perhaps the most typifying example here is Judas Priest, the English heavy metal group who broke through into popular acceptance in 1980 with the British Steel album. The singer of the group was Rob Halford, whose image evolved from when he joined the group in 1973 to 1978 when it was pretty much complete. Roy Wilkinson (2010) writes that, ‘in the late 1970s, Halford emerged with a new leather-man look. When Judas Priest started making regular appearances on Top of the Pops, Halford was boldly accessorized with biker cap and bullwhip’. The change in costume was made around the time of 1978’s Killing Machine album. Will Hodgkinson (2018) amplifies the description of Halford: ‘Then there was the frontman’s outfit. The chained sailor’s cap, leather trousers and cut-off leather jacket over a bare chest, accessorized by studded wristbands and a whip, screamed one clear message to us kids, he must be really hard.’ However, underneath this hard biker image, it turned out that Halford was gay. He came out in 1998. The point here being that he was performing an image. Halford says in Hodgkinson’s article that he never thought he looked gay in the biker gear to which Hodgkinson comments that nobody except under-twelves thought he was hard rather than gay. While this is an obvious exaggeration, the point has merit. The American group called the Village People started having hits in 1978. They were well known to be gay. Each member played a classic gay stereotype. Glenn Hughes’s image was that of the biker. There is a fundamental difference between being a biker and performing as a biker. Halford, like Hughes, knew how to construct the image and perform being a biker for real in the gaze of an audience. Hughes was performing the biker as gay stereotype. They are both performances, and somewhere in the logic of desire they merge. In glam, the artist often feminized himself as an object for his audience to gaze upon. Audiences, as Mulvey indicates, are overdetermined as male. Young women and girls take on a male, active role in the desiring structure. Suzanne Moore (1988) writes about the possibility of an active female gaze evolving in the 1980s as more and more images of semi-naked males appeared in the media. However, as audience members, most obviously in popular music, young women had been active since at least their involvement in Beatlemania (Evans and Gamman 1995). In glam, as Bolan and Bowie transformed into androgynous objects of desire, so their (male) audience often transformed into imitations of them. This was one source of the myth that glam rock was a youth culture. Bolan and Bowie – and, as we have seen, Jagger – are often talked about as androgynous. Joel Lucyszyn has usefully distinguished between androgyny and bisexuality. He explains: ‘Classical and Renaissance art presents androgyny as an almost transcendent fusion of opposites – a perfect state in which the masculine and feminine cancel one another out, leaving behind the world of gender and sexuality

Glam Rock

to form the “androgyne” ’ (Lucyszyn 2017). In this cultural understanding, the androgyne has no desire but is the object of fascination. Francette Pacteau (cited in Meese 1992: 36) has theorized the modern experience of androgyny: The androgyne dwells in a distance. The androgynous figure has to do with seduction, that which comes before undressing, seeing, touching. It can only exist in the shadow area of the image; once unveiled, once we throw light on it, it becomes a woman or man … The androgyne is excessive in its transgression of the boundaries of gender identity; however, this threat of superabundance, of overflowing, is safely contained within the frame of the feminine and the masculine.

In glam rock, androgyny was a key element of the scopophilic regime that structured the relationship between the glam rock artist and their audience. It is here that the androgyne dwells in a distance before they are revealed to us as male or female. It should remind us of Ziggy, Bowie’s androgynous alien inhabiting the Other world of difference. We must remember here that there is a relationship between fantasy and desire. Androgyny, Pacteau reminds us, provokes desire. She is suggesting that androgyny is related to the visual, to the gaze. It is the fantastic foundation of a fascination by the audience, the glam rockers, with sexual Otherness founded in an excess beyond the conventional sexual binary. Bowie, more than even Bolan, played up to this fascination. He claimed in an interview in 1972 in Melody Maker with Mick Watts that he was gay and always had been even when he was David Jones. Watts (1972) wrote that ‘David’s present image is to come on like a swishy queen, a gorgeously effeminate boy’. He looked androgynous. The implication is of a fluid sexuality and not clear binary homosexuality – more bisexual. Discussing the conflation of androgyny and bisexuality, Lucyszyn (2017) argues that the sexual revolution and its aftermath took this conflation to the literal forefront of our vision; on our televisions, magazines and stage artists such as Prince, David Bowie and Sinead O’Connor had their revolutionary, valuable androgynous style become symbolic for their sexual experiences and orientations. The work these artists did for LGBT people are [sic] invaluable – but they were not necessarily androgynous because of their sexualities.

Lucyszyn goes on to write that androgyny needs to be understood in visual terms in relation to gender, lifestyles and fashion, while bisexuality refers to sexual orientation. Bowie looked androgynous and asserted in the Watts interview that he was gay. An insistent rumour went round that Angie, Bowie’s wife, had walked in on Bowie and Jagger in bed together. We should remember that this was only five years after the legalization of same-sex acts between men. It is in the first appearance of T. Rex performing ‘Hot Love’ on Top of the Pops in early 1971 that we see glitter under Bolan’s eyes for the first time. This was the idea of Chelita Secunda, who had been employed by Bolan’s wife June as a stylist and

229

230

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

publicist for Bolan. Chelita had a wealthy Trinidadian background. Her mother was English and her father was of Corsican heritage. She was stylish and cosmopolitan, and had worked in public relations for the fashion designer Ossie Clark and for the boutique she co-owned, Quorum. It was Chelita, the wife of Tony Secunda, who took over management of Bolan in 1971, who accompanied him around the boutiques and dressed him in the excessive clothes and makeup, such as feather boas and eyeliner, that made him look so androgynous. June Child came from a left-wing avant-garde background in London, including going to the arts-oriented Holland Park Comprehensive where John Mayall and Alexis Korner, the blues musicians; Ken Russell, the film director; and various high-profile Labour politicians sent their children. She had worked for Blackhill Enterprises, which looked after Pink Floyd, and spent time as a minder for Syd Barrett, the lead singer and guitarist of the group during its early years, who suffered a severe mental illness. When June Child started a relationship with Bolan, she already knew her way around the music business. While June and Chelita were developing the glam style for Bolan, Bowie’s wife Angie was having great input into his stage presence. Angie wrote in her autobiography: I was in fact very important indeed to the most creatively and commercially successful period of David’s career. Many of the crucial business moves, musical and professional connections, and marketing and imaging strategies were my work, as were, much of the time, the daily minutiae. For a number of years David’s career was my job. (Bowie 2000: 44)

Like Chelita, Angie had a cosmopolitan background, being the daughter of an American colonel posted to Cyprus and a Polish mother who was a naturalized Canadian. She was educated in Cyprus and Switzerland. She had arrived in England after being expelled from a prestigious Connecticut college in America for having an affair with another girl. It was these three women, all of whom were well acquainted with the business side of Swinging London, who were central to the look of glam rock. As women, they were used to being watched and being the focus of male desire. They knew how to manipulate this. In their self-consciousness about performance they had much in common with the gay managers. They translated the experience into the stage presentation of Bolan and Bowie creating their androgynous looks and manipulating the desire of the audience.

Conclusion A large component of glam rock was nostalgic. Artists such as Gary Glitter, Alvin Stardust and Wizard recycled styles and references from the rock’n’roll era of the 1950s, but now as spectacular image with no pretensions to authenticity (FeldmanBarrett and Bennett 2016). At the same time, glam rock can be understood as being

Glam Rock

aligned with the later New Romantic youth culture, again better thought of as a neotribe, a term even more apt for the New Romantics than the glam rockers. Where glam rockers behaved like fans, taking their leads from the artists, the New Romantics created their own fashions and danced to records. Many of the most significant figures in New Romanticism, such as Steve Strange, who had had a teenage obsession with Bowie, and Rusty Egan, who played drums with the Rich Kids, a group influenced by both glam and punk, had adolescent roots in glam rock. DJing at the pioneering New Romantic club Blitz, Egan would play tracks by Bowie and Eno as well as glam rock dance tracks such as Sweet’s ‘Ballroom Blitz’ alongside tracks by Kraftwerk and the burgeoning electro-pop scene. New Romantic groups such as Visage, which included both Strange and Egan, and Spandau Ballet grew out of the scene (Bennett 2015; Rimmer 2003).

Note 1 In ‘Why Doesn’t Anybody Write Anything about Glam Rock’ (Stratton 1986), I argued that glam rock was not a class-based youth culture and could be understood through the prism of the ending of the myth of classlessness in British society and, as I put it then, ‘a last attempt at a politics of affluence’.

References Arnott, J. (2006). ‘Blown Away’. Guardian, 23 April. Available online: https://www.theg​ uard​ian.com/books/2006/apr/23/fict​ion.dav​idbo​wie (accessed 6 August 2020). Auslander, P. (2006). Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bennett, A. (1999). ‘Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste’. Sociology, 33(3): 599–617. Bennett, A. (2015). ‘ “Fade to Grey”: The Forgotten History of the British New Romantic Movement’. In C. Feldman-Barrett (ed.), Lost Histories of Youth Culture (pp. 51–64). New York: Peter Lang. Bennett, A. (2020). British Progressive Pop 1970–1980. London: Bloomsbury. Bowie, A. (1993). Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie. London: Orion. Buckingham, D. (n.d.(a)). ‘Defining Glam’. Available online: https://davi​dbuc​king​ ham.net/grow​ing-up-mod​ern/glit​ter-glam-and-gen​der-play-pop-and-teeny​ bop-in-the-early-1970s/defin​ing-glam (accessed 6 August 2020). Buckingham, D. (n.d.(b)). ‘Glam, Girls and Fandom’. Available online: https://davi​dbuc​ king​ham.net/grow​ing-up-mod​ern/glit​ter-glam-and-gen​der-play-pop-and-teeny​ bop-in-the-early-1970s/glam-girls-and-fan​dom (accessed 6 August 2020).

231

232

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Chambers, I. (1985). Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture. London: Macmillan. Cohen, P. (1980). ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working-Class Community’. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (pp. 66–75). London: Unwin Hyman. Debord, G. ([1970] 2000). The Society of the Spectacle. Ann Arbor, MI: Black & Red. Evans, C., and L. Gamman (1995). ‘The Gaze Revisited, or Reviewing Queer Viewing’. In P. Burston and C. Richardson (eds), A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture (pp. 12–62). London: Routledge. Feldman-Barrett, C., and A. Bennett (2016). ‘ “All That Glitters”: Glam, Bricolage and the History of Post-war Youth Culture’. In I. Chapman and H. Johnson (eds), Global Glam and Popular Music: Style and Spectacle from the 1970s to the 2000s (pp. 11–24). London: Routledge. Fowler, D. (2008). Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c. 1920–c. 1970: From Ivory Tower to Global Movement – A New History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gill, J. (1995). Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth Century Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gregory, G. (2002). ‘Masculinity, Sexuality and the Visual Culture of Glam Rock’. Culture & Communication, 5(2): 35–60. Hall, S., and T. Jefferson, eds (1975). Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Haslam, D. (2016). Life after Dark: A History of British Nightclubs & Music Venues. London: Simon & Schuster. Hawkins, S. (2009). The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture. London: Ashgate. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Taylor & Francis. Hodgkinson, W. (2018). ‘When Judas Priest’s Rob Halford Came Out as Gay, the Metal Crowd Said: “You Think We Didn’t Know?”’. Times, 5 March. Available online: https://www.theti​mes.co.uk/arti​cle/when-judas-prie​sts-rob-half​ord-came-ou t-as-gay-the-metal-crowd-said-you-think-we-didnt-know-93zm2k​fwr (accessed 14 August 2020). Lucyszyn, J. (2017). ‘Is Bisexuality Androgynous?’ Varsity, 20 October. Available online: https://www.vars​ity.co.uk/featu​res/13769 (accessed 14 August 2020). Maffesoli, M. (1996). The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage. Marwick, A. (2000). The Sixties: Cultural Transformation in Britain, France, Italy and the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meese, E. (1992). Sem(Erotics): Theorising Lesbian: Writing. New York: New York University Press. Melly, G. (1970). Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts. London: Alan Lane. Moore, S. (1988). ‘Here’s Looking at You, Kid!’ In L. Gamman and M. Marshment (eds), The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture (pp. 44–59). Seattle: Real Comet.

Glam Rock

Mulvey, L. (1999). ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. In L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (pp. 833–44). New York: Oxford University Press. Napier-Bell, S. (2002). Black Vinyl, White Powder. Ringwood: Penguin. Reynolds, S. (2016). Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Dey Street. Rimmer, D. (2003). New Romantics: The Look. London: Omnibus. Robins, D., and P. Cohen (1978). Knuckle Sandwich: Growing Up in the Working Class City. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Stratton, J. (1986). ‘Why Doesn’t Anybody Write Anything about Glam Rock?’ Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, 4(1): 15–38. Stratton, J. (2021). ‘Glam Rock and the Society of the Spectacle’. Contemporary British History, 35(2): 210–34. Taylor, I., and D. Wall (1976). ‘Beyond the Skinheads: Comments on the Emergence and Significance of the Glam Rock Cult’. In G. Mungham and G. Pearson (eds), Working Class Youth Culture (pp. 105–23). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Trynka, P. (2011). David Bowie: Starman. Boston: Little, Brown. Watts, M. (1972). ‘Bowie: I’m Gay and Always Have Been’. Melody Maker, 22 January. Available online: https://www.bow​iebi​ble.com/1972/01/22/bowie-im-gay-and-alw​ ays-have-been (accessed 14 August 2020). Wilkinson, R. (2010). ‘How Judas Priest Invented Heavy Metal’. Guardian, 21 May. Available online: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/music/2010/may/20/judas-pri​ est-rob-half​ord-brit​ish-steel (accessed 14 August 2020).

233

234

12 Time to DIY: A history of punk and indie Matthew Bannister

Is a history of punk a contradiction in terms? That was the view of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s son Joe Corré, who burned reportedly £5 million worth of punk memorabilia on a boat on the Thames, London, in November 2016 (Press Association 2016). But is the destruction of history liberation or burning the evidence? Even Corré’s iconoclastic gesture referenced the history he was trying to destroy – the Sex Pistols’ infamous boat trip past Parliament playing ‘God Save the Queen’ in June 1977. Punk and indie share ideals of independence and autonomy, which often mean denying influence. Bob Stanley (2015: 443) blames the Clash for ‘Punk’s Maoist “year zero” take on pop history’ adding that ‘a few older acts – the Velvet Underground, Stooges … were permissible’, suggesting that a selective punk canon was always virtually present. So did punk ‘independence’ empower marginal identities or was it ‘conformity in another uniform’, as Corré alleged? (Press Association 2016). Insistence on immediacy also denies mediation – the many ways that punk (and indie) was adumbrated, even theorized, in other media before it was music, and the ways that mediation became part of the event – independent record companies, media coverage of punk and so on. UK punk was the latest translation of US musical innovation into UK style, which was then imported back to the United States, the lucrative trajectory from Berry Gordy’s ‘Money’ (1960) to Pink Floyd’s 1973 hit of the same name. But in the 1950s and 1960s, the UK appropriated mostly Black-originated US styles, whereas US punk was mainly white, both in personnel and musical influences. However, UK punk added reggae, which both opened up music to new forms of participation (notably by women) and helped transform punk into postpunk and New Pop, the latter being reimported back to the United States, where it constituted a second ‘British Invasion’ (Reynolds 2005: 340–3). However, most postpunk moved away from the mainstream, forming independent systems of production and distribution, focused

236

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

on local scenes and increasingly its own style of music – the rise of indie and, with it, a partial shift away from the UK/US dialectic – for example, New Zealand. But did the ‘independence’ of indie represent freedom or a regression into Brexit-style isolation? (Bannister 2006; Hesmondhalgh 1999; Reynolds 2005). The mid-1970s was marked by a sense of cultural and economic stagnation, as post-war prosperity faded. Baby boomers – the key demographic associated with rise of popular music in the 1950s and 1960s – grew up, and the ‘long sixties’ finally ended, as post-war consensus – a neo-Keynesian contract between governments, unions and businesses – broke down (Jameson 1984; Kavanagh 1990). London and New York, cradles of punk, experienced rampant inflation, unemployment, violent crime and social unrest, suffering periodic power blackouts, crippling strikes and urban decay. The photo essays of Roger Perry (1976) in London and Peter Hujar in New York attest to the grimness of the period. Many looked back to the 1960s for reassurance or to apportion blame. Punk rock got in first with its denunciation of ‘old hippies’; similarly, ‘the indie community saw what had happened to the Sixties dream … the baby boomers’ egregious sellout’ (Azerrad 2001: 7). But the Right also laid into the 1960s’ supposed excess and moral slackness, blaming it for a culture of state handouts, narcissism and drug-addled self-indulgence, and using this to justify drastic economic reform (MacDonald 1998: 1–4). Western societies were entering late modernity, marked by fragmentation, atomization and individualism – traditional social ties (family, religion) replaced by media and market relations – alienation was the new norm. Geoffrey Holtz (1995) argues that the 1970s saw a demonization of children and youth, in US popular culture especially. Films such as The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976) featured pathological children, Taxi Driver (1976) sexualized young women and the teenage vampire in George Romero’s Martin (1976) symbolized once-desirable youth consumption as pathological: ‘compulsive yet affectless, media-obsessed … living in a world self-fashioned out of the scattered detritus of consumer culture’ (Latham 2002: 75–6). Punk re-enacted these images of monstrous youth (Savage 2017).

Punk and art None of the above was news in the art world, which had been predicting social apocalypse since Dada in the First World War. Dada was nihilistic and provocative – its premise to incite audience riots (Marcus 1989). This in turn drove Situationism, associated with the 1968 student uprisings and influencing art school students and later punk band managers such as Malcom McLaren and Bernie Rhodes to turn spectacle (the static, apparently inevitable tableaux of consumer capitalism) into explosive situations or events (Marcus 1989; Savage 1992: 30–6). Meanwhile, in New York, Andy Warhol was becoming the most influential artist in the United

Time to DIY

States (Danto 2009). Though not political like Situationism, Warhol’s Factory and the New York art scene were increasingly cross-fertilizing with music at venues such as Max’s Kansas City, Mercer Arts Centre and CBGBs. Pop Art was becoming Art Pop. In the late 1960s, Warhol and his Factory entourage took up nightly residence in Max’s back room, which became legendary for exhibitionism, attracting all kinds of ‘leather and plastic freaks’ (Lillian Roxon, qtd in Mother of Rock, 2010): transsexuals, hookers, artists, journalists and intellectuals. ‘Max’s at that time was a kind of metaphor for what New York was becoming, and what would soon be impossible to sustain … After a while, you couldn’t fit fashion, poetry, rock and roll, art and movies in one place’ (Danny Fields, qtd in DeCurtis 2017: 104–5; McNeil and McCain 1996: 27). Australian journalist Lillian Roxon was instrumental in introducing musicians into the mix: ‘Thru Lillian’s and Danny’s patronage, I gained entry to the back room, and that was the moment when Max’s seemed to evolve from being a Warhol superstar hangout to more of a rock and roll thing’ (Lenny Kaye, qtd in Mother of Rock, 2010). Max’s regulars included William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, would-be glam rockers Marc Bolan and David Bowie (who paid homage to Warhol in song), Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Wayne County, the New York Dolls, Lenny Kaye, Debbie Harry (who waitressed there) and writers such as Roxon, Lester Bangs and Lisa Robinson (McNeil and McCain 1996): [Warhol superstar] Jackie [Curtis] was at the mirror … stoned on speed … she was putting on make-up … hitting herself so hard because she couldn’t feel anything, with her powder puff … and Jayne County looked up and said ‘Jackie, you’ll give yourself a black eye,’ and then she turned around … with red glitter on her lips, silver glitter on her eyes, her dyed red hair was all teased out … a ripped old lady dress held together with safety pins … runs in her stockings. And she … said ‘Ha! Ha! One day everyone will look like me!’ (Lee Black Childers, qtd in Mother of Rock, 2010)

Punk style developed under Warhol’s blank gaze, which took in sex, drugs, excess, TV, films, advertising, magazine, soup cans, newspapers, car crashes, Nazis, death, suicide and nuclear apocalypse and reduced them to a thin trickle of glitter, a surface play of signifiers. He incarnated the passive dupe of mass culture critique with a vengeance. He liked to watch, and his indifference incited spectacular acting-out in a postmodern ‘vicious’ circle that became part of the punk phenomenon (Frith and Horne 1987). Warhol’s ‘star’ persona was as important as his art: his child-like incoherence, mumbled monosyllabic responses, air of narcotic passivity and deathlike pallor were prototypes for the ‘put-ons’ of Lou Reed, Iggy and the Stooges, the Ramones and the punk bands that followed: ‘one of the things that makes the punk stance unique is how it seems to assume substance or at least style by the abdication of power: Look at me! I’m a cretinous little wretch! And proud of it!’ (Bangs 1987: 273; emphases in original). This persona was also queer or asexual: ‘Frigid people … really make out’

237

238

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

(Warhol 1977: 56), opening up rock culture to women, and allowing men to perform sexual ambiguity, notably the New York Dolls, who led the way from glam to punk rock. Women writers and performers shaped the budding punk rock culture – Ellen Willis, Lisa Robinson, Lillian Roxon, whose Rock Encyclopedia championed women performers and the New York scene, inspiring Patti Smith and Debbie Harry – while the all-male Rolling Stone panned Roxon’s book (Marcus 1970). Punk provided an important entry into the music world for British women too – for example, writers Caroline Coon, Jane Suck and Julie Burchhill. Warhol’s other musical coup was to discover and manage the Velvet Underground. Via member John Cale, they married the avant-garde minimalism of Steve Reich with the rhythms of rock music, thereby establishing a style of art rock quite distinct from its UK progressive counterparts. Ellen Willis (1996: 73) wrote (originally in 1978): There was a counter-tradition in rock and roll that had much more in common with high art – in particular avant-garde art – than the ballyhooed art-rock synthesis [progressive rock] … Using the basic formal canons of rock and roll as material (much as pop artists used mass art in general) and refining, elaborating, playing off that material to produce … rock-and-roll-art … [which] came out of an obsessive commitment to the language of rock and roll and … disdain for those who rejected that language or wanted it watered down … the new wave has inherited the counter-tradition.

Lou Reed’s lyrics took the 1960s rock counterculture’s sexual liberation to extremes – sadomasochism, homosexuality and perversion, observed with Warholian detachment, which Willis read as asceticism: ‘the self-conscious formalism of [Reed’s] music an attempt to purify rock’n’roll, to purge it of … material goodies and erotic good times’ (75). UK punk adopted this asceticism, resulting in ‘affirmation of a peculiarly joyless sort, for the new wave’s minimalist conception of rock and roll tends to exclude not only sensual pleasure but the entire range of positive human emotions’ (77). Here was punk’s negation – ‘Punks just like to be hated’ (Hebdige 1979: 117). Finally, as ‘the first important rock-and-roll artists who had no real chance of attracting a mass audience’ (Willis 1996: 96), the VU helped invent alternative rock. Punk’s precedents were often artistic or literary, Lenny Kaye curating Nuggets, a 1960s garage rock compilation that Lester Bangs and other writers at Creem, Dave Marsh and Greg Shaw, used as a blueprint for punk. They coined the term ‘punk rock’ which Bangs codified as assault, minimalism and youthful amateurism, counteracting progressive rock’s ‘maturity’, virtuosity and complexity (Gendron 2002: 235–6). As Warhol (1977: 82) said, ‘I can only understand really amateur performers … because whatever they do never really comes off, so … it can’t be phoney.’ Of all the New York groups, the Ramones were closest to Bangs’s ideal. Their cartoonish, moronic group persona, the simplicity and durability of their threechord rock, played at breakneck speed, with minimal instrumentation, gesture, ornamentation, lyrics or melody, were copied by punk bands worldwide. Patti Smith

Time to DIY

combined poetic gravitas with an androgynous image based on Keith Richards and Bob Dylan. The Patti Smith Group was the first female punk band to sign with a major record label and release an album, Horses (December 1975). Smith claimed: ‘I ain’t no women’s lib chick’ (Mc Neil and Mc Cain 1996: 114), but her persona enabled women’s participation in rock music. All the most commercially successful New York punk groups featured women, with Patti Smith, Blondie and Talking Heads setting a precedent for new wave, punk’s mainstream variant: the B-52s, the Pretenders, Lene Lovich, the Motels and Cyndi Lauper. Television was originally the project of Tom Miller (Verlaine) and Richard Meyers (Hell), who is credited with inventing the first distinctively punk look: ‘large fifties shades, leather jackets, torn T-shirts and short, ragamuffin hair’ (Savage 1992: 89). The punkiness of the band dissipated when Verlaine fired Hell (who formed the Voidoids); however, the distinctive interplay of Verlaine’s and Richard Lloyd’s brittle guitar lines influenced 1980s indie guitar rock (Reynolds 1989: 246). Hell was a more immediate influence on UK punk, with Malcolm McLaren borrowing his image for the Sex Pistols (McNeil and McCain 1996: 198). Finally, Talking Heads picked up on the quirkier elements of the Velvet Underground legacy, like Jonathan Richman, their ‘straight’-ness challenging rock Romanticism (and sexism), which still lingered in punk. Like Warhol, Talking Heads went to art school (Rhode Island School of Design), in common with many UK musicians from the Beatles onwards. According to Frith and Horne (1987: 124), ‘Punk rock was the ultimate art school movement music movement’, with UK punk artists who had attended art school, including Adam Ant, Viv Albertine, most of Wire, Glen Matlock (Sex Pistols), Lora Logic and Joe Strummer (The Clash).

UK punk US punk emerged out of bohemia, and with the few exceptions noted above, that is where it stayed – the United States was too large and conservative a market for a New York cult to make much immediate impression. The UK was smaller and more centralized, with a legacy of state control in broadcasting and a public service ethos, unlike the United States. In the early 1960s, the Beatles, borrowing US sounds, broke into the London-based national press and media and punk followed a similar trajectory, creating a media phenomenon based around its figurehead, the Sex Pistols. Most first-wave UK punk acts signed with major record labels, appearing on John Peel’s Radio 1 show,1 in the UK music press and on TV – such mass exposure was unlikely in the United States. The Beatles had represented a new, ‘workingclass’, youthful, upwardly mobile provincialism, heightening the visibility of the youth cultures – Teds, rockers, mods – written up in Dick Hebdige’s Subculture (1979). UK punk continued this class fascination, manifesting its difference through

239

240

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

increasingly outrageous style and behaviour via national media, inciting shock and moral panic. Indeed ‘gaze’, implying projection of desire onto an object or Other, is a useful metaphor for UK punk, and Hebdige was frequently accused of wishing punk into existence: ‘Authentic subcultures were produced by subcultural theorists, not the other way round’ (Redhead 1990: 25). Like Malcolm McLaren, both were ‘in love with the myth of the working-class, barely articulate Rock star’ (Nick Kent, qtd in Savage 1992: 71). Simon Frith (1981: 158) remarked that punk was a god-send to left-wing academics because it ‘revived the hopes of rock’s original, 1960s dreamers’. However, Hebdige did highlight the ability of youth cultures to appropriate mass culture to articulate identity – something that was already McLaren’s stock-in-trade. In the early 1970s, with partner and clothes designer Vivienne Westwood, McLaren was running Let It Rock, a clothes shop for teds – at this point McLaren preferred 1950s rock’n’roll to 1960s garage rock. As Chrissie Hynde (2015: 156) remarks, ‘The English kept a tribal thing going indefinitely.’ In 1973, McLaren visited New York and through clothes connections met Sylvain Sylvain of the New York Dolls (who pioneered spandex trousers), also partying with the Max’s crowd (Savage 1992). After a failed attempt to manage the Dolls, McLaren started looking for musicians, hoping to reproduce the US scene in London. The shop, by now rebranded SEX and selling bondage gear and Westwood’s proto-punk creations, attracted shoplifter Steve Jones and sidekick Paul Cook, employees Glen Matlock and punk fashion icon Jordan, whose provocative appearance established punk fans as just as outrageous as band members. The Sex Pistols’ name came from a 1974 McLaren t-shirt – both provocative and advertorial for the shop, it listed ‘hates’ and ‘loves’, with ‘Kutie Jones and his Sex Pistols’ in the latter category (Savage 1992: 84). McLaren aimed to polarize people, get a reaction and then sell things, similar to Warhol. SEX’s aesthetic was shock and negation. Reproducing taboo imagery – pornography, paedophilia, Nazi insignia – created outrage; McLaren and Westwood were fined for obscenity in 1975 (103). But punk subculture refused the customary connection between sign and meaning. Wearing swastikas did not mean that punks were fascists, just as wearing bondage gear did not mean they were sexy – or perhaps it did. Punks did not care, echoing Warhol’s indifference. ‘The symbol was as “dumb” as the rage it provoked’ (Hebdige 1979: 117). John Lydon aka Rotten completed the group. ‘I … saw Rotten’s ability to create image around himself … [he] was just an arrogant little shit’ (McLaren qtd in Savage 1992: 121). Rotten’s eclectic, art school tastes for reggae, Krautrock and obscure English progressive/experimental rock put him at odds with McLaren and the band but proved important to postpunk (Reynolds 2005: 15–17). UK punk’s association with reggae via skinhead culture and the UK’s expatriate Black Jamaican population set it apart from US punk, also sundering the historic connection of UK rock with US Black music. The Clash covered Junior Murvin’s ‘Police and Thieves’

Time to DIY

and wrote about reggae all-nighters on ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’ while simultaneously being ‘bored with the USA’. On 1 December 1976, punk became a matter of national interest when the Pistols swore on Bill Grundy’s Today on Thames TV: ‘The interview lasted all of one minute 40 seconds but … Grundy both managed to sketch in the popular stereotype of punk and to expose himself as envious, patronizing and vulgar’ (Laing 2015: 49–50). The national newspapers blew the story up, creating the Situationist ‘event’ McLaren craved, although his initial reaction was panic (Savage 1992: 264). Neither this nor the successive firing of the group from EMI or A&M Records was engineered by McLaren – he and the band were riding the storm of negative publicity, in which the media magnified reactions they themselves incited, as in Grundy’s infamous ‘Go on, you’ve got another ten seconds. Say something outrageous’ (qtd in Savage 1992: 259). The paradox of the Pistols was that the less they played, the more famous they became – most of their concerts were banned, but the bans created more publicity. In postmodern fashion, mediation outstripped immediacy. However, punk’s greatest impact was at the other end of the media scale, with the growth of fanzines, DIY punk art and fashion, and independently produced music, everyone getting their Warholian ‘15 minutes’ of fame (Guinn and Perry 2005: 4, 364–5; Teal 2006). Writing in 1981, Simon Frith analysed three claims about UK punk – its representation of working-class youth consciousness, its questioning of musical meaning and its apparent challenge to capitalist control of mass music. Contra subcultural theory, Frith (1981: 158) suggested that punks were too arty and selfaware to simply reflect ‘real’ social conditions. Indeed, much of the ‘realism’ of punk came down to musical conventions, basically Bangs’s punk aesthetic: ‘ugly versus pretty, harsh versus soothing, energy versus art’, raw (simple lyrics, ‘a three chord lack of technique, a “primitive” beat, spontaneous performance) versus cooked (poetry, virtuosity, technical complexity, big-studio production)’ (158–9). Punk’s seizing of the means of production, argued Frith, drew on 1960s countercultural discourses of ‘small is beautiful’ and DIY independence. Independent label Rough Trade Records, Frith argued, was merely the new Virgin Records, which, ironically, had signed both the Pistols and Mike Oldfield (159). Both artists were, in their time, both commercially and artistically, risky signings. Punk labels were informed by the 1960s Romantic commerce/creativity split, but their parricidal tendencies meant disavowal of these countercultural ‘roots’. While admitting that early punk had a shock effect, Frith concluded that the genre was ‘constricted by its realist claims’ (160). This led to a split between conservative, populist punk like Oi!, which followed the minimalist template, and avant-garde postpunk, pioneered by groups such as Wire and PIL (161). This paralleled the split in indie between a politicized, postpunk approach and a US punk-based classicism, redefining ‘realism’ in terms of local authenticity and a restricted canon, which became central to 1980s indie rock.

241

242

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Women in punk Women were empowered by punk’s combination of DIY and androgyny/asexuality, taken to new extremes in the UK. According to Richard Hell (2013: 232), ‘The British punk culture seemed strangely asexual … for the most part the relations between boys and girls seemed infantile … it seemed to be bad form to regard each other as sexual prospects.’ Viv Albertine (2014: 114) said, ‘Full-on sex isn’t … popular, anti-emotion is the prevailing doctrine.’ Punk puritanism reacted to the 1960s counterculture’s association of rock with sexuality: ‘You never see Vivienne [Westwood] and Malcolm [McLaren] touch or kiss and I think that’s set the tone for how we all behave in our relationships’ (128). Albertine also notes that Westwood was ‘strong, opinionated … although the clothes she wears are daring, there’s something about her that’s quite puritan and austere’ (126–7). US punk acts such as the Heartbreakers and Wayne County played rock’n’roll – rolling swing or boogie rhythms and blues guitar solos referencing Black US music, which white audiences still associated with sexuality. British punk was more stark and alienated, avoiding blues influences (Reynolds 2005: 3), an idea that originated with the US band Velvet Underground (Willis 1996). But UK punk took it further, its amateurism deglamorizing rock performance. Viv Albertine (2014: 106) notes that ‘Sid [Vicious] says “I’ll be in a band with you.” This is an extraordinary thing for a guy to say.’ But Vicious dropped her, eventually joining the Pistols. Chrissie Hynde (2015: 172) reports a similar experience with Mick Jones of the Clash. It was not until Albertine found like-minded women that she could form a group – the Slits – and write songs. Women’s groups such as the Slits and the Raincoats departed from Bangs’s punk aesthetic of minimal assault, moving towards postpunk, with its questioning of standard rock tropes and incorporation of reggae and dance music (Frith 1981: 162–3). Viv Albertine (2014: 207–8) said, ‘I’m moving away from the buzzsaw industrial whine … [I’m] influenced by Steve Cropper … Dionne Warwick records and reggae guitar playing … None of it has a distorted, rocky guitar sound … [which] felt masculine and unappealing.’ The Slits’ first album, Cut (1979), was produced by reggae producer Dennis Bovell and influenced later UK women’s groups such as Delta 5 and the Au Pairs. Chrissie Hynde took a different approach. Although, like Albertine, she hung out at SEX, she ‘did not want to be a solo, a singer-songwriter … or do anything… other than [be] … part of a band setup’ with men (Hynde 2015: 212). Hynde wanted to avoid the ‘solo’ tag because she would be objectified and her musical talent ignored (Green 1997). Rather, she wanted to be ‘one of the boys’. Like Patti Smith, her heroes were male – ‘if Lemmy [of Motörhead] wouldn’t do it, don’t ask me’ (qtd in the documentary Girls Will Be Girls, 2014). Her band, The Pretenders, exemplifies how punk and postpunk revitalized the mainstream, which absorbed many postpunk innovations

Time to DIY

such as reggae influence (The Police, Culture Club, 2-Tone); new technologies such as synthesizers and drum machines (Scritti Politti); women’s involvement (The Human League, The Thompson Twins, New Order, Eurythmics, Altered Images, Yazoo); and emphasis on visual style, which found its ideal outlet with the rise of MTV. Finally, some of the original punk bands, such as Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees, influenced postpunk movements such as goth. Many became associated with ‘new pop’, a danceoriented, highly visual pop/rock music that led to a mid-1980s resurgence in UK popularity in the United States, a second ‘British invasion’ (Reynolds 2005: 340).

Independent record labels The Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP (New Hormones, January 1977) and the Desperate Bicycles (Refill Records, August 1977) may not have been the first independent punk release (this generally being credited to Australian band the Saints’ ‘I’m Stranded’ (Fatal Records, September 1976)), but they were the first to foreground the production process (a record is literally a spiral scratch), and the Bicycles’ DIY motto ‘it was easy, it was cheap – go and do it!’ featured on a number of their early releases. Rough Trade, a London record shop, started its own label in 1978 and also inaugurated a distribution network (Cavanagh 2000). Publicity was supplied by John Peel, and by 1980 an independent music chart featured in the weekly music papers (Cavanagh 2000: 61): Postpunk companies, often started by musicians or by record shop owners, saw independents as a means of reconciling the commercial nature of pop with the goal of artistic autonomy for musicians. Creative autonomy from commercial restraint is a theme which has often been used to mystify artistic production by making the isolated genius the hero of cultural myth. Indie, however … made significant challenges to the commercial organization of cultural production favoured by the major record companies. (Hesmondhalgh 1999: 35)

David Hesmondhalgh argues that indie labels were split between those with a political agenda, such as One Little Indian, and labels ‘built very much around a set of aesthetic concerns: in particular, a reverence for a certain “classic” pop/rock canon’ (36), such as Creation. This split parallels that between postpunk and punk mentioned above and has ramifications for the identity politics of what was to become known as indie. Ironically, some of the most politicized groups/labels sought commercial success or ‘sold out’ from an indie perspective. Scritti Politti experimented with post-Marxism and anarchism before concluding that the way forward was to deconstruct pop music discourse, subverting it from within, rather than resisting from outside like punk/ indie, thus fulfilling Andy Warhol’s (1977: 92) postmodern prediction that ‘good business is the best art’ (Reynolds 2005: 316–17). Such ‘new pop’ groups made glossy, digitized, dance music that ‘classicist’ indie defined itself against.

243

244

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Punk had originated in cities which were also centres of the record industry – hence many punk bands signed to major labels and gained publicity and notoriety from being close to media production centres. Indie saw, to some degree, a decentralization of music-making, the creation of independent networks of production, performance and distribution, a musical style and a rhetoric of ‘peripheral’ authenticity over centralized commercialism (Kruse 2003: 1). In the 1960s, independent labels such as Stax in Memphis had injected soul music into the mainstream, reversing the traditional showbiz narrative of migration to the centre. ‘Hicks from the Sticks’ (Rockburgh Records, 1980), as the title of an early UK indie compilation ironically put it, were becoming the self-proclaimed future of rock music. For acts on these labels, signing to a major label equated to artistic failure: ‘Virtually every band did their best … work during their indie years … once they went to a major label, an important connection to the underground community was invariably lost’ (Azerrad 2001: 5). Examples of 1980s indie scenes included Manchester and Liverpool in the UK (Cohen 1991), Minneapolis, Athens, Georgia and Seattle, Washington in the United States (Azerrad 2001) and Dunedin in New Zealand (Bannister 2006), each associated with independent record labels. If punk was revolution, indie was devolution: setting up alternative systems at a more local level. This definition could suggest insularity, and scenes were often imagined as isolated: ‘Independent rock and roll does not present itself as a challenge … to the dominant culture … It seeks to escape, to define a space which neither impinges upon nor is impinged upon by the hegemony: “we want our world” ’ (Grossberg 1984: 241). Geoff Travis, founder of Rough Trade, comments: ‘We were happy in our own world … the real world’s taste is so terrible’ (qtd in Stanley 2015: 434). But isolation can also mean exclusion, and the ‘rules’ that bound the supposedly oppositional space may reproduce hierarchical discourses. Certainly, punk ‘realism’ and the US punk aesthetic posited a relatively unproblematic correspondence between life and music while at the same time exerting a strong, even paternalistic grip on what counted as music, excluding many of the Black and female influences of postpunk.

Indie According to Simon Reynolds (2005: 391), ‘ “Independent” had once been a neutral term indicating a record’s conditions of production and distribution. By 1985, “indie” referred to a musical genre … with increasingly narrow parameters.’ Reynolds argues that the independents’ creative impetus had dissipated (in the UK, at any rate) – or, in Hesmondhalgh’s terms, the ‘classicists’ had won out over postpunk political awareness. Indie replaced the future orientation of postpunk with a retro aesthetic, ‘record collection rock’, citing mainly white 1960s sounds (Reynolds 2005: 393). At the same time, Reynolds acknowledged a certain ‘uptight’-ness in postpunk,

Time to DIY

compared with the comparative abandon of 1960s music, and argued that the ‘best’ new bands such as R.E.M. evinced a ‘dreamy yearning’ (392). This he set against the ‘C86’ UK indie bands (named after a New Musical Express cassette giveaway), which he described as the ‘stunted remnant’ of punk, and accused of ‘shortsighted, dogged adherence’ to punk realism – literal-minded, parochially local, purist, puritan and incompetent ‘regressive rock’ (Reynolds 1990: 39). Indie opposed contemporary mainstream music: ‘glossy, guitar-free, blackinfluenced, soulfully strong-voiced, dance-oriented, high-tech, and ultra-modern … [and] made a fetish of the opposite characteristics: scruffy guitars, White-only sources, weak or “pale” folk-based vocals, undanceable rhythms, lo-fi or Luddite production, and a retro (usually sixties) slant’ (Reynolds 2005: 391). Stylistic innovation or resistance became less important than authenticity to local places and a restricted, punk-based canon. The New Zealand indie scene, which created the Dunedin Sound, is discussed below in terms of these tensions (Brown 1983; Churton 2000; McLeay 1994; Mills 2016; Robertson 1991). Record shops, typically run by older men with large private record collections, were a common feature of 1980s indie scenes. Some of them wanted to ‘educate’ their customers; some started record labels: Geoff Travis and Rough Trade (Kruse 2003: 51–5; Cavanagh 2000: 37–42); Alan McGee and Creation (Hesmondhalgh 1999: 45–50). In Minneapolis, record shop owner Peter Jesperson educated local bands, notably the Replacements, making sure ‘they were aware only of the finest musical influences’, also co-running an independent label, Twin/Tone (Azerrad 2001: 200). Wuxtry Records in Athens, Georgia, provided a focus for the B-52s and R.E.M. – the latter’s guitarist Peter Buck would ‘spend hours in listening sessions, dissecting, analyzing, categorizing, and playing’ with store co-owner Dan Wall (Buckley 2002: 11). R.E.M.’s manager Jefferson Holt also owned a record shop (40–1). In Brisbane, Australia, the Go-Betweens released initially on Able, a label run by Toowong Music Centre proprietor Damien Nelson (Nichols 2003: 53–5). Writing of R.E.M., David Buckley (2002: 5) states, ‘A great rock group … needed not just a sexy singer, a great virtuoso, or a sussed marketing scam … It needed a pop historian’ (emphasis in original). In Dunedin, second-hand record shop owner and music journalist Roy Colbert emulated punk journalists such as Lester Bangs, while supplying local musicians with taped copies of Nuggets and Velvet Underground albums. Writers were also important in alternative music as exposure via commercial radio play was unlikely.

The Dunedin Sound In line with Reynolds’s argument, the Dunedin Sound (and its associated record label Flying Nun, New Zealand’s best-known independent) became an indie ‘hit’ because

245

246

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

it was so retro. Its relative isolation made it a time capsule of classic 1960s influences, which by the mid-1980s had become the acme of indie hipness. The scene, initially comprising bands such as the Clean, the Chills, the Verlaines, the Stones and Sneaky Feelings, was so far behind the times it was contemporary again: I remember Chris Knox saying to me, ‘It will be interesting what people think of this, because it’s backwards, nothing new, it’s kind of 60s. People will wonder what this is.’ They weren’t breaking new ground, or they weren’t copying Auckland, and it was interesting that people found it original … It’s … essentially music that had been done. (Roy Colbert, qtd in Mills 2016)

Both participants were influential, Colbert as discussed above, Knox as leader of Dunedin’s first punk band, the Enemy, and a key player in the fledgling Flying Nun record label. Clearly both were sceptical about the scene’s archivalism; both (but especially Knox) were also committed to the US punk aesthetic, Frith’s ‘punk realism’ and arguably Reynolds’s ‘regressive rock’ and associated practices of DIY amateurism and independence. ‘When punk rock exploded, Knox was already a good bit older than its target market, so he was able to absorb what it really stood for – DIY authenticity, not spiky hair and Dr Martens boots. The Enemy … influenced a generation of would-be punks, making Knox a punk godfather’ (Steel 2013). The presence of older, mentor figures in indie music scenes suggests that music is not a spontaneous youth creation, and the fact that these mentors were almost always (white) men has implications for these scenes’ identity politics. Finally, it suggests a natural ‘patrilineage’ by which indie is born out of punk, in turn encouraging a selective canon of ‘pure’ influences. Both Colbert and Knox have been described as ‘Godfather of the Dunedin Sound’ (Mills 2016). Realism posits a ‘natural’ fit between locale and culture. Accounts of the Dunedin Sound equate physical isolation with musical creativity: ‘generated through a cultural geography of living on the margin, “producing a mythology of a group of musicians working in cold isolation, playing music purely for the pleasure of it” ’ (Shuker 1998: 103–4, quoting McLeay 1994: 39). A similar rhetoric occurs with other indie scenes, for example, Seattle: ‘isolation was … why we could come up with such an original sound’ (Prato 2009: 13). Accounts of both scenes point out the primary influence of punk rock (Anderson 2007: 12; McLeay 1994: 41; Prato 2009: 47, 105). Craig Robertson (1991: 19) characterizes the Dunedin scene as based not on ‘fashion’ punk (based on appearance) but rather on its DIY ethos. The scene was marked by a lack of division between audience and performer, valuing ‘dirty’ over clean art, and simplicity over complexity, the same binaries described by Frith (1981: 158; see also Robertson 1991: 39, 35–6, 49). Robertson (1991: 9) claims the Dunedin scene valued an extemporized approach – ‘just doing it’ – effectively naturalizing punk ideology (see also Churton 2000). Punk rock’s dismissal of the past – ‘It was like ditching your record collection and starting all over again’ (Shepherd 2016: 35) – reinforces the

Time to DIY

perception of autonomy. Finally, and unlike Seattle, none of the Dunedin bands went on to mainstream success, thus guaranteeing their cult status as envisaged by punk and indie discourses of creative practice. The isolation/creativity argument usually has a second strand, however, which is that isolation gives time and space to reflect, hence the Dunedin Sound ‘was rather insular at its inception, influences were largely internal … because trends took so long to get here, people tended not to jump on them’ (Graeme Downes of the Verlaines; qtd in Mills 2016). ‘Picking up a few ideas from a fashionable overseas band was no substitute for the long simmering of ideas, sounds, styles and nuances … that the Clean had distilled’ (Shepherd 2016: 69). A final strand here is authenticity – the association of music with a local place isolated from commercial trends guaranteed ‘music that was honest and real’ (Prato 2009: 8); ‘the sound of honesty’ (Martin Phillipps of the Chills; qtd in Mills 2016). Even climate apparently contributes: ‘Dunedin has a cold, drizzly atmosphere over half the year. So, you generally stayed inside and practised, and made a lot of music’ (Martin Phillipps; qtd in Mills 2016). Similarly, in Seattle, ‘it’s rainy … all the time, so … people are going to stay in their basements and play loud rock music’ (Anderson 2007: 10–11). The same could also be said for Liverpool and Manchester. The essential point was that these melting pots produced ‘new’ music – the Dunedin sound and grunge, and indie labels to market it (Flying Nun and Sub Pop). It is worth noting, however, that Flying Nun was a Christchurch label, so the Dunedin Sound was mediated through the ears of its founder, Roger Shepherd, who by releasing four bands on the Dunedin Double EP (1982) effectively created the idea of a Dunedin scene. Likewise, Subpop mediated grunge: ‘ “Our bands are all lumberjacks,” [label owner] Jonathan Poneman declared. “Or they painted bridges.” And if they didn’t, Sub Pop made it seem like they did’ (Azerrad 2001: 441–2). New Zealand’s first punk independent label was Ripper Records, which released AK79 (1979), a compilation LP of Auckland punk and postpunk bands. Propeller Records, formed in 1980, released more Auckland groups that showed a UK postpunk influence – Blam Blam Blam’s fidgety guitar, angular melodies and use of reggae rhythms recalled early Scritti Politti; the Features sounded a bit like PIL. Later postpunk-influenced Auckland bands included Children’s Hour (Joy Division, early New Order), the Car Crash Set (the Passage) and the Newmatics (ska, 2 Tone). The idea of an ‘Auckland sound’ did not take off because the bands were too diverse, too obviously influenced by postpunk, and because Auckland was already the centre of the local record industry. Wellington’s Beat Rhythm Fashion borrowed the Cure’s flanged guitar sound and dreamy atmosphere, whereas Naked Spots Dance were more like the Raincoats. Christchurch groups such as the Pin Group (Flying Nun’s first ‘signing’) channelled Joy Division (again). UK postpunk was influential everywhere, except in Dunedin. Why did Dunedin bands not defer to postpunk? All the other main centres had record shops that imported independent music, mainly from the UK. But in Dunedin, there was only Roy Colbert’s second-hand store. Dunedin also

247

248

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

lacked student radio – Radio One did not start until 1984. NZ student radio (Radio Active in Wellington, Radio B in Auckland, Radio U in Christchurch), like US college radio, was the only alternative music programming. Finally, the influence of older scene members, such as Knox and Colbert, dominated discourse about the scene, attempting to keep the bands on a tight leash, with varying degrees of success. Most Dunedin bands went on to record in large, professional studios, and some had hopes of mainstream success, such as the Verlaines, the Chills and Sneaky Feelings (a group which the author was a member of), but they had to beware of Knox snapping at their heels about ‘selling out’. The Enemy are generally cited as the beginning of the Dunedin Sound, although the group was short-lived, spent little time in Dunedin as a working group and never recorded (Dix 1988; Mills 2016). Vocalist Chris Knox’s influence was both practical (he owned a four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder on which most early Flying Nun releases were recorded) and ideological: I did get reasonably well known for sort of drunkenly and stonedly going up to bands and saying ‘aw for chrissakes you gotta stop playing that song, that song and that song, and you gotta get rid of that bloody bass player.’ I’d like to think I was the Jiminy Cricket, sort of conscience on the back of the Pinocchio that was Flying Nun. I tried to keep things pure. (Chris Knox, qtd in Hawkes 2002)

Because many indie labels were initially more ‘artistically’ than commercially driven, aesthetic preferences were central: ‘the whole thing is just my taste’ (Alan McGee of Creation Records, qtd in DeRogatis 1996: 221; Hesmondhalgh 1999: 46). In the United States, Homestead Records (later Matador) head Gerard Cosloy (who also edited indie fanzine Conflict) was notorious for his vehement views on correct musical practice (Arnold 1995: 37; 118–21; Azerrad 2001: 326–7). Such figures played an important role in ‘policing’ the purity of the genre. Purity meant the US punk canon, which tended to exclude non-white influences and women. In 1983, journalist Russell Brown of NZ music paper Rip It Up and Chris Knox discussed a ‘lineage … the Velvets, John Cale, The Saints, Wire, The Stooges, The Birthday Party and authors like William Burroughs … who have tried to describe the White Man’s Condition … it is soul music in the sense of the white man’s soul’ (emphasis added). Knox responded by describing Dunedin band the Stones as ‘plugged into the white man’s heartbeat’ (Brown 1983: 12). The tendency to reproduce a ‘white’ canon is evident in indie discographies and overviews (Strong 1999; Thompson 2000). Reynolds describes UK indie music as ‘whiter than white “pure pop” ’, influenced by the ‘pure [original emphasis] voices of Syd Barrett, Roger McGuinn, Arthur Lee [sic]’ (Reynolds 1990: 23; 1989: 247). This implied a similar canon to other indie scenes: ‘strictly albino roots like the Velvet Underground, Television, The Byrds, psychedelia, folk, country’ (Reynolds 1989: 246; see also Cavanagh 2000: 228). Some US indie fanzine writing was blatantly racist – for example, Gerard Cosloy

Time to DIY

in Conflict: ‘Only thing in this world that’s worse than listening to some spliffed-out moron who ain’t washed his hair in three years singing “I love Jah” is watching white college students throw frisbees around to the strains of the above Rasta fool’ (qtd in Arnold 1995: 120) and US hardcore scenes were also accused of racism (Azerrad 2001: 141). Chris Knox handed over his NZ Listener record column to a guest to review dub, funk and reggae, and Colbert segregated black music in a separate bin from rock music, which occupied pride of place (Bannister 1999: 21; Knox 1985). Funk-influenced Auckland postpunk bands often received a hostile reception in the South Island (Churton 2000: 251). The Dunedin scene was mainly young white men. It was not until 1985 that allwoman Dunedin band Look Blue Go Purple released a record on Flying Nun. If punk (briefly) opened opportunities for women, ‘classicist’ indie tended towards conservatism (as noted above, bands with women seemed to have more commercial appeal, which was taboo in indie). Mary Ann Clawson (1999) notes the prominence of woman bass players in indie (Dunedin examples include Jane Dodd of the Chills and the Verlaines, and Kat Tyrie of Sneaky Feelings), suggesting that female participation was offset by the instrument’s low status compared to the guitar, which was associated with songwriting and leadership. Bass could also connect to gendered ideologies about feminine bodies, rhythm and maternal groundedness (Clawson 1999). Lauren Goodlad (2003: 138) argues that indie practised ‘a kind of antisexist sexism … dominated by male musicians, prone to appropriating “femininity” as a male aesthetic credential, rather than to empowering women’. Indie purism/punk minimalism was also enforced through technological Ludditism, turning necessity (outdated or minimal technology) into virtue (directness/honesty). Knox (1991: 72) claimed to use ‘only one mike and my only effect is an antique plate reverb … used very sparingly’. He can be read as a punk ‘realist’, with a modernist ‘form follows function’ approach: ‘Music should be unadorned so as to communicate directly with the audience … the fewer steps between performer and audience the better’ (72). Permissible mediation is limited to electric guitars ‘following the root chords pretty religiously’ (73). Knox contrasts punk lo-fi honesty with both mainstream pop’s ‘sugary hooks’ and progressive rock virtuosity: ‘Get a bunch of real musos in the studio and each will be bursting to show how empathic they are with the song … the vast majority of songs are chokka with unnecessary distractions, there purely because someone thought they’d add to the song (man)’ (72; original emphases). Illustrating the article is a Knox cartoon with the legend ‘Join the Luddites against Technology’. In the Dunedin scene, guitar effects pedals, such as chorus or delay, essential to postpunk music, were generally frowned upon, as were transistorized amplifiers, electronic drums, synthesizers and sequencers. Vintage equipment, such as valve amps and old guitars, was approved. Reverberation (but not echo) was a preferred effect, in common with other indie scenes (Bannister 1999: 72; Cavanagh 2000: 175). Such practices are clearly about

249

250

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

authenticity, identifying on the one hand with ‘tradition’ and on the other with an ideal of unmediated sound, of ‘real’ performance or direct expression, which derived from punk and folk, both of which claimed to value immediacy and honesty above technological polish. Such discourses could also apply in the studio, where a ‘live’ sound, captured on simple technology, was preferable (hence the importance of Knox’s four-track recorder). ‘Lo-fi’ eventually became an indie genre, associated with recording on cassette tapes. Quick, rough recordings proved authenticity and independence: ‘Getting records to sound clean is expensive and time-consuming, but recording on an eight-track and turning everything up … is quick, easy’ (Anderson 2007: 24). Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade’s twenty-five tracks were recorded in forty-five hours, ‘at least twenty-one of them first takes’ (Azerrad 2001: 181). Clearly such statistics imply an immediacy and urgency that inform readings of the band’s music. Ideas of purism and authenticity also informed performance personae: indie acts generally practiced ‘dressing down, a minimum display of musical prowess, and a deliberate muting of charisma’ (Hesmondhalgh 1999: 38) to counter mainstream norms of extravagant performance, whether contemporary pop music’s emphasis on visual style or ‘rockist’ performances of machismo (Morley 2006). Caught between contemporary pop and 1970s rock, indie performance was tightly bounded – little surprise that it gave rise to ‘shoegaze’. As indie continued through the 1980s, US scenes became increasingly dominant (some Flying Nun acts signed with US indies in the early 1990s). The US scene moved towards late 1960s/early 1970s influences (e.g. Black Sabbath in the Seattle scene), and the music got louder, slower and more distorted (Reynolds 2005: 394), influencing later Dunedin acts such as Straitjacket Fits, Snapper and the 3Ds, as well as the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and shoegaze in the UK. US groups such as Butthole Surfers and Steve Albini’s Big Black also favoured confrontational stage presentation and taboo lyrical topics, influenced by the late 1970s New York No Wave scene, which was postpunk at its most radical and nihilistic, producing ‘heavy’ groups like the Swans, extreme performance artists like Lydia Lunch and artier variations, of which Sonic Youth was the longest lasting and most influential. As in New Zealand, punk (US hardcore) was frequently cited as inspiring acts like Hüsker Dü, the Replacements (both from Minneapolis), Dinosaur Jr., the Minutemen, Fugazi and the Pixies (Azerrad 2001). US hardcore, developed in California and Washington, DC, in the early 1980s, developed distinctive lifestyle philosophies such as ‘straight edge’, associated with Washington band Minor Threat, whose leader, Ian MacKaye, went on to form Fugazi (Azerrad 2001). MacKaye counselled avoidance of drugs and alcohol, and over time hardcore became associated with veganism and even sexual abstinence (Haenfler 2006). More overtly resistive than other indie scenes, it was also more conformist, its stress on self-reliance echoing the contemporary right-wing philosophy of Reagan. Its stress on masculinity, violence and sometimes misogyny was criticized – for example, by riot grrrls (Downes 2012). Nevertheless, hardcore

Time to DIY

scenes have spread globally and have proved durable (Martin-Iverson 2014; Rohrer 2014). This may be because hardcore’s DIY ethos has proved adaptable to different times, places and media, such as the ‘participatory cultures’ associated with the internet (Jenkins et al. 2005). The success of Nirvana’s second album Nevermind (1991), dragging in its wake other grunge acts such as Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, was the first example of an indie scene enjoying substantial mainstream success. Partly in reaction to this, UK Britpop brought indie-styled guitar-based pop/rock back into the charts: Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Supergrass, Suede, Radiohead and Elastica. Notably both Seattle grunge and Britpop drew on the discourse of localism, now entrenched as a guarantee of indie authenticity, though almost all acts were on major labels – ‘indie’ was now only a sound. With few exceptions (Elastica), these were groups of white males, and some saw in Britpop ‘the assertion of a white, male, heterosexual Englishness … [and] a conservative reaction to the changes that were transforming Britain in the 1990s’ (Stratton and Bennett 2010: 6). The main exception to this trend was riot grrrl, an early 1990s ‘collective of young White women, involved in the punk subcultures of Olympia, Washington and Washington, D.C., [who] constructed a punk-feminist subculture’ (Downes 2012: 209). Their music was influenced by punk, but with a postfeminist emphasis on traditionally ‘girly’ imagery: ‘riot grrrl … was a reclamation of taboo imagery or things that were considered not feminist, but trying to reclaim those and say … We can be cutesy and girly … but we still should have rights and … be taken seriously’ (Allison Wolfe, qtd in Downes 2012: 211). In the UK, the riot grrrl scene seemed beholden to C86 UK indie groups such as the Pastels, the Shop Assistants and Talulah Gosh, emphasizing ‘cutey’, ‘twee’ and androgynous style, providing a riposte to Reynolds’s dismissal of this phase of indie (Downes 2012: 211). Finally, indie influenced the late 1990s garage rock revival – for example, the White Stripes (from Detroit), the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (from New York) and the Dandy Warhols (Los Angeles).

Conclusion In a period marked by a number of musical revolutions (hip-hop, EDM, world music), punk/indie has increasingly been affiliated with conservatism and the canonization of ‘rock’ music. Lists of great albums are dominated by white male artists who either influenced punk/indie (the Beatles, David Bowie, Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Love, the Who) or punk/indie artists themselves. Rolling Stone’s Top 50 includes the Clash’s London Calling, the Ramones’ first album, the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks and U2’s The Joshua Tree, with Patti Smith’s Horses being the only punk album by a woman (Rolling Stone 2012). The US/UK dialectic has become increasingly US dominated, and the appropriation of US Black music by white UK acts is largely

251

252

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

historical. The indie production/distribution networks of the 1980s are now largely superseded by the internet, which (depending on how you look at it) democratizes musical production/distribution, or supersedes it by offering an almost limitless choice of basically free music. It may not be, as Decca executive Dick Rowe once advised the Beatles, ‘that groups of guitars are on the way out’ (Davies 1969: 146), but they are only one option available to music listeners now. ‘Indie’ has become an allpurpose epithet for any new media that is not obviously mainstream – indie film, indie media, indie fashion, though, similar to hipsters, today’s indie practitioners typically look forward by looking back, preferring analogue authenticity to digital flash. Punk aesthetics and lifestyles have proved durable, often joining with lifestyle movements such as veganism, eco-awareness, feminist/queer movements, anti-capitalism and even religion (Christianity, Islam, Hare Krishna). Hardcore has spread worldwide, a readymade, DIY form of mostly youthful anti-establishment-ism that increasingly incorporates a range of musical genres, from grindcore to math rock. As the t-shirt says, old punks never die – they just stand at the back.

Note 1 John Peel’s late-night show on state broadcaster BBC Radio 1 gave a huge range of alternative music a national voice from 1967 to 2004.

References Albertine, V. (2014). Clothes Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys. London: Faber and Faber. Anderson, K. (2007). Accidental Revolution: The Story of Grunge. New York: St Martin’s. Arnold, G. (1995). On the Road to Nirvana. London: Pan. Azerrad, M. (2001). Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981–1991. Boston: Little, Brown. Bangs, L. (1987). Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. New York: Vintage. Bannister, M. (1999). Positively George Street: Sneaky Feelings and the Dunedin Sound. Auckland: Reed. Bannister, M. (2006). White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and Indie Guitar Rock. Aldershot: Ashgate. Brown, R. (1983). ‘Stone Free’. Rip It Up, June, 12. Buckley, D. (2002). R.E.M. Fiction: An Alternative Biography. London: Virgin. Cavanagh, D. (2000). The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes are Hungry for the Prize. London: Virgin. Churton, W. (2000). ‘Have You Checked the Children?’ Punk and Post-punk Music in New Zealand, 1977–1981. Christchurch: Put Your Foot Down.

Time to DIY

Clawson, M. (1999). ‘When Women Play the Bass: Instrument Specialization and Gender Interpretation in Alternative Rock Music’. Gender & Society, 13(2): 193–210. Cohen, S. (1991). Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon. Danto, A. (2009). ‘Andy Warhol’. New York Times, 11 December. Available online: https://www.nyti​mes.com/2009/12/13/books/exce​rpt-andy-war​hol.html (accessed 4 June 2019). Davies, H. (1969). The Beatles: The Authorized Biography. St Albans: Granada. DeCurtis, A. (2017). Lou Reed: A Life. London: John Murray. DeRogatis, J. (1996). Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Rock from the 60s to the 90s. Citadel: Secaucus. Dix, J. (1988). Stranded in Paradise: New Zealand Rock’n’roll 1955–1988. Auckland: Paradise. Downes, J. (2012). ‘The Expansion of Punk Rock: Riot Grrrl Challenges to Gender Power Relations in British Indie Music Subcultures’. Women’s Studies, 41(2): 204–37. Frith, S. (1981). Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll. New York: Pantheon. Frith, S., and H. Horne (1987). Art into Pop. London: Methuen. Gendron, B. (2002). Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodlad, L. (2003). ‘Packaged Alternatives: The Incorporation and Gendering of “Alternative” Radio’. In S. Squier (ed.), Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (pp. 134–63). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Green, L. (1997). Music, Gender, Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grossberg, L. (1984). ‘Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock & Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life’. Popular Music, 4: 225–8. Guinn, J., and D. Perry (2005). The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame. New York: Jeremy F. Tarcher/Penguin. Haenfler, R. (2006). Straight Edge: Clean-Living Youth, Hardcore Punk, and Social Change. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hall, M., dir. (2014). Girls Will Be Girls: Women in Punk. UK: BBC 2. Hawkes, M., dir. (2002). Heavenly Pop Hits: The Flying Nun Story. NZ: Satellite Media. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Hell, R. (2013). I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. New York: Ecco. Hesmondhalgh, D. (1999). ‘Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre’. Cultural Studies, 13: 34–61. Holtz, G. (1995). Welcome to the Jungle: The Why Behind ‘Generation X’. New York: St Martin’s. Hynde, C. (2015). Reckless: My Life. London: Ebury. Jameson, F. (1984). ‘Periodizing the 60s’. Social Text, 9(10): 178–209. Jenkins, H., R. Puroshotma, K. Clinton, M. Weigel and A. Robison (2005). ‘Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century’. Available online: http://www.new​medi​alit​erac​ies.org/wp-cont​ent/uplo​ads/pdfs/ NMLWhi​tePa​per.pdf (accessed 7 January 2022).

253

254

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Kavanagh, D. (1990). Thatcherism and British Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knox, C. (1985). ‘Rasta Nah Leggo’. New Zealand Listener, 16 November. Knox, C. (1991). ‘Uneffected Music’. New Zealand Listener, 4 February. Kruse, H. (2003). Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes. New York: Peter Lang. Laing, D. (2015). One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Oakland, CA: PM. Latham, R. (2002). Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacDonald, I. (1998). Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties. London: Pimlico. Marcus, G. (1970). ‘Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia’. Rolling Stone, 7 February. Available online: https://grei​lmar​cus.net/2014/09/17/lill​ian-rox​ons-rock-encyc​lope​ dia-020​770 (accessed 7 November 2018). Marcus, G. (1989). Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. London: Secker & Warburg. Martin-Iverson, S. (2014). ‘Bandung Lautan Hardcore: Territorialisation and Deterritorialisation in an Indonesian Hardcore Punk Scene’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 15(4): 532–52. McLeay, C. (1994). ‘The “Dunedin Sound”: New Zealand Rock and Cultural Geography’. Perfect Beat, 2(1): 38–50. McNeil, L., and G. McCain (1996). Please Kill Me: The Uncensored History of Punk. New York: Grove. Mills, A. (2016). ‘Dunedin Sound – the Sound of Honesty?’ Audioculture, 15 November. Available online: https://www.audio​cult​ure.co.nz/sce​nes/dune​ din-sound-the-sound-of-hone​sty (accessed 17 October 2018). Morley, P. (2006). ‘Rockism, It’s the New Rockism’. Guardian, 25 May. Available online: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/music/2006/may/26/pop​andr​ock.coldp​lay (accessed 6 November 2018). Mother of Rock (2010). Lowlands Media, Australia. Nichols, D. (2003). The Go-Betweens. Portland, OR: Verse Chorus. Perry, R. (1976). The Writing on the Wall. London: Elm Tree. Prato, G. (2009). Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music. Toronto: ECW. Press Association (2016). ‘Punk Funeral: Joe Corré Burns £5m of Memorabilia on Thames’. Guardian, 26 November. Available online: https://www.theg​uard​ian.com/ music/2016/nov/26/punx-not-dead-joe-corre-burns-memo​rabi​lia-worth-5m-on-tha​ mes (accessed 5 November 2018). Redhead, S. (1990). The End-of-the-Century Party: Youth and Pop towards 2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Reynolds, S. (1989). ‘Against Health and Efficiency’. In A. McRobbie (ed.), Zoot Suits and Second Hand Dresses (pp. 244–55). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Reynolds, S. (1990). Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock. London: Serpent’s Tail. Reynolds, S. (2005). Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984. New York: Penguin.

Time to DIY

Robertson, C. (1991). ‘It’s OK, It’s All Right, Oh Yeah: The “Dunedin Sound”? An Aspect of Alternative Music in New Zealand 1979–85’. Honours dissertation, University of Otago. Rohrer, I. (2014). Cohesion and Dissolution: Friendship in the Globalized Punk and Hardcore Scene of Buenos Aires. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. Rolling Stone (2012). ‘500 Greatest Albums of All Time’, 31 May. Available online: https://www.rolli​ngst​one.com/music/music-lists/500-great​est-alb​ ums-of-all-time-156​826 (accessed 5 November 2018). Roxon, L. (1969). Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia. New York: Workman/Grosset and Dunlap. Savage, J. (1992). England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber and Faber. Savage, J. (2017). ‘The Filth and the Fury, Taxi Driver, the Ramones and the Spirit of ’76’. Sight & Sound, 8 February. Available online: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opin​ion/ sight-sound-magaz​ine/comm​ent/festiv​als/filth-fury-taxi-dri​ver-scors​ese-ramo​nesspi​rit-1976 (accessed 4 June 2019). Shepherd, R. (2016). In Love with These Times: My Life with Flying Nun Records. Auckland: HarperCollins. Shuker, R. (1998). Key Concepts in Popular Music. London: Routledge. Stanley, B. (2015). Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé. New York: W.W. Norton. Steel, G. (2013). ‘Chris Knox Profile/Stories’. Audioculture, 13 May. Available online: https://www.audio​cult​ure.co.nz/peo​ple/chris-knox (accessed 21 October 2018). Stratton, J., and A. Bennett (2010). ‘Introduction’. In A. Bennett (ed.), Britpop and the English Music Tradition (pp. 1–7). Farnham: Ashgate. Strong, M. (1999). The Great Alternative and Indie Discography. Edinburgh: Canongate. Teal, T. (2006). ‘Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY Aesthetic’. Journal of Design History, 19(1): 69–83. Thompson, D. (2000). Alternative Rock. San Francisco: Miller Freeman. Warhol, A. (1977). The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. San Diego: Harvest. Willis, E. (1996). ‘Velvet Underground’. In G. Marcus (ed.), Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (pp. 71–83). New York: Da Capo.

255

256

13 The dynamics of dance: An early history of electronic dance music Alex van Venrooij and Rens Wilderom

The summer of 1988 saw the breakthrough of one of the largest UK youth movements of the twentieth century: the acid house revolution. In this second ‘Summer of Love’, as it came to be known, a new youth culture – which included a new musical style (‘acid/house music’), new ways of dancing (‘raving’) and the use of new recreational drugs (‘ecstasy’) – reached a level of visibility and popularity that created the foundation for the development of a new musical field, nowadays called ‘electronic/ dance music’ (EDM), that today encompasses a global network of club goers, party organizers, DJs, record labels, booking agencies, festivals and magazines. The history of UK acid/house music has been chronicled in a number of journalistic and academic publications (Bainbridge 2013; Brewster and Broughton 2000; Collin 2010; Rietveld 1998; Reynolds 2012; Thornton 1995). These histories generally trace the musical roots of this movement to the post-disco US music scenes of Chicago ‘house music’ and Detroit ‘techno’. Chicago house was allegedly named after the Chicago dance club the Warehouse, home to resident DJ Frankie Knuckles, and referred to the early productions by Knuckles and other Black artists such as Jesse Saunders, Marshall Jefferson and Steve Silk Hurley. Detroit ‘techno’ was the musical innovation of Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins, known as the ‘Belleville Three’, who developed a variant of house music that was less disco oriented and more strongly inspired by electro – especially through the influence of Juan Atkins who had been active as an electro producer in the early 1980s with his group Cybotron. ‘Techno’, as explained by Derrick May in an early interview with UK magazine The Face, was what you get when ‘George Clinton and Kraftwerk get stuck in an elevator with only a sequencer to keep them company’.

258

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

These US scenes had been introduced to the UK in the mid-1980s. In 1986, London Records released a compilation album, The House Sound of Chicago, at the initiative of then A&R manager and later house DJ Pete Tong. The album received exposure in multiple outlets such as New Musical Express (NME), The Face and i-D Magazine. The compilation album also included two top 10 hits: Love Can’t Turn Around by Farley Jackmaster Funk, which entered the chart in August 1986, and Jack Your Body by Steve Silk Hurley, which reached no. 1 in the UK charts in early 1987. Chicago house had also been entering UK dance clubs. In Manchester, Mike Pickering had allegedly started playing house music, amongst a set of hip-hop and soul records, in the Hacienda as early as late 1985/early 1986 (Bainbridge 2013). In the summer of 1987, Frankie Knuckles had been a guest resident DJ at the London club Delirium. Also, and most famously, in the summer of 1987, a group of London-based friends – Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway, Johnny Walker and Danny Rampling – vacationed together on the island of Ibiza and were exposed to the ‘Balearic Beat’ of DJ Alfredo: a mixture of early house music records and soul, hip-hop and electro-pop records. They also discovered the drug ecstasy as it fuelled the all-night dance parties. Upon their return to London, they recreated their Balearic experience by setting up their own clubs. Danny Rampling and his fiancée Jenni Rampling created Shoom in November 1987, which quickly became one of the ‘foci’ for the emerging dance music scene and received underground notoriety by its coverage in the underground magazine Boys Own Magazine. A few months later, in April 1988, Paul Oakenfold organized Spectrum in the club Heaven (which was owned by Richard Branson) and Nicki Holloway organized The Trip at the Astoria in Central London in June 1988. The small scene of Ibiza visitors had grown into a sizeable youth movement and the summer of 1988 became the tipping point at which house music culture turned into a national phenomenon. In this chapter we (re-)analyse this ‘take-off ’ phase of the EDM field in the UK. Our analysis is informed by two distinct narratives. On the one hand, a ‘movementcentric’ narrative describes the emergence of the acid house revolution as a bottom-up process that involved the activities of a network of people, friends often, that developed a small underground scene of acid house aficionados which – between the summer of 1987 and the summer of 1988 – founded a number of clubs that laid the foundation for the emergence of a large acid house movement which spilled over into the mainstream in the Summer of Love. It is an ‘organic growth’ narrative that depicts the movement as starting from the seed of a small scene and subsequently becomes exposed to a wider public by the mainstream media and industry. On the other hand, another narrative highlights the ‘leading’ influence of mainstream media in constructing and legitimating the acid house ‘scene’. This narrative, eloquently described by Thornton (1995), suggests that the established media in the UK – record companies and music magazines – did not just expose acid house to a wider public, but had actually been instrumental in creating the scene, developing its subcultural

The Dynamics of Dance

credibility and introducing house music to the UK in the first place. According to this narrative, ‘Subcultures do not germinate from a seed and grow by force of their own energy into mysterious movements only to be belatedly digested by the media. Rather, media and other culture industries are there and effective right from the start’ (181). Instead of a ‘scene-to-industry’ trajectory, acid/house music had followed a change from ‘industry-to-scene’ in the UK (Lena and Peterson 2008). In this chapter, we will further explore this second narrative. We will discuss how record labels and music magazines indeed were quick to provide attention to ‘house music’, and through media exposure and compilation albums, did much of the cultural work to establish house music as a legitimate cultural form. This cultural work included providing the symbolic resources for anchoring the emerging field in a convincing ‘origin myth’ of Black, urban, peripheral yet authentic musical sources. Drawing on empirical material gathered and analysed in some of our own work (van Venrooij 2015, 2019; Wilderom and van Venrooij 2019), we also provide some quantitative evidence for the long-term effects of this cultural work in how the media discussion of dance music in this early take-off phase defined the parameters of the genre for decades to come.

From disco to house to electronic/ dance: ‘Continuity in discontinuity’ EDM is nowadays used as an umbrella term that labels a set of music made with computers and electronic instruments – often, but not always, for the purpose of dancing (McLeod 2001). The number of more specific genres categorized under ‘electronic/dance’ is extensive: it includes genres such as house, techno, dubstep, hardcore, drum ’n’ bass, UK garage, ambient, triphop, minimal techno and many more. The meta-category of EDM is an ever-evolving, dynamic one, whose boundaries are not strictly defined and shows occasional overlap with hip-hop, rock, pop and even country. Yet, at the same time, EDM as a category also defines ‘systems of orientations, expectations, and conventions that bind together an industry, performers, critics, and fans in making what they identify as a distinctive sort of music’ (Lena and Peterson 2008: 698). There is a sense of a common enterprise which is partly the result of a sense of a shared heritage, a sense of common origins, a musical ‘canon’ as it were. ‘Chicago house’ is generally considered the ‘germinal genre’ of the EDM field. According to Lena and Peterson (2008: 713), germinal genres refer to genres that are considered ‘a significant departure from earlier musics’ and which tend to spawn new genres that are marginally different from them. They create new branches on the evolutionary tree of music. At the same time, as with each artistic revolution, there are also continuities in discontinuity (Bourdieu 2017), and in the case of Chicago

259

260

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

house its emergence and diffusion cannot be understood without first situating it in the context of the rise and fall of disco music in the United States. Initially, the Chicago house scene developed around key resources brought to Chicago during the nationwide spread of disco. The Warehouse – which became the focal point for the house music scene – was founded in Chicago during the highpoint of disco, and in its wake had brought DJs such as Frankie Knuckles, who was one of the original members of the early disco organization the ‘Record Pool’ in New York (Lawrence 2003), to Chicago. Rocky Jones, owner of what would become one of the two largest house music labels, DJ International, also had a history in disco as he was previously involved in the organization of the local Audio-Talent Record Pool in Chicago. Yet in 1979, not long after Frankie Knuckles’s arrival in Chicago, and not very far from the Warehouse in Chicago, at Comiskey Park, rock radio DJ Steve Dahl staged an event dubbed the Disco Demolition Night where crowds gathered to openly express their hatred for disco music and collectively burned stacks of disco records while shouting ‘Disco Sucks’ (Lawrence 2003). This event marked the end of the disco era, and record companies who had previously produced disco in large numbers withdrew their support for the music. With fewer and fewer disco records to play, Frankie Knuckles experimented with new techniques such as editing on reel-to-reel tapes, cutting out segments of records and looping them to create extended versions of disco records which became known as the new genre of ‘house’ music. The shortage of disco records also incentivized Frankie Knuckles and other DJs such as Ron Hardy to play material produced by local acts, most of them first time producers and new to the industry. Chicago clubs such as the Warehouse and the Music Box, therefore, became ‘access’ points for an increasing number of local producers. The disintegration of the disco era had thus opened up possibilities for local scene development. Yet the decline of the disco industry also meant that these emerging dance music scenes, and dance music in general, had difficulties in penetrating the US mainstream market. Clubs and DJs had lost some of their ‘taste-making’ capabilities and were less likely to ‘create’ hit records. To illustrate the shift, consider the following numbers. In 1976, at the high point of the disco era, fourteen out of seventeen no. 1 club hits also appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 sales chart, and eleven of these fourteen hits were first club hits (79 per cent) and spent on average 7.5 weeks on the club hits chart before they entered the Billboard sales chart. Moreover, ten of these hits never reached the radio top 15 as reported by Radio & Records. In 1986, however, when the house music scene was at its high point, eleven out of twenty-eight no. 1 club hits did not make it to the Billboard Hot 100 chart (in 1976 this was only three out of seventeen) and of the seventeen no. 1 club hits that did appear on the Billboard sales chart, only seven were established club hits before entering the Billboard charts (and only spent an average of six weeks on the club charts before making it into the sales

The Dynamics of Dance

charts). Ten out of seventeen hits actually had their first appearance on the Billboard chart before the club charts. This suggests that, compared with 1976, clubs played less of a leading role in creating hits. Moreover, only six of these seventeen hits were not among the top 15 of the radio charts and could reach significant sales without the support of radio. Interestingly, one of those no. 1 hits on the club charts that failed to enter the Billboard charts was ‘I Can’t Turn Around’ from Chicago house act J.M. Silk, one of whose members, Steve Silk Hurley, later had the first no. 1 house hit in the UK Top 40 Singles Chart with ‘Jack Your Body’. Although a no. 1 on the national club chart, it was only added to the playlists of seven urban radio stations and did not appear on any radio charts. This was also the fate of several other Chicago producers who made successful club hits but were not added to radio and did not break the Billboard sales charts. Post-disco dance music seemed to have lost its connection with mainstream audiences. Besides a growing disconnect between club music and the mainstream music market, the house music scene in the United States was also likely blocked in its growth by the absence of resources – such as major label representation – in the Chicago area specifically. Economic geographers have long argued that the resources of cultural industries tend to cluster in geographic areas. The US music industry is indeed strongly geographically concentrated in the cities of New York, Los Angeles and Nashville (Florida, Mellander and Stolarick 2010; Scott 1999). This geographic concentration also affects the chances of national diffusion. Using data from 1997 on location patterns of independent record companies, Scott (1999) shows, for example, that the ratio of independent labels located in New York that produce at least one hit record is 2.56 while for other locations this is only 0.34. New York’s clustering of resources thus offers independent record companies an almost eight times higher chance of producing a hit record than in other areas. Although comparable data from the 1980s on Chicago is not available, Florida, Mellander and Stolarick (2010: 794) show that, although it is the third largest city in the United States, its clustering of music industry resources – the number of musicians and recording industry establishments – is much lower than expected based on its population size. Using data from 1970 to 2000, Florida, Mellander and Stolarick (2010) also report that Chicago’s position as a music cluster decreased within this period, suggesting that the 1980s saw an even further depletion of available resources (cf. Chicago Tribune, 19 March 1992). Local music scenes in Chicago were most likely affected by this withdrawal of resources from the city during this period. What also seems to have blocked the trajectory of growth in the United States is that the lack of available resources in Chicago, such as major label representation in Chicago, gave certain entrepreneurs a structural power position as ‘brokers’ to the wider industry. Larry Sherman, for example, owned the only remaining record pressing plant in Chicago, and local producers had to go through him to press their

261

262

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

records. This enabled him to initially spot an emerging market and develop one of the two largest labels in the city for dance music: Trax Records. This ‘resource dependence’ also enabled Sherman to control the careers of artists – in most cases new to the music industry. However, he mostly acted as a ‘failed entrepreneur’ from the perspective of art world development. He was not interested in building a sustainable art world by nurturing careers, developing talent or promoting cooperation (Becker 1982). Sherman seems not to have been driven by values or ‘grand social ambitions’, such as the institutional entrepreneurs described by DiMaggio (1982), but by lowly ambitions and – in the words of Anand (2000) – ‘simple appetites’, such as earning some ‘fast’ money. He also avoided signing distribution deals with US major labels (which, in the United States, was crucial for nationwide success). He probably feared the possible ‘talent flight’ (Lee 1995: 15) that this would lead to and did not want to jeopardize his control of the resources on which many of the local artists depended, and which he had acquired almost by accident. Rocky Jones, the label owner of the other prominent label DJ International, also avoided making deals with US major labels, for similar reasons, but also because of a ‘hysteresis’ effect whereby Jones, who had acquired his resources during the disco era, as he had previously organized the local Chicago record pool, continued to believe in the independent hit-making capabilities of the disco infrastructure (cf. Billboard, 7 April 1990). In both cases, the decision of Sherman and Jones to not cooperate with outside parties to enable the wider US distribution of the local music scene seemed to have been a residue of the crumbling disco field. At the same time, these Chicago label owners were quite eager to sign licensing deals with UK record labels, as these were relatively low risk and commercially profitable. The wider, mainstream diffusion of house music therefore did not occur in the United States, but in the UK.

The House Sound of Chicago In August 1986, Chicago house music was introduced in the UK by London Records with the compilation album The House Sound of Chicago. This was on the initiative of Pete Tong, then A&R manager for London Records, who convinced the label to license a number of tracks from DJ International. The album contained such tracks as ‘Jack Your Body’ by Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley, ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ by Farley Jackmaster Funk featuring Daryl Pandy and ‘Move Your Body’ by Marshall Jefferson who cleverly subtitled the song ‘The House Music Anthem’ to give house music its defining anthem (much like Bill Haley did for rock’n’roll with his song ‘Rock Around the Clock’). The liner notes of the compilation album were written by Stuart Cosgrove – de facto editor-in-chief at the New Musical Express (NME) – who had visited Chicago and interviewed some of the local people involved in house music. He not only used that material to write the liner notes for the compilation album but also several magazine

The Dynamics of Dance

articles – amongst others – a front-page article in the NME heralding Chicago house as ‘The Sound of the Moment’. The compilation album proved a commercial success. It stayed on the album charts for twelve weeks and included a top 10 hit (‘Love Can’t Turn Around’) entering the charts in August 1986 and then, in January 1987, a no. 1 hit (‘Jack Your Body’). Most importantly perhaps, it was successful in establishing a model for a large number of subsequent compilation albums. London Records released several more volumes within their The House Sound of Chicago series. And other record labels followed suit: not only in releasing ‘house’ compilation albums but also in using the compilation album to introduce new genres into the UK market. Detroit techno was, for example, introduced to the UK market two years after the success of the first Chicago house compilation, when another DJ/entrepreneur, Neil Rushton, had come across records from Detroit by Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins in a crate of records that normally contained only soul records. With the Chicago house compilation in mind, he saw a commercial possibility and convinced Virgin subsidiary 10 Records to also release a compilation album. The title for this album initially stressed the continuity between the music of the Detroit producers and Chicago house as its working title was: The House Sound of Detroit. The Detroit producers themselves also initially did not differentiate techno from house. Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson had close ties to the Chicago scene, and Derrick May had also not previously objected to being categorized as house. The decision to differentiate the album from house and to give it a separate and distinct identity by using the label ‘techno’, which had been used previously by Juan Atkins, came from the marketing department of 10 Records. The compilation album was thus renamed ‘Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit’. The subsequent process for introducing the genre onto the UK market was similar. Again, the label asked Stuart Cosgrove to write liner notes and do interviews with the artists. And in those interviews especially, Derrick May described how closely related their music was to Detroit, how it was an expression of the post-industrial character of Detroit and how this music could not have been made in any other place than Detroit. This was also the framing that Cosgrove gave to the introduction of Techno, as a genre intimately linked to Detroit the place and city, and embedded in a local scene. Whether this was a fair representation of the Detroit music scene was questionable. According to Thornton (1995), the music was hardly played at all in Detroit. There were no real clubs or places to speak of. Only after the compilation album, when Europeans had embraced techno, did local producers try to build a local scene, but the club they set up in 1991, the Music Institute, lasted only for one year, illustrating the lack of local interest in the genre. This suggests that the close tie between techno and Detroit was mostly a construction created by journalists and the marketing department of the record label. The marketing department of 10 Records, Stuart Cosgrove and Derrick May had ‘invented a tradition’ of Detroit Techno as a

263

264

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

way to give authenticity to the idea of techno as a new genre, not only musically but also socially, by suggesting that it had emerged from a ‘real’ scene. ‘Acid house’ was introduced in a similar way. By the time London Records planned to release a third compilation album, they were actively searching for a new genre. They took their cue from the release of the song ‘Acid Track’ by Phuture (1987), which featured the new drum computer (TB-303) and constructed a new genre around it. The album, however, contains only one song that actually seems ‘acid’ and is similar to the Phuture track, while the rest was ‘regular’ house music. The compilation album therefore seemed to prematurely invent a genre, trying to create a kind of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. To legitimate it as a new genre, the record label again asked Stuart Cosgrove to write the liner notes, and he described the music as a new sound and now framed it as an ‘underground’ sound with strong connections to a drug culture. But, as discussed by Thornton (1995), even though the acid house scene in the UK positioned itself as emerging from the dark, underground corners of youth culture, the mainstream media and industry had actually taken the lead in instigating this genre. These examples suggest that the UK media industry played an active and leading role in valorizing and developing these dance genres. They did not so much ‘organically grow’ from an underground scene yet were – to varying degrees – the outcome of the interplay between record label marketeers and music journalists. Moreover, this occurred a full year before the London ‘Balearic’ scene around Danny Rampling, Trevor Fung, Terry Farley and Paul Oakenfold had developed. House music had therefore not ‘entered’ the UK through decentralized, personal network diffusion but by the one-to-many diffusion of the media. And even when the Balearic crowd started to spread the word about house music locally in London, it was in the context of a mixture of musical styles of which house music was only one among many genres. ‘Balearic beat’ – as the sound of clubs like Shoom was labelled – was not so much a musical genre (and the compilation album bearing its name was also criticized for this reason) but ranged from the industrial music of Nitzer Ebb to the pop music of Mandy Smith. It lacked the categorical crispness that often is necessary for an emergent musical style to become successful (Boone et al. 2012). The legacy of the Balearic scene probably lies more in developing a certain club culture, a network of individuals and thereby the social foundation of the dance scene in London rather than laying the foundations of the category of EDM for the years to come. Chicago house and Detroit techno, by way of the described interplay between compilation albums and magazine coverage, more strongly affected the definition of dance. The rapid adoption of these US music scenes by the UK media raises some interesting questions. First, are there structural reasons why the UK media field was quicker to adopt these genres than the US field? We have already described factors that seemed to have played a role in inhibiting its national diffusion in the US. But were there also ‘pull’ factors within the UK field? Second, can we provide evidence that

The Dynamics of Dance

the media consecration of the US scenes had any long-term effects on how the field of EDM further developed? Did the more restricted focus on the ‘crisp’ categories of house and techno, which differed from the more elaborate, ‘fuzzy’ Balearic category, prove more successful over time? Although in retrospect it seems clear, and has been the dominant narrative, that Chicago house and Detroit techno should have been the ‘germinal genres’ of the dance music field, at the time, it seemed less clear that these US genres would take on that role. What could explain their success in that regard?

The UK media field The quick adoption of the US dance music genres in the UK can be understood as the result of the more general ‘openness’ of this market to new cultural innovations, especially compared to the United States. This seems to be the case for several reasons. First, the UK mainstream music market is a relatively ‘open’ market with lower levels of market concentration and lower barriers to entry, which, in general, is associated with more rapid commercialization of new genres (Dowd 2002). In one of our studies (Wilderom and van Venrooij 2019), we compared the concentration of the UK and US mainstream market (which is higher when fewer firms have a larger piece of the market) and found that between 1985 and 2005, market concentration (using the Herfindhalh index) was on average 1,388 in the UK and 1,920 in the United States. We also found that the British market had a much higher independents’ average market share: 21 per cent versus 12 per cent in the United States. The average quarterly number of new artists was also substantially higher in the UK: thirty-seven versus fourteen in the United States, and in the UK singles spent on average only four weeks on the charts compared with twelve weeks in the United States. Second, the rapid adoption of cultural innovations is also helped by a highly competitive magazine industry, which creates a ‘hype’ culture that can quickly provide exposure to new cultural innovations – or in the words of one NME journalist who covered house music: ‘The British have always been good at scams. We delight in finding links between certain groups or records, christening them as one, and building a movement or scene out of it’ (Hewitt 1988: 19). In the UK magazine field, a high number of magazines compete over a relatively limited resource space. Overall, the UK magazine market has roughly the same number of titles as the United States (2,800 versus 3,200), but for a much smaller population. Similarly, while in the United States the music magazine market is dominated by one player (Rolling Stone magazine, which is by far the largest magazine in terms of circulation), in the UK, especially in the 1980s, there were more equal contenders for market share, and at the end of the 1990s some twenty titles had to compete over market share (Forde 2001: 25). This market competition is exacerbated by the reliance of UK music magazines on singlecopy sales rather than subscriptions (Noam 2016; cf. Benson 2005). Rolling Stone,

265

266

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

for example, only relies for about 5 per cent on single copy sales, while the largest music magazines in the UK rely for approximately 50–70 per cent on single copy sales and therefore have to compete per issue for sales. These competitive pressures in the British magazine market are also amplified by their geographic concentration in London (cf. Benson 2005) and the existence of ‘the weeklies’, such as NME and Melody Maker in the 1980s and 1990s, which needed to provide new content on a weekly basis. Moreover, Forde (2001: 28) argues that UK music journalists often regard the music press as a short-term bridging career into the mainstream press. These short-term careers can incentivize music journalists to quickly ‘make their name’ by discovering a new style or movement and by consecrating new cultural innovations that in the end consecrate them as influential journalists within the field (Bourdieu 1983; Cattani, Ferriani and Allison 2014: 7; van Rees 1987).

A taste for the peripheral In the case of the adoption of US dance music scenes, the British media emphasize not only newness but also ‘peripherality’. As described by Cheyne and Binder (2010), music critics can have ‘cosmopolitan preferences’ – that is, a strong orientation towards foreign, not-yet-commercialized local music scenes. They can value local music from abroad as aesthetically and politically more important since foreign music scenes ‘represent an opportunity for these writers to maintain their position as arbiters of avant-garde taste’ (354). Tastes for peripheral, non-commercialized foreign music scenes can, in other words, act as local field capital. To investigate whether this is a fair description of the journalistic reporting on dance music, we investigated the coverage rates in the NME and Melody Maker (see Wilderom and van Venrooij 2019). Our findings did indeed indicate that UK music journalists covering dance music in the early take-off phase between 1985 and 1989 were more likely to give coverage to newly emerging rather than established music scenes from the United States when discussing dance music. By measuring the size of twenty music genres in five US cities between 1979 and 1989, we found that the fewer ‘peers’ an act had in a city and a genre, the more likely it was that they were covered by the UK press. Moreover, we also found that commercial success in the United States decreased the chances of coverage in the UK. Music journalists sought out the new, the peripheral and the non-commercial when discussing the US field. There is a history to this ‘taste for the periphery’. The UK music field has a long history of importing music that remained relatively peripheral in the United States. Examples include the ‘discovery’ of the Chicago blues by British groups such as the Rolling Stones and the Northern Soul movement that revolved around the import of obscure soul records from the United States (Raine 2019). Not coincidentally, several key players in the import of US dance genres, such as Stuart Cosgrove and

The Dynamics of Dance

Neil Rushton, had a history in the Northern Soul movement. The import of these peripheral, not-yet-commercialized US music scenes could therefore also rely on an existing cultural narrative that defined US urban music scenes as ‘authentic’ sources of new possible music genres (Kahl, Kim and Phillips 2010). The peripherality of Chicago house and Detroit techno most likely helped legitimize it in the UK.

The development of the compilation canon We turn now to the question of the longer-term evolution of EDM. How did the genre develop after the ‘start-off ’ phase of 1985–9? How did the acts and producers of the early period fare over time? Which direction would EDM take? And did some acts, producers or genres have greater long-term influence on this further evolution? It is important to stress at this point that in retrospect many have recognized the ‘break’ that house and techno music established with other music, how it represented the start of a new musical development and that there was a ‘before’ and ‘after’ house. Social movements often recount these kinds of ‘origin myths’ that creates a sharp, discontinuous break with the past (Hannan, Negro and Olzak 2022). Yet at the same time, many observers at the time also were of the opinion that house and techno were ‘just’ some examples of many recent dance music styles – either from the United States, with the previous emergence of Go-Go music from Washington and Freestyle from Miami and New York, but also ‘domestic’ dance music, such as the industrial sound of Nitzer Ebb or Electronic Body Music of Front 242. In the United States, prominent journalists explicitly questioned the ‘newness’ of house music and saw it as a form of retro-disco. Nelson George, for example, called house music a form of ‘retro-disco’ (1988: 32–3) and Brian Chin of Billboard considered house a derivative of disco (Lawrence 2013). Chicago house artists themselves also seemed hardpressed to describe the difference with established artists such as Colonel Abrams who had a hit record with ‘Trapped’ just a few years earlier. In other words, it was not obvious that house music would come to be known as the ‘origins’ of dance music. Especially not considering the fact that the movers and shakers of the club landscape championed a much broader and inclusive set of styles as we have seen in the case of the Balearic scene. Let us first provide evidence that this is indeed what happened. This can be done by consulting many of the written publications on dance music, which, as argued, commonly point towards house and techno as the ‘germinal genres’ of dance music. But there are also more quantitative ways to retrace the narrative of dance. We can, for example, investigate ‘retrospective consecration’ projects such as the ‘greatest 50 dance tracks of all time’ that are occasionally published by dance music magazines (cf.

267

268

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Schmutz 2005). These can give us an indication of which artists and genres have stood the test of time and are retrospectively consecrated as the foundations of the field. Yet another music history can be written in the form of a discographical canon. Phillips (2013), for example, studied the development of jazz music by tracing the songs that were rerecorded multiple times by different groups and thereby became ‘jazz standards’. While rerecording is not the practice within dance music, a comparable discographical canon is constructed by the repeated inclusion of acts/tracks on dance music compilation albums. One track on the Techno compilation, ‘Strings of Life’ by Derrick May (under the name Rhythim is Rhythim), has reappeared on more than sixty compilation albums since its first release, illustrating its ‘classic’ status within the field. Looking at the number of times different acts have appeared on compilation albums can therefore provide us a sense of this dance music canon.1 We constructed a ranking of the ± fifty thousand acts that appeared on all ‘electronic’ compilation albums released in the UK between 1985 and 2010 as catalogued on Discogs.com. Table 13.1 lists the top 50 most included acts. To investigate the origins of dance, we paired this ranking with a list of all ‘electronic’ acts that released music in that category between 1979 and 1989, to understand which acts from that early period, after the collapse of disco, were absorbed into this new canon of EDM. We use a regression analysis that models as a dependent variable the number of times an act from that ‘starting population’ was included in the compilation-canon. The higher the frequency of inclusion, the more important an act has been for the dance music category. A few observations seem noteworthy. Although the top 50 of most included acts on compilation albums shows that, in the long run, UK acts dominate the canon of dance, the regression analysis in Table 13.2 shows that the ‘sources’ of the dance category were located predominantly in the United States. US acts from the ‘start population’ are on average more often included in the UK compilation canon than acts from other countries. What is also notable is that US acts that debuted in the same year in the United States and the UK seemed to do especially well in this regard. In other words, US acts that were quickly adopted by the UK industry were especially likely to play an important role in defining the EDM field. This provides additional evidence that rapidly adopted US acts stood as the basis of the emerging dance music category. We can also assess how the different genres of the post-disco era between 1979 and 1989 fared over time. The results show that the dance music field experienced a clear ‘break’ with earlier forms of dance music. The dance category clearly started from house and techno. Variations of house music such as acid house, house, garage house and deep house also did well over time (with the exception of hip house, which seemed to have been a relatively short-lived fad). Genres that predated house, such as synth-pop, new wave, disco, Italo disco and more ‘avant-garde’ genres such as industrial music, were on average less likely to become part of the EDM canon. These were also mostly European or UK-based music genres which again reinforces the

The Dynamics of Dance

Table 13.1  Artist Appearances on Compilation Albums Artist

Count

Country of origin

Underworld Moby Fatboy Slim X-Press 2 Armand Van Helden Chicane Basement Jaxx Blaze Mauro Picotto Leftfield Prodigy, The Agnelli & Nelson Groove Armada Bob Sinclair Inner City Masters at Work Josh Wink Paul van Dyk Moloko BK BT Energy 52 Slam Delerium Roger Sanchez ATB Kings Of Tomorrow Ultra Naté Roni Size DJ Seduction Faithless Push Scott Brown Storm Total Science Sy & Unknown Future Sound of London, The Shamen, The Todd Terry Art Of Trance Three Drives Sasha Way Out West ATFC Timo Maas Jaydee Kerri Chandler Sneaker Pimps Axwell Dennis Ferrer

291 288 262 246 234 215 212 205 191 183 178 167 161 157 156 156 154 153 152 151 149 149 144 143 138 136 134 134 130 128 128 128 125 125 125 123 122 121 121 119 119 118 118 117 116 115 112 112 111 110

UK US UK UK US UK UK US Italy UK UK UK UK France US US US Germany UK UK US Germany UK Canada US Germany US US UK UK UK Belgium UK Germany UK UK UK UK US UK Netherlands UK UK UK Germany Netherlands US UK Sweden US

269

270

Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture

Table 13.2  Negative Binomial Regression on Counts of Compilation Appearances, 1990–2010 Model 1 Parameter Intercept Number of UK hits Number of UK releases d_1979 d_1980 d_1981 d_1982 d_1983 d_1984 d_1985 d_1986 d_1987 d_1988 UK debut US debut UK_US debut Techno House Acid House Garage House Deep House Synthpop Disco Industrial Experimental Abstract Ambient Downtempo EBM EuroHouse Freestyle Leftfield Minimal New Age Noise Electro HiNRG Hip House ItaloDisco New Wave Dispersion Log Likelihood 17955.2370

Estimate -1.7670 0.0629 0.3202 0.3076 0.3309 0.2908 0.1121 0.0151 -0.1622 -0.0341 0.0102 0.1444 0.0148 0.0612 0.3721 0.8835 0.9493 0.4694 0.5301 0.5929 0.6300 -1.0318 -0.2661 -0.4936 -0.2927 -1.0752 -0.1442 0.2443 0.3045 0.0516 -1.0320 0.2994 -0.9048 -0.5636 0.2071 0.1100 0.1119 -0.0012 -0.8223 -1.1584 6.1076

Standard Error 0.0943 0.0121 0.0117 0.1483 0.1583 0.1450 0.1354 0.1246 0.1247 0.1209 0.1151 0.1061 0.1003 0.0849 0.0760 0.1127 0.2243 0.0935 0.1603 0.1853 0.2443 0.0810 0.0857 0.1586 0.1114 0.2315 0.1608 0.1858 0.3186 0.1935 0.1815 0.3063 0.1928 0.3030 0.2515 0.1037 0.1600 0.3040 0.1041 0.1833 0.2040

Pr > ChiSq