Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes (Routledge Advances in Sociology) (Andy Bennett, Paula Guerra)
DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes (Routledge Advances in Sociology) (Andy Bennett, Paula Guerra)
Music Scenes
This volume examines the global influence and impact of DIY cultural practice as this informs the
production, performance and consumption of underground music in different parts of the world. The
book brings together a series of original studies of DIY musical activities in Europe, North and South
America, Asia and Oceania. The chapters combine insights from established academic writers with
the work of younger scholars, some of whom are directly engaged in contemporary underground
music scenes.
The book begins by revisiting and re-evaluating key themes and issues that have been used in
studying the cultural meaning of alternative and underground music scenes, notably aspects of space,
place and identity and the political economy of DIY cultural practice. The book then explores how
the DIY cultural practices that characterize alternative and underground music scenes have been
impacted and influenced by technological change, notably the emergence of digital media. Finally,
in acknowledging the over 40-year history of DIY cultural practice in punk and post-punk contexts,
the book considers how DIY cultures have become embedded in cultural memory and the emotional
geographies of place.
Through combining high-quality data and fresh conceptual insights in the context of an inter-
national body of work spanning the disciplines of popular-music studies, cultural and media studies,
and sociology the book offers a series of innovative new directions in the study of DIY cultures and
underground/alternative music scenes. This volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate
students in the above-mentioned fields of study, as well as an invaluable resource for established aca-
demics and researchers working in these and related fields.
Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social
Science at Griffith University. A leading international figure in sociological studies of popular music
and youth culture, he has written and edited numerous books, including Popular Music and Youth
Culture, Music, Style, and Aging and Music Scenes (co-edited with Richard A. Peterson). He is a
faculty fellow of the Yale Centre for Cultural Sociology, an international research fellow of the
Finnish Youth Research Network, a founding member of the Consortium for Youth, Generations
and Culture, and a founding member of the Regional Music Research Group. He is also the co-
founder and co-cordinator of KISMIF Conference. URL: www.kismifconference.com/en/.
Paula Guerra is Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of
Porto (FLUP), and a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Sociology (IS-UP). She is also Invited
Researcher at the Centre for Geography Studies and Territory Planning (CEGOT) and CITCEM –
Transdisciplinary Research Centre ‘Culture, Space and Memory’ at the University of Porto (UP),
and Adjunct Professor at Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research (GCSCR). Professor
Guerra was the Head Researcher of ‘Keep it simple, Make it fast! Prolegomena and Punk scenes – a
Road to Portuguese Contemporaneity (1977–2012)’, an international and interdisciplinary project
about the Portuguese (and global) punk and underground scenes. She is also the co-founder and co-
coordinator of KISMIF Conference. URL: www.kismifconference.com/en/.
Routledge Advances in Sociology
Occupying London
Post-C rash Resistance and the Limits of Possibility
Sam Burgum
List of illustrations x
Notes on contributors xi
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
A ndy B ennett and P aul A G uerra
PART I
Underground music scenes between the local and
the translocal 19
3 Punk stories 31
C arles F ei x a
Part II
Music and DIY cultures: DIY or die! 75
Part III
Art, music and technological change 137
Part IV
Music scenes, memory and emotional geographies 183
Index 243
Illustrations
Figures
5.1 Space of practices and opinions (cloud of 124 active
modalities in the factorial plan 1–2) 55
5.2 Space of social properties (cloud of 37 illustrative modalities
in the factorial plan 1–2) 58
10.1 Records from the five surveyed labels 116
14.1 Mail art, 1978–79 164
14.2 Covers of DK/Decay magazines 1979–80 164
20.1 The first rock festival in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, 1987;
Borisova Gardens, then called Liberation Park 233
20.2 Milena Slavova and Vasil Gurov from band Revu in front of
the café ‘Kravai’ – a gathering place for youth subcultural
groups during the 1980s 234
20.3 Dimitar Voev challenging the intended interpretation of the
Monument of the Soviet Army in Sofia 237
Table
10.1 Records from the five surveyed labels 120
Contributors
books, including De jovenes, bandas y tribus (5th ed., 2012), Global Youth?
(2006) and Youth, Space and Time (2016). He has been Vice-President for
Europe of the Sociology of Youth research committee of the International
Sociological Association. In 2017, he obtained two of the highest accolades
for his research work: the ICREA Academia Award of the Generalitat de
Catalunya and the Advanced Grant of the European Research Council.
Paula Guerra is Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at
the University of Porto. She has been an invited researcher in several inter-
national universities (Brazil, Vietnam, Canada and Morocco, among other
countries). She is coordinator and founder of the KISMIF Project and co-
coordinator of the KISMIF Conference. She is also coordinator and founder
of All the Arts: Luso-Brazilian Network of Sociology of the Arts and Culture.
She has written numerous books, including More than Loud, The Words of
Punk and The Unstable Lightness of Rock, and numerous articles published in
national and international peer-reviewed journals: The Journal of Sociology,
Popular Music and Society, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Critical
Arts, the Portuguese Journal of Social Sciences and Cultural Sociology.
Pierig Humeau defended his PhD thesis, ‘Sociology of the French “inde-
pendent” punk space’, in 2011. He has worked on various research projects
concerning young people’s social trajectories, the working class and cultural
practices. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Limoges
and author of The Punk (2019).
Jeder Silveira Janotti Jr is Professor at the Communication Graduate Program
in the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil and a researcher
with the National Council for Science and Technological Development
(CNPq – Brazil).
Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso graduated with a Master of Arts in ethnomusicology in
2005. After various music-related jobs, he began his PhD project, ‘Dynamics
of democratization and digitalization of record production in Finland in the
2010s’, at the University of Tampere in 2011.
Sean Martin-Iverson is a lecturer at the University of Western Australia. He is
also writing a book about the hardcore punk scene in Bandung, based on his
doctoral research, and has ongoing research interests in the politics of cultural
production, global punk, transnational social movements and urban Indonesia.
Yvonne Niekrenz is a senior scientist in the Department of Sociology and
Demography at the University of Rostock. She studied sociology, and
German language and literature. Her research interests include the sociology
of culture, the sociology of the body and the sociology of youth.
Raphaël Nowak is a cultural sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the
Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University. His
xiv Contributors
Outline of the book
In Chapter 1, Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra consider the origins and devel-
opment of DIY culture and practice in relation to music and associated forms of
underground and alternative scenes since the emergence of punk in the mid-
1970s. As Bennett and Guerra detail, since the 1970s the concept of DIY has
2 A. Bennett and P. Guerra
position-takings. The idea is thus to illustrate how DIY culture brings into play
the extreme porosity between musical commitment and political front.
Dealing with the issue of gender performances, in Chapter 6 Yvonne
Niekrenz focuses on the construction of gender in alternative music-based youth
cultures. The focus of the chapter is the male-dominated hardcore punk scene
and the Goth scene in the city of Rostock, which is the biggest city in
Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. There she poses the question of how young
people deal with gender as a category and resource in their youth-cultural self-
expressions, investigating how they find spaces and places of belonging.
In Part II, the authors examine the ways in which DIY cultural practices have
evolved to survive in a rapidly changing cultural landscape marked by the
increasingly aggressive tendencies of commodification and politically charged
cultural policy.
Taking the Basque Country as an example, in Chapter 7 Ion Andoni del Amo
Castro examines how the emergence of a youth resistance movement, organized
around punk and Basque radical rock has been involved in the development of a
Basque radical culture – a social, political and cultural phenomenon that disrupts
the categories of political subjectivity established by the framework of political-
institutional narratives that make up the social space – that is, the dispute over
hegemonic control of the Basque and Spanish national narratives.
In Chapter 8, Katie Rochow examines Home Economics, a Wellington-based,
semi-regular event organized by an initiative of local artists who transform
homes into underground performance spaces. The basis of this chapter is a case
study that argues Home Economics is characterized by the ‘in-betweenness’ of
metamodernism, which represents a spacetime that is neither ordered nor dis-
ordered, and is characterized by a continuous switching between the ways of
being in modernity and postmodernity.
Following on from this, in Chapter 9, Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso studies the
ideological and aesthetic practices and discourses of Finnish small-scale record
producers in terms of their professionalism. The chapter focuses on ten DIY
micro-labels from Finland, noting their shared negative attitude towards profes-
sionalism, as well as their unique viewpoints and perspectives. The various dis-
courses and practices though which the relationship of each the ten cases to
professionalism materializes highlight the questions that exist around the
meaning of being professional.
In Chapter 10, Sarah Benhaïm explores the modes of production and distri-
bution of recordings in underground networks, based on the results of a survey
of five noise and experimental music labels. By giving a detailed account of
these labels’ practices, which are characterized by a DIY ethos, it appears that
the music featured, the agreements made with musicians, the emotional rela-
tionship with recorded media and the practice of exchanging records all
enhance the emotional commitment to the detriment of commercial objectives.
Far from being mere details, these record-related practices involve ethical, social
and affective negotiations that contribute to defining noise as a genre.
4 A. Bennett and P. Guerra
From a point during the mid-1970s, the notion of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture
has developed from a punk-focused ethos of resistance to the mainstream music
industry into a more widely endorsed aesthetic underpinning a broad sphere of
alternative cultural production (Bennett, 2018). While by no means eschewing
anti-hegemonic concerns, this transformation of DIY into what might reason-
ably be termed a global ‘alternative culture’ has also seen it evolve to a level of
professionalism that is aimed towards ensuring aesthetic and, where possible,
economic sustainability. During a period in which the very concept of culture is
the object of various attempts at hyper-commodification under the ever-
broadening banner of the ‘cultural industries’ (Power and Scott, 2004), many of
those cultural practitioners who wish to remain independent have at the same
time benefited from the increasing emphasis in urban centres on cultural pro-
duction, performance and consumption. Indeed, such individuals are often able
to hone creative skills acquired as participants in underground and alternative
cultural scenes for use in ongoing careers as DIY cultural entrepreneurs. This
chapter examines the longevity of the DIY cultural aesthetic and its evolution
in a global context. As the chapter will illustrate, from its roots in the punk
movement, the concept of DIY has grown to encapsulate a highly complex and
vibrant alternative sector of cultural production and consumption on a global
scale. The concluding section of the chapter will consider how such exponential
growth in DIY practices presents new questions about the nature and prevalence
of the DIY aesthetic and whether we need to reposition it as an increasingly
pivotal aspect of contemporary urban life.
during the 1950s, with the Situationist International, an artistic and cultural
movement that sought to satirize and denounce the contradictions of capitalist
consumer society (Debord, 1992; Downes, 2007; Frith and Horne, 1987)
through the creation of countercultural artistic objects that opposed dominant
cultural representations and used new forms of communication, such as mani-
festos, zines and other mediums, to awaken a feeling that the ordre des choses
(system) could be changed. Moreover, the claims of the Situationist movement
extended to using the symbols and forms of the status quo as a means of sym-
bolic and ideological resistance. Owing much to the Dadaist movement of the
early twentieth century, the Situationist International appropriated everyday
images and objects, repositioning them in new contexts that stripped them of
their original meaning in ways that served to question both the nature of art
and the state of the wider society.
Twenty years later, the DIY ethos of the Situationist movement was dramat-
ically resurrected in punk, a scene that coalesced youth sensibilities and aes-
thetic understandings of music and style at a critical point of socioeconomic
crisis (Hebdige, 1979). Although its origins were in the United States during
the mid-1970s (Laing, 1985; Lentini, 2003), punk’s salience as a statement of
resistance among disenfranchised and disillusioned youth was realized several
years later when punk music and culture were first experienced by British audi-
ences. During a period that saw salaries frozen, a plummeting of trade rates and
economic stagnation, and high unemployment – particularly among youth – the
rising discontent of various layers of society made itself felt. In this context,
punk became a spectacular platform, both in a visual and sonic sense, for the
anger and dissatisfaction of youth while simultaneously acting as an unwilling
vehicle for fear and moral panic (Holtzman, Hughes and Van Meter, 2007).
What also made punk appealing to musicians and audiences was its DIY quality.
While earlier musical styles – notably skiffle (Stratton, 2010) and rock ’n’ roll
(Bielby, 2004) – had also displayed a distinctive DIY quality, punk’s entire
musical and cultural ethos was heavily invested with a strong and distinctive
DIY aesthetic (McKay, 1998). By the time of punk’s arrival, the popular-music
industry had grown to a point where the production and distribution of popular
music were both tightly regulated and heavily routinized, with music created on
a mass scale and calculated to appeal to mass audiences. From a punk per-
spective, the consequence of such regulation was that music lost touch with its
audience, and in doing so also became divested of value – socially, culturally
and politically. The key mission of punk, therefore, was to reinvest music with
an aesthetic more akin to what it saw as the excitement of the rock ’n’ roll years
while also reinstalling a political message (Laing, 1985).
As the initial punk scene of the 1970s diversified and give rise to a range of
new musical and stylistic scenes, including anarcho punk (Gosling, 2004),
Gothic punk (Hodkinson, 2002) and hardcore (Driver, 2011), the DIY prin-
ciples that had been at the core of punk continued to be reflected in the way
that these newer styles were created, performed and consumed. Although, in a
Rethinking DIY culture 9
mainstream context, pop and rock became reinstated as dominant forms of live
and recorded music entertainment – not least because of the emergence of MTV
(Kaplan, 1987) and the increasing prominence of live music mega-events such
as Live Aid (Garofalo, 1992) – punk’s splitting of the music world continued to
manifest itself in the form of alternative networks of music production, perform-
ance and consumption that characterized a proliferation of local, translocal and,
from the mid-1990s, virtual scenes (Peterson and Bennett, 2004). Indeed, in
addition to giving rise to a number of punk subgenres, it would also be accurate
to say that since the 1970s the DIY aesthetic of the early punk scene has become
a key source of influence and inspiration for a successive range of other genres,
among them rap (Rose, 1994), indie (Bannister, 2006) and dance (Thornton,
1995).
in a city where the attitude of many young people was that you might as
well pick up a guitar as take exams, since your chances of finding full-time
occupation from either were just the same, being in a band was an accepted
way of life and could provide a means of justifying one’s existence.
In the decades since Cohen’s study was published, the socioeconomic scenario
she describes in relation to Liverpool has become more commonplace, not
merely in the United Kingdom but in a wider global sense. Similarly, the ease
with which young people, and indeed post-youth generations, can view music
and other forms of creative practice as viable occupations has also evolved glo-
bally, often in tandem with a strongly articulated DIY code of cultural politics
and practice. This evolution of DIY culture in a broader global sense is highly
significant, not least of all because of its demonstration of DIY as a more com-
monly embraced language of action and intent among an increasingly broad
range of cultural producers and their audience. Once used as a means of denot-
ing pockets of resistance to mainstream forms of music and broader cultural pro-
duction in a mainly localized sense (e.g. McKay, 1998), DIY has now become
synonymous with a broader ethos of lifestyle politics that bonds people together
in networks of translocal, alternative cultural production.
While the Global North has perhaps led the way in terms of establishing the
core qualities and parameters of DIY cultural practice, the prevalence of DIY
sensibilities is by no means restricted to these regions of the world. On the con-
trary, as music styles and scenes such as punk, metal and dance have found their
10 A. Bennett and P. Guerra
way into countries in the Global South, this has had a critical bearing on the
evolution of DIY culture in a broader global context. Thus, just as it is now
legitimate to talk about punk, rap, indie and various other musical and stylistic
genres as global forms of culture (e.g. Nilan and Feixa, 2006), so too is it pos-
sible to see how the strong heritage of DIY culture interwoven with such genres
has accompanied their global mobility, finding a voice in various local cultures
around the world to produce a rich array of distinctively localized yet at the
same time translocally connected DIY cultural scenes.
In the same period, the rapid emergence of creative digital technology, while
not democratizing the process of cultural production in a universal sense, given
the cost implications involved in acquiring such technology for personal use,
has made it easier for increasing numbers of people – including young people –
to obtain the means to create and disseminate their own cultural products, be
they music, literature, art, film or associated artefacts. As this suggests, the com-
bined effect of such socioeconomic and technological shifts has significant rami-
fications for the position and status of DIY as both cultural discourse and
cultural practice in the post-industrial era. Indeed, akin to Cohen’s (1991) Liv-
erpool musicians in the mid-1980s, as post-industrialization has laid the ground
for a new, seemingly unshakable era of neoliberalism, what could legitimately be
termed a global risk generation (Bennett, 2018) has embraced music-making
and similar creative cultural practices as a way of life, frequently regarding them
as viable career pathways in a socioeconomic context where each career trajec-
tory can appear as precarious as the next. In this way, successive generations of
young people on a global scale are striving to work against the pathological
potentialities of biographical drift brought about by risk and uncertainty through
flexing self-honed entrepreneurial skills – both musical and extra-musical – in
ways that are geared towards the establishment of satisfying, if not always neces-
sarily economically fulfilling or even sustainable, DIY careers (Threadgold,
2018). While the more mainstream cultural industries, which are also largely a
product of post-industrialization, are primarily driven by a profit motive, this is
far less the case with DIY cultural practices, which are often driven by motives
of creative and aesthetic gratification (Ferreira, 2016).
The same is also true of clusters of DIY practice in other parts of the world, as
the case studies in this book illustrate.
The fact that DIY culture can be depicted as a lifestyle in the way outlined
above is very much due to some of the other factors discussed earlier in this
chapter. Most stridently, perhaps, the appropriation of DIY principles and prac-
tices by many individuals in late modernity bespeaks their opposition – both
personal and in many cases collective – to the tightening grip of neoliberalism
in a global context. By opting to pursue a lifestyle based around DIY ideology
and practice, individuals can articulate more incisively their sense of distance
from the institutional and cultural politics of a neoliberal existence. As themes
of culture and creativity are sucked into discourses framed around the related
concepts of the ‘creative class’ and ‘creative city’ (Florida, 2005), adopting a
DIY stance that spans aspects of work and leisure, public and private, indi-
viduals create and maintain habitable spaces on the margins of this rapid urban,
and increasingly regional, transformation.
In this sense, DIY culture and practice also signify vibrant new forms of
sociality. In the late nineteenth century, Simmel’s (1950) innovative writing on
cities and urban crowds pointed to the dual effect of anonymity as both liberat-
ing while at the same time exposing the ongoing desire of individuals for a sense
of community and belonging. In the late twentieth century, a number of theo-
rists including Slater (1997) and Mafessoli (1996) argued that communities in
late modernity were far more likely to be built around common leisure and con-
sumption interests than older forms of bonding grounded in issues of class,
ethnicity, neighbourhood and so on. As discussed earlier, based on the findings
of our own research on the punk scene in Portugal, we would argue that residual
aspects of community can remain current, at least in some local settings. Never-
theless, it seems clear that contemporary forms of sociality do embrace more
recently established aspects of leisure and consumption. As previously noted in
this chapter, however, with the onset of risk and deindustrialization, many are
now drawing on skills and practices acquired outside of conventional work and
education, and this extends to skills acquired as participants in music scenes and
other forms of alternative culture. Such skills acquisition and the conversion of
those skills into more sustained forms of cultural practice and production
underpin contemporary expressions of DIY. As such, DIY culture also provides a
space whereby people with common tastes, outlooks and experiences can come
together and build new forms of community, asserting their solidarity and dis-
tinctiveness in the late-modern urban context.
Conclusion
This chapter has mapped and explored the origins and development of DIY
culture and practice in relation to music and associated cultural forms. It began
by discussing the significance of DIY for punk culture in the mid-1970s and then
turned its attention to how punk’s adoption of a strong DIY aesthetic was to
Rethinking DIY culture 15
Acknowledgements
These findings were generated as a result of the research programme developed
by the KISMIF project, Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! Prolegomenons and Punk
Scenes – a Road to Portuguese Contemporaneity (1977–2012) (PTDC/CS-
SOC/118830/2010). This project was funded by FEDER through the COMPETE
Operational Programme from the FCT, the Foundation for Science and Tech-
nology. It is led by the Institute of Sociology of the University of Porto (IS-UP)
and developed in partnership with the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural
Research (GCSCR) and Lleida University (UdL). The following institutions
are also participants: Faculty of Economics of University of Porto (FEP), Faculty
of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto (FPCEUP),
Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra (FEUC), Centre for Social
Studies of the University of Coimbra (CES) and the Lisbon Municipal Libraries
(BLX). The project and its results can be found at www.punk.pt.
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Part I
Underground music
scenes between the local
and the translocal
Chapter 2
Understanding Mile End
Since 1999, I have lived in a neighbourhood of Montreal called Mile End.
Throughout these years, Mile End has been considered the most vital area for
rock-based music in Montreal, and in Canada more broadly. It is the home base
of the influential group Godspeed You! Black Emperor, of their record label
Constellation Records, of house-music label Mile End Records and of the influ-
ential recording studio Hotel2Tango (for a detailed account of this musical con-
figuration, see Mouillot, 2017). Mile End is also the ‘birthplace’ of Arcade Fire,
the location of the Casa del Popolo (probably the most important venue for
alternative rock-based forms of music in Montreal) and the neighbourhood in
which dozens of bands and other musical configurations started and many con-
tinue to live – at least intermittently.
In 2016, it was common to hear that the Mile End neighbourhood was slowly
losing some of its cultural centrality, as musical activity moved north in the face
of ongoing gentrification. However, for the first fifteen years of the new century,
Mile End was considered the epicentre of rock-based musical activity in Canada.
In 2012, it was one important site of what, borrowing from Greil Marcus, people
began calling the ‘New Weird Canada’, a musical underground characterized by
high levels of experimentation and eccentricity (Trapunski, 2012).
As journalistic interest in the Mile End scene exploded, particularly after the
New York Times wrote about it in 2005, a stream of reporters from various media
came to investigate the neighbourhood. The challenge they confronted was that
the Mile End music scene was difficult to capture in visual terms. Music con-
sumed in dark rooms, in lofts or bars, is not particularly photogenic. This is par-
ticularly true of music that is not particularly theatrical, and which is often
marked by a cultivated casualness. In any case, darkened rooms conveyed little
of the geography of a scene, of the neighbourhood in which it had grown or the
broader ambiances into which it had settled (and which it had helped to
create).
Most of the images of Mile End that circulated in press coverage intended
to cover musical activity were images from which music was absent. As an
22 W. Straw
experiment, I regularly type the phrases ‘Mile End’ and ‘music scene’ into
Google Images and save the results. Typically, of the first 30 or 40 images
through which I scroll, only a few bear any relationship to music. In one compi-
lation of these images is a musician performing at the inauguration of a park,
another speaking in a seminar and the logo for the Montreal house-music label
Mile End Records. Mostly, there are images of buildings that bear no necessary
relationship to music: churches, shops, restaurants. Usually, these buildings are
located along Bernard or St Viateur streets, the key east–west arteries of the
neighbourhood. In only half of the images, roughly counted, are there people,
and they are usually sitting in cafés or restaurants. For a long time, the most
predictable image was one of people sitting outside a place called the Café
Olympico. In the early 2010s, journalists, prompted by their local informants,
usually described this as the informal meeting place for Mile End’s hipster music
scene.
This relative absence of images representing music does several things. First,
it enhances the sense that the music in Mile End is underground music – not
only in the sense of being experimental and often transgressive, but because it is
invisible. The scene does not offer itself up to be easily understood or decoded,
and indeed, the images of casual coffee consumption that are so common
counter the reputation of the earnest, even militant, musical production for
which the scene is sometimes known. When I first moved to Montreal in the
late 1970s, the markers of its rock-based music scenes were highly visible, in the
ways in which adherents of punk (and, later, New Wave) dressed and occupied
public space. As Erik Cimon’s (2016) documentary Montreal New Wave shows,
the city embraced the exuberant stylistic explosion that followed punk more
enthusiastically than most North American cities. In Mile End, it is rather as if
musicians are hiding among the general population, undetected.
A second effect of the absence of music from images of Mile End is that, in
their focus on buildings and streets, these images contribute to the sense that
music here is deeply grounded in space and locality, even if music itself is almost
never shown in the places in which it happens. Viewers scan these images for
evidence of music, but in doing so they are mapping a space rather than observ-
ing a cultural activity. A third effect, to which I will turn at greater length
shortly, is that the absence of images of music confirms a tendency of twenty-
first-century urban life that cultural activity – even of the most avowedly oppo-
sitional kind – will be absorbed within a generalized sense of lifestyle, the most
visible features of which are the spaces of public sociability and consumption,
like restaurants and cafés.
We may contrast representations of the Mile End scene with those of another
‘scenic’ phenomenon: the configuration that Eric Davidson (2010) calls the
‘Gunk Punk’ scene. Gunk Punk names a loosely connected scene devoted to the
music of the 1990s which fell stylistically between hardcore punk and messy
power pop or garage rock – music performed by bands like the New Bomb Turks
and the Ding Dongs. If representations of Mile End’s music scene are so often
Visibility in music scenes 23
Two years later, in 1991, Hakim Bey would suggest a very different kind of pol-
itics. The key actors in subcultural politics were no longer, as with Hebdige, a
marginalized underclass that must find ways of asserting its identity. Nor was the
most important enemy a power engaged in surveillance in order to understand,
and therefore to control. Rather, the enemy against which subcultures now
struggled was a logic of consumerism that turned every subcultural image into a
spectacular, cinema-like commodity. The subcultures most worth studying were
those that sought to undermine the society of the spectacle by building mar-
ginal, short-lived spaces of invisibility. In a society that transforms everything
into spectacle, the radical gesture was the one that failed to attract the look. For
24 W. Straw
Bey (1991), the purpose of a radical politics was to create temporary auto-
nomous zones that left no traces and to which no looks were directed:
Clearly, Hebdige and Bey are not offering different theoretical accounts of the
same thing. Hebdige, as we know, is talking about the long line of spectacular
subcultures that runs from the London street gangs of the nineteenth century
through to the punks of the twentieth century. Bey’s idea of the temporary auto-
nomous zone would become a key element in the ways by which rave culture in
the 1990s came to theorize itself. One way of describing the difference between
them is to say that Hebdige is iconocentric – he sees visibility and the image as
key to resistance, and conceives cultural conflict in terms of semiotic warfare –
while Bey is iconophobic, condemning the image for its inevitable complicity
with a mediatized consumer culture.
We can say many things about these two approaches to visibility, but I want
to talk for a moment about their implications for the question of identities – for
the question of bodies marked by race, gender and sexuality. The problematic
relationship with visibility that, for Dick Hebdige, is typical of street subcultures
has long been true for racial minorities, for the bearers of certain sexual identi-
ties and so on. The resistance of African Americans, Latinx or transgender com-
munities has involved the claim to the right to occupy public space and to assert
those visible identities where they might not be wanted. However, this occupa-
tion of public space will often include a resistance to any easy understanding.
Hakim Bey’s fight for invisibility, on the other hand, is a refusal to fight at the
level of the image. There is a history of this struggle for invisibility at the heart
of black American politics, and in particular in the thinking of Ralph Ellison.
To be invisible is to find places, not just of refuge, but of community and self-
development (for recent discussions of the politics of invisibility, see Talbot,
2007, p. 12; DeGuzmán, 2014, pp. 43–4). By the time Hakim Bey was writing,
though, the refusal to fight at the level of the image also, on occasion, was
marked by a disinterest in conceiving of cultural struggle in terms of race,
gender, sexuality – all those things that function, in important ways, at the level
of the visible, of the marked body. This is one source of the perception of rave
culture as sexless or ungendered, as implicitly white and unconcerned with a
politics of social identities.
Visibility in music scenes 25
Signifying lifestyle
Arguably, the last decade or two has seen a declining role for music scenes as
spaces for the representation of subcultures as they were classically conceived.
In the shifts involved here, various displacements have occurred in the realm of
the visible. Increasingly, musical activity is represented (or displaced) by the
signifiers of urban lifestyle, which organize themselves into at least two sets. One
consists of the forms of material culture that fill the spaces of hipster bohemian-
ism. The other set of signifiers collaborates to convey an image of public socia
bility. We may find examples of both by returning to the example of the Mile
End neighbourhood in Montreal.
In March 2014, the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, which is published in Cana-
da’s capital city (two hours by road from Montreal), ran an article entitled ‘Day
Trip: A day in Mile End, Montreal’s “hipster capital” ’ (Johansen, 2014). What
interests me about this piece, which was generally successful in its characteriza-
tion of the neighbourhood, was the photographic image that accompanied it: a
photo of a vintage boutique selling old clothes and other kinds of vintage
objects. Images such as these now serve with increasing frequency to represent
the neighbourhood. If the original centre of the Mile End cultural scene was
music-making, that activity was, and largely remains, invisible and unrepre-
sented. There are obviously formal problems with representing music in visual
terms, and it is commonplace to note that images of the material supports of
music – records, instruments and so on – are usually used to stand in for a sub-
stance that is sonic rather than visual. What is interesting in the case of Mile
End is that imagery now quickly steps over the material supports of music to
show us the non-musical materials of a scene originally founded on music, like
the objects that have accumulated and been repurposed and that now fill hipster
vintage shops. Scenes generate this accumulation of material goods as one of
their underlying processes; these material goods then become the visible tokens
of the tastes that characterize the scene. Their relationship with the scene is
indexical in the sense that these objects point towards the tastes that participate
in the scene, but express them only partially.
disturbing character of loud music heard late at night continue to divide urban
populations, conflicts are just as likely now to centre on the loud street-level
conversation and collective smoking of those standing outside a bar à ambiance
musicale in mid-evening.
variety of artworks that had as their mission producing new kinds of intercon-
nection, through such actions as the serving of meals in a gallery. We might ask
whether something similar is happening with music. The late-night venue in
which one encountered the new and the previously unheard is losing ground to
the mid-evening bar à ambiance musicale. Here, one talks with friends against a
background of music that is kind of interesting but demands no intensely
focused attention. This is not all that is happening, of course: elsewhere, inter-
esting music continues to be made and heard, and late-night spaces of transgres-
sion continue to develop, in cities around the world. However, as images of
convivial café or craft brewery life come to define important cultural scenes –
like those of the neighbourhood in which I live – we need to ask the question:
Have we finally found that more perfect world, in which culture settles into the
routines and the intimacies of everyday life? Or is this, rather, the triumph of a
soft complacency in which the divisive cultural struggle over meaning has
disappeared?
Conclusion
The politics of musical undergrounds are increasingly marked, I suggest, by their
‘urbanization’. By this I mean that music draws its political force less and less
from a politics of form or expression, from challenging convention or expanding
the range of available musical forms and experiences. Rather, music finds itself
caught up in broader struggles over the transformation of cities. In one version
of these struggles, music is reduced to the noise that troubles newly gentrified
neighbourhoods and sets new settlers of neighbourhoods against venue owners
and performing musicians. In other instances, the economic viability of live
music venues is calculated relative to the potential economic returns from res-
taurants, cocktail bars or condominiums that might occupy the same spaces in
an age of rising property values. In another arena still, music’s defenders have
little alternative but to capitulate to the language of municipal urban innova-
tion agendas, justifying music’s existence by locating it within a range of cul-
tural fields (like gaming and software design) in which cities glimpse their rosy
economic futures. Symptoms of all these developments include the push to
appoint ‘night mayors’ in city governments, campaigns to designate nightclubs
as ‘heritage’ institutions protected from market forces, and the movement to
brand certain cities as ‘Music Cities’ in an appeal to tourists and local con-
sumers. In 2017, whether we like it or not, the contemporary politics of popular
music express themselves most forcefully in relation to these initiatives. If waves
of underground music, from be-bop to punk, once derived purpose from their
attacks on the musical commodity and the musical forms believed to sustain it,
newer waves now express their radicality in the claim to occupy space in the
contemporary city.
30 W. Straw
Acknowledgements
Portions of the research on which this chapter is based were funded by an
Insight grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.
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Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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Youth Studies, 8(1), 21–40.
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er+capital/9669130/story.html.
Mouillot, F. (2017). Distribution Ambiances Magnétiques Etcetera and Constellation
Records: DIY Record Labels and the Montreal Experimental Music Scene. Unpub-
lished doctoral thesis, McGill University, Montreal.
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Chapter 3
Punk stories
Carles Feixa
This chapter proposes to read the history of punk through two single punk
stories: the narratives of my encounter with two youths who decided to
identify with this lifestyle in different moments (the 1980s and 1990s) and in
different places (a small city in Catalonia and a metropolis in Mexico). I start
by interpreting the canonic history of punk through five triangular axes, con-
necting this history to previous social, aesthetic, musical, countercultural and
subcultural trends. I follow this by presenting pieces from my field notes in
Lleida (1985) and Mexico City (1991–96), following the punk stories of Felix
the Cat and Pablo the Rotten. I then conclude by analysing these narratives
as portraits and self-portraits that transform punk into a metaphor for social
and biographical crisis.
Punk histories
Interpretations of the punk movement have been as numerous as serious
research is scarce about the style’s form and content. Some essayists have ana-
lysed the ‘histories’ of punk as a symbolic synthesis of previous philosophical,
aesthetic, musical or countercultural trends, as well as a prophetic announce-
ment of later social evolutions, expressed through several types of triangular
correlations.
Dandy-f lâneur-punk
The first type of correlation is established with nineteenth-century figures that
express the emergence of the contemporary metropolis and the emergence of a
bohemian and blasé attitude towards it. Marie Roué (1986) compares the punk
to Baudelaire’s dandyism, which is understood as a rebellious and nihilist atti-
tude based on the awareness of the uselessness of any project and on insolence
as a way of relating to others. The opposition to previous idealistic trends, the
eccentric clothing, the obsession with creating his own original image, the
rejection of work, the boredom (spleen) more than disbelief, the negation of
nature and a passion for the city are elements of correlation between the
32 C. Feixa
Dada-S urrealism-punk
Greil Marcus (1989) has seen in aesthetic experimentation and the punk’s
vital attitude the echo of artistic and literary vanguards that emerged in the
convulsion of Europe between the wars. Punks take from Dada a sense of play,
the conversion of the stigma into an emblem (‘Dada, Dada is the Yet of the
blamed’) and the negation of future (‘I am stigmatized by a living death in
which real death holds no terrors for me,’ says Artaud (1976, p. 92), but it
could describe any punk). From Surrealism, the punk takes the obsession for
flouting codes, for metaphorical associations, for subversion as a policy, for the
privilege of the visual. (Punks are enthusiastic about Buñuel’s films, Le chien
andalou and Los olvidados.) From futurism, the punk takes technological
advances, urban identity and the collapse of symbols for the success of signals.
In fact, the punk brings new aesthetic languages: fanzines, videos, garments,
graffiti.
Rock-p op-punk
Parallel to the countercultural line, another interpretation focuses on the music
dialectics lived during the post-war period. For Paul Yonnet (1988), the punk is
a synthesis between the rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s and the pop of the 1960s;
between hard harmony and sophistication; between acoustic animality and arti-
ficiality; between the myth of origin and the myth of scatology (between past
and future); between the mask activities and the vertigo activities (between
fashion and drugs); between the male and the female; between experience and
utopia; between community and individual. In this sense, the sublimation of the
one-dimensional human is prophesized.
Beat-h ippie-punk
The clearest correlations are established with the countercultural youth move-
ments that preceded punk (and against which punk reacts). Luis Racionero
(1983) chooses the cycle beat-hippie-punk as emblem of three different times in
the development of advanced industrial societies, corresponding to three succes-
sive models of social attitudes towards free time (the post-war elitist existential-
ism, the consumer welfare of the 1960s and the crisis of the 1980s). In this
Punk stories 33
sense, the punk announces in a buffoon’s way the inevitable transition from
unemployment to leisure.
Skinhead-R astafarian-punk
Dick Hebdige (1979) interprets different reactions to the presence of black
immigrants coming from Jamaica. In this sense, the punk aesthetics can be seen
as a ‘white translation’ of ‘the black ethnicity’ – that is, an ambivalent reaction
against the racist exploring of autochthonous working-class subcultures (skin-
heads) and the subcultures of the second generation of West Indian immigrants
(Rastafarians). Punk music combines elements from harsh Oi! music and from
apocalyptical reggae. Punks and skinheads share their proletarian origin, their
ties to the territory, their aggressive attitude, some elements of style (boots,
short hair), their rejection of the police and a certain sense of being British, but
their political attitudes and their relationship with other ethnical groups are
what make the difference. Punks share with Rastafarians their appreciation of
multiculturalism (punks were called ‘blacks’ as a snub), a politically engaged
attitude and even a certain sense of apocalypse (futurist in the case of Rastafari-
ans, presentist in the case of punks). Therefore, they explore the emergence of a
syncretic culture.
Every one of these correlations shows more or less relevant, more or less
visible, aspects, but they all focus on the original British punk. To a certain
extent, it is assumed that there is a homogeneous universal model, the tend-
encies of which are slight variations of the same thing. What is significant about
punk, however, is that it managed to take root in different – sometimes contra-
dictory – social and territorial contexts, and managed to adapt efficiently to the
national and local conditions. At the beginning of the 1980s, when the move-
ment was fading in its British cot, it was emerging from its own ashes in other
places like Lleida and Neza York (Feixa, 2012).
Punk stories
Felix the Cat
One morning in June 1985, walking along Calle Major in Lleida, Catalonia, I
met Felix. He was seated on the terrace of the Bar Alcazar, drinking mineral
water and reading El País. He had short hair, sunglasses and a big earring in one
ear. I had met him at the Movement of Objectors of Conscience. I stopped and
talked to him for a while. He told me he was unemployed and was expecting
some news from the civil service. He told me also that he had just issued a
fanzine that he had been preparing for a long time. At that time, I was looking
for informants for my degree thesis about youth. I had been gathering life histo-
ries of middle-class pijos, progres and kumbayás, but I had yet to deepen my
research into the experience of young suburban people. I knew that Felix was
34 C. Feixa
from La Terreta, one of the most popular neighbourhoods in the city, and that
he was into alternative things, so I suggested interviewing him. He gladly
accepted: he had stacks of time and he didn’t mind talking about his life. We
met at his place the following day and he promised to show me his latest
records.
I was punctual to my appointment. Felix was waiting for me at the threshold
of his home, a ground floor in a subsidized housing estate from the 1960s like
many others in that working-class suburb. After showing me the posters in his
bedroom, we went out to the little garden of the block and sat on a bench. I
explained to him that I was carrying out a study about young people in Lleida
and that I wanted him to tell me things about his life. I could hardly get my
notebook and my recorder out before Felix started to talk, and our conversation
went on for three hours. Few informants have made my work so easy. During
this first session, I only listened. My friend’s discourse about his own biograph-
ical trajectory was structured and spontaneous. I soon realized that there was a
lot to the story: I was facing a good narrator who could combine detailed
descriptions of places and environments with general reflections about different
subjects, funny anecdotes and critical opinions in a fresh and enjoyable lan-
guage. I think he had as good a time as I did, so he was happy to meet me again
the following week to complete the story.
The second interview was more structured. I had some guidelines regarding
the subjects I was interested in researching and was asking leading questions to
gather information about them, as I had done with my previous informants.
What was unique about Felix was that the reflections about every institution
fitted together in a vital, original, emblematic trajectory. I soon realized that the
connecting thread in the whole story was the influence of certain musical-
aesthetic styles that marked different phases in his life, in an evolution that had
led him to his current identification as punk – something I didn’t view as
random, but rather something linked to his social condition and ideological
itinerary. I had interviewed another two young people who belonged to urban
tribes, but so far, I had not found anyone who could reason their life options in
such a convincing way. This time we met in a bar in the local neighbourhood,
and some of his friends came too. After playing a game of pool, I put my
recorder on the table. In that session, the monologue became a dialogue of
different people. It wasn’t only Felix talking: there was a game of mirrors estab-
lished between himself, his people, the neighbours and the interviewer. The sur-
prising thing was that Felix’s look was not very spectacular (he didn’t really look
too punk). Unlike some of his punk friends, Felix was apparently pacific and not
particularly outrageous. But he wasn’t showing everything on the surface.
I spent that summer in the Pyrenees writing up my thesis work. I presented it
in October and invited Felix to the reading that I introduced with some rock
music. Everyone who read my work agreed that Felix’s autobiography was the
best part of it. I decided to write an introduction that could put the story into
context and look for an editor who would publish it. But time went on, and the
Punk stories 35
project lay in a drawer. What didn’t get put aside was the friendship between
Felix and me. The following year I moved to Sitges, and Felix visited me often.
I remember a carnival when we went into many pubs. We used to go to the Bar
Felix, in the Street of the Sin, where they played hardcore and we would spend
hours playing pool and drinking beer. That bar had the same name I had chosen
for my informant: I completed his nickname by adding the name that was
painted inside the bar (‘The Cat’). At that time Felix was still unemployed,
doing a thousand little jobs. His dream was to rent a house in Lleida’s old city
centre and open a music bar. At that time there was a TV programme presented
by Montserrat Roig, a famous Catalan writer, called Buscarse la vida (Making a
living). In that programme, portraits of different youth environments were pre-
sented every week through an in-depth interview. I thought Felix could be a
good interviewee, and sent his life story to the writer who presented the pro-
gramme. Shortly afterwards, she wrote back showing her interest in interview-
ing my friend. I told Felix and he was totally thrilled about it: ‘I might even find
a job,’ he said to me. A TV team visited him at home, but the programme was
suddenly cancelled (it was seemingly too daring). Felix told me in the end that
he was relieved: he wasn’t sure he would be able to control his image as natur-
ally as he did during the interview. Audio-visual language did not allow the
same parity as simple aural language.
I did not hear from him again until I returned from Mexico in 1992. My stu-
dents told me that there was a new bar open, and that it was run by a very nice
couple. One day I was telling them about the youth gangs in Mexico and they
invited me to go there. It was a narrow and noisy hole, full of young rockers and
countercultural posters; the atmosphere was warm and cosy. Felix and his
partner were at the counter: they had realized their dream of opening a music
bar. We hugged and I invited them home to talk to them about Mexico and the
youth movement. Felix didn’t look punk any more. He had settled down and his
hair had grown. He lived with his wife above their bar and things were good:
‘All I have to do is pay my taxes every three months and defend myself when
the police come looking for drugs.’ I brought him Mexican hardcore music,
Emiliano Zapata’s posters and mezcal. He had become an adult, but he hadn’t
lost any of his youthful ideals.
5/5/91. My wife and I are invited at Podrido’s today for dinner. He wants us
to meet his wife, Geli, and his baby. They live in the colony of Las Aguilas,
quite far away from Neza. We spend nearly one hour in the truck from the
metro terminal, dodging traffic along Pantitlán Avenue (a total of nearly
two hours from central DF ). It is a very hot Sunday and we are exhausted
by the time we get there. The young couple lives in a room attached to
Pablo’s mother’s house. There is a log at the entrance ‘where the drunk sit’.
In the interior patio, there are a few plants, a basin, the hanging laundry
and the faded garlands from the fifteenth birthday party that one of Pablo’s
sisters celebrated before Christmas. Geli is a very beautiful girl; she’s about
24, and she is very happy to meet us. After showing us their baby, she
makes us a very refreshing mango drink. The room is very simple. Pablo
only finished putting up the asbestos roof a few weeks before, and they had
hardly finished painting it. There’s a small double bed, a cooker, a few
shelves with cooking utensils and food, a work table for cooking and low
unit with a small TV on top of it. There isn’t a cot for the baby, and the
couple’s few belongings are under the bed. The walls are decorated with
posters of La Polla Records and punk collages. While Geli prepares dinner,
Pablo shows us some fanzines, newspaper cuts, old photos, punk music cas-
settes … his whole personal and disorganized museum. He also shows us his
old clothes as a relic: a denim jacket with holes on it, full of punk designs
and inscriptions; his Sex Pistols flip flops; a mask that he used to wear when
he did freestyle wrestling in an arena in the neighbourhood. After the meal
(beef tacos with nopales), we went for a walk round the area. We couldn’t
have had a better guide. Podrido shows us around: streets, walls, people.
The most immediate visual impact is how people look. In fact, the whole
territory is a big look: every wall is marked with an inscription – usually the
name of the gang that dominates in the area: Mierdas Punk, Vagos, Chicos,
Diablillos. Or nicknames of gang members (Podrido is in a few of them).
The place with more inscriptions is around the secondary school: ‘All gangs
gather here and they want to demonstrate that they exist.’ Against the
Punk stories 37
13/9/91. Our plane leaves Monday early morning from the city that has
kept us for nine months, and we have decided to gather the people that we
have met and loved during this intense period. It can really be explosive
because we have invited pure chavos banda, rock ’n’ rollers, anthropologists,
museologists and others. The happiest ones seem to be the gang from Neza,
who promise to call. At about eight, nearly everything is ready: botanas,
tamalitos, drinks and other foods. Pablo and Geli arrive, very happy, with
their child. After a while, the whole gang gets there: ET, Sara, el Espía, el
Radio and el Rabino. There are over 40 people. The variety in their cloth-
ing makes a really striking impact. Before they leave, the punks take me
outside and they empty a whole bottle of beer over my head: this is the
baptism to enter the gang. ‘Now you’re one of us!’ They climb into their
Colectivo Caótico van and take their way back to Neza. Podrido stays at
the party (he’s a little drunk) with the rest of old jipitecas and chavos afresa-
dos. Someone complains that I take Pablo – who has fallen asleep from his
drinks – as representative of the gang: ‘This is not the gang, this is a
drunken man.’ I prefer not to say anything, but a chava says it for me: ‘Why
do you take it from him? I could be the one drunk!’ In the meantime, Geli
puts her baby into bed. We have to wait until seven – when the under-
ground opens – to take a more serene Pablo, Geli and the baby home:
‘We’ll miss you!’
7/9/96. Five years have elapsed and I have spent a few days in Defé. Nearly
everything has changed in Mexico during this time: the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas, the political murders, the fall of Salinas, the economic and
political crisis, and more. Shortly after arriving, a new guerrilla unit located
38 C. Feixa
in Guerrero and Oaxaca has carried out its worst attack: there have been
dead from two places I know, Tlaxiaco and Huatulco. The streets are full of
caricatures of Salinas and the Chupacabras (a mysterious mutant that kept
the whole country in anxiousness during the summer). But in el Chopo and
Neza, everything is more or less the same. I meet a few Mierdas on Saturday
at El Chopo: ET is the same as ever, like the lady of tacos, but something
looks different at the market: Jipitecas have their stalls, everything seems
more settled, there are CDs instead of tapes, there’s a space for exhibitions
and gigs at the end, drugs are banned and there’s even a security guard from
the tianguis. On Sunday, I am invited to Neza: They visit some premises at
Chimalhuacán that maybe will get assigned for cultural activities. We
spend the time discussing the impact of Zapatism among chavos. I don’t see
Pablo until the day before I leave. He attends the closing session of the
seminar and we spend the night with him and Maritza. I can see he’s a lot
more mature and settled, he’s put some weight on and he’s as kind as ever.
Pablito was christened and they have another chavito. His jobs are tempo-
rary as ever, but he’s never unemployed. They’re still living with his
parents-in-law. I talk to Geli on the phone to reassure her: Pablo will spend
the night with me. He says he hasn’t drunk for a while: they went to Guad-
alupe with his wife and swore that he would not drink at all during a year,
and he has kept his word so far. Nevertheless, he still goes to some wild
parties and his cultural activism has increased: they issued a handicraft little
book, they made a new video recording, they continue with their fanzines
and poetry, they projected a self-employment cooperative for the Diablillos,
they supported the Zapatistas. We have breakfast at the airport in the
morning. I am travelling to Paris and he is going back to Neza. When we
say our goodbyes, I promise myself that I will publish his story soon, so that
there is a testimony of his contradictions and his fights, so that his dreams –
his punk dreams – can revive.
Punk lives
The life stories of Felix and Pablo diverge in terms of time and space: six years and
an ocean separate them. Yet they present many surprising parallels. The first is a
formal one: both texts are the result of four-session recorded interviews that lasted
for about ten hours; once transcribed, they are about the same length; they are
both structured into big thematic biographical parts that correspond to the
different institutional and leisure spaces where their lives have developed; they
both have a novel structure that combines anecdotes with the essential, humour
with the tragic sense of life, a slow pace with speed, romantic fiction with genre
noir. Although my analysis is not focused on this, it is important to point out that
the language is a fundamental element when it comes to understanding the
stories: they are both full of the youth jargon that is characteristic of the particular
places and moments (the language of movida and caló, respectively).
Punk stories 39
The second parallel relates to the content. The two men’s life trajectories
have significant coincidences: they were both born in the 1960s and were young
in the 1980s; they both come from a working-class background; their families
had migrated to the city; they both show a strong class, gender and generational
awareness; both were brought up in peripheral areas with strong networks of
neighbouring solidarity and an important movement of association; both lived
through family conflicts and both experienced the absence of their fathers (due
to death or separation); they had both been good students during their primary
education and they both became ‘lazy’ at secondary school; they both have a
long labour experience where they have combined factory jobs with working in
the underground economy, and periods of great activity with times of unem-
ployment; they were both initiated into sex by mature women; they have both
belonged to youth gangs; they both broadened their area contacts to the broader
city; and both have settled as they have married their partners, who were also
part of their world and with whom they hope to share their future. Their aes-
thetic and ideological options have also many things in common: both have
belonged to anarchist groups; both have been attracted by rock ’n’ roll as a form
of expression of youth identities; they have been active in free-radio move-
ments, fanzines, squatting and so on; they evolved from more or less destructive
phases, marked by drugs and violence, to more constructive attitudes; they both
make astute criticisms; and they both conceive ‘being punk’ not as a trend but
rather as a behaviour that reflects their understanding of life and the world.
A life story gathers the subject’s view in a given moment of their life devel-
opment. It is a synthesis of personal identities in transition, of the image that
each narrator wants to give of his self, and his social and cultural environment.
Maybe not everything happened as they say it happened, and maybe they don’t
say everything that happened, but that’s how they experienced it, and that’s
how they want to transmit the story. In this sense, every life story is constructed
around one or more leitmotifs, which organize their form and content. The leit-
motif of Felix’s autobiography is the discontinuous construction of a personal
awareness and image. Using his own words, he sees himself as a ‘mutant’ who
constructs his personality like a jigsaw puzzle, from cuts and compositions, in a
constant game of mirrors with his equals and his opposites. Although it may
seem circular, the story is linear: it is a trajectory with a beginning (the neigh-
bour and class identity) and a destination (the daily underground fight). No
wonder the first and last bits (which were also the first and last things he told
me about) are about his social environment and the reaction of his neighbours
to the earring he’s wearing. Every thematic part is also linear (family, school,
work, sexual and religious trajectories always lead to the reformulation of his
awareness). The continuity of the written text reflects the continuity of the oral
story: the interview had few interruptions and I hardly had to organize the
material at all.
Pablo’s autobiography is much more discontinuous. The leitmotif is whether
or not he is still punk. This is the eternal reformulation of the question about a
40 C. Feixa
sense of existence. Although it may seem linear, it is a circular story that seems
to stumble over the same pebbles repeatedly: the absence of the father; the
neighbourhood’s poverty; the gangs’ violence; the police repression; escaping
adult responsibilities; the desire to emigrate to the gabacho and so on. It is
emblematic in the last part of the interview, when he talks about his dream. I
consider it the perfect metaphor for his personal situation at that time: the
punks’ disorientation, fear of the future, the presumption of an apocalypse in
their immediate environment. But it is also the symbolic formulation of his
hope to preserve his principles, his leadership of the gang: his wish not to
change personally within the change. His life story is very well elaborated (the
original interview was full of skipping and repetitions), which is why I struc-
tured it into ten topics that were repeated (not necessarily in chronological
order). I am very concerned about being loyal to the person speaking to me,
rather than to the tape on which I recorded his voice.
These stories are pictures (or self-portraits). The resulting life story is the
fruit of two glances crossing: the glance of the subject who tells the story and
the glance of the researcher who asks, listens and elaborates upon what has been
said. I have always tried to reflect the images that both Felix and Pablo wanted
to transmit, but I am aware that without my presence, the stories would have
not been written or would not be the same. When they read them, both of them
found them acceptable, but I am not so sure now that they identify any more
with what they said then: they are both married and they don’t grumble about
their future as much. But that’s how they felt when they were young, and that’s
how they told their stories.
References
Artaud, A. (1976). Antoine Artaud: Selected Writings (ed. S. Sontag). Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Canevacci, M. (1990). Il punk e il flâneur. In M. Canevacci, Antropologia della comuni-
cazione visuale. Roma: Sapere 2000.
Feixa, C. (2012). De jóvenes, bandas y tribus (5th ed.). Barcelona: Ariel.
Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Marcus. G. (1989). Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Racionero, L. (1983). Beatnik, hippie, punk. In L. Racionero, Del paro al ocio. Barcelona:
Anagrama.
Roué, M. (1986). La Punkitude, ou un certain dandysme. Anthropologie et Societés, 10(2):
37–55.
Yonnet, P. (1988). Juegos, modas y masas. Barcelona: Gedisa.
Chapter 4
For those who are unfamiliar with what happened on the night of 30 October
2015, it was the night a fire started in the Colectiv Club, one of the best-known
rock nightclubs in Bucharest. A total of 64 people died and 173 were injured
(mostly young people). That night, members of the rock band Goodbye to Gravity
had planned to launch their new album, Mantras of War. They brought fireworks
into a closed space, which was not designed or properly equipped for this kind of
entertainment, and within a couple of minutes, everything turned to ashes. From
that moment, my research gained a new direction, because the Bucharest night-
scape economy and music scene have changed a lot since, and we can speak about
‘the Colectiv effect’, with its potent political and social implications.
The tragic event rocked Romanian society from the first hours after the fire,
as the number of dead and injured rose. The reaction of the Romanian institu-
tions in charge of the rescue was slow, chaotic and demonstrated that they were
unprepared for a disaster. The social reaction was fast, though, helped by social
networks and mass media. Just four days after the event, around 25,000 people
marched on the streets of Bucharest and in the main cities of the country
against the government, the politicians and institutional corruption, blaming
these factors for the tragedy. The slogan of the protesters was ‘Corruption kills’
and the social networks helped to spread this message and mobilize the people.
As the official investigation into the Colectiv tragedy revealed, an act of cor-
ruption was the main cause of a series of illegal actions that were perpetuated
over the years and peaked on the night of the fire. Moreover, the high number
of people who died after being taken to hospital revealed the deficiencies in the
Romanian medical system, with intra-hospital infections and counterfeited
sanitary solutions, due to corruption among hospital management. Romanians
regarded these events as similar to the rest of the corruption with which they
were dealing in their everyday lives, and asked for more: they wanted a change
in the social and political environment. Enache Tuşa (2016, p. 28) also refers to
a ‘Colectiv phenomenon that can be attributed as responsibility of the political
system and of a part of society’.
42 A.G. Becuț
The echo of the popular manifestations that took place in November 2015
persisted for nearly two years, and the spirit of protest rose again on 31 January
2017, when at night-time the recently elected government adopted a controver-
sial decree that would decriminalize corruption. As in the case of the 2015 pro-
tests, social networks and mass media helped to bring together social spirit and
civil society and once again the music of Goodbye to Gravity, this time in the
form of the song The Day We Die (Goodbye to Gravity, 2015) with its critical
commentary on the political situation in Romania, mobilized the people to
demand their rights.
With the help of their music, the underground artists have transmitted a
message against the perverted values of Romanian society. They have created
a social movement of moral recovery and have persuaded many young people
to follow them in unlikely locations (Tuşa, 2016, p. 22). This was only one
episode in a long series of social resistance movements, including the Vama
Veche Rock Festival ‘Stufstock’, where there was resistance against tourism
development, and ‘Fân Fest’ Festival in Roşia Montană, which resisted a gold-
mining project. Research on the role of music as an agent of change has
demonstrated that music has a rhetorical content and a larger meaning beyond
the lyrics (Tas, 2014, p. 369). William Roy, cited by Hakki Tas, highlights the
ability of music to turn into a form of collective action and a platform for
solidarity (2014, p. 369).
The ‘Colectiv effects’ were political (the governmental change), social (a
new attitude against corruption), economic (on the night-time economy) and
cultural (on the music scene). After the fire, many nightclubs and other cultural
locations (such as theatres) in Bucharest and across the country were closed
down, many of the music bands or artists cancelled or postponed their concerts
and the public remained extremely cautious about safety conditions in public
spaces. In this context, it is important to understand the complexity of Bucha-
rest cultural spaces and their role in the development of the city’s urban culture.
Methodology
The methodology used in this study is based on 30 semi-structured interviews
with artists, band staff members and business people who organize music events.
The selection of the respondents was based on specific criteria, such as the
organization type – private – and the location and type of cultural activity.
Another method used for collecting information was the participant observa-
tion, carried out by the author during the period 2010–11, and internet docu-
mentation conducted from January to March 2017.
The concept of music scenes is in accordance with the definition of Peterson
and Bennett (2004, p. xvi):
The concept ‘music scene’, originally used primarily in journalistic and everyday
contexts, is increasingly used by academic researchers to designate the contexts
Between popular and underground culture 43
The chapter is organized into three parts, focusing on the distinction between
mainstream and underground in terms of types of space and genres of music.
The first part presents the Bucharest underground music scene. The second part
focuses on the underground spaces from the viewpoint of gentrification and
industrial reconversion, as important pillars on which the leisure and entertain-
ment businesses in Bucharest city centre are built. The third part presents the
audience–artist relationship in the Bucharest underground scene.
Most of the earnings come from concerts organized mainly on weekends. The
fee for a concert ticket is very low – around 20 Lei (4.5 Euro), mainly because
the spectators are students and young people. The sale of CDs or DVDs is not a
profitable activity because of extensive piracy and the Romanian audience’s low
level of interest in paying for music.
In this context, only a few recording studios are willing to sustain the Roma-
nian underground music scene; if they decide to do so, the partnerships are
mainly based on friendships. Therefore, most of the underground bands decide
not to produce records or to open their own recording studios. There are few
appearances of Romanian underground bands on television.
Music consumption on the internet affects the Romanian underground music
scene too, so the production of records has become very weak in recent years.
This is why the main incomes are generated by playing live concerts. According
to my informants, there is a change in the way that music consumption in
recent years has been expressed in the audience’s interest in fresh music. While
some years ago tours were based on a music album, now they are based only on a
few singles. The internet changed the attitude of music consumers towards
music performances, because several years ago they first listened to the album
and then came to the concerts to see the artists; now they first access YouTube
and see the concert or listen to the music, and then come to live concerts.
Visual identity therefore becomes more important, and videos are an essen-
tial tool to attract audiences. In the context of social media, having a distinctive
visual identity enables underground bands to promote their music and enlarge
the number of fans. According to Mitchell and MacDonald (2016, p. 1), ‘visual
information plays a critical role in the assessment of music performance’. Many
researchers have highlighted the importance of the visual in interpreting
musical signals, suggesting that more attention should be paid to video than to
audio (2016, p. 2).
Subcarpaţi is an example of a Romanian underground band that has shaped
for itself a visual and acoustic identity based on Romanian folklore and become
known both nationally and internationally. The band has built its visual iden-
tity by using traditional images and objects in its first albums – reminders of the
country’s rural regions – but in its latest albums it has also explored the post-
communist identity (see the communist blocks of flats in the video clips Cînd a
fost la ’89 or Am crescut pe la Romană). According to the Guardian (2012):
An important part of the band’s identity is the language used in its perform-
ances and its name. There is a current debate about whether underground bands
should play in Romanian or in English, and there is also a trend towards choosing
Between popular and underground culture 45
strange or funny names for the band – for example, Abnormin Deffect, High-
light Kenosis, Travka, Psiho Simphony.
These places are part of the night-time economy by providing youth a ‘play-
ground’ for pleasure-seeking and performing their identities. This type of
space is characterized by ‘owned themed/branded or stylized environments
and strict regulatory practices’ (Chatterton & Holland, 2003, p. 93). In
contrast, the alternative consumption places or underground spaces are
defined by Chatterton and Hollands (2003, p. 93) in opposition to and dis-
tinct from the ‘mainstream’, while the margins form the geographical edge
of the centre. While some alternative spaces are simply more bohemian
versions of mainstream culture, others openly identify themselves as
oppositional.
consumption mostly in the city centre, together with few transportation facili-
ties for the neighbourhoods on the periphery.
The capacity of clubs to receive the underground music audience is reduced;
while there are several clubs in the city centre with a relatively large capacity, it
is not sufficient, and initiatives to set up former factories in other neighbour-
hoods as venues have failed because of the public’s preference for attending
events in the centre of Bucharest:
These kinds of spaces tend to cluster in a certain area of the city – in Bucharest,
particularly in the Old City. Some authors consider the return of entertainment
to the city centre as an expression of the revitalization of the central areas of
the old industrial cities, and view it as very important for urban economic devel-
opment (Chatterton and Hollands, 2002).
A possible explanation is that, in the post-socialist era, the audience prefers
to occupy the city centre, which during the socialist period was under the domi-
nation and control of the Communist Party and its members. After the fall of
the communist regime, the old cultural spaces remained more or less the same
in terms of architecture, design and amenities, keeping the stamp of communism
and becoming unattractive to audience and artists. Therefore, while the spaces
analysed are entertainment spaces, at the same time they are a part of the cul-
tural infrastructure and a cultural consumption space. However, the local
authorities were not sufficiently aware of this until the fire in the Colectiv Club,
and such places remained ignored in terms of regulations and control for a
long time.
Due to its communist past, the cultural sector in Romania has several dis-
tinctive characteristics in terms of its cultural infrastructure, the features of the
main actors who operate in the field, the profile of the cultural audience/
consumers and the structure of the cultural system. The fall of the communist
regime brought important changes in the cultural system. Relevant to our ana-
lysis is the privatization of some cultural public spaces as well as the public
spaces that dealt with food and drink consumption. Privatization brought with
it the transfer of responsibility from the state to private owners and a weak
degree of regulation and control of the activities in these places (the legal
Between popular and underground culture 47
In the last five years the underground market has developed very much
because of the great demand in the clubs, which compete against each
other and have begun to bring less-known foreign bands and artists, which
has created competition for the Romanian bands. The bands choose their
performing spaces depending on the customers’ profile, too – they make
sure that the customers match the profile of their fans. There are clubs that
have a disco programme during the weekend and underground concerts on
weekdays.
(PR professional for an underground music band)
to venue safety laws that reduced the fire risk, but they also put severe con-
straints on a successful local industry (Homan, 2002, p. 94).
Another phenomenon worth mentioning is the reconversion of old commu-
nist factories or industrial areas into leisure spaces. In Bucharest, this is linked
with the process of deindustrialization and functional reconversion. As Liviu
Chelcea (2008, p. 361) states, ‘being evacuated slowly from the Bucharest land-
scape, the industry was reinserted in most diverse cultural spaces, as a metaphor,
as museum artefact, or as cultural distinction (alternative cultural space)’.
Ironically, in this context, the work spaces from the communist period
became the leisure spaces in post-communist Bucharest. The Colectiv Club is
one example, where the old space was redesigned for entertainment purposes.
The club used the basement of a hall of the old Pionierul shoe factory, but the
materials used to redecorate the place were not suitable, and allowed the fire to
spread quickly. The investigation revealed that the materials used provided a
good acoustic and were very aesthetically pleasing, but they were not fire-
resistant; on the contrary, they helped the flames to spread, which raised the
number of deaths and injured people.
While in other countries there is legislation that attempts to abolish danger-
ous practices in entertainment venues, as in the case of Oz Rock in Australia
(Homan, 2002, p. 92), in Romania, until the Colectiv fire, there weren’t any
laws regarding the number of people attending performances, or related to
internal décor (paint fire ratings, fire-retardant furniture).
of them being more integrated into youth culture than others. Their audience
tends to fall into the young professionals (yuppies) category; as long as the
night-time economy focuses on the idea of being ‘cool’, these young profes-
sionals seek fashionable bars and clubs (Chatterton and Hollands, 2002). The
audience for an underground band in Bucharest is between 200 and 1000
people, while Facebook fans number around 30,000 on average. Most of them
are young people between 16 and 35 years of age, students or active in NGOs or
companies in the creative sector:
For the most part there are the students, if we take into consideration the
events, too; they are 22 years old on average, if we consider live concerts,
well-known bands, but there are also concerts attended by married people.
(Underground artist)
When choosing a place in which to perform, the artists consider their public
first, to see whether they are willing to come to that location. The interviewed
artists mentioned that Bucharest was lacking suitable places for underground
music, and they named around four places, with Colectiv Club being one
of them:
My music is for bars and clubs, I couldn’t sing at the Philharmonics, because
I would look ridiculous. We grew up on this music and I don’t want to get
away from this music area, we used to be consumers in this area, too … An
advantage would be that, in a club such as Fabrica, which accommodates
nearly 500 people and people are ‘packed’, this seems to me an ultimate
advantage, because this shows your value on the market, the great dis-
advantage is where you cannot know whether the people have come for you
or for other bands or only to hang around.
(Underground artist)
Because what counts the most is the sound system, you can sing on a
stadium and have a bad sound or you can sing in small spaces, like I did in
Arad a while ago, in a small space, with 250 people and it went great, I like
these places where I can interact very well with the public.
(Underground artist)
don’t sing anymore’, and I somewhat understood him, but the club was
overcrowded and it would have been kinda stupid to postpone the concert
because the sound went down, but in the end we sang a lot that evening.
(Underground artist)
Conclusion
In the post-socialist period, the Bucharest underground music scene became
more and more developed and attractive for Romanian as well as international
artists, until the tragic event in the Colectiv Club. Underground music has
developed particularly in alternative cultural spaces – for example, the former
communist factories or old nationalized buildings. While in other countries
these alternative spaces tend to be found on the outskirts of cities, in Bucharest
their clustering is greater in the centre of the city because of the urban policy
and cultural consumption practices during the communist period, the effects of
which have manifested themselves up to the present.
The economic and social problems (including corruption) from the commu-
nist period, as well as the deficient urban infrastructure, are reflected in the con-
tents of the underground music (lyrics, sounds, images) as well as in the manner
in which this music scene has developed in Romania.
The results of our research showed that the underground music scene in Bucha-
rest had developed in an unsafe environment, marked by a precarious infrastruc-
ture, corruption regarding operation licences, greed and ignorance of the
stakeholders in the entertainment nightscape. The impact of the ‘Colectiv effect’
is far from being over: it still affects the underground music scene, not only in
Bucharest but all over the country, and this is the main reason why our research
will help future analysis of this topic by providing precious information.
Acknowledgements
The chapter is based partly on a study carried out in 2010 by the team of the
Centre for Research and Consultancy on Culture, conducted by the author
(June–September 2010; March–August 2014; and January–March 2017). The
chapter uses the information collected in 2011 through semi-structured inter-
views undertaken by a research team from the Center for Research and Consul-
tancy on Culture (Oana Donose, Ștefania Voicu, Crăița Curteanu and Andrei
Crăciun, under the supervision of Anda Becuț).
Between popular and underground culture 51
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Brake, M.C. (2003). Comparative Youth Culture: The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth
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Chapter 5
Even though punk music has now taken its rightful place in the musical land-
scape, as demonstrated by Andy Bennett’s (2009) work, it is still mostly neg-
lected in the field of sociological research – at least from a non–Anglo-Saxon
perspective. The field of cultural studies has dealt with youth ‘subcultures’
(Cohen, 1970; Gelder and Thornton, 1997; Hall and Jefferson, 1975; Hebdige,
1996), looking into aspects such as the ‘significance of style’ (Hebdige, 1979)
and the concepts of ‘creolization’ (Hannerz, 1992) and ‘cultural hybridization’
(Hall, 2000), yet French scientific research has shown little interest in the punk
genre so far, while most other musical genres have become more privileged
regarding the study of the sociology of music (jazz, rock, rap, metal and elec-
tronic music). However, since the mid-1970s, the punks have been gaining a
certain visibility in the social space. In France, there are nearly as many punk
concerts today as there were when the genre first emerged. This is a sign of an
interest in line with public taste, as demonstrated by the high number of bands,
production labels, websites, forums, newsletters and fanzines, as well as the
growing number of (auto)biographical works emerging from the punk avant-
gardes (Colegrave and Sullivan, 2002; Gray, 1999; Lydon, 1996; Parker, 2004;
Savage, 2005). One of the main points of interest of this study is its ability to
engage sociological issues beyond its boundaries. The punk ‘space’ (Humeau,
2011; Moore, 2007) is a powerful way to analyse the rise of countercultural
styles (Bennett, 2006, 2012) and their international circulation (Bourdieu,
2002; Guerra and Bennett, 2015; Humeau, 2011; Sapiro, 2008) through trans-
fers and exchanges selected by intermediaries (Becker, 1982) who apply their
categories of perception (Bourdieu, 2002). Punk music provides an interesting
means to inquire into the concepts of structural homology, particularly in the
context of young male working-class countercultural movements (Crossley and
Bottero, 2014). It also provides a means to observe the changes in ways of
socialization as well as in political engagement in relation to this phenomenon
(Humeau, 2011).
This chapter demonstrates how the structure of this space and its recognition
paradoxically evoke principles akin to those of more autonomous spaces like ‘art
for art’s sake’ or ‘social art’ (Bourdieu, 1992), as opposed to the logic that is
DIY as a resource of French punk capital 53
structuring the cultural and musical industries. Contrary to other established art
fields, where this economic ‘interest in disinterest’ is quite common, here the
disinterest does not also come with political disaffection.
How can the first steps be transformed – or not – in a multidimensional
activism? The effects of practical and ‘learning-by-doing’ socialization will be
demonstrated in order to understand the continuities – which are neither linear
nor mechanical – between musical tastes, musical commitment and political
front. A factorial design of the punk space will be presented (Lebaron and Le
Roux, 2015; Le Roux and Rouhanet, 2004; Rouhanet and Le Roux, 1993,
2010). It is defined by specific laws and an internal structure linked to a specific
configuration of agents coming from specific class fractions. The direct or indi-
rect relations between the agents are defined by the distributions of their social
resources, which are also linked to tastes and lifestyles. The aim is to produce a
synthetic visualization of the relations between the space of positions and the
space of punk tastes by presenting the oppositions and similarities of the agents.
Based on the presentation of the group’s structure, we will discuss its different
polarizations. The research material consists of a statistical survey (n=636) of 36
in-depth interviews and more than three years of participant observation. For
this chapter, the most important statistical results will be presented (for more
details, see Humeau, 2011).
The global punk population interrogated is predominantly masculine (85%)
and comes from working-class families; more than seven out of ten people are
sons of workers or employees. Twenty-three per cent are high school pupils or
students, 22 per cent are workers, 16 per cent of employees and 21 per cent are
unemployed persons with low-level qualifications and unskilled jobs. School tra-
jectories are frequently marked by a confrontational relationship with school
(grade repetitions, exclusions from school) and very early drop-outs.
A synthetic approach to the French ‘independent’ punk space will be
adopted through a multiple correspondence analysis (MCA).
structuring of this space. Position variables – age, gender and profession – will
thus be projected as additional variables. For this MCA, there are nineteen
active variables and 124 modalities. The cloud of individuals is interestingly
spread, distributing the respondents in a homogenous way within the factorial
space.
the group of agents who make their first steps in the punk space, where we will
later find the future producers. At the end of this analysis, we will call them the
newcomers.
The north-east quadrant regroups punks with much more confirmed politico-
musical competences than the newcomers. They have production practices –
bands, sound engineering – and much stronger political involvement. They are
multi-activists and have many current political activities. For this research, their
interrogation by questionnaire took place in the artistic squats. They have many
relations with movements defending illegal immigration, homeless people and
unemployed people, with anti-fascist movements, with the anarchist movement
and with groups defending the environment. They also have an important sen-
iority. In contrast to the newcomers, the styles they represent are hardcore
punk, punk rock and Oi! Affiliated to anarcho-syndicalism, we can find among
them CNT supporters, anarchists and LCR supporters. They state that they
attend concerts ‘for activism’ and to ‘support the scene’. The factorial chart is a
perfect match between concerts, bands and militant practices.
Finally, in the south-east quadrant, we find the more ancient respondents,
who are the established avant-gardes. They seem a little less involved in current
militant activities. Nevertheless, they mostly declare an affiliation with organi-
zations or unions of which they once were a part. Their relationship with music
resembles the established in track of recognition, since they also participate in pro-
duction. The ‘band’ modality is very close to the horizontal axis, and this
expresses a strong affiliation for such practices for both poles. Moreover, we are
not surprised to find them running a radio station or organizing concerts.
Average styles quoted tend towards an intentional eclecticism (Coulangeon,
2003) and call on going back to the sources (the ‘alterno’). This reminds us that
they were involved in the alternative scene during the 1980s. The term ‘alterno’
is a gratifying response regarding the implicit hierarchy of musical styles. Unlike
the newcomers, they do not state that they are attracted by other styles. In addi-
tion to these eclectic musical and political practices, there are some other elitist
practices mentioned, like all the reading media.
This cartographic exploration reveals various results. First, this space opposes
agents according to their militant capital (Axis 1). Such a statement may seem
common or a bias of analysis. But the agents themselves consider the links that
connect music and politics to be very important. Second, the volume of the spe-
cific militant and cultural capital (Axis 2) gives an account of the differentiated
representations of what punk space is and should be through the prism of gener-
ational conflicts. The social reputation and visibility of the bands reinforce
these differentiating factors. At the edge of the chart, the newcomers partly
deny the reputation and recognition of avant-garde punks, as they lack informa-
tion about them and wish to further enlarge the frontiers, influenced by the
critic media.
The interest of this approach is not only to reveal polarizations due to stylis-
tic affinities, works, bands, political affiliation and artistic ageing. The following
Figure 5.2 Space of social properties (cloud of 37 illustrative modalities in the factorial plan 1–2).
DIY as a resource of French punk capital 59
meaning people in precarious situations (north side of the graph) who are
directly concerned by these struggles, but also ancient or new militants who are
not directly concerned by these social problems, yet are very concerned by the
defended cause.
Beyond musical styles compatible with politico-cultural nebula, we also find
the ‘masculine’ modality and two bands who rally these agents. Thus this part of
the chart contains one of the most popular bands of the Oi! scene, the La
Brigada Flores Magone, close to anarcho-syndicalism and the band Attentat
Sonore, related to anarcho-punk music. The harmony of homologies between
average styles, quoted bands, political activities and objective social positions
turns out to be quasi-perfect for this group.
Finally, those with a second or third university degree are found with the
group of established avant-gardes. We can assume that the most qualified particip-
ants, who are also the strongest readers, tend to play the sophistication card
regarding the ‘rock’ modality on the factorial chart. The multivariate analysis
shows that the most qualified come from the upper classes (65 per cent come
from the middle classes). The idea of homology between positions and position-
taking is therefore reinforced.
was following a designer’s professional qualification and was excluded from it. He
no longer has any relationship with his father, who is a heating installer. His
mother is a janitor and his parents are divorced. He had participated in at least
two more punk rock bands before we met. As a spectator, he comes to concerts
between two and three times a week. In order to be able to organize the tours, the
group members navigate between unemployment periods and temporary workers’
missions. Mathieu, like the other members of the band, invests himself in many
political local organizations: ‘Total supporters of anarchism, but not engaged in a
party or a union … We want to stay free.’ Along with the band, Mathieu has
created a production label. He organizes concerts frequently in an artistic squat.
His body hexis is very marked: crest, studded leather jacket and tattoos.
Jean is part of the third category, the established avant-gardes. He is 48 years
old, works as a teacher, is a father of two and lives with his girlfriend. He has a
university degree in contemporary history. The son of a union worker, he
declares having arrived in the punk scene when he was 16. His militant pathway
is formed by multiple affiliations, such as the Young Communists and Fédéra-
tion Anarchists. For the last five years, he has been the secretary of the Com-
munist Party in the region where he lives. With friends, he created a fanzine
and a production label. He considers himself less engaged today than he was in
the 1980s and 1990s, but without having lost all contacts. He continues to help
out in concert organizing and participates in a radio programme once a month.
Finally, he invests himself in an organization that aims to build an alternative
village close to human rights protection movements and agro-ecology.
Those participants who are the most autonomous in this space and who are
closer to DIY are the ones who stay for the long term. This shows the effect of
this conviction on these agents. It is how they can gain a certain form of specific
capital. The common denominator, the DIY, leads some agents who come from
certain class fractions to engagement and others to self-exclusion. The DIY
assures a cultural, political and musical transmission and becomes a social frame-
work for a part of the working class. To know oneself and to go into action
under a common watchword functions as social magic, symbolically redefining
each one’s position.
Note
1 These young people, unemployed or workers, tend to live on their own; they are often
single, and thus have more flexible schedules and timetables. They are not in the petit
bourgeoisie ‘settling down’ model, or seeking social upgrade (Geay and Humeau,
2016).
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Bennett, A. (2006). Punk’s not dead: The significance of punk rock for an older genera-
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Poetics, 37: 474–89.
Bennett, A. (2012). Pour une réévaluation du concept de contre-culture. Volume!, 9(1):
19–37.
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système d’enseignement. Paris: Minuit.
Cohen, S. (1970). The teddy boy. In V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (eds), The Age of
Affluence, 1951–1964. London: Macmillan.
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Coulangeon, P. (2003). Stratification sociale des goûts musicaux. Revue Française de soci-
ologie, 44: 3–33.
Crossley, N. and Bottero, W. (2014). Music worlds and internal goods: The role of con-
vention. Cultural Sociology, 9(1): 38–55.
Geay, B. and Humeau, P. (2016). Becoming parents: Differentiated approaches to the
procreation imperative. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 214: 4–29.
Gelder, K. and Thornton, S. (1997). The Subcultures Reader. London, Routledge.
Gray, M. (1999). The Clash. Combat Rock. Paris: Camion Blanc.
Guerra, P. and Bennett, A. (2015). Never mind the Pistols? The legacy and authenticity
of the Sex Pistols in Portugal. Popular Music and Society, 38(4): 500–21.
Hall, S. (2000). Une perspective européenne sur l’hybridation: Éléments de réflexion.
Hermès, 28: 99–102.
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Hannerz, U. (1992). Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning.
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Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Hebdige, D. (1996). Système du mod. Réseaux, 80: 71–80.
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trajectoires et vieillissement politico-artistiques. PhD thesis, Université Picardie Jule
Vernes, Amiens.
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culturel, espace social et analyse des données. Paris: Dunod.
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Chapter 6
This chapter focuses on the construction of gender in youth cultures. The main
question posed by the chapter is how young people deal with gender as a cat-
egory and resource in their expression of their youth culture. The focus of the
chapter is the male-dominated hardcore punk scene and the Goth scene in the
city of Rostock, which is the biggest city in Mecklenburg Pomerania, Germany.
A common tendency among young men and women of both youth cultures is to
diverge from dominant male and female body images. Young males in the Goth
scene use female-labelled representations, such as wearing makeup, while young
females in the hardcore punk scene use male-labelled signs and patterns of
behaviour – for example, wearing army-style boots. During adolescence, young
people experiment with their own bodies (Niekrenz and Witte, 2011). Gender-
based positioning and the provocative overstepping of normative gender bound-
aries, as well as an extreme emphasis on certain attitudes and characteristics
linked to one’s own gender, are part of the personal development process. This
chapter analyses qualitative interviews with three male members of the Goth
scene and three women from the hardcore punk scene in Rostock. The analysis
shows that adolescents display less normative differentiation between male and
female bodies, instead allowing themselves to find various ways of representing
masculinity and femininity. Therefore, these young men and women have their
own views about male and female body images and gender issues.
Definitely, there have been bizarre situations. Who reckons with somehow
encountering five Goths standing in front of a mirror, five male Goths in
front of a mirror touching up their makeup at a party when you go to the
men’s room?
(Paul, p. 19)
Morthar observes that ‘men mostly use black nail polish, whereas women tend
to rather use these reddish colours’ (Morthar, p. 47). The rhetoric of blurring
gender is replaced here with precise observations of subtle differences between
male and female Goths and their body practices. For members of the scene,
clothing and styling are important means of expressing themselves. They distin-
guish between styling for everyday life and for events or parties. Makeup with at
least some eyeliner (‘somehow an eyeliner which doesn’t mean a lot of time and
effort either’: Paul, p. 18) often plays a role for men and women in the extensive
party preparations – aside from a deliberate selection of clothing. Members of
the scene show a preference for the colour black, not just at scene gatherings
but also in everyday life. They wear body decorations (earrings, piercings,
chains), which on occasion are replaced by special pieces for parties (‘When I
go out now, I wear a special earring or I put in a special nose-ring’: Paul, p. 22)
(see also Hodkinson, 2004).
Manu displays an extremely different and expressive means of self-enactment.
He has been a Goth since the age of eighteen. Manu describes his styling as follows:
In the past, when I was younger, I would shave the sides [of my head] bald
and wear a Mohawk,1 of course, apply kohl and makeup, polish my nails,
wear skirts, wear lacquer, I would express my feminine side more.
(Manu, pp. 30, 31)
There were times when I wouldn’t leave the bathroom in under three hours;
well, today I take one and a half hours.
(Manu, p. 32)
He rationalizes the shorter length of time needed for styling with an increase in
self-confidence:
By this age … you don’t need that any more … I appreciate myself much
more, yes, I see myself much more clearly, more reflectively …, of course, I
still file my nails excessively, yeah, I hate having dirty fingernails, hair is
fucking important …, however, I don’t wear skirts any more.
(Manu, p. 31)
… [But] even though I don’t wear skirts any more, I still stick out my little
finger when I drink.
(Manu, p. 36)
Boys in black, girls in punk 67
A lot [feel compelled to] ask me whether I’m gay due to my appearance,
yeah, though that’s not the case. In spite of everything, the question keeps
coming due to my facial expressions, my gestures, my habitus.
(p. 31)2
Because Manu does not comply with the heterosexual normative standard, his
sexual orientation is up for debate too. This passage clearly demonstrates the
close relationship between socially normed gender role, gender identity and
sexual desire. Manu’s self-performance is rewarded with a high standing within
the scene:
I gathered such great experience and within the scene, what can I say, well,
exaggerating a bit, I was king [laughs].
(Manu, pp. 31–2)
Through his enactment of the feminine, Manu achieves special status (see also
Brill, 2006, p. 191). Within the scene, he wins recognition and enhances his status.
He feels like a king because he dares – as a heterosexual man – to overstep bound-
aries. His self-enactment not only grants him scene-specific symbolic capital; it also
leads to the ability to observe his own gender identity at arm’s length:
Katrin: It’s plain and simple, it has to do with them getting to know some
great guy who’s in the hardcore scene or who totally likes to listen to the
music and says: ‘Honey, come on, let’s go, it’ll be fun’. That’s what I think
dollies are there for or because they think, ‘Geez, the guys look pretty
good, I’ll just go there’. But, I really don’t think they’re interested in the
music or in what the band stands for according to the lyrics or anything
like that.
(Katrin, pp. 7, 8)
Therefore, the categorization between insiders and dollies is more than a means
of demarcating inclusion and exclusion. It is a means used by the ‘established’
girls to devalue other young women and to set and maintain certain standards of
belonging. Differences between men and women are stressed explicitly through
dancing. Here, all three of the girls interviewed act in a very guarded fashion.
None of them go into the so-called mosh pit – the part of the dance floor where
the physically demanding moshing takes place. Moshing is a form of a dance
that consists – from an outside perspective – mostly of bumping into someone
Boys in black, girls in punk 69
When they get started with their moshing or whatever. It’s not for me … I
prefer standing on the fringes somewhere … Well, I wouldn’t like to be
somewhere on the frontlines in the middle of the mosh pit and to be shoved
around with other people.
(Katrin, p. 2)
Nadine, who also remains in the background, tries to explain her reservation:
With most bands I tend to be the passive spectator standing at the back …
Very often, it’s not possible to stand at the front without, uh, having
someone on your back right away that you don’t know or getting elbowed
in the neck.
(Nadine, p. 3)
On the one hand, Nadine describes the physical closeness to strangers as being
unpleasant; on the other, she stresses the danger of getting hit in places sens-
itive to injury. Jenni, by contrast, would very much like to dance in the pit, but
perceives herself as physically inferior:
I’d also like to go into the mosh pit. But I’m rather … I’m rather too small
for that and I have way too much respect for … Nah, I don’t think so, no.
I’d go under there.
(Jenni, p. 4)
But she also reports an experience at an event in the scene when girls got in the
pit and claimed their space:
At the Hamburg Persistence Tour there were a whole lot of women who
really got into the act. Dude, that was really crazy and they didn’t even look
like – I’d say it really is a very, very aggressive dance style. But, they didn’t
even look like rowdies, these girls. Nah, they weren’t total butch femmes or
anything like that. … Well, I totally admire that.
(Jenni, p. 4)
70 Y. Niekrenz
The women who dare to go into the pit are treated with approval, respect and
even admiration. At the same time, they are set apart as young women, defined
as ‘the others’ and non-males. The mosh pit is the place where masculinity and
gender differences are established. Injuries count as a sign of masculinity, are
taken for granted and accepted, and have a positive connotation. Women, who
are ascribed peaceableness qua their gender role (Mitscherlich, 1987) mostly
disapprove of these physical experiences. These moshing girls are the admired
exception in the pit. Describing the young women as non-butch femmes and
non-rowdies establishes the difference between masculine size, strength and
power, and female delicateness, and marks the dancing girls in the pit as expli-
citly female. The delicateness and femininity of those dancing in this venue of
masculine self-enactment is emphasized. The women interviewed explain their
passivity with their fear of getting injured. They are not afraid of hurting others;
they see themselves in the passive role of victim(s), not in the active role. Also,
the passages cited demonstrate the naturalization of gender differences. The
women interviewed believe that it is due to biological differences – their body
build – that they cannot go into the pit: they are too small, too delicate
(Schulze, 2007).
Hardcore punk is a politicized scene that, within its respective sub-styles,
focuses on various issues, including anti-sexism, anti-racism, vegetarianism and
veganism. As a lifestyle, hardcore is ‘more than music’ (Calmbach, 2007): polit-
ical themes are also picked up – among other things, the exclusion of girls and
sexism is discussed and criticized in fanzines, on internet forums and in the lyrics
of hardcore bands. So, in a subcultural discourse, the topic is anchored within
the scene. Altogether, girls in the hardcore punk scene find many body practices
that traditionally are attributed to males. These practices give them connecting
factors, however, which they can use to develop their own forms of femininity,
as the three adolescents interviewed here demonstrate. They are confronted by
stereotypes and sometimes resist them, but sometimes accept them without
question. They react with resistance when they perceive conflicts between
gender norms in hardcore punk and their own femininity, and find their place
in the scene – not moshing, but intellectually dealing with the history of their
subculture or band. However, in the scene, one can also find people living out
an alternative to traditional gender stereotypes (Leblanc, 2002).
in the hardcore scene also refuse to follow the norms seen as typically feminine
and understand femininity as a continuum granting them freedom in terms of
forms of expression. Their world is punk instead of pink, and they have to assert
themselves in this male-dominated youth-cultural world. Furthermore, they
attempt to become accepted members of that world through ‘subcultural capital’
(Thornton, 1995), by studying lyrics and band histories. In this way they gather
specific experiences in terms of the effect of their self-enactment and the enact-
ment of male and female hardness and dominance.
By using their bodies and by resorting to a rich variety in terms of gender
images, the adolescents tackle gender without actually intending to portray
asexuality or act out a transition to the other gender. Adolescents come to see
the male/female dichotomy as a space that is, after all, open to nuanced vari-
ation, where they can act out masculinity and femininity in different ways.
Trial and error, and experimentation, enable the adolescents to gain a more
differentiated point of view of body and gender, but also confront them with
the boundaries of heterosexual norms of body images. These self-enactments
create meaning for adolescents (and even post-adolescents) who are con-
fronted with the demands made of young women and men as they become
adults (Stauber, 2007).
The flexibility in terms of the bodily representation of masculinity and femi-
ninity as shown and reported by members of the scene is a possible alternative
to the heteronormative order. It is an assault on the rigidity of boundaries
between the genders, but an assault that fundamentally depends on drawing
boundaries. Although adolescent self-enactment turns into a form of ‘doing
gender differently’ (Stauber, 2011), it exists within the boundaries of a contin-
uum of ‘doing female’ and ‘doing male’. However, playing with self-expression
in this manner can in fact function as an attack on strict dichotomies and
binary constructions of gender, by drawing attention to them. The discomfort
sparked by the ways adolescents present their bodies reveals the male/female
dichotomy for what it is: a social construct. That is where the potential of such
presentations lies: they are discomforting, calling into question the significance
traditionally ascribed to the male and female genders, and casting doubt on cat-
egorizations and their serious consequences.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the suggestions made by the editors, which
resulted in a more precise argument and a significantly improved chapter. Many
thanks to the students who were involved in the research project.
Notes
1 The Mohawk (also referred to as a Mohican) is a hairstyle in which both sides of the
head are shaven, leaving a strip of noticeably longer hair in the centre.
72 Y. Niekrenz
2 Manu majored in social studies, which is also reflected in the terminology of his self-
description. Since the three Goths who were interviewed are between the ages of 30
and 31, they reach a different level of reflection in the interview than the hardcore
fans. The women interviewed were between the ages of 23 and 24, and have not been
on the scene as long as the men. Their interviews are characterized not so much by
retrospection and self-reflection as by descriptions of their own preferences, trends and
conflicts within the scene.
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Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. New Delhi: Sage.
Brill, D. (2006). Subversion or Stereotype? The Gothic Subculture as a Case Study of Gen-
dered Identities and Representations. Gießen: Ulme Mini Verlag.
Brill, D. (2007). Fetisch-Lolitas oder junge Hexen? Mädchen und Frauen in der Gothic-
Szene. In G. Rohmann (ed.), Krasse Töchter. Mädchen in Jugendkulturen (pp. 55–70).
Berlin: Archiv der Jugendkulturen.
Calmbach, M. (2007). More Than Music: Einblicke in die Jugendkultur Hardcore.
Bielefeld: transcript.
Erikson, E.H. (1959). Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: W.W. Norton.
Fend, H. (2005). Entwicklungspsychologie des Jugendalters. Wiesbaden: VS.
Haenfler, R. (2006). Straight Edge: Clean-living Youth, Hardcore Punk, and Social Change.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Hitzler, R., Bucher, T. and Niederbacher, A. (2005 [2001]). Leben in Szenen. Formen
jugendlicher Vergemeinschaftung heute. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag.
Hitzler, R. and Niederbacher, A. (2010). Leben in Szenen. Formen juveniler Vergemein-
schaftung heute. Wiesbaden: VS.
Hodkinson P. (2004). The Goth scene and (sub)cultural substance. In A. Bennett and
K. Kahn-Harris (eds), After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture
(pp. 135–47). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hübner-Funk, S. (2003). Wie entkörperlicht ist die Jugend der Jugendsoziologie? Argu-
mente für eine ‘somatische Wende’ unserer Disziplin. In J. Mansel, H. Griese and A.
Scherr (eds), Theoriedefizite der Jugendforschung. Standortbestimmung und Perspektiven
(pp. 67–74). Munich: Juventa.
Inhetveen, K. (2004). Gewalt, Körper und Vergemeinschaftung in Subkulturen. In C.
Liell and A. Pettenkofer (eds), Kultivierungen von Gewalt. Beiträge zur Soziologie von
Gewalt und Ordnung (pp. 43–63). Würzburg: Ergon.
Jovchelovitch, S. and Bauer, M.W. (2000). Narrative Interviewing. London: LSE.
Retrieved from http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/2633.
Keupp, H., Ahbe, T., Gmür, W., Höfer, R., Mitzscherlich, B., Kraus, W. and Straus F.
(1999). Identitätskonstruktionen: Das Patchwork der Identität in der Spätmoderne.
Reinbek: Rowohlt.
Leblanc, L. (2002). Pretty in Punk. Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Lorig, P. and Vogelgesang, W. (2011). Jugendkulturen und Globalisierung. Die
Hardcore-Szene als Prototyp ethisch-translokaler Vergemeinschaftung. Diskurs Kind-
heits- und Jugendforschung, 4, 369–86.
McRobbie, A. and Garber, J. (2000 [1991]). Girls and subcultures. In A. McRobbie (ed.),
Feminism and Youth Culture (pp. 12–25). London: Macmillan.
Boys in black, girls in punk 73
In fact, over the last 50 years, the Basque Country has witnessed major counter-
culture phenomena. Spheres that belonged to the state, such as cultural promo-
tion, began to be expressed alternatively and organized in a DIY way by young
people, cultural groups, and social and political movements. From the 1960s,
traces of traditional Basque language and culture acted as powerful magnets,
since they were able to carry out symbolic apertures and blend with new
(counter)cultural phenomena, giving rise to interesting mutations (Amezaga,
78 I. Andoni del Amo Castro
1995; Larrinaga, 2016). One important mutation was the punk and Basque rock
that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. The field of Basque pop music in par-
ticular is a privileged terrain of symbolic action, given that it is the new cultural
phenomenon of the period, able to mobilize feelings and emotions (Larrinaga,
2016; Urla, 2001).
Such musical protest crystallized an aesthetic and a soundtrack, and a prolific
DIY praxis: festive spaces, a wave of squatting, fanzines, free radio stations and
music. This chapter proposes an overview of these key anti-hegemonic cultural
scenes in the Basque Country during the late 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Luis Sáenz de Viguera (2007, p. 167) indicates that the movement involved the
development of a ‘Basque Radical Culture’, which expressed the distance
Music, protest politics, DIY and identity 81
between the democratic discourses in the media and the brutal realities of
crisis, unemployment and, above all, continued repression now justified by
the system, by the alliance between the new democratic political parties
and the old forces of order.
But this cultural and social creativity, which combined both negation and cre-
ation (Porrah, 2006), did not occur in a sociopolitical vacuum, but rather within
the political and social magma of popular initiatives that had been proliferating
for several years. What we find is an effervescent antagonistic culture ready to
be ‘infected’ by punk (Herreros and López, 2013).
So the initial rejection of Euskal Kantagintza Berria should be understood as
an implicit negation of seriousness and solemnity as necessary registers of polit-
ical rebellion. The fiesta, playfulness, celebration and irreverence would now be
put forward as fully valid dimensions of the antagonistic culture (Herreros and
López, 2013; Lahusen, 1993; Pascual, 2010).
The social origins of those making up the youth movement were mainly
working class, with a certain presence from the middle class (Porrah, 2006).
These had a close relationship with DIY initiatives such as popular fiestas or
gaztetxes, and the different social movements: anti-militarist, political amnesty,
internationalism – Nicaragua, Cuba, etc. – and ecological (Amezaga, 1995;
Pascual, 2010). This strengthened the movement’s most positive and creative
dimension, the DIY ethic, with an emphasis on alternative social transforma-
tion or effects.
Music – especially punk – appropriated the new geography that no other cul-
tural agent had even approached: the street (Kasmir, 1999). Festive practices
and songs created other celebratory spaces or added a new narrative to those
already in existence, reinserting them in the radical space, in which rejection
and pleasure constantly mingle (Sáenz de Viguera, 2007). Different movements
and subcultures mixed in bars and the festive space of the txoznas: punks, sup-
porters of independence movement, skinheads, middle-class hippies, ecologists,
artists, feminists.
The scope and dimension of the Basque Radical Rock and the youth move-
ment are not easy to understand without paying attention to the conjunction of
the cultural and the political in the conflictive Basque context, the hybridiza-
tion of the Basque culture, and the rise of both symbolic or material DIY spaces
(Herreros and López, 2013; Pascual, 2010).
Yet among those who sang in Basque, there was a virulent criticism of
current conceptions of all things Basque. This is the case with the song ‘Drogak
AEK’n’ by Hertzainak, which used irony to criticize official conceptions –
whether traditional or from the point of view of the nationalist left wing –
instead championing the culture and identity of street life (Atutxa, 2010). In
the French Basque Country, punk was particularly irreverent, to the extent
where relationships with Basque nationalism were not always good, and in some
cases were decidedly poor (Bidegain, 2010).
Punk contributed to the innovation of a non-essentialist Basque identity. It
contributed to a definitive change of old Basque identities – deriving their
source from lineage and ethnicity – to innovative modes and privileges, as well
as features of Basqueness. Furthermore, punk occupied an alternative communal
space where a new collective identity was created and expressed (Kasmir, 1999).
This would largely favour the integration of young people from Basque- and
Spanish-speaking areas within a common frame of reference. Jakue Pascual
(cited in Herreros and López, 2013, p. 91) remembers:
We were urban, we loved rock, and we didn’t live in anything like a farm-
house. Also, there were lots of maketos [Spanish-speaking immigrants] or
children from mixed families of Basques and immigrants among us, and
even so it was the only movement that managed to bring Basque-speaking
culture and Basque down to street level, with groups like Hertzainak.
The youth movement and the nationalist left would coincide not only in terms
of their anti-repressive dynamics, but in the new DIY or resignified spaces: gaz-
tetxes, the old quarters of towns and cities, alternative bars. After an initial
rejection, there was recognition by the nationalist left of the mobilizing and agi-
tating power of the musical and youth movements. The Martxa eta Borroka
campaign organized by the nationalist left in 1985 – concerts featuring the main
punk bands of the time in imitation of the ‘cheerful and combative’ dynamic of
the FSLN in Nicaragua – marks one of the strongest moments of these hegem-
onization attempts.
These relationships were simultaneously contradictory and complementary,
yet the main figures involved point out, with hindsight, that they were bene-
ficial for both groups. The result was negotiations, debates and exchanges among
different groups, networks and movements, as well as the construction of a
common and viable national discourse as a political project and a coherent and
convincing aesthetic (Lahusen, 1993). A whole infrastructure linked to the
nationalist left was made available to the youth movement: a communication
84 I. Andoni del Amo Castro
network, especially through the newspaper Egin, the bars linked to the national-
ist left, the left’s own youth movement events and political support for festivals,
gaztetxes, txoznas, free radio stations and other DIY infrastructure created or used
by the youth movement.
Basque Radical Rock would not have been the same, either in importance or
in duration, without this interrelationship. However, the nationalist left would
not have been the same either, since over and above counter-hegemonic stra-
tegic mobilization, it built its own group identity largely linked to this sound-
track and aesthetic. This dimension of group political identity-building, together
with its exceptional success as a mechanism of political communication and
reproduction – more than compensating for nationalism’s structural weakness in
the established cultural media, press and broadcasters – largely blocked the pen-
etration of successive waves of youth production: in the Basque Country, the
1980s were to last at least 25 years.
also, in a certain way, divergent: on one hand, ‘the enduring memory of Basque
punk’ that ‘seems to have been suspended in time, perhaps assuming the punk
slogan of No Future’; on the other, a trend in which the band Negu Gorriak
(with the same people from Kortatu) was central, marked by experimentation,
crossover and the use of Basque as a form of commitment to the emancipatory
cause of Basque culture and society. The track Esan ozenki by Negu Gorriak is a
good reflection of this kind of Basque nationalist optimism, which looks to
African-American pride, rap, Malcolm X and the call to The Clash’s white riot,
expressed in the slogan ‘Basque speakers are the blacks of Europe’ (Porrah, 2006;
Urla, 2001). The dichotomies ‘punk versus society’ and ‘Basque versus Spanish’,
which converged in the 1980s (Lahusen, 1993), would be joined in the 1990s
by a third: ‘Basque language versus state languages’ (Urla, 2001).
The 1990s was to be a period of consolidation and building, in every sense, a
Basque counterculture, one that was markedly in the Basque language, its phys-
ical and symbolic DIY spaces still in unstable equilibrium: gaztetxes, fiestas,
txoznas. This was also the case for aesthetic conventions, although in mixed
form. The conflicts continue to be present in the streets, particularly in public
altercations (Larrinaga, 2016).
It was also a time of progressive professionalization of bands and musical
spaces, at the price of losing the immediacy of the early punk groups. And it was
very intense in terms of the DIY initiatives. Very significant is the case of the
record label Esan Ozenki, promoted by the group Negu Gorriak following the
self-management model of US hardcore counterculture, especially Fugazi and its
label Dischord. There were other projects based on the DIY philosophy: the gaz-
tetxe Bonberenea, which had a self-managed recording studio and record press;
projects such as Musikherria and Taupada; internet broadcasting initiatives like
Harrobia Lantzen and Entzun (Larrinaga, 2016).
It was to be a defeat of and victory over radical culture, ‘from its partial exile,
whose adaptation distanced it from its early period, but allowed it to continue in
time’ (Sáenz de Viguera, 2007, p. 268).
seem to explain the long continuation of these cultural scenes. The first is the
combination of a Basque ethnic culture that, in its condition of subaltern
culture, is articulated as a popular culture (Amezaga, 1995) with global
(counter)cultural expressions, which has favoured processes of cultural and
identity reconstruction.
The second is the joint cultural and political mobilization in the different
conflicts – particularly the national one, which has encouraged all these
processes:
Acknowledgement
Research funded by the Research Training Programme of the Department of
Science Policy of the Basque Government.
Notes
1 The Burgos court case was a summary trial initiated on 3 December 1970 in the
Spanish city of Burgos against sixteen members (including two priests) of the Basque
nationalist armed organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), accused of the murders
of three people during the dictatorship of General Franco. The presence of the
national and international press in the courtroom during the trial was used by the
defence to morally and politically damage the Franco regime with its allegations.
Popular mobilizations, the intervention of high ecclesiastical hierarchies and inter-
national pressure resulted in the death sentences imposed on six of the defendants not
being executed, and the sentences being commuted to life imprisonment.
2 There were many festivals, especially in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia. The town’s frontons
and squares began to be filled with thousands of people, and there was a new element
that was not known during the singing festivals: audience participation. One of the
milestones in this phenomenon was the ‘24 hours in Basque’ festival on 27 March
1976, organized by Popular Radio in the Anoeta Velodrome (San Sebastián). Another
Music, protest politics, DIY and identity 87
important festival was the end of the ‘Bai euskarari’ (Yes to the Basque Language)
campaign, in the San Mamés stadium, Bilbao, on 17 June 1978.
3 The dictator Franco died and the process of reform of the regime began. It was time for
the legalization of political parties, unions and associations, and there was a prolific
emergence of them. The Basque flag was also legalized. In 1975, the pro-Amnesty
Committees were also established; in 1977, the first parliament democratically elected
since 1936 promulgated the Amnesty Law. There were also three fully active armed
organizations: ETA (military), ETA (politico-military) and the Autonomous Anti-
capitalist Commandos.
4 The trikiti, trikitixa or eskusoinu txiki is a two-row Basque diatonic button accordion
with right-hand rows keyed a fifth apart and twelve unisonoric bass buttons. Probably
introduced by French or Italian immigrants coming from the Alps, the first written
evidence of the trikiti comes from 1889, when the diatonic accordion was used for
music in a popular pilgrimage festivity of Urkiola (Biscay). The pair of diatonic button
accordions, along with tambourine, gradually grew in popularity and was adopted to
perform in local and popular festivities. That playing pattern remained unchanged up
to the 1980s, when Kepa Junkera and Joseba Tapia started to develop unprecedented
ways of playing trikitixa (Wikipedia).
5 The Basque alboka (albogue), is a single-reed woodwind instrument consisting of a
single reed and two small-diameter melody pipes, with finger holes and a bell tradi-
tionally made from animal horn. Additionally, a reed cap of animal horn is placed
around the reed to contain the breath and allow circular breathing for constant play
(Wikipedia).
References
Amezaga, J. (1995). Herri kultura, euskal kultura eta kultura popularrak. Leioa: UPV-EHU.
Atutxa, I. (2010). Tatxatuaren azpiko nazioaz. Donostia: Utriusque Vasconiae.
Bidegain, E. (2010). Patxa: Besta bai, borroka ere bai. Larresoro: Gatuzain.
Eyerman, R. and Jamison, A. (1998). Music and Social Movements. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Herreros, R. and López, I. (2013). El estado de las cosas de Kortatu: Lucha, fiesta y guerra
sucia. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo.
Kasmir, S. (1999). From the Margins: Punk Rock and the Repositioning of Ethnicity and
Gender in Basque Identity. In W. Douglass, C. Urza, L. White and J. Zulaika (eds),
Basque Cultural Studies (pp. 178–204). Reno: University of Nevada.
Lahusen, C. (1993). The aesthetic of radicalism: the relationship between punk and the
patriotic nationalist movement of the Basque Country. Popular Music, 12(3), 263–80.
Larrinaga, J. (2016). Euskal musika kosmikoak. Mungia: Baga-Biga Produkzioak.
Letamendia, F. (1994). Historia del nacionalismo vasco y de ETA: ETA en el franquismo
(1951–1976). Donostia: R&B.
Lete, X. (1977). Euskal kanta berria. Jakin, 4.
López Aguirre, E. (2011). Historia del rock vasco. Vitoria-Gasteiz: Ediciones Aianai.
Moso, R. (2004). Flores en la basura: Los días del Rock Radikal. Algorta: Hilargi Ediciones.
Pascual, J. (2010). Movimiento de resistencia juvenil en los años ochenta en Euskal
Herria. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU).
Porrah, H. (2006). Negación punk en Euskal Herria. Tafalla: Txalaparta.
Ramírez de la Piscina, T. (2010). Basque Country as alternative media laboratory: Com-
pilation of the most interesting experiences for the last 30 years. Revista Latina de
Comunicación Social, 65, 310–24.
88 I. Andoni del Amo Castro
Sáenz de Viguera, L. (2007). Dena ongi dabil! ¡Todo va dabuten! Tensión y heterogenei-
dad de la cultura radical vasca en el límite del estado democrático (1978–). Unpub-
lished PhD thesis. Duke University, Durham, NC.
Urla, J. (2001). We are all Malcolm X! Negu Gorriak, Hip-Hop and the Basque political
imaginary. In T. Mitchell (ed.), Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA (pp.
171–93). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Zallo, R. (2013). Camus Bergareche, Bruno: Para entender la cultura vasca. Revista Inter-
nacional de los Estudios Vascos, RIEV, 58(1), 227–36.
Chapter 8
Home Economics
Fusing imaginaries in Wellington’s
musical underground
Katie Rochow
In 2010, the Dutch cultural philosophers and art theorists Timotheus Ver-
meulen and Robin van den Akker responded to this shifting zeitgeist with their
article ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, asserting that ‘the postmodern years of
plenty, pastiche and parataxis are over’. Vermeulen and Van den Akker are not
the first scholars to declare the ‘death of postmodernism’, however. Various
forms of post-post-modernism have been proposed, such as Lipovetsky’s (2005)
hypermodernism, Kirby’s (2009) digimodernism, Samuels’ (2008) automodern-
ism and Bourriaud’s (2009) altermodernism.1 However, according to Vermeulen
and Van den Akker, those conceptions tend to radicalize the postmodern rather
than restructure it. They mistake a multiplicity of forms for a plurality of struc-
tures, and fail to be wholly comprehensible. Hence current developments in aes-
thetics, music and culture can no longer be explained in terms of the
postmodern, but should be conceived via another critical discourse: metamod-
ernism. Since its (re)introduction in 2010, the concept of metamodernism has
been discussed in various forms and fields: as a ‘new philosophical approach to
counselling’ (Gardner, 2016), a ‘philosophical reflection on the essence of the
universe and the evolution of the contemporary world’ (Baciu, Bocoş and
Baciu-Urzică, 2015) or a ‘framework to understand certain current religious
developments’ (Clasquin-Johnson, 2017). Clasquin-Johnson (2017, p. 2) argues
that in order to investigate metamodernism, we have to ‘delve into the world of
online articles, tweets, blog posts and podcasts’, which underlines the concept’s
current status ‘as a philosophy for and by the young’. In addition to Vermeulen
and Van den Akker’s webzine Notes on Metamodernism, there are a number of
postgraduate dissertations that discuss the relationship between metamodernism
and literature (Dumitrescu, 2014; McDonald, 2014), popular music (Shepherd,
2015) and contemporary art (Frick, 2015). However, apart from a limited
number of dissertations and academic articles, there has been a lack of further
scholarship attempting to deepen the discussion on the metamodern discourse.
In particular, discussions on metamodern manifestations in underground music
scenes have been rather neglected by current research.
Methodology
The findings presented in this chapter stem from a three-year ethnographic
study in which participant observation and serial interviews were part of the
methodological toolkit through which I explored the spatial dynamics of Wel-
lington’s local music scene. When I started my research in 2013, I became
absorbed by the city’s eclectic and active music culture, its numerous cafes, bars,
clubs, festivals and galleries, which account for a specific socio-musical
experience.
I actively immersed myself in the city’s urban rhythms, following the daily
schedule of the city-dwellers as much as I could. I soon developed my personal
routes and routines, which included the usual bike-ride to work in the morning,
coffee at the local coffee shop in the afternoon and the frequent night-life
92 K. Rochow
exploration in the evening. This allowed me not only to gather local knowledge
of the areas, but made it possible for me to create a foundation from which I
could understand and analyse the musician’s opinions and reactions in a
different way than otherwise.
As I started to explore the local music scene, attending performances around
the city, potential interviewees were soon identified. Twenty local musicians
took part in the research. They were aged between 24 and 57, ten males and ten
females. The pool of respondents was restricted to independent musicians who
were active in the local music scene at that time, and viewed themselves as
professional musicians. Such subjective self-evaluation does not necessarily
mean that they were working as musicians full time, or that they got a satis-
factory financial reward for their music. However, all the participants had at
least partly figured out a way to have a career as a musician, be it through grants,
secondary occupations or a commitment to various bands. They were all aiming
to work full time creating original, independent music. I did not want to con-
centrate on one specific musical tradition, but rather tried to consider the wide
variety of musical genres to be found in Wellington. Consequently, the study
includes jazz, folk, pop and rock musicians, punk, brass and experimental music-
makers as well as singer-songwriters.
Wellington
The focal point of this chapter is Wellington, the capital of Aotearoa New
Zealand. The city is built along a ‘natural amphitheatre of hills’ enclosing the
vast natural harbour at the south-western tip of New Zealand’s North Island
(Wellington City Council, 2017). In addition to being the nation’s capital city,
Wellington is also the ‘cultural capital’ of New Zealand, according to the urban
branding strategy of Wellington’s City Council. With its population of about
450,000, the Wellington Region is the third most populous urban area in New
Zealand (Wellington City Council, 2017). Despite its compact size, Wellington
claims to have more cafés, bars and restaurants per capita than New York City
(Stahl, 2011). In particular, the Cuba Quarter, Wellington’s ‘discrete zone of
hip, alternative stores’, represents an eclectic blend of cafés, bars, restaurants,
music venues, op shops and ateliers, which reinforce the city’s status as a vibrant
and creative destination (Brunt, 2011, p. 163). The thriving urban culture
attracts many artists and performers, allowing for diverse creative scenes to
flourish. Apart from the city’s distinct dub/reggae/roots scene associated with
what has been referred to as the ‘Wellington sound’, there is also a thriving jazz
scene, a drum’n’bass scene, a country and garage rock scene as well as an experi-
mental sound and noise scene, constituting the city’s vibrant cultural space
(Straw, 1991).
Wellington’s musical vitality is not just confined to the commercial setting of
bars and clubs, but unfolds in various alternative performance venues such
as warehouses, factory lofts or domestic spaces. The creation of alternative
Home Economics 93
of venues and some kind of job-creation measure, the two local artists had
founded the Home Economics Initiative in 2011. The non-profit event is based
on the entrepreneurial spirit and collaboration of the organizers, the owners or
inhabitants of the respective domestic spaces, as well as the artists (the musi-
cians and visual artists), with the aim of transforming the home into an under-
ground performance space.
Bennett and Rogers (2016) argue that the establishment of ‘unofficial live
music venues’ such as this not only reflects a gap in venue provision within the
local urban night-time economy, but also reveals a
Home Economics, as a DIY live music event, creates public performance space
out of what has traditionally been defined as a place of intimacy, stability and
security. The home is typically understood as a space of safety and familiarity – a
‘private’ space away from the demands of ‘public’ life. However, as Blunt and
Dowling (2006, p. 27) remind us, domestic space is not separated from public,
political worlds but rather is constituted through them. It is a multiscalar spatial
imaginary saturated with the experiences, memories and emotions of
everyday life:
[H]ome does not simply exist, but is made. Home is a process of creating
and understanding forms of dwelling and belonging. This process has both
material and imaginative elements. Thus people create home through social
and emotional relationships. Home is also materially created – new struc-
tures formed, objects used and placed.
(2006, p. 23)
In this context, Home Economics creates performance space that resonates with
the traditional confines of domestic space, such as intimacy, familiarity or
stability, yet remains detached from bourgeois conceptions of home, economic
forces and the spectre of neoliberalism. It provides a space of creative freedom
that neglects the practical and economic constraints imposed by the cultural
policy of local venues or galleries, providing a nurturing environment that oscil-
lates between private and public, security and freedom, tradition and creation.
This ‘in-betweenness’ is paradigmatic of a new generation of artists, who are
swinging or swaying ‘with and between future, present and past, here and there
and somewhere; with and between ideals, mindsets, and positions’ (Vermeulen,
2012). This generation is inspired by a modern naïveté yet informed by post-
modern scepticism. They express ‘(often guarded) hopefulness and (at times
Home Economics 95
The negotiation of such opposite poles, between the modern and the post-
modern, creates a ‘both–neither’ dynamic. Metamodernism intimates a constant
repositioning:
not a compromise, not a balance, but a vehemently moving back and forth,
left and right. It repositions itself with and between neoliberalism and Key-
nesianism, the ‘right’ and the ‘left’, idealism and ‘pragmatism’, the discur-
sive and the material, web 2.0 and arts and crafts, without ever seeming
reducible to any one of them.
(Vermeulen, 2012)
As such, the name Home Economics clearly refers to the traditional field of study
also referred to as Human Ecology, Home Science or Family and Consumer
Science. In this regard, Home Economics focuses on the organization of the
household, including cooking, food preservation, handicrafts, family relation-
ships and the management of domestic budgets. This notion of Home Eco-
nomics formalizes hegemonic principles of domesticity, which are firmly rooted
96 K. Rochow
We want to put on an event that happens outside of the run of the usual
venues in Wellington and we’re interested in using kind of spaces that we
had at hand such as domestic spaces and I guess we are interested in other
kinds of exchanges other than financial exchanges that happen in the usual
show formats and bars.
When I asked Georgina and Richard whether they would pass on the event
if they left Wellington, they both answered:
Nah, I don’t think so. It is just a time and place kind of thing. It wouldn’t
be as organic if we would try to pass it on. It would seem forced. There are
gonna be lots of other interesting initiatives in Wellington. I feel we would
be branding ourselves if we would pass on the Home Economics name, which
would be weird.
Conclusion
Driven by a markedly modern commitment, yet permeated by a postmodern
detachment and pragmatic indifference, Home Economics is a sign of its time,
representing a new structure of feeling that shapes the making of music in Wel-
lington’s underground music scene. Spurred by a neoliberal, entrepreneurial dis-
course and the deep-seated concept of ‘Kiwi ingenuity’ within New Zealand’s
imagery, the DIY event creates alternative performance spaces detached from
modern commodity and economic principles. The event provides a musical
space, liberated from political and economic forces, which allows for the sharing
of intimate experiences in order to pursue the music-makers’ need to be ‘private
in public’ (Blum, 2003). It provides a safe haven and space for collective
intimacy, in which ‘sharing and being shared can be seen and oriented to as its
own specific form of creativity’ (2003, p. 179). However, it also opens its doors
to strangers, visitors, flâneurs and voyeurs, ‘deconstructing our assumptions
about our lived spaces’ (Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 2010, p. 8). As such,
Home Economics is the re-signification of the home: it is the re-signification of
‘the commonplace with significance, the ordinary with mystery, the familiar
with the seemliness of the unfamiliar, the finite with the semblance of the finite’
(2010, p. 12). By choosing the multiscalar spatial imaginary of domestic spaces,
Home Economics fuses private and public, security and freedom, tradition and
creation, creating a ‘creative spielraum’ for a metamodern generation of musi-
cians grappling with the financial, geopolitical and climatological uncertainties
of a globalized, technologized society. It reacts to the need for a ‘decentralized
production of alternative energy’ and a sustainable urban future, providing a
temporary solution to the ‘waste of time, space and energy caused by (sub)urban
sprawls’ (2010, p. 5). Consequently, Home Economics constitutes a metamodern
performance space, that ‘displaces the parameters of the present with those of a
future presence that is futureless’ (2010, p. 12).
Notes
1 French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky (2005) claims that the postmodern has given
way to the hypermodern. According to Lipovetsky, we have entered a new phase of
‘hypermodernity’, which is characterized by movement, fluidity and flexibility, new
98 K. Rochow
technologies, markets and global culture. Similarly, Alan Kirby (2009) proposes that
postmodernism has been superseded as a cultural dominant by digimodernism and/or
pseudomodernism, ‘a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pres-
sure of new technologies and contemporary social forces’. Cultural theorist Robert
Samuels (2008) argues that our current epoch is that of automodernism – a combina-
tion of ‘technological automation and human autonomy’. Probably the best-known
conception of the latest discourse is Nicholas Bourriaud’s suggestion of altermodern-
ism, which represents the ‘synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism’, taking
into account today’s global context and its economic, political and cultural conditions
(Bourriaud, 2009).
2 Due to an oil crisis in the 1970s, high inflation, rising levels of unemployment and an
increasing trade deficit, severe international and domestic pressures were manifest in
New Zealand. The third National government under Robert Muldoon (1975–84)
attempted to stabilize the domestic economy by combining subsidies to key export
sectors and overseas borrowing. This highly interventionist approach resulted in raising
taxes as well as a wage, price and rent freeze in 1982. In this context of crisis, David
Lange’s fourth Labour government (1984–90) loosened subsidies, privatized state-owned
enterprises and introduced a new course of welfare reform based on individual choice
and self-sufficiency. This shift from Keynesian welfarism towards a ‘competition state’,
which emphasizes the promotion of enterprise, innovation and profitability in the
private and public sectors, is also known as the ‘New Zealand experiment’ or ‘an extreme
example of neoliberalism and economic restructuring’ (Larner 1997, p. 7).
3 The New Zealand pioneer is an old national foundation myth/stereotype that idealizes
the sacrifices and physical hardships of the early settlers (pioneers), yet neglects colon-
ization, domination and subjugation of the indigenous population, who were under-
mined by the pioneers’ new systems of ownership, law, education, language and
technology.
Those who worried about declining national spirit thought that people needed to
rediscover some of the hardiness and resourcefulness of the pioneers. In this
stereotype lay a story of courage, industry, vision and faith, a heritage to be celeb-
rated and a source of comfort and inspiration in times of recession and war fever.
(www.nz.history.net.nz)
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Chapter 9
Proud amateurs
Deterritorialized expertise in
contemporary Finnish DIY
micro-labels
Juho Kaitajärvi-Tiekso
In popular media, music industry careers are often described using a model that
I describe as ‘evolutionist’. In this model, artists start their careers locally from
the grassroots level, and work their way up to higher levels, always aspiring to
become better – in other words, more professional. The first of these levels is
local fame, while the next entails wider regional or national awareness and
recording on small record labels. At the highest level, artists are signed to multi-
national record labels, and tour and attain fame internationally (Hearn et al.,
2004; Toynbee, 2000, pp. 25–6; Wikström, 2009, pp. 66–9). By studying
popular-music production in more detail, however, this model is easily
challenged.
Since roughly the 1980s, when recording technology became increasingly
affordable and available, the production of popular music has often followed a
different logic – one in which both artists and producers work on a do-it-yourself
(DIY) basis. They build their own informal networks and industries at the grass-
roots level while at the same time aiming to distinguish themselves from the
professional, mainstream music industry and those who aspire to be part of it
(Peterson and Bennett, 2004; Toynbee, 2000, p. 27). In this field, amateurism is
preferred to professionalism, which is thought to hinder creativity and corrupt
the social aspects of music production networks. During the 2000s, the internet
and digital technology further facilitated the development and expansion of
these DIY industries as a whole. Nevertheless, those committed to such altern-
ative industrial strategies are generally aware of the precarity of their situation
(see Graham, 2016; Haynes and Marshall, 2017). A number of commentators
(e.g. Collins and Young, 2014) argue that DIY practices are more likely to lead
to professional careers in the age of social media. However, many others remain
sceptical (e.g. Haynes and Marshall, 2017), and those amateurs who do in fact
consider themselves aspiring professionals are not the focus of this chapter.
The focus here is on examining the ideological and aesthetic practices and
discourses of specifically DIY independent micro-labels in Finland, which have a
less straightforward attitude towards professionalism. Robert Strachan (2003)
was the first to explore such actors at any great depth. According to him, DIY
independent micro-labels are small record producers who have a common
102 J. Kaitajärvi-Tiekso
ideology based on an ‘art vs. commerce’ binary. They seek to maintain the auto-
nomy of their artists and releases by resisting the production logic of the ‘music
industry’, which they see as purely utilitarian in valuing profit over aesthetic
qualities. In Finland, there are approximately 70–100 actively independent
micro-labels adhering to the qualifications1 outlined by Strachan, most of which
are more or less networked with each other. For my study, I have interviewed
ten of these, from four different cities: Harmönia Records, Helmi-levyt, Combat
Rock Industry (CRI), Verdura Records, Jozik Records, 267 lattajjaa and Tem-
mikongi from Helsinki; Ektro Records from Pori; Fonal Records from Tampere;
and Airiston Punk-levyt from Turku. Their releases consist of various musical
styles, from metal and punk groups to experimental electronic music and noise.
According to Strachan (2003), the extrapolation of art and commerce is
closely connected to questions of amateurism and professionalism in micro-label
communities. Amateurism is seen as characteristic of sincere, Romantic art,
while professionalism is equated with a more blatant utilitarianism. All the
Finnish micro-labels studied have this somewhat negative – or at least reserved
– attitude towards professionalism in common, even if they differ in other ways
regarding the subject.
establishing spaces that are reserved for these activities and defined by them.
‘The line of flight’ provided by amateurism is a way to undo this, to deterritorial-
ize (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, pp. 559–62) such activities so that they are free
to wander from the linear ‘hallowed’ path to professionalism mentioned at the
start.3 According to Jason Toynbee (2000, pp. 25–7), communities of artists and
their audiences ‘in arenas which are not fully commodified’ – a category among
which I reckon non-professional DIY scenes – form a proto-market. These
provide the industry – that is, professional production – with a diverse range of
talent and, in the process, some of the amateurs become professionals (cf. Hearn
et al., 2004; Wikström, 2009, pp. 66–9). Although this view of musical activity
would seem to displace the more linear evolutionist account, artistic activity is
still seen as subordinate to music markets, leaving just two ‘territories’: the
‘mainstream’ (Hearn et al., 2004) and a proto-market of ‘promising’, ‘new’ or
‘unproven talents’ (Wikström, 2009, pp. 66–9, 126–31).4 This dovetails all too
comfortably into the hegemonic evolutionist model of culture, which is exactly
what DIY amateurs are seeking to avoid. Thus they deterritorialize their prac-
tices and refuse to form this proto-market.
While the recording industry has changed profoundly since the theories of
Toynbee (2000), Jo Haynes and Lee Marshall (2017) claim that fundamental
industry practices have actually remained the same. While Toynbee might no
longer characterize a proto-market in the same way, major producers are still
scouting for new talent, whether it be through live events, talent programmes
on TV or social media (Wikström, 2009, pp. 165–6). This notional shift in the
industry in the age of social media, with a common narrative that describes
aspiring artists as ‘going viral’ and becoming stars overnight (Collins and Young,
2014; Haynes and Marshall, 2017), has not suppressed the deterritorializing
aspirations of micro-labels. The dominant considerations of success or quality
(Toynbee, 2000, pp. 2, 28) that manifest in the dualism of professional, main-
stream quality and unpopular, amateurish or ‘artsy fartsy’ ‘junk’ is precisely what
the micro-labels are seeking to refute, instead preferring to define their own
qualifications or territories. Moreover, this reterritorialization (Deleuze and Guat-
tari, 2004, pp. 332–4, 559; Widder, 2012, pp. 132–5) may go even further and
involve a perpetual flight from the establishment of qualifications, territories or
categories. Thus, passing into its purest, most absolute form, deterritorialization
does away with all juxtapositions or stable identities (‘strata’). These are escaped
‘nomadically’ by envisioning a ‘new earth’ allowing for ‘rhizomatic’ multiple,
non-hierarchical interpretations (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000, pp. 315–21, 382;
Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, pp. 45, 60, 421, 556–62; Widder, 2012, pp. 131–5).
For most of us on this list running a label is not about BUSINESS but about
GETTING INVOLVED getting music heard getting it out there … I dislike
this idea that labels that do this are ‘unprofessional’ give me the semi-pros
and amateurs any day as long as their heart is in it.
(Strachan, 2003, p. 93)
This attitude was echoed in all the Finnish cases too; at the ideological level,
the labels would generally agree with Roope Seppälä of Temmikongi:
Now I have really begun to sort of savour what this is, that I’m a hobbyist.
A hobby at its best is professionalism without [economic pressure] … when
this [pressure] does not determine what you do.
(Seppälä, 2014)5
The element of professionalism that sits most uncomfortably with the passion
and creative autonomy that micro-labels require is thus the economic pressure
to increase profitability and rationalize production.
However, as mentioned, the Finnish micro-labels are not immune to all
aspects of professionalism, nor are they deliberately trying to behave amateur-
ishly by mismanaging their productions. All the label representatives considered
that they had built up skills, knowledge and networks in the course of running
their labels (albeit often in a relatively organic and haphazard way), but in their
view, gaining this kind of professional experience had not corrupted their
Proud amateurs 105
Similar views were voiced by Antti Lind (2012) of Helmi-levyt. ‘As an amateur,
you must have interest and passion – if you don’t have that, you may as well do
something else’. While for Lehtisalo the occupation of professional territory is a
challenge to be overcome, Lind’s words provoke a recognition that ‘desire’ –
Deleuze and Guattari’s (2000, pp. 378–82) revolutionary force and prerequisite
for deterritorialization – is the most important thing.
For Temmikongi and Ektro, avoiding professionalism is perceived as a
struggle against the ever-present threat of commercial opportunism determining
artistic practices:
In the case of the smaller underground labels, such as Jozik (Zherbin and
Kretova, 2013) and 267 lattajjaa (Haahti, 2012), professionalism was not per-
ceived to be any kind of ‘threat’. Being amateur was simply a conscious choice
they had made. Their representatives claimed the small scale of their releases
meant that any negligible profits from record sales would always be spent on
future releases. For Mirko Metsola (2014) from Airiston punk-levyt, the differ-
ence was clear. He did not see himself as a professional, since no loans had been
taken out for the label and he was holding down a day job as a dockyard
foreman. Running a punk label was his part-time hobby: in a small country like
Finland, he thought it would be very difficult to run it professionally full-time.
The Finnish micro-labels interviewed here clearly had to support themselves
with income from other activities. With the more established labels – such as
106 J. Kaitajärvi-Tiekso
CRI, Ektro, Fonal and Helmi-levyt – that acknowledge a greater degree of pro-
fessionalism, the income from record production was described as being just one
piece of the pie. For instance, the sole owner of CRI, Jani Koskinen, treated
looking after the record store of the same name as his main day job, while
running the label was his real passion – even more so than playing in some of
the bands he has released – despite it being of far less economic importance:6
[The record store] is the [main] job, it doesn’t depend on whether I like it
or not. But this label still aspires to certain purity, I don’t have to see it in
turns of money … I see it … as a lifetime’s work … I am not the main song-
writer in the bands I play in anyway, but the label, that is my vision of what
I have to offer.
(Koskinen, 2014)
I try to stay an amateur … but one cannot help being professional in the
sense that this is a kind of full-time job to me.
(Lind, 2012)
However, he also receives income from being a musician, and Helmi-levyt also
operates as a booking agency for the bands in which he plays, but Lind claims
he does not take anything for doing this:
It would be a bit crude [if] you took first a cut for booking the gig, next a cut
for playing in it, and then on top of that sold records for which you get
most of the money; [so] a bit of fairness [is needed].
(Lind, 2012)
[S]ome [producers] might say, ‘It’s true I am making huge margins’ … and
it’s down to … the publishing contracts and so on. This doesn’t affect my
world though, as I represent a different branch of science … I mean, basi-
cally, I don’t know what they are! … I feel … this [music industry] thing
happens behind closed doors. I think it’s a good thing that there are some
who [produce and play music] from the heart, and others who do it with
something else in mind – you can’t fault that either. I mean, I can’t say for
certain that everything I do is pure, or that artists I have released are so.
But I hope they’d do things with a pure impulse, with some kind of joy and
desire, rather than thinking about the market and calculating everything to
death. Personally, stuff like that irritates the hell out of me.
(Lehtisalo, 2012)
A nebulous border
The interview quotes show that there is some confusion about where exactly
the border falls between amateur and professional activities. Despite cherishing
his punk label, Koskinen (2014) claims that most things he does as part of his
day job could also be described as his hobby – the only difference is whether it
pays or not, and the degree of involvement. For him, his hobby, punk, had also
become his job – or a way of life, as he described it. He also did not identify
himself with average professionals in the record business as it is only punk on
which he considers himself an expert. As he put it, ‘I don’t exactly see how one
could be a professional in punk rock’.
This lifestyle aspect, which seemed to be hard for some interviewees to pin
down, was also voiced by Sasha Kretova and Dmitri Zherbin of Jozik:
JK-T: Do you get the feeling that you are good at what you do, that you have
skills to do this?
PH: Hell yeah, I mean we’re like really fucking good at this!
JK-T: So would you describe yourself as professional, then?
PH: No way! We’re complete dilettantes, but then in other ways … I’d say with
this kind of music – the marginal of the marginal – to distribute it around
the world in ridiculously small editions … we’ve done it really well – not
economically speaking, of course, as it’s doomed from the start, but in ful-
filling our objectives.
(Häkkinen, 2012)
Conclusion
My interviews with representatives of Finnish DIY micro-labels do not support
the widely adopted ‘evolutionist’ model, where a pool of aspiring amateur musi-
cians and producers hone their skills so that they can ascend from the grassroots
level to the higher echelons of their respective professions. Nor do the micro-
labels and the artists they release represent a proto-market (Toynbee, 2000).
There is, instead, an ideological opposition to ‘professionals’ that is often inten-
tional, and certain amateurish practices are embraced, if not fully then at least
rhetorically. However, unlike Strachan (2007), I do not consider that this
opposition indicates a strongly dialectical relationship with ‘the industry’.
Instead, employing the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari (2004), Finnish micro-
labels ‘flee’ certain professional business practices so that they can better focus
on their autonomous aspirations or ‘desires’. They should thus not be seen in
terms of evolutionist career development as a proto-market; perhaps it should be
viewed instead as an ‘alternative market’ after Fabian Hein (2012).
One could also argue that average professional record producers would simply
not get on in indie, punk or underground scenes, despite their ability to spot
new ‘talent’. Although not exclusively, we have seen here that micro-labels
seem to shape their practices and ideology partly in reaction to the hard-headed
economics of the mainstream. On the one hand, strong identification with
amateurs can be seen to reinforce the dichotomy between amateur and profes-
sional, but on the other, most of the micro-labels examined here considered
themselves autonomous actors and, as such, free of such dualist constraints alto-
gether. This ‘rhizomatic’ thinking with scant regard for pinning down exactly
where the amateur/professional border lies is what Deleuze and Guattari (2004,
pp. 10–13) famously encourage. In the cases where the border is questioned or
even refuted, a line of flight becomes visible, and a new frame for production
becomes established. At this point, reterritorialization has occurred, and a new
dichotomy may form. In this new frame, economic success and a professional
career have been dropped in favour of other objectives – perhaps finding a small,
but like-minded audience, or securing the availability of certain records valued
as ‘weird’ or simply ‘good’. In other cases, this space might be deterritorialized
further, so that simplistic dichotomies soften further and distances shorten as
viewed from a new perspective of continuous and fully autonomous flight – a
process that Deleuze and Guattari (2004, pp. 559–62) call absolute deterritorial-
ization. There are thus many nuances and questions regarding micro-labels and
their practices that could be explored in further studies. The concepts of Deleuze
and Guattari (2000, 2004) would be useful, for instance, for understanding
further how capitalism on the one hand deterritorializes by feeding the auto-
nomy of producers such as micro-labels, while on the other reterritorializes by
co-opting their production in the form of sponsorship, advertising and online
services such as distribution and social media. In the case of those micro-label
owners whose living depends more on producing recordings, the question of
110 J. Kaitajärvi-Tiekso
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by the Finnish Doctoral Programme in Music
Research.
Notes
1 He associates micro labels with genres such as indie rock, post-rock and punk, as well
as in a later article on the study (Strachan, 2007, p. 260) styles as diverse as jazz, folk
and improvised music. My definition of the concept is based less on the relatively
contingent musical styles in which the labels specialize and more on their practices,
as well as cultural and ideological motivations.
2 ‘Lines of drift’ in Deleuze and Guattari (2004, pp. 224, 344).
3 Deleuze and Guattari (2004, pp. 559–62; see also Widder, 2012, pp. 132–5) distin-
guish between different types of deterritorialization: negative and relative. These
respectively obstruct and segment the lines of flight, later curtailed by reterritorializa-
tion – if not channelled into ‘lines of destruction’ (e.g. fascism) or absolute deterrito-
rialization that ‘connect[s] lines of flight’ with an autonomous multitude that
continues the process further.
4 Toynbee (2000, pp. 2, 27) is aware of the ambivalence towards the market among
producers and artists. At the discursive level, his concept of the proto-market never-
theless lumps all amateur activity together as being subordinate to the market, con-
flating aspiring professionals with deterritorializing amateurs.
5 All interviews apart from Zherbin and Kretova (2013) were translated from
Finnish to English by the author with the assistance of Alex Reed. In Finnish,
harrastelija, translated as ‘a hobbyist’, is often used interchangeably with amatööri
(‘amateur’).
6 In 2016, he sold the store on, concentrating on running the label.
7 There is also some ambiguity in Strachan (2003, pp. 234–7).
8 One of the largest international music business trade shows, held annually in Cannes,
France.
9 The interview was conducted in English, which is the mother tongue of neither the
interviewees nor the interviewer. As the words ‘amateur’ and ‘hobby’ bear language-
specific meanings, the meanings of these words in this interview are only proximate
to the meanings in the translated interviews.
10 This is one possible translation of the Finnish phrase tosissaan, mutta ei vakavissaan,
often heard in the underground music context and understood to mean not taking
oneself too seriously.
References
Collins, S. and Young, S. (2014). Beyond 2.0: The Future of Music. Sheffield: Equinox.
De Certeau, M. (1988 [1980]). The Practice of Everyday Life. S. Randall, Trans. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Proud amateurs 111
Noise music is notorious for being intended to be heard live: not only does it
favour a physical and sensory experience through loud sounds, but noise listen-
ers also value a kind of performativity that centres on a freely improvised way of
playing and homemade instrumental material. Noticing that many fans never
listen to noise records, Klett and Gerber (2014, p. 287) conclude that ‘recorded
media do not explain why participants find noise compelling, or how these
“attachments” develop’. However, records have a great importance within the
genre. As I have shown using a study on the listening practices of noise music
fans (Benhaïm, 2016), records encourage an intimate, attentive approach to lis-
tening that focuses on the subtleties of sound textures. Records also allow a
variety of attachments, blending personal dispositions, listening rituals and per-
ceptive games related to ambient noise and the listener’s environment. Further-
more, the importance of recorded media in noise stems from a culture of
amateur record production that fully participated in the emergence of the genre
in the late 1970s, then established itself as an important means for the circula-
tion and exchange of music. Evidence of this is given by GX Jupitter Larsen
(2012), the pioneering figure of noise-performance group The Haters:
In the years when punk and mail art overlapped, from the late 1970s to the
early 1980s, what was then called cassette culture developed. At the time,
people would freely trade and give away tapes to one another through the
post. This went on spontaneously around the world. During this cassette
culture, some people combined the punk attitude with the aesthetics of
industrial music. This led to a wide range of experimentation in both styles
and technics.
Cassette culture largely contributed to the sharing and circulation of music, but
also to sonic experimentation, with cassettes among the instrumental sources
used in noise creation. It embodied a DIY production and distribution culture
that was emblematically associated with underground music, and represented a
whole set of practices linked to a will to make technologies one’s own and to
democratize social relations in production activities, outside the multinationals’
Noise records as noise culture 113
domination of the music industry. On the one hand, cassette culture fitted
within the general context of home recording – due to the low costs of
(re)production – and on the other, it accompanied the emergence of myriad
small post-punk labels created in response to the previous generations of ‘inde-
pendent’ punk labels, which had collaborated with mainstream majors
(Hesmondhalgh, 1997). Noise labels appearing in this context were thus part of
a ‘record culture’ characterized by the ethos, authenticity and aesthetics of DIY
– as emblematically illustrated by the band Crass (Gosling, 2004) – which still
determines their unique mode of production today.
In order to study the way the DIY ethics manifests itself within record-related
practices, this chapter provides an account of the results of a survey conducted
by email in 2013, involving five experimental music labels answering a series of
questions. The labels were PAN, run by Bill Kouligas in Berlin since 2008;
Phase! Records, run by Panagiotis Spoulos in Athens since 2002; RRRecords,
run by Ron Lessard in Lowell, Massachusetts since 1984; Tanzprocesz, run by Jo
Tanz in Paris since 2003; and Ultra Eczema, run by Dennis Tyfus in Antwerp
since 1997. By focusing closely on these labels’ DIY methods of both production
and distribution, the aim of the chapter is to reassess the importance of record-
related practices in the construction of noise and experimental music spheres by
paying meticulous attention to the tangible processes of manufacturing, sharing
and commodification of these objects and to the creativity and autonomy that
they convey within underground networks.
There is rarely any profit, because I try to sell items cheaply and I give a lot
of them away … If by some miracle there is profit, it is used to pay down
114 S. Benhaïm
the debt from other releases. The issue of money has never come up with
the people I’ve released anyway.
(Tanzprocesz)2
The label is focused on just a personal taste and interest that has been fil-
tered through the years, with either artists whose music I love or close
friends … There is a very strong connection to the people that are involved
and I would like to keep it that way. … I have no interest in releasing big
established artists, because there are a million of other labels that could do
that. It is important to give the opportunity to smaller artists to find their
home and express their creativity.
(PAN)
The fact that labels are rooted in a community is vital for the promotion of
musicians and the audience’s trust of labels’ evaluations of music. Labels become
Noise records as noise culture 115
the guardians of high standards in the way artists are selected: self-production
involves a strong personification that likens the label owner’s function to that
of a curator: ‘everything depends on my personal tastes and interest, the final
deciding factor is my ears’ (RRR); ‘this is my label, it follows my desires, my
evolutions. I don’t need nor want to keep the same sound identity … I’ve always
released what I wanted without caring about the question of style’ (Tanzprocesz);
‘there is no sound identity, but there certainly is a “feeling identity” … Sounds
ought to be true, at least to my ears’ (Phase!). While the record industry for-
mally codifies the genre by shaping the creative practices of musicians and the
organization of labels (Negus, 1999), noise labels assert their decompartmentali-
zation by offering their own ‘view’ on musics. In short, the ‘entrepreneurship’ of
DIY labels (Hein, 2012) is characterized by a relatively deprofessionalized prac-
tice based on supporting musicians with little media exposure, while having
little interest in genre categories. The valorization of a singular identity is
intrinsically related to the underground positioning of these labels. To the detri-
ment of economic interests, this positioning favours a selective approach to
music that conveys authenticity by suggesting social proximity between the
players in the noise scene and high aesthetic standards, which provide a founda-
tion for an economy of scarcity.
A small edition in vinyl costs a fortune and for unknown projects it’s a little
bit hazardous … because the more expensive the object unit is, the more
expensively you must sell it if you want to avoid losing money … Besides,
releasing vinyls or CDs means making at least 300 copies, that can take a
long time to sell off. Even if there are several labels involved.
(Tanzprocesz)
I really love physical formats. Vinyl is my favorite but you always need a
budget and at most times it’s something frustrating. CD-Rs and tapes have
something cooler, though. You might have fifteen tapes lying around at
your apartment, feel creative and do something with them during one night
only. It’s pretty easy with those formats to think of and actually make a no-
budget, magical concept release.
(Phase!)
Tapes are often appreciated from an economic viewpoint. They also carry a
playful character and an important emotional value. RRR points out that ‘my
favorite format is cassettes as they are a labor of love, artists make them at home
Noise records as noise culture 117
and it comes directly from their hands into mine … How awesome is that?’ The
lexical field used in these statements (‘sucker’, ‘care’, ‘love’, ‘fetish’, ‘magical’,
‘awesome’) interestingly expresses the special nature of the relationship between
DIY labels and music records. Running a label is viewed as a practice intrinsic-
ally connected to the amateur’s attachment: records are material intermediaries
between amateur and music as well as vectors of passion, an emotion described
as an ‘intense activity oriented towards making oneself available by oneself to
uncontrolled forces’ (Hennion, Maisonneuve and Gomart, 2000, p. 158). In
addition to the emotional commitment of labels towards musicians, the auto-
nomous record-production process symbolically contributes to stripping the item
from its market value while also creating its specific identity, which is another
token of authenticity for noise listeners.
The feeling of belonging to a shared culture based on objects derives from
practical initiatives, but also from inherited codes belonging to various subcul-
tures and suffusing the imagery of noise labels: the dark symbolism of industrial
music, the typically crude appearance associated with the punk era and, above
all, underground collages and drawings oriented towards alternative con-
temporary art. While very particular aesthetic principles may be shared in some
extreme subgenres such as power electronics or old-school noise, following the
path of industrial music and its demystification of symbols (Obodda, 2002),
the aesthetic judgements embraced by labels and listeners often demonstrate the
rejection of imagery that is considered unoriginal. An interesting example is the
strong criticism formulated by RRR in the fanzine Degenerate7 towards the con-
temporary use of extreme imagery, which he regards as a pseudo-transgressive
aesthetics:
I personally have no interest in that stuff. For some reason the early noise
artists latched onto that imagery and it became the norm for this scene. I
think it’s just tough-guy poseur shit, kinda like rap and their gangstas and
the heavy metal kids and the devil. Of course, this imagery is completely
over-used and has simply become boring and trite. A number of the old-
school artists have stuck with it and that’s all fine and dandy for them.
However when I see a new, young artist doing it, my first instinct is that
they are amateurs without a shred of imagination.
As this reaction testifies, aesthetic stances can have a very important value for
these underground labels, which attach great importance to the visual origin-
ality of cover art. Visual identities strongly contribute to the particular attach-
ment between amateurs and artefacts by giving them a singularity that is very
much linked to the symbolic capital of noise subculture. The emphasis on auto-
nomy and creativity is enhanced by the importance given to record art within
an underground context where art’s frontiers become blurred. Beyond their
cover art, some records are even turned into a subject of experimentation – for
instance, vinyl records with holes drilled in them, playing in reverse or with
118 S. Benhaïm
Asia
USA
Israel
Japan
Africa
Russia
Turkey
Canada
America
Oceania
South Am.
(Australia)
Hong Kong
Phase! 0 8 1 9 1 1
RRR 0 233 12 1 246 3 2 6 7 1 19 3
Tanzprocesz 0 22 1 23 1 1
Ultra Eczema 0 68 2 70 1 1 2
PAN 0 30 4 34 2 1 2 5 1
UK
Italy
Spain
France
Poland
Others
Greece
Austria
Europe
Finland
Sweden
Belgium
Portugal
Germany
Denmark
Netherlands
Phase! 4 2 2 3 10 3 3 1 3 31
RRR 85 9 20 5 8 5 31 12 24 19 6 3 9 38 19 293
Tanzprocesz 8 5 1 1 13 5 5 1 39
Ultra Eczema 13 2 17 4 1 2 9 5 4 6 2 1 1 13 2 82
PAN 19 1 6 2 1 1 6 6 8 2 5 1 20 1 79
Noise records as noise culture 121
by an explicit prior agreement between two labels (or musicians), which con-
cludes the non-market trading of their releases. Often one of their first motiva-
tions, trading seems to be at the heart of labels’ genesis when they have not yet
established their network and are not familiar with the different players:
The players’ unanimous declarations suggest that, apart from facilitating the cre-
ation of networks with record dealers and distributors, trading is a central prac-
tice between DIY labels. Establishing a continuity with the ‘trading friendships’
found in various societies and age groups (Testart, 2001), transfer is conditioned
by the recognition of a peer affiliation to the same community. Besides being an
interesting means to sell off releases, trading allows labels to freely acquire
records from other underground labels, as well as expressing their mutual
interest:
As Stacy Thompson (2004) has shown in the case of anarchist-punk groups, the
point is indeed to resist conventional forms of commodification by way of tactics
that promote use-value over exchange value, and by endorsing cultural values in
keeping with their productions. From self-promotion using digital communica-
tion tools to niche intermediaries, the network of noise labels thus constitutes a
web that offers an alternative to the record industry by defending ways of
dealing and trading that gain their authenticity from the fact that they distance
themselves from the market.
Conclusion
Although constitutive of the ethos associated with the experimental under-
ground, record-related practices have often been underestimated in existing
studies of noise music. By providing a pragmatic analysis of labels, this case study
shows how they actually strive to construct the genre’s identity by establishing
themselves as a standard for the ethical, cultural and aesthetic values linked to
experimental underground music. DIY, which impels people to undertake pro-
jects, create and become self-sufficient, favours creative and affective dimen-
sions, which are central to the process of recognition by fans: the activity of
labels becomes essentialized as that of curator-individuals, who are close to artist
figures. Through an emotional commitment and singular modes of creation,
they are also stripped of their purely commercial value. The minimal financiali-
zation of production costs implies a sometimes tense relationship with commod-
ification, because the romantic conception that links an ideal vision of
authenticity to an art devoid of any exchange value deeply suffuses the genre
and its avant-garde ambitions.
The strategies resulting from this equation aim to reduce the exchange value
by detaching themselves from the notion of profit for profit’s sake and by setting
affordable prices; by doing away with or reducing intermediates, when not
working within their own immediate circle; by de-monetizing an important part
of their transactions through gifts, counter-gifts and negotiated trades; and,
finally, by using physical formats that convey a subcultural history that endures
by embodying a divide with new technologies and representing a symbolical
barrier in the face of the culture industry’s appropriation (Harrison, 2006).
While all of these practices may encourage an economy of scarcity that ends up
upholding hierarchies of legitimacy (Straw, 1999), they are also compensated by
the extreme profusion of recordings, the consequence of which is that collecta-
bility is hindered.10 To conclude, far from representing an insignificant, mar-
ginal activity, the DIY practices of labels actually reveal the ongoing
negotiations shaping the experimental underground as well as the necessity for
DIY to lend itself to an appropriation devoid of past distortions of its values in
order to guarantee its credibility and authenticity in the eyes of its fans.
Noise records as noise culture 123
Notes
1 For an in-depth study of these two economic models and their interdependent rela-
tionships, see Lebrun (2006, pp. 35–6) and Negus (1999).
2 All the translations from French are mine.
3 The nature of noise music offers the advantage of being able to record a great variety
of music over a short period of time – a practice that echoes the ideal of spontaneous
creation in artists’ work, as opposed to the length of time needed for commercial pro-
motion in the record industry (Harrison, 2006).
4 For example, SACEM in France, SABAM in Belgium, ASCAP and BMI in the
United States, GEMA in Germany and AEPI in Greece.
5 These collaborations are facilitated by the strong representation of artistic and cul-
tural professions within experimental music scenes. In this regard, the influence of
art-school backgrounds would deserve a special study, following the example of Frith
and Horne (1987) about post-punk subcultures.
6 MP3s are often used to freely distribute recordings on the internet, but the labels sur-
veyed do not appreciate it as a paid-for format.
7 In this interview, RRR explicitly refers to musician John Duncan and child porn.
8 While most records have a locked groove at the end of each side, it is also possible to
record sound in these locked grooves, which makes the recording loop.
9 These labels work with Metamkine, Staalplaat, Boomkat, Infinite Limits, A-Musik,
Volcanic Tongue for Europe; Forced Exposure, RRR, Tedium House, Cassettivity,
Fusetron, Tomentosa for America; Disk Union, Meditations for Asia.
10 Merzbow’s abundant production has indeed raised controversy within the academic
world, with Nick Smith (2005) defending the idea that the Merzbox established a
paradigm of collectability, whereas Paul Hegarty (2007) argues that Merzbow actually
distorted it through his innumerable releases, which deconstruct the notion of collec-
tion and address that of consumption.
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amateurs à l’épreuve de la musique noise. L’Autre Musique, Bruits, 4. Retrieved from
http://lautremusique.net/lam4/funambule/entre-ecoute-reflexive-immersion-sensuelle-
et-confrontation.html.
Chaney, D. (2008). Pourquoi acheter un CD quand on peut le télécharger ? Une approche
exploratoire par le concept d’appropriation. Management & Avenir, 20(6), 30–48.
Frith, S. and Horne, H. (1987). Art into Pop. London: Methuen.
Gosling, T. (2004). ‘Not for sale’: the underground network of anarcho-punk. In A.
Bennett and R.A. Peterson (eds), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (pp.
168–83). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Harrison, A.K. (2006). ‘Cheaper than a CD, plus we really mean it’: Bay Area under-
ground hip hop tapes as subcultural artefacts. Popular Music, 25(2), 283–301.
Hegarty, P. (2007). Noise/music: A History. New York: Continuum.
Hein, F. (2012). Do It Yourself: Autodétermination et culture punk. Congé-sur-Orne: Édi-
tions le Passager clandestin.
Hennion, A., Maisonneuve, S. and Gomart, É. (2000). Figures de l’amateur: formes,
objets, pratiques de l’amour de la musique aujourd’hui. Paris: Documentation Française.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (1997). Post-punk’s attempt to democratise the music industry: The
success and failure of Rough Trade. Popular Music, 16(3), 255–74.
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Klett, J. and Gerber, A. (2014). The meaning of indeterminacy: Noise music as perform-
ance. Cultural Sociology, 8(3): 275–90.
Larsen, GX Jupitter (2012). Email interview, 16 September.
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Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 92(4): 33–45.
Mauss, M. (2007). Essai sur le don: forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Negus, K. (1999). Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. London: Routledge.
Obodda, S. (2002). Sordid Allusion: The Use of Nazi Aesthetic in Gothic and Industrial
Genres. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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sity of New York Press.
Chapter 11
Punk positif
The DIY ethic and the politics of
value in the Indonesian hardcore
punk scene
Sean Martin-Iverson
Indonesia is home to a thriving, diverse and contested punk scene, with a legacy
of combative street politics alongside a distinctly entrepreneurial approach to
production. This scene also includes a smaller DIY hardcore current, striving to
establish autonomous community based on non-commercial DIY production.
These anak DIY (DIY kids) position their activities as a positive punk altern-
ative to the aestheticized rebellion and spectacular protest politics that have
characterized Indonesian punk. In this chapter, I examine the value politics of
this DIY hardcore current in the Indonesian scene, describing their attempts to
realize the DIY punk values of autonomy and community through the social
organization of DIY production, while critically assessing the political signifi-
cance of DIY hardcore in the context of the Indonesian scene and more broadly
as an attempt to develop relations of autonomous production outside the capi-
talist value system.
I focus especially on the Kolektif Balai Kota (BalKot), a DIY hardcore organ-
izing collective in the city of Bandung, West Java, where I conducted fieldwork
in 2004 and 2005. Emerging in the early 2000s from a group promoting the
straight-edge lifestyle of abstinence and self-control, this collective soon set
aside its straight edge exclusivity to develop a focus on DIY production. This
shift was encouraged in part by the group’s developing links to global DIY hard-
core networks, but also by their own critical reaction to the commercialization
of the Indonesian punk scene. Punk arrived in Indonesia as global and com-
modified media images of youthful rebellion and subcultural distinction (Baulch,
2002), but over the course of the 1990s local underground scenes became well-
established, often connected to radical political movements. However, these
scenes themselves became more commercialized following the overthrow of
Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998, alongside broader processes of neoliberali-
zation in ‘post-authoritarian’ Indonesia (Heryanto and Hadiz, 2005). BalKot
activists and other anak DIY position their DIY production of hardcore punk as
a challenge to these localized processes of commodification, and often as part of
a global anti-capitalist movement as well.
With the decline of the confrontational street politics of the anti-dictatorship
struggle of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the rise of a more entrepreneurial
126 S. Martin-Iverson
approach to scene development, the anak DIY have turned towards a prefigura-
tive politics of community-building and autonomous production. Rather than
directly confronting the state or authoritarian currents within Indonesian
society, they seek to evade capitalist commodification and alienation through
constructing an autonomous community organized around a cultural commons
of DIY hardcore. The anak DIY describe their activities as a form of punk positif
(positive punk), emphasizing the creative production of new forms of value and
social organization as against a purely negative critique or protest.
The etika DIY (DIY ethic) of autonomy and community constitutes an emer-
gent value system enacted through the practices and social relations of DIY pro-
duction. Through their DIY value practices, the anak DIY are seeking to
establish a cultural commons and to realize a degree of autonomy from capital,
but they are also bound up in an antagonistic relationship with its ongoing pro-
cesses of expansion, enclosure and exploitation – most directly in the context of
the commercialization of the wider Indonesian punk scene. This fits with under-
standings of punk as a dialectic of deconstruction and reconstruction, of disrup-
tion and creativity, and of resistance and alternatives (Dunn, 2016; Laing, 2015;
Moore, 2004; Muñoz, 2013). For the anak DIY, this is also a value struggle, in
De Angelis’s (2007) terms: insurgent practices of social production located
neither entirely outside nor entirely within capitalist circuits of value.
City Hall (Balai Kota). Meetings usually attracted between 15 and 30 people,
gathering to organize hardcore punk shows, hold discussions, trade cassettes,
CDs and other merchandise, and also to nongkrong (hang out) and socialize.
BalKot served as a central meeting place and networking hub for the anak DIY,
helping to bring together various DIY activities, projects and enterprises into a
coherent community. The collective was rather marginal in relation to the
broader scene, but also stood out as a bastion of hardcore authenticity and com-
mitment to DIY principles. Although BalKot in this form ceased operating in
2006–07, it has been succeeded by a range of successor collectives and projects,
including a re-founded ‘BalKot Terror Project’.
The meetings at BalKot were initially organized in 2002 as a successor to the
defunct Sadar181 collective, which promoted the straight-edge practices of
strict abstinence from alcohol, drugs, casual sex and meat-eating within the
scene. Although BalKot has developed beyond this origin, the straight-edge life-
style and related youth-crew hardcore style remain prominent within the col-
lective. More generally, subcultural identification with hardcore punk continues
to be an important factor in participation. Although many BalKot activists
define DIY as a broadly applicable ethic of independent production, the col-
lective remains focused on forms connected to hardcore punk. Their main col-
lective activity is the organization of non-profit hardcore punk shows, while
other activities include skill-sharing workshops on topics such as screen-printing
and badge-making, and discussions about the state of the scene as well as
broader social and political issues.
BalKot is part organizing collective and part social gathering; the work of the
BalKot collective is embedded in a context of personalized DIY hardcore activities
and exchanges. In this, it is similar to the informal entrepreneurial organizing of
the wider Indonesian punk scene (Luvaas, 2012; Martin-Iverson, 2012). Yet the
anak DIY seek to avoid the informal forms of authority and profit-seeking that
operate in the wider scene, and to this end enact forms of consensus-based col-
lective decision-making, modelled on the direct democracy of American DIY
punk and hardcore collectives (see Barrett, 2013) and the decentralized affinity-
group model of self-organization associated with contemporary anarchist and
autonomist movements (Dupuis-Déri, 2010; Graeber, 2009, pp. 300–32).
As they focused on their own DIY activities, BalKot and the anak DIY
increasingly became detached from the more commercial punk scene, although
these links were not entirely severed. This growing separation was in part a
contest over subcultural identity, as the anak DIY asserted their hardcore punk
authenticity against the ‘drunk punks’ and ‘fashion punks’ they saw as dominat-
ing the wider scene. However, it was also a conflict over economic and political
principles. Despite their commitment to hardcore punk, the anak DIY developed
a growing suspicion of subcultural identities and lifestyle politics, as expressed
through their increasing self-distancing from the straight-edge hardcore origins
of their community and a growing emphasis on DIY as a more general ethic of
autonomous production.
128 S. Martin-Iverson
People who have faith in DIY see DIY as a weapon for, like, striking against
the music industry, for example. Or the popular culture industry, or the
culture industry. By doing things by themselves, without dependence or help
from corporations, from enterprise and all that … While on the other side,
maybe they’ve lost some of this independent attitude, they just want to
replicate the capitalist model or system, right?
(Interview with Ernesto, 2004, my translation)
While DIY suggests a rather individualistic approach to production, for the anak
DIY it is fundamentally a collective practice; as Dunn (2016, p. 27) argues, the
non-alienated creative activity of DIY punk is grounded in both individual pro-
duction and ‘the active recognition of membership in a human community’.
‘Community’ can, of course, be harnessed for oppressive and exclusionary ends,
but the anak DIY embrace a punk cosmopolitanism against the essentialized
ethnic, religious and national identities that exert such a powerful influence on
Indonesian social and political life; the DIY community is conceived as a reali-
zation of unity in diversity, an elective community of affinity based on shared
interests, experiences, commitments and values. Dupuis-Déri (2010) describes
the anarchist principles of affinity organizing as a militant expression of trust,
friendship and intimacy, and at its best DIY komunitas approaches this.
According to Day (2005, pp. 178–202), the politics of affinity reaches
towards a ‘groundless solidarity’ that rejects fixed identities, and the anak DIY
have sought to reposition BalKot as an open collective founded on a commit-
ment to DIY principles rather than an exclusive subcultural community. Yet the
group remains tied to its hardcore punk origins and shaped by de facto exclu-
sions. The DIY community welcomes many who do not ‘fit in’ to the wider punk
scene, but there are few women or older people involved, and participation in
the community remains strongly correlated with investment in particular styles
of hardcore punk. Nevertheless, the anak DIY place more value on the DIY
ethic as a way of organizing the relations of production than they do on hard-
core punk as an aesthetically defined identity or genre.
DIY production is often characterized as being driven by a social rather than
an economic logic (Dunn, 2016, pp. 127–58; Moore, 2007; O’Connor, 2008).
As in the wider Indonesian scene, this social logic can itself be harnessed for
economic ends, but the anak DIY view it as inimical to the pursuit of profit.
130 S. Martin-Iverson
It’s a struggle, like we’re resisting the world, we resist – okay, we live in a
world that’s shitty, right? We live in a shitty world. And so we leave that
world to make our own world, together with our friends who agree with us,
or who have similar ideas. We leave this world and make our own, in
accordance with our ideals.
(Interview with Tremor, 2004, my translation)
The anak DIY seek to enact emancipatory values in everyday life as part of an
active struggle against capitalism – an example of the anarchist ethic of practice
(Portwood-Stacer, 2013). Bookchin (1995) characterizes this approach as
Punk positif 131
becoming other than capital’ (De Angelis, 2007, p. 229). The positive side of
this struggle lies in self-valorization as the production of autonomous social
values, relations and subjectivities (Cleaver, 1992; Hardt and Negri, 2005, 2009;
Negri, 1991). Within DIY hardcore, this positive social creativity lies not only
in the production of new aesthetic forms and identities, but also new social rela-
tions and ways of organizing production.
Yet the ‘surplus sociality’ of such creative practices and struggles can be har-
nessed by processes of capital accumulation as well as being deployed to disrupt
them (Shukaitis, 2016, p. 84). Indeed, in a fundamental sense, capital is consti-
tuted by the alienation and enclosure of human social creativity (De Angelis,
2007; Haiven, 2014). The struggle for DIY autonomy thus involves an antago-
nistic interdependence of the DIY ethic and capitalist value. For the anak DIY,
this interdependence is displayed through their embeddedness in the wider
Indonesian punk scene, with its entrepreneurial take on punk independence,
and also within the global circuits of capital.
In contrast to the ‘positive’ autonomy asserted by Hardt and Negri (2005,
2009), Holloway (2005) positions emancipatory praxis in negative terms, as an
antagonistic struggle to negate the alienation of human creativity. Self-
valorization is thus a ‘rejection of a world that we feel to be wrong, negation of a
world we feel to be negative’ (2005, p. 2). In this sense, DIY hardcore is not so
much positive punk as a rearticulation of punk’s ‘scream of refusal’, a contra-
dictory desire for something more grounded in an alienated existence (Muñoz,
2013; Thompson, 2004).
Yet there is also a sense in which DIY hardcore can offer a taste of a non-
alienated life, rather than simply a hunger for it. The etika DIY is an expression
of the insurgent imagination, prefiguring a better world while struggling against
the current one; as such, it combines constituent power – the power to imagine
and create our own social world – with imaginative counter-power – the nega-
tion of the established social order (Graeber, 2009; Haiven, 2014; Shukaitis,
2009). Of course, DIY hardcore itself remains a partial and contested altern-
ative, largely contained within a limited subcultural sphere of activity. BalKot’s
social and political impact has been mainly as an internal critique of the wider
Indonesian punk and anti-capitalist activist scenes, although it also gives its
participants a taste of non-alienated creative production, and thus hope for a
non-alienated way of life. While we should not ignore capital’s power to enclose
and recuperate struggles for autonomy, we should also not fixate on such pro-
cesses to the extent of ignoring the very real emancipatory power of these strug-
gles. This power emerges through the ongoing, incomplete and thus open
attempts to resist and evade recuperation; self-organization and refusal are part
of the same recompositional struggle for autonomy ‘within and despite capit-
alism’ (Shukaitis, 2009, p. 221).
DIY hardcore has helped a small community of young people in Bandung to
establish a degree of independence; to share skills, knowledge and resources; and
to establish relatively non-alienated social relationships. It has also provided
134 S. Martin-Iverson
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the first Keep It Simple,
Make It Fast international conference in Porto. This chapter is based on
research funded in part by a Hackett Postgraduate Research Scholarship from
the University of Western Australia. Fieldwork in Indonesia was made possible
by the sponsorship of Professor Kusnaka Adimihardja (INRIK-Unpad); I would
also like to thank the anak DIY in Bandung for their cooperation, insight and
tolerance.
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Part III
A variety of authors have given attention to what they see as an important shift
in the live music sector, observing transformations underway in the world of
music. New logics, tactics and economic strategies have emerged for both
obscure and widely known artists inserted in different (and sometimes diver-
gent) possibilities created by new processes for production, circulation, con-
sumption and appropriation of musical products in the twenty-first century.
Herschmann (2007, 2010), Yúdice (2011) and Gibson and Connell (2012) are
some of the authors who have focused on the restructuring of business and con-
sumer experiences involving music consumed at concerts and festivals, offering
analyses to provide a better understanding of current dynamics in the economic
and cultural processes engendering both mainstream events and those directed
at independent markets.
For example, in Brazil the live music market developed in the late 2000s.
These included: shows driven by the mainstream music festivals segment (such
as the return of the Rock in Rio Festival in Rio de Janeiro, and the arrival of the
Lollapalooza Festival in São Paulo); a growth in the number of independent
music festivals; an increase in international tours by major known artists who
come to Brazil; and the emergence of new players from the indie1 scene (such as
the ‘Fora do Eixo’2 circuit, Abrafin and festivals promoted by the ‘Rede Brasil’3).
According to Herschmann (2010, p. 118):
The new data in this context of crisis and market restructuration is the
growing awareness by music professionals that live music remains very
valued and demanded by the public … If, on the one hand, perhaps in the
indie business it is possible to see clearly how live music is growing in relev-
ance and the phonograms, on the other … live concerts – even in the
major’s universe – came to represent a growing percentage of the revenues
generated by music industry
We have observed over the past few years a great transformation in the Brazil-
ian independent music consumption context. Typically viewed as a growth
sector, we have noticed over time how independent music festivals in Brazil
140 J.S. Janotti Jr and V. de Almeida Nobre Pires
What was previously a ‘paying’ audience – that is, people who buy tickets and
attend shows – today can be observed to have taken on a much more active role
in the production of these events, becoming recognized as a maker agent putting
on the events:
The average fan’s role in that process is simple: buy a ticket and leave the
rest to the professionals. Live music is an industry unto itself, with a well-
established machinery of venue owners, promoters, booking agents and
ticket vendors. If you’re not one of those people – or wealthy enough to
rent out talent at million dollar prices – it can seem as if there isn’t much
you can do to participate.
However, there are ways to work outside the system – if you’re willing to
put in some extra effort. That could mean writing to local clubs and urging
them to book the bands you love. You could use a web service like Event-
ful, which allows users to ‘demand’ that specific acts play in their area
(registered artists can use those tallies to discern where they have the best
chance of drawing a crowd). Or, with a little trust in the kindness of
strangers, you can take matters into your own hands.
(Tyler-Ameen, 2011, p. 1)
There’s very little focus and respect for the music, especially for new acts.
My friend Dave [Alexander, co-founder along with third part, Rocky Start]
and I were at a gig and it was so loud we couldn’t even hear the musician,
that’s when we decided that there had to be another way …
(Offer, cited in Fryatt, 2013)
After the first session, held in his own home, Offer used his network of contacts
to produce other events in New York and Paris. After the initial events and dis-
covering that a real demand existed in other places, the movement quickly
spread. Eight years later, it has become an important network for the circulation
of new global independent music. The formula adopted by the movement is
simple but unusual: transform a fan’s living room into a place to perform shows
with indie bands. Those who attend are required to refrain from talking, texting
or taking pictures. They must also stay until the end of the presentation.
However, ‘this is less authoritarian than it sounds and, coupled with the
environment, makes for some electric live music sessions’ (Fryatt, 2013).
Beyond the distinctive aspects that characterize this kind of network aimed
at producing small performances, one can conclude that another attraction from
a phenomenon such as Sofar Sounds is the opportunity for the development of
musical listening practices. These work as a social distinction: an event made
with only a few people, for a small and restricted audience, contacts that will
support artists and ‘respect’ the live music performance. Perhaps, more than
being seen as an alternative to the megalomania of the mainstream music festi-
vals or even to the fact that live music is being neglected in some bars, these
practices are linked to the search for something that fans value in these times of
excess musical information. This search has occurred because the internet era
offers tremendous circulation of musical products in all dimensions: amateur,
indie, wide-ranging and mainstream.
This scenario is characterized by a great abundance of new music, but also by
its discarding. Thus, Sofar supporters advocate for a distinctive refinement, which
– at least initially – involves choosing the ‘correct’ audience: people who appreci-
ate music and are dedicated to listening. This care taken with the musical event is
also reflected in the way guests are chosen. When the network began, candidates
who wanted to attend performances were assessed in terms of their ability to
spread the idea of the network to other people or to help publicize the event and
the bands through their work in photography and filmmaking:
So far, yet so near 143
This logic extends to disseminating these events on the internet, with the help
of these multipliers, such as music fans who attend the concerts and share their
experience on social media. All activities from Sofar Sounds are photographed,
filmed and edited by volunteer professionals linked to the network, who ‘pass
the hat’ among the guests at the end of the night. They thereby generate prod-
ucts that circulate in the Sofar Sounds global network, contributing to publicity
for the event and the bands involved. This publicity encourages more people to
participate in the activities and provides visibility for these groups in other parts
of the world that are part of the global network.
In the case of Sofar Sounds, disseminating videos after concerts becomes
important, since it is difficult for most new bands to have access to high-quality
promotional materials, and especially for these products to be distributed to a
wider audience. Beyond engaging in the production of shows for emerging bands
and putting them in touch with an interested audience, Sofar Sounds also dis-
seminates post-show videos, thus helping groups to attain greater visibility and
expanded projection:
Sofar then became Flow’s flagship. The partnership between the two com-
panies works like this: Flow represents the brand Sofar in Brazil, coordinates
the executive productions and has a producer in each of the twelve cities
where the project is: Aracaju, São Paulo, Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Belém,
Maceió, Goiânia, Curitiba, Florianópolis, Salvador, Porto Alegre and Rio
de Janeiro. Dilson and Juliana also work the commercial part with the posi-
tioning and representation of the brands that participate in the event, with
an eye on those that add to the concept of Sofar, and this work goes hand
in hand with communication. Finally, Flow also makes exclusive content,
such as institutional videos, to reverberate the actions, and is responsible
for all Sofar Sounds Brazil communication (social networks such as Face-
book and Instagram, enter this package).
(Sofar, 2017)
That said, we understand that the live music embodied in Sofar Sounds’
network is connected to a chance for action, highlighting music’s impact with a
‘presence effect’: ‘It is suggested, for example, that we conceive the aesthetic
experience as an oscillation (sometimes an interference) between “presence
effects” and “sense effects” ’ (Gumbrecht, 2010, p. 22). In this manner, we can
think of music in current times as a complex web where live music exercises a
dynamic centrality, at the same time triggering economic, aesthetic and cultural
values.
As well as being an online platform for dissemination of new bands, Sofar
Sounds awakens our interest by showing itself as a distinctive practice in live
music production and consumption. We perceive a politicized and distinctive
posture in consumption modes depicted in the preference for small venues,
unknown artists and the experience of live music potentially free of distractions.
We therefore realize that, even as a geographically disperse phenomenon, the
value added from the Sofar Sounds initiative is essentially connected to the
movement’s reliance on selective and smaller audiences. These perspectives
linked to the trajectory of Sofar Sounds help us to better understand the pro-
cesses that enabled a self-designed hobby-practice among a group of friends
become a growing network composed of fans who are active in production pro-
cesses, as well as the projection of emerging bands that benefit from a global
network of an increasingly consolidated audience. Consisting of a practice
emerging from pop music, consumed on a large scale and widely visible, contra-
dictory and tense dynamics are triggered. At the same time, the productive prac-
tices embedded in Sofar Sounds shows its potential to compete on the
contemporary music scene.
We will now address DIY in relation to Sofar Sounds in the Brazilian
context. Following is a richer and more complex panorama related to building
the Sofar network, viewing related productive practices as an agglutinating
factor that is critical to understanding specific aspects of this community.
So far, yet so near 145
There are some issues involved in the meaning of the DIY concept that are
deeply rooted in views set forth by journalists, cultural critics, musicians, pro-
ducers and fans – especially those of Anglo-Saxon origin. While we understand
their meaning, we recognize that DIY practices have a slightly different conno-
tation within the Brazilian context. The ideas discussed below are not meant to
take away from the development and understanding of the notion of inde-
pendent music in Brazil. Even in an academic context, there is little research or
studies about DIY in the country. What exists is generally restricted in scope to
research on punk and hardcore music, as O’Hara (2005) points out.
In the Brazilian context of independent music – especially over the last 15
years – we have witnessed warning signs in these markets and sectors of the
music industry, potentially affecting the development of independent labels and
live music. In retrospect, we are able to make a more accurate assessment, as the
boom in the national indie sector has also been linked to a framework based on
public and private funding opportunities and sponsorship.
Precisely for this reason, as we have seen in several studies, the view of ‘inde-
pendent productions’ in Brazil is aligned with practices not necessarily recog-
nized as DIY. This helps us to understand the indie sector as a ‘grey’ area. It can
be seen as a very broad playing field, uniting artists who make use of the strategy
and logic of predominant cultural funding opportunities. It includes bands who,
for ideological reasons, do not identify with this reality – because they do not
meet legal criteria, or because they are on the margins of cultural public policies.
We thus begin to see how the notion of ‘independent’ here in Brazil goes
beyond just being ‘on the fringe’ of mainstream recording companies. The
modus operandi for independent music is also driven by the funding of projects
through public and private funding opportunities, as well as policies for public
and private sponsorship. As Herschmann (2010) describes it, this notion is
linked to relative autonomous production.
Thus, several Brazilian researchers have become predisposed to working on
these issues, no longer placing watertight separations between independent and
mainstream cultures. Rather, they are addressing issues that are ‘in the middle’,
in this ‘grey’ environment in which these logics – previously seen as fixed divi-
sions – take on different perspectives in a transversal environment. For example,
when we analyse debates about creative autonomy (Thomas and Chan, 2013)
146 J.S. Janotti Jr and V. de Almeida Nobre Pires
An analysis of tactics used for small festivals and some concert productions
reveals that they tend to make use of smaller organizations to generate oppor-
tunities somewhat haphazardly, such as when a band tours around the country,
and this leads to spontaneous opportunities for playing in other events:
This discussion has gained new meaning in the Brazilian context of national
independent music, especially over the last fifteen years, as we have witnessed
the development of these markets and sectors of the music industry, with an
increase in the number of independent labels and live music events. We see
today that the boom in the Brazilian indie sector is also linked to a tradition of
public and private funding opportunities and sponsorship. Today, in the context
of an economic crisis that forces many companies (as well as governments) to
tighten their budgets and reduce investment in the cultural area, we see industry
feeling the decline of resources. So, once again, we believe that the analysis of
Sofar and music from its macro and microeconomic aspects is also a funda-
mental articulation of musical phenomena in the communications area.
Conclusion
Several studies affirm a view of ‘independent’ music in Brazil as being in tune with
practices not necessarily recognized as DIY. This helps us to understand the indie
sector as a ‘grey’ area, or a very broad field, that unites artists who may still employ
strategies for drawing on public and private funding opportunities for cultural
events. This includes bands that do not identify with this situation for ideological
reasons, either because they do not meet legal criteria, or because they are on the
fringes of cultural public policies. So we can begin to see how the notion of ‘inde-
pendent’ here in Brazil goes beyond just being ‘outside’ the mainstream record
companies. The modus operandi for independent music also drives the process for
approval of projects for public and private funding initiatives and fundraising pol-
icies towards public and private sponsorship. As Herschmann (2010) describes,
this same notion is linked to relative autonomous production.
In fact, Sofar Sounds itself articulates some values and microeconomic char-
acteristics that also interact with macro aspects of the market for contemporary
music. One cannot help but notice how the very model it preaches presents
Sofar as a counterpoint to the mainstream events, triggering notions of ‘inde-
pendence’ and ‘DIY’ in relation to these traditional models of production.
Further, Sofar becomes more robust in today’s context of a macroeconomic crisis
148 J.S. Janotti Jr and V. de Almeida Nobre Pires
across the national independent music movement, dependent upon public pol-
icies and sponsorship.
Production techniques for Sofar Sounds, as well as other cases in the global
music scene, create conditions based on the idea of community in action. These
processes make it evident how we must rethink our driving notions and con-
cepts, and how their properties and uses created by actors involved in music
practices must be understood better. We therefore believe that the notion of
community is constructed in a tangled way, so that even when a hierarchy
defines its distributions process, it leads us to reflect on affection and marketing
practices, collective and individual agencies, the value of music and the group-
ings that arise around them.
Notes
1 The term ‘indie’ arose as an abbreviation of ‘independent’ and refers to the pop indus-
try structured in parallel to the major companies in the music industry. All and any
activity in the arts and entertainment sphere that is sustained independently can be
termed ‘indie’. But before playing the role in the dichotomy mainstream‒independent,
we assume that nowadays these values are part of dynamic correlations, depending on
various contextualizations and materializations.
2 Fora do Eixo is a network of work designed by cultural producers from the midwest,
northern and southern regions of Brazil late in 2005. It began as a partnership between
producers in the cities of Cuiabá, Rio Branco, Uberlândia and Londrina. They wanted
to encourage the movement of bands, the exchange of technology for cultural produc-
tion and the circulation of musical products.
3 Brazil Network.
4 A living room tour is characterized by the production of a certain number of concerts
organized in the houses of fans. This idea has been growing over the last decade as an
alternative to ‘traditional’ touring models, based on booking music venues. The bene-
fits of this new model are the intimacy created among musicians and fans; the low cost
to book and realize the concerts (often there is no need for amplification); and the
possibility of making the activity more profitable, since the initial investment is
smaller than that for ‘traditional’ touring.
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Chapter 13
in over a decade. In previous years, revenues had dropped from 21 million euro
in 2008 to 1 million euro in 2015. The report nonetheless expresses doubt that
this slight growth indicates a bona fide revival of the cassette compared with
that of the vinyl record (Bundesverband Musikindustrie, 2017). In Japan, pro-
duction units and sales revenue from cassettes continued to decline in 2016, as
in prior decades (RIAJ, 2017).
The sales numbers released by the online music platform Bandcamp, however,
point in a different direction. The company recorded growth within every sector
for the year 2016: physical sales recorded vinyl growing by 48 per cent, followed
by CDs rising by 14 per cent, with cassettes experiencing the strongest growth,
with a 58 per cent increase in sales (Diamond, 2017). Websites like the cassette-
based podcast Tabs Out or the map of the United Cassettes blog feature lists with
hundreds of currently active labels releasing on cassette (Tabs Out Cassette
Podcast, 2017; United Cassettes, 2017). The clothing corporation Urban Outfit-
ters sells cassettes featuring major label releases such as Lana Del Rey’s album Lust
for Life (Urban Outfitters, 2017). However, there seems to be a gap between the
sales numbers released by the global music-industry associations and the cassette-
related distribution and marketing practices in various e-commerce outlets, and
their accompanying blogs and news pages. Even though worldwide sales numbers
for cassettes generally continue to decline, the cassette format is currently achiev-
ing growing recognition in various music scenes and genres. In what way has this
progress been traced by research so far? We find that, although there has been an
abundance of online news stories, reports and blog posts about cassette tapes over
the last five years (Butler, 2013; Rogers, 2013; Wrench, 2010), and monthly
reviews of newly released cassettes on Bandcamp or the Quietus, the amount of
research published on the cassette revival phenomenon is minimal.
Literature on cassette cultures over the last decade highlights two dichoto-
mies underpinning the meaning of the format. These are continuity versus
revival on the one hand, and resistance versus co-optation on the other. Indeed,
the cassette tape format has been investigated in small DIY scenes, where it has
been continuously present (Novak, 2013). Subgenres of metal, punk, hip-hop
and electronic music are examples of scenes where the cassette tape has never
completely disappeared (Bailey, 2012; Busby, 2015; Curran, 2016; Harrison,
2006; Novak, 2013). In the meantime, the cassette format also seems to be
undergoing a revival (Bohlmann, 2017; Demers, 2017; Eley, 2011). As a con-
sequence of the two concurrent streams through which the cassette format cur-
rently exists, another dichotomy appears in the literature, which frames cassette
cultures as either a form of resistance to the capitalist market of popular music
(Bailey, 2012; Curran, 2016; Eley, 2011; Harrison, 2006; Novak, 2013) or as
being co-opted and integrated within the logic of the capitalist market (Curran,
2016; Demers, 2017). These dichotomies are in fact rooted in different music
genres/scenes, and also within different geographical contexts.
At the core of these issues lies the question of whether the cassette format is
constructed in scene contexts that express resistance against dominant modes of
152 B. Düster and R. Nowak
that just a small group attended the event solely out of an interest in buying music
on cassette and to search for new content.
From a producer’s perspective, the event turned out to be an ideal platform for
exchanging cassettes and information between labels rather than selling them to
customers. The discussions evolving from the encounters with other people act-
ively engaging with the format revolved around the different music genres, nation-
alities of the released artists and how cassettes were incorporated into design
concepts. It showed that a fair number of labels and projects evolved from cliques
and personal networks based on mutual support. For instance, in the case of the
label Twaague, with whose label operator Düster spoke, the idea is to purposefully
bring together artists with differing styles originating from the same circle of
friends. The label released a ‘split cassette’, which features two different artists with
diverging musical aesthetics, with each contributing one side of music to the cas-
sette. The cassette release then functions as a platform for artistic convergence
while preserving the characteristics of each contributor (Bandcamp, 2017a).
Another form of making use of face-to-face encounters based on cassette
exchange is the Berlin Tape Run (Staaltape, 2017) project initiated by the cas-
sette label Staaltape of the long-standing, and now Berlin-based, store and mail
order company Staalplaat (2017). The project can be understood as reminiscent
of the cassette-based artistic exchanges of the 1980s cassette culture: each artist
contributed a single piece to the medium and then the ‘cassette was handed over
in person from one artist to the other. During four months in 2009 the tape
changed hands and places in Berlin. The track order follows this trip’ (Staaltape,
2017). Here the cassette works in the way it was used by artists in the second half
of the twentieth century: as a medium for artistic exchange connecting people
who are physically separated from each other. The Berlin Tape Run, while relying
on hand-to-hand passing on of the tape, in this sense realizes a variation from the
mostly mail-based practices of cassette culture over past decades. It is important to
bear in mind that these methods have been replaced in the twenty-first century by
cloud services for the exchange of sound files and digital art projects. By turning
to a physical format like the cassette tape to release their artistic work, labels aim
to induce consumption practices that contrast with those induced by digital tech-
nologies – for instance, by offering a decelerated way of accessing music, and fea-
turing a greater physical and social component as the focus of attention.
In all the examples mentioned above, the cassette functions either as an ‘art-
istic calling card’ (Novak, 2013, p. 223) or as a transmitter of artistic ideas.
However, during the research it became increasingly evident to Düster that it
was impossible to grasp a coherent scene in Berlin that was based only on the
bare use of cassettes. In fact, the fragmentation of the various usages and under-
standings of cassettes emerged from the diverging genres and their assertion of
specific ideals and aesthetics through the use of cassettes. This became apparent
both in the way cassette labels designed and crafted their releases in different
ways according to genre aesthetics, incorporating screen printing in contrast to
digital printing, and vice versa.
Cassette cultures in Berlin 155
It was also shown in the way Berlin music shops selling tapes selected the
releases according to their curatorial focus. Thus, different labels approached
different shops for distribution of their cassettes according to the music genres
they produced and released. This was not limited purely to music shops: stores
in Berlin like Motto, Staalplaat and Rumsti Pumsti blur the boundaries between
art gallery, bookstore and record shop (Motto Distribution, 2017; Rumstipumsti,
2017; Staalplaat, 2017). It turned out that genre-specific aesthetic ideals also
contributed to the fact that none of the aforementioned shops were represented
at the Cassette Store Day event. As a clerk of the Berlin record shop Bis Aufs
Messer put it, the advertisement of the event was too bright to catch the atten-
tion of their regular customers, who tend to be interested in black metal, hard-
core punk and noise. Besides that, to him the whole idea underpinning both the
Cassette Store Day and the Record Store Day is questionable, as neither the
cassette nor the vinyl record ever vanished within various DIY music scenes, so
he saw no need to stage a revival of these formats.
Nevertheless, besides the various usages of cassettes as a transmitter and
physical inspirational tool for artistic face-to-face collaborations that occur
during events like the Cassette Store Day, cassettes now primarily exist in inter-
connection with digital technologies.
analogue sound by engaging with the haptic and visual rituals necessary for the
playback of the formats within a domestic environment.
However, as cassette releases only mark a physical bonus to mainly digitally
distributed music, the association of these practices as independent DIY structures
opposing major music labels (Curran, 2016, p. 45) is no longer suitable. Both
small and major music labels now rely on the same online digital playback plat-
forms and e-commerce structures to market and sell their music. Within this
framework, smaller labels specialize more in developing a strong curatorship con-
cerning music genres to occupy specific niches for a stable revenue. The avail-
ability of different formats is helpful in this matter, as it broadens the appeal to a
greater group of possible consumers. This can be illustrated by DIY releases that
are available in all popular formats (Harrison, 2006, p. 292). The sound aesthetic,
together with visual, haptic and aesthetic aspects of every music format, has
become a matter of taste and taste culture. As such, affordances of music formats
are utilized to trigger specific consumer preferences, and listeners can choose a
format with which they associate a certain genre. Indeed, it is remarkable that
through this combination of material and virtual circuits of practices, the relat-
ively small group of people involved with cassettes lifted the format back into the
attention of mainstream media and major music labels (see Düster, 2016). This
has led to a broader recommodification of the format through mainstream distri-
bution that in some cases dominates the production plants for cassettes and vinyl
records, causing small labels to struggle as orders from major firms are often priori-
tized over those from independent labels (Beck, 2015).
Yet the existential need of self-sufficient artists and labels to promote their
work through the internet, as expressed by Curran (2016, p. 46; see also Prior,
2010), poses the question of how the boundaries of DIY and independent music
cultures are to be defined in the realm of overarching digital marketing and
trade structures. The next section of the chapter focuses on the use of the cas-
sette tape to define and delineate particular music genres.
Conclusion
This chapter has investigated contemporary cassette cultures and the various ways
through which the materiality of the format is used. Drawing on an empirical
fieldwork study conducted in Berlin in 2015–16, we show how the scenes that use
158 B. Düster and R. Nowak
cassettes to produce, distribute and consume music tend to remain quite small in
number, even if the face-to-face interactions that are inherent in cassette culture
contribute a great deal to maintaining and even reviving the analogue format.
Torn between a continuing existence within DIY underground music scenes and
a recent mainstream revival, the cassette format contributes to the contemporary
multiplication and fragmentation of practices of production, distribution and con-
sumption of music by providing an avenue via which particular genres can
develop an identity through their material, aesthetic and sonic features.
Besides the genre-specific mechanisms that shape approaches to cassettes,
upcoming research may elaborate on the diverging ways in which music scenes
have adapted to the digital technologies of marketing and distribution while
trying to preserve their specific scenic integrities. In this respect, cassettes con-
stitute highly appropriate research objects, as they intersect issues of materiality
and aesthetics with questions of music distribution in relation to genre conven-
tions in the digital age. As we have shown, the narratives growing around cas-
settes as countercultural forms of music production, distribution and
consumption stem mostly from practices that occurred last century. The con-
temporary encounters with cassette tapes therefore have to be reconceived
within the digital framework that now mediates our everyday lives.
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Chapter 14
‘Here Today’
The role of ephemera in clarifying
underground culture
John Willsteed
The scene
The punk/post-punk years in Brisbane have been written about by journalists,
novelists and academics ever since the early 1980s. Clinton Walker’s Inner City
Sound (1982) was designed by Marjorie McIntosh in a monochrome, cut-up,
photocopied, collage style that honoured the aesthetic of the period, and was as
influential as it was referential. It was followed two years later by the publication
162 J. Willsteed
of The Next Thing (Walker, 1985). Walker’s books not only gathered together
writings about, and interviews with, Australian musicians in order to capture a
sense of this flood of new music that was insinuating the cultural landscape; they
also gave the scene validation. Although these books were about Australian
bands/artists, they were comprehensive in their inclusion of Brisbane music –
Walker grew up in Brisbane, and understood the ‘cultural cringe’ that was such
an intrinsic part of Brisbane’s self-image.
This was a time of high youth unemployment in Australia, and particularly
Queensland, rising from 2.5 per cent in 1972 to 18 per cent in 1986 (Australian
Bureau of Statistics, 2001), but with an enhanced welfare system due to the pro-
gressive policies of the Whitlam Labor government in Canberra. These factors
created a scenario where time and money were (relatively) abundant, a fertile
bed in which subcultures could thrive.
The Saints grew from the south-western suburbs of Oxley and Inala, from
migrant families and the crippling boredom of endless hot nights in a town
where the city closed at dark. The police were on the lookout for any roaming
youths; the watch-house was always waiting. After the release of their first
single, which put them in the same critical, influential frame as The Ramones
and the Sex Pistols, The Saints left town. Other punk bands, like The Leftovers
and Razar, were central to the scene, but were soon subsumed by a flood of post-
punk and pop bands: The Go-Betweens, The Numbers, The Pits, The Survi-
vors, Swell Guys, Toy Watches and many more. Many of these bands took over
empty warehouses in the inner city in a wave of cultural energy that flooded
Brisbane in the years before the gentrification of the 1990s squeezed them out.
The structure that supported the growth of this music scene consists of a
number of elements. Most importantly, community radio station 4ZZZ, launched
in 1975, connected like-minded youth. This collective-run institution was housed
at the University of Queensland and survived on subscriptions as well as its pro-
motion arm. It was also the only avenue for locally produced music – the commer-
cial and government stations generally refused to touch anything that wasn’t
released by the major labels (Radical Times, 2018). The city also had a number of
venues – some run by 4ZZZ, others by independent promoters, but all helping to
transform Brisbane’s nightlife. Both the radio station and the University of
Queensland Students’ Union published magazines – Radio Times and Semper –
that gave work to young designers and cartoonists, and reviewed locally produced
cultural products. The Students’ Union also financed the Activities Centre, where
posters could be printed cheaply, while all the universities had libraries with cheap
photocopying services, making fanzine production affordable.
Much of this is detailed in Andrew Stafford’s Pig City (2004) – probably the
most well-known publication about the Brisbane music scene – which lays out
the confluence of popular culture and politics that was peculiar to Brisbane in
the 1970s and 1980s, and reveals the power wielded by the Queensland Police
Force: a power gifted by Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who either supported or blithely
ignored its abuse. But the scene was fertile ground for creative enterprise.
‘Here Today’ 163
Ephemera
The Brisbane underground music scene in the late 1970s was, like those of New
York or London, saturated with the DIY ethos. By late 1976, Australia’s first
punk fanzine, Plastered Press, was produced by Bruce Milne in Melbourne, and
by early 1977 it was followed by Clinton Walker and Andrew McMillan’s
SSuicide ALLey – a first for Brisbane (Walker, 2016). The ensuing ‘amphetamine
rush of punkzines’ led directly to some of the ephemeral items that feature in
this chapter.
But fanzines were not the only remnants of this period in Brisbane’s cultural
history. There were handbills and posters, recordings and radio shows, photo-
graphs and film/video footage. Some of the items were produced in their thou-
sands (handbills) and some in mere handfuls (some of the more obscure
magazines), but in the first instance they were all influenced by the new wave of
punk culture. John Gross (2011), reviewing David Ensminger’s (2011) Visual
Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation, describes
a Houston scene very much like the one in Brisbane. Punk music was ‘designed to
be of the moment, immediate, in direct contrast to the cold distance of stadium
rock and the inaccessibility of major record labels. It was designed to be fast, cheap
and out of control’. This was very much the case in Brisbane, already separated
from the ‘civilized’ southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne by distance as much
as by politics. The artefacts produced by the Brisbane scene represent ‘punk’s sense
of endless struggle, its hope and hopelessness, and its irony and humor, which are
often overlooked’ (Ensminger, 2011, p. 9). Although the state government had a
demonstrated negative attitude towards youth and youth culture, this humour is a
strong underpinning of much of the work, regardless of form.
The magazines and other ephemera, like handbills and posters, were often con-
structed in very simple ways, with skills and information being shared in small
working groups. Sometimes this was a necessity – screen-printing, for instance,
was a process requiring numbers of pairs of hands; more often than not, though, it
was a social choice. Frith (1996, p. 111) proposes that members of a subculture
‘only get to know themselves as groups (as a particular organization of individual
and social interests, of sameness and difference) through cultural activity, through
aesthetic judgement’. The development of ideas, the creation of artwork and then
the process of manufacture were all undertaken with friends or band members in
bars or lounge-rooms or workshops. It was an activity Ensminger (2011, p. 9) calls
‘folk art – often hand-drawn, hand-assembled collages taped or glued into place
before being copied and stapled’. Although we continued to embrace this ethos,
we were also keen to make the best thing we could make within the constraints of
the social and economic environment.
Initial forays were made into mail art, one-off pieces of collage that were
influenced by Dada and Fluxus artists, and mailed to friends near and far (see
Figure 14.1), which fed into an existing international web of connection that
has existed since at least the 1960s (Friedman, 1995, p. 7).
164 J. Willsteed
The next logical step after letters and postcards was towards small-format
magazines, the core example in this chapter (see Figure 14.2). These ephemera
started out as photocopied, short-run mags, addressed, stamped and mailed out.
The first, DK, produced in the winter of 1979, was 20 pages, A4, black and
white Xeroxed, and consisted of mostly photocopy collages. This DIY approach
was ‘a new language of rupture and roughness … a metaphor for punk’s chal-
lenge to watered-down corporate mentality’ (Ensminger, 2011, p. 9). The maga-
zine was also an illustration of our engagement with the media we consumed
daily, and was ‘able to liberate its producer(s) from the controls and limits set by
the dominant order by redeploying its resources in radical, infractory ways’
(Atton, 2002, p. 64).
DK was produced by Gary Warner and a handful of contributors, all members
of a close-knit social scene. There were no more than 50 copies printed and
mailed out to friends. The content, although devised and produced by musicians
and others, was not about the underground music scene, which set DK apart
from the other similar magazines being produced around the country. The first
issue and its subsequent versions are certainly influenced by the Dadaists, espe-
cially the small-format magazines from the early decades of the twentieth
century, like Dada, Cabaret Voltaire and Cannibale, as well as the works of Max
Ernst, George Grosz and Kurt Schwitters. The connection between Brisbane
punk/post-punk art and Dada has been made before: Danni Zuvela, discussing
the exit of artists from Brisbane in the Bjelke-Petersen years, cites Szulakowska:
There were other influences, which inspired feelings of global kinship in a pre-
internet world. One of the most powerful and pervasive was RAW Magazine,
published in New York by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. The first issue,
in July 1980, contained the vibrant work of more than 25 graphic artists from
Europe and the United States, including subcultural icons like Charles Burns
and Gary Panter, as well as the first episode of a small-format (roughly A5) seri-
alized graphic novel, Art Spiegelman’s Maus.
Over the next year or two, as the ‘publisher’ of DK developed the identity of
Decay House Films Ink, roughly ten A6 magazines were produced: some hand-
coloured; some containing colour Xerox elements, a technology that was then
in its infancy. It is common for such ephemera to ‘chronicle technological and
cultural shifts in contemporary history’ (Ensminger, 2011, p. 9) by using cutting-
edge technology in these seemingly frivolous activities. Atton also sees the
magazine as a set of embedded practices: ‘As they practise media production
within this place, they establish their own spaces: the space that is the zine
might be considered as an instance of de Certeau’s “practiced place” ’ (Atton,
2002, p. 64). The magazines comply with a set of visual tropes – text and pen-
and-ink drawing, photo-collage and Xerox manipulation – and a content
through-line, where dreams and self-portraits are common themes.
The next phase of production was Zip. The Zip collective contained members
of the original DK-makers and produced three cassette magazines – Zip start, Zip
too and Zip III – from late 1982 to 1984, which were somewhat inspired by the
colourful, informative issues of Fast Forward, produced in Melbourne from 1980
to 1982. Production elements had been extended to include cassettes of original
music and numerous small-format magazines, offset-printed, with A6 screen-
printed covers and A5 laminated postcards. These were available for sale by
mail order and in selected record and bookstores in clear ziplock bags, and
adopted the same format as and similar content to the previous visual work. The
final release, in 1985, was a 7-inch-square format, offset-printed, perfect-bound
56-page book with a 7-inch vinyl single inserted inside the back cover. This
166 J. Willsteed
release, ZIP.EYE.EAR, was produced with the aid of a grant from the Australia
Council of the Arts and reiterated the aesthetic intention and structural form
that had been followed for seven years. Following its release, the group folded.
These magazines, produced between 1978 and 1985, are a strong, stylish
thread winding through the post-punk scene in Brisbane. They exist in both
libraries and private collections, and carry a significance that can be evoked by
both memory and experience, but require a curatorial framework to fully realize
their potential.
Shadow stories
In the case of Brisbane’s post/punk scene, the remnants of the past are littered
across the social landscape. They exist in different forms: there may be photos of a
particular show, but neither the venue nor the bands, nor any posters or handbills,
remain. Or there may be a photograph of a poster on a kitchen wall, but no copy
of the poster itself. Some of the items lie in institutional care, while many others
are in boxes or under beds – the fond memories of a receding youth. Lambert
(2008, p. 125) sees ephemera as surviving largely ‘by chance, not just in libraries,
but also in museums, archives, local studies collections, and other institutions,
each of which has its own ways of describing the objects in its care’. Before any
curatorial intent is brought to objects like the DK and ZIP magazines, it is
important to note that these objects of ephemera, and many like them, have not
necessarily found an obvious home in the institution. In the years when these
items were being produced, the larger public cultural institutions in Queensland
supported attitudes that were pervasive in the 1970s in Brisbane: political con-
servatism; an unbridled enthusiasm for the classics; a comforting sense of separa-
tion from the outside world. They had little time for such subcultural artefacts.
However, in 1986, ten years after The Saints’ first single, ‘(I’m) Stranded’,
was released, Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA) – a gallery space funded
by both the state government and private donations – was home to Know Your
Product, curated by Ross Harley (1986), ‘a collection of seventies and early
eighties punk ephemera, such as fanzines, photographs, films, videos, music,
posters and other materials. It was one of the most important exhibitions ever
held at the IMA, if not the most important’ (Szulakowska, 1998, p. 57). The
small magazines described earlier, by Decay Films Inc. and ZIP, were pivotal to
this ambitious curatorial work, as they were to The Brisbane Sound (IMA, 2008),
curated by David Pestorius. Both The Brisbane Sound and Know Your Product
were expansive, including live music, radio documentaries and panel discus-
sions, critically addressing the punk/post-punk underground music scene in Bris-
bane and its intersection with the art scene.
Signs of the Times – Qld Political Posters 1967–1990 at the Queensland Art
Gallery in 1991 was curated by Clare Williamson. This comprehensive exhibi-
tion contained much cross-cultural material: music was a medium for opposition
to the government, and many gigs were events of support for community and
‘Here Today’ 167
Conclusion
Cultural and subcultural heritage is most often activated in fairly traditional
forms – exhibitions, books and articles, radio, film and TV documentaries, web-
sites. A music scene will be defined by the bands and music itself – vinyl releases
and video clips – and embedded in a chronology by factual data and interviews,
fleshed out with ephemera. The Brisbane punk and post-punk scene tradition-
ally has been defined by the more famous or influential bands – The Saints or
The Go-Betweens – and the published words of critics and historians. But for
every vinyl release during this period in Brisbane’s underground history, there
are hundreds of live shows with posters and handbills to publicize them; docu-
ments of the event surviving as cassettes, negatives, footage or diary entries; and
the even more vaporous artefact that is memory.
The objects – the small-format magazines, in this instance – have an intrin-
sic aesthetic value as well as being representative of the time, energy and social
168 J. Willsteed
connection required to devise and produce them. They are most often used to
evoke the period and contextualize the core elements of the story, but with a
different curatorial focus they can be moved to the centre of the story as repre-
sentative of this social and cultural activity. By taking this different approach,
by acknowledging the complexity of a scene where social relationships and day-
to-day culture-making can be seen as vital, we can begin to glimpse a possible
story that has more nuances and greater honesty, and the ability to transform
the identity of Brisbane – the big country town.
Epilogue
The role of the curator in the institution is historically someone who enables
sense-making of the collections based on their topical expertise, acquired for
this very purpose. And although the notion of the artist as curator may bring
another layer of expertise, I would suggest that this is, likewise, an acquired
knowledge. In the winter of 2015, I made a decision to tell the story of the
Brisbane scene from my perspective. This story, as it evolved, required soph-
isticated, situated interpretation, and inside knowledge to make contextual
connections. My connection to the time, my part in the making of the
culture and, most importantly, my 40 years as a professional storyteller,
enabled me to see that performance would be the transforming aspect of this
project.
In October 2015, at Brisbane’s Powerhouse theatre, using hundreds of
images from the State Library collections, my own archive, and many bits of
media kindly placed in my hands, I performed It’s Not The Heat, It’s The
Humidity for the first time, a story about Brisbane’s punk and post-punk scenes
split over two nights. The audience was drawn into the story by song and
voice, by memories and impressions rather than dates and facts, and by the
faces and voices of other members of the scene interviewed. Hours of 16 mm
and 8 mm film footage were reduced to potent, fleeting glimpses of the past,
with saturated colour and soundtracks based in songs from the time. Photo-
graphs were almost constant – enabled principally by the donation to the
State Library of 900 monochrome images of the Brisbane scene taken by Paul
O’Brien between 1978 and 1980. I reprinted even smaller versions of a few of
the little magazines that have been discussed here, to place in people’s hands.
The ephemera, the discards, of our lives. The things we thought we would
never see again, returned to us.
There were many comments after the performance, but this one resonates:
I was impressed by the poetic beauty of his account, his insistence on allow-
ing most of what he shared to speak for itself, and the respectful way in
which he treated a subject that is precious to those of us who were a part of
this scene … It was magnificent.
(Tanmay Malcolm Skewis, Facebook post)
‘Here Today’ 169
In 2006, after seeing the Taking It to The Streets exhibition at the Museum of
Brisbane, Michael O’Neill expressed a similar sentiment:
It’s a thing that’ll happen only once in one’s life that someone takes the
trouble to re-create (and invites you to help to do it) the segment of your
life that represents the most crucial, most alive and most meaningful con-
tribution you made to the life of the society around you.
(Besley, Denoon and McConnel 2007, p. 10)
Acknowledgements
DK/Dekay/Decay produced by: Gary Warner, Adam Wolter, John Willsteed, John
Gorman, Terry Murphy, Tony Milner, Judy Pfitzner, Iréna Luckus. Zip produced
by: Iréna Luckus, Terry Murphy, Matt Mawson, Tim Gruchy, John Willsteed.
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Zuvela, D. (2008). The Brisbane sound. Art Monthly Australia, 211: 45–8.
Chapter 15
First reports of a ‘lo-fi’ or ‘bedroom pop’ music scene1 in Budapest in the online
music press date from 2011, and although the scene – along with its respective
artists (such as Piresian Beach, Morningdeer, Zombie Girlfriend, Mayberian
Sanskülotts and Eyes on U) – became more widely known in the ensuing years,
it arguably continued to expand and change without surrendering its striving for
exclusivity and underground status. Despite its representation – ‘insider’ and
niche media – as a distinct scene, this musical micro-world did not develop in a
vacuum. Rather, its particular logic is embedded in complex ways into local and
translocal music worlds and genres, as well as technologies, including digital
home recording technology and online platforms. I examine the emergence of
this underground scene with the aim of exploring how it is constructed – both
as a scene and as underground. More precisely, I look, first, at how it formed as
an online and offline network of cooperation, interaction and creativity; second,
how it has been shaped through the particular use of technologies and the atti-
tudes towards such; and third, how it is embedded into local and translocal art
and music worlds and histories. Through this analysis, I reflect on the shifting
role of DIY attitudes and practices in the maintenance of cultural autonomy.
When speaking of an online and offline network of cooperation, interaction
and creativity, I employ the term ‘network’ in a descriptive sense, invoking
Howard Becker’s (1982, p. x) well-known concept of the art world as ‘the
network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint know-
ledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that
the art world is noted for’. Becker’s theory has already been employed by others
to describe ‘music worlds’ (e.g. Crossley, 2015). The ‘art works’ may be under-
stood in the present context as the musical product, as well as other closely asso-
ciated creative output such as poster or album artwork, photographs shared via
social media and even blog posts.
My observations are based on research conducted between 2014 and 2016 in
Budapest, Hungary, which included methods of online and offline observation,
with myself increasingly becoming a participant not only as a concert-goer, but
also through organizing workshops and a ‘Ladyfest’ day for the Rakéta festival in
2016; 14 qualitative interviews conducted with musicians and people otherwise
172 E. Barna
active in the music world; the analysis of Tumblr profiles; and network mapping
based on relationship data obtained from the interviews. The defining particu-
larity of the music world is the so-called bedroom musician practice, involving
the use of home recording technology and online platforms, as well as playing
shows at certain venues, attending gigs and going to certain pubs to socialize.
and other music and art worlds, as well as regimes of aesthetics and attitudes
such as ‘hipster’ taste. In the following, I explore such connections to demon-
strate the embeddedness of the scene that crystallized around 2011 in the
manner shown above.
also comprised her University of Fine Arts diploma work. The artist spoke about
how close expression through image and expression through sound felt to her,
and how she approached writing music in a ‘fine art’ manner – that is, creating
‘with simple tools’ (she also cited blues as a key musical influence). This meant
that she deliberately remained unprofessional with musical instruments, as the
process of learning to play an instrument to her was inextricably linked to the
creation of the musical piece (Erika, musician and fine artist). Anna Szemere
(2001, p. 224) observes in relation to (post-)socialist Hungarian underground
music how ‘the reappropriation of the high-art ideology in popular culture is …
bound up with a search for autonomy’. In this case, there is no ideological dis-
tinction on the level of discourse; rather, the techniques of fine art seem to lend
themselves well to the DIY creative practices of the lo-fi scene.
The singer and songwriter of the aforementioned Mayberian Sanskülotts,
referring to the role of the media in labelling the scene, explained how the band
had never planned to be a lo-fi act; rather, ‘someone had the idea that this was a
style that we record our songs at home – so we recorded everything on a laptop
on purpose, then we also recorded on cassette because it gave it a metallic
sound’ (Zita, musician). She connected the ‘metallic sound’ to an album by
female-fronted 1980s underground rock band Trabant (a name that itself has a
lo-fi resonance, referring to the low-cost, mass-produced East-German car brand
ubiquitous in socialist countries), which she used to listen to on cassette tape.
Itself representing an introspective, bedroom-type style, Trabant served as a
source of inspiration for the singer, and her aim was to recreate that familiar
sonic texture. The ‘bad quality sound’ thus gained an additional nostalgic
meaning, as well as a rootedness in Hungarian underground music history.
Irony and play
One distinct feature of the scene is what is known as multi-tasking in the jazz
world (Stewart, 2007) – simply put, this means that everyone is playing in eve-
ryone’s band but, in addition, also producing, promoting and writing about each
other’s band. This practice is not necessarily exclusive to lo-fi bands, but can be
regarded as a general feature of the Hungarian music industry, and is in part
undoubtedly rooted in economic constraints. It may thus, in some cases, be
interpreted as compromise rather than choice. Yet, besides the type of multi-
tasking where side-projects at times become indistinguishable from main pro-
jects, deliberately temporary bands or projects also thrive within the lo-fi music
world. I term such projects ‘scene bands’ to indicate the insider quality of the
practice as well as its simultaneous function of reinforcing inward-looking, self-
reflexive creative and social relations. ‘We’re sitting in the office Friday after-
noon, let’s form a band in the evening then break up at midnight – it is just a
game,’ explains one musician (Zsófia).
As another example, the duo Fél Fény played their debut gig at the Rakéta
festival in 2013 and their planned farewell gig (eventually cancelled) at the
176 E. Barna
On the one hand, the occasion is merely a gathering of friends, all involved in
the same creative community, documented through photographs and in the
memory of the music world as a truly DIY event. On the other hand, it already
contains key discursive gestures of irony (‘international’, ‘week’). Moreover, it
takes place within a space that is somebody’s home and the creative space of
their band at the same time – thus the ‘bedroom’ where music is made and dis-
tributed from is extended to become a creative and social space for the whole of
the – still very small – music world.
Continuity with indie
The close association of lo-fi with the indie music genre can be understood in
terms, first, of local popular-music history; second, shared online and offline
spaces; third, personal network continuities; and fourth, shared aesthetics and
ethics, on a translocal level. With regard to local popular-music history, the
Budapest ‘indie scene’ certainly serves as a frequent referential point in the sub-
cultural discourse of the lo-fi music world: according to the insider narrative, the
‘indie boom’ in Hungary – also centred in Budapest – had taken place in the few
years leading up to the ‘lo-fi boom’. Continuities in terms of places – for
example, the indie venue Beat On the Brat, which opened in 2013 and subse-
quently served as one of the venues for Rakéta – and people – for example, the
Birth of an underground music scene? 177
[The band] FUSEISM dwells on the ground that could capture the atten-
tion of lame hipsters as well but they have the attitude and the credo that
can convince punks that all the fancy assholes at the shows are there by
mistake.
(Vargyai, 2011)
On the other hand, a lo-fi musician asserted that this antagonism was com-
pletely one-sided: ‘We never had this [drawing of boundaries], it’s more
common for people to hate us, we never had a problem with anybody’ (Zsófia,
musician). Needless to say, it generally comes more easily for the member of
any subcultural group to make such overall statements regarding the other
group – as Thornton (1996, p. 99) observes, ‘although most clubbers and
ravers characterize their own crowd as mixed or difficult to classify, they are
generally happy to identify a homogenous crowd to which they don’t belong’.
In a parallel manner, it might be easier for members of a music world to see
themselves and their group as more tolerant, while critically perceiving the
other group’s intolerance.
Boundaries are also negotiated in relation to media presence. The relation-
ship of the underground to mainstream, or non-subcultural, media is undoubt-
edly complex and layered, although the models of Thornton (1996) and
Hodkinson (2002) can be effective in analysing this complex relationship. In
the case of the Budapest lo-fi world, the significance of mainstream media is less
evident, as the scene is present and represented mainly through micro-media
such as Tumblr and niche media – that is, online magazines. In one particular
instance, a track by Zombie Girlfriend was featured on Hungarian music tele-
vision channel VIVA, along with an interview with the band’s singer and song-
writer Benedek Szabó. This media event prompted an anonymous user to send
the following online message to Piresian Beach: ‘hi Zsófi, do you think Zombie
Girlfriend Benedek has betrayed the Hungarian lo-fi scene with this Viva inter-
view? … [PS your new EP is great!!!]’. First, the fact that a question like this is
addressed to Piresian Beach implies that the artist is considered by the fan as a
representative of the scene, presumably with ‘authority’ to offer a meaningful
comment on this dilemma. Second, the question and the implied assumption
that Benedek appearing on a mainstream music channel could be problematic
echo a kind of ‘incorporation’ or ‘selling-out’ narrative from subculture theory
(Hebdige, 1979). The artist’s response, on the other hand – ‘you decide’ – which
Birth of an underground music scene? 179
was published on her Tumblr page, appears as a knowing and slightly ironic
reflection on the irrelevance of the above narrative.
Others were more direct: ‘We don’t want to be these snobs, saying ‘We only
make music for the underground” ’ (Zita, musician). Categories, the same musi-
cian asserted, were unnecessary, as musical styles and the groupings around them
were becoming blurred. As another example, Mayberian Sanskülotts was invited
to take part in the mass-media–broadcast talent contest The X-Factor ‘so that
the public would get to know the alternative sphere’. Its members decided not
to enter because of the disadvantageous conditions of the contract, but other-
wise the singer saw no problems with saying yes. She was unsure about whether
it would be regarded as ‘uncool’ for them to participate or whether, on the con-
trary, it would be ‘cool’ for a band like Mayberian Sanskülotts – an underground
act – to be represented on the TV show (Zita). Yet she criticized the ‘kind of
narrow-mindedness, old-fashioned thinking’ that would condemn the band for
appearing on mainstream television. This attitude points towards the easing of a
countercultural, and certainly of an anti-capitalistic, stance that historically has
been associated with DIY music cultures, particularly punk. Paradoxically, criti-
cism of old symbolic hierarchies from within may to an extent assist the dissolu-
tion of cultural autonomy.
Conclusion
The Budapest lo-fi music scene is a creative community that actively works in
online and offline spaces to maintain an exclusive underground status and a kind
of symbolic autonomy through communicated anti-professional attitudes, insider
practices – such as Tumblr interactions – not easily visible and decipherable ‘from
outside’ or self-referential creativity exemplified by scene bands, as well as, in
some cases, symbolic links to Hungary’s (post-)socialist underground. At the same
time, it is also continuous with other music and art worlds and is embedded into a
complex social and creative network. Regardless of the symbolic continuity, the
practices and attitudes of digitalized DIY are no longer clearly associated with a
defined counterculture – Szemere (2001) explores how this dissolved after the
1989–90 turn in Hungary along with the socialist political system – nor with the
political or institutional critique that shaped (post-)punk and indie internation-
ally during the 1980s (Hesmondhalgh, 1999). The DIY practices and attitudes,
along with underground status, rather seem to contribute to the construction of a
subcultural capital that is potentially convertible to cultural capital. ‘Cool lists’,
while self-reflexive, ironic and not altogether benevolent, can also be viewed as
lists of young cultural entrepreneurs in Budapest worth paying attention to –
almost in the spirit of a Forbes Magazine list, they remain entirely within a capital-
istic logic. This means that while cultural autonomy is maintained on a symbolic
level, it is also continuously being compromised.
Acts of displaying taste and affinity online, such as posting music and other
content online or sharing pictures, not only serve to communicate (sub)cultural
180 E. Barna
capital and maintain in-group hierarchies. They also function as the visible
mortar of a community based on friendships, which at the same time also func-
tions as a professional creative network. Online interaction, frequent posts,
feedback and evaluative acts can all be considered relationship labour. In
harmony with the demands of the ‘attention economy’ (Davenport and Beck,
2001), timing is crucial in this displaying of connections – the frequency of
messages and the almost over-abundance of information require attention,
and attention signifies participation or being ‘in’. The displaying of a local
virtual network therefore functions not only as the reinforcing of social and
(sub)cultural capital, but also as a means for expressing and enacting belonging.
Notes
1 The two labels were used alternately, although the musicians I spoke to in 2014–16
tended to use the former more, while the music press seemed to prefer the latter. For
the sake of simplicity, I mostly use the term lo-fi in this chapter.
2 I use first names only to refer to interview subjects.
3 I examined the role of such gatekeepers in the music world’s continuity in time and
the maintaining, even through symbolic violence, of hierarchical structures, as well as
reproducing mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in Barna (2017).
4 As Andrew Ross (1989, p. 5, quoted by Bannister 2006, p. 25) argues, ‘ “hip”, “camp”,
“bad” or “sick” taste and, most recently, postmodernist “fun” … are opportunities for
intellectuals to sample the emotional charge of popular culture while guaranteeing
their immunity from its power to constitute social identities that are in some way
marked as subordinate’. ‘Cool’ could be added to this list.
5 Again, this is an internationally experienced trend (e.g. see Kearney, 1997; Leonard,
2007).
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Birth of an underground music scene? 181
wide to accept all sources and influences, more willing to ingest the diversity it
is already immersed within until the only sure identity is a fragmented one.
Ideally, essentialist distinctions fade until individuals are more like a culture
unto themselves, one constructed from varied contact zones that can never
congeal in exactly the same way to form similar subjectivities.
This is why it is easy to see how an organized subculture, even one with an
alternative DIY ethos, functions like a traditional social group. The subculture
tries to administer the values, beliefs and codes of meaning associated with its
style; therefore, if a member rejects the group’s strategies of totalization while
still claiming membership, the subculture is rendered inoperative – even if only
for that individual subject. There are few better examples of this attempt at
control than revivalist movements. As identities dependent on replicating a
previous form, they are prone to a stricter sense of rules governing the style, if
only so it is recognizable to people inside and outside the movement. Larry
Hardy, founder of In the Red Records, offers this critique of the revivalist
impulse: ‘I just don’t see why you’d want to relive a bygone era so exactly, why
you didn’t want to do something to it to make it your own or more con-
temporary’ (Davidson, 2010, p. 185). So is the revival in question an appropri-
ation of the past that scrapes off its hallowed veneer and uses it for its own
contemporary purposes? Or is it just a longing for that surface that likewise takes
history at its surface by buying into the past’s self-representation because the
memory-as-product fulfils a desire – maybe even some psychological need – for a
previously enacted rebellion that is now romanticized into fantasy? Or is this
style, and the affection for the music used to express it, just another model of
conformity, only with a different style, a different look from the present histor-
ical moment yet once again and, quite predictably, deployed as a tool of differ-
entiation used to sell sameness?
ovement. So, on one level, the ‘No’ can be read as declaring a disconnection
m
from the channels of mainstream success by disdaining all that might allow for
it. Michael Azerrad (2001, p. 231) describes it in such terms: ‘The music was
spare but precipitously jagged and dissonant, with little regard for conventions
of any sort; the basic idea seemed to be to make music that could never be co-
opted.’ That does not mean they wanted to avoid recognition or fame, but they
hardly chose the easy path to achieve it – which speaks to the lingering artistic
ethos informing their aspiration to destroy the past.
During its brief existence, No Wave made no bones about putting a stake in
the heart of rock. Most bands still used the instruments of the form – guitar,
bass, drums – albeit forcing sounds from them that were deliberately (and obvi-
ously) intended to be heard as confrontational acts. Simon Reynolds (2005,
p. 140) accounts for this choice: ‘It was as though the No Wavers felt that the
electronic route [i.e. synthesizers] to making a post-rock noise was too easy. It
was more challenging, and perhaps more threatening, too, to use rock’s own tools
against itself.’ This was not music meant to offer people escapism or entertain-
ment. In its various forms it presented disharmony, irregular tunings, static,
sparseness, unmelodic, off-key and/or atonal vocals (often amounting to little
more than screaming) as well as repetitive single-beat rhythms and single-note
chords distorted into thudding white noise and drone. In short, the music could
be intense, spontaneous, even haunting. These were the tools for tearing apart
punk’s lingering connection to the blues and Chuck Berry riffs as an avant-garde
artistic statement ushering in a new sensibility.
Part of No Wave’s genius lay in its complex minimalism. The music was
informed by more than banging out noises, even if that was all it sounded like. No
Wave combined highly intellectual theories with the corporeality of energy and
emotional intensity. Anger, paranoia and despair are common, yet there is also an
underbelly of joy in releasing these feelings – albeit hardly the typical easygoing
fun of teenagers celebrated in so much pop music – to create an aggressive music
that represents a desire to be free from the dictates of imposed reason and order.
Lydia Lunch, of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, described her desire for a self-
exorcism of the past through an act of filial and musical culturecide:
It was much more about personal insanity than political insanity … There
wasn’t much to fight against, except tradition, where you came from, what
your parents were … [Musically] everything that had influenced me up to
that point I found too traditional … I felt there had to be something more
radical. It’s got to be disemboweled.
(Reynolds, 2005, pp. 145, 148)
To be excluded from the community built upon a reified pop-music history was
another of No Wave’s goals. The problem of history as a tool of social control is
central to this response, especially in relation to how a person’s identity is
constructed for him or her and policed by the official narrative of any collective
188 D.S. Traber
‘we’ that explains how we came to be and what we mean because of that history.
As a system of meaning production, history is used to represent us to ourselves
as an undifferentiated, totalized ‘us’. The narrative of any group’s specific history
restricts individual meaning by making singular what is plural; this includes
when the marginalized singularize themselves by repressing the diversity within
the plurality itself if they speak, think or in any way resort to a transparent
group representation.
No Wave refused to associate itself positively with the memories of that pop
history, except by casting them negatively to create its own counter-identity.
For No Wave to break free of the past it had to remove itself from its means of
self-replication in the present. And in doing that, these bands likewise wanted
to extricate themselves from the notion of community built on that history. No
Wave set out not only to denaturalize but to undermine the centre around
which popular music still revolved in terms of how it was played, heard or
experienced, documented and then commodified.
Still, one of the seeds that contributed to the scene’s quick disintegration was
actually a record. Brian Eno released the No New York compilation in 1978 with
only four bands chosen to represent the movement. Eno’s choices could all be
justified, but they highlighted an existing geographical rift between bands
divided by neighbourhood, with SoHo castigated for being too close to the
reigning art establishment. DNA’s Arto Lindsay confessed to persuading Eno to
exclude the SoHo groups, thus ensuring their clique would constitute the offi-
cial and public face of The New Sound (Heylin, 2007, p. 497). Here community
functioned to enforce codes and marginalize those who didn’t behave properly,
those who were ‘not like us’. A concomitant problem in No Wave’s discourse
with regard to the wider public was its complicity in promoting a system of taste
– a value resulting from the band’s desire for artistic status, specifically as the
next phase in the history of avant-garde music. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of taste
as a tool of social identity is applicable here:
In No Wave, taste was redefined and recoded, so that the dominant culture’s
preferences would now fill the subordinate slot in the scene’s binary structure:
smart/dumb, authentic/fake, new/old, original/generic. There was certainly an
inherent challenge in appropriating the positive terms in order to turn them
against the common understanding of how they should be applied, yet they were
still used to mark people and make sense of the world in a way that framed and
enforced their taste preferences as those of the new breed of true artists: those in
the know and the now.
The inoperative subculture 189
there was little chance of reaching a wider audience for most bands. Unfortu-
nately, even regional success became impossible once the major record
companies ‘persuaded’ radio stations to phase out regional acts for an album-
oriented format. But nationwide fame was never the point for many bands.
The garage appellation denotes a lack of professionalism, but it also connotes
what made them rebellious figures besides growing their hair out. In addition to
the occasional sexual innuendos and drug references in songs, these bands con-
stitute a suburban underbelly. The garage, as part of the American postwar tract
home, symbolizes upward mobility and material success – a home and a car – but
inside the children set to inherit this life are banging out noises that don’t jibe
with the surface desires. Pre-psychedelic garage rock’s lyrical evocation of fun
(girls, cars, parties), its preference for musical speed as a sign of youthful energy
(as opposed to the adult world of kids, work and mortgages) all coated with fuzz
distortion (opposing suburbia’s promise of cleanliness and the way most popular
music sounded) adds up to a counter-statement against suburban dreams of
smooth perfection that cover over the enforced conformity.
Many of the first punks in the mid-1970s were familiar with Lenny Kaye’s
1972 Nuggets compilation of 1960s garage rock; so too, it would seem, were
those in the early 1980s who participated in the first revival. During this period,
quite a few bands took their adoration to a purist’s level by also mimicking the
visual style of the early 1960s, such that mop-top hairdos sat atop paisley shirts,
turtlenecks, skinny lapel suits, pointed Beatles boots and tight, tapered pants.
Aurally, the influences and specific styles were diverse (drawing on blues, rocka-
billy, surf music, the British invasion, psychedelic rock, and punk), but there
was a shared conscious rejection of the new wave sound that leaned heavily on
the cold, mechanical tones of computerized synthesizers. In contrast, garage
bands preferred the ‘natural’, less clinical sound of old Farfisa organs, guitars and
drums played by human beings. More recently, a split has occurred between
either fusing jangly guitars with a dose of punk energy or the more punk-
influenced hard guitar that is sometimes labelled garage punk, but the distinc-
tion is fairly useless since plenty of harder-, punkier-sounding bands play
without jangle and dress in the old clothes (for example, The Makers and The
Hives). In fact, it has often been difficult to distinguish between garage and
punk on many of these recordings, so garage will be used as a catch-all term.
Garage rock survived in America through the 1990s (The Hentchmen, The
Makers and The Woggles are all fine examples), but finally received serious
media attention at the turn of the century. A number of bands were branded
with the term – some far too easily – resulting in Spin doing a cover story on
The White Stripes and neo-garage in October 2002 while, in the same year,
Steven Van Zandt began the syndicated radio show Little Steven’s Underground
Garage. The White Stripes’ MTV hit ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’ (2001) is a mag-
nificent reminder of a raw garage aesthetic. Sweden’s The Hives, on the other
hand, stuck to the formula more consistently than others, and achieved sudden
fame in the United States with Veni Vidi Vicious (2000). It was not their first
The inoperative subculture 191
album, but it was the first time many had heard anything about this foreign
band dressed in matching outfits, like early 1960s groups (in fact, Sweden is
brimming with good neo-garage bands, like The Maggots, The Maharajas and
The Strollers).
MTV helped get the word out, but you can’t always get people to buy what
they don’t want, regardless of the Frankfurt School’s complaints about the
culture industry’s oppressive control over our desires and consumption habits. I
am more inclined to believe the energetic, riff-laden garage sound was a major
factor in the style’s popularity as an antidote to the previous era’s saturation by
Tiger Beat pop-punk acts, choreographed boy bands, producer-centric R&B,
and jailbait divas – all of which made music that sounded to some as if it were
drafted by a computer running pop-formula algorithms.
Memory is rarely innocent, but nostalgia is a term referring explicitly to
romanticized representations of the past that purposefully leave out the negat-
ives; such manipulation may even be an ideologically motivated act of remem-
bering. I therefore find it puzzling that Eric Abbey views nostalgia as a politically
radical cultural strategy in his book on contemporary garage rock. The average
garage band’s nostalgia goes beyond a benevolent appropriation of the blues that
is intent on inserting a sense of authenticity and rawness, heart and soul into
the corporate pop industry. The use of early 1960s style cues and iconography in
the sound, fashion, haircuts and album art is framed by Abbey (2006, p. 8) not
as postmodern pastiche, but rather as a sincere attempt to ‘reclaim, for a new
time period, [a rebellious form that] has been lost’. He believes that the move-
ment’s lived nostalgia for 1960s garage and mod bands challenges capitalism and
the bourgeois conformity of the suburbs. Garage rock is ‘outside of capitalist
notions of conformity’, and as a style it is ‘outside of societal norms’; thus it is a
taking control of subjectivity from capitalism’s focus on the present by resurrect-
ing a past once framed as rebellious (2006, p. 1).
So is the retro early 1960s white-rocker style an appropriation of the past
that scrapes off its hallowed veneer and uses it for its own contemporary pur-
poses? Or is it just a longing for that surface that likewise takes history at its
surface – in other words, buys into the past’s self-representation because the
memory-as-product fulfils a desire, such as a fan’s psychological need for a previ-
ously enacted rebellion that is now romanticized into a naturalized fantasy? Or
is this style, and the affection for the music used to express it, precisely a model
of conformity but with a different style, a different look, once again selling same-
ness? One finds varying levels of commitment to the appearance; nonetheless,
even the true believers offer little more than a capitalist-infused rebellion in
that the politics are enacted through lifestyle consumption (even if ‘recycling’
vintage clothes) instead of trying to actually affect the system itself.
Repeating the past submits to, obeys, a prior code – the sense of what a garage
rocker should sound and look like – as well as eventually becoming its own
uniform in the scene. That scene may be moderately positioned outside the
mainstream, but it betrays the participants’ willingness, their deepest desire, to
192 D.S. Traber
behave, to believe, to live precisely like other people once they find the code
that appeals to them. This may transgress being forced to blindly accept the
present forced upon you, and the culture it offers, as the only available option,
such that if you cannot escape the social chains attaching you to your present at
least you can reject the cultural ones. Or is this refusal an escapist playtime with
an historical theme? What about the imposition of the past and the burden of a
forced inheritance? Neo-garage has to avoid being a simple matter of nostalgia
for a time that isn’t its own, and being self-aware of the repetition does not fully
mitigate complicity. The appropriation of an historical look and sound must
receive modifications; imitation requires distortion – plugging history into the
fuzzbox – to find a balance between the individual and community. Neo-garage
suggests we are not totally free to choose our subjectivity because the music and
look are not original, yet the choice does not have to be between unreflective
mimicry or the nothingness of No Wave’s static.
But there is another style of contemporary garage rock, one less interested in
simply recycling the past, that concocts a musical identity at the junction point
between rock and avant-gardism. To its 1960s and punk influences, it adds more
noise, distortion and lyrics that are inaudible or so stupid it doesn’t matter, or
both. Rather than mimicking the past (in contrast to those strict revivalists who
become tribute bands for a time period) this lo-fi style integrates the more
antagonistic spirit of avant-garde noise-rock to revel in the chaos of dissonance
and high-volume cacophony. Their anti-aesthetic devalorizes being ‘good’
beyond the amateur stance of garage rock – not just raw or simple – to declare
lo-fi pride in doing a ‘bad’ rendition of once ‘bad’ music. As Paul Hegarty (2007,
p. 89) states, ineptitude is an ‘anti-cultural statement … the playing of incorrect
notes, or the wrong kind of playing, maybe even offending the delicate sensibili-
ties of the elite listener/performer’. Avant-garde garage rock finds its own iden-
tity within acknowledging its family tree, but choosing its own position in it.
These performers don’t want to wipe out their history, but rather attenuate it as
a sole explanatory source for the self. Hegarty (2007, p. 60) describes feedback
as surplus sound, ‘unwanted, excess, waste’; however, this style wants more of it,
and that choice can be read as representing a part of the subject that resists
being contained by a closed sense of community. A willing connection to
history and tradition is maintained even as they are reformed in order to make
them speak differently.
San Francisco’s Coachwhips (2001–05) exemplify this approach. The notion
of subjectivity being built upon historical traces we can manipulate to our indi-
vidual needs finds expression in John Dwyer’s stylized transformation of the past.
While their garage roots can be heard as a historical reference point – guitar,
drums, organ – they are squeezed and stretched into a blurry deconstruction of
garage rock that comes across as affectionate rather than spiteful. In songs like
‘Just One Time’, ‘Yes, I’m Down’ and ‘Extinguish Me’, the drums are a simple
pounding interspersed with crashing cymbals, the organ is a crapped-out Casio
making wheezy, whiny single notes, while these two elements are trammelled by
The inoperative subculture 193
a guitar so buzzy, so effectively washing over everything else, that even when
Dwyer changes chords it sounds monotone – more so for his voice being modu-
lated via a telephone mouthpiece as microphone (which he often places inside
his mouth) and overdriving the volume into an in-the-red homicidal racket that
creates a blasted, hollow, spectral sound, leaving the lyrics for listeners to
decipher.
The Coachwhips prove themselves an example of Nancy’s theory of the
singular plural subject:
The singular is primarily each one and, therefore, also with and among all
the others. The singular is a plural … [Being] is always an instance of ‘with’:
singulars singularly together, where the togetherness is neither the sum, nor
the incorporation, nor the ‘society’, nor the ‘community’.
(Nancy, 2000, p. 32)
to an unreflective echo of the past. Rather, you put your own touch on it to
make it your sound that resists a repetition that may make for a lively perform-
ance but rather a dulled sense of self.
Many bands prove capable of borrowing without copying by shaping the
sources to their needs. Avant-garde garage rock opposes completely wiping away
the past to make a shiny new future. Aspiring to absolute difference from all
previous forms – casting them as temporal and cultural others – like No Wave is
not the goal. To understand the effect of your others on your own ontological
creation is more honest and potentially more complex than starting from
scratch because you have to manoeuvre a reified musical identity: ‘Being cannot
be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with
of this singularly plural coexistence’ (Nancy, 2000, p. 3). The larger lesson to
take from avant-garde garage rock’s use of voluntary cultural history is its
response to community through that history, as a system that partly produces
individuals while lacking total rule over them. Thus we see that agency can
exist within structure – as sound can meld with music, as subjectivity depends
on being subjected – without us resorting to totalizing the power of either.
References
Abbey, E. (2006). Garage Rock and Its Roots: Musical Rebels and the Drive for Individuality.
Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Azerrad, M. (2001). Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Under-
ground, 1981–1991. Boston, MA: Back Bay Books.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. R. Nice trans.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Coachwhips (2003). Get yer Body Next ta Mine [CD]. New York: Narnack.
Coachwhips (2004). Bangers vs. Fuckers [CD]. New York: Narnack.
Davidson, E. (2010). We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988–2001. New York:
Backbeat.
Frere-Jones, S. (2010). ‘Noise control’. The New Yorker, 24 May, pp. 80–1.
Hegarty, P. (2007). Noise/Music: A History. New York: Continuum.
Heylin, C. (2007). Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge. New York: Conongate.
Hicks, M. (1999). Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press.
Johnson, D.E. and Michaelsen, S. (1997). Border secrets: An introduction. In S.
Michaelsen and D.E. Johnson (eds), Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics (pp.
1–39). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, J. (1991). The Inoperative Community (P. Conner et al. trans). Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Nancy, J. (2000). Being Singular Plural (R.D. Richardson and A. O’Byrne trans). Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Reynolds, S. (2005). Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984. New York: Penguin.
Chapter 17
Collectivity
Gilbert (2014) analyses the necessity of and difficulties faced by creative col-
lective practice in a context that promotes neoliberal individualism as common
sense. Following on from Gilbert’s work, this chapter aims to delineate how
modes of collectivity and individuality are constituted in these scenes and to
highlight their interdependence, requiring reflection and contingency-aware
work of researchers (Lutter and Reisenleitner, 2002). Gilbert’s Common Ground
(2014) delineates the pervasiveness of possessive individualist thought through-
out much of Euromodernity and examines its role for current inhibitions of the
emergence and sustenance of creative collectivities. As we face (environmental,
humanitarian) crises that call for decisive and sustainable intervention, col-
lective decision-making appears to be stuck in a rut. The institutions of liberal
democracy have lost what transformative power they may have had in the
Fordist era; they appear unsuited to the post-Fordist era and the complex shifts,
modulations and speeds of Deleuze’s ‘societies of control’, in which traditional
political movements have lost much of their ability to articulate collective
interests. Much Euromodern thought (especially the liberal tradition with
Hobbes as a recurring point of reference, but also the social psychology of Le
Bon and Freud, and even some Marxist theory) appears incapable or unwilling
to conceive of collectivity outside what Gilbert calls ‘Leviathan logic’.
According to this set of assumptions, group formation occurs through dis-
tinct, isolated individuals’ investment in a core object, leader or idea. Collectiv-
ity is thus defined by hierarchical, vertical relations and conceptualized ‘as a
simple aggregation of individuals [or] a homogeneous and monolithic com-
munity’ (Gilbert, 2014, p. x), often understood as violent and irrational. Against
this, Gilbert articulates an anti-individualist theory of relationality that
denounces ontological individualism and posits the feasibility and importance
of horizontal relations and the collectivities they co-constitute. Leviathan logic
constrains collectivity, and consequently democracy – the basic idea of which is
‘the community taking collective control of its own destiny’ (2014, p. 20).
While Gilbert acknowledges that any group is likely to be constituted by
both horizontal and vertical relations, the former have been marginalized
throughout much of Euromodernity. Their construction is emphasized most
Collectivity and individuality 197
Method
Free-folk musics are often described as simply being about friends making music
together. While this cannot be an exhaustive description of the research field, it
is true that this focus on the social – on playing experimental music among
friends at home, at house shows and in similar contexts – is crucial to an under-
standing of these scenes. Methodologically, I attempted to implement this focus
on social relations through 22 qualitative (Froschauer and Lueger, 2003),
problem-centred3 (Witzel, 2000) interviews with 25 interviewees (16 men, 9
women), most of them musicians. Many of these are also, for instance, label
owners and/or show organizers, sometimes also music writers. The interviews
took place in the United Kingdom (London and Glasgow), Austria (Vienna
and Graz) and the United States (New York City; Brattleboro, VT; Doylestown,
Philadelphia, Orwigsburg and Pittsburgh, PA; Oakland and Los Angeles, CA;
and Austin, TX). They were recorded, transcribed, and coded through thematic
analysis (Froschauer and Lueger, 2003).
While the later parts of interviews usually consisted of more specific and
straightforward, less open, often quantitative questions related to my project’s
focus on gender and politics – for example, about gender ratios in these scenes – I
mainly asked interviewees to speak of their personal paths through various scenes.
I thereby attempted to make space for the field’s own structuring efforts (Fro-
schauer and Lueger, 2003) and to enable a mapping of the relevance of gender
and politics as they constitute and are constituted by everyday lives and social
relations. Here already, questions of relationality emerge. Instead of ‘individual’
trajectories and narratives, it is more apt to speak of ‘specific’ or ‘singular’ ones
traced through these interviews (Gilbert, 2014). It is certainly possible to inter-
nally ‘divide’ these narratives and narrators. This also applies to researchers, who
must reflect on their own relations to the research field. The trajectories and
198 M. Spiegel
arratives analysed here are complex, relational and intersecting; they are incon-
n
ceivable without the impact of other trajectories. Musicians’ narratives emerge
from the ever-shifting map of relationships between various forces and
protagonists.
Like Eric [Arn], he’s one of those guys, he’s been around for a long time and
you know, everybody, people know him and we just trust him. We all put
each other up … we all support each other, no matter what the other
person does, and there’s this kind of comfort when we all get together or
when we’re all in the same room, whether it’s like three or four of us or 50
of us like this, that we’re not being judged by anybody else. I mean, yes,
there’s some cynical people and people always say stupid things about other
people (MS laughs), and there’s always, you know, little things, but …
nobody’s trying to hurt each other, you know what I mean … They do
nothing but push you to do bigger and better things, and their energy inter-
acts with yours and makes you wanna do bigger and better things.
This involves personal care, support and relative freedom for participants,
connectable to Valentine’s ‘free thinking folk’; non-judgementality enables
the unfolding of one’s expression and by-passes neoliberal encouragement of
competition (Gilbert, 2014). LaBrecque’s experience suggests that collectivity
indeed fosters creativity. As important as an expressive individualism praising
the uniqueness and creativity of their peers may be to musicians, their creativ-
ity emerges out of a complex web of care and like-mindedness. In this affec-
tive alliance, mutual enhancement of creative capacities is key and very
visible – ‘whereas the individualist tradition and Leviathan logic can only
Collectivity and individuality 199
the advent of the loop[/]delay pedal has enabled people … to make their
own one [person] show, because you can, it’s very easy now, they built some
great pedals that enabled you to loop effectively live, and layer sounds, so
you have someone who’s singing or playing guitar or [an]other instrument
and they create a whole sound world, without having a band … On those
two pedals [Line 6 and Boss], you can really control the loops, so you can
create live something that normally you had to do in the studio … And also
it’s a way for people that frankly don’t have a lot of traditional musical skills
to create a whole world of sound with loops …
200 M. Spiegel
It contributes to the rise of solo projects as described by Brown (2013), and thus
disturbs relations based on conventional band formats often constituted by boys’
club–type friendships and thus implicitly gendered (Bayton, 1998; Clawson,
1999; Kearney, 2006). The possibility to make dense, busy music on one’s own
allows anyone to avoid difficult band politics, as Donaldson suggests. Ideas such
as those of Jeremy Gilbert (2004), partially via John Corbett, on the ‘rhizomatic
moment of improvisation’ enable further interesting observations. The aes-
thetics of projects that use delay and loop pedals to construct quasi-choirs con-
sisting of sometimes only one person – what Keenan (2007) calls ‘vocal magic’
or ‘massed voices’ – blur or dissolve conventions of singular authorship. In such
moments, it can be particularly unclear whether such voices are male or female.
Solo artists such as Grouper and Inca Ore, or groups such as Double Leopards
and The Skaters, may sound like amorphous masses without clear gender iden-
tity and author subject; their voices may not even sound human. Any all-too-
easy expressive individualism is challenged by a human-device assemblage, by
strange animal-becomings (Braidotti, 2011; Büsser, 2007; Deleuze and Guattari,
2008). What is expressed here? Maybe not an authentic individual core, but
practices directed towards transformation beyond the unitary subject. The
messiness of the strange worlds (Spiegel, 2012, 2013) generated through such
techniques is part of the attractiveness of these scenes.
The horde
Similar points may be made about shapeshifting, often improvising projects such
as Sunburned Hand of the Man, No-Neck Blues Band (NNCK) and Jackie-O
Motherfucker. In diverse ways, these groups match what Diedrich Diederichsen
(2004, 2005a, 2005b) calls the ‘horde’. This concept also encompasses groups
that invoke collectivity (2005b) and do not necessarily constitute a loose,
sprawling pack; Animal Collective, possibly the best-known group to emerge
from these scenes, exemplifies such invocation. In the case of groups such as
Sunburned, this horde character implies an improvisational approach, gener-
osity and what Diederichsen (2005a, p. 158) calls the ‘radikal Offene’ (the radic-
ally open). It is a relaxed approach to musical material that eschews genre
conventions. Such groups may shapeshift quite noticeably, with Sunburned
consisting at times of two people, at others of more than a dozen.
None of this implies that such groups represent an egalitarian, free-for-all
ideal. Here, a remark by interviewee Ron Schneiderman, another Sunburned
member, is particularly interesting. He served as co-organizer of the aforemen-
tioned Brattleboro Free Folk Festival and also plays solo (under his own name
and as Pewt’r. as well as Estey Field Organ Tone Archive) and in groups such as
Coal Hook and Green Hill Builders; he runs the Spirit of Orr and Blueberry
Honey labels. Schneiderman (personal communication, 13 July 2009) pointed
out that there was ‘a strong dudes gang thing going on’ in Sunburned Hand of
the Man, which he suggested was understood and not exclusionary, a ‘male
Collectivity and individuality 201
clubhouse type … energy’. Indeed, most members have been male, but the group
has included and does include female members. Sunburned is not necessarily a
feminist band, but Schneiderman’s remarks about his own approach are of great
importance here:
[S]o I decided that at one point I was gonna have a subconscious agreement
with myself that my efforts would be towards this one cause, but without
any sort of actual plan or operational focus, but I would say basically, it is
the interest of dismantling paternity, the paternal order, it’s pretty much
where I sit on it.
In some ways, despite great openness, such groups do not move beyond more
traditional rock groups’ tendency to be predominantly male. Clubhouse energies
and other gendered traits have a long history in rock (and other) musics. To set
up more inclusive collectivities against such sedimented gendered characteris-
tics takes time and effort, which is especially difficult in times of financial insec-
urity and neoliberal anti-collectivism. That said, Schneiderman’s remarks about
‘dismantling paternity’ hint at such hordes’ strengths and potentials.
One day before our exchange, Schneiderman (personal communication,
12 July 2009) joined his friend and fellow interviewee Matt Valentine and me
during our interview and discussed mechanisms of communities ‘not aligned
with a larger sort of control mechanism that seems to be afflicting us in some
way’. A strong, openly anti-authoritarian current flows through Schneider-
man’s and Sunburned’s practice. Depending on context and reflection, in
their anti-author subject, anti-authoritarian, perception-challenging and
irreducibly diverse approach, these hordes potentially model experimental,
non-identitarian politics. With their tendency towards democratic improviza-
tion, they often exemplify the dynamic, ever-shifting horizontal relations
emphasized by Gilbert. Although Sunburned sometimes revolves around core
members such as John Moloney, showing that such groups’ relations are never
exclusively horizontal, it demonstrates an intriguing exploratory practice – a
laboratory of collective experimentation. This is not a generic mode of collec-
tivity: members come and go; various weirdnesses are fostered through per-
sonal myths; and the group ‘is defined by “transversal” relations which do not
work to delimit or negate the inherent “multiplicity” of the elements which
they relate’ (Gilbert, 2014, p. 107).
However, as Britt Brown (2013) argues, most group forms in these scenes
tend to be in decline compared with forms of solo practices afforded by increas-
ingly accessible technologies. Solo activities are attractive for logistic and finan-
cial reasons. It can be difficult to get a sprawling collective on the road, not least
as band members grow older, start families or move away from core locations.
Additionally, improvising hordes are hard to market and discipline. Asked
about questions of such groups’ decreased presence in an email, Brown (personal
communication, 27 December 2012) saw it in the context of his Wire piece:
202 M. Spiegel
Democratic collectives like those are radically out of step with the current
cultural mood, especially in light of the social/creative transformations that
technology is wreaking right now … NNCK and Sunburned and such col-
lectives were inevitably and inextricably based on the philosophy of pursu-
ing art for art’s sake, not careerist advancement. There were too [many]
people involved, too much messy humanity, to possibly curtail the sound
into something streamlined and brand-conscious, which is the goal of
almost all independent musics these days, even the craziest micro-niches.
So then the free aspect started playing into everything I did from that point
on … It’s interesting, something I found really strange was everyone got, it
seemed almost too free, like free jazz started becoming a really strong influ-
ence in all of the projects, Metabolismus, Hall of Fame, Tower [Recordings]
and it somehow was the end in a weird way and then all the groups started
to kind of break down … It’s so weird how you need this constant balance
between structure and free, you know, and, it’s always questionable where
does the structure come from, and how do you bring the free into it …
I mean, Matt’s work I felt like has gotten more and more clear that he has a
vision, you know, and that we should come to his vision and it’s less about
the, I mean as we all are it’s less about the group dynamic, and it’s more
about supporting his function as a band leader or as a songwriter and I’m
doing the same thing with my solo records. But, of course, touring with
Matt, you know, then there’s periods of things getting very loose live, and
that’s always great.
Lubelski also emphasized ‘the individuality and the personal creative vision’
that is ‘really highly prized, at least in this scene’. The free and the structured
often appear to coincide with a predominance of horizontal and a re-emergence
of more hierarchical vertical relations respectively. However, they are not
necessarily equivalent. The ‘periods of things getting very loose live’ take place
under Valentine’s banner, although group hierarchies may have loosened. Free
folk is constituted by combinations of horizontal and vertical relations; its
success often depends on the individuation of protagonists’ creative visions.
These are inherently social, but sometimes articulated into ‘individual’ oeuvres.
Free folk’s creative collectivities involve various modes of never truly complete
individuation from a field of ‘infinite relationality’, the complex web of relations
that founds inherently social creativity and precedes any mode of individuality
and its stakes (Gilbert, 2014). These scenes’ valued originality and expressive
individualism are enabled by supportive relations of care and shared creativity.
Despite expressing admiration for individual creativity, they do not quite adhere
to romantic images of genius.
What infuses these relations and makes people connect? There are many
factors: aesthetics, a certain social orientation and more. But Samara Lubelski
has hinted at the importance of like-mindedness, of ‘a particular headspace’, and
openness that must be mentioned here (personal communication, 8 July 2009;
Spiegel, 2012, 2013). This affective alliance is based more on affinity than per-
ceived identity (Haraway, 1991); it is based on ‘(mind)sets of aesthetic potenti-
alities’ (Spiegel, 2012, p. 194). Olaf Karnik (2003) understands these scenes ‘im
weitesten Sinne als spirituelle Wertegemeinschaft’ – as a spiritual community of
values in the widest sense; but these values are not static, expressed in a shared
singular style, or expressive of a shared identity. The articulation of new con-
nections, including historical ones to forebears (Spiegel, 2012), bolsters collec-
tivities’ sustainability. New transversal relations are articulated along lines of
affinity, and serve creative transformation.
Conclusion
Free-folk scenes stand in tension with the promotion of individualism as common
sense. Their practices highlight sociality as a condition of possibility for artistic
creativity; they embrace collectivity. Elements of expressive individualism persist,
but there is an awareness of the importance of community-building for mutual
204 M. Spiegel
Acknowledgements
This chapter emerged out of my diploma-thesis work in political science and
history at the University of Vienna. I want to thank my diploma supervisors,
Roman Horak and Siegfried Mattl, and my mentor, Christina Lutter, for their
support and guidance. I also want to thank Andy Bennett, Paula Guerra and the
entire KISMIF team for setting up this book project as well as the conference at
which the first version of this chapter was presented, and my fellow participants
for inspiring exchanges. I am very grateful to faculty and fellow graduate stu-
dents in communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for
the intellectually stimulating and supportive environment they articulate, and I
especially want to thank my advisor, Larry Grossberg, for his support and guid-
ance. This work was supported by the FSIB, University of Vienna, under a
KWA short-term grant abroad.
Collectivity and individuality 205
Notes
1 I am staying close to the results of my theses in this text and will not refer explicitly
and separately to them except where it appears particularly useful. Quotations taken
from interviews and email exchanges have already appeared in the theses, sometimes
closer in form to raw interview material.
2 A CD-R (Compact Disc–Recordable) is a CD that can be written once by any com-
patible optical disc drive.
3 The problem-centred interview is a hybrid inductive-deductive method. It solicits per-
sonal narratives while generating understanding through specific exploration based on
information learned previously or in the interview.
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Chapter 18
A combination of industrial and aesthetic factors means that few are likely
to either challenge the mainstream music industry, or have to collaborate
with or sell a share of their label to major recording companies … By
attempting to engage with cultural production in an overtly self-conscious
manner, they offer a critique from the margins and attempt to address the
problems of ‘media power’.
(Strachan, 2007, p. 248)
Some labels were indeed explicit in their politics – notably Crass Records in
the United Kingdom (founded in 1979 by Essex anarcho-punks Crass), with its
commitment to anarchism and radical feminism; in California, Alternative
Tentacles was founded in 1979 by Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray of The Dead
Kennedys, with a leftist commitment to critiques of capitalism and imperialism
(Gosling, 2004). Many, if not most of these labels, were founded and run by
committed individuals, very small partnerships or collectives, and were at
various times subject to the kind of internal conflict that Lee documents at Wax
Trax. Lebrun (2006, p. 33) addresses the ‘problems and contradictions’ faced by
ideologically constrained punk and post-punk indie labels. However, she also
notes that in the 1960s and early 1970s the relationship between smaller inde-
pendent labels and major labels was not always antagonistic, which suggests that
the pragmatic approach to independence I argue is at work at Chemikal Under-
ground has deeper roots in the history of the record business.
For pragmatic reasons, micro-label owners do not see the rewards of releasing
records in financial terms, and therefore reconceptualize themselves as fan-
producers gaining satisfaction from engaging with a particular scene, sound or
production practice (Strachan, 2007, p. 250). This discursive construct did
appear during my interviews with Chemikal Underground, but it is typically
counterbalanced by the clear sense that the label must also be economically sus-
tainable as a business because it is the principal source of income for the label
directors and their dependants.
What is most striking about the case of Chemikal Underground is the appar-
ently peaceful coexistence of a realism required to ensure the ongoing economic
viability of the label with a commitment to a set of aesthetic and business prac-
tices that the label directors continue to argue are independent – or at least dis-
tinct – from those of the mainstream record industry. At the same time,
Chemikal Underground has had early and important connections to the micro-
label scene. The Delgados’ first commercially released song was not on Chemi-
kal Underground; rather, ‘Liquidation Girl’ appeared in 1994 on an eccentric
Canadian independent compilation, Nardwuar The Human Serviette Presents:
Skookum Chief Powered Teenage Zit Rock Angst, and a short time later on Gayle
Brogan’s Glasgow-based Boa label, as a split single with Van Impe’s2 ‘Pirhana’.
Strachan (2007, p. 247) argues that, ‘[m]icro-labels are not integrated within
the structures of the media and music industries, yet they are engaged with a
similar set of practices: the sale, promotion and distribution of recordings.’
Through their association with Nardwuar and Brogan, The Delgados were col-
lectively familiar with the working practices of micro-labels as they set up
Chemikal Underground in late 1994. They clearly saw themselves as part of a
discourse of creative independence, yet also as potentially distinct from those
micro-labels, both in ideology and in their engagement with the economic real-
ities of a capitalist system of cultural production.
210 J.M. Percival
Chemikal Underground
One of my key arguments about Chemikal Underground is that, collectively,
the label has been distinctively pragmatic (particularly for a label interested in
releasing broadly guitar-based ‘indie’ music) in its approach to notions of ‘inde-
pendence’. As Paul Savage put it, just over five years after the label’s first release,
in a discussion of the distinction between indies and major record labels:
The independent record label 211
What right do I have to sit here and have a go at [for example] Sony? They
sell shitloads more records than we do and they know how to do it. So we
might as well employ some of the same tactics … but with better bands.
(Savage, interview, 2000)
The label had, and continues to have, no ideological objection to the objective
of selling as many records as possible, nor to the use of marketing or distribution
approaches that were in principle similar to those of the ‘major’ sector.
A second important factor in the longevity of the label has been the col-
lective approach to both making music and running Chemikal Underground.
This was also central to the early success of the label, despite the stresses for
The Delgados (as a band) of writing, recording and touring, while at the same
time managing a rapidly growing record company. Stewart Henderson contex-
tualized the strength of being a collective-label management team with a com-
parison to other indie labels run by solo managers:
I know people who run labels on their own and often they’re not selling
many records. After about a year of that, the brain numbing paperwork and
administration gets on top of you, and people give up.
(Stewart Henderson, interview, 2000)
The collaborative nature of being a band (Behr, 2010) was being carried over
into Chemikal Underground the record label, and both Pollock and Henderson
understand here that the peculiar group social dynamic of working closely with
other musicians in a group contributed to the early coherence and development
of the label.
Independence
In 2007, Emma Pollock viewed independence in two ways: one of which is
contingent on the label’s experience in the record industry and one of which is
about an understanding of audience:
Our idea of independence now is very different to what it was. We all know
a lot more about the industry. You can only understand what it means to be
independent when you understand what it means not to be. You really need
to learn about the context in which an independent record label has to
exist.
(Emma Pollock, interview, 2007)
released her first solo album, Watch the Fireworks, on 4AD (another Beggars
label) around the time of this 2007 interview, so it is possible to interpret her
comments in light of her experience of working with a much larger label.
Just as important to Chemikal Underground’s understanding of itself as inde-
pendent is its relationship to the audience that buys its records. Pollock, again
in 2007, was optimistic about independence in popular music as a focus for a
matrix of values in an audience that she sees as distinct from a more mainstream
music consuming public:
I think a small number of people do still care very much about independ-
ence. Alternative audiences are so passionate about music: they seek out
music, rather than waiting for it to come to them.
(Emma Pollock, interview, 2007)
Selling music
Chemikal Underground’s success was at least partly due to its ability to adopt an
approach to selling records that was influenced from an early stage by the desire
to maximize sales of often left-field music using whatever marketing strategies
they might be able to adopt and adapt from the major label sector. In 2000,
Stewart Henderson expressed his frustration with the arguments around a par-
ticularly essentialist notion of independence, shortly after the peak of Britpop3
in the second half of the 1990s:
Henderson clearly feels at this point (after only five years in the record business)
that there are clear tensions between ideologically driven notions of post-punk
independence as a rejection of a mainstream corporate (capitalist) industry and
the need for the label to make money. His point is that Chemikal Underground
The independent record label 213
is ambitious, but also that the label is not run by capitalists intent on an ongoing
project of commodifying popular music. In 2009, Henderson expanded on the
label’s pragmatic approach to selling independent music:
We never really bought into the idea of the ‘sell out’ thing. Selling out is
not necessarily about giving your track away to British Aerospace or Smith-
Kline Beecham. We were always quite happy to get our music out there to
as many people as possible. We were never intentionally obtuse about how
we would choose to sell our product.
(Stewart Henderson, interview, 2009)
We didn’t re-press The First Big Weekend single [on 7-inch vinyl, by Arab
Strap in 1996], but that was a marketing decision as well … it would sell
more copies of the album and we would make more money.
(Stewart Henderson, interview, 2014)
The act of not re-pressing an unexpectedly successful single release could have
been viewed positively by indie ideological purists as a rejection of the tempta-
tion to capitalize on that success. Yet there are two short-term consequences:
the first is that, in a time before digital distribution, in order to hear that song, a
music fan would have to buy the album rather than the single, thus maximizing
profit for the label. The second, and probably unintended, consequence is that
the price of copies of the first pressing of 700 of The First Big Weekend single
would increase for collectors seeking a copy on the used market, thus validating
the taste of fans who bought the record the first time around (and so also con-
tributing to fan cultural capital). Similarly it is a win–win situation for Chemi-
kal Underground: the decision not to re-press the 7-inch single both respects
the integrity of the original limited run of 700 copies and also drives sales of the
album from which the single comes, which contributes to both the cultural and
economic capital of the label.
Difficulties in generating revenue streams emerged for Chemikal Under-
ground as early as 2000. Emma Pollock notes in an interview from that year
that (a few years before broadband really took off ) the independent sector was
under increasing pressure: ‘It’s much harder to sell records now than it used to
be. Chain retailers are getting more reluctant to deal with independent labels
like Chemikal.’ Seven years later, in 2007, Stewart Henderson was clearly
aware of the impact of the wide availability of free popular music via the
internet:
Selling records is hard these days, people just aren’t buying them. Music has
turned into something you don’t really have to pay for. It’s not like years
214 J.M. Percival
ago where you’d circle the date on the calendar when the record came out,
’cos the only way you’d hear it was going to the shop and buying it.
(Stewart Henderson, interview, 2007)
It is Henderson’s position that file sharing and free distribution of popular music
have disproportionately affected the independent sector, where margins are slim
and cash flow is often a problem.4 This lack of economic capital constrains the
marketing approach of independent labels, which therefore have to rely more
on cultural and social capital:
If you want to [release records] and get your music out there as much as pos-
sible, I don’t see any harm in a computer company using a version of a song.
If any company phoned up and said that they want a Delgados song, but an
instrumental version of it and we didn’t have it, I would go into the studio
that night and do it.
(Alun Woodward, interview, 2009)
Selling expertise
The experience and expertise represented by Chemikal Underground is typic-
ally perceived as a number of contrasting and frequently unquantifiable sets of
skills and abilities: identifying and developing new talent (often, but not always
Scottish); recording and releasing critically successful music; and effectively
working with public sector and community organizations. In 2009, Stewart
The independent record label 215
We’re lucky that over the past six to eight years [2001–09] we’ve had
support from the Scottish Arts Council [Creative Scotland from 2010]. I
think many people still consider Chemikal Underground to be one of the
most successful independent record labels that Scotland has had.
(Stewart Henderson, interview, 2009)
Being successful at winning public funding is not a foregone conclusion for any
organization, and this is also true for Chemikal Underground. As Alun Wood-
ward correctly pointed out in 2009, ‘[t]hey have a lot of people shouting for
their money.’6 The development of Chemikal Underground from being an inde-
pendent record label into a management company, an events organizer and a
community-focused nexus of arts and cultural production more generally is most
clearly demonstrated in The East End Social, organized by the label. This was a
programme of music-focused events running from March to August 2014,
funded by the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme’s Open Fund7 and urban
regeneration company Clyde Gateway.8 As Stewart Henderson observed in
late 2014:
Were it not for the East End Social, I think Chemikal Underground would
be in a grave position. Because there is no way that a simple record label
could go to a bank and ask for money to keep going – they wouldn’t have
seen the profitability. The East End Social has done enough to show a way
forward for the label.
(Stewart Henderson, interview, 2014)
The cultural and social capital accumulated through the process of developing
and administering a complex series of events with diverse interests at stake,
from bands and DJs to schools and local community organizations, enabled
important diversification in revenue flow for Chemikal Underground.
Conclusion
Using a longitudinal series of interviews with the four founders of Chemikal
Underground Records, this chapter argues that the label demonstrates a hybrid
ideological approach to independent cultural production. Chemikal Under-
ground’s founder-directors understand their production practices in ways that
place them somewhere between two apparently contradictory ideological con-
structions of ‘independence’. At one end of this continuum are the independent
electronic dance-music labels for which making money is more than comfort-
able: it is desirable (Hesmondhalgh, 1998; Smith and Maughan, 1998). These
labels typically adopt a discourse of independence that is underpinned by the
216 J.M. Percival
notion of ‘artistic freedom’, but with little in the way of informed critique of the
capitalist system within which they function as producers of culture. They are
familiar with the economics of cultural production and consumption, and the
modes of production that have evolved within a capitalist system: software,
hardware, records, venues, promotion, leisure practices and so on.
The other pole of ‘independence’ is characterized by the attempts of punk,
post-punk and experimental music labels to distance themselves from capitalist
production practices and the notion of ‘commercial’ music designed in those
discursive constructions primarily to make money (Cammaerts, 2010; Dunn,
2012; Hesmondhalgh, 1998; Strachan, 2007). For some of these independent
labels, their resistance is framed in explicit political terms. For others, their pro-
duction of popular music – or indeed, sometimes rather unpopular music – is
situated in a discourse of art for art’s sake. Here, engagement with the machinery
of capitalism is a necessary evil, at best.
Chemikal Underground occupies a flexible space that draws on elements of
both positions, and seems able to accommodate apparently contradictory con-
cepts within a rationalist ideology of independent music production. For this
label, engaging with the conventional economics of the music industry is a
means to an end. Its key objective has been to create and sustain a cultural busi-
ness that is driven by a clear sense of artistic vision, supported by the need to
not only create enough revenue to release the next record, but also to generate
a viable income for the label owners.
Chemikal Underground has, over two decades, acquired and maintained an
accumulation of cultural and social capital enabled by a pragmatic ideological
flexibility, through which its owners understand it as both a serious business
enterprise but also as a significant contributor to the production of music, art
and culture in Scotland.
Notes
1 Stewart Henderson (bass); Emma Pollock (vocals and guitar); Paul Savage (drums and
production); Alun Woodward (vocals and guitar).
2 Van Impe were in fact also The Delgados, working under an alias.
3 Britpop, despite the significant mainstream sales of its biggest bands (Oasis, Blur,
Pulp), was a sound that arguably grew from ‘indie’ roots (Borthwick and Moy, 2004),
although the extent to which there was a genuinely national UK phenomenon is a
subject of some debate (Percival, 2010; Scott, 2010).
4 Personal interview with the author, September 2014.
5 Ibid.
6 Personal interview with the author, October 2009.
7 Administered by Creative Scotland, www.creativescotland.com/funding/archive/
glasgow-2014-cultural-programme. The cultural programme of events ran before,
during and after the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
8 See www.clydegateway.com.
The independent record label 217
References
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thesis, University of Stirling. Retrieved from https://dspace.stir.ac.uk/
bitstream/1893/3051/1/A.Behr-Group%20Identity-%20Bands,%20Rock%20%26%20
Popular%20Music.pdf.
Borthwick, S. and Moy, R. (2004). Popular Music Genres: An Introduction. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and
Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–58). New York: Greenwood Press.
Cammaerts, B. (2010). From Vinyl to One/Zero and Back to Scratch: Independent Belgian
Micro Labels in Search of an Ever More Elusive Fan Base. Media@LSE Electronic
Working Paper Series, 20. London: London School of Economics and Political
Science. Retrieved from www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/mediaWorkingPapers.
Dunn, K. (2012). ‘If it ain’t cheap, it ain’t punk’: Walter Benjamin’s progressive cultural
production and DIY punk record labels. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 24(2):
217–37.
Gosling, T. (2004). ‘Not for sale’: The underground network of anarcho-punk. In A.
Bennett and R.A. Peterson (eds), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual (pp.
168–84). Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (1998). The British dance music industry: A case study of inde-
pendent cultural production. British Journal of Sociology, 49(2): 234–51.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (1999). Indie: The aesthetics and institutional politics of a popular
music genre. Cultural Studies, 13(1): 34–61.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2006). Bourdieu, the media and cultural production. Media, Culture
& Society, 28(2): 211–31.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2012). The Cultural Industries (3rd ed.). London: Sage.
Lee, S. (1995). Re-examining the concept of the ‘independent’ record company: The
case of Wax Trax! Records. Popular Music, 14(1): 13–31.
Lebrun, B. (2006). Majors et labels indépendants, 1960–2000. Vingtième Siècle. Revue
d’Histoire, 92: 33–45.
Negus, K. (1995). Where the mystical meets the market: Creativity and commerce in
the production of popular music. Sociological Review, 43(2): 317–39.
O’Connor, A. (2008). Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy: The Emergence of
DIY. Lexington, KY: Lexington Books.
Percival, J.M. (2010). Britpop or Eng-Pop? In A. Bennett and J. Stratton (eds.), Britpop
and the English Musical Tradition (pp. 123–44). Farnham: Ashgate.
Percival, J.M. (2011). Chemikal Underground: ‘Post independent’ rock and pop in Scot-
land? In S. Lacasse and S.P. Bouliane (eds), History, Genre and Fandom: Popular Music
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Scott, D.B. (2010). The Britpop Sound. In A. Bennett and J. Stratton (eds), Britpop and
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Smith, R.J. and Maughan, T. (1998). Youth culture and the making of the post-Fordist
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245–65.
218 J.M. Percival
Webb, P. (2007). Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures.
London: Routledge.
Discography
Most of the Chemikal Underground releases listed here in physical formats are also avail-
able as downloads from the label’s online shop at www.chemikal.co.uk.
Arab Strap (2006), The First Big Weekend, Chemikal Underground, CHEM007 [7-inch
vinyl single/CD].
The Delgados (1994), ‘Liquidation Girl’, split single with Van Impe, Piranha, Boa
Records, Hiss 4 [7-inch vinyl single].
The Delgados (1994), ‘Liquidation Girl’, on Nardwuar The Human Serviette Presents:
Skookum Chief Powered Teenage Zit Rock Angst, NardWuar Records, CLEO 8 [12-inch
vinyl LP/ CD].
The Delgados (1995), Monica Webster/Brand New Car, Chemikal Underground,
CHEM001 [7-inch vinyl single].
The Delgados (1996), Domestiques, Chemikal Underground, CHEM009 [12-inch vinyl
LP/CD].
The Delgados (1997), BBC Sessions, Strange Fruit, SFRSCD037 [CD].
The Delgados (1998), Peloton, Chemikal Underground, CHEM024 [12-inch vinyl LP/
CD].
The Delgados (2000), The Great Eastern, Chemikal Underground, CHEM040 [12-inch
vinyl LP/CD].
The Delgados (2001), Live at the Fruitmarket: Glasgow 2001, Chemikal Underground,
(‘Official’ Bootleg, No Catalogue Number) [CD].
The Delgados (2002), Hate, Mantra, MNTCD1031 [12-inch vinyl LP/CD].
The Delgados (2004), Universal Audio, Chemikal Underground, CHEM075 [LP/CD].
The Delgados (2006), The Complete BBC Peel Sessions, Chemikal Underground,
CHEM088 [CD].
Hubbert, R.M. (2014), Ampersand Extras, Chemikal Underground, CHEM217 [12-inch
vinyl LP/CD].
Lord Cut-Glass (2009), Lord Cut-Glass, Chemikal Underground, CHEM118 [CD].
Pollock, E. (2007). Watch the Fireworks, 4AD, CAD2719CD [CD].
Chapter 19
arehouse and outdoor free parties known as the Orbital Raves (1989) that
w
took place around the M25, and the mass gathering of sound systems at Cas-
tlemorton Common Free Festival in 1992 (McKay, 1996, 1998).
Raves and sound system culture, in the 1990s continued despite the law
enforcement of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (CJB), which
sought to prohibit these activities. I propose the term ‘niche-rave’ to explore the
creation of the temporary sound system Verbal (1997–98), in which a second
wave generation of ravers aged from their early teens to early twenties learned
to mobilize from their peers. In this context, the term refers to an intense com-
mitment to localized DIY rave practices.
Sound system culture as a practice sought to create an alternate pleasure
space and community offset against a parallel electronic dance music club
culture that focused on profit and had to abide by local council pressure under
the Public Entertainment Licences [Drug Misuse] Act 1997. The creation of the
Verbal events appealed to an alienated youth who were underage and had very
little to no income to gain admittance to, or spend on the consumption of
alcohol in, licensed venues. The Verbal organizers took pleasure in attracting a
micro movement of people and occupying illegal spaces in which the produc-
tion of unlicensed activities was in the tradition of free party culture.
of two hours, and how the researcher attempted to objectively tease out a coher-
ent narrative during analysis, remains imperfect. There are, then, some com-
plexities to an approach that is subjective, personal and reliant on memory.
However, this should not detract from the value or the impetus to document
such cultural phenomena.
In addition, Little Jon’s personal vignette is given over to the agency of a
self-reflexive motivation. I call this aesthetic sensibility ‘rave cultural authentic-
ity’. This is where a rave member negotiates his or her own sense of belonging
that is subject to revisionism over time and the fallible nature of memory. To
elaborate, Little Jon’s experiences were connected to an intergenerational
grouping and a sense of enculturation that was central to an identity forming
practice. In this case, he was part of a group of rave members referred to as the
‘little generation’ by the peer members of the culture:
I was doing babble, I met all the ‘little gang’ – so all my mates that were the
same age as me all got christened ‘little’ obviously because we were like ten
years younger than everyone … so you got Little Dave, Little Ian,
Little Matt.
The purpose of being named ‘little’ demarcates the levels of assumed know-
ledge and experience among members within the social world of the DIY rave
network. It also alludes to a peer culture in which older members are seen as
the gatekeepers of knowledge and admittance into the culture. Besides this
initial meaning, for Little Jon, the title of ‘little’ has over time provided him
with a status that represents his prior commitment to the DIY rave project
through Verbal and his contact with members of the free party network in the
present. He has, in this way, procured a recognizable status of acceptance and
authenticity within the culture as part of a late post-boomer generation. In
this sense, Little Jon has acclimated within the culture and evolved into being
a part of the peer group. Little Jon’s retelling also conveys a belonging that is
male oriented, where the mention of any female presence is almost irrelevant
to his rave cultural memory, and reflects studies on music (sub)culture that
describe an overtly prescribed male dominated environment in which taste is
a form of cultural power (cf. Breen, 1991; Hebdige, 1979; McRobbie, 2000;
Reddington, 2003; Redhead, 1993; Rose, 1994; Thornton, 1995; Weinstein,
2000; Willis, 1978).
Moment 1
Within the urban terrain of the inner city areas of Leicester, Little Jon’s early
learned preference for electronic dance music became a catalyst for modes of
222 Z. Armour
behaviour that derived from within a free party environment. In the first stage
of ‘access’ into a music oriented social world, Little Jon situated his awakening
to electronic dance music sometime in 1991, when he was 11 years old:
Everyone one was listening to kind of hip hop and stuff … I was really into
my fucking obscene Jungle music.
Comparatively, there are a number of interview based studies that touch upon
(pre-)teen taste in the development of a genre specific liking for music, and
confer on the personal construction of self in what is often described as a ‘dis-
course of authenticity’ (Frith 1996, p. 109). In the case of Little Jon, he was at
an intermediary age in the school system between the transfer from primary to
secondary school, where his underground musical knowledge was learned and
shared through the mundane interaction of everyday spaces as a boy approach-
ing adolescence. These were located through conversations with peers that took
place in the childhood spaces of the bedroom, living room, out on the streets
and in school:
It was very much a part of the underprivileged culture that was going on in
any of the fucking rougher areas, that if you were working class and you
were skint, that was it.
From this perspective, these ‘early’ moments of rave cultural impact occur
through a connection between the social and the spatial, where the familiar
concept of ‘the “hidden histories” of people on the margins [and a] rich evid-
ence about the subjective or personal meanings of past events’ (Thomson, 1999,
p. 291) was articulated through the process of remembering. Such a cognition
privileges a sense of rave cultural access through the microcosm of geographical
spaces in a city. This was a working class experience of music related socializa-
tion in which Little Jon inhabited a world that was tied to a shared economic
struggle across many of the inner city areas of Leicester. It was a visible culture
to those who were ‘in-the-know’ and an invisible existence to those who did
not enter into this social music world.
More specifically, it was Little Jon’s experience of living in the denser areas
of New Parks and then Beaumont Leys on the outskirts of the inner city, to
spending time with members on the Braunstone Estate (also on the outskirts) to
being in the parameters of the city centre, in the micro areas of the Belgrave
Gate, St Marks, St Matthews and Highfields estates. These factions were unified
as a network in an (in)visible urban music world where those living in such eco-
nomically deprived areas, were thinking creatively through music and producing
reggae, soul, ska, jungle, hip-hop, drum’n’bass, techno, house and trance.
For Little Jon, his experiences of the Leicester music network constituted a
period in which the process of acquiring musical knowledge occurred through
conversations held in early spaces of adolescent social interaction – for example,
Verbal Sound System (1997–98) 223
The music scene for the older generation was the outlet and that filtered
down to the nippers, and we got access to it not via clubs at that stage but
via the radio.
They were doing quite good nights, we were getting like MasterSafe and SS
and really top quality hard-core DJs coming up to play for all these [even
though Little Jon reflectively demarcated these early club experiences from
the adult free parties he would later attend] … well I suppose it was a glori-
fied disco in a way.
224 Z. Armour
There was no ID for 14 to 17. So we would always lie about our age and
started going out to them.
This account illustrated that a younger age group was participating in this tem-
porary licensed social world. It was the creation of a nocturnal environment
held on a school night that also enticed teenagers above the age limit and gave
a young audience their first taste of rave culture.
Moment II
The next moment of rave cultural impact happened to Little Jon at the age of
14 (1994) when he gained access to a peer culture of free party people at a
licensed babble event. This occurred at a chance meeting and street conversa-
tion in which his demonstration of musical knowledge and taste prompted a
party invitation. He had illustrated a form of rave cultural authenticity (see
above):
I suppose it was bumping into a few people, got chatting to them, they were
all much older than me but I was really into my music, I suppose that
carried over.
With the notion of a collective ethos that is imbued within the tenets of free
party culture, it is possible to infer that such a social world is open to all who
are prepared to accept a lifestyle that falls outside the normative and
accepted regulations within a capitalist framework. An invitation to an event
through a peer member and guaranteed entry on the guest list imply accept-
ance as a form of access into the adult social world and a temporary club
venue that has to abide by underage restrictions of admission. Access gave
Little Jon an insight into a free party peer culture of people who were willing
to find a way around government regulation so he could experience this
environment. It allowed him to make an independent decision about his rave
cultural sensibilities and musical taste. In addition, Little Jon’s willingness to
attend was the very embodiment of the free party ethos, as he was an accom-
plice to bending the rules that would ordinarily isolate him from the col-
lective experience:
Verbal Sound System (1997–98) 225
Because I was a nipper, they had to get me on the guest list to make sure I
didn’t get stopped by the bouncers … and from going to the first couple on
the guest list because I wouldn’t have got past the bouncers, I ended up
getting given jobs to do.
After successfully gaining access to a few babble parties, Little Jon volunteered to
participate in the daytime organization and night-time running of the licensed
events as a way to maintain personal access to the people and music within this
social world. These particular events were held at established club venues in the
vicinity of the city centre of Leicester: Mud Club, Luxor, Fan Club and Starlite
2001. He therefore transitioned into an organic DiY apprenticeship in sound
systems in which an invisible daytime culture consisted of activities that included
hanging camouflage netting and neon painted backdrops, lighting set-up, stacking a
rig, running cables, making love cabbages5 and repairing equipment at the club
venue. A visible aspect of the organization required handing out flyers to the general
public and fly posting across the cityscape to advertise the event. This resulted in
the partial visibility of an organic pedagogy in collective activities through a free
party peer culture in the realization of the nocturnal happening of the event.
During these activities of DIY labour, Little Jon experienced a form of social-
ization within the free party community ethos that focused on the development
of ‘our own culture’, created with core babble members and those who particip-
ated in the organization of the parties:
I knew all the politics about everything but everyone looked after me and I
got on with everyone.
Essentially, Little Jon’s affiliation with babble gave him further exposure to a
variety of alternative ‘free party people’ from diverse backgrounds. This early
and organic immersion into a socio-political grassroots culture in which older
226 Z. Armour
members found solutions to pending issues and resulted in Little Jon’s social
inclusion and access to free party events in his mid teens (14 to 16 years of age).
It meant that he was able to experience the rave counterculture during one the
most significant periods of political and cultural dissent as he became a recog-
nized rave member and an authentic cultural insider, and ventured beyond the
parameters of Leicester to Loughborough, Nottingham, Derby and Wales:
I was going to free parties from when I was 14 and driving off out for 2
hours into the countryside to go to Smokescreen and DIY.
Moment III
After two years of participating in the culture and experiencing the dwindling
number of free babble parties due to the high risk of imprisonment after the CJB
was sanctioned, the creation of Verbal Sound System (1997) was a demonstra-
tion of Little Jon’s DiY pedagogy in sound system culture:
We got fed up with the fact that they were doing a lot of club nights and
weren’t doing enough free parties … we decided we could do it better … the
two of us just thought, yeah, we’ve served our time, we know what we’re doing.
The Verbal parties were unlicensed raves, held in abandoned buildings except
for those rare occasions when the Verbal rig would be used by another sound
system, such as babble or Peak, to venture further afield and collectively trespass
on private land. A Verbal party comprised a full rig, camouflage netting, back
drops and ultraviolet cannons. The participants at these city based events were
a diverse crowd of ravers, clubbers, and curious revellers unknown to the free
party community, who were poached from club nights on the eve of the event,
usually at the weekend:
A lot of times we’d try to kind of pull it, so I had warehouses lined up for, to
be geographically close to certain clubs. And depending on what night was
on, would depend on where I’d pitch the free party.
Verbal Sound System (1997–98) 227
Most notable was the event held in the basement of the Shires Shopping
Centre. This was a spectacular seizure of space described as a temporary auto-
nomous club (TAC), as its aesthetic appearance resembled the layout of official
club spaces that had a concrete structure with pillars and drapes:
We’d pull up in a van, throw two items out, those two items would be run
in, the van would pull off … and then we’d do the same again.
When the police finally acted and set about closing the party down, Little Jon’s
skull was fractured when he was thrown against a wall. He describes the policing
up until this event as ‘still quite relaxed’, having liaised with the police on those
occasions when an event was discovered:
I got dragged out by the coppers and thrown leg and a wing into a wall …
that was the only party where we really got viciously busted.
The Verbal parties came to an end because the founders, Little Jon and Little
Matt, were leaving Leicester. Little Jon had completed his A Levels and decided
to do a carpentry apprenticeship in Ireland, while little Matt joined Spiral Tribe
on the Teknival Circuit in Europe. Other members who could have continued
to run free parties under the Verbal banner were organizing their own sound
systems, such as Krunch sound system (1998–present).
Conclusion
This chapter has examined how Little Jon articulated his involvement in the
British free party counterculture of the mid-to-late 1990s through a semi-
structured interview that provided the material for an insight into a second
wave generation rave member’s lived cultural history. More specifically, Little
Jon’s personal vignette was critically framed through the methodological prac-
tice of a ‘conversational retelling’ (Marsh, 2007) and analysed through an
awareness of a subjective, selective and fragmented memory where the
researcher was also complicit in rendering the aesthetic of an authentic rave-
cultural account of the past.
The focus on one ageing rave member allowed for the socio-historical signifi-
cance of marginal DiY practices of Little Jon’s ‘niche-rave’ experiences to
228 Z. Armour
Notes
1 babble collective sound system (1993–present, Leicester) was started by four male students
who were inspired by DIY Sound System (1989–present, Nottingham) and Smokescreen
(1991–present). They were and remain a not-for-profit collective with a nucleus of volun-
tary members who participate from time to time in community oriented activities.
2 A rig in a literal sense is a set-up of equipment. It comprises a van, speaker stacks,
amplifier, turntables, electrical generator, lighting, projector and fog machine.
3 The term ‘lifeworld’ is adapted from Husserl’s 1936 (1970) conception of ‘lifeworld’
and Habermas’s (1981) contribution for the purposes of explaining the intersecting
‘micro-social’ interactions of those who participated in the practices of listening to
electronic dance music.
4 See www.thepiratearchive.net.
5 The ‘love cabbage’ is a DiY badge in the shape of a five-leaf flower, cut out on
brightly coloured and reflective sticky-back paper and pieced together, sometimes
with a heart shape placed in the centre. It is a sign of the spirit of unity and to show
that a financial contribution has been made in order to help with the cost of funding
a future event.
6 All Systems No, Leicester Branch was a part of the national party network. This
organization became a fund for when a rig got seized by the police. Membership meant
that a rig could be replaced. There was also a kamikaze rig in place for parties that
were deemed to be high risk.
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Chapter 20
music artists, music label business figures, copyright specialists, producers, critics
and journalists, young music audiences and social protest activists.
Data collection concentrated on a process of integration within the field as
insight was derived through fieldwork immersion into the Bulgarian post-punk
scene and related artistic content, events, practices and social circles. Empa-
thetic fieldwork relations were enhanced through biographical experience,
making connections with established networks and providing access to qual-
itative data (Blackman, 2007, pp. 699–716). In the field, the research position-
ality of a critical insider allowed for attaining a ‘thick description’ (Geertz,
2000) and for conceptual ideas to be built from the ground up. The immersive
analytical processes, facilitating the extraction of theoretically potent structures
and concepts, follow the grounded theory approach of Glaser and Strauss
(1967). NVivo coding of empirical data allowed for the emergence of themes
and ideas (Silverman, 2011, pp. 67–74). Using quotes and examples, we convey
a ‘raw’ sense of the data to legitimize arguments through the ‘voice’ of the field,
provoking the reader’s ‘ethnographic imagination’ (Atkinson, 1990).
Figure 20.1 The first rock festival in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, 1987; Borisova
Gardens, then called Liberation Park.
Source: Neli Nedeva-Voeva.
234 A. Draganova and S. Blackman
Figure 20.2 Milena Slavova and Vasil Gurov from band Revu in front of the
café ‘Kravai’ – a gathering place for youth subcultural groups
during the 1980s.
Source: Neli Nedeva-Voeva.
A howl of the estranged 235
We, Klas, decided to make music in the new wave style because it was new,
different, cool, and we liked it; but above all it was different from every-
thing that was imposed, that was tendentiously shown and played in Bul-
garia to create some illusion about a culture which was entirely artificial …
Our first record disseminated all over the place from one initial audio cas-
sette … It was amazing! When we did our first gig, the venue was full, and
everyone knew the lyrics: all of this happened without any official media
getting involved.
which celebrated a joyful unification. The ‘we’ of the new generation promul-
gated by post-punk subcultures was critical, and pursued social change. During
the 1980s reforms, Soviet and Eastern Bloc sociologists used the term ‘informals’
to refer to youth formations outside the state-designed ones, like the Komsomol.
Pilkington (1994, pp. 94–131) and Shein (1990, p. 11) see the subcultural
development of the informals as linked to wider cultural change, as a movement
with radical potential; however, they also highlight that the state identified sub-
cultural groups as requiring ‘taming’. Furthermore, the 1989 changes arrived at
the same time as the post-punk scenes were participating in the construction of
a new culture of social critique. Among members of early Bulgarian post-punk,
such as journalist Petar Milanov, the band Nova Generatsia has been referred to
as Nova Demokratsia – New Democracy:
The society around Nova Generatsia constitutes a silent coup, the revolu-
tion of young intellectuals unhappy with totalitarianism. The underground,
specifically the new wave underground, do not shout, they do not make too
much noise, they don’t highlight themselves, they are not on the TV every
evening, and they don’t fill up Hall 1 of the National Palace of Culture
when they perform … These young people, despite their early age, were
active and conscientious as citizens.
When the transitions towards democracy began in Bulgaria in the early 1990s,
post-punk subcultures saw an opportunity to promote a new generational iden-
tity whereby music could integrate with wider forms of social and cultural resist-
ance. Nova Generatsia was central to establishing a connection between music
and protest in the early 1990s. The sense of a ‘different’ community as a theme
in Bulgarian post-punk artistic expression gives voice to a perspective of the
angry and betrayed. Here are examples of Voev’s poetic output, which marked –
stylistically and ideologically – the formation of the Bulgarian cold wave:
When transitions began in late 1989, Bulgarian citizens started to exercise their
renewed freedom to protest. The first music-festival-as-protest to be organized in
A howl of the estranged 239
Bulgaria took place in 1991, Save Ruse. Ruse, a town on the shore of the
Danube, was one of the largest cities in the country, and was heavily polluted by
a factory in Romania, presenting a major threat to the population. The Save
Ruse music demonstration initiated by Voev, Nova Generatsia and the band’s
fan club in Ruse, became the first mass ecological protest in Bulgaria. The term
‘informals’, which used to refer to formations of subcultural character – like
those associated with Bulgarian cold wave – distanced them from radical con-
notations. The suggested ‘informality’ alludes to social impotence and devalu-
ates subcultures by highlighting their leisure rather than political character
(Pilkington, 1994, p. 86). Nevertheless, ‘informals’ proved that they could be
highly organized social groups: Save Ruse turned into a large-scale protest,
which brought significant results, attracted international media attention and
laid the foundations for ecological activism in Bulgaria. Following the term glas-
nost, ecology-related activism became known as ekoglasnost, and was among the
key vehicles for democratic transitions in Bulgaria (Baumgartl, 1993).
Bulgarian citizens have become increasingly active in articulating positions
through peaceful protest; and ecological concerns have acted as a unifying
cause. In 2012, an open discussion organized by Nova Generatsia brought
together participants in the Save Ruse protests from the 1990s and active organ-
izers of the current ecology-linked demonstrations. The discussion outlined the
relatedness between generations of people who seek to create alternative prac-
tices, serving the economic ambitions of few. In recent years, Vasil Gurov,
singer and bass player from key acts, including Kale and Revu, has built on the
ongoing relations between post-punk scenes and activism by becoming a spokes-
person for political-ecological campaigns such as Save Koral (2015–present) and
Save Pirin (2017–present). Simultaneously, the protest meanings that early cold
wave attached to the derelict symbols of communism resulted in the develop-
ment of a long-term practice within ‘deviant’ graffiti art, such as the works of
collective Destructive Creation (2011), which accompanies protest in con-
temporary Bulgaria in an urban environment heavily affected by its political and
architectural past. The continued relationships of early underground post-punk
scenes with acts and symbols of resistance can be interpreted as a substantial
subcultural value.
Contemporary Bulgarian post-punk underground scenes also preserve their
subcultural substance as they rely on the commitment of fans and artists rather
than commercial ties to external bodies. For instance, in 2012 the newly estab-
lished ‘Dimitar Voev-Nova Generatsia’ Foundation initiated a three-day music
and arts festival, New Life Street, which was held for the second time in 2017.
These events successfully brought together new and ‘classic’ names and re-
energized local post-punk scenes. The events were supported entirely by audi-
ences, rather than by commercial sponsors or advertising. At these festivals and
other events, it could be observed that post-punk scenes had accommodated art-
istic flexibilities. For example, they appear to have changed their politics
towards style, as visual markers of identity are not emphasized. During the
240 A. Draganova and S. Blackman
beginnings of Bulgarian post-punk in the 1980s, bands and fans were stricter
about aiming for provocative styles that were commercially unavailable and had
to be pursued through DIY strategies. However, resistance through style is now
less powerful – subcultural appearance is tolerated and commodified, and there-
fore has become irrelevant as a core value. Contemporary post-punk scenes are
not marked by their fixation on appearance, although there is a generic inclina-
tion towards holistic rock/punk aesthetics. The post-punk coherence is pre-
served through the style of content (Lowndes, 2016). The relationship between
poetry and music, the exploration of abstract ideas over materiality, DIY politics
of independence, experiment over formulae, the centrality of the bass guitar and
the mixed male–female participation in bands are all themes consolidated as
platforms for expression.
Conclusion
Through the lens of Bulgarian post-punk subcultural scenes, this chapter has
discussed aspects of the relationship between popular music and the social, cul-
tural and historical contexts in which it operates. The explorations of local
post-punk underground music scenes add new perspectives to studies in popular-
music cultures, and enrich and diversify related conceptual devices. This chapter
analytically approached Bulgarian post-punk underground scenes by studying
their ‘roots’, the historicity and genealogy of the cultural meanings they have
produced (Guerra, 2014, pp. 111–22). Contemporary projections of Bulgarian
post-punk derive from complex trajectories of evolution: they embody a produc-
tive, inclusive, intergenerational dialogue, allowing for innovation but also
affirming core practices, ideals and artistic values. Such factors formulate subcul-
tural substance that enables longevity and flexibility in articulating resistance.
As post-punk scenes emerged during the communist regime, the culture-
controlling state rejected them. Today, post-punk refuses to conform to newer
forms of artificiality and exists outside the dominant order constructed through
the profit-making imperative defining music industries. Importantly, the con-
tinuous relevance of Bulgarian post-punk subcultural scenes is achieved through
DIY strategies of ‘organic’ development. They originally led to the formation of
a cultural phenomenon that, despite cosmopolitan and connected to globally
recognized styles, achieved local distinctiveness (Blackman and Kempson,
2016).
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Neli Nedeva-Voeva for allowing us to use her excellent
photographs from her personal archive. Thanks to Petar Milanov, who helped
us gain access in the field.
A howl of the estranged 241
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DIY cultural practice: in Brazil 145–7 (see Finnish DIY micro-labels 3, 101–10;
also Sofar Sounds); as counterforce to autonomy 103–7; income from other
neoliberalism 12–13; definition 12; activities 105–6; professionalization
entrepreneurs 7; evolution 3, 7; as 104, 107–8; as proto-market 109
global alternative culture 7, 9–10, 13; Flaherty, Paul 195
handcrafting 115; historical context flâneur 32
7–9; learning by doing socialization 53; Florida, Richard 14
lifestyle politics of 9; memory and 5; For a do Eizo circuit 139
origins 1; post-industrial global context France: independent punk scene 2–3,
in 7–15; as prefigurative politics 130–2; 52–62; structure of countercultural
record aesthetics 115–18; shared culture space 52
117; transnational connections 12; use Frankfurt School 191
of vinyl 115–16; visual elements 117 free folk music (US) 5, 195–204; care and
DIY kids see anak DIY support 198–9, 204; collectivity 196–7;
DIY Sound System 219 free thinking folk 198; solo projects
DK/Decay 164, 165 199–200, 202
Doji 219 free party counterculture (UK) 5, 219–28
Donaldson, Glenn 199–200 Frere-Jones, Sasha 186
Double Leopards 200 FSB 232
Dunn, Kevin 12, 210
Düster, Benjamin 153–4 garage rock: contemporary avant-garde
Dwyer, John 192–3 185–94; lo-fi sound 189–94; neo-garage
Dylan, Bob 78 190; style 191–2
gender in youth cultures 3, 63–71
East Bay Ray 209 geographies of place 1
East End Social, The 215 Gerber, Alison 112
ekita DIY 126, 128, 131, 133; see also DIY Germany 63–71
aesthetic Gibson, Chris 139
Elder, Erika 202 Gilbert, Jeremy 195, 196, 200, 201
Elemental 219 Glasgow 5, 207
emancipatory praxis 133 glasnost 234
Eno, Brian 188 Go-Betweens 161, 162, 167
Ensminger, David 163 Godspeed Ye Black Emperor 21
Entrance B 235 Goodbye to Gravity 41, 42
ephemera see music ephemera Gorbachev, Mikhail 234
Esan Ozenki 85 Goth scene 3; clothing and styling 66;
established avant-gardes 57, 59–61 gender performance 63, 65–7
Esty Field Organ Tone Archive 200 Gravity’s Rainbow Tapes 153
ETA 78, 83 Green Hill Builders 200
Etherington, Paul 152 Gross, John 163
Euskal Kantagintza Berria (New Basque Grouper 200
Music) 78–9, 80, 81, 82 Guattari, Felix 102–3, 104, 109
Eyerman, Ron 85 Guerilla Poubelle 56
Ez Dok Amairu 78 Gunk Punk scene 22–3
Gurov, Vasil 234, 239
Fall, The 235 Guthrie, Woody 78
Fân Fest (Roşia Montană) 42
fanzines 163–6, 167–8 Häkkinen, Pertu 108
Federal Music Industry Association Hall of Fame 202
(Germany) 155 hardcore punk 3, 8, 56, 57; dollies 68;
Fél Fény 175–6 gender performance 63, 68–70; Indonesia
Felix the Cat 31, 33–5, 38–40 125–34; insiders 68; moshing and gender
Finland 3, 101–10 69–70; politics 70; see also straight edge
246 Index