Andy Bennett

Researching youth culture and popular music:

a methodological critique

ABSTRACT

In this article I argue the need for critical evaluation of qualitative research
methodology in sociological studies of the relationship between youth culture
and popular music. As the article illustrates, there is currently an absence of
critical debate concerning methodological issues in this Ž eld of sociological
research. In the Ž rst part of the article I begin to account for this absence by illus-
trating how early research on youth and music rejected the need for empirical
research, relying instead on theories and concepts drawn from cultural Marxism.
The second part of the article illustrates how the legacy of this early body of work
in youth and music research manifests itself in current research which, although
empirically grounded, is characterized by an almost total lack of engagement with
methodological issues such as negotiating access to the Ž eld, manangment of
Ž eld relations and ethical codes. Similarly problematic is the uncritical accept-
ance on the part of some researchers of their insider knowledge of particular
youth musics and scenes as a means of gathering empirical data. In the Ž nal part
of the article I focus on the issue of insider knowledge and the need for critical
evaluation of its use as a methodological tool in Ž eld-based youth and music
research.

KEYWORDS: Methodology; ethnography; youth culture; popular music;

access; insider knowledge

Since it Ž rst became a focus for sociological interest during the mid-1970s,
the relationship between youth culture and popular music has been the
subject of a great number of books, journal articles, conferences and
courses taught as part of university degree programmes. While early studies
were primarily theoretical, more recent work has sought to empirically
engage with issues of youth culture and popular music as these relate to
sociological themes such as postmodernism (Redhead 1993; Muggleton
2000), cultural capital (Thornton 1995), social geography (Skelton and
Valentine 1998) and local identity (Finnegan 1989; Cohen 1991; Shank
1994). If early studies of youth culture and popular music can be criticized

British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 53 Issue No. 3 (September 2002) pp. 451–466
© 2002 London School of Economics and Political Science ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online
Published by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the LSE
DOI: 10.1080/0007131022000000590
452 Andy Bennett

because of their lack of empirical engagement, in much of the later, more

empirically focused work little attempt is made to re ect on the research
process itself. Although it is clear that the research process impacts both on
the Ž eldwork setting and the data produced (see Hobbs and May 1993),
critical, analytic overviews of the research methods used rarely feature in
Ž eld-based accounts of youth and music. In this article I begin to engage
with such methodological issues. I start by charting the development of
youth culture and popular music as an object of sociological study
grounded in a discourse of cultural Marxism, which deemed empirical
research an unnecessar y element in the analytical project of understand-
ing the stylistic responses of youth, before going on to critically evaluate
subsequent, empirically focused work on youth and music. In the Ž nal part
of the article I focus on a speciŽ c methodological aspect of contemporary
Ž eld-based research on youth culture and popular music, the use of
‘insider’ knowledge as a means of gaining access to and researching music
and style-based youth cultural scenes. Although this approach is now
commonly applied, particularly among younger researchers, there is
currently an absence of critical debate concerning the methodological
justiŽ cation for the use of insider knowledge in this area of sociological
research.

FLITTING ACROSS THE SCREEN

The lack of attention to methodological detail in current research on youth

and music is a legacy of the formative sociological work on this aspect of
contemporary social life. In ‘Symbols of Trouble’, the specially written
introduction to the third edition of his highly in uential book Folk Devils
and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, Stanley Cohen
presents a critical overview of British research on music and style-based
youth cultures in the Ž fteen year period between the book’s original publi-
cation in 1972 and the appearance of the third edition in 1987. An under-
lying theme throughout Cohen’s account is the failure of British youth
researchers to engage with the perceptions of the social actors at the centre
of their work. This begins with Cohen’s critical self-assessment of Folk Devils
and Moral Panics: ‘In uenced by labelling theor y, I wanted to study
reaction; the actors themselves just  itted across the screen’ (1987: iii). In
many respects this constitutes a highly telling criticism of research on youth
and music during the 1970s and early 1980s. With the exception of Paul
Willis, whose work I will presently consider, little attempt was made by
youth researchers to engage with the social actors at the centre of their
work using ethnography or other qualitative Ž eldwork methods.
A major obstacle to the development of a Ž eldwork tradition in youth
and music research at this time was the theoretical framework under-
pinning much of the research conducted. In the now widely criticized work
of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)
Researching youth culture and popular music 453

(see, for example, McRobbie 1980; Clarke 1981; Harris 1992; Bennett
1999), post-Second World War working-class youth cultures, such as mods,
rockers and skinheads, were studied using a structural-Marxist approach
incorporating Gramsci’s concept of ideological hegemony. Through the
application of such a framework, the CCCS argued, it was possible to map
the stylistic responses of postwar working-class youth cultures against a
backdrop of socio-economic forces only weakly comprehended by the
social actors involved. Thus, as Waters states, according to the theoretical
model of the CCCS, the actions of postwar youth cultures represented a
‘half-formed inarticulate radicalism’ (1981: 23). The structuralist narra-
tives produced by the CCCS served to render Ž eldwork redundant in social
settings deemed to be underpinned by irremovable socio-economic deter-
minants which, it was argued, fundamentally shaped the consciousness of
social actors.
According to the CCCS, the symbolic shows of resistance engaged in by
postwar youth cultures, although at one level indicative of the symbolic
creativity of youth, amounted to little more than a spectacular form of
bravado when viewed within the wider context of the social relations of
capitalism; the teddy boy’s ‘ “all-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go ” experience
of Saturday evening’( Jefferson 1976: 48) or the skinhead’s magical
recovery of community (Clarke 1976) re ecting the ‘historically located
“focal concerns” ’ of the equally trapped working-class parent culture
(Clarke et al. 1976: 53). The underlying implication here is that the resort
to Ž eldwork would serve only to reveal something which is already known,
the misconception of working-class youth concerning the socio-economic
forces which conspire to produce the everyday experience of class. The
‘real’ nature of such circumstances, and thus a more accurate understand-
ing of youth’s symbolic forms of resistance, it is maintained, can only be
grasped through theoretical abstraction. Thus, as Hall notes
. . . to think about or to analyse the complexity of the real, the act of
practice of thinking is required; and this necessitates the use of the power
of abstraction and analysis, the formation of concepts with which to cut
into the complexity of the real, in order precisely to reveal and bring to
light relationships and structures which cannot be visible to the naked
eye, and which can neither present nor authenticate themselves. (1980:
31)
One variation in this trend in youth research during the 1970s is Paul
Willis’s book Profane Culture. Transcending the original CCCS concern with
working-class youth, Profane Culture presents empirical case studies of a
working-class motorbike gang and a group of middle-class hippies. Using
ethnography, Willis provides highly detailed descriptions of the bikers’ and
hippies’ lifeworlds. Incorporating bikers’ and hippies’ own accounts into
the text, Willis begins the process of mapping their symbolic transform-
ation of commodities – for example, in the case of the bikers, the motor-
bike, in the case of the hippies, marijuana – into group speciŽ c cultural
454 Andy Bennett

icons. In developing this analysis Willis employs the concept of homology

as a theoretical framing device. Homology is deŽ ned by Willis as ‘the
continuous play between the group and a particular item which produces
speciŽ c styles, meanings, contents and forms of consciousness’ (1978: 191).
Problematically, however, at this point in the text the accounts of the
respondents are effectively sidelined, the task of interpretation being
achieved through theoretical abstraction. The result of this is a study which
comprises two largely incompatible projects: one which seeks to provide the
reader with an ethnographic ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) of the
everyday lives of working-class bikers and middle-class hippies; another
which effectively re-reads the entire Ž rst section of the book using a narra-
tive of homology in which issues of musical taste, personal image, and a
range of other consumer choices, which may on the surface appear to hold
highly re exive meanings, are argued by Willis to be structurally deter-
mined. The resulting methodological tensions which arise from Willis’s
attempt to ‘bolt’ this homological reading onto his ethnographic study are
neatly summed up by Harris who argues that
. . . [homology] has become famous as an account of how particular
items re ect the structured concerns and typical feelings of a group, as,
say, the black leather jacket does for bikers. Each homology arises from
an ‘integral’ process of selection and cultural work on an object or item,
in a complex dialectical way, naturally. As a result, current members of a
group are not subjectively aware of these structural meanings, embedded
in the history of the black leather jacket in previous cycles of provision,
transformation and resistance. (1992: 90)
Agar suggests that what makes ethnography ‘unique among the social
sciences [is its] commit[ment] to making sense out of the way informants
naturally talk and act when they are doing ordinary activities rather than
activities imposed by a researcher’ (1983: 33–4). There is a clear sense,
then, in which Willis’s application of homology as an interpretative tool in
Profane Culture compromises the ethnographic claims of the text.
Similar problems can be identiŽ ed with Hebdige’s (1979) treatment of
punk rock in his study Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Although not
engaging directly in empirical research, Hebdige pursues what Chaney
terms ‘a quasi-ethnographic research style allied with a sophisticated theor-
etical intent in interpretation’ (1994: 39). Using the concept of polysemy
(borrowed from the French Tel Quel group1) Hebdige posits an association
between the fragmented, ‘cut up’ style of the punk image and the socio-
economic decline of Britain during the late 1970s (1979: 26, 87–8).
Methodologically, however, the thesis presented in Subculture is problem-
atic. On the one hand, Hebdige invests considerable time and effort illus-
trating the semiotic linkage between punk’s chaotic visual image and the
British media’s ‘rhetoric of crisis’ during the late 1970s while at the same
time proclaiming the unlikelihood that those directly involved in the punk
rock scene ‘would recognize themselves re ected here’ (ibid.: 87, 139).
Researching youth culture and popular music 455

Overall then, one is left with the distinct impression that the empirical
re ections offered by Hebdige are being made to Ž t the bigger picture
which has already been fashioned at the level of theoretical abstraction.
Thus, as Cohen observes in relation to Hebdige’s reading of punk’s appro-
priation of the swastika
Displaying a swastika shows how symbols are stripped from their natural
context, exploited for empty effect, displayed through mockery, distanc-
ing, irony, parody, inversion . . . But how are we to know this? We are
never told much about the ‘thing’: when, how, where, by whom or in
what context it is worn. We do not know what, if any, difference exists
between indigenous and sociological explanations. (ibid.: xvii)
Such was the sociological trend in imposing theoretical frameworks on
the cultural signiŽ cance of music and style from above that, by the mid-
1980s, the sociology of youth culture had become, to use Phil Cohen’s
words, ‘simply the site of a multiplicity of con icting discourses . . . [with]
no reality outside its representation’ (1986: 20). From the mid-1980s
onwards many sociologists of youth and those in related areas of study
began to reject purely theoretical models of investigation and turned to
ethnographic research in an attempt to situate their accounts of the
relationship between youth culture and popular music more Ž rmly in the
social settings where this relationship is formed and where its micro-social
manifestations could, it was argued, be more readily observed. At the same
time, researchers became more concerned to engage with the accounts of
young people themselves and to incorporate such accounts into their
writing.

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC TURN

Two early studies which begin to redress the absence of ‘ethnographic data
and microsociological detail’ (Cohen 1991: 6) in research on youth and
music are Finnegan’s (1989) The Hidden Musicians and Cohen’s (1991) Rock
Culture in Liverpool. Cohen, in particular, weaves extensive interview and
observation material into an analysis of the correlation between young
people, music-making, identity and ever yday life in the post-industrial
setting of mid-1980s Liverpool. Finnegan’s study, although less focused on
rock and pop than Cohen’s, is similarly concerned to ethnographically map
the relationship between local music-making processes and the broader
social processes which inform ever yday life in local settings. An important
feature of both Finnegan and Cohen’s work is the way in which each writer
re ects on their role as researcher and the possible impact of their
presence in the Ž eld on the data collected. In Cohen’s case this concern is
most saliently expressed in relation to her status as a female researcher in
a male-dominated local music scene which, Cohen concedes, may ‘have
made some people uneasy’, especially as wives and girlfriends of musicians
456 Andy Bennett

were systematically barred from attending rehearsals for fear of them being
a distracting or disruptive in uence (1991: 205). Indeed, such bias on the
part of the research respondents conspired to impose a form of gender-
coded ‘outsider status’ on Cohen. Thus, as she observes
. . . my activities obviously con icted with those normally expected of a
woman. I attended gigs alone, expressed interest in the technicalities of
music-making and in the attitudes and concerns of those who made it,
and contradicted in other respects most women many of the band
members were familiar with. (ibid.: 205–6)
For Finnegan, whose presence in the Ž eld was less temporal than
Cohen’s, a different methodological problem emerged, namely, how to
retain objectivity in the context of familiar surroundings. Mason suggests
that
Although the purpose of observation is to witness what is going on in a
particular setting or set of interactions, the intellectual problem for the
researcher is what to observe and what to be interested in . . . [the
researcher] must work out how to tackle the questions of selectivity and
perspective in observation, since any observation is inevitably going to be
selective, and to be based upon a particular observational perspective.
(1996: 67–8)
In the case of Finnegan this problem was exacerbated due to her famili-
arity with Milton Keynes, the setting in which she conducted her research.
A resident of Milton Keynes, Finnegan was unable to take advantage of the
re exive detachment available to those ethnographic researchers who
enter the research setting for a given period of time, ultimately withdraw-
ing in order the analyse their data and write up the Ž ndings. Thus, as
Finnegan observes, ‘the well-known issue of how far one should or should
not “become native” looks rather different, if still pressing, in one’s own
community. Being too much of an insider (and ceasing to be a detached
observer) was always a danger’ (1989: 343).
It is signiŽ cant that, with the exception of Finnegan and Cohen, both of
whom have backgrounds in social-anthropology rather than sociology, little
attempt has been made in empirical research on youth and music to re ect
on the role of the researcher, the relationship between the researcher and
the research respondents and the possible impact of the latter on the
nature of the research data produced. On the contrar y, in a number of
recent empirically focused sociological studies of youth and music a subjec-
tively informed enthusiasm stands in for any consideration of such
methodological issues. In this respect, a number of studies warrant critical
attention. Redhead’s Rave Off, an early account of the British house music
phenomenon of the late 1980s and early 1990s, draws together the work of
young researchers in a series of papers whose content re ects Ž rst hand
experience of the UK club scene and the exoticism of Ibiza’s Balearic Beat.2
Redhead’s scene-setting introduction casts a critical postmodern eye on the
Researching youth culture and popular music 457

work of the Birmingham CCCS and related studies, suggesting that the
latter’s ‘ “linear” way of thinking about the connections between pop and
youth culture’ (1993: 2), if always problematic, is becoming increasingly so
as the quickening circular  ow of musical genres, sub-genres and attendant
youth styles blurs into what Polhemus (1997) terms a ‘supermarket of style’.
The burden of empirical proof for Redhead’s grand theoretical claims is,
however, placed on a series of quite poorly conceptualized semi-ethno-
graphic studies of dance club settings whose privileging of frontline know-
ledge of the house music scene over the necessity to critically engage with
issues of access, Ž eld relations, and objectivity of data is treated in an
entirely unproblematic fashion by the researchers involved in the work. As
a result, much of the empirical illustration in Rave Off is comparable with
the intelligent ‘fanspeak’ that characterizes underground fanzines; a series
of ‘in club’ accounts which maintain that the experience of the writer is the
collective experience of the crowd. This tendency is clearly illustrated in
Melechi’s essay ‘The Ecstasy of Disappearance’
. . . the trance-dance moves the body between the spectacle of the ‘pose’
and the sexuality (‘romance’) of the look into a ‘cyberspace’ of musical
sound, where one attempts to implode (get into) and disappear. (1993:
33)
Similar methodological problems can be identiŽ ed with other work on
contemporary dance music, Richard and Krüger’s (1998) study of the
annual ‘Love Parade’ in Berlin and Champion’s (1997) account of the
struggles of Wisconsin ravers with the hostile attitudes of both local
communities and the police adopting an essentially partisan stance. No
attempt is made to assume a critical distance from the research setting and
respondents, the descriptive authority of the researchers concerned
becoming a one-dimensional voice which echoes the self-assumed ‘right-
ness’ of the movement which each study seeks to describe. Such accounts
are easy targets for the recent cultural populist critiques of writers such as
McGuigan (1992) who argue that academic writing on popular culture and
its audience has become an uncritical celebration of mass culture which,
like popular journalism, claims knowledge through an ability to identify
with the ‘street level’ sensibilities of particular scenes and audiences.
However, it is not only in such overtly subjective writing that a lack of
attention to methodological detail is evident. A further study of contem-
porary dance music, Thornton’s Club Cultures, is situated more Ž rmly in the
ethnographic ‘tradition’. Thornton claims no personal ‘insider’ knowledge
of dance music and concentrates instead upon an attempted engagement
‘with the attitudes and ideals of the youthful insiders whose social lives
revolve around clubs and raves’ (1995: 2). Moreover, Thornton is re ex-
ively aware of the various issues which set her, as the researcher, apart from
the subjects of her research
. . . I was an outsider to the cultures in which I conducted research for
several reasons. First and foremost, I was working in a cultural space in
458 Andy Bennett

which ever yone else (except the DJs, door and bar staff, and perhaps the
odd journalist) were at their leisure. Not only did I have intents and
purposes that were different to the crowd, but also for the most part I
tried to maintain an analytical frame of mind that is truly anathema to
the ‘lose yourself ’ and ‘let the rhythm take control’ ethos of clubs and
raves. Two demographic factors – my age and nationality – further
contributed to this detachment. (ibid.)

Beyond this introductory assertion, however, very little is said by

Thornton on the issues of access and acceptance in the research setting.
Hammersley and Atkinson suggest that: ‘The problem of obtaining access
. . . is often most acute in the initial negotiations to enter a setting . . .
though the problem persists, to one degree or another, throughout the
data collection process’ (1995: 54). Given Thornton’s vivid initial descrip-
tion of her outsider status in the club culture setting, it is striking that she
makes no attempt to follow this through with a more sustained account of
how such differences between herself and the research subjects impacted
upon the research. Not only are such considerations absent from
Thornton’s account, but the research subjects themselves play only a rela-
tively minor role in the text. According to Agar: ‘Ethnography is experien-
tially rich [drawing on] the experiences that an ethnographer has with the
informants’ (1983: 33). In view of the time which Thornton invested
gathering data in club settings one might reasonably expect that more of
the raw data, for example, the expressed opinions of clubbers and obser-
vations of particular club behaviour, would have been used as a basis for
the text’s exploratory analysis of the cultural dimensions of contemporary
dance club scenes. As it is, the authoritative voice in Club Cultures is
predominantly Thornton’s, the one exception being a small Ž ve-page
section mid-way through the book entitled ‘A Night of Research’ where
Thornton offers the reader a brief sample of the ethnographic data she
gathered in club settings. In truth, however, the empirical insights offered
by this section into contemporar y club culture are relatively few; certainly
no attempt is made to provide thematic linkages between the descriptions
offered here and other parts of the book, the section existing very much as
a ‘stand alone’ piece in the study. Thornton’s personal experience of
taking the designer club drug Ecstasy (see Saunders 1995), a rare and
potentially valuable account of the ethical dilemmas often encountered by
youth and music ethnographers in their attempts to ‘get close’ to the
research subject, is only thinly related and prematurely concluded. Beyond
an account of being given Ecstasy in a dance club, Thornton offers the
reader no real insight into how she felt about taking Ecstasy, what
happened when the drug began to take effect, or of how, if at all, it altered
her experience of the dance club environment.
In other cases the use of ethnography as a means of generating data has
been accompanied by a seeming disregard for even the most fundamental
methodological principles of ethnographic research. As Cohen argues,
Researching youth culture and popular music 459

many so-called ethnographic studies in the Ž eld of popular music studies

‘rely upon preformulated questionnaires, surveys, autobiographies or
unstructured interviews which study people outside their usual social,
spatial and temporal context’ (1993: 127). A case in point is Arnett’s study
of heavy metal fandom in the USA which attempts to map the relationship
between taste in heavy metal music and the ‘ideology of alienation’ that,
according to Arnett, is widely ‘embrace[d]’ by fans of heavy metal music
(1995: 71). In many ways, Arnett’s study effectively buys into and exploits a
wave of public anxiety in the USA concerning teenagers’ interest in heavy
metal music, an anxiety fuelled by several high proŽ le court cases during
the early 1990s against heavy metal artists whose songs, it was claimed, had
been responsible for a series of teenage suicides (see Richardson 1991;
Walser 1993; Weinstein 2000). The style of Arnett’s study, a series of indi-
vidual ‘proŽ les’ on heavy metal fans, does little to critically engage with the
media’s representation of heavy metal and the ‘narrow ideation of youth’
which this produces (Epstein 1998: 1). Through a series of biographical
accounts, designed by Arnett to illustrate how taste in heavy metal corre-
sponds with a need to resolve the restrictive conditions of adolescent
teenage lives, typically depicted in terms of broken homes, low educational
achievement and economic hardship, a decidedly forced account of heavy
metal’s socio-cultural signiŽ cance is produced. Crucially absent from
Arnett’s reading of heavy metal is any real attempt to place the individual
accounts of heavy metal fans within the wider context of their ‘day-to-day
activities, relationships and experiences’ (Cohen 1993: 127).
The methodological advancement of qualitative research on youth
culture and popular music demands both that researchers be more open
about the various methodological issues confronting them and that they
re ect more rigorously on the relationship between the researcher and the
research subject in the Ž eldwork context. A number of existing studies deal
with these aspects of qualitative research in a more general sense (see, for
example, Burgess 1984; Hobbs and May 1993; Hammersley and Atkinson
1995). Clearly, however, every aspect of social life presents its own particu-
lar methodological problems for the researcher. In the Ž nal part of this
article I want to focus on one particular methodological issue facing those
engaged in qualitative research on youth culture and popular music.

RESEARCHING THE FAMILIAR: THE USE OF ‘INSIDER’ KNOWLEDGE IN

YOUTH AND MUSIC RESEARCH

At times one still hears expressed as an ideal for ethnography a neutral,

tropeless discourse that would render other realities ‘exactly as they are’,
not Ž ltered through our own values and interpretive schema. For the
most part, however, that wild goose is no longer being chased, and it is
possible to suggest that ethnographic writing is as trope-governed as any
other discursive formation. (Pratt 1986: 27)
460 Andy Bennett

Chumbawamba should never have sold out and recorded ‘Tubthump-

ing’. They’re anarchists! (Comment made by a participant in a graduate
conference focusing on youth subcultures, Rochester, NY, 1998)

As the references in the Ž rst part of this article to recent work on contem-
porary dance music begin to illustrate, empirical accounts of the relation-
ship between youth culture and popular music are increasingly being
provided by young researchers with an existing, and in some cases exten-
sive, ‘insider’ knowledge of their area of study. For many years the notion
of Ž eld-based research being carried out by a person with native or near
native knowledge of the subject matter of their research was deemed un-
ethical given the need for objectivity and detachment, qualities considered
central to the social-scientiŽ c rigour of bona Ž de ethnographic sociological
work. Similarly, many sociologists expressed the view that a relative ignor-
ance of the research subject in the Ž rst instance would ultimately result in
the researcher listening more intently to the accounts of the research
participants, thus gaining a more comprehensive insight into the rules and
systems underpinning ever yday life in that particular setting than could be
achieved by an insider whose views would inevitably be coloured by existing
knowledge and value judgments. This position is evident, for example, in
Whyte’s Street Corner Society, a seminal study of youth gangs in a 1930s Italian
slum in Boston, where the writer offers the following re ections on his own
socio-economic detachment from the subject of study

I come from a very consistent upper-middle-class background. One

grandfather was a doctor; the other, a superintendent of schools. My
father was a college professor. My upbringing, therefore, was ver y far
removed from the life I have described in Cornerville . . . We may agree
that no outsider can really know a given culture fully, but then we must
ask can any insider know his or her culture. (1993: 280, 371)

In more recent years this once established maxim in ethnographic

research has been challenged as an increasing number of researchers have
drawn on their ‘insider’ knowledge of particular regions or urban spaces
and familiarity with the patterns of everyday life occurring there. As a
number of contemporar y ethnographic studies reveal, such knowledge of
and familiarity with local surroundings has substantially assisted
researchers both in their quest to gain access to particular social groups
and settings and in knowing which roles to play once access has been
achieved. This is true, for example, in the case of Hobbs whose ‘common-
sense knowledge of East End culture’ proved to be an invaluable asset in
his study of entrepreneurship in East London (1988: 15). Similarly, in a
methodological account of his research on the ‘Blades’ (supporters of the
football team ShefŽ eld United), Armstrong notes that: ‘A ShefŽ eld back-
ground was vital for taking part in the chat and gossip which took up a
major part of the time when Blades met together’ (1993: 26). Such develop-
ments in ethnography resonate with a broader critique of sociological
Researching youth culture and popular music 461

research’s claim to ‘provide “objective” or “value-free” analysis’ (Rappert

1999: 713). Thus, as Hine observes
The basis for claiming any kind of knowledge as asocial and independent
of particular practices of knowing has come under attack, and ethnog-
raphy has not been exempt. The naturalistic project of documenting a
reality external to the researcher has been brought into question. Rather
than being the records of objectively observed and pre-existing cultural
objects, ethnographies have been reconceived as written and unavoid-
ably constructed accounts of objects created through disciplinar y prac-
tices and the ethnographer’s embodied and re exive engagement.
(2000: 42)
Viewed from this perspective, it could be argued that the use of ‘insider
knowledge’ by contemporary youth and music researchers is simply follow-
ing a current methodological trend in ethnographic work, at the centre of
which is an open acknowledgment of the researcher’s tiedness to space and
place. Problematically, however, while ethnographers working in other
areas of sociology have countered their use of ‘insider’ knowledge with
critical evaluations of this approach, in studies of youth and music, perhaps
because of the lack of an ethnographic ‘tradition’ in this sphere of socio-
logical work, researchers have tended to display an uncritical acceptance of
insider knowledge as an end in itself. Thus, for example, in his otherwise
highly insightful account of dance club culture, Malbon suggests that ‘my
own background as a clubber was, I believe, crucial in establishing my
credentials as someone who was both genuinely interested in and could
readily empathise with [clubbers’] experiences rather than merely as
someone who happened to be “doing a project” on nightclubs as his “job” ’
(1999: 32). In social-scientiŽ c terms, this observation tells us ver y little.
What is crucially missing from Malbon’s study is an attempt to evaluate, in
anything more than an anecdotal sense, the methodological advantages of
such insider knowledge in the research process. To paraphrase Marcus:
‘What remains is how to deal with the fact of re exivity, how to handle it
strategically for certain theoretical and intellectual purposes’ (1998: 190).
There are at least two reasons why this lack of critical engagement with
the methodological soundness of using insider knowledge is signiŽ cant.
First, and most fundamentally, given that research on music and style-based
youth cultures is set to continue being a focus for young and relatively inex-
perienced researchers, the funding opportunities for such research
becoming increasingly scarce beyond Ph.D. level, a body of work offering
a re ective, self-analysis of the researcher’s relationship to both the
research setting and those within it would provide ver y useful insights to
those beginning such work. Second, given the new approaches which are
beginning to inform ethnography, the use of insider knowledge in research
on youth and music may point the way to a timely deconstruction of the
researcher/fan position. Clearly, it is important for those who become
researchers of music and style-centred youth cultures because of prior
462 Andy Bennett

engagement as fans to effect a level of critical distance from the fact of

being a fan, and from popular fanspeak contrast-pairings such as ‘under-
ground’ and ‘commercial’; ‘authentic’ and ‘packaged’. At the same time, it
is equally desirable that such critical distance does not result in the
conducting of research from what Jenson refers to as the ‘savannah of smug
superiority’, that fandom does not come to be perceived as ‘what “they” do’
(1992: 25, 19). Indeed, there may be much to learn about the social signiŽ -
cance of contemporary youth cultures and musics using an approach which
combines critical re exivity with an intimate knowledge of fan discourse.
In a study of music-making practices of three young bands in Sweden,
Fornäs et al. note how they were able to ‘augment [their] insights by recall-
ing [their] own experiences [as musicians]’ thus achieving an emphatic
interpretation of their subject matter (1995: 15, 10). The broadening of
such an approach to encompass music consumption as well as production
could well provide the key to a more effective mapping of youth cultural
alliances, the acquisition of musical taste, scene membership and so forth.
Arguably, the theoretical justiŽ cation for a more re exive position in
ethnographic research on youth and music has been gathering pace for
some time. As noted in the Ž rst section of this article, early sociological
work on the relationship between youth, style and musical taste was based
upon a grounding belief in the proximity of this relationship to the experi-
ence of particular class conditions, the direct product of which, it was
argued, were the so-called postwar working-class youth ‘subcultures’ (Hall
and Jefferson 1976). The subsequent rejection of such explanations has
necessarily involved a revision in sociological thinking about the nature of
musical taste and stylistic preference and their articulation at a collective
cultural level. This has led to an abandonment of the concept of ‘subcul-
ture’ in favour of terms such as ‘scene’ (Straw 1991), ‘tribe’ (Bennett 1999)
and ‘taste culture’ (Lewis 1992) which allow for the greater heterogeneity
now routinely identiŽ ed with stylistically and/or musically demarcated
groups. Such new approaches stress the signiŽ cance of musical taste as one
of a series of inter-related aesthetic values through which individuals both
construct their own identities and identify with others who are seen to
possess the same or similar values. This, in turn, highlights the value of a
more re exive understanding of popular music’s meaning at a collective
cultural level on the part of researchers. Important in this respect is the
work of Frith who has illustrated the difŽ culty of analysing and accounting
for the aesthetics of popular music in ‘traditional’ sociological terms

There is no doubt that sociologists have tended to explain away pop

music. In my own academic work I have examined how rock is produced
and consumed, and have tried to place it ideologically, but there is no
way that a reading of my books (or those of other sociologists) could be
used to explain why some pop songs are good and others bad . . . how is
it that people (myself included) can say, quite conŽ dently, that some
popular music is better than others? (1987: 133–4, 144)
Researching youth culture and popular music 463

Frith’s observations begin to illustrate how an intimate knowledge of fan

discourse, rather than serving as a distraction from the purpose of youth
and music research, may in fact be utilized as a means of understanding the
collective aesthetic values attached by audiences to particular styles of
music. The task thus becomes one of systematically assessing how far
discourse, as a knowledge acquired through the learning of a particular set
of stylistic and ‘performative’ (Malbon 1999) conventions, can be recast as
a method of researching, analysing and relating musical taste to the broader
issues surrounding the ‘musicalization’ (Shank 1994) of ever yday life for
young people. In her ethnographic research on uses of the internet, Hine
suggests that: ‘Conducting an ethnographic enquir y through the use of
CMC [computer-mediated communication] opens up the possibility of
gaining a re exive understanding of what it is to be a part of the Internet’
(2000: 10). In a similar way, through a consideration of their insider know-
ledges and attendant ‘learned’ discourses as an interpretive tool in the
research process, youth and music researchers could begin to develop a
re exive understanding of what it means to be part of a particular scene.
The social scientiŽ c value of insider knowledge in youth and music
research crucially depends, then, upon a critical evaluation of its use as a
method of research – and I have suggested a means by which this might
begin to be effected. Clearly, however, such an evaluation must also take
into account the possible limitations of using ‘insider knowledge’. I have
already noted the tendency of youth and music researchers to engage in an
uncritical celebration of their insider status as a means by which to distance
themselves from other researchers whose interest is apparently motivated
simply by the demands of the research project itself. However, as critical,
self-re ective accounts of the research process in other areas of ethno-
graphic sociological work reveal, there are contradictions present in the
‘insider/researcher’ role which often create tensions in the research
setting. Thus, as Armstrong explains in relation to his research on ShefŽ eld
United football fans
There was certainly some ambiguity in my role. Because I was often out
and about with the ‘core’ Blades confusion over my true role could arise;
one would joke when I was talking to him: ‘Are we talking Blade to Blade?
Which head have you got on, your journalist’s or your hooligan’s?’.
(1993: 30)
The scenario described by Armstrong serves as a pertinent illustration of
the remaining and unavoidable presence of barriers between the
researcher and the researched, even in those cases where the insider know-
ledge of the researcher plays a major role in facilitating access to the Ž eld
and the forming of Ž eld relations. It seems fair to assume that similar draw-
backs can also apply to the use of insider knowledge in Ž eld-based research
on youth culture and popular music. Given that such methodological
problems can arise in relation to the use of inside knowledge, the
researcher needs to consider the nature of his/her Ž eld role very carefully,
464 Andy Bennett

especially the extent to which he/she is really considered to be an ‘insider’

by those who are being researched.

CONCLUSION

In this article I have sought to provide a methodological critique of Ž eld-

based sociological research on the relationship between youth culture and
popular music. I began with an account of how early studies of youth and
music, in uenced by a discourse of cultural Marxism, largely rejected the
use of empirical research deeming it unnecessary to the task of under-
standing the stylistic and musicalized responses of youth. This was followed
by a critical overview of more recent empirically focused youth and music
research which, I have argued, is characterized for the most part by a lack
of focus on methodological problems and issues arising from the research
process. In the Ž nal section of the article I presented a critical evaluation
of the use of ‘insider’ knowledge in contemporary Ž eld-based research on
youth culture and popular music. Clearly, the analysis I present here is by
no means exhaustive. There are, in effect, a whole range of issues that need
to be addressed in relation to youth and music research. The point
remains, however, that there is currently an absence of critical debate
concerning methodological procedure in this area of contemporary socio-
logical work. There is little to be gained from privileging empirical research
over theory simply on the basis that it is somehow ‘more in touch’ with the
object of study. On the contrar y, the movement of research on youth
culture and popular music beyond the realm of theoretical abstraction and
into the clubs, streets and festival Ž elds where young people and music
interact demands, in addition to written accounts of the research Ž ndings,
a body of work that critically re ects on the research process itself.

(Date accepted: April 2002) Andy Bennett

Department of Sociology
University of Surrey

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