Empire of Dirt - Wendy Fonarow Music Culture

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spectatorships. Since bodily deployment is a constitutive part of spectatorship, it is essential to attend to the different behaviors and activities of audience members and to the relationships these different spectorial positionings have to one another.

      Different spectorial modes have been a problem for film theory (Doane 1987). Since concrete practice was originally ignored in the development of spectorial theory, film theory often presented a monolithic model of subjective positionings in which all participants were seen to view the event (Mulvey 1989). When we introduce the notion of participatory spectatorship, a plethora of communicative modalities appear, far greater than the singular, conquering, all-seeing “eye/I” of cinematic spectorial articulations. In participation, subjective relationships can be articulated along other modalities. Participatory spectatorship does not replace or supersede the spectatorship of textual structures. It is just another code of communication. Spectatorship inscribed in the structure of spectacle is yet another. Embodied spectatorship requires an understanding of the intersection of the structural and narrative components of spectacle with the bodies of participants; in other words, the ways we organize and are organized by activity. Both discourse and practice need to be examined in order to understand the nature of subjectivity. Meaning does not come from a symbol itself, but from the interaction between symbol and social action, or the intersection of ideology and practice. To understand the social world, we must look at both internal narratives and practical actions for the consistencies and contradictions between them, and for the ways they can each reinforce or obviate the other.

      This ethnography is meant to add to the growing body of ethnographic and sociohistoric literature that addresses local music communities (Cohen 1991, Finnegan 1989, Shank 1994, Urquia 2004), music genres (Forman 2002, Grossberg 1992, Keil 1966, Negus 1999, Oliver 2001, Rose 1994, Walser 1993), the experience of music (Berger 1999, Grossberg 1997), and the meaning of music as cultural practice in other societies and transnationally (Basso 1985, Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000, Chernoff 1979, Emoff 2002, Feld 1982, Lipsitz 1994, Taylor 1997).7 In popular music studies, the general trend has been to focus on the performance, the music performed, the artists, and the music’s production and consumption. Several ethnographies include some examination of audience behavior. There is also literature examining the cultures of fans that seems to vacillate between abstraction and discussions based on interviews with subjects who were asked about their memories of their experiences. Some of the most interesting work in this area has come from those who examine the representations of fanship and fan behavior (Brooker and Jermyn 2002, Hills 2002, Lewis 1992). This ethnography is in a vein similar to the ethnographic writings of Small on classical music and Travis Jackson on jazz, both of whom write detailed examinations of audience practices and subjective responses (Jackson 2003, Small 1998).

      Positing the music performance as the unit of analysis necessitates attending to the meaning-making activities of all participants—performers, crews, and audience members. A defining characteristic of the participant structure for indie gigs is that audience members get to choose where they locate themselves within the venue. Unlike traditional symphonic or arena rock concerts with assigned seating, indie gigs have relatively few seats.8 This opens up a variety of organizational constructs. Concerts that occur in seated halls place participants in positions where they are equidistant from each other and generally discourage or limit physical contact between audience members. This setting fosters a contemplative and comfortable comportment. In contrast, at non-seated venues, audience members have the opportunity to be close or distant and active or passive. This difference in participant structure has a significant impact on how the event is experienced. While the music performance in the two different kinds of settings may be the same, the range of experiences of the audience in concert halls and gigs is quite varied.9 This demonstrates why it is insufficient to merely examine the spectacle on stage. It is not just the spectacle that constitutes an event but a dynamic relationship among an audience, performers, and the performance.

      Furthermore, the event space does not in and of itself determine participant structure. The same venue used for a gig one night may be used for ballroom dancing the next. Different music cultures have different notions of appropriate interaction between audience members and performers, and different genres of music frame expectations of appropriate activities in a performance space. For example, piggybacking or taking off one’s shirt are extremely rare for indie shows but are frequent at metal or mainstream rock shows. At indie gigs, activity levels are segmented, highly marked, and disparate. For dance bands, there is a greater amount of movement shared over the entire venue space. In his discussion of southern medicine shows in the early part of the twentieth century, Paul Oliver notes that audience members were expected to interject and respond verbally during the performance, and the performer was expected to be responsive to these interjections (Oliver 1995). In indie, by contrast, verbal interjections are eschewed while music is being performed, and there is some expectation that performers will not respond at all to interjections from audience members.10 Thus, different genres have different notions of what is appropriate and expected in the performance setting. Not paying attention to the norms of a particular community using a space is similar to not paying attention to cultural differences. It ignores the specific rules that different communities use to accomplish interaction. The physical space is the same, but the participant structure alters how the space is used.

      The activities I observed in my ethnography of the British indie music scene were part of a specific community with a specific history. The term “indie” is a diminutive for “independent” rock and pop music. In a broad sense, it refers to the music on independently owned record labels. Indie music is considered to be more experimental, and it tends to appeal to a particular fan base or local community as opposed to a mass audience. Indie music fans are composed almost entirely of adolescents and young adults. Students comprise the majority of British indie music’s fan base.

      Indie fans come from a cross-section of classes, from unemployed youth on government relief to affluent private school students. However, much of the indie fan base comes from a middle-class background. In Britain, two-thirds of the indie community is male, one-third female.11 Indie is also primarily a white phenomenon that has very little participation from Britain’s other ethnic communities, which comprise on average only between 1 and 3 percent of an audience on any given night.12

      Indie music is just one of the genres of music. Yet its members and its events transcend national boundaries. Indie music is played all over the world. The community’s discourse can be found in the international music press and in online chat. Yet indie performances in different cultural settings have different participant structures. Bands report that Japanese fans behave very differently during shows than their European and American counterparts. The participant structure of British and American indie audiences, however, has much in common. Movements that originate in one country are soon found in the other.13

      Several factors played in the decision to focus my study on independent music in Britain. The first is the comparatively greater cultural focus on music in Britain. In Britain, music and football (soccer) are national passions. However, while football is a passion that takes its fans from childhood to old age, an interest in music is considered to be a youthful pursuit (Frith 1981, Hornby 1992). In Britain, there is a great depth of musical knowledge among the general population. Musical performances are an important part of Britain’s festival cycle. In summer, there are several large music festivals that fans travel from all over the country to attend (Reading, Glastonbury, Gathering of the Tribes, the V Festival, Finsbury Park, T in the Park). These festivals are held so dear that in 1991 the two major weekly music papers (Melody Maker and New Musical Express) listed the Reading festival as the event of the year, two places over the fall of the Berlin Wall. Music is also extensively covered in the British press. At the onset of my research, the aforementioned weekly magazines had a combined circulation of approximately 175,000.14 Several glossy monthlies were devoted to music, and there was a substantial variety of televised music programming. During my research, I was consistently surprised by people’s passion for music. When having a drink in a nondescript pub in my neighborhood of Islington (a borough of London), I found that the people who befriended me, sometimes fifteen years my senior and whom I

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