Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music
eBook - ePub

Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music

Milieux Cultures

Peter Webb

Share book
  1. 278 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music

Milieux Cultures

Peter Webb

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

This book provides an `insider' view of worlds of popular music. It shows the relationship between music, creativity, ideas and localities by looking at cities, independents, genre, globalization and musician's relationships with each other.Webb examines groups of musicians, audiences and people involved in the music industry and shows the articulation of their position as well as how to understand this theoretically by looking at the city as a centre for music production; the industrial music inspired neo-folk genre; independence and its various meanings as a productive position in the music industry; the globalization ofmusic; and musicians own narratives about working together and dealing with the industry. Utilizing case studies of a variety of different cities-- Bristol, London, New York, San Francisco, Berlin-- and genres -- Trip-hop, Hip-hop, Industrial, Neo-folk -- this volume isa landmark in popular music studies.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music by Peter Webb in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Médias et arts de la scène & Musique. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2010
ISBN
9781135910785

Section 1
Theories of Culture and Music

1
A Journey Through Theories of the Intersection of Music and Culture

Studies and commentary on the intersections of youth and music, subculture and music, or communities and music have been developed through a series of theoretical prisms that have made a variety of claims to explain the connection and mixing of these areas. Starting with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s and their various takes on what they called subculture, moving through a variety of post-subcultural studies to a series of neo-tribal and postmodern attempts at theorising this issue we have a bewildering number of theoretical takes that give us many different starting points for analysis. This section outlines those theoretical understandings and discusses the journeys made by those authors. Part 2 of this section develops a critique of these positions through a cultural sociological vision of how these formations can be understood in the current social context using a combination of Schutz’s phenomenology, Durrschmidt’s development of this, and Bourdieu’s ‘fields of cultural production’ and Harvey’s dialectics within a Globalization framework. This forms the basis for understanding the way in which the rest of the book and its vast amount of ethnographic work, interview material. and secondary data are woven together to present an account of what I call milieu cultures within worlds of popular music.

PART 1

Identifying Subcultures: Skins, Punks, Rastas, Mods, and Rudies—The era of self-identifying youth cults and their academic reading
Dick Hebdige in his groundbreaking and influential book Subculture: The meaning of style gives a beautiful account of the impact, meaning, and subversive nature of a variety of subcultural groupings. Punks, Mods, Skinheads, Rastas are all tackled by Hebdige mainly at the level of style and mainly through the lens of a variety of structuralist Marxism that incorporated versions of Saussure and Barthes’s semiotics, Gramsci, Althusser, and Marx’s take on ideology and Hegemony, and Kristeva’s subversive use of language and positioning. His prose also uses many literary reference points, particularly John Genet and his take on the turning of objects into codes of refusal or the reloading of their cultural signification. A tube of Vaseline is described by Genet as a key transgressive signifier that represents his gay identity and refusal to adhere to mainstream moral codes. Hebdige goes on to describe the way in which mundane objects become a ‘form of stigmata’ and ‘tokens of self imposed exile.’ These objects become sites of the tension between mainstream culture and subordinate cultural groups who are defying the dominant cultural order. A safety pin, a quiff, a scooter, or a pair of Dr. Martens boots, they can all represent a refusal or a gesture of contempt. For Hebdige, there seems to be the acceptance that this is what these codes ultimately do represent; they are just a gesture.
Hebdige outlines how subcultural subversions are composed by a type of ‘bricolage’ that is only conscious in that its combination of particular stylistic items causes a rupture or disturbance of the norms of mainstream culture. The subculture acquires its own homology, its own set of conventions and rules; in the case of Punk this is a homology of chaos, of noise, hollering at the edges of perception of ‘normal’ behaviour. Punk attempts to project a shocking combination of stylistic nihilism and rejection. Swastikas represent the Punk’s desire to shock, not a sympathy to Nazism; bin liners and safety pins are a pair of shears to the tailor’s finest cut of cloth; ‘No future’ and ‘Pretty vacant’ are the cries of a generation experiencing creativity in the shadow of unemployment, social upheaval, and political change. Within Hebdige’s account though is a sense that the subculturalists are not conscious of their transgressive position beyond the stylistic two fingers that they are waving at mainstream culture. Soon their subcultural revolt is incorporated by the mainstream, repackaged and resold as ‘interesting’ cultural artefact and fashion for the masses.
For Hebdige, subcultures like Punk become incorporated into the mainstream via the commodity form in terms of mass-produced objects and the ideological form in terms of the way in which the press and commentators can ‘other’ the subculture by trivialising, naturalising, or domesticating it. Alternatively, these social commentators can transform it into meaningless exotica that spectacularises the actions of the subculture and separates it from mainstream understanding. Both these processes tend to happen at the same time to eventually co-opt the subculture back into the fold of normal behaviour. Punk ‘filth and fury’ run alongside articles about Punk mothers, babies, weddings, and good deeds. This process, for Hebdige, represents the incorporation of subculture into the mainstream, usually on the basis that culture is so open that those who complain about its limits, inequalities, and economic deficiencies can become ‘successful’ and rise from rags to riches. This sense was magnified as Punk bands like the Clash, Sex Pistols, Stranglers, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Damned became major players in the record industry and redefined what popular music was in the late 1970s.
The problematic nature of this account is not in its ability to provide a very nuanced and literary discussion of the development of subcultures but its lack of ability to see beyond the immediate vision and public face of the subculture. The style is ‘read’ and ‘interpreted’ by the theorist who cannot really understand or define it or its creators, (Hebdige, 1979, p. 139); in fact, Hebdige states that the subculturalist would find this descriptive analysis unpalatable and antithetical to his/her existence. This leads the theorist to assert a kind of negative inevitability of either the co-option of the subculture as just another stylistic or aesthetic development in popular cultures lexicon of style, or as a radical gesture that is in parts melancholic and inevitably defeatist. Hebdige again returns to Jean Genet and his discussion of the black activist prisoner George Jackson to explain this process:
So Genet brings us full circle. He brings us back to an image of graffiti, to a group of blacks immured in language, kicking against the white washed walls of two types of prison–the real and the symbolic. By this indirect route he brings us back also to the meaning of style in subculture and to the messages which lie behind disfigurement. To stretch the metaphor a little further, we could say that the subcultural styles which we have been studying, like prison graffiti, merely pay tribute to the place they were produced, and ‘ … it is prudent…. That any text that reaches us from this…. place should reach us as though mutiliated’ (Genet 1971). (Hebdige, 1979, p. 136)
This quote expresses the futility of the act of ‘kicking against the pricks’ or of rupturing mainstream culture. We are left with the image of two prisons–the relative and the symbolic, which we attack but are left mutilated by. The gloom and melancholic nature of this statement mirror the ending paragraphs where Hebdige suggests that the hope that a study of subculture would lead the analysts to a place closer to or reunited with the ‘people,’ the subculturalists, with whom they may identify ends by confirming the distance between them (1979, p. 140). What happens then is the confirmation of distance between the reader and the text, the analysts and the subculture, and within that, a recognition that subculture is read in a way that the subculturalist cannot, or refuses to, recognise or understand. This in turn backs up the continued theme through the book of the limits of the subculturalists’ own understanding of what they are producing and the effects of it.
This, I feel, shows an incredibly limited understanding of the ways in which these movements of music and culture develop and the complex building of ideas and interpretations that the members of these particular subcultures go through. It is telling that Hebdige hardly ever refers to individual accounts of the Punk subculture from those involved in it. This omission limits Hebdige’s ability to actually ‘read’ the full impact of the subculture on its participants. This omission is repeated throughout most CCCS work. I now turn to the discussion of Skinhead culture by John Clarke and Tony Jefferson (Clarke and Jefferson, 1973a, 1973b, 1974) and Dick Hebdige’s work Reggae, Rastas, and Rudies (Hebdige, 1974). These accounts further develop and show up the many problems of the theoretical analysis taken by the CCCS scholars. I have prefaced this discussion by a quote from Laurel Aitken, who many Skinheads saw as the godfather of ska:
“I used to play a few places back then and you’d see skinheads on the scene,” remembers Laurel. “You used to see a few in the dances, and it just grew. I’ve been having a skinhead haircut since the Sixties so seeing skinheads coming into the dances with their short hair didn’t mean anything to me. I used to be a skinhead and I still am,” he jokes, as he takes off his trademark pork pie hat and displays a bald head. (Aitken quoted in Marshall, 1996)
Laurel Aitken was born in Cuba (1927), moved to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1938, and emigrated to England in 1960. His music, ska, became the musical soundtrack to the mixing of White working-class skinheads and Black Jamaican émigrés in the late 1960s. Tracks like Aitken’s Skinhead Train, Symarip’s Skinhead Moonstomp, Skinhead Jamboree, and Skinhead Girl all testified to the importance of Skinheads to Jamaican music’s development in the UK. Skinhead was one of the first youth subcultures or cults to be analysed by academics in Britain, particularly those at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
John Clarke and Tony Jefferson used Skinheads in a variety of papers on youth subcultures. They discussed the treatment of adolescence as a ‘single monolithic culture’ (Clarke and Jefferson, 1973a, p. 1) where deviance in the form of working class delinquency is a product of ‘status frustration,’ ‘alienation,’ ‘anomie,’ or ‘dissociation.’ Clarke and Jefferson, like Hebdige, suggested that one area that would help this analysis that had been ignored by previous theorists was the area of ‘cultural symbolisation’ or ‘style’ (Ibid, p. 2). Cultural symbols (e.g., dress and music) ‘are attempts, by people, to make meaningful, at the cultural level, their social reality’ (Ibid, p. 2). They build on work done by Phil Cohen where he suggests that post-war youth cultures are often attempts to express and ‘magically’ resolve the contradictions that remain hidden or unresolved in the parent culture. The post-war ‘parent’ ‘respectable’ working-class culture has been pulled in two directions: one of the traditional ideology of production (work ethic) and the other new media-promoted ideology of spectacular consumption. For the CCCS theorists, Mods were an example of those exploring the ‘upward’ option of spectacular consumption and skinheads the ‘downward’ one of the celebration of more traditional working-class loyalties.
Clarke and Jefferson argue that subcultures need to be seen as particular responses to culture engendered by structural conditions that are quite specific to youth. Youth subcultures ‘originate in structural inequalities and culminate in specific historical moments: moments when the negotiation of particular subordinate class fractions both for a space and a definition of self become crystallised, for a short period, into a recognisable cultural style: a specific, symbolic system’ (Ibid, p. 6). The social reaction to subcultures was an important element of the Birmingham approach. Stereotyping the ‘folk devils’ (as Stanley Cohen (1972) had put it) happened through media-conveyed versions of the subculture to those whose experience of the subcultures would be ‘outside their immediate personal orbit’ (Ibid, p. 6). The groups themselves would be vulnerable to these portrayals as they didn’t have access to ‘major channels of communication’ (Ibid, p. 6). The groups relied upon an outsider status to the mainstream moral order.
In their conclusion, Clarke and Jefferson suggest that youth subcultures need to be ‘read’ in the following way:
We should not expect to find within these groups an articulate self-definition at a verbal level, that is, the level at which most of us would consider articulacy to be primarily achieved: in most cases they come from those sectors of society where such articulacy is held in suspicion and to whom formal education offers only minimal training in such fine arts. Instead their self definition is articulated at the level of style. There are two dimensions which a reading of any such style must take into consideration: that of the internal meanings, the style’s constituent elements, and that of its external location: the events, situations and meanings which together form the historical conjecture in which it arises. (Ibid, p. 8).
They then summarised skinheads in this way. Their historical location was traditional working-class areas that were undergoing substantial change. They faced the implosion of the community, an influx of middle-class property buyers and immigrants, and a disappearance of focal points for the community–corner shop, pub, and streets. The education system and changing employment structures meant that they were facing employment in routine ‘dead-end’ jobs and possibly long periods of unemployment. Skinheads then become seen by Clarke and Jefferson as an ‘attempt to revive a culture which was changing and entering into new negotiations of its own with the dominant culture as a response to its structural position’ (Ibid, p. 9).
Clarke and Jefferson viewed youth culture as ‘a struggle for control, an attempt to exert some control over one’s life situation’ (Ibid, p. 9). They suggest that the ‘social space’ afforded to youth before adulthood and responsibility are fully embraced, is important in allowing these subcultures to express varying viewpoints. The commercial leisure market that encourages the development of different teenage markets also plays a role in this subcultural space. In summary then, Clarke and Jefferson assert that youth culture is always negotiating with the dominant social order and culture. They are involved in a struggle for the ‘control of meaning.’
Dick Hebdige gave a more complex and nuanced account of the development of specific subcultures in his account Reggae, Rastas and Rudies: Style and the Subversion of Form (1974). He starts by giving an in-depth account of the development of reggae in Jamaica and its formation through the importing of American soul and R&B (rhythm and blues) music and the complex social formation and history of Jamaica. Here is his definition of reggae as a musical form:
Reggae itself is polymorphous–and to concentrate on one component at the expense of all others involves a reduction of what are complex cultural processes. Thus Reggae is transmogrified American soul, with an overlay of salvages African rhythms, and an undercurrent of pure Jamaican rebellion. Reggae is transplanted Pentecostal. Reggae is the Rasta hymnal, the heart cry of the Kingston rude boy, the nativised national anthem of the new Jamaican government. The music is all these things and more—a mosaic which incorporates all the strands that make up black Jamaican culture; the call and response patterns of the Pentecostal church, the de...

Table of contents