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Introduction
Youth is often conceptualised in terms of transition from dependence to independence, accompanied by identity formation. It might not always be obvious that these processes occur with and through collectivities, but this can be seen in the case of music. This chapter considers how adult music scene participants reflect on their youth, with reference to musical experience which is reflexively interactive and intersubjective. A frequently expressed motivation for youthful musical activities and entry into a music scene is the desire to ‘be a part of it’, and exploring this idea reveals particular kinds of collectivity and provides insight into the nature of music-based sociality.
In this chapter, young people’s interactions with music are viewed through the lens of peak music experiences, which are those specific experiences with music that stand out from general experience as affecting and meaningful (see also Green 2016). Other cultural objects and practices can offer epiphanies of similar significance (see Woodward 2001), although popular music discourse places a strong focus on this aspect of consumption and fandom. For some people − and certainly the music scene participants represented in this research − peak music experiences provide focal points for thinking and talking about music, their relationship to it and their lives more broadly. These experiences have particular importance for the period of youth, in which they tend to be clustered. It is argued that this is not only attributable to the co-presence of peak music experiences with otherwise memorable events of youth, but also reflects the contributions of musical experience to the texture and shape of youth itself. Defining aspects of youth are anticipated, realised and remembered through peak music experiences, exemplifying the broader significance of music for young people. They epitomise music’s capacity to afford experiences of the self in connection to something greater, inviting and enabling young people to ‘be a part of it’.
The type of belonging that is sought and celebrated in peak music experiences is neo-tribal in nature, characterised above all by the transcendence of rational individuality in collectives of human and non-human parts (Bennett 1999, Maffesoli 1996). However, while the concept of neo-tribes has come to imply surface-level engagement and ephemerality in the post-subcultural study of youth cultures, the findings discussed in this chapter demonstrate neo-tribal solidarity and endurance in music scenes and in the lives of their participants, supporting the recovery of less-utilised but arguably central elements of Michel Maffesoli’s theory. People’s experiences of moving into and within music scenes reveal how a shared ‘ethic of the aesthetic’ (Maffesoli 1991) structures activities and preferences within the scene. This is an alternative both to subculturalist theories of homologies between groups and their preferred cultural objects that are predetermined by class (Willis 1978, Hebdige 1979), and also to the opposite notion of free-floating choice associated with some post-subcultural theories (Polhemus 1996). Instead the focus is on the shared feelings and ways of feeling that motivate and define belonging in a group, and which guide the selection and use of cultural objects like music – a focus consistent with recent explorations of the affective dimensions of music scenes (Bennett and Rogers 2016). This affective structuring is how neo-tribal groupings can endure and in any case have lasting effects on participants, while leaving room for movement and chance encounters. Accordingly, the study of peak music experiences reveals the types of collectivity that develop around popular music, as well as showing how musical experience is for some people a defining aspect of youth.
After discussing this theoretical framework, this chapter will present findings from an ethnographic study in Brisbane, Australia. The analysis seeks to follow Bennett (1999), Malbon (1999) and Muggleton (2000) in considering the extent to which empirical observations reflect, often incompletely, the ideal types proposed in neo-tribal and other theories of youth culture. The central focus is on the logic and importance of non-rational attractions, willing surrenders and collective expenditures that fall between the stools of structural determinism and reflexive individualism, but which matter to young people and help to characterise youth itself. Alongside material transitions to independence, and the construction of individual identity in negotiation with traditional forms of belonging like place and ethnicity, young music scene participants find and become themselves through submission to an aestheticised, emotional being-together, epitomised in experiences of the loss or transcendence of individuality.
Studying youth: Independence, identity and belonging
The field of youth studies was historically oriented around the ‘twin tracks’ of transitions and culture, although the last decade in particular has seen concerted efforts to bridge the gap between them (see Woodman and Bennett 2015). The expansion of both streams, from structural explanations focussing on pre-determined groups towards more qualitatively attuned explorations of subjective experience among reflexive actors, have generated opportunities for the further integration of the transitions and culture perspectives.
In the transitions literature, youth is understood as ‘essentially a period of semi-dependence that falls between the full dependency that characterises childhood and the independence of adulthood’ (Furlong 2013: 3). This phase is then further divided into more specific transitions toward independence: from education to employment, and between different categories of housing and family relationships (Stokes and Wyn 2007). As these priorities indicate, work on youth transitions has been most concerned with economic conditions and inequalities, favouring large-scale quantitative and longitudinal methods. This approach has tended to downplay culture, especially popular culture, and the subjective experience of young people (Furlong et al. 2011). Criticisms and revisions of the transitions model have pointed both to inherent problems, such as normative assumptions about what constitutes a successful or failed transition, and to its limitations in the context of late modern de-standardisation, individualisation and uncertainty (Furlong 2013, Furlong et al. 2011, Stokes and Wyn 2007). This was also the context for so-called ‘post-subcultural’ developments in the theorisation of youth culture, which will be discussed in the next section.
Two concepts have been proposed by theorists who seek to bridge the gap between culture and transition: identity and belonging. Identity is understood to be multiple and potentially contradictory across lived contexts, produced in ongoing processes, involving a degree of choice and reflexivity, shaped and mediated by various factors within socio-historical contexts (Furlong et al. 2011, McLeod and Yates 2006, Stokes and Wyn 2007). This challenges the traditional dichotomy separating objective conditions and subjective experience, and, more broadly, the separation of the concepts of transition and culture. In this vein, the biographical or life story approach draws on young people’s lived and projected experiences, focussing on critical moments (Thomson et al. 2002) or continuities (Cuzzocrea 2018) in their self-narratives, which, in addition to the classic, public markers of transition identified above, extend to more private matters, including hobbies and consumption. The overtly relational concept of belonging brings focus to young people’s meaningful connections to other people, and to places, beliefs and objects (Cuervo and Wyn 2017, Henderson et al. 2007, Wyn et al. 2019). This further integrates the material and subjective aspects of youth, challenging the binary between subjects who act and objects that are acted upon, drawing attention also to productive interactions between human and non-human entities. These approaches to identity and belonging emphasise their ongoing re-production and co-construction, as well as their plurality and potential diversity, subject to material and discursive power structures. Traditional communities of identity can thus co-exist and interact with post-identity communities of affective inclination and physical proximity (Antonsich 2010). These latter dimensions of belonging are contemplated by post-subcultural models of youth culture, especially neo-tribalism, as outlined in the following section.
Neo-tribal sociality: Losing and finding oneself in the other
The post-subcultural turn in youth culture studies of the 1990s and early 2000s, like the broadly contemporaneous critique of transitions discussed above, was partly a response to the perceived decline of stable identities and trajectories in late- or post-modern society. The previously dominant subcultural theory was seen to place too much emphasis on structural constraints and especially class in determining young people’s cultural tastes, activities and affiliations. Post-subcultural scholarship, while diverse in many ways, has sought to account for the levels of autonomy, fragmentation, fluidity and reflexivity apparent in youth culture (as summarised in Bennett 2011). This includes new attention to such factors as locality and global cultural flows, but often also individualism. The emphasis on individual agency in some post-subcultural theory became a focus for debates and criticisms, in youth culture studies (Bennett 2011) but also from the more economically or structurally informed youth transitions perspective (Furlong et al. 2011). As a consequence, significant internal differences in post-subcultural literature have been underexplored. This goes not least for the reception of neo-tribal theory.
The work of Maffesoli (most prominently Maffesoli 1996) describes a swing from the rationalised social of modernity to a postmodern, empathetic sociality. At the collective level this involves a trend away from goal-oriented groups of rationally contracting individuals toward affectual tribes or ‘neo-tribes’ of disindividuated, plural persons with a focus on simply ‘being-together’ in the present (Maffesoli 1996: 7, 11). At the personal level, according to Maffesoli, stable identity and inherent functions are replaced by successive identifications and contextual roles or personas (Maffesoli 1996: 76, 164). Accordingly, neo-tribalism is characterised by the prioritisation of proximity and form, as well as an associated instability (Maffesoli 1996: 16, 76, 144). While Maffesoli also has much to say about the solidarity and structuring effects of neo-tribal sociality, describing the inherent logic of the neo-tribe as both ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ (Maffesoli 1996: 144), it is fluidity that has come to define and delimit the concept in English language scholarship.
The discussion of neo-tribes in youth studies, both positive and negative, has also tended to associate the concept with individual choice. This is not an aspect of neo-tribal sociality but its polar opposite, although Maffesoli does see the two extremes co-existing to different degrees over time (Maffesoli 1996: 97). The theoretical conflation of neo-tribes and individualisation is explicit in the early, sometimes pre-translation discussion of Maffesoli’s ideas by such English-language theorists as Bauman (1992: 137) and Hetherington (1998: 52–53). This occurred i...
