DIY Cult and Underground

DIY Cultures and Underground
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
The Great Transformation

History for a Techno-H uman Future
Judith Bessant
Occupying London
Post-C rash Resistance and the Limits of Possibility
Sam Burgum
Populism and the Crisis of Democracy

Volume 1: Concepts and Theory
Edited by Gregor Fitzi, Jürgen Mackert and Bryan S. Turner

Volume 2: Politics, Social Movements and Extremism

Volume 3: Migration, Gender and Religion
The Challenge of Modernity

Simmel’s Sociological Theory
Gregor Fitzi
The World Multiple

The Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds
Edited by Keiichi Omura, Grant Jun Otsuki, Shiho Satsuka and Atsuro Morita
DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes

Edited by Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra
For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Advances-in-Sociology/book-series/SE0511.
DIY Cultures and
Underground Music Scenes
Edited by Andy Bennett and

Paula Guerra
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Andy Bennett and Paula
Guerra; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra to be identified as
the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bennett, Andy, 1963– | Guerra, Paula.
Title: DIY cultures and underground music scenes / edited by
Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2019. |
Series: Routledge advances in sociology
Identifiers: LCCN 2018037494| ISBN 9780415786980 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315226507 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Punk rock music–Social aspects. | Punk culture.
Classification: LCC ML3918.R63 D58 2019 | DDC 781.66–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037494
ISBN: 978-0-415-78698-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-22650-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Goudy
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
We dedicate this book to Paula’s mother, Maria Amélia Guerra,
who passed away on 26 March 2018 and to the memory of Andy’s
mother, Anne Shirley Bennett (1937–2008)
Contents
List of illustrations x
Notes on contributors xi
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
A ndy B ennett and P aul A G uerra
1 Rethinking DIY culture in a post-industrial and global

context 7
A ndy B ennett and P aula G uerra
PART I
Underground music scenes between the local and
the translocal 19
2 Visibility and conviviality in music scenes 21

W ill S traw
3 Punk stories 31
C arles F ei x a
4 Between popular and underground culture: an analysis

of Bucharest urban culture 41
A nda G eorgiana B ecu ț
5 DIY as a constitutive resource of the specific punk

capital in France 52
P ierig H umeau
viii Contents
6 Boys in black, girls in punk: gender performances in the

Goth and hardcore punk scenes in Northern Germany 63
Y v onne N iekren z
Part II
Music and DIY cultures: DIY or die! 75
7 Music, protest politics, DIY and identity in the Basque

Country 77
I on A ndoni de L A mo C astro
8 Home Economics: fusing imaginaries in Wellington’s

musical underground 89
K atie R ochow
9 Proud amateurs: deterritorialized expertise in

contemporary Finnish DIY micro-labels 101
J uho K aitaj ä r v i - T iekso
10 Noise records as noise culture: DIY practices,

aesthetics and trades 112
S arah B enha ï m
11 Punk positif: the DIY ethic and the politics of value in

the Indonesian hardcore punk scene 125
S ean M artin - I v e R son
Part III
Art, music and technological change 137
12 So far, yet so near: the Brazilian DIY politics of Sofar

Sounds – a collaborative network for live music
audiences 139
J eder S il v eira J anotti J r and Victor de A lmeida
N obre P ires
13 Cassette cultures in Berlin: resurgence, DIY freedom

or sellout? 150
B enjamin D ü ster and R apha ë l N owak
Contents ix
14 ‘Here Today’: the role of ephemera in clarifying

underground culture 160
J ohn W illsteed
15 Birth of an underground music scene? Creative

networks and (digital) DIY technologies in a Hungarian
context 171
E m í lia B arna
Part IV
Music scenes, memory and emotional geographies 183
16 The inoperative subculture: history, identity and

avant-gardism in garage rock 185
D aniel S . T raber
17 Collectivity and individuality in US free-folk musics 195

M a x imil I an S piegel
18 The independent record label, ideology and longevity:

twenty years of Chemikal Underground Records in
Glasgow 207
J . M ark P erci v al
19 Verbal Sound System (1997–98): recalling a raver’s

DIY practices in the British free party counterculture 219
Zoe A rmour
20 A howl of the estranged: post-punk and contemporary

underground scenes in Bulgarian popular music 230
A sya D ragano v a and S hane B lackman
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
Victor de Almeida Nobre Pires is Professor at the Federal University of

Alagoas (UFAL) and a researcher with the Audiovisual and Music Analysis
Laboratory – LAMA (PPGCOM/UFPE).
Ion Andoni del Amo Castro holds a PhD in Social Communication, and is
member of the NOR Research Group, and teacher and researcher at the
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). He is the author of Party &
Borroka: Jóvenes, músicas y conflictos en Euskal Herria (2016) and of several
individual and collective works about music, subcultures, social movements
and ICTs.
Zoe Armour is completing a PhD in electronic dance-music culture at De
Montfort University, Leicester. Her work is interdisciplinary and draws
from the fields of cultural sociology, popular music, memory studies, media
and communication, and film. She is the author of ‘Dedicated followers of
paSSion (1995–present): Seasoned clubbers and the mediation of collective
memory as a process of digital gift-giving’ on ageing clubbers and the inter-
net. She is a member of the Media Discourse Centre and IASPM, and follows
the Punk Scholars Network and Group for Subcultures, Popular Music and
Social Change. She also teaches on a variety of undergraduate and post-
graduate courses and attends electronic dance music events.
Emília Barna PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and
Communication, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Her
main areas of research are music scenes and genres, the digital music indus-
tries, and popular music and gender. She is a founding member and former
chair of the Hungarian branch of the International Association for the Study
of Popular Music.
Anda Georgiana Becuț has been a researcher since 2005. She has coordinated
several studies related to culture and creativity. She holds a PhD in sociology
and has published many books and articles about the cultural sector. She is
Chief of Research at the National Institute for Research and Cultural Train-
ing and she teaches Food Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and
xii Contributors
Social Work, University of Bucharest. She is also interested in rural com-

munities and creative industries.
Sarah Benhaïm holds a PhD in music and social sciences (École des Hautes
Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris) and a master degree in aesthetics. Her
research focuses on the contemporary practices associated with noise music,
as well as on values in the experimental underground field. She is also a sub-
editor for the journal Transposition: Musique et sciences sociales, and has taught
art theory at the ESAD Orléans.
Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology in the School of Humani-
ties, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University. A leading inter-
national 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.
Shane Blackman is Professor of Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church
University in the United Kingdom. Shane has dedicated his research to sub-
cultural scenes, the cultural politics of substance consumption, drug policy,
class and place in relation to young people. He is also interested in the role
and development of reflexivity in ethnographic research.
Asya Draganova is a lecturer in Media and Communications at Birmingham
City University. Her PhD, obtained in 2016, reflected on ethnographic
research into the creation and articulation of popular music in contemporary
Bulgaria. Asya has also studied the value of popular-music cultures, particu-
larly heavy metal and the Canterbury Sound for the heritage identities of
places and communities.
Benjamin Düster is a PhD candidate at Griffith University and an affiliate
member of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. He holds
an MA in musicology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research
interest focuses on the contemporary use of cassettes and the social dynamics
within experimental music scenes. He also performs sound art and coord-
inates the music label Gravity’s Rainbow Tapes.
Carles Feixa is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universitat Pompeu
Fabra (Barcelona). He has a PhD from the University of Barcelona and an
Honoris Causa from the University of Manizales (Colombia). A former pro-
fessor at the University of Lleida, he has been a visiting scholar in Rome,
Mexico City, Paris, Berkeley, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Newcas-
tle and Lima. He has specialized in the study of youth cultures, conducting
fieldwork research in Catalonia and Mexico. He is author or coauthor of 50
Contributors xiii
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
research explores issues related to music, technologies, heritage and genre.

He is the author of Consuming Music in the Digital Age (2015) and co-editor
of Networked Music Cultures (2016).
J. Mark Percival is Senior Lecturer in Media at Queen Margaret University,
Edinburgh. His 2007 doctoral thesis at the University of Stirling, ‘Making
music radio’, focused on the social dynamics of the relationship between
record industry pluggers and music radio programmers in the United
Kingdom. He has written about Scottish indie music production, popular
music and identity, and mediation of popular music, and is currently working
on projects on speed and meaning in music, and music in superhero comics.
Katie Rochow is a teaching assistant at the College of Creative Arts and the
School of English and Media Studies at Massey University, Wellington, New
Zealand. Her research interests are focused on popular music, place-making,
affectivity, embodiment and cultural production in the city. She also has
specific expertise in visual ethnography, particularly photo-elicitation and
mental mapping. Katie holds a PhD in Media Studies from Victoria Univer-
sity of Wellington.
Maximilian Spiegel is a PhD student in communication at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his diploma degrees in political
science and history from the University of Vienna. Spiegel’s current work
draws from cultural studies to explore collectivity, experimentation and the
relations between these two concepts, focusing on selected cultural forma-
tions constituted around musical practice.
Will Straw is James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies at McGill
University in Montreal, Canada. He is co-editor, with Georgina Born and
Eric Lewis, of the recent book Improvisation and Social Aesthetics and, with
Janine Marchessault, of The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema. His cur-
rent research is focused on cultures of the urban night.
Daniel S. Traber is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, Galves-
ton. He is the author of Culturcide and Non-Identity across American Culture
(2017) and Whiteness, Otherness, and the Individualism Paradox from Huck to
Punk (2007). His work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Critique,
The Journal of Popular Culture, The Hemingway Review, American Studies and
Popular Music and Society.
John Willsteed is a musician and academic. He toured the world through the
late 1980s in the Go-Betweens, and is currently a member of award-winning
Brisbane group Halfway. He is also an award-winning composer and sound
editor, with over 90 film and television credits, and is Senior Lecturer in
Music at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane.
Acknowledgements
This book is primarily an outcome of the KISMIF (‘Keep it Simple, Make it

Fast’) conference, an international event dedicated to the study and discussion
of DIY (do-it-yourself ) cultural scenes in a global context. We would like to
express our sincere thanks to all of those people who have attended KISMIF
since it began in 2014 and shared with us their insights, both academic and
practitioner-based, on DIY cultural practice around the world. We would also
like to thank those organizations that have supported KISMIF: Foundation for
Science and Technology of Portugal, Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the
University of Porto, Institute of Sociology of the University of Porto, Rectory of
the University of Porto, Griffith University, Australian National University,
RMIT University, Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, York
University of Toronto, Dinâmia’CET – Centre for the Study of Socio-Economic
Changes and Territories, CEGOT – Centre for the Study of Geography and
Spatial Planning, Municipality of Porto and Casa da Música.
As with all edited volumes, this book could not have been completed
without the hard work and commitment of the chapter authors. It has been a
pleasure to have worked with you all – thank you so much for your stimulating
contributions.
The publication of this book was supported by the Foundation for Science
and Technology (FCT) within the scope of UID/SOC/00727/2013. Thank you
also to the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research for providing finan-
cial support to assist us in the completion of the manuscript and to Susan Jarvis
for her excellent editorial and indexing work during the final stages of the
manuscript production.
Finally, a big thank you to our families for their support and understanding as
we have worked on this book project to bring it to fruition.
Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra
Introduction
Do-it-yourself (DIY) culture describes a form of cultural practice that is often

pitched against more mainstream, mass-produced and commodified forms of cul-
tural production. It often finds itself aligned with an anti-hegemonic ideology
focused around aesthetic and lifestyle politics. The concept of DIY cultural pro-
duction gained critical momentum during the late 1970s with the emergence of
punk: disillusioned with the mainstream music industry of the mid-1970s, punk
rock created an alternative platform for the production and distribution of music
through small-scale, independent recording labels. This proved to be a catalyst
for the creation of a broader DIY aesthetic that has continued to underpin a
succession of punk and post-punk music styles from the late 1970s onwards.
Indeed, to talk about DIY music scenes and cultures in a contemporary context
is to talk about a phenomenon that is truly global in its reach.
The chapters in this book address, for the first time, 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. In its examin-
ation of DIY musical practice in a global context, the book begins by revisiting
and re-evaluating several 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 character-
ize alternative and underground music scenes have been influenced by techno-
logical change, notably the ready availability of digital media. Finally, in
acknowledging the now over 40-year history of DIY cultural practice in punk
and post-punk contexts, the book considers how DIY cultures have seeped into
the cultural memory and emotional geographies of place.
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
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 considers how such exponential growth in DIY practices raises new
questions about the nature and prevalence of the DIY aesthetic and its place as
an increasingly pivotal aspect of contemporary urban life.
The rest of the book is organized into four parts: Part I: Underground music
scenes between the local and the translocal; Part II: Music and DIY cultures:
DIY or die!; Part III: Art, music and technological change; and Part IV: Music
scenes, memory and emotional geographies.
Part I presents an in-depth examination of the spatial characteristics and
dynamics of DIY culture and looks at its bearing on underground music scenes.
As the chapters in this section illustrate, the appropriation and maintaining of
space in urban contexts is a critical currency of DIY cultural practice. This
theme is key to Chapter 2, where Will Straw considers how underground music
scenes within cities have been celebrated or condemned for their visibility.
They have confounded journalists and would-be members of such scenes
through their invisibility as well as through their barriers to entry. This dual
character of underground music scenes – their visibility and invisibility – fre-
quently poses problems for those individuals (journalists, tourists, critics)
seeking to find and observe music scenes, and also marks the complex ways in
which members conceive such scenes.
In a similarly urban vein, in Chapter 3 Carles Feixa examines the connec-
tions between music, youth culture and urban life using a perspective drawn
from case studies undertaken in Catalonia and Mexico. The author achieves
this by considering youth musical genres as metaphors for youth itself (and spe-
cifically their difficulties of integration in society), proposing to illustratively
capture punk history through two punk stories: the narratives of Feixa’s encoun-
ter with two young people who chose to identify with this lifestyle in different
moments (the 1980s and the 1990s) and in different places (a small city in
Catalonia and a metropolis in Mexico).
Anda Georgiana Becuț’s aim in Chapter 4 is to map the independent cul-
tural urban spaces in Bucharest and to highlight the specificity of these hybrid
spaces. Can these places be considered a part of the urban culture, as inde-
pendent cultural consumption spaces or as cultural entities that transcend the
line between popular and underground culture? Are they a reflection of the
alternative or underground culture? Moreover, what influences have their char-
acteristics had on the artistic content and on the relationship between the
artists and the audience? Such concerns with the way place ties into the wider
social fabric are also key to Chapter 5, in which Pierig Humeau applies an ana-
lysis of data collected on the French ‘independent’ punk scene in an effort to
question the concept of DIY culture by demonstrating that it acts as a constitu-
tive resource of specific punk capital. By analysing the topography of the French
contemporary punk space, the author reveals the links between the objectively
occupied social positions within the social space, and the aesthetic and political
Introduction 3
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.
In Chapter 11, Sean Martin-Iverson draws on ethnographic fieldwork with

the Kolektif Balai Kota, a DIY hardcore organizing collective in Bandung, West
Java, Indonesia, to explore the value politics of DIY production, both in the
specific context of Indonesian hardcore punk and as a more general strategy for
creative autonomy and social transformation. These DIY activists position DIY
hardcore as a form of ‘positive punk’, putting into practice the twin values of
autonomy and community through a DIY ethic of independent cultural produc-
tion, which they regard as the essence of punk.
The chapters in Part III examine the relationship between DIY cultures,
music and technological change. As they demonstrate, reactions among DIY
cultural practitioners to technological change have been characteristically
diverse. Thus, while on the one hand more recent developments in digital tech-
nology have been embraced as a significant tool in the production, dissemina-
tion and consumption of music and related aspects of DIY culture, at the same
time such developments have also produced an emphasis on pre-digital products
as significant markers of a DIY aesthetic. These latter themes are central to
Chapter 12, where Jeder Silveira Janotti Jr and Victor de Almeida Nobre Pires
take up the debate concerning the importance of direct, present experience in
the consumption of music and about music scenes as an important part of those
articulations. In their chapter they seek to approach the affective, distinctive,
fetishized political and cultural aspects of these alternative forms of production
as well as their impact on so-called popular music, by focusing on the case of
Sofar Sounds (Songs from a Room), a collaborative network that promotes
small and generally non-publicized secret concerts in the musicians’ and fans’
homes to a selected group of cultural intermediaries.
In Chapter 13, Benjamin Düster and Raphaël Nowak, drawing on qualitative
data gathered in Berlin in 2015 and 2016, explore contemporary cassette cul-
tures and the various ways in which the format subsists. The authors argue that
the contemporary discourses on cassette tapes are embedded in a tension
between small music scenes that incorporate cassette tapes for face-to-face and
digital processes of creation on the one hand, and a broader recent mainstream
revival on the other hand. Such cultural processes are explored in a different
way in Chapter 14, in John Willsteed’s analysis of the importance of ephemera
in historical collections and archives. Willsteed achieves this by looking at what
constitutes ephemera and what its role might be in activating subcultural stories,
with a particular emphasis on the Brisbane underground music scene from the
late 1970s to the mid-1980s. This includes discussing particular artefacts, how
and why these items were made, where they are now and what their legacy
might be.
In Chapter 15, Emília Barna looks at the lo-fi or ‘bedroom’ music scene in
Budapest as an underground scene that relies on the use of digital technology
and the internet – in particular, music platforms such as Bandcamp and social
networking sites such as Tumblr. The author reflects on the online practices of
music distribution, consumption and evaluation that are central to this scene,
Introduction 5
while also demonstrating the necessity of studying the network of participants,

online and offline spaces and content, and how these are related to principles of
the underground.
Part IV, the final section of the book, examines the relationship between
DIY music scenes and memory. Given the longevity of punk-inspired DIY cul-
tural practices across the world, in many cases these have become significant
aspects of collective memory in local, translocal and, in some cases, virtual con-
texts. The chapters in this section offer important insights regarding the various
contexts within and around which collective memories become embedded in
forms of underground and alternative music and associated forms of DIY cultural
practice.
In Chapter 16, Daniel S. Traber turns to Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the
‘inoperative community’ to consider the negotiations of history and community
required of revivalist subcultures and the lessons they convey regarding identity.
The author’s example of an ‘inoperative subculture’ is drawn from contemporary
garage rock, wherein a willing connection to the styles, sounds and icons of the
early 1960s bands is maintained – albeit reformulated to allow one to speak
differently, as opposed to simply mimicking the past, as the stricter traditional-
ists demand.
Maximilian Spiegel focuses on collectivity and individuality in US ‘free folk’
music in Chapter 17. In particular, Spiegel traces the social relations constitut-
ing the dynamic and heterogeneous field of research, drawing on interviews
conducted with protagonists of psychedelic, DIY-based, local, translocal and
virtual scenes.
In Chapter 18, J. Mark Percival explores notions of independence in the
record industry through a longitudinal case study of Glasgow-based label Chemi-
kal Underground. Drawing on a series of personal interviews conducted with
the founders and directors of Chemikal Underground between September 2000
and September 2014, the development of the label over 20 years is explored and
situated in a milieu of cultural production that depends increasingly on the
power of social and cultural capital to enable and transform economic capital.
This is followed in Chapter 19 by Zoe Armour’s examination of how an indi-
vidual of the late post-baby-boomer generation articulates his involvement in
the British free-party counterculture of the mid- to late 1990s. While sociologi-
cal research on rave culture in the period of the fin de siècle is apparent, the
significance of marginal practices remains largely unmapped in terms of the
individualized niche experiences of ravers participating in an alternate life-
world. Thus the singular ethnographic interview that forms the basis for this
chapter provides a micro analysis of the sound system and the forms of affective
association to which it gave rise.
Finally, in Chapter 20, Asya Draganova and Shane Blackman, drawing on
recent ethnographic interviews and observations with music consumers and
producers in Bulgaria, argue that estrangement acted as a creative force for
the emergence of underground post-punk subcultural scenes. The Bulgarian
underground scenes of the 1980s delivered content incongruous to the aesthetic

values imposed by the communist state, which controlled official culture pro-
duction. Thus, DIY strategies were crucial to the enhancement of artistic identi-
ties, alongside the diversification of post-punk within multiple music ‘waves’,
and the formation of scenes throughout the country.
Chapter 1
Rethinking DIY culture in a

post-industrial and global context
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.
DIY culture in a historical context

The term ‘DIY’ first begun to be heard at the beginning of the twentieth
century, when it was used and understood in the context of home improvement
(Gelber, 1997). Referring to the practice of creating, repairing and/or modifying
things without the use of an expert craftsperson, the meaning and currency of
DIY gradually evolved over subsequent decades to embrace a range of creative
cultural practices. As part of this evolution, DIY assumed a critical resonance
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).
DIY and global ‘alternative’ culture

During the same period in which these later, post-punk genres have emerged,
deindustrialization in the Global North has further contributed to the preval-
ence of DIY discourses in music and associated forms of cultural practice. In a
study of the local Liverpool music scene conducted in the mid-1980s, Cohen
(1991, p. 2) notes how,
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
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).
Artistic self-p roduction and DIY cultural practices

As indicated in the foregoing sections of this chapter, the notion of DIY culture
has undergone significant transformations since the mid-1970s, when its associ-
ations with youth, music and style first manifested themselves in the shape of
punk. In this section, we set about the task of beginning to delineate and define
a new framework of DIY culture and cultural practice that can be applied in
more contemporary global settings. On the basis of ethnographic work con-
ducted by the authors on the Portuguese punk scene (Guerra and Bennett,
2015), it seems clear that if DIY in the early years of punk was a relatively
spontaneous gesture of resistance to capitalism, this has now evolved into an
essentially pre-digested understanding of what punk, and by definition those

musical and other cultural scenes that have come after punk and been inspired
by it, are seen to symbolize. Indeed, one of the critical findings of our research is
that, while theoretically rich, such a portrayal of DIY culture is also highly com-
patible with the way social actors reflexively perceive themselves and their
agentic relationship with the everyday practice of DIY culture. Thus, when we
questioned our interviewees about the effective nature of DIY, they pointed out
numerous roles, tasks, functions and competences associated with meaning-
making mechanisms, in practice allowing the participants of different scenes to
see themselves precisely as participants of a particular scene in a way that is
analogous to Thornton’s (1995) club cultures. In the case of Thornton’s work,
and in ours, a common thread is the way scene competence is connected with
artefacts and knowledge (implicit and symbolic) that are recognized and
esteemed in a given culture (Jensen, 2006).
The question of authenticity and its response/alternative to the mainstream
are key configurations in the DIY ethos of Portuguese punk (Guerra, 2017; Silva
and Guerra, 2015), as indeed they are in numerous other DIY cultural scenes
around the world. These self-producing strategies, founded on displays of scene
competence, have consolidated over the last 30 years, meaning that two-thirds
of the interviewees say they have acquired DIY competences through participat-
ing in local punk scenes, and that cooperation networks (Becker, 1982; Cross-
ley, 2015) played a key role in facilitating this. In essence, what this reveals is
the ongoing presence of a strong underground scene, sustained through the
engagement of young musicians, amateur and professional gatekeepers and
deeply loyal, albeit small, audiences. The underground – the loose term that
brings together notions of youth conviviality, artistic production, mainstream
defiance, ritual performance – is in essence a collective creative network (Willis,
1977), which expresses everyday aesthetics in youth-culture contexts. Several
variables appear that are crucial to our understanding of these realities: musical
pathways (Finnegan, 2007, p. 297) or the initial design of leisure careers (Black-
man, 2005; MacDonald, 2011) as entry routes to local punk music scenes stand
out as critical elements in understanding the individual and collective traject-
ories of social actors. In that sense, the most common career profiles can be dis-
cussed as combinations of key roles in the scene, such as music agent/promoter,
including a wide array of profiles such as fan, distributor, editor/musician, edu-
cator and so on.
The roles and tasks that these scenes and musical pathways entail in Portu-
guese punk are marked by heterogeneity and flexibility. The DIY ethos is repres-
ented as a strongly valued asset in community-based amateur music practice
that goes hand in hand with the underground world (Guerra and Bennett, 2015;
Guerra and Silva, 2015). The musical underground appears, then, as a claim
from young musicians to a unique artistic expression, or a counterpointed
authentic experience – not without its internal contradictions and ambiguities
– against the market and dominant music conventions. It is, however, possible
to analyse this space as including multiple socialization processes in a social

sphere in which stratification factors, such as class or school capital, are played
in a symbolic experimentation, opening up the possibility for new cultural prac-
tices and trajectories. The circuits of music-making make up a plurality of social-
izing spaces, characterized by diverse symbolic codes according to different
music genres, youth cultures, social backgrounds, urban contexts and approxi-
mation to professional means, among others (see Gelder and Thornton, 1997).
As a general framework for use in addressing this issue, we can look to the
autonomist Marxist thesis of immaterial labour (Hardt and Negri, 2003; Negri,
2005) – that is, the notion imbricated in the capitalist system of creative, affec-
tive and informational work, which has, as the post-industrial socioeconomy
evolves, become widespread and deeply influential. This sort of concept works
in practice and, specifically in what our interviewees sensed in the DIY music
scenes, as an ontological reordering of the principles of work and play (Willis,
1977). By privileging creative autonomy, measuring success in terms of symbolic
capital, as Moore (2004) argues, and putting weight into institutional challenge
and resistance, this focus on immaterial labour serves DIY cultures as an altern-
ative and more adequate measure of the work contained in them. As Dale
(2008, p. 190) suggests, the institutional challenge of independent music was
part of an attempt to ‘spread power out, to re-distribute cultural capital and
encourage self-expression’. One such case was that of pop-punk music in the
United States, which, since the early 1990s, has become associated with a range
of DIY labels and local scenes. For Barrett (2013), the punk movement in the
United States signifies a politicized form of collective action, encompassing a
complex of counter-institutions, while Dunn (2012) advocates that ‘punk rock
kick-started the DIY record revolution’, meaning that the independent DIY
punk labels opened a space in which to resist the alienation of modern society.
All of this, of course, begs a critical question: Given the increasingly
complex, locally specific but transnationally connected ways in which DIY
culture has evolved since the 1970s, how can we specifically define what DIY
means concretely in a contemporary context? Some authors note the at-times
profound ambiguities of the DIY ideal, which can only be related to a specific
ethical code underlying all movements, in favour of autonomy and independ-
ence in the face of conspicuous consumption-driven societies (Císar and
Koubek, 2012; Gosling, 2004; O’Hara, 1999). In a preliminary approach, DIY
can mean the creation of a symbolic alternative through a (physical or meta-
phoric) space of self-empowerment, mutual help and alternative social engage-
ment (Holtzman, Hughes and Van Meter, 2007). Alternatively, and more
frequently in the Portuguese context, it has meant the associative and recrea-
tional practices organized by the participants themselves in a process of empow-
erment that impacts their own personal project.
More than anything, DIY serves as a counter-force to neoliberalism.
However, this is only one part of the story. We must take into account several
questions that connect us to alternative socialization paths; new forms of education
and family-building; the rejection of corporations, business chains and multina-

tionals (Crossley, 2015; Haenfler, 2004, 2012, 2014; Heartfield, 2003; Moore,
2004; Ruggero, 2009); the emphasis on alternative media and information chan-
nels (Coopman, 2003; Dahlgren, 2007; Downing, 2001; Duncombe, 1997;
McKay, 1996); the relationship with direct-action strategies (Epstein, 1993);
the production of an alternative living system (squats, cooperatives) (Hemphill
and Leskowitz, 2013); the practices of emancipatory DIY culture in learning
with computers and new technologies (Kafai and Peppler, 2011); a defence of
life based on ecological principles, including gardening, home repairs and recyc-
ling, music and the recycling of discarded food (Kuhn, 2010; McKay, 1996); and
the education of adults (Downes, 2007; Hemphill and Leskowitz, 2013).
Clearly, while practices of cultural production remain core to the ethos of
DIY, what now act to distinguish it from its early years are a broader lifestyle
philosophy and a more diverse approach to DIY practice that extends across a
range of everyday activities. The concept of lifestyle was originally applied in
sociology by Weber (1978) as a means of considering how aspects of social status
and standing were articulated through displays of material wealth and conspicu-
ous consumption. Lifestyle again became fashionable in sociology during the
late twentieth century when, in the wake of the cultural turn (Chaney 1994),
the significance of cultural consumption again came to the fore as a means to
explain the basis of individual and collective identities in late-modern social
settings. David Chaney is a key contributor to this contemporary sociological
work on lifestyle. His reconceptualization of lifestyle in a contemporary context
is highly instructive for our understanding of a range of cultural identities and
cultural practices that characterize late-modern society, including those that
underpin the notion of DIY culture. In that context, Chaney (1996) regards
lifestyles as demonstrative of the increasing reflexivity exhibited by individuals
in both the practice and negotiation of everyday life. Key to Chaney’s interpre-
tation of lifestyle is his distinction between ‘lifestyles’ and ‘ways of life’ (1996,
p. 97). He argues that lifestyles are ‘creative projects’ that rely on ‘displays of
consumer competence’, while ‘ways of life’ are ‘typically associated with a more
or less stable community [and] displayed in features such as shared norms,
rituals, patterns of social order and probably a distinctive dialect’ (1996, p. 92).
Given the results of our findings on the Portuguese punk scene, it seems clear
that while lifestyles do indeed reflect newer trends in society – in this particular
case, based around the acquisition of musical tastes and the appropriation of
associated stylistic resources globally inscribed in punk culture – they do at the
same time continue to reflect older and more established aspects of the local
communities in which they take form. Thus language and an awareness of more
recent historical events taking place in Portugal have a bearing on the articu-
lation of Portuguese punk, as do the specific hard and soft infrastructures (Stahl,
2004) present in different cities in the country. Such aspects of local, vernacular
culture are integral to the character of Portuguese punk, its DIY cultural practice
and the ways in which this informs a broader array of DIY lifestyle sensibilities.
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
become a template for various punk-influenced styles, as well as other genres

such as rap and dance music. It then considered how the global spread of DIY
cultural practice, combined with significant socioeconomic shifts on a global
scale, has given rise to a concomitant shift in the role and significance of DIY as
a translocally linked series of networks that underpin alternative forms of cul-
tural production. The final part of the chapter then went on to consider how,
given such a deepening of the DIY aesthetic at a global level, it is now possible
to map DIY culture not merely in terms of forms of cultural production but as
the basis for lifestyle projects, whereby individuals articulate a sense of distance
from more mainstream and ‘official’ discourses of urban transformation under-
pinned by neoliberal policy. Such articulations of DIY cultural practice have
also sown the seeds for new forms of community cohesion, with the potential for
these to be maintained and developed over a period of years and across
generations.
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.
References
Bannister, M. (2006). White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Barrett, D. (2013). DIY democracy: The direct action politics of US punk collectives.
American Studies, 52(2): 23–42.
Becker, H.S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bennett, A. (2018). Conceptualising the relationship between youth, music and DIY
careers: A critical overview. Cultural Sociology, doi:10.1177/1749975517750760.
Bielby, W.T. (2004). Rock in a hard place: Grassroots cultural production. American
Sociological Review, 69(1): 1–13.
Blackman, S. (2005). Youth subcultural theory: A critical engagement with the concept,
its origins and politics, from the Chicago School to postmodernism. Journal of Youth
Studies, 8(1): 1–20.
Chaney, D. (1994). The Cultural Turn: Scene Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural
History. London: Routledge.
Chaney, D. (1996). Lifestyles. London: Routledge.
Císar, O. and Koubek, M. (2012). Include ’em all? Culture, politics and a local hardcore/
punk scene in the Czech Republic. Poetics, 40(1): 1–21.
Cohen, S. (1991). Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Claren-
don Press.
Coopman, T.M. (2003). Alternative alternatives: Free media, dissent, and emergent
activist networks. In A. Opel and D. Pompper (eds), Representing Resistance: Media,
Civil Disobedience, and the Global Justice Movement (pp. 192–208). Westport, CT:
Praeger.
Crossley, N. (2015). Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Dahlgren, P. (2007). Civic identity and net activism: The frame of radical democracy. In
L. Dahlberg and E. Siapera (eds), Radical Democracy and the Internet: Interrogating
Theory and Practice (pp. 55–72). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dale, P. (2008). ‘It was easy, it was cheap, so what?’ Reconsidering the DIY principle of
punk and indie music. Popular Music History, 3(2): 171–93.
Debord, G. (1992). La Société du Spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle). Paris: Gallimard.
Downes, J. (2007). Riot grrrl: The legacy and contemporary landscape of DIY feminist
cultural activism. In N. Monem (ed.), Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now! (pp.
12–51). London: Black Dog.
Downing, J.D.H. (2001). Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Driver, C. (2011). Embodying hardcore: Rethinking subcultural authenticities. Journal of
Youth Studies, 14(8): 975–90.
Duncombe, S. (1997). Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative
Culture. London: Verso.
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.
Epstein, B. (1993). Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the
1970s and 1980s. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ferreira, V.S. (2016). Aesthetics of youth scenes: From arts of resistance to arts of exist-
ence. Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research, 24(1): 66–81.
Finnegan, R. (2007). The Hidden Musicians. Music-Making in an English Town. Middle-
town, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge.
Frith, S. and Horne, H. (1987). Art into Pop. London: Methuen.
Garofalo, R. (1992). Understanding mega-events: If we are the world then how do we
change it? In R. Garofalo (ed.), Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements (pp.
15–36). Boston, MA: Southend Press.
Gelber, S.M. (1997). Do-It-yourself: Constructing, repairing and maintaining domestic
masculinity. American Quarterly, 49(1): 66–112.
Gelder, K. and Thornton, S. (eds) (1997). The Subcultures Reader. London: Routledge.
Gosling, D. (2004). ‘Not for sale’: The underground network of anarcho-Punk. In A.
Bennett and R.A. Peterson (eds), Music Scenes: Local, Trans-local and Virtual (pp.
168–83). Nashville, TN. Vanderbilt University Press.
Guerra, P. (2017). Just can’t go to sleep: DIY cultures and alternative economies from
the perspective of social theory. Portuguese Journal of Social Science, 16(3): 283–303.
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.
Guerra, P. and Silva, A.S. (2015). Music and more than music: The approach to differ-
ence and identity in the Portuguese punk. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(2):
207–23.
Haenfler, R. (2004). Rethinking subcultural resistance: Core values of the straight edge
movement. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 33(4): 406–36.
Haenfler, R. (2012). More than the Xs on my hands: Older straight edgers and the
meaning of style. In A. Bennett and P. Hodkinson (eds), Ageing and Youth Cultures:
Music, Style and Identity (pp. 9–23). Oxford: Berg.
Haenfler, R. (2014). Subcultures: The Basics. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2003). Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-form. Minne-
apolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Heartfield, J. (2003). Capitalism and anti-capitalism. Interventions, 5(2): 271–89.
Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge.
Hemphill, D. and Leskowitz, S. (2013). DIY activists: Communities of practice, cultural
dialogism, and radical knowledge sharing. Adult Education Quarterly, 63(1): 57–77.
Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford: Berg.
Holtzman, B., Hughes, C. and Van Meter, K. (2007). Do it yourself … and the movement
beyond capitalism. In S. Shukatis, D. Graeber and E. Biddle (eds), Constituent Imagina-
tion: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization (pp. 44–61). Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Jensen, S.Q. (2006). Rethinking subcultural capital. Young: Nordic Journal of Youth
Research, 14(3): 257–76.
Kafai, Y.B. and Peppler, K.A. (2011). Youth, technology and DIY: Developing participa-
tory competencies in creative media production. Review of Research in Education,
35(1): 89–119.
Kaplan, E.A. (1987). Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Con-
sumer Culture. London: Methuen.
Kuhn, G. (ed.) (2010). Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and
Radical Politics. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Laing, D. (1985). One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes:
Open University Press.
Lentini, P. (2003). Punk’s origins: Anglo-American syncretism. Journal of Intercultural
Studies, 24(2): 153–74.
MacDonald, R. (2011). Youth transitions, unemployment and underemployment: Plus ça
change, plus c’est la meme chose. Journal of Sociology, 47(4): 427–44.
Maffesoli, M. (1996). The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society,
D. Smith trans. London: Sage.
McKay, G. (1996). Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties.
London: Verso.
McKay, G. (1998). DIY culture: Notes towards an intro. In G. McKay (ed.), DIY Culture:
Party and Protest in Nineties Britain (pp. 2–43). London: Verso.
Moore, R. (2004). Postmodernism and punk subculture: Cultures of authenticity and
deconstruction. The Communication Review, 7(3): 305–27.
Negri, A. (2005). The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nilan, P. and Feixa, C. (eds) (2006). Global Youth? Hybrid Identities, Plural Worlds.
London: Routledge.
O’Hara, C. (1999). The Philosophy of Punk. More than Noise! Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Peterson, R.A. and Bennett, A. (2004). Introducing music scenes. In A. Bennett and
R.A. Peterson (eds), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (pp. 1–15). Nash-
ville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Power, D. and Scott, A.J. (2004). Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture.
London: Routledge.
Rose, T. (1994). Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
London: Wesleyan University Press.
Ruggero, E.C. (2009) Radical green populism: Environmental values in DIY/punk com-
munities. MA thesis, University of Delaware.
Silva, A.S. and Guerra, P. (2015). As palavras do punk (The Words of Punk). Lisbon:
Alêtheia.
Simmel, G. (1950). The Sociology of Georg Simmel. K.H. Wolf trans, ed. and introduc-
tion. New York: The Free Press.
Slater, D. (1997). Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Stahl, G. (2004) ‘It’s like Canada reduced’: Setting the scene in Montreal. In A. Bennett
and K. Kahn-Harris (eds), After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth
Culture (pp. 51–64). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stratton, J. (2010). Skiffle, variety and Englishness. In A. Bennett and J. Stratton (eds),
Britpop and the English Music Tradition (pp. 27–50). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Threadgold, S. (2018). Creativity, precarity and illusio: DIY cultures and ‘choosing
poverty’. Cultural Sociology, doi:10.1177/1749975517722475
Weber, M. (1978 [1919]). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Ber-
keley, CA: University of California Press.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs.
Farnborough: Saxon House.
Part I
Underground music
scenes between the local
and the translocal
Chapter 2
Visibility and conviviality in music

scenes
Will Straw
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
devoid of any pictures of music, Davidson’s book is the opposite. It is full of

photographs of music being made: every image, it seems – including the one
that adorns its cover – is of a band playing in a club. With time, as one reads
through the book, all these images come to look the same. In particular, the
spatiality that seems almost alone in defining the Gunk Punk scene is that of
the generic club. One has the impression that there were no spaces or neigh-
bourhoods with which it was associated, no places in which the scene converged
and drank coffee in the afternoon. Rather, one is faced with a scene held
together by a thin line of taste that joined together, across the United States
and Western Europe, those musicians who were too archival in their tastes to
simply want to make hard-edged punk and too punky in their tastes to simply
want to be 1960s garage band revivalists. ‘Gunk Punk’ was just the name of the
network and of a set of endlessly repeated concerts that formed along this line of
taste. It was visible only in the moments of its enactment.
Scenes and subcultures, visible and invisible

The question of the visibility of musical scenes and subcultures, and the polit-
ical meanings of this visibility, may be said to fall between two positions that
were elaborated in the 1980s and 1990s. One of these is the idea that subcul-
tures, from the moment of their first appearance, are subject to a look: the look
of surveillance, a look that seeks to decode, to understand, to categorize. Classic
subcultures, it was suggested – like the street-corner gatherings of teddy boys or
punks – seek out these looks in order to inhabit them. At the same time, the
behaviours and attitudes of subcultures are devoted to ensuring that the look of
others does not reach the understanding that is one of its objectives. Dick
Hebdige (1989, p. 35) states that:
Subculture forms up in the space between surveillance and the evasion of

surveillance, it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure
of being watched. It is a hiding in the light … Subcultures are both a play
for attention and a refusal, once attention has been granted, to be read
according to the Book.
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:
Getting the Temporary Autonomous Zone started may involve tactics of

violence and defense, but its greatest strength lies in its invisibility – the
State cannot recognize it because History has no definition of it. As soon as
the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish,
leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else,
once again invisible because indefinable in terms of the Spectacle.
(Bey, 1991, p. 405)
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.
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.
Urbanizing scene studies

The other set of signifiers attaching themselves to urban music scenes are those
of urban sociability, of what I would call public conviviality. By relocating itself
within urban cultural studies, the concept of ‘scene’ has been able to leave the
debate over subcultures and tribes, a debate that David Hesmondhalgh (2005)
so expertly summarized several years ago. ‘Scene’ now returns us to the question
of visibility in urban life (e.g. see Casemajor and Straw, 2017). ‘Scene’, as soci-
ologist Alan Blum (2003) once argued, designates the theatricality of urban life,
the ways in which part of the pleasure of the city comes from seeing people
together in convivial situations.
26 W. Straw
However, this image of public conviviality sits in an uneasy relationship with

music or other cultural forms. Does the image of people at Café Olympico in
Mile End reveal the secrets of the music scene or camouflage them? Scenes
make cultural activity visible and decipherable by rendering it public, taking it
from acts of private production and consumption into public contexts of socia
bility, conviviality and interaction. Seeing people who look like musicians or
artists sitting together, drinking coffee, we may think we have witnessed and
understood a scene. Just as clearly, though, scenes make cultural activity invis-
ible and indecipherable by ‘hiding’ cultural productivity behind seemingly
meaningless (or indistinguishable) forms of social life. Five years ago, when both
national and international media sent reporters to cover Montreal’s high-profile
Mile End cultural scene, these countervailing logics of a scene played them-
selves out in ways that were both revealing and amusing. Journalists hung
around the two main Italian coffee shops in Mile End – the conventional ports
of entry to this scene – uncertain about where to begin. They were unsure
whether the easily observed social effervescence in these places was the scene
itself or simply a set of distractions that camouflaged a real, more secret scene to
which they would never gain access.
It is in relation to these ideas that this chapter offers a number of hypotheses
about the place of cultural and musical scenes in city life. The first is that it is
becoming increasingly difficult to separate the notion of scene from a logic of
gentrification. Let us define a scene as that cultural phenomenon that arises
when any purposeful activity acquires a supplement of sociability, and when
that supplement of sociability becomes part of the observable effervescence of
collective life. This is not a complete definition of scene, but I think every defi-
nition of scene must account for a supplement of sociability as one of its constit-
uent features. If there is only cultural work and no sociability, we have little
more than a network or a sphere of cultural production. If, on the other hand,
there is only sociability, and no underlying cultural labour or expression, we are
dealing with little more than the broadly dispersed effervescence of city life.
Scenes translate cultural work into the visibility of public socializing, then offer
the energies of the latter as symptoms of the cultural ferment and creativity that
they thinly veil. This ferment and creativity, then – as is well known – become
instrumentalized within the self-promotion campaigns of cities and their
neighbourhoods.
My second hypothesis follows from this: that what were once marginal or
secondary aspects of scenes – their ‘support’ system – are now fully assimilated
within ideas of creativity and innovation. While I don’t want to labour the cri-
tique of ideas of the creative city or the creative class, I do want to note that
those things that Howard Becker (1982) once saw as part of the ‘support system’
of an art world or scene – cafés, bars and restaurants– are now enshrined as full
players in a culture of creation and innovation. ‘Food is the new rock’, the
Washington Post suggested recently (Richards, 2013), and the displacement of
music by food as the locus of creative energies is visible in a variety of places.
My third hypothesis is that, in the contemporary life of cities, music has

come to be more and more embedded in a generalized conviviality marked by
conversation, the consumption of food and drink, and a structuring of atmo-
spheres in which music has lost some of its centrality. In many respects, this
tendency restores a set of relationships that had been fractured over the last
half-century or more. In many countries, up until the late 1950s, the ‘supper
club’ was a central cultural format: one sat, ate food and drank alcohol, con-
versed with friends and then got up and danced while live performers played.
Then, from the 1960s through to the late 1990s, in countries of the Global
North and elsewhere, music came to be severed from the conviviality of public
eating and drinking. A key development in this severing was the rise, in the
1960s, of the discothèque and the dance club: one no longer went out only in
couples or groups of couples; the taking of drugs to a certain extent displaced
the activity of eating; and the rise of the DJ meant that one danced to unbroken
sequences of records, rather than pausing between songs to return to a table and
to conversation. This severing of relaxed conviviality from the consumption of
music in a sense freed music to move later into the night and to assume more
experimental and oppositional forms.
The late-night consumption of music continues, of course, but I am inter-
ested in the ways in which music and the conviviality of eating/drinking are
now collapsing back on each other. In France, for the past several years, people
have noted the rise of bars à ambiance musicale (bars with musical ambiance) and
the same phenomena is noticeable in Montreal, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Bogota
and other cities that I have visited recently. In France, the bar à ambiance musi-
cale is judged to be a specific kind of venue, requiring a distinct licence from
SACEM, the music rights licensing organization:
Les bars à ambiance musicale are establishments whose principal revenues

come from the sale of drinks and, optionally, food (without a dance floor or
dancing, and without performances aimed at an audience which has come
for the purpose of hearing such) for whom music is an accessory activity but
constitutes an essential element of the environment and background.
(SACEM, n.d., my translation)
In a bar à ambiance musicale, people eat and drink to the accompaniment of

recorded music, usually curated by a DJ. Music recedes from the centrality of
live performance but moves forward from the status of unnoticed background.
The soft buzz of conversation has long been considered, by musicians and others,
as an unwelcome challenge to the unsettling force of music. In the bar à ambi-
ance musicale, conversation has won the battle. Similarly, as these bars host their
largest clientèle in mid-evening, rather than later, music has been pulled back,
in many cases, from its association with the deepest night, from that space/time
in which, historically, the most transgressive forms of expression have been
thought to unfold. While, in neighbourhoods around the world, battles over the
28 W. Straw
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.
Conviviality and the multi-p urpose space

More broadly, we can see changes in the relationship between cultural forms
and spaces of conviviality. In Mexico City, repertory cinemas add restaurants or
bars as appendages, to make up for the declining attraction of cinema itself and
to add sociability to the consumption of cinema. Bookstores in the same city
have added cafés to attract customers and increase revenue. In some cases, these
cafés have become restaurants, with outdoor terraces and curated music, such
that the bookstore becomes little more than a decorative backdrop and heritage
feature. The commercial resurgence of Montreal’s Boulevard Saint-Laurent in
2017 has been ascribed, in part, to the decision by yoga studios and fashion bou-
tiques to add cafés and restaurants with recorded music backdrops to their pre-
mises, to retain customers and contribute to a general sense of social buzz along
the street (Freed, 2017). The broader tendency here is one that seeks to build
possibilities of social interaction into every form of cultural consumption.
In Montreal, as in many other cities, one of the most widely perceived threats
to a certain kind of culture has come with the transformation of almost every
available commercial space into a restaurant or bar. Retail book or record shops
have continued to close, largely as a result of logics internal to their industries,
but venues devoted to live music are closing as well. The restaurants or bars that
replace them do not necessarily or even usually belong to corporate chains; they
are very often opened by genuinely imaginative people for whom food and drink
are full participants in the new culture of urban creativity. But here, again,
many of the cultural processes we once associated with music are now being
taken over by the sale of food and drink. Since the 1960s, music promoters have
played a key role in repurposing older forms of urban architecture: the ballrooms
of the 1930s became the psychedelic concert halls of the 1960s; ethnic social
clubs became punk venues in the 1970s; and abandoned industrial lofts became
performance spaces in the 1980s and 1990s. Now it is restaurants that are
central to this conversion, usually at the expense of small, independent retail
stores, which close, but whose markers of entrepreneurial authenticity are often
maintained by the owners of the restaurants that open within their premises.
My final hypothesis is that, in the current historical moment, the organiza-
tion of culture follows the perception that what is scarce is sociability, not inter-
esting cultural expression. In the 1990s, those who theorized what is called
relational aesthetics in the visual arts came up with a similar idea: what art must
resolve, they argued, is not an absence of meaning but an absence of intercon-
nection (see the various articles collected in Bishop, 2006). Meaning was every-
where, it was claimed; what was scarce was sociability. And so we saw the wide
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.
References
Bey, H. (1991). The temporary autonomous zone: Ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism.
Retrieved from http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html.
Bishop, C. (ed.) (2006). Participation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Blum, A. (2003). The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal: McGill Queen’s Univer-
sity Press.
Casemajor, N. and Straw, W. (eds) (2017). The visuality of scenes. Imaginations: Journal
of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, 7(1). Retrieved from http://imaginations.csj.ualberta.
ca/?p=9149.
Cimon, E. (2016). Montreal New Wave. Documentary. Montreal.
Davidson, E. (2010). We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut, 1988–2001. Milwaukee,
WI: Backbeat Books.
DeGuzmán, M. (2014). Buenas Noches: American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Freed, J. (2017). The Main 2.0 is ‘a street of dreams’. Montreal Gazette, 29 April.
Retrieved from http://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/josh-freed-the-main-2-
0-is-a-street-of-dreams.
Hebdige, D. (1989). Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London: Comedia.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2005). Subculture, scene or tribe: None of the above. Journal of
Youth Studies, 8(1), 21–40.
Johansen, P. (2014). Day trip: A day in Mile End, Montreal’s ‘hipster capital’. Ottawa
Citizen, 15 January. Retrieved from www.ottawacitizen.com/Trip+Mile+Canada+hipst
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.
Richards, C. (2013). Are foodies quietly killing rock and roll? Washington Post, 10 May.
Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/are-foodies-quietly-
killing-rock-and-roll/2013/05/10/632f1718-b8fb-11e2-b94c-b684dda07add_print.html.
SACEM [Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique] (n.d.). Règles géné-
rales d’autorisation et de tarification: Bars à ambiance musicale. Retrieved from https://
clients.sacem.fr/docs/autorisations/RGAT_Bars_ambiance_musicale.pdf.
Talbot, D. (2007). Regulating the Night: Race, Culture and Exclusion in the Making of the
Night-Time Economy. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Trapunski, R. (2012). The new weird Canada: Exploring the emerging music under-
ground. Retrieved from http://archive.fo/WBaz0.
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
nineteenth-century dandy and the contemporary punk. Massimo Canevacci

(1990) focuses his attention on another typically Parisian (and to a certain
extent Baudelairean) image: the flâneur or engrossed wanderer, considered by
Walter Benjamin as the dialectic image of nineteenth-century urban culture.
Like the flâneur, the punk lives in the metropolis, his stage on which to
represent himself: he makes squares and streets his home; he makes his body the
emblem of his anguish; and he takes marginality as his way of living.
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.
Pablo el Podrido (Pablo the Rotten)

Four months after I got to Mexico, in April 1991, a chavo member of Neza’s
Mierdas Punk called me on the phone. I had met him at El Chopo, a street
market for all the subcultures, and Maritza, a Peruvian sociologist and very good
friend of mine who was doing her PhD thesis about Mexican rock ’n’ roll, had
talked to him about me. He said his name was Pablo and he wanted to visit me
and show me some videotapes about his gang in Neza. What follows are frag-
ments of the diary I wrote, including some impressions of my relationship
with him.
36 C. Feixa
26/4/91. Pablo visits me in the afternoon. He seems a sensitive, somewhat

sad boy. He is about 22, although he looks older: he is married and has a
months-old baby. He is wearing working boots, jeans, a metal bracelet and
a white shirt with the inscription, ‘We don’t vomit what we feel, just what
we know’. He works as a freelance roof waterproofer, although he also has
chambeado [worked] as a fire-eater, masked fighter and factory worker. Since
he has had to face new family responsibilities he doesn’t look punk
anymore, but when he can he disguises again, like he did last Sunday when
he went to a gig of Eskorbuto (a Basque Punk band). He is very punctual to
our appointment and brings some fanzines with poems he wrote. Without
much introduction, he starts the story of his life and he even asks to be
recorded. I record four hours with one interruption to eat.
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
background of desolated streets, without any pavement, with rubbish piling

up in some of the corners, the graffiti is in perfect symbiosis with the eco-
system. Another visual impression is given by the crosses in the streets.
Pablo had already mentioned them during our interview. They are there in
memory of chavos (men) who have been murdered in fights between gangs,
robberies or police fire. The most impressing ones are two standing together
in a street where two morritos (young boys) from the Diablillos were killed.
They are surrounded by metal tanks with wilted flowers: ‘Three members of
this gang have been killed already. I’m showing you so that you can’t think
I’m making things up. Violence is daily routine.’ We meet two Diablillos
and we start to talk. Last Saturday evening there was a fight in the neigh-
bourhood between a local gang and a gang from another area, at a gig. One
chavo ended up in hospital, and there’s fear of revenge. Chavos inquire
about Spanish rock ’n’ roll. A third member of the gang joins us later on,
with his string vest, all in black. Leaning against the wall, the gang
members slowly join in, in the calm of a Sunday afternoon, after the
thunder of the Saturday night.
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
Between popular and underground

culture
An analysis of Bucharest urban
culture
Anda Georgiana Becuț
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
in which clusters of producers, musicians, and fans collectively share their

common musical tastes and collectively distinguish themselves from others.
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.
Bucharest underground music scene

In Romania, underground music began to develop after 2000. Although almost
200 music bands have played in concerts and festivals since then, only around
20 music bands remain active, including small and new bands. Few bands
managed to survive more than ten years, with most of them falling apart only
after several years of existence. The bands that managed to remain in the scene
for more than a couple of years were mainly those whose members were deter-
mined to play despite the difficult financial conditions from the first years, when
the members of the bands had to invest their own money in their music
production.
So how do we define underground music in Romania? The analysis of the
discussions on this topic revealed the fact that a music band is considered to be
underground according to the number of spectators who can be mobilized in a
concert (under 3000 spectators) or according to the band’s artistic message,
which is an experimental or an alternative one. An underground band addresses
a narrow segment of the population and plays non-commercial music that
cannot be heard on the radio or TV.
According to my informants, only rock and hip-hop bands are considered to
be underground. Another definition of underground music is linked to altern-
ative music, which is a music style ‘where the verse is very low and the chorus is
very high, referring to the alternation of rhythms and sounds with a particular
attention given to music text’ (underground music artist’s definition).
Romanian underground artists address social themes in their songs, some of
them related to poverty, social injustice, young people’s problems and corrup-
tion. They are not influenced by music-market expectations, but do their job for
pleasure – as a hobby – rather than as a business or for profit. Many of the artists
have a second job, working mainly in the creative sectors (in architecture, mar-
keting and publicity, IT and so on). The underground music scene is not a
profitable activity, as there are not sufficient festivals and not enough spaces for
this music; furthermore, there is no radio station dedicated to this genre – Radio
Guerrilla used to promote the underground music scene, but was closed down
between 2013 and 2016.
44 A.G. Becuț
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):
Subcarpați is an explosive mixture of old and new. It’s an eclectic combina-

tion that brings together melancholy Romanian folk songs, Romanian unity
songs, traditional instruments and the rhythms of trip-hop, dubstep, hip-
hop and dancehall.
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
strange or funny names for the band – for example, Abnormin Deffect, High-
light Kenosis, Travka, Psiho Simphony.
Underground spaces in Bucharest: gentrification

and reconversion
This analysis is meant to highlight the profile of the spaces where underground
music is performed, and their interdependence with the cultural expressions
that are produced or distributed in these places. One of the main findings is that
the spaces analysed are entertainment or leisure spaces – part of the city’s cul-
tural infrastructure and cultural consumption. We consider these places to be
alternative cultural consumption spaces because they are an alternative to the
public cultural infrastructure that is directed especially to mass consumption of
‘popular’ cultural genres.
In order to understand the features of these spaces in Bucharest, we present
the definition of the concepts used and make the distinction between the
commercial mainstream, and alternative or underground spaces. We will make
use of Chatterton’s and Hollands’ (2003, p. 93) definition of the commercial
mainstream space as ‘a place of capital accumulation’ and acknowledge that
‘only coincidently does it has anything to do with creativity, diversity and
access’. Moreover, they are profit-oriented entertainment places with the
purpose of attracting both mass and niche audiences, consisting of young
people in search of places that correspond to their expectations and their dis-
tinction practices.
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.
Although the places analysed correspond to this definition of alternative or

underground spaces, there are some differences as far as their localization is con-
cerned. In Chatterton and Hollands’ analysis, the alternative spaces are located
at the margins of cities because of a lack of consumer financial strength. In
Bucharest, they can be found especially in the historic city centre, although
there are a few around the city’s periphery. This is partly because corporations
recently entered Bucharest’s night-time economy, and partly because of the
clustering of leisure spaces that has created a habit of cultural and entertainment
46 A.G. Becuț
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:
In a concert the bands manage to gather approximately 1000–2000 people

– and this is also the maximum capacity of a club in Bucharest. The bands
that rally more than 2000 people are scarce and are facing a lack of space.
There were initiatives for setting up concert spaces in (former) industrial
halls, there was the Music Hall somewhere around Mihai Bravu. There are
three or four clubs with a large capacity for concerts, such as Fabrica, Silver
Church and … the majority are found in the Old City of Bucharest. There
is also Turbohale, but it’s far from the centre of the city and the people only
come if they are offered something of quality.
(PR professional for an underground music band)
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
p rovisions refer mainly to alcohol and tobacco consumption, noise management

and fire safety).
After a long period of censorship, the need for leisure activities and enter-
tainment was huge, and the Romanian people were eager to try different forms
of arts and culture. But the old cultural infrastructure and cultural spaces were
not adequate for the new forms of artistic expression in terms of capacity, amen-
ities and design in various cultural subsectors – especially music, theatre and
visual arts. A new category of actors was therefore born in the cultural field,
consisting mainly of private spaces for businesses combining leisure, entertain-
ment and artistic performances:
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)
Gentrification of the Bucharest city centre is a recent phenomenon, compared

with other European capitals, because the buildings were nationalized in the
communist period. In the transition period, the process of property restitution
was slow and many buildings are still in dispute. In some cases, the nouveaux
riche bought the spaces and evacuated the tenants (many of them members of
vulnerable groups, such as people with low incomes or Roma people).
Some of the newly renovated buildings in the city centre have been trans-
formed into restaurants, shops, night-clubs or music clubs, with very few of them
having any approval from the institutions in charge of fire prevention. Moreover,
many of these buildings have no resistance in case of an earthquake, so they are at
risk of collapse at any time, thus endangering patrons’ lives. This was the main
reason why, after the Colectiv Club event, nearly all these spaces were closed
down. Some of the businesses from the city centre moved to safer buildings, while
others improved their conditions and obtained approval from the fire station.
In Bucharest, the development of club culture over the last 25 years has been
based on the pillars of an inadequate infrastructure, a low level of public regula-
tion and control, and a high degree of interest in entertainment. The case of
underground music clubs in Romania is very much like that of the Australian
East Coast during the period 1950–70, where ‘the pub rock boom benefited by
the expansion of radio and music television programs and also by corruption,
lax policing and a blatant failure to observe licensing regulations’ (Homan,
2002, p. 92). Similar to the Romanian case, the fire that led to seven deaths at
the amusement centre at Luna Park in Sydney in June 1979 prompted changes
48 A.G. Becuț
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).
Underground music and the audience–artist

relationship
This gentrification trend is highlighted through the consumer/public profile.
These places are visited and preferred by young people, teenagers and young
adults, as well as middle-aged people in search of ‘cool’ places.
Researchers became more and more interested in this social phenomenon
and used different concepts in order to explain the diversity of forms of expres-
sion and practices related to youth culture. These included the model of subcul-
tures from the Chicago School, club cultures (Malbon, 1999) and ‘neo-tribes’
(Bennett, 2001). In this context, music offers the opportunity for young people
to build ‘magical identities’ in their search for ‘an identity which is separate
from the roles and expectations imposed by family, school and work’ (Brake,
2003, p. 166).
The audience profile in the Bucharest underground music scene is influenced
by a venue’s design and structure, depending on the genre of music delivered in
that space. The cultural genre or the event type will shape the place’s identity
and the public/consumer’s profile. These ‘sensescape’ spaces are defined through
the ambience designed by the owner of that place, and in this way the latter
structures the profile of the future audience/consumer. The research showed the
direct connection between the public’s age and the genres of music, with some
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.
They mentioned the importance of ventilation, which is very important during

the performance – both for the artists and for the audience. Another important
criterion mentioned was the acoustics, both from the artistic viewpoint and
from the standpoint of the public’s satisfaction:
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.
Last time when we performed in Expirat, we went there, we tested the

equipment also before the concert started and the basses died, to this day I
don’t know why, it’s still an enigma, Miki panicked and said, ‘That’s it, we
50 A.G. Becuț
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.
Unfortunately, none of my informants mentioned the safety of the artists and

audience, which after the Colectiv fire proved to be the most important cri-
terion in choosing a location for performance or entertainment.
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).
References
Bennett, A. (2001). Cultures of Popular Music. Berkshire: Open University Press.
Brake, M.C. (2003). Comparative Youth Culture: The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth
Subcultures in America, Britain and Canada. New York: Routledge.
Chatterton, P. and Hollands, R. (2002). Theorising urban playscapes: Producing, regu-
lating and consuming youthful nightlife city spaces. Urban Studies, 39(1): 95–116.
Chatterton, P. and Hollands, R. (2003). Urban Nightscapes: Youth Cultures, Pleasure
Spaces and Corporate Power. London: Routledge.
Chelcea, L. (2008) Bucureștiul postindustrial: Memorie, dezindustrializare și regenerare
urbană. Bucharest: Polirom.
Goodbye to Gravity (2015). ‘The Day We Die’. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/
watch?v=APQLbhk-rfY.
Guardian (2012). July’s best music from across the MAP. Guardian, 18 July. Retrieved
from www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2012/jul/18/music-alliance-pact-july.
Homan, S. (2002). Cultural industry or social problem? The case of Australian live
music. Media International Australia, 102(1): 88–100.
Malbon, B. (1999). Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London: Routledge.
Mitchell, H.F. and MacDonald R.A.R. (2016). What you see is what you hear: The
importance of visual priming in music performer identification. Psychology of Music,
44(6): 1–11.
Peterson, R.A. and Bennett, A. (2004). Introducing music scenes. In Bennett, A. and
Peterson, R.A. (eds), Music Scenes: Local, Trans-local and Virtual (pp. 1–16). Nash-
ville, TN. Vanderbilt University Press.
Tas, H. (2014). Melodies of resistance: Islamist music in secular Turkey. Social Compass,
61(3), 368–83.
Tuşa E. (2016). Colectiv-Dezastrul care a schimbat o epocǎ (Colectiv, the Disaster that
Changed an Era). Sfera Politicii, 14: 19–30.
Chapter 5
DIY as a constitutive resource of

the specific punk capital in France
Pierig Humeau
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).
The independent punk-s pace polarities

One of the characteristics of the punk space is the close link between multi-
positional producers – musicians, fanzines, labels – and their public. This means
that the receivers are often members of the bands, or participate in the organiza-
tion of concerts. The mere concept of this space – the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos
– acts as the power of each individual’s know-how. A graphic representation of
the independent punk space as a whole will be proposed, without ignoring the
spaces of producers and bands, and the effects of internal distinctions between
bands.
The modalities were chosen with the aim of rebuilding the punk space by
putting together the variables of position-taking – such as practices and musical
tastes – with the agents’ positions, both social and professional. Practices and
opinions will be considered hypothetically as capable of ‘explaining’ the social
54 P. Humeau
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 space of position-t aking

The correspondence analysis (Figure 5.1) permits the establishment of the
different polarities as far as taste is concerned inside the independent punk
space by opposing the different generations as well as the politico-artistic ageing.
These generational differences go beyond the factor of age or seniority, and
reflect a series of oppositions between the newcomers and the already estab-
lished ones, expressed by what we will be calling the punk capital and the DIY.
The first horizontal axis represents 23.53 per cent of total space inertia. The
modalities that contribute the most in the creation of axis 1 are, for the left side
of the graph, affiliation with organizations: ‘no’ (6.98%); current militant activ-
ities: ‘no’ (5.32%); musical activities: ‘no’ (4.68%); ancient militant activities:
‘no’ (4.12%); frequency: less than once a month (3.95%); other readings: ‘no’
(3.89%); seniority: less than a year (3.18%); motivation: to party (2.33%); and
fanzine reading: ‘no’ (2.10%). For the right side, they are ancient militant activ-
ities: ‘yes’ (2.95%); current militant activities: ‘yes’ (2.79%); and motivations:
‘for activism’ (1.82%). The contributions in the first axis reflect the indicators
of proximity (or of distance) to the militant activities. Axis 1 was thus identified
as the one opposing the ‘militant capital –’ in the west side of the graph and the
‘militant capital +’ in the east side of the graph.
The second axis represents 6.37 per cent of total inertia. On the south side,
it is structured by: other readings: ‘yes, books’ (8.07%); other readings: ‘yes,
science fiction’ (4.33%); average style: ‘rock ’n’ roll’ (4.08%); other readings:
‘yes, history novels’ (3.65%); other readings: ‘yes, graphic novel’ (3.18%); other
readings: ‘yes, magazine’ (2.18%); newspaper: ‘Le Monde’ (1.93%); other read-
ings: ‘yes, philosophy’ (1.85%); magazine, ‘Rock Sound’ (1.80%); ‘other styles’
(1.75%). On the north side of the graph, it is: other readings: ‘no’ (4.87%); sen-
iority: ‘between three and four years’ (2.57%); type of place: ‘an artistic squat’
(2.12%); motivations: ‘for activism’ (2.08%); current militant: ‘yes’ (1.70%).
This second axis follows a double logic defined by cultural capital. The clouds
of points are distributed according to the relationship to reading and the
sequencing of these practices. In the half-chart situated on the south, we find
those who read the most; we can easily distinguish among them two poles. On
one hand, on the south-west part, we have magazines more or less related to the
punk space and what we call ‘amplified musics’ (Rock Sound, Punk Rawk). On
the east side, readings concern a larger panel: press, novels – science fiction,
polar; books – philosophy, history; and comics. The half-chart situated on the
north represents the ‘non-readers’.
Figure 5.1 Space of practices and opinions (cloud of 124 active modalities in the factorial plan 1–2).
56 P. Humeau
However, if we look beyond the reading practices, which is an objective indi-

cator of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1970), two of the modalities mentioned
above seem to be very interesting. On one hand, the most important contribu-
tion in the creation of this axis is ‘average style of concert the respondent goes
to’, namely rock ’n’ roll (4.08%). This modality is situated in the south part of
the chart, almost in the intersection of the vertical axis. The second modality
(‘other styles’: heavy metal, techno) is projected on the south-west quadrant of
the chart. In the creation of this ‘cultural capital’ axis, we notice that average
styles are reinforced by adjacent cultural practices like ‘(no) reading’. This way,
average styles evoked by the respondents and knowing the bands reflect globally
specific dispositions.
Observing the contributions – less important in percentage terms – seems to
be of great interest. Indeed, after the modalities mentioned above comes a series
of styles and of bands described by the respondents as independent punk bands.
In the north-east part of the chart we find the styles ‘punk’, ‘hardcore punk’,
‘Oi!’ and the bands RAB, RABHOP and Les Maux de la rue. For the south-
west, it is ‘rock ’n’ roll’ and ‘other styles’ and Guerilla Poubelle. For the south-
east part, it is Ludwig von 88, Oberkampf and Burning Heads. The above
oppositions are based on a double dichotomy.
The first opposition concerns the south-east part of the chart, which seems
rather oriented towards the past and expresses a certain punk cultural elitism
based on a historic knowledge of this space, with bands like Oberkampf and
Ludwig von 88, as opposed to the south-west, where the average style is ‘other
styles’. The north part of the graph tends to question the legitimate aesthetic
ideals produced by the amateurs of the south-east of this space. This means that
the agents situated in the north of the graph quote rather small, contemporary,
politicized bands, on upward mobility and seeking recognition. They consider
that the punks of the 1980s belong to the past. On the contrary, those of the
south-east quadrant quote the 1970s and 1980s bands as if the latter still con-
tinued to define the good taste of this space. We find the band Parabellum next
to the horizontal axis. This old group reconciles the two east regions. Regarding
these first two axes, the bands Berurier Noirs and Tagada Jones (in the centre of
the chart) are uncontroversial for all the respondents.
The combination of the two main axes brings out three poles that intersect
the effects of political and artistic ageing. In the south-east region of the chart,
we find the younger respondents who declare not having partisan or affiliation
activities; for them, the average taste is rather ska music or other styles. The
punk rock band Guérilla Poubelle is one of the references for this group. With
regard to critic magazines of rock’n’roll and punk music, we observe that they
are very visible socially, mainly to young people, as they declare that they are
devoted to this type of reading. This group’s statistical analysis enables us to
assume that some of these young people are in a situation of transition towards
other musical spaces, closer to their social dispositions of origin. Their relation
to this punk space is more distant. This socially miscellaneous region represents
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).
correspondence analysis enables an explanation of some principles regarding

tastes and practices, through the projection of the social positions of the agents
inside the space of tastes. The aim of this process is to demonstrate the exist-
ence of links that bring together the objective social positions in the social
space and the musico-political position-takings in the punk space (Figure 5.2).
The space of positions inside the space of tastes

Six variables were projected into additional elements (37 modalities): sex, age,
profession, degree, level of qualification and father’s profession.
On the vertical axis, we can see a reversed social distribution that opposes
the working classes in the upper side of the chart, to the middle and upper
classes in the bottom of the chart. On the same axis, the level of qualification
confirms professional positions. The more we step away from the top of the
graph, the more the agents possess an important school capital. The additional
variables on the factorial map oppose agents who are professionally ‘established’
or students pursuing their studies to agents who are in rather precarious profes-
sional situations. Newcomers are geographically spread out near intermediary
and higher professions.
The horizontal axis leads to the hypothesis of an early politico-artistic ageing,
since the age curve approximately follows the seniority curve. Characterized by
militant capital, this axis helps in differentiating the younger participants, who
are still studying and not declaring their political affiliations – the newcomers –
from the established avant-gardes and the avant-gardes in track to recognition, who
have or have had militant activities. Those who have a post-baccalaureate
qualification are already next to the latter. Even if this does not come as a sur-
prise, we ought to underline this precocity since half the post-baccalaureates are
younger than 20. The chart shows that they appear at the intersection of the
two categories of avant-gardes. We can assume that these effects are due to the
structure of this space. If the cultural and school capital plays a role on militant
careers, we thus notice a first transfer of school capital converted to militant
capital. Finally, what brings together these avant-garde groups is, on one side,
the confirmed links between politics and musical style and, on the other, their
leisure time.1
The group of avant-gardes in track to recognition comes together by the possib-
ility of acquiring a common musico-militant culture. For these fractions, which
are very poorly qualified, it is about converting practical competences into social
and militant capital. Acting becomes a duty inside the group. For this part of
the chart, it does not come as a surprise to find some working-class fractions, as
well as young post-baccalaureate students with sympathy for anarchist move-
ments, anti-fascist movements and movements to protect human rights. These
movements are original because of the forms they take – flexible associative
structures, formed as friends’ networks, with a wide range of struggles – unem-
ployment, accommodation – as well as because of the type of agents they rally,
60 P. Humeau
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.
A space of possible careers

Based on these analyses, we could consider that the creation of a punk ‘career’
follows a succession of non-linear, non-mechanical phases in which individual
autonomy and DIY contribute to self-definition. In this space, the newcomer,
situated on the west side of the graph, has the role of a fan, an element that acts
as a rite of practical initiation according to the principles of imitation and iden-
tification of famous bands. This participant undertakes the DIY and the ‘get on
with it’ as a framework for normative action. Through a network of friends, they
will go to concerts, then create music bands and play cover songs that are
already famous. After all that, the punk apprentice will engage in a series of ‘self-
produced’ and ‘self-managed’ actions, the artistic and political value of which
will be evaluated by their peers.
Three typical examples taken from the qualitative inquiry will now be pre-
sented in order to demonstrate the DIY effects on the individual paths.
Tom’s profile is caracteristic of the newcomer. He is 19 years old and in the
last year of a technical high school. His father is a mason and his mother is a
‘line worker’ in a factory. He listens to punk music every day. Tom declares that
he goes to concerts to meet people and to talk with the musicians. Some of his
friends play in a ska-punk band. He has not tried to play yet, but seems inter-
ested in doing so. Fanzines provide another perspective, even if he says he has
trouble managing a computer. Finally, during the interview, he declares being
close to anarchist milieux.
Those in the category of avant-gardes in track to recognition consider the DIY
as a conviction and illusio. Mathieu, 26, is a singer in his punk rock band. He
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).
References
Bennett, A. (2006). Punk’s not dead: The significance of punk rock for an older genera-
tion of fans. Sociology, 40(2): 219–35.
62 P. Humeau
Bennett, A. (2009). ‘Heritage rock’: Rock music, representation and heritage discourse.
Poetics, 37: 474–89.
Bennett, A. (2012). Pour une réévaluation du concept de contre-culture. Volume!, 9(1):
19–37.
Bourdieu, P. (1992). Les règles de l’art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil.
Bourdieu, P. (2002). Les conditions sociales de la circulation internationale des idées.
Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 145, 3–8. Retrieved from www.persee.fr/doc/
arss_0335-5322_2002_num_145_1_2793.
Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.C. (1970). La Reproduction: Éléments pour une théorie du
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.
Colegrave, S. and Sullivan, C. (2002). Punk: Hors limites. Paris: Seuil.
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.
Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds) (1975). Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in
Post-War Britain. London: Routledge.
Hannerz, U. (1992). Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Hebdige, D. (1996). Système du mod. Réseaux, 80: 71–80.
Humeau, P. (2011). Sociologie de l’espace punk «indépendant» français: apprentissages,
trajectoires et vieillissement politico-artistiques. PhD thesis, Université Picardie Jule
Vernes, Amiens.
Lebaron, F. and Le Roux, B. (2015). La méthodologie de Pierre Bourdieu en action. Espace
culturel, espace social et analyse des données. Paris: Dunod.
Le Roux, B. and Rouanet, H. (2004). Geometric Data Analysis from Correspondence Ana-
lysis to Structured Data Analysis. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Lydon, J. (1996). Sex Pistols: Rotten by Lydon. Paris: Camion Blanc.
Moore, R. (2007). Friends don’t let friends listen to corporate rock: Punk as a field of cul-
tural production. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36(4): 438–74.
Parker, A. (2004). Sid Vicious: Too Fast to Live. London: Glitter Books.
Rouanet, H. and Le Roux, B. (1993). Analyses des données multidimensionnelles. Paris: Dunod.
Rouanet, H. and Le Roux, B. (2010). Multiple Correspondence Analysis. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Sapiro, G. (ed.) (2008). Translatio: Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la
mondialisation. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Savage, J. (2005). England’s Dreaming: Les Sex Pistols et le punk. Paris: Allia.
Chapter 6
Boys in black, girls in punk

Gender performances in the Goth
and hardcore punk scenes in
Northern Germany
Yvonne Niekrenz
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.
Background and methodology

In adolescence, teenagers are confronted with the dominant societal expecta-
tion of reproducing gendered identities and representations. This means display-
ing one’s own gender in a binary gender system, either as a man or as a woman.
The hegemonic gender model is based on heterosexual gender identity and
gender roles, which are based on biological gender attributes. During the youth
phase – which youth research still conceptualizes as a moratorium (Erikson,
1959) – adolescents are able to gain experience about their societal environ-
ment and their own bodies. Research shows that gender-related positioning is
part of the moratorium and is expressed through exaggerations, ironic displays
64 Y. Niekrenz
or hyper-pointed emphasis (Fend, 2005, p. 222; Hübner-Funk, 2003). Exagger-

atedly or ironically doing gender is frequently found in youth cultures, as it has a
central meaning for adolescents’ coexistence with their peers (Brill, 2007).
Within the Goth scene, male adolescents use androgynous forms of self-
expression. Research on female adolescents in the male-dominated hardcore
punk scene is important because these young women occasionally display idio-
syncratic representations of femininity, including baggy jeans, athletic wear,
khakis, cargo or military shorts, plain or band T-shirts and band hoodies. Of
course, what is fashionable in one branch of the hardcore scene may be frowned
upon in another; nevertheless, for young women in hardcore punk, personal
comfort is highly influential, making it rare to find them in court shoes, lace gar-
ments or slinky mini-dresses.
With regard to Goth and hardcore punk, the following questions arise: What
kind of self-interpretations of gender do young men in the Goth scene display?
Which idiosyncratic representations of femininity do women demonstrate in
the male-dominated hardcore punk scene? To what extent do they cross or shift
the boundary norms of a heterosexual gender order? How do they find spaces
and places of belonging?
Narrative interviews with members of two specific scenes in Northern
Germany are used here. The narrative interview envisages a setting that encour-
ages and stimulates an interviewee to tell a story about some significant event in
his or her life and social context (Jovchelovitch and Bauer, 2000). These inter-
views were collected in research projects at the University of Rostock in the
years 2010 and 2011. The student interviewers had personal experience with
and access to the Goth and hardcore punk scenes. They had only rough guide-
lines, in order to give participants as much room as possible for their own views
on their youth culture and biography. The interviewees were between 20 and 30
years old. Six interviews were evaluated for this chapter, using the
reconstructive-hermeneutic approach (Soeffner, 2004). Three young men from
the Goth scene and three young women from the hardcore punk scene in the
city of Rostock talked about their (adolescent and current) self-enactments and
observations in these scenes. To protect the anonymity of the interviewees,
pseudonyms have been used.
Youth-c ultural enactment of gender

Research about youth culture has a long tradition. One outcome is the con-
sideration of the body at an early stage and the importance of symbols, rituals
and the practice of dance and movement. Nonetheless, researchers have often
neglected the role of gender and gender enactment. In 1976, McRobbie and
Garber (2000, p. 12) criticized the discursive exclusion of girls in youth culture
research: ‘Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth-
cultural groupings.’ Nowadays, the amount of research involving girls and young
woman has increased (e.g. Rohmann, 2007), but research still has to overcome
Boys in black, girls in punk 65
classic gender attributions. In the end, it is necessary to ask how adolescents in

youth cultures display gender at all (Stauber, 2011).
Both the youth cultures observed below are rooted in punk. However, they
have developed beyond their punk origins in terms of their mode of expression
and way of life. The Goth scene and hardcore punk are, first and foremost,
music-oriented scenes, even though followers express themselves not only in
their music preferences but also through a specific way of life. Goths stand for
values such as non-violence, tolerance and peacefulness (Hodkinson, 2004).
They engage in topics from their everyday lives, such as lyrics, painting and
photography (Hitzler and Niederbacher, 2010, pp. 63ff ) and are often seen as
apolitical and introverted. Aesthetic self-expression and doing individuality
matter to them. Members of the hardcore scene also understand music and way
of life as a single unit. One prominent lifestyle adopted by hardcore punks is
straight edge, which adheres to abstinence from intoxicants (including alcohol
and nicotine) and a vegetarian (or, in many cases, vegan) diet (see Haenfler,
2006). Their way of life is ultimately aimed at political and societal change. In
the following, insights are given into youth-cultural performance of gender in
the Goth and hardcore punk scenes.
Youth-c ultural enactment of gender in the Goth scene

The Goth scene – also commonly termed the ‘dark scene’ – is one of the most
multifaceted youth culture scenes with a broad range of musical sub-styles
(Schmidt and Neumann-Braun, 2004). The participants distinguish between
two style trends – ‘guitar dominated’ (Gothic rock) and ‘electronic’ (such as
electronic body music) – which not only differ musically, but also with regard to
outfit, styling and dance style. The three interviewees align themselves with
‘conventional’ guitar-dominated music, which is also more relevant for exam-
ining the scene under the gender perspective. Here, divergences from dominant
male body images and the associated normative gender images manifest them-
selves more clearly. Ages within the scene vary from approximately 14 to 40
(Hitzler, Bucher and Niederbacher, 2005, p. 72) and the male-to-female ratio
among (post-)adolescents is relatively balanced. In the Goth scene, both women
and men use makeup, wear skirts and display a noticeable amount of jewellery;
they colour and style their hair elaborately or paint their fingernails. Therefore,
a tendency towards androgyny or an idealization of the female is often attrib-
uted to the scene. A blurring of conventional gender boundaries seems to be a
characteristic trait of the Goth scene. It seems to generate a kind of genderless
sphere (Brill, 2007). In her study of Goth culture, Brill describes how this sphere
theoretically enables Goths to perform as much gender as they like. This often
leads to female hyper-femininity and male androgyneity (2007, pp. 109ff ).
At the beginning of the interviewees’ narratives, gender plays an inferior role
for the two interviewees Paul and Morthar. However, Paul explicitly focuses on
gender later when it comes to makeup for men:
66 Y. Niekrenz
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)
Through self-presentation and by playing with bodily displays and emotions,

Manu does identity work. His gender portrayal uses a broad repertoire of strat-
egies by exceeding familiar norms and sometimes even mocking them. When he
flirts with ways of presenting resources considered to be feminine, this also leads
to questions about his sexual orientation from strangers:
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:
In part, as a member of the male community, I am ashamed to be male, yes

when I see what many men’s habitus are like nowadays. It’s not my thing, I
don’t fit into that.
(Manu, p. 31)
He is repulsed by a stereotypical enactment of masculinity and against the con-

ventional masculine self-enactment.
Especially in light of the postmodern increase in insecurity (Beck, 1992),
identity work has become increasingly important (Keupp et al., 1999). Manu’s
interview shows how the possibilities of playfully trying things out with regard
to bodily presentation are used within the scene. For his identity search, these
divergences from dominant male body images and flexibility in visually repre-
sentations of masculinity were important. He presents himself as self-confident,
with a tendency towards extravagance. Playing with variations on masculinity
gained Manu experiences that are also adaptable to other areas of life, where
reflexivity and a mindset of critical thinking (e.g. dealing with a patriarchal
society) are needed.
68 Y. Niekrenz
Youth-c ultural enactment of gender in hardcore punk

Hardcore is a music-based, male-dominated youth culture that developed out of
the early 1980s punk scene in the United States (Haenfler, 2006). Nowadays, the
scene presents itself as translocal (Lorig and Vogelgesang, 2011). The average age
of scene members varies from 20 to 25 (Schulze, 2007). The music is dominated
by aggressive-sounding guitars and screamed vocals. The three female interview-
ees named extensive tattoos, tunnels in the ear lobes, piercings and band T-shirts
as typical styling elements of hardcore. Inside knowledge is very important for
membership of the scene. According to their narratives, the women interviewed
deal intensively with the music, the lyrics and background information on bands
and sub-styles. They flag up their inside knowledge and thus also set boundaries
for outsiders. They describe themselves as accepted as part of the scene because
they study band histories and lyrics. In Katrin’s narratives, the female outsiders are
identified as ‘dollies’ (diminutive plus metaphor ‘doll’!) thereby earmarking out-
siders as female. There are those ‘who actually have no business being there and
… who have no idea what kind of concerts they’re attending’ (Katrin, p. 7). The
‘dollies’, or ‘bimbos’ as they are also known, are stigmatized as ‘someone’s girl-
friend’. They don’t have inside knowledge and are called ‘coat-racks’ within the
scene. The term ‘coat-rack’ refers to them holding jackets and back-packs for their
boyfriends while they dance. Schulze (2007) also found this categorization in her
study on women in hardcore. She describes this category as typical for the estab-
lished girls who want to prevent competition from newly arrived girls. The follow-
ing interview passage also leads to this interpretation:
Interviewer: Dollies? Why do you think they are there?
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
(similar to pogo, but without the vertical mobility). These rambunctious

encounters in violent dancing are entirely intentional by the members of the
scene. Moshing is an intensive physical experience, and can be understood as a
means of subcultural integration (Inhetveen, 2004). Based on the interview
material used here, the pit can be interpreted as a representative venue for self-
expression. The brawniness, strength and power emanating from youthful bodies
are demonstrated. Girls rarely dance there and, as a consequence, young women
are marked out as unusual and different. Most girls remain in the background
and watch the band from the other end of the room (Schulze, 2007, p. 93).
Katrin also states that she would rather stay in the background when dancing:
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).
Analysis and summary

For adolescents, the youth cultures of Goth and hardcore punk open up courses
of action in terms of the enactment of gender. Young men in the Goth scene in
Rostock use the appealing opportunity the scene provides to present themselves
by acting out a beauty of the kind traditionally ascribed to females. Manu’s flirt-
ing with queerness, for instance, gives him a different perspective on gender.
The reactions provoked by his self-enactment in a relatively provincial region
lead him into self-reflection and a critical view of gender stereotypes. The girls
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.
References
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.
Mitscherlich, M. (1987). Die Friedfertige Frau. Frankfurt: S. Fischer.

Niekrenz, Y. and Witte, M.D. (2011). Zur Bedeutung des Körpers in der Lebensphase
Jugend. In Y. Niekrenz and M.D. Witte (eds), Jugend und Körper. Leibliche Erfahrung-
swelten (pp. 7–20). Munich: Juventa.
Rohmann, G. (ed.) (2007). Krasse Töchter. Mädchen in Jugendkulturen. Berlin: Archiv der
Jugendkulturen.
Schmidt, A. and Neumann-Braun, K. (2004). Die Welt der Gothics: Spielräume düster kon-
notierter Transzendenz. Wiesbaden: VS.
Schulze, M. (2007). Mädchen im hardcore: Not just boys’ fun? In G. Rohmann (ed.),
Krasse Töchter. Mädchen in Jugendkulturen (pp. 91–105). Berlin: Archiv der Jugendkul-
turen.
Soeffner, H.-G. (2004). Auslegung des Alltags – Der Alltag der Auslegung. Zur wissenssoziol-
ogischen Konzeption einer sozialwissenschaftlichen Hermeneutik. Constance: UVK.
Stauber, B. (2007). Selbstinszenierungen junger Szene-Aktivistinnen: Gender-
Konstruktionen in Jugendkulturen. In G. Rohmann (ed.), Krasse Töchter. Mädchen in
Jugendkulturen (pp. 32–43). Berlin: Archiv der Jugendkulturen.
Stauber, B. (2011). Androgynität und Gender-Switching in Jugendkulturen? Doing
gender differently – Geschlechtervariationen in jugendkulturellen Körperinszenierun-
gen. In Y. Niekrenz and M.D. Witte (eds.), Jugend und Körper. Leibliche Erfahrung-
swelten (pp. 223–37). Munich: Juventa.
Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures. Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge:
Polity Press.
Part II
Music and DIY cultures

DIY or die!
Chapter 7
Music, protest politics, DIY and

identity in the Basque Country
Ion Andoni del Amo Castro
The Basque social space

The Basque Country has been constituted from the end of the nineteenth
century by different historical narratives that articulate the national subject
from diverse positions (Sáenz de Viguera, 2007). To this national issue is added
a historical contradiction: a strong economic development – and with it an
earlier entrance to modernity with all its contradictions – along with a weak
state institutional political construction during the Spanish dictatorship from
1939 to 1978 (Zallo, 2013). This situation is shot through – over-determined
and filled with emotion – by the traumatic reality of multiple forms of violence.
In this context, we see the emergence of popular movements in defence of
Basque culture that are linked with grassroots political movements:
Unlike the satisfied cultures of nation-states, our double gap (dependent

institutionalization and lack of cultural and educational policy until the last
third of the twentieth) has been so immense that it explains that cultural
defensive movements have been linked to political movements, and vice
versa. They have been forced to compensate for these failures. This brings
with it virtues (placing eroding culture and language at the heart of polit-
ical programs) and perversions (risks of instrumentalization, polarization
and social cultural disintegration according to political affinities) … It is
easy to conclude that without the nationalisms of the twentieth century,
‘the Basque’ would only be a name without substance.
(Zallo, 2013, p. 234)
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.
Euskal Kantagintza Berria and the countercultural

ethnogenesis
The Basque music-cultural group Ez Dok Amairu, founded in 1966 by figures
such as Mikel Laboa, Xabier Lete, Lourdes Iriondo and Benito Lertxundi, was
the main focus of a wide-ranging musical movement known as Euskal Kantag-
intza Berria (‘New Basque Music’), which included other figures such as Michel
Labéguerie, and Imanol. It was very much open to the influence of international
music currents, such as the Nouvelle Chanson in France; Pete Seeger, Bob
Dylan, Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie in the United States; Violeta Parra, Ata-
hualpa Yupanqui and Víctor Jara in Latin America; and the Nova Cançó in
Catalonia (Amezaga, 1995; Larrinaga, 2016).
One of its main figures, Xabier Lete, typifies at least three expressions in this
movement: first, those who understood it as a cultural recovery of the Basque
language; second, those for whom it was, above all, a national recovery in the
political sense; and finally, those who considered music as an important part of a
Basque aesthetic renewal project, including the sculptor Jorge Oteiza. All these
expressions appeared at the same time and also mingled, from the aesthetic
renewal project led by Oteiza, to the Cultural Front approaches of the leftist
nationalist armed organization ETA, ‘Basque Country and Liberty’, founded in
1959 and later evolving from a group promoting traditional Basque culture to an
armed group (Amezaga, 1995; Lete, 1977).
The Cultural Front gave central importance to the language and its recovery.
Opposing the racial and genealogical version of traditional nationalism, ETA’s
alternative proposal considered the language to be a key element in the defini-
tion of the Basque identity and nation (Amezaga, 1995).
Together with the cultural recovery movements, from 1962 strong conflicts
were registered in the field of labour. The debates would be reflected within
ETA, which at its second assembly declared itself openly socialist, introducing a
heterogeneity into the national narrative by which class and nation were identi-
fied as two aspects of the same event (Sáenz de Viguera, 2007). Although at
times contradictory, this facilitated an absorption of nationalism by a working
class mainly made up of Spanish immigrants (Herreros and López, 2013).
Factory struggles also moved into the urban space in the form of neighbourhood
Music, protest politics, DIY and identity 79
movements, demanding improvements in living conditions (Herreros and

López, 2013; Larrinaga, 2016).
The creation of a new Basque community nationalism took place particularly
in the three years from August 1968 to mid-1971, being defined especially in
anti-repressive terms, above all after the Burgos court case1 and the wave of
solidarity that occurred around Europe (Larrinaga, 2016; Letamendia, 1994).
Although clandestine, this new nationalism became hegemonic; its identity is
fundamentally transgressive and anti-repressive.
During this period, spheres that belonged to the state, such as education and
cultural promotion, began to be expressed alternatively, with a national-activist
intention (Larrinaga, 2016; Letamendia, 1994). The Basque language, group
consumption and reproduction of elements of Basque culture, and the Basque
flag, the Ikurriña, banned since 1939, became symbols of this new identity (Lar-
rinaga, 2016; Letamendia, 1994). It had a particularly emotional expression in
music, and festivals turned into a kind of collective catharsis.
Songs became a medium for launching new messages of hope, justice, peace
and freedom, of reconstruction and dissemination of a renewed culture in the
Basque Country. Festivals achieved vital importance.2 The major music festivals
were a common mobilizing resource in anti-nuclear campaigns and for those in
favour of the Basque language or a political amnesty (Amezaga, 1995).
So global counterculture and the new Basque ethnogenesis coincided, giving
rise to a new cognitive framework that was young, modern and Basque-speaking.
The success of this symbolic operation, which transformed the Basque language
from something associated with the countryside into a symbol of modernity, was
only possible inasmuch as it was countercultural, transgressive and ground-
breaking (Larrinaga, 2016).
The town and city councils in the late 1970s were also handing over the
powers to organize fiestas (a city, town or neighbourhood’s yearly festival) to
people’s committees. To raise money, makeshift bars, or txoznas, were set up in
the streets, organized in a DIY way by cultural, political, neighbourhood and
sports groups, as well as by the anti-repressive community. They often offered
their own cultural events, becoming ephemeral but influential DIY festival
spaces. The music – live or recorded – defined a particular scene (Larrinaga,
2016). The Bilbao fiestas were the great popular triumph of the time: the txoznas
area, which was organized directly in a DIY way based on volunteer work,
immediately became, and has remained, the engine of the fiestas (Larrinaga,
2016).
By the end of the 1970s, despite political, social and organizational turmoil,3
it seemed that a cultural cycle had come to an end (Larrinaga, 2016). In 1981,
only eleven albums of Basque music were released. It was the decline of a disco-
graphic cycle that had begun around 1967 with the creation of Basque record
labels; this involved the release of a total of 50 LPs and 220 singles or EPs
between 1967 and 1976 (López Aguirre, 2011).
Basque radical rock explosion

In the late 1970s, despite a Spanish consensus, in the Basque Country the agree-
ments for reforming the dictatorship were confronted by either an explicit rejec-
tion or a critical acceptance. This political framework – and the repression that
accompanied it – produced a sensation of exclusion and distance from Spanish
celebratory cultural reference points (the movida) and also from Euskal Kantag-
intza Berria.
A second factor that fed this feeling of exclusion was socioeconomic: the
capitalist crisis and restructuring, and a deficit of public services, incipient eco-
logical problems and the formation of ghettos. In many districts, this involved
youth unemployment levels of up to 40 or even 50 per cent, and worker resist-
ance that in some cases resembled urban guerrilla warfare (Amezaga, 1995; Her-
reros and López, 2013; Larrinaga, 2016; Pascual, 2010).
In this context, heroin arrived. But there were also other cultural references:
the ‘No Future’ of punk and its ability to communicate the present. The nega-
tion of that already established crystallized – especially in the most economic-
ally disfavoured areas – into an explosion of punk groups labelled, not
uncontroversially, Basque Radical Rock (Rock Radical Vasco, or RRV).
Together with these shifts, and no less important, was a prolific DIY praxis.
On one hand, there was a redefinition of specific physical spaces by and for
young people: the street full of people, certain bars, a wave of squatting of gaz-
tetxes – social centres run by young people. On the other, there was a constella-
tion of independent and self-managed communication channels: fanzines,
magazines, stickers, graffiti, comics, free radio stations, amateur music-making,
record shops, the circulation of recorded cassettes, concerts and style, and even
coarse, direct language that challenged moral taboos: ‘In the specific socio-
political environment that took place during the 80s, the Basque Country was
an important laboratory of Alternative Media experiences’ (Ramirez de la
Piscina, 2010, p. 320).
Jakue Pascual (2010, p. 16) refers to a ‘Youth resistance movement’, in the
social movement sense:
It was characterized by punk, assembly-based decision-making, their own

understanding of what it meant to fight against the repression carried out
against young people under police control, and their own feeling of belong-
ing to a differentiated territorial, cultural and symbolic space. A movement
that was connected to an aesthetic explosion and with the expressive and
spatial redefinition that the social movements carried out in the West, but
which also had their own meaning in the Basque case, mixing both points
of view variably.
Luis Sáenz de Viguera (2007, p. 167) indicates that the movement involved the
development of a ‘Basque Radical Culture’, which expressed the distance
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).
A redefinition of the Basque identity

The youth movement came about in relation to the working-class areas where
Spanish immigrants settled in the 1960s. Most groups sang not in Basque, but in
Spanish. Some, like Roberto Moso (2004) of Zarama, have spoken of a fascina-
tion with the ‘repressed’ language: singing in Basque felt like the most punk
thing that could be done, even without knowing the language very well.
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.
Among musical groups, as well as when participating in festivals linked to cul-

tural demands, the presence of the Basque language was to become ever larger.
Traditional instruments (trikitixa,4 alboka5) were included and they even parti-
cipated in homages to some of the main figures of Euskal Kantagintza Berria,
especially the one most ahead of his time, Mikel Laboa.
The evolved and militant syncretism of modernizing elements – which came
from international youth cultures, particularly punk – and indigenous popular
Basque components was what favoured this creative explosion (Amezaga, 1995;
Porrah, 2006). This hybridization was mediated by the mobilizing role of the
nationalist left.
Counter-h egemonic mobilization

In the Basque Country, much of what was perceived as the official dominant
culture appeared to be linked to the Spanish cultural matrix. Furthermore, these
groups of young people were not the only ones to feel excluded from the agree-
ments made to reform the dictatorship. The new nationalism that had arisen from
the countercultural ethnogenesis of the previous period split in two: on one side a
political culture that wanted to take advantage of the possibilities offered by polit-
ical reform; on the other, those who, with Herri Batasuna as their electoral frame-
work, felt that there were still chances to carry out a revolutionary rupture. This
division was experienced, to a large extent, along generational lines (Larrinaga,

2016).
In the optimistic atmosphere that sprang up regarding the possibilities of
revolutionary rupture, and given the continuing harsh political repression, the
military organization ETA(m) decided to maintain its dynamic, and pull
towards it a large part of the social forces accumulated in the countercultural
ethnogenesis. Local and communal groups, student movements, unemployed
workers, ecologists, feminists and many more would be found holding these
positions of rupture, sharing spaces and struggles (Larrinaga, 2016).
Repression would act as the glue that held them all – including the young
punks – together. In fact, direct nationalist references were hardly made by RRV
groups, who preferred negative circumlocutions expressed in anti-repressive
terms: against those who acted against the construction of national Basque
structures (Porrah, 2006).
Jakue Pascual (2010, p. 116) describes the shared identity between young
punks and the nationalist left putting down roots as the latest symbolic and ter-
ritorial extension of the Basque social proletariat, as well as tackling the
national question:
The solution adopted by a large number of young Basque people in this

context was the creation of their own identity as a group apart. The ‘official
us’ was negated and questioned by an ‘individual us’ … But there were not
only two levels of identification (by and from the radical youth): an inter-
mediate level was also present, that saw the izquierda abertzale [‘nationalist
left’] as a revolutionary force, partly as a force to question the current
system, and which at certain times managed to mediate between the two
identities mentioned above.
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
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.
Euskalduna naiz eta harro nago! The affirmation

and consolidation of Basque counterculture
As Bernardo Atxaga (cited in Herreros and López, 2013) recalls, all this was
affected and marked in the 1980s by several forms of violence. At the end of the
decade, it was also impacted by two sinister newcomers: drugs and AIDS. Those
in the youth movement interviewed by Jakue Pascual (2010) agree when they say
that by 1989 the movement was failing. They talk about the end of a cycle; a wea-
riness; a lack of young people coming up to take their places; a consolidation of
the institutions and a resulting narrowing of the margins of action; the advance of
the processes of privatization of social behaviour and exposure to the media; a loss
of the ‘street’ and of the immediacy of action; organizational problems among
groups; and the ineffectiveness of assemblies as a decision-making mechanism.
However, a new mutation was happening: young people who had grown up
within the punk counterculture appeared in the street, in schools, at concerts
and in gaztetxes. They would not experience tensions between orthodox nation-
alists and punks; a new cultural identity was being consolidated (Larrinaga,
2016). This new wave of young people – unlike the last one – would, after the
first few years, experience a decade of economic bonanza.
From 1991, albums in the Basque language would outnumber those released
in Spanish, even in punk (Amezaga, 1995). Kortatu’s change to Basque in 1988
appeared to be a watershed moment; it was not for nothing that the group had
played a key political role as a bridge between the nationalist left and the youth
movement. It contributed decisively to the legitimization of Basque in rock
music and to bringing it into an international context. Even veteran RRV bands
that continued to be active, and had always sung in Spanish, started to include
the occasional song in Basque on their albums or in group projects.
A new stylistic aperture began to appear, incorporating rap or heavy metal.
Huan Porrah (2006, p. 162) discusses two simultaneous tendencies that were
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).
By way of a short conclusion

The Basque anti-hegemonic scene, its transformations and the condensation of
the conflicts present (national, social, political) make this an especially produc-
tive case study. Eyerman and Jamison (1998) highlight the idea that the con-
struction of social representations also takes place in community processes, and
particularly in the heart of social movements. Cultural traditions mobilize and
reformulate themselves as part of social movements, structuring the different
forms of resistance and their relationship with hegemony by offering visions and
models of alternative forms of meaning and identity that can be chosen
consciously.
The countercultural wave has been longer in the Basque country, extending
for decades – even with different mutations. In summary, three key elements
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:
It is the political responses that generated the collective consciousness of

cultural and national identity, of community with the right to live as such,
and have saved that part of cultural identity. The thrust of the community
and its civil society are those that have maintained a level of mobilization and
cultural voluntarism that, today, in the present young parents has ignited
for the family transmission.
(Zallo, 2013, p. 232)
Third, processes of (counter-)institutionalization have been favoured in the

political realm and in material DIY infrastructures (festive spaces, squats, fan-
zines, graffiti, free radio stations, amateur music-making), which has granted
them particular power and a lasting nature. In fact, in spheres such as the cul-
tural promotion of festive spaces, DIY began to be part of an alternative expres-
sion, often organized by young people, cultural groups and social and political
movements.
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
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.
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
Manifested in the relationship of people, places and musical practices, Welling-

ton’s urban ethos is guided by two sets of practices: lo-fi entrepreneurialism/
do-it-yourself (DIY) and social networking/do-it-together (DIT) (Stahl, 2011).
The lo-fi, DIY approach reflects a long-standing New Zealand attitude, which is
born out of geographical isolation, a creative desire and the entrepreneurial
imperatives of neoliberalism. The DIT ethos manifests itself in the sharing of
resources such as rehearsal space, expertise and stories, as well as profound social
relationships, which are explicitly cooperative and collaborative (2011,
pp. 151–2). Originating from this framework is the concept of Home Economics,
a Wellington-based, semi-regular event organized by an initiative of local artists
who transform the home into an underground performance space. As a form of
lo-fi entrepreneurialism, Home Economics combines home craft, video art, sonic
arts and music ranging from gamelan to acoustic folk, experimental and noise,
augmenting the traditional imaginary of domestic spaces. It creates performance
space that resonates with the traditional confines of domestic spaces, yet
remains detached from bourgeois conceptions of home, economic forces and the
spectre of neoliberalism.
In this context, this chapter offers a provisional exploration of an emerging
‘structure of feeling’ that shapes the socio-musical dynamics in Wellington’s
underground music scene. It explores the ways in which Home Economics, as a
kind of DIY performance event, is characterized by the ‘in-betweenness’ of met-
amodernism, which represents a spacetime that is neither ordered nor disordered
and constantly oscillates between ‘a typically modern commitment and a mark-
edly postmodern detachment’ (Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 2010, p. 2). It
takes note of how the imaginary horizons of this event’s alternative performance
space reflect the decline and demise of the postmodern (Bourriaud, 2009; Kirby,
2009; Lipovetsky, 2005) while simultaneously creating new, metamodern
dynamics and possibilities that support the creative development of under-
ground musicians in Wellington.
Before discussing the theoretical foundation of this concept, I would like to
give a brief description of the event. What does Home Economics look, sound
and feel like? Home Economics is a non-profit, semi-regular art and music event
90 K. Rochow
that is held in different domestic spaces around Wellington city. Unlike a

normal house party, the event tends to start in the late afternoon, making use of
daylight for possible performances outdoors in the garden area of the home.
My first Home Economics event took place in a private flat in the suburb of
Newtown, which is situated in the southern part of Wellington. The former
working-class suburb is now an attractive neighbourhood for immigrants, young
families, students and artists. The event took place in what was once a disused
factory, but has since been transformed into a spacious living area for up to six
people. All rooms were rebuilt and converted, in DIY manner, by the inhabitants
themselves, into a cosy, open living space with a communal kitchen, bathroom,
toilet and wood burner for cold winter days. The event was spread out across the
entire communal space, including one ‘stage’ – which wasn’t really a stage or ‘plat-
form’, but a ground-level performance area – in the kitchen/living room and
another in the entrance hall. Vegetarian food and home-brewed beer were pro-
vided by the organizers or inhabitants and served in the kitchen area – everything
without any monetary exchange or reward. Guests brought their own drinks and
sometimes more snacks for everyone. It seemed a very friendly, cosy atmosphere,
almost like a usual gathering of friends, enjoying food, drinks and some live music.
Sonic and video artists exhibited their work in the domestic realm accompanied by
various music performances, ranging from acoustic folk, blues and outsider punk to
experimental, techno and noise performances. Although there wasn’t any pro-
gramme or set list for the night, the performances happened in a rather organized,
yet organic way. The audience seemed curious, attentive and appreciative. There
weren’t any heavily drunk or intoxicated people – everyone seemed to respect the
domestic surroundings and the unwritten ‘house rules’, so it didn’t get overly messy
or chaotic but remained a creative and free-flowing event until the end.
Metamodern music-m aking

The term ‘metamodernism’ can be traced back as far as 1975, and has various
meanings attached to it (Carruth, 1986; Koutselini, 1997; McCloskey, 1992;
Truitt, 2006; Zavarzadeh, 1975). Yet none of these scholars uses the term in the
same way it is used today. Clasquein-Johnson (2017) refers to metamodernism
as a ‘philosophy of the Millennial Generation’, a ‘21st-century development’ or
a structure of feeling of a generation born in the 1980s. This generation grew up
in economic prosperity and abundance, but also witnessed financial crises and
therefore ‘the collapse of the neo-capitalist dream and, as a result, the evapora-
tion of the political essence of the 1990s’ (Van Poecke, 2014). It is a generation
that experienced years of (postmodern) irony and scepticism, and as a result
suffers from what David Foster Wallace (1996) terms ‘analysis paralysis’ – the
inability to commit to a choice or make a decision. It is a generation that is
sceptical about the universal power of grand narratives or existing political
structures, and in search of innovation. This generation finds its anchor in art
and music (Van Poecke, 2014).
Home Economics 91
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
p erformance spaces is partly due to the lack of infrastructure in terms of record-

ing, rehearsal or performance rooms, and is also an echo of a neoliberal, entre-
preneurial discourse that has shaped cultural and social life in Wellington since
the early 1980s.2 The neoliberal shift in political philosophy and policy devel-
opment was part of the government’s attempt to devolve responsibility for
welfare away from the centre to the community, and from the collective to the
individual (Fitzsimons, 2000). Hence the former welfare goals of participation
and belonging have been replaced by a methodological individualism that
focuses on the individual as self-motivated entrepreneur and problem-solver,
and the source of creative solutions to whatever dilemmas they may face (Stahl,
2011). In Wellington, independent and underground musicians strive to eman-
cipate their music from the institutional and commercial pressure of the art
world by celebrating a low-level, ‘lo-fi’, do-it-yourself ethic, which has long been
part of the city’s socio-musical experience. The DIY approach is a deep-seated
concept within New Zealand’s imagery, reflecting the common attitude of
‘jumping in with what you have and making do’ (Meehan, 2009, p. 104), which
is constantly reiterated through the nationally ingrained myth of ‘no. 8 wire’ as
an expression of ‘Kiwi ingenuity’. The ‘no. 8 wire mentality’ is named after a
type of fencing wire that farmers often inventively and practically use not only
for strapping or tie-downs, but for hooks, ties, aerials and various applications
other than fencing – anything for which a bendable piece of metal thread might
be useful. This ‘Kiwi ingenuity’ is hence a ‘find a way to get it done–approach’,
which provides motivational fuel for aspiring entrepreneurs who hope that the
country’s isolation, small population and relative lack of resources won’t restrain
them too much in relation to the more mature markets in the United States or
Europe. The DIY ethic is therefore partly a reflection of the ‘pioneering spirit’3
in New Zealand, reinforced by the country’s geographical isolation, lack of
resources and creative possibilities. It is also entrenched to the ways in which
neoliberalism has taken root in the country, diminishing state-sponsored welfare
yet elevating the individual as a self-motivated problem-solver. Born out of
isolation, creative desire and punk’s own DIY legacy, lo-fi entrepreneurialism
constitutes a definitive aspect of the city’s urban identity and underpins an alle-
giance to local music-making in Wellington’s underground music scene.
Collaborating and creating space

The lack of creative infrastructure and possibilities clearly shapes Wellington’s
musical underground as it breeds a feeling of community that is oriented towards
solving local problems. This collaborative spirit manifests itself in the sharing of
resources, expertise and stories, and propels local musicians to engage collec-
tively in order to transcend the shortcomings of the city. During my exploration
of Wellington’s music scenes, I met Richard and Georgina, two underground
musicians, lo-fi entrepreneurs and the organizers of an experimental music and
sound art event called Home Economics. Driven by a creative impulse, the lack
94 K. Rochow
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
desire among a particular community of music fans for a different kind of

experience than that which can be garnered from an officially run venue
space, whose listings may be governed more by dominant music tastes and
the need for profit.
(2016, p. 492)
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
feigned) sincerity’ that hint at another structure of feeling – namely metamod-

ernism (Vermeulen and Van den Akker, 2010, p. 2). The prefix ‘meta’ refers to
such notions as ‘with’, ‘between’ and ‘beyond’, suggesting that metamodernism
should be situated epistemologically with (post)modernism, ontologically
between (post)modernism, and historically beyond (post)modernism (Vermeu-
len and Van den Akker, 2010). The metamodern generation oscillates between
a postmodern doubt and a modern desire for sense, meaning and direction. As
Van den Akker and Vermeulen (2010, p. 6) put it:
ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the post-

modern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern
irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness,
empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity
and ambiguity.
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)
Home Economics is paradigmatic of this emerging structure of feeling, carrying

the ‘in-betweenness’ already in its title. When I asked the organizers, Richard
and Georgina, how they came up with the name of the event, they responded:
We were talking about alternative currencies and the idea of creativity in

the home and domestic work; the work that isn’t necessarily paid for, such
as doing the dishes; just domesticity in general and the idea of that as kind
of an economy. And then it’s obviously a kind of joke on the old Home
Economics, the thing you do in high school where you do a bit of cooking
and household budgeting and that stuff. It’s pretty much like an old school
housewife training school.
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
in fundamental values of capitalism and economic materialism. However, Home

Economics as it takes place in Wellington’s musical underground celebrates its
entrepreneurial spirit and independence from economic forces. As Richard and
Georgina frame it, the focus of the DIY event lies in alternative exchanges other
than financial exchanges, creating a money-free environment and a space
detached from modern commodity and economic principles:
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.
Home Economics creates a space of hospitality and familiarity that is linked

closely to the traditional imagery of the home as a place of intimacy, privacy
and family dwelling. This romanticized conception of home originates in the
bourgeois age where the house was an essential aspect of the identity and self-
definition of the middle class (Welter, 1966). It continued to be significant
within the disciplines of phenomenology and philosophy in the early 1960s,
when the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1969) argued that home was a
haven and our own little corner of the world.
Nevertheless, however solidified this imaginary of the home appears to be,
the ‘metamodern pendulum’ swings to the opposite pole. Home Economics trans-
forms the private, quiet and peaceful realm of the home into a public, noisy and
vibrant performance space with the doors thrown wide open for strangers, visi-
tors, flâneurs and voyeurs. Unlike the bourgeois conception of home as a locus
of identity and self-definition, domestic space serves as a medium for artistic cre-
ation and self-realization. The metamodern performance space rather resembles
what Walter Benjamin (1969) refers to as (creative) spielraum (or space for
play), mirroring the romantic desire of the artist for an authentic state of being
– that of the free-playing child.
With their (modern) commitment and enthusiasm and a (postmodern) lo-fi
entrepreneurialism, Richard and Georgina set up a ‘haven for local underground
musicians’, a creative spielraum opposing deficient urban infrastructure and finan-
cial challenges. They have created a private-public space, the ‘underground at
home’ for a musical family of friends and strangers. It is a familiar environment,
yet undefined, unique and special: an open-ended, free-flowing, ever-changing
and moving event, which yet retains a certain kind of stability, rhythm and iden-
tity. Home Economics is a form of what Vermeulen and Van den Akker (2010)
term ‘constructive engagement’ – a way by which individuals of the contemporary
twenty-first–century globalized world, unblinded by ideological dogmas, try to
manifest their engagement within society without political actions against the
state or against society, but with DIY or DIT in a small-scale setting: the city, the
neighbourhood or the home (Van Poecke, 2014).
Home Economics 97
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)
References
Bachelard, G. (1969). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Baciu, C., Bocoş, M. and Baciu-Urzică, C. (2015). Metamodernism: A conceptual
foundation. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 209: 33–8.
Benjamin, W. (1969). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In H.
Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217–51). New York: Schocken Books.
Bennett, A. and Rogers, I. (2016). In the scattered fields of memory: Unofficial live
music venues, intangible heritage, and the recreation of the musical past. Space and
Culture, 19(4): 490–501.
Blum, A. (2003). The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s Univer-
sity Press.
Blunt, A. and Dowling, R.M. (2006). Home. London: Routledge.
Bourriaud, N. (2009). Altermodern. London: Tate Publishing.
Brunt, S. (2011). Performing identity and place in Wellington’s Cuba Street Carnival.
In G. Keam and T. Mitchell (eds), Home, Land and Sea: Situating Music in Aotearoa
New Zealand. Auckland: Pearson Education.
Home Economics 99
Carruth, H. (1986). The defeated generation. The Kenyon Review, 8(1): 111–17.
Clasquin-Johnson, M. (2017). Towards a metamodern academic study of religion and a
more religiously informed metamodernism. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies,
73(3): e1–e11.
Dumitrescu, A.E. (2014). Towards a metamodern literature. Unpublished PhD thesis,
University of Otago. Retrieved from https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/handle/10523/4925.
Fitzsimons, P. (2000). Neoliberalism and ‘social capital’: Reinventing community. Paper
presented to Area Symposium on Neoliberalism, Welfare and Education, ‘The New
Zealand Experiment’: Critique and Critical Transformations, New Zealand Associ-
ation for Research in Education, New Orleans.
Frick, L.Y.E. (2015). Am I a fluxus artist? An exploration of the ideas behind fluxus,
avant garde ideologies and the relationship between life and art. Unpublished PhD
thesis, Iceland Academy of the Arts, Reykjavik.
Gardner, L. (2016). Metamodernism: A new philosophical approach to counseling.
Journal of Humanistic Counseling, 55(2): 86–98.
Kirby, A. (2009). Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and
Reconfigure Our Culture. New York: Continuum.
Koutselini, M. (1997). Contemporary trends and perspectives of the curricula: Towards a
meta-modern paradigm for curriculum. Curriculum Studies, 5(1): 87–101.
Larner, W. (1997). The New Zealand experiment: Towards a post-structuralist political
economy. Unpublished PhD thesis, Carleton University.
Lipovetsky, G. (2005). Hypermodern Times. Cambridge: Polity Press.
McCloskey, D.N. (1992). Minimal statism and metamodernism: Reply to Friedman. Crit-
ical Review, 6(1): 107–12.
McDonald, T.A. (2014). Between Artifice and Actuality: The Aesthetic and Ethical Metafiction of
Vladimir Nabokov and David Mitchell. Athens, OH: Ohio University. Retrieved from https://
etd.ohiolink.edu/pg_10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:ouhonors1400014295.
Meehan, N. (2009). Mike Nock on New Zealand and jazz. In R. Hardie and A. Thomas
(eds), Jazz in Aotearoa (pp. 56–68). Wellington: Steele Roberts.
Samuels, R. (2008). Auto-modernity after postmodernism: Autonomy and automation in
culture, technology, and education. In T. McPherson (ed.), Digital Youth, Innovation,
and the Unexpected (pp. 219–40). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shepherd, P. (2015). The spirit of the age: Are reports of postmodernism’s demise exagger-
ated or is there a new zeitgeist in town? Unpublished PhD thesis, Falmouth University.
Retrieved from www.researchgate.net/publication/276113483_The_spirit_of_the_age_
Are_reports_of_Postmodernism’s_demise_exaggerated_or_is_there_a_new_zeitgeist_in_
town.
Stahl, G. (2011). ‘DIY or DIT!’ Tales of making music in a creative capital. In G. Keam
and T. Mitchell (eds), Situating Music in Aotearoa New Zealand (pp. 145–60). Auck-
land: Pearson Education.
Straw, W. (1991). Systems of articulation, logics of change: Communities and scenes in
popular music. Cultural Studies, 5(3): 368–88.
Truitt, S. (2006). The riderless world. American Book Review, 27(3): 23–4.
Van Poecke, N. (2014). Beyond postmodern narcolepsy [Notes on Metamodernism].
Retrieved from www.metamodernism.com/2014/06/04/beyond-postmodern-narcolepsy.
Vermeulen, T. (2012). TANK magazine interviews Timotheus Vermeulen. TANK, 23
February. Retrieved from www.metamodernism.com/2012/02/23/tank-interviews-
timotheus-vermeulen-about-metamodernism.
100 K. Rochow
Vermeulen, T. and Van den Akker, R. (2010). Notes on metamodernism. Journal of Aes-
thetics & Culture, 2(0). Retrieved from www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/
article/view/5677.
Wallace, D.F. (1996). Infinite Jest: A Novel/David Foster Wallace. Boston: Little, Brown
and Co.
Wellington City Council (2017). About Wellington. Retrieved from http://wellington.
govt.nz/about-wellington/history/history-of-wellington/pre-european-settlement-1865.
Welter, B. (1966). The cult of true womanhood: 1820–1960. American Quarterly, 18(2):
151–74.
Zavarzadeh, M. (1975). The apocalyptic fact and the eclipse of fiction in recent Ameri-
can prose narratives. Journal of American Studies, 9(1): 69–83.
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.
Amateurism as a line of flight

The charm for Finnish micro-labels of being amateur is perhaps best illustrated by
the etymological meaning of ‘lover’ as it is borrowed from Latin (amātor) via
French. While amateurs can be passionate artists or producers – and often one
and the same in DIY cultures – who produce what they love, professionals are
obliged to conduct thoroughly rationalized routine practices, free of any economic
(let alone artistic) risk. Whereas the amateur is allowed to experiment and fail, if
the same happens to a professional, it is ‘a flop’. Using the vocabulary of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari (2004, pp. 10, 224–6), amateurism provides a ‘line of
flight’ – a way to escape the evolutionist model focused as it is on establishing a
professional career stage by stage. This concept is inspired by Fernand Deligny’s
mapping of the wandering paths walked by autistic children and adolescents
(Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, pp. 16, 224–6). Likewise, Michel de Certeau (1988,
pp. 30–5) has appropriated Deligny’s ‘wander lines’2 in describing those acts of
consumption where a commodity is used in a different way or for a purpose other
than that for which it was originally designed. The concept could be extended as
a way to conceptualize acts of production aspiring to avoid professionalism, since
it is also consumption as the tools of production are being consumed. For instance,
the playing of instruments might not be learned in the same way as they would be
in a music school, or sound captured and produced as intended by the designers of
audio equipment, or music recorded following existing professional conventions
that consider wider audience expectations.
Deleuze and Guattari (2004, pp. 344, 353–4, 360) claim that professionalism
involves territorializing ‘the functional activities’ of occupations. This is done by
Proud amateurs 103
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).
Amateurism and Finnish micro-l abel autonomy

The celebration of autonomy and the disavowal of economic ambitions are
reflected in the way Finnish micro-labels embrace amateurism. All the repre-
sentatives of the labels interviewed claimed to be ‘unprofessional’ insofar as they
distanced themselves from professional record production – conflating it with

economic or business organizational concerns. Although none of them professed
to have had any training directly related to record production, or even music,
this was not considered a hindrance. Such openness and trespassing on other-
wise professional territories correspond with the nomadism encouraged by
Deleuze and Guattari (2004, pp. 25–7). Yet there were differences expressed
regarding certain aspects of remaining amateur: some described it as a conscious
ideological struggle against the determination of artistic practices by commercial
objectives, while others saw it as a necessity, borne of an unwillingness to sink
time and effort into rationalizing production and profitability and a passion to
instead pursue their own artistic and cultural objectives. There was also some
ambiguity about the concept: Verdura, for instance, described its label as profes-
sional when it came to the artistic nature of the label’s content; Harmönia saw
itself as professional in addressing the specific subcultural aesthetic conditions of
the label’s audience.
While they proudly avowed that they were amateur, all the label representa-
tives acknowledged that some degree of professionalization had occurred during
their existence. Their complex relationship with professionalization could partly
be explained through Strachan’s (2003) work on British micro labels. He quotes
an email by ‘Skif ’ of Elastic Fiction Records on a micro label’s mailing list:
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
objectives of production. The more popular Finnish micro-labels, such as Ektro,

Fonal, CRI and Helmi-levyt, acknowledged that some degree of professionalism
had been acquired over the years, but nevertheless argued they had tried to
maintain an amateur attitude. For example, while Jussi Lehtisalo of Ektro con-
ceded that hard work is character-building, at the same time he pointed out that
the expectation to follow it up with professionalism actually threatens
creativity:
[Professionalism] destroys everything – practically everything … Profession-

alism has all these kinds of expectations … It makes things quite different,
its obligations eat into our natural abilities. It forces us to make conscious
decisions to develop a certain way, or someone else might take our place.
And though often good things might come from this too, I see things
[differently] as an amateur essentially.
(Lehtisalo, 2012)
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:
As long as you’re operating on a small-scale, it’s fun … It has always been

my personal mission to try and stay there, a place where you are not looking
to make money … I just try not to get excited when I see these
opportunities.
(Seppälä, 2014)
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
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)
Meanwhile, Antti Lind considered running Helmi-levyt to be his main

occupation.
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)
This principle of ‘fairness’ could be seen as contrasting with professional prac-

tices, where the key objective seems to be to extract profit wherever possible –
often at the expense of the recording artist (McLeod, 2005; cf. Strachan, 2003,
pp. 234–7). In addition to threatening artistic inspiration, micro-labels associate
professionalism with questionable ethics: ‘[The word professional] conjures up
the ugly side of the business’ (Martinkauppi, 2014). It is this ethical criticism of
‘the music industry’ that Strachan (2003, 2007) considers typical of inde-
pendent micro-labels.
Strachan (2007, pp. 246–7) argues that the micro-labels he studied cannot
achieve autonomy as they are ‘dialectically bound up with the aesthetics and
discourses of large-scale cultural organizations’. The micro-labels examined in
this study, however, cannot be portrayed in the same way.7 Although many of
them expressed disenchantment with the ‘mainstream’ music industry, it would
be a step too far to claim that they focus entirely on opposing it. Rather, it
Proud amateurs 107
seems that Finnish micro-labels escape the mainstream in a more Deleuzian,

non-dialectic fashion (see Widder, 2012, p. 19; Deleuze and Guattari, 2004,
p. 567). Simply focusing on their own territory, they care less about the work-
ings of the professional, mainstream music industry:
[O]f course we are a kind of alternative. We shouldn’t see it as simply main-

stream versus underground, but it’s quite clear that we operate … outside
the sort of norms of record labels. We don’t go to MIDEM8 or other indus-
try fairs, so it’s clear that we are underground—though maybe not
intentionally so.
(Martinkauppi, 2014)
[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: [D]o you see yourselves as like professionals in what you do?

DZ: It depends what you mean by professionals. We don’t have any
education in
this field … it’s not like work, a day job, so in that way we’re not
professionals.
SK: We don’t really treat it as a hobby.9 It’s pretty serious.
JK-T: Do you call yourselves amateurs then?

DZ: Well, we don’t really call ourselves either, we just … it’s just something
we do.
JK-T: It’s more than a hobby?
SK: [F]or me always a hobby sounds like … something you do when you don’t
need to do anything serious.
DZ: I wouldn’t say it’s like a hobby … music is just more important.
(Zherbin and Kretova, 2013)
Although they do not see themselves as professionals, or people aspiring to be

so, Kretova and Zherbin describe their production endeavours as a kind of life-
style choice – or a ‘lifetime’s work’, as Koskinen calls it. Perttu Häkkinen of
Harmönia also showed a certain ambiguity in his interview.
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)
Portraying himself as an expert in his own especially marginal field of music,

Häkkinen’s statement also resembles Koskinen’s above. Janne Martinkauppi
(2014) of Verdura expressed similar paradoxical feelings towards professional-
ism. Claiming to operate his label ‘seriously, but not too seriously’,10 he con-
sidered the releases themselves as professional in terms of ‘artistic substance’ or
‘vision’, being produced with ‘the best available resources’ – for what they are
worth. However, in other ways he described Verdura, in self-deprecating terms,
as amateurish in carrying out the (otherwise ‘professional’) artistic ideas, making
‘stupid decisions’ and ‘operating randomly’. Despite (or because of ) this, he was
more sympathetic to the idea of being amateur than professional, for much the
same reason as the other labels already mentioned.
The manifold paths that micro-labels navigate across this nebulous border
between the amateur and professional seem to correspond to rhizomatic or
‘nomad thought’ processes as described in the theories of Deleuze and Guattari
(2004). In these interviews, the micro-labels revealed a multitude of auto-
nomous aspirations amounting to much more than a simple dichotomy between
the ‘pure’ amateur and ‘cynical’ professional.
Proud amateurs 109
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
amateurism is more complex: how can one maintain the autonomy of an

amateur – an art lover – while becoming increasingly professional? This is about
founding new production practices, or a ‘new earth’ as Deleuze and Guattari
(2004) would describe it.
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
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2000 [1972]). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. R.

Hurley, M. Seem and H.R. Lane, Trans. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004 [1980]). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia. B. Massumi, Trans. London: Continuum.
Graham, S. (2016). Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political, and Aesthetic Mapping
of Underground and Fringe Music. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Haahti, H. (Interviewee) and Kaitajärvi, J. (Interviewer). (2012). Digital recording, 19
December.
Haynes, J. and Marshall, L. (2017). Beats and tweets: Social media in the careers of inde-
pendent musicians. New Media & Society. doi:10.1177/1461444817711404
Hearn, G., Ninan, A., Rogers, I., Cunningham, S. and Luckman, S. (2004). From the
margins to the mainstream: Creating value in Queensland’s music industry. Media
International Australia, 112: 101–14.
Häkkinen, P. (Interviewee) and Kaitajärvi, J. (Interviewer). (2012). Digital recording,
30 October.
Hein, F. (2012). Le DIY comme dynamique contre-culturelle? L’exemple de la scène
punk rock. Volume!, 9(1): 105–26.
Koskinen, J. (Interviewee) and Kaitajärvi-Tiekso, J. (Interviewer). (2014). Digital
recording, 18 February.
Lehtisalo, J. (Interviewee) and Kaitajärvi, J. (Interviewer). (2012). Digital recording,
10 May.
Lind, A. (Interviewee) and Kaitajärvi, J. (Interviewer). (2012). Digital recording, 15
August.
Martinkauppi, J. (Interviewee) and Kaitajärvi-Tiekso, J. (Interviewer). (2014). Digital
recording, 28 February.
McLeod, K. (2005). MP3s are killing home taping: The rise of internet distribution and
its challenge to the major label music monopoly. Popular Music and Society, 28(4):
521–31.
Metsola, M. (Interviewee) and Kaitajärvi-Tiekso, J. (Interviewer). (2014). Digital
recording, 12 April.
Peterson, R.A. and Bennett, A. (2004). Introducing music scenes. In A. Bennett and
R.A. Peterson (eds), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (pp. 1–15). Nashville,
TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Seppälä, R. (Interviewee) and Kaitajärvi-Tiekso, J. (Interviewer). (2014). Digital record-
ing, 5 February.
Strachan, R. (2003). Do-it-yourself: Industry, ideology, aesthetics and micro independent
record labels in the UK. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool. Retrieved
from Strachan’s profile pages in www.academia.edu.
Strachan, R. (2007). Micro-independent record labels in the UK: Discourse, DIY cul-
tural production and the music industry. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2):
245–65.
Toynbee, J. (2000). Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions. London:
Arnold.
Widder, N. (2012). Political Theory After Deleuze. London: Continuum.
Wikström, P. (2009). The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Zherbin, D. and Kretova, A. (Interviewees) and Kaitajärvi-Tiekso, J. (Interviewer).
(2013). Digital recording, 23 October.
Chapter 10
Noise records as noise culture

DIY practices, aesthetics and trades
Sarah Benhaïm
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.
Noise labels and DIY entrepreneurship

Despite their specificities, the five underground record labels of the survey stand
out from conventional categories such as ‘independent labels’ and ‘majors’1 by
proposing an alternative dimension to the organization of the music industry, be
it by their scale, their operations or their ethics. All run by one person, they are
always a leisure activity separate from professional sources of incomes. By
making sure that the prices of the records they release are affordable – they are
sometimes even sold at cost price – and by establishing a trust policy with musi-
cians, giving them around 20 per cent of the copies released rather than signing
a contract and paying them according to its terms, DIY labels favour a not-for-
profit business model:
Everything must be not overpriced and as user-friendly as it can be. So I’m

offering a fixed price of €6 per tape or CD-R postage-paid worldwide. It
doesn’t matter if you live in Bolivia or United Kingdom. Price must be
equal for a fan.
(Phase!)
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
Contrary to what Keith Negus (1999) has observed regarding conventional

labels in the music industry, where artists are selected based on a series of
commercial judgements and cultural hypotheses to ensure the success and
long-term investment in these projects, noise labels don’t consider the uncer-
tainty of sales to be a major issue. Although they must control their deficit so
that it doesn’t have too much impact on their – sometimes precarious – per-
sonal situations, and so they can reinvest in new projects, their choice of a
minimized ‘commodification’ increases in contrast to artists’ freedom: since
there are no exclusive arrangements or time engagements establishing a rela-
tionship of dependency with musicians, there isn’t any competition between
labels either – which also entails the possibility for musicians to release their
records via a great variety of labels, helping to disseminate the abundant pro-
duction for which noise and experimental music are known.3 The position
adopted by underground labels regarding copyright legislation also differs from
the status of independents and majors. Noise labels rarely register their pro-
ductions with organizations devoted to protecting copyright and distributing
royalties:4 as the artists they release are rarely professionals, benefits from
record sales are not a substantial source of income for them. Even when artists
are registered – particularly within academic experimental music or for those
whose profession is connected to the world of arts and entertainment – under-
ground labels tend to struggle with these organizations and press their records
abroad to circumvent copyright issues.
The fact that noise labels sometimes go through financially and legally prob-
lematic situations hasn’t stopped them from proliferating, since their interest is
not to release a band that might ‘sell’, as Alan O’Connor (2008) observed with
DIY punk micro-labels, but rather to support artists according to their personal
inclinations. This emotional commitment explains why label owners give par-
ticular support to musicians from within their own circle of friends:
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
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.
DIY production and the aesthetics of records

By using affordable and reproducible materials, and through a set of handcraft-
ing practices often valued by fans – such as the drawing, collage or sewing of
cover art, and the manual duplication of cassette tapes and CD-Rs – noise labels
provide an opportunity for everyone to create. Although the final product is
sometimes the fruit of collaborations between musicians, artists and technicians5
for example, when it comes to mastering, silkscreen printing, paper printing,
duplication and pressing, these tasks are generally undertaken by the person
who runs the label (see Figure 10.1 for examples of records by the labels
surveyed).
In this way, labels are fields in which personal creativity can be expressed,
inscribed within a record culture: since the emergence of noise culture, the
numerous releases of each artist and label include a wide range of analogue and
digital audio formats, with particular affection being shown for material ones.6
For instance, CD-R is often used because of its easy availability, its low cost and
its format, which easily lends itself to homemade production. For these reasons,
it is often associated with the first years of a label, while vinyl remains the pre-
ferred medium, as evidenced by Ultra Eczema: ‘I am a sucker for LPs and singles
… they demand care, the visual work you can attach to it can be big, and I like
extra inserts with it. Call it a fetish.’ Vinyl is widely favoured for its aesthetic
qualities, but whether or not to use it is a decision that is strongly determined by
financial resources, as the situation of underground labels doesn’t always allow
them to cover the costs of vinyl production:
116 S. Benhaïm
Figure 10.1 Records from the five surveyed labels.
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
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
locked grooves8 in various projects by RRR and Ultra Eczema. According to

Thompson (2004), the case of vinyl marbling already testified to the importance
of arts and crafts for punk collectors, by undermining the reification of records
and promoting the visibility of human work.
It seems that the complex objects made by noise labels, however, tend to be
closer to works of art, being the results of experiments with the material itself.
In addition to the rarity of artefacts, which reinforces the feeling of having made
a precious acquisition, visual creation highlights the work carried out by micro-
labels, displaying itself as the inspired creation of an individual in honour of the
musicians featured on the record. The more visible the dimension of affect in
the cover art, and the more it seems to break with professionalism, the more
value it has for music fans. As Damien Chaney (2008) explains, following Jean
Baudrillard and Nathalie Heinich, authenticity – which lies in the capacity to
connect with the artist through the grasp of their intentionality – implies that
one goes back to the object’s origin and attaches value to this relationship.
Record production in experimental DIY scenes is therefore a favourable ground
to explore how the connection between affect, autonomy and proximity builds
symbolic capital, reinforcing the feeling of a specialized and authentic musical
culture for its fans.
The circulation of records in global and local

networks
While the structuring of a global network composed of private individuals,
labels, distributors and record stores initially may appear similar to the conven-
tional production and distribution channels of the mainstream music market,
noise labels develop in a parallel economy. Before the internet, a global noise
network already existed and the most widespread communication practice for
labels was the use of a mail-order catalogue provided in specialized fanzines and
independent record stores. The turning point of the 2000s marked the creation
of a multitude of underground labels, however, with the democratization of the
internet offering new, free means of communication, such as websites, news-
letters, social networks, specialized blogs and forums, that were very useful for
their visibility.
While fans usually buy records straight from labels, global and national distri-
bution may also take place through more traditional networks made up of small/
middle-sized experimental music distributors,9 whose role is important. On the
one hand, they act as intermediaries facilitating the distribution of records to
independent stores and private individuals by offering buyers a selection of
specialized records. On the other hand, in addition to contributing to the
viability of the labels I surveyed, as they rank among their main buyers, they
allow them to manage fewer orders and be visible within wider underground
networks. These time-saving qualities are crucial when labels aren’t run profes-
sionally. Going through distributors also enables labels to save money by grouping
purchases, which is particularly interesting when it comes to shipping costs

between Europe and the United States, which have increased markedly over the
last few years. These conditions demonstrate the genuine benefit that under-
ground labels derive from being included in niche catalogues such as these,
although distribution is not an issue for them as much as it is for so-called inde-
pendent labels – for which distribution is the main reason to collaborate with
the majors (Negus, 1999). Some labels, like RRR and Phase!, also use the
Discogs record database for its visibility within the global network. For that
matter, the Discogs data may be helpful to visualize where the labels’ records are
distributed, through the distribution of sellers by label and by country (see Table
10.1). Although the platform is intended to transcend national markets by cre-
ating an international network, the table interestingly suggests that the popular-
ity of labels is essentially linked to national/local culture, since for each label,
the country with the greatest number of buyers (the United States) is the one in
which the label is based.
These results echo the local commitment of noise labels, which establish
important connections with players in the experimental scene, such as record
stores. For instance, by implementing mutual support systems, record stores dis-
tribute labels’ productions – whether it be by buying them immediately or on
consignment – sometimes within a dedicated section, and promote them to cus-
tomers. Underground labels give record stores special prices and sometimes
support them by providing extra copies for free. It must nevertheless be noted
that there are very few record stores specializing in experimental music, and that
this preferred intermediary, which plays a unifying role in subcultural sociab-
ility, is only present in certain big cities where an audience for such music
exists.
Concerts are the most common opportunity for local networks to advertise
their recorded products, through displaying them on merchandizing tables. The
benefits are communicational rather than financial, since these transactions
only represent a tiny fraction of the sales of noise labels; however, the local
scene is the preferred place to expand a network through meetings, to influence
the musical selection of labels and, finally, to legitimate an underground scene
characterized by very little media coverage. The ‘local community’ dimension,
which is crucial to the DIY principle, with respect to both its functioning and
its symbolical cohesion, is represented through the release of recordings from
local concerts such as Ultra Eczema’s Antwerp live shows and Tanzprocesz’s
Paris Live Series. The ‘extra-somatic memory’ devices (Straw, 1999) that such
recordings emblematically embody serve as archives for noise listeners, allowing
them to retain a shared memory of these social events.
Finally, discussing record circulation without mentioning gifts and trading
would be prejudicial, as they are major components of noise culture. While a
gift – a ‘transfer of goods that implies the waiver of all rights on that goods and
of all rights that could come from this transfer’ (Testart, 2001, p. 719) – some-
times also comes with spontaneous ‘counter-gifts’, trading is generally determined
Table 10.1 Records from the five surveyed labels
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
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:
At the beginning I had no communication, because I didn’t know the net-

works nor people. Actually I sent my records to Bimbo Tower [record store]
freely and anonymously so that they could give them to customers. As soon
as I bummed around and did record shopping in specialized stores … I
began to distribute and trade records, and progressively my contact list grew
… It was my only communication method.
(Tanzprocesz)
At the beginning, I almost exclusively traded. Later, interest grew and

people got in touch to distribute stuff. I still trade a lot, as it’s one of the
main reasons I started doing this … It’s one of my favorite things to do. I’ve
traded records with many labels including American tapes, AA, …
Tanzprocesz, RRR, Load, Chocolate Monk …
(Ultra Eczema)
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:
Constantly, I trade with as many labels as possible. I consider trades to be

the lifeblood of noise activity, it gets my releases out of my hands and into
the hands and ears of others. Whenever an artist or label approaches me
about carrying their new release in my shop, that’s usually my first question,
‘wanna trade?’ And of course it allows me to acquire their release at my
manufacturing costs and allows me to offer their items at the lowest prices
possible. It’s a total win–win situation.
(RRR)
Non-market trading is a practice that is inherent to the underground. It acts as

a unifying element for the network and as a preservation of the players’ relations
– to refuse them would expose them, as Marcel Mauss (2007, p. 89) showed, to
a kind of refusal of ‘alliance and communion’. By encouraging such practices,
which embody the ethos of DIY, the limitation of financial transactions suggests
a rationale of trading that differs from the conventions of the record industry.
122 S. Benhaïm
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.
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.
References
Benhaïm, S. (2016). Entre écoute réflexive, immersion sensuelle et confrontation : les
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.
124 S. Benhaïm
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.
Lebrun, B. (2006). Majors et labels indépendants: France, Grande-Bretagne, 1960–2000.
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.
O’Connor, A. (2008). Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy: The Emergence of
DIY. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Smith, N. (2005). The splinter in your ear: Noise as the semblance of critique. Culture,
Theory and Critique, 46(1): 43–59.
Straw, W. (1999). The thingishness of things. In[ ]Visible Culture: An Electronic Journal
for Visual Studies, 2. Retrieved from http://rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue2/
straw.htm.
Testart, A. (2001). Échange marchand, échange non marchand. Revue Française de Soci-
ologie, 42(4): 719–48.
Thompson, S. (2004). Punk Productions: Unfinished Business. Albany, NY: State Univer-
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.
A note on research method

This chapter draws mainly on my doctoral research, for which I carried out
twelve months of participant observation fieldwork in Bandung in 2004 and
2005, though it also benefits from the perspective offered by my ongoing com-
munication with former research participants in subsequent years. The DIY
community around BalKot became my primary research focus, although I also
engaged with the wider scene. My participant observation involved attending
the weekly BalKot organizing meetings, social events, musical performances and
other community activities; I was also invited to join and participate in their
associated online networks. As a supplement to the method of participant obser-
vation, I also conducted and recorded semi-structured interviews with 30 parti-
cipants. This research was conducted with the awareness, consent and
cooperation of BalKot members, and I obtained consent from individual parti-
cipants for the use of material from interviews, emails and personal communica-
tions. Participants are variously identified by pseudonyms, scene nicknames or
real names, according to their own expressed preferences.
The Kolektif Balai Kota

While the organizational structure of Indonesian DIY hardcore is quite fluid, for
much of the 2000s the DIY community in Bandung was based around BalKot,
named after its regular meeting place on a flight of steps in front of Bandung’s
Punk positif 127
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.
Positive punk and the DIY ethic

Punk has often been interpreted primarily through its disruptive, challenging
and negative aesthetics (Hebdige, 1979; Laing, 2015; Muñoz, 2013). A symbolic
negation of the existing social order, expressed through confrontational style
and transgressive performance, has certainly been an important part of Indone-
sian punk, both during its emergence under the authoritarian New Order regime
and in its ongoing challenge to conservative social, cultural and political tend-
encies in Indonesia. However, with the development of local Indonesian scenes
and more direct connections with other punk scenes around the world, a
concept of punk authenticity rooted in the DIY ethic (etika DIY) of independent
production and community-building has also taken hold within Indonesian
punk (Martin-Iverson, 2016).
The anak DIY emphasize the positive, constructive side of punk as the pro-
duction of social alternatives, rather than simply expressing their opposition to
the status quo. This emphasis on ‘positive punk’ is a reaction against a wider fix-
ation on the spectacular negative aesthetics of punk, which they view as being
both politically limited and bound up with the commodification of punk. As
Laing (2015, pp. 175–9) and Moore (2004, p. 321) argue, the pursuit of a fixed,
authentic punk identity to the exclusion of its negative, disruptive dimensions
can undermine the power of punk. However, as demonstrated by BalKot’s move
from a focus on straight-edge purity to participatory DIY production, the anak
DIY are pursuing a form of positive punk that is grounded in alternative value
practices rather than a defined subcultural identity.
For the anak DIY, the essence of positive punk is a commitment to building
an autonomous community of creative production, rather than to punk as a
style or even an identity. Drawing on global DIY and anarcho-punk networks
(Dunn, 2016), as well as their local experiences in the Indonesian scene, they
seek to uphold a commitment to the etika DIY understood as practices of pro-
duction and social organization that enact the DIY values of autonomy (kemand-
irian) and community (komunitas). Rather than a contradiction between
individualism and collectivism, these values are united in the autonomous com-
munity of DIY hardcore, a living example of punk positif that serves as an altern-
ative not only to the commodified aesthetic rebellion of the commercial punk
scene but also to the wider system of capital accumulation.
O’Hara (1999) describes DIY punk as an anti-authoritarian philosophy of
independence and self-expression, and this corresponds closely with the DIY
value of autonomy as understood by the anak DIY in Bandung. An aspect of this
is the assertion of aesthetic independence from the market, establishing DIY
punk as a distinct field of cultural production (Moore, 2007; O’Connor, 2008;
Thompson, 2004). Yet this approach to DIY – emphasizing aesthetic rather
than political autonomy – can also lead to an entrepreneurial ethic of individual
enterprise and neoliberal precariousness, as it has in the wider independent
music scene in Bandung (Luvaas, 2012; Martin-Iverson, 2012). The anak DIY
Punk positif 129
reject this approach to punk independence, instead promoting their version of

the etika DIY as a form of collective self-organization – a refusal of alienated
labour and an affirmation of creative social production outside of the logic of
the market. This approach aligns them with anarchist and autonomist currents
within global punk (Donaghey, 2013; Dunn, 2016, pp. 57–8; Holtzman, Hughes
and Van Meter, 2007), while often putting them at odds with dominant prac-
tices in the Indonesian scene. BalKot activist Ernesto contrasts the DIY com-
munity with more commercial tendencies in the scene:
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.
They seek to establish an autonomous community as a cultural commons of

shared means and value, while minimizing the role of alienated wage labour
within the production process. DIY production can thus be considered a form of
‘commoning’: an active, collective labour process that produces and reproduces
the commons while resisting capital’s ongoing drive to enclosure and disposses-
sion (De Angelis, 2017, pp. 121–3; Linebaugh, 2014, pp. 13–15).
The autonomy of DIY production necessarily remains partial and contested,
as value in various forms flows between the DIY commons and the wider market
economy in which it remains embedded. Although the anak DIY do take on
much of the ‘non-creative’ work of reproduction and distribution, they still rely
on a wide range of commodities produced through the alienated wage labour of
others. The valorization of their creative work as an authentic form of DIY
expression can contribute to the alienation of these other contributions as
uncreative and depersonalized (Bestley, 2017; Thompson, 2004, pp. 133–4).
DIY self-organization can also easily slip into forms of self-exploitation (Shukai-
tis, 2009, pp. 126–31), and their DIY activities have helped prepare many of the
anak DIY for work in the cultural industries. Still, the etika DIY remains a
powerful demonstration of the desire to escape from the dominance of the
market and the conviction that another way of life is possible. This is the core
of DIY as ‘positive punk’.
DIY as prefigurative politics

The central project of the anak DIY is their attempt to construct an autonomous
community of DIY production, as a positive alternative to capitalist production.
While not all of the anak DIY self-identify as anarchists, DIY punk has often
been considered an important example of anarchist praxis (Donaghey, 2013;
Dunn, 2016, pp. 197–223; O’Hara, 1999, pp. 71–100) or the autonomist strategy
of revolutionary exodus (Holtzman, Hughes and Van Meter, 2007; Ovetz,
1993). Through its production of alternative values and social relations, DIY
punk can be understood as a form of prefigurative politics (Day, 2005, pp. 34–44;
Graeber, 2009), providing a ‘means by which alternative ways of being are ima-
gined and realized’ (Dunn, 2016, p. 19). As BalKot activist Tremor puts it:
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
‘lifestyle anarchism’, reducing the anarchist commitment to radical social

change to an individualized and commodified identity. However, the anak DIY
reject the idea that DIY production can be reduced to this kind of lifestyle or
identity politics. For BalKot activist and musician Methui, DIY punk is a reflex-
ive, self-critical form of politics:
Well, according to the definition of punk as it was promoted by several old

bands like [British anarcho-punk band] Crass, punk is truly also politics,
with an emphasis on the conditions in a country or even within an indi-
vidual. So the relationship between DIY punk and politics is very strong,
y’know? Especially when we look more broadly at the crimes of the capital-
ist system. And with DIY punk, we are more self-critical, that is we look
more closely at what we must do or not do in the world of politics.
(Interview with Methui, 2004, my translation)
Still, there is often a certain ambivalence about characterizing DIY punk as a

political movement. As BlankFlag puts it:
I like the words, what is it … ‘there is no freedom where there is authority’,

right? But my band is not the Black Bloc, yeah? Not the Black Bloc. But I
think – I think we have a movement, yeah? But the movement is not like
joining the demonstration. Our method is more like we write, nulis, and
sing, y’know, nyanyi, although we know it will give a little effect. But at
least we tried, y’know? As for anarchy, well, everyone is an anarchist when
they make their own vision for their own life.
(Interview with BlankFlag, 2004)
In this sense, DIY punk can be considered a form of ‘anti-political politics’,

forming part of a wider movement towards the revolution of everyday life (Shu-
kaitis, 2009; Vaneigem, 2006). The etika DIY is above all about emancipation
from alienated labour, even if only in a restricted field of creative production;
DIY production is a ‘political force antagonistic to capital’s organization of life
around work’ (Ovetz, 1993, p. 21). As in many other forms of anti-work politics
(Shukaitis, 2016, pp. 87–99; Weeks, 2011), the DIY refusal of alienated labour
is enacted not through idleness but rather through the pursuit of creative and
imaginative practices of production. This politics is both anti- and post-work,
‘both deconstructive and reconstructive, deploying at once negation and affir-
mation, simultaneously critical and utopian, generating estrangement from the
present and provoking a different future’ (Weeks, 2011, p. 233). Autonomous,
non-alienated creativity may be impossible to fully realize under current social
conditions but, as Shukaitis (2009, pp. 136–8) argues, it is the ‘absurd’ struggle
to put such impossibilities into practice that enables them to be imagined and
thus, perhaps, ultimately achieved. Holloway (2005) positions this primarily as
a negative movement of refusal, but it is also a positive assertion of autonomy
and ‘self-valorization’ (Cleaver, 1992; Negri, 1991), a compositional politics

producing new forms of cultural and social value outside the circuits of capital.
Central to this kind of prefigurative politics is the power of the radical imagi-
nation – the ability not only to conceptualize social alternatives but to collec-
tively enact them (Graeber, 2009, pp. 509–34; Haiven, 2014, pp. 217–55).
Certainly, an important part of this is the rejection of existing conditions – the
imaginative ‘anti-power’ of resistance (Holloway, 2005, pp. 27–38). Yet also
vital are the recognition, mobilization and production of the various alternative
values and social practices that can, have and do exist beyond capitalism. To
imagine and produce such alternatives, while resisting reincorporation and
enclosure, constitutes a dynamic value struggle (De Angelis, 2007; Haiven,
2014; Shukaitis, 2009, pp. 206–24).
Some of the anak DIY see this alternative as an end in itself: as a refuge from
capitalist alienation or simply as a sustainable and enjoyable hobby activity.
Others position DIY production as part of a broader counter-hegemonic and
anti-capitalist movement. These conflicting tendencies are brought together –
at least temporarily – by their common community-building project. DIY hard-
core could be interpreted as a retreat into lifestylism, marking the defeat of the
more overtly combative anarcho-punk politics of the Reformasi era, but it is also
an attempt to enact a compositional politics of emancipation, to both prefigure
and help constitute a movement beyond capitalism. As Hardt and Negri (2009)
argue, the production of social alternatives, of a commons outside capital, is also
necessarily a political struggle.
Positive punk? The dialectics of DIY

The anak DIY position their activities as a form of ‘positive punk’, emphasizing
the positive, constructive side of punk as the production of immanent social
alternatives. As a prefigurative politics of practice, DIY hardcore enacts altern-
ative social values, reconfiguring the social relationships of production in order
to construct an autonomous community. This positive punk approach contrasts
with the negative punk of spectacular disruption and symbolic protest. However,
there is also a negative dimension to DIY production, a refusal to be productive
in capitalist terms (Cuffman, 2015; Dunn, 2016, pp. 155–8; Thompson, 2004,
pp. 149–57). For Muñoz (2013, p. 98), the punk commons is a coming together
through a ‘lived politics of the negative’; similarly, Shukaitis (2016, pp. 148–50)
associates autonomous creativity with an ‘undercommons’ of disidentification
and disalienation. At the heart of ‘positive punk’ is an insurgent social creativ-
ity that is necessarily also a negation of capital accumulation and alienation.
The anak DIY do have a positive social goal – the building of a sustainable auto-
nomous community – but this cannot easily be disentangled from an antagonis-
tic politics of anti-capitalism.
In this sense, DIY can be understood as a value struggle characterized by a
dialectic of incorporation and excorporation, with autonomy as the ‘process of
Punk positif 133
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
them with a practical education in self-organization and the politics of cultural

production within, outside and against capital. Ultimately, the Bandung DIY
hardcore community has played a small but not insignificant role in the recom-
position of anti-capitalist struggles in Indonesia at a historical moment charac-
terized by its fragmentation and decline. Although DIY hardcore remains
substantially within a politics of antagonism and negation, it does help to push
forward the ongoing dialectic of anti-capitalist value struggle through its prefig-
uration of alternative value practices, and in this sense it can be considered a
form of ‘positive punk’.
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.
References
Barrett, D. (2013). DIY democracy: The direct action politics of US punk collectives.
American Studies, 52(2): 23–42.
Baulch, E. (2002). Alternative music and mediation in late New Order Indonesia. Inter-
Asia Cultural Studies, 3(2): 219–34.
Bestley, R. (2017). Design it yourself? Punk’s division of labour. Cadernos de Arte e Antro-
pologia, 5(1): 5–21.
Bookchin, M. (1995). Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm.
San Francisco: AK Press.
Cleaver, H. (1992). The inversion of class perspective in Marxian theory: From valorisa-
tion to self-valorisation. In W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds), Open
Marxism II: Theory and Practice (pp. 106–44). London: Pluto Press.
Cuffman, T. (2015). Idle musical community: Dischord Records and anarchic DIY prac-
tice. Contemporary Justice Review, 18(1): 4–21.
Day, R.F. (2005). Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements.
London: Pluto Press.
De Angelis, M. (2007). The Beginning of history: Value struggles and global capital. London:
Pluto.
De Angelis, M. (2017). Omnia sunt communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to
Postcapitalism. London: Zed Books.
Donaghey, J. (2013). Bakunin brand vodka: An exploration into anarchist-punk and
punk-anarchism. Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 1. Retrieved from www.
anarchist-developments.org/index.php/adcs_journal/article/view/59/62.
Dunn, K. (2016). Global Punk: Resistance and Rebellion in Everyday Life. London:
Bloomsbury.
Punk positif 135
Dupuis-Déri, F. (2010). Anarchism and the politics of affinity groups. Anarchist Studies,
18: 40–61.
Graeber, D. (2009). Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Haiven, M. (2014). Crisis of Imagination, Crisis of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the
Commons. London: Zed Books.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2005). Multitude. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Heryanto, A. and Hadiz, V.R. (2005). Post-authoritarian Indonesia. Critical Asian Studies,
37, 251–75.
Holloway, J. (2005). Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press.
Holtzman, B., Hughes, C. and Van Meter, K. (2007). Do it yourself …and the move-
ment beyond capitalism. In S. Shukaitis and D. Graeber (eds), Constituent Imagination:
Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (pp. 44–61). Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Laing, D. (2015). One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Oakland, CA:
PM Press.
Linebaugh, P. (2014). Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. Oakland,
CA: PM Press.
Luvaas, B. (2012). DIY Style: Fashion, Music and Global Digital Cultures. London: Berg.
Martin-Iverson, S. (2012). Autonomous youth? Independence and precariousness in the
Indonesian underground music scene. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 13(4):
382–97.
Martin-Iverson, S. (2016). The production of ‘do-it-yourself ’ authenticity in the Indone-
sian hardcore punk scene. In J. Lee and M. Ferrarese (eds), Punks, Monks and Politics:
Authenticity in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia (pp. 105–24). Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Moore, R. (2004). Postmodernism and punk subculture: Cultures of authenticity and
deconstruction. The Communication Review, 7(3): 305–27.
Moore, R. (2007). Friends don’t let friends listen to corporate rock: Punk as a field of cul-
tural production. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36: 438–74.
Muñoz, José Esteban (2013). ‘Gimme gimme this … gimme gimme that’: Annihilation
and innovation in the punk rock commons. Social Text, 31(3): 95–110.
Negri, A. (1991). Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons from the Grundrisse. New York: Autonome-
dia.
DIY. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
O’Hara, C. (1999). The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise! Oakland, CA: AK Press.
Ovetz, R. (1993). Noize music: The hypostatic insurgency. Common Sense, 13: 5–23.
Portwood-Stacer, L. (2013). Lifestyle politics and radical activism, New York: Bloomsbury.
Shukaitis, S. (2009). Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-organization in the Revolutions of
Everyday Life. London: Minor Compositions.
Shukaitis, S. (2016). The Compositions of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural
Labor After the Avant-Garde. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Thompson, S. (2004). Punk Productions: Unfinished Business. Albany, NY: State Univer-
sity of New York Press.
Vaneigem, R. (2006). The Revolution of Everyday Life. London: Rebel.
Weeks, K. (2011). The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and
Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Part III
Art, music and

technological change
Chapter 12
So far, yet so near

The Brazilian DIY politics of Sofar
Sounds – a collaborative network for
live music audiences
Jeder Silveira Janotti Jr and Victor de Almeida
Nobre Pires
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
have been developed through private- and especially public-sector sponsorship

designed to ensure that a festival event could be held – albeit falling short of
sustaining the event’s continuity over time. Pires (2015) identifies indie festi-
vals (and also major events, like Sónar São Paulo) that were not sustainable due
to their inability to raise sufficient resources through laws designed to ensure tax
incentives for investments in cultural events. During his research on inde-
pendent festivals linked to the Brazilian post-rock music scene, Pires tracked
events like the ‘Produto Instrumental Bruto’ – PIB (Gross National Product)
festival – in São Paulo and the ‘Pequenas Sessões’ festival in Belo Horizonte,
which was discontinued after 2012 due to fundraising difficulties, despite being
approved for funding through tax incentive laws for cultural events.
Due to the economic crisis faced by Brazil since the early 2010s, independent
festivals have been forced to rely on support from public-sector‒based cultural
tax incentives. Some examples of this kind of funding are those enabled through
the Petrobrás state-owned oil company, Conexão Vivo, and Funarte. Due to the
tightening of budgets at several companies, such as Vivo, Oi and Petrobrás, the
scenario for the future is likely to be a gradual slowdown in cultural investments
and the end of programmes like ‘Conexão Vivo’. This is a national programme
encouraging and promoting musical production through funding from the
mobile phone company Vivo. Various festivals that were part of this programme
may be affected. In the ten years of its existence, Conexão Vivo sponsored more
than 1500 shows in five states of Brazil: Pará, Minas Gerais, Bahia, Espírito
Santo and Pernambuco.
However, there is another component of independent music production
activities that at times goes unnoticed in academic research. It is an aspect of
production that remains largely outside the realm of public funding opportun-
ities, cultural incentive laws and private sponsorships. Even with diverse inde-
pendent events in all parts of Brazil, it is still possible to find agents whose work
is based on a different logic, as they continue to perform their shows, organize
their tours, record their albums and so on, thus adopting a more traditional DIY
stance.
It is in the current context of constant crises and economic disruptions that
we see the emergence of new production tactics in the live-music sector. In par-
ticular, these are production practices driven mainly by aesthetic and emotional
attachments to music that run counter to the former market logic that previ-
ously underpinned the cycle of music production in Brazil. We believe it is
important to remember that some small live-music events are still performed
almost as a kind of ‘symbolic barter’, made possible through the logic of
exchange of services by actors involved in music scenes providing voluntary
hosting, the creation of artwork designs and recording services, even when musi-
cians and producers are seeking to make their mark as professionals.
Given this reality, and considering the independent music scene and recent
changes in this sector, we can affirm that there is a change underway in the role
played by audiences participating in the production of certain kinds of events.
So far, yet so near 141
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)
In the context of Brazil, such audience initiatives include crowdfunding plat-

forms such as Queremos and Catarse, while some bands touring in Brazil employ
the Living Room Tours’ model,4 such as Apanhador Só. This model, as observed
in Brazil and elsewhere, sheds light on how fans from around the world have
taken on a new kind of importance when it comes to making shows feasible.
Whether it is organizing events in a fan’s home or becoming a maker agent in
partnership with local producers, this approach provides a viable alternative
strategy for overcoming the difficulties inherent in performing small shows in
larger concert halls where costs can be prohibitive. It is largely a strategy that
operates to disseminate and produce those events.
It is true that these practices are not totally innovative, since some musical
genres, such as punk, are linked to the DIY approach and have a history of
activism among fans. What is new, however, is the way that these independent
contemporary practices are managing networks and how they are reviving the
debate over the cultural and economic value of live music, transformations in
musical consumption and dynamics between economic feasibility versus emo-
tional bonds in independent musical markets.
Sofar Sounds: ‘There is something wrong in live

music …’
Sofar Sounds (the acronym for ‘Songs from a room’) began in March 2009 in
the living room of composer and co-founder Rafe Offer. The guiding idea for
this movement was to support emerging and independent artists and bands, by
making musical presentations in an intimate format. Today, over 300 shows

organized by local volunteers are performed every month.
Rafe Offer explains that the idea came about when he realized that he had
grown tired of going to concerts where audiences were not interested in the
music – especially at shows performed by new bands. According to Offer, there
is no longer any respect for live music, and it is common to find people talking,
texting on mobile devices and otherwise making noise during the shows:
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:
We spend as much time on the guest list as we do on the music. For

instance, there are 80 people coming to the gig tonight in London – we can
guarantee that at least half of them will have never been before. And we
prioritize those who can help in some way – bloggers, people helping with
the filming, people that are part of the family in some way. And also fans –
the kind of people who will come and then tell another 100 people ‘you
won’t believe what I saw last night!’
(Fryatt, 2013)
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:
It’s the correlation between these real-world experiences and a plugged-in

digital strategy that makes Sofar not only cool, but commercially viable.
Local volunteers create gloriously high-quality image galleries and video for
each event – furnishing the Sofar website and social media with great
content, as well as giving free marketing materials to the performers. For any
young bands starting out, it’s hard to get yourself out there. Anyone can pop
stuff online but as a fan it’s hard to find anything and as a musician it’s hard
to promote yourself unless you’re a social media expert or entrepreneur.
(Fryatt, 2013)
As the network has developed, bringing on growing demands by fans to attend

the concerts and the entry of foreign investment, a drastic change is evident in
these modes of operation. There has been a visible adaptation of production
practices to meet the need to generate income from these activities. One critical
issue is the opening of a non-selective public-ticket sales process for attending
the session. Another is the network’s international expansion. In Brazil, for
example, the Sofar Sounds headquarters is run by a local company, which
manages local volunteers and producers:
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.
DIY in Brazil: from strategies to tactics in

living-r oom concerts
Sofar Sounds is revolutionizing the DIY music scene. Their mission is to
‘bring the magic back to live music’ by hosting exclusive live music events
throughout a city. These ‘Sofars’ are an intimate, invite-only performance
event – the best new music played in unique spaces (like someone’s rooftop
or basement), to passionate audiences.
(Silvestri, 2016)
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)
and authenticity (Janotti, 2007), we perceive how it is possible to identify traces

of discussions that permeate in the independent ideal and DIY, as well as their
possible conformity in the production of contemporary music markets.
In other words, the discussion here does not merely incorporate pre-existing
polemics over marketing, ideologies and cultural dualities in the music industry.
Rather, our intention is to perceive DIY practices and their manifestations as
mediation practices within the Sofar Sounds network, inscribed in a series of
developments. The main one, we believe, is precisely the collective dimension
of DIY practices implied within this network and how this ‘productive col-
lective’ is the first link in what is coming to be known as the ‘global community’
of Sofar Sounds. Put in another way, we seek to look at the tensions between
the individual and the collective that are behind one of the mediations of DIY
processes and negotiating differences that arise between actors in the Sofar
network.
Based on de Certeau’s (1988) ideas, we can indeed conclude that the great
live music festivals, with their connections with sponsors, agendas, broadcasting
rights, exclusive contracts with artists and services, operate with a long-term
perspective, planned in relation to competitors and their market position on a
large scale, allowing their effective existence as milestones in the consumption
calendars for live music:
I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships

that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business,
an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place
that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations
with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competi-
tors, enemies, the country sur-rounding the city, objectives and objects of
research, etc.) can be man-aged. As in management, every ‘strategic’ ration-
alization seeks first of all to distinguish its ‘own’ place, that is, the place of
its own power and will, from an ‘environment.
(de Certeau, 1988, p. 99)
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:
A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without

taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It
has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare
its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. The
‘proper’ is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not
have a place, a tactic depends on time – it is always on the watch for oppor-
tunities that must be seized ‘on the wing’. Whatever it wins, it does not
keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into

‘opportunities.’ The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces
alien to them. This is achieved in the propitious moments when they are
able to combine heterogeneous elements (thus, in the supermarket, the
housewife confronts heterogeneous and mobile data – what she has in the
refrigerator, the tastes, appetites, and moods of her guests, the best buys and
their possible combinations with what she already has on hand at home,
etc.); the intellectual synthesis of these given elements takes the form,
however, not of a discourse, but of the decision itself, the act and manner
in which the opportunity is ‘seized’.
(de Certeau, 1988, p. 100)
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
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.
References
de Certeau, M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of Califor-
nia Press.
Fryatt, L. (2013). Sofar Sounds: The secret gig movement changing the face of live
music. The Heureka, 19 March. Retrieved from http://theheureka.com/sofar-sounds-
rafe-offer.
Gibson, C. and Connell, J. (2012). Music Festivals and Regional Development in Australia.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Gumbrecht, H.U. (2010). Produção de Presença. O que o sentido não consegue transmitir.
Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto.
Herschmann, M. (2007). Lapa, cidade da música. Desafios e perspectivas para o crescimento
do Rio de Janeiro e da indústria da música independente nacional. Rio de Janeiro:
Mauad X.
Herschmann, M. (2010). Indústria da Música em Transição (Vol. 1). São Paulo: Estação
das Letras e das Cores.
Janotti, J. Jr (2007). Música Popular Massiva e Comunicação: um universo particular.
Interin, 4: 1–12.
O’Hara, C. (2005). A filosofia do punk. São Paulo: Radical Livros.
Pires, V. (2015). Além do pós-rock: as cenas musicais contemporâneas e a nova música instru-
mental brasileira. Maceió: Edufal.
Silvestri, L. (2016). Know your scene: Carolyn Lederach of Sofar Sounds Philly. Rock on
Philly, 5 February. Retrieved from http://rockonphilly.com/2016/02/know-your-scene-
carolyn-lederach-of-sofar-sounds.
Sofar (2017) Brasília. Retrieved from www.sofarsounds.com/brasilia.
Thomas, K. and Chan, J. (2013). Negotiating the paradox of creative autonomy in the
making of artists. Studies in Art Education, 54(3): 260–72.
Tyler-Ameen, D. (2011). Live in your living room: You book the bands. The Record, 11
March. Retrieved from www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2011/03/11/134425621/live-
from-your-living-room.
Yúdice, G. (2011). Apontamentos sobre alguns dos novos negócios da música. In M.
Herschmann (ed.), Nas bordas e fora do mainstream musical. São Paulo: Estação das
Letras e das Cores.
Chapter 13
Cassette cultures in Berlin

Resurgence, DIY freedom or sellout?
Benjamin Düster and Raphaël Nowak
The cassette tape, once seemingly on the brink of extinction, continues to

survive. In the contemporary landscape of music production, there has been a
significant revival in the distribution and consumption of cassettes. Apart from
its long-lasting prominence in some underground and DIY music scenes, such as
metal, hip hop, punk or electronic music (Eley, 2011; Harrison, 2006), the cas-
sette tape shows signs of reinvigoration – for instance, through the release of
Demi Lovato’s 2017 album Sorry Not Sorry as part of the Cassette Store
Day 2017.
Drawing on qualitative data gathered in Berlin in 2015 and 2016 (see Düster,
2016), this chapter explores contemporary cassette cultures and the various
ways in which the format subsists. Following a critical review of the literature
on cassette cultures, we detail the empirical component upon which this chapter
is based. We then develop the argument that the contemporary discourses on
cassette tapes are embedded within a tension between small/DIY music scenes
that incorporate cassette tapes for a whole range of interwoven face-to-face and
digital processes of creation and distribution on the one hand, and a broader
recent mainstream revival that ranges from cassette releases of mainstream
artists and feature articles in major newspaper outlets on the other (Coleman,
2013). In the third section, we contextualize this approach through an investi-
gation of the infrastructures of music scenes in Berlin that produce and dis-
tribute music on cassette tapes, the interconnection of cassettes with digital
technologies and the use of cassette for defining a genre identity.
Cassette cultures: continuity or revival?

In the statistics released by the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA) about music sales in the United States, there is no longer any explicit
mention of cassettes (IFPI, 2017; RIAA, 2017). Cassettes do, however, appear
in the statistics of Germany and Japan – currently the only markets worldwide
that still build primarily on revenues from physical formats. In Germany, the
music cassette records a low-level growth of 1.2 per cent for the year 2016 (see
Bundesverband Musikindustrie, 2017). This is the first increase to be recorded
Cassette cultures in Berlin 151
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
music consumption, or whether cassettes correspond to one of the material

means through which music is experienced in everyday life (Nowak, 2015). In
Curran’s research (2016, p. 44), one participant – Paul Etherington – emphas-
izes how the format exists outside the current dominant circuits of production
and distribution of recorded music. Underground scenes in metal, punk, noise,
indie or electronic music have continuously released music on cassette tapes, as
a way to exist outside of the dominant music market.
In addition, the research conducted by Curran (2016) also sheds light on the
integration and co-optation of cassette tapes within a capitalist logic. To
Curran, this current co-optation of the format by major labels and artists is a
sign of the tendency of capitalism’s ability to transform oppositional elements of
a historic counter-culture into ways to maximize profits. For instance, a label
owner and artist from Edinburgh (UK), Ali Robertson, is quoted by Curran as
saying, ‘We’re living through these times of just trying to squeeze every last bit
of monetary worth out of stuff. And that’s like that shit – “Tapes, hey! Let’s see
if we can milk this!” ’ (in Curran, 2016, p. 48). Indeed, the marketing structures
of independent labels do not differ from those of major distribution companies
and labels that are based on e-commerce platforms and marketing through social
media. In the words of Prior (2010, p. 404), ‘the DIY ethic so cherished by punk
rockers is no longer an activist ideology, but a systematic, structural condition of
the production of music itself ’.
The tension that emerges out of the cassette format as existing within under-
ground DIY scenes or as being co-opted by the capitalist market through the
release of mainstream music highlights not only the vibrant contemporary exist-
ence of the format, but also the network of politics within which it is embedded.
Regardless of whether cassettes have persisted (in certain DIY scenes/genres) or
revived (in more mainstream popular-music genres), the contemporary presence
of the format requires investigation in an age when physical audio releases are
no longer a necessity for most music labels and artists. Indeed, digital releases
via platforms like Bandcamp or streaming services like Pandora or Spotify suffice
for many artists to acquire a level of visibility.
It is therefore worth noting that the cassettes produced by independent labels
and artists need to be seen as additional distribution and marketing forms for
releases where the main revenue comes from download or streaming sales. As
Novak (2013) puts it, cassettes may maintain or even re-establish the face-to-
face encounters that are based on their function as artistic calling cards. In that
regard, we argue below that cassette cultures are animated by discursive features
that are critical to constructing and stabilizing genre conventions. The cassette
tape, often used as a material vehicle to make claims about the capitalist market
and cultural industries, is in fact an integral part of the contemporary process of
genre identification, and therefore of the fragmentation of the production, dis-
tribution and consumption of particular music genres.
Case study: cassettes in Berlin in 2015–16

Berlin, as an important European music centre for various genres and inter-
national artistic exchanges, constitutes an ideal field for research. To date, the
vast number of contemporary cassette-related labels and projects in Berlin have
not been examined thoroughly. The data upon which we draw in this chapter was
collected for a small-scale pilot study that Benjamin Düster conducted in 2015–16
(see Düster, 2016). The focus of the study was to gather and map the manifold
practices related to cassettes that were based in or related to Berlin over a period
of approximately one year. To achieve this, Düster identified and recorded
different perspectives on the viability of the cassette format through consulting
with artists, labels, event organizers and consumers. He deployed a mixed-methods
research approach, which included semi-structured expert interviews with scene
members occurring in varying positions within the field, research in specialized
shops and on the internet, participant observations, and auto-ethnographic notes
and analysis. This last technique proved to be an essential tool for the study, as
Düster has actively participated in music scenes dealing with cassettes as a per-
former for experimental music since 2014, and as a co-operator of the cassette
label Gravity’s Rainbow Tapes since 2015. Hence critical reflection of Düster’s
roles in the field was necessary to maintain an objective distance from the research
object. This required the contextual analysis of field notes and interviews. To map
the organizational structure of the field, Düster recorded his roles and connections
to the positions of the interviewees, venues and shops in a process chart.
Cassette cultures in Berlin: discursive features for genre

conventions
In what follows, we argue that the very materiality of the cassette partakes in
creating particular modes of engagement with various musical styles, and it con-
structs and delineates their main aesthetic features. The desire for engagement
with the material affordance of cassettes is echoed in the empirical data col-
lected by Düster in Berlin in 2015–16, which we discuss below.
Scene infrastructure of cassette labels in Berlin

During one of his participant observation sessions, Düster attended the Kassetten-
tag event in Berlin, which was part of the German branch of the 2015 Cassette
Store Day. At this event, he and his label partner, Thomas Radam, sold the cas-
sette releases on their label, alongside cassettes from other labels, live concert cas-
settes and cassette DJ sets. For a fairly brief period of time – about fifteen minutes
– the room was in a state that could be described as a market atmosphere: people
were going from table to table, picking up cassettes and eventually buying some of
them. The rest of the day (about seven hours) appeared to be what Radam called
a ‘meet-up of friends where everyone knows everyone’. By implication, this meant
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.
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.
(Inter)connections with digital technologies

The examples of shops in houses and people sharing their passion for cassettes
in direct conversations at events are just part of the contemporary occurrence
and use of cassettes. Every label encountered during the research in Berlin in
2015–16 features a presence on websites like Bandcamp, Soundcloud or Bigcar-
tel. Through these, the projects sell tapes and provide digital versions via down-
loads or streaming. All the shops selling cassettes in Berlin rely on e-commerce
sales. It is useful to note at this point that virtually none of the cassettes sold
through retailers in Berlin features a barcode. Moreover, most of the shops
selling cassettes do not use an electronic checkout. This indicates that sales
through them and mail orders are not recorded in the statistics of the Federal
Music Industry Association (Bundesverband Musikindustrie, 2017).
Looking at the structures of the labels that sell cassettes, it is also apparent
that one of the cassette’s original meanings – as a format enabling mobile
private listening practices through the Walkman (Hosokawa, 1984) – belongs
to a time pre-dating mobile digital technologies. As every cassette purchase
through Bandcamp features a code for unlimited streaming or for the download-
ing of the tracks, the mobile consumption of music is now concentrated on
digital devices like smartphones, whereas the cassette appears as a material and
aesthetic format that belongs to the household. The cassette as a physical object
is therefore transforming into a format that induces practices of music consump-
tion similar to those of the vinyl record, which correspond to a decelerated form
of music consumption, where listeners cherish the technical characteristics and
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.
Using cassettes for defining music genre

conventions
Interestingly, a contemporary opposition to capitalist structures of music distribu-
tion expressed through the sole use of cassettes for releases, which omits the use of
the internet for promotion and distribution, only occurs within specific music
scenes. As Bailey (2013, pp. 304–26) has shown for a range of black metal
releases, the structural avoidance of any type of advertisement can shift into
modes of effective anti-promotion. By distributing their releases just through
cassettes and, at least initially, not in digital formats, small labels try to assure that
dedicated listeners aligned with corresponding scenic ideals will be satisfied.
This form of anti-promotion is effectively utilized by the Berlin store Rumsti
Pumsti, which has a shop in the basement of a residential building located in a
quieter suburb. This relates to the genres and types of distributed items that
represent everything that can be considered outside the scope of mainstream

music, such as spoken word and radio art, electroacoustic music, field recordings
and free improvised music. In incorporating this strategy, the shop systemati-
cally excludes casual customers who are just passing by or in search of main-
stream releases. Moreover, the store does not offer any playback devices for
pre-purchase listening to the records. As a customer put it (in Düster, 2016,
p. 46), people have to know and research in advance what they want before
they step into Rumsti Pumsti.
Due to the fact that certain types of genres draw fewer potential customers
than others, some Berlin-based black metal bands like Ancst (Bandcamp,
2017b) prefer to release their experimental ambient and noise albums and col-
laborations on cassette, whereas their regular black metal albums are usually
pressed on vinyl and eventually released on CD. Here, the economic character-
istic of cassette production that does not require a minimum quantity in the
pressing plants allows these projects to run smaller editions, and therefore to
engage with more experimental styles of music.
As Bailey (2012, pp. 286–303) and Novak (2013, p. 224) demonstrate, the
conceptual releases of, for example, dirt-covered cassettes within the noise and
industrial scenes leave some cassettes as barely playable objects. This can be inter-
preted as employing the cassette format’s characteristics to generate a form of anti-
commodity. However, the ‘object-ness’ of these releases and their limited editions
contribute to the fetishization of collectibles that are sold for high prices on web-
sites like Discogs, and that are charged with a longing for scenic authenticity by
their pursuers (see Discogs, 2017). Such examples primarily represent cassette cul-
tures in the 1980s and 1990s, but are rather rare nowadays. The contemporary use
of cassettes does not incorporate much manipulation of the format. A fair amount
of the cassette releases that occur in the vaporwave and techno genres actually
merge analogue and digital technologies in manifold ways – for example, by
heavily stylizing the digital look of their cover artwork (Düster, 2016; Walker,
2017). The noise and industrial scenes, however, imitate releases from the 1980s
and 1990s by using a raw photocopy and collage aesthetic for their artworks.
These examples shed light on the various ways by which the cassette tape –
even if it does not construct a music market outside of the scope of capitalism –
does a great deal to foster particular stylistic discourses around certain music
genres. The format not only becomes associated with certain music genres, but
also clearly contributes to defining the conventions around the production, dis-
tribution and consumption of these genres by inducing particular types of prac-
tices and discourses.
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
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.
References
Bandcamp (2017a). ‘Twaague’. Retrieved from https://twaague.bandcamp.com.
Bandcamp (2017b). ‘Ancst’. Retrieved from https://twaague.bandcamp.com.
Bailey, T.W.B. (2012). Unofficial Release: Self-released and Handmade Audio in Post-
industrial Society. London: Belsona Books.
Beck, J. (2015). ‘Deutschlands erster Cassette Store Day: Initiatoren Anton Teichmann
(Mansions and Millions) and Amande Dagod (Späti Palace) im Gespräch’. Retrieved
from www.spex.de/deutschlands-erster-cassette-store-day-initiatoren-anton-teichmann-
mansions-and-millions-amande-dagod-spaeti-palace-im-gespraech.
Bohlmann, A.F. (2017). Making tapes in Poland: The compact cassette at home. Twen-
tieth Century Music, 14(1): 119–34.
Bundesverband Musikindustrie (2017). Musikindustrie in Zahlen. Retrieved from www.
musikindustrie.de/fileadmin/bvmi/upload/02_Markt-Bestseller/MiZ-Grafiken/2016/
bvmi-2016-musikindustrie-in-zahlen-jahrbuch-ePaper_final.pdf.
Busby, L. (2015). Editions of you: A DIY archive of DIY practice. In S. Baker (ed.), Preserving
Popular Music Heritage: Do-it-yourself, Do-it-together (pp. 227–40). New York: Routledge.
Butler, W (2013). Bandcamp daily: Rewind! The cassette is back. Retrieved from https://
daily.bandcamp.com/2013/05/07/rewind-the-cassette-is-back.
Coleman, M. (2013). Can cassette tapes be cool again? Retrieved from http://edition.
cnn.com/2013/09/06/opinion/coleman-cassette-day/index.html.
Curran, K. (2016). ‘On tape’: Cassette culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow now. In R.
Purcell and R. Randall (eds), 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and
Culture: Listening Spaces (pp. 33–55). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Demers, J. (2017). Cassette tape revival as creative anachronism. Twentieth Century
Music, 14(1): 109–17.
Diamond, E. (2017). Everything is terrific: The Bandcamp 2016 year in review. Retrieved
https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/01/24/everything-is-terrific-the-bandcamp-2016-
year-in-review.
Discogs (2017). Angel Dust Whore/Pain Jerk – split cassette. Retrieved from www.
discogs.com/de/sell/item/243836890.
Düster, B. (2016). The placing of audio cassette production and consumption within the
musical practice of Berlin and Japan. Unpublished MA thesis, Humbolt University of
Berlin.
Eley, C. (2011). Technostalgia and the resurgence of cassette culture. In J.P. Fisher and
B. Flota (eds), The Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in
the Time of Terror (pp. 43–57). Farnham: Ashgate.
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.
Hosokawa, S. (1984). The Walkman effect. Popular Music, 4: 165–80.
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) (2017). Global Music
Report 2017. London: IFPI.
Motto Distribution (2017). Motto Berlin. Retrieved from www.mottodistribution.com/
site/?page_id=1020.
Novak, D. (2013). Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press.
Nowak, R. (2015). Consuming Music in the Digital Age: Technologies, Roles, Everyday Life.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Prior, N. (2010). The rise of the new amateurs: Popular music, digital technology and
the fate of cultural production. in J. Hall, L. Grindstaff and Ming-Cheng Lo (eds),
Handbook of Cultural Sociology. London: Routledge.
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) (2017). Facts and Research: 2017
Mid-Year RIAA Shipment and Revenue Statistics | RIAA. Retrieved from www.riaa.com/
reports/2017-mid-year-riaa-shipment-revenue-statistics-riaa.
Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) (2017). (2017). Statistics Trends.
Retrieved from www.riaj.or.jp/f/pdf/issue/industry/RIAJ2017E.pdf.
Rogers, J. (2013). Total rewind: 10 key moments in the life of the cassette. Guardian, 30
August. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/music/2013/aug/30/cassette-store-day-
music-tapes.
Rumstipumsti (2017). About. Retrieved from www.rumpsti-pumsti.com.
Staalplaat (2017). Website. Retrieved from http://staalplaat.com.
Staaltape (2017). Berlin Tape Run. Retrieved from https://staaltape.wordpress.com/
berlin-tape-run.
Tabs Out Cassette Podcast (2017). Tape label list. Retrieved from www.tabsout.
com/?page_id=15214.
United Cassettes (2017). Map. Retrieved from http://map.unitedcassettes.com.
Urban Outfitters (2017). Lana Del Rey – Lust for Life, limited cassette tape. Retrieved from
www.urbanoutfitters.com/shop/lana-del-rey-lust-for-life-limited-cassette-tape?category=
cassettes&color=060.
Walker, B. (2016). Bandcamp daily: 2016 – the year in stats. Retrieved from https://daily.
bandcamp.com/2016/12/23/2016-the-year-in-stats.
Wrench, N. (2010). The cassette comes back as art. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.
uk/2/hi/entertainment/8441839.stm.
Chapter 14
‘Here Today’
The role of ephemera in clarifying
underground culture
John Willsteed
This chapter will examine the importance of ephemera in historical collections

and archives by examining what constitutes ephemera and what its role might
be in activating subcultural stories, with a particular emphasis on the Brisbane
underground music scene from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. This will
include discussing particular artefacts: how and why these items were made,
where they are now and what their legacy might be.
One month before the Sex Pistols released ‘Anarchy in the UK’, Brisbane
band The Saints released their first single, ‘(I’m) Stranded’. Both songs fuelled a
wave that swept through youth culture in the 1970s. The Brisbane bands that
followed The Saints grew from a social scene tied together by railway lines,
unemployment and access to copies of Creem from the United States, or New
Musical Express from the United Kingdom, as well as the intermittent inner-city
reach of the community radio station (Stafford, 2004). And as music-making
became accessible through simplicity of style and the DIY ethos, so related cul-
tural activity flourished, as analogue communication technology – audio and
video recording, photocopying and photography – became cheaper and easier to
access. These ‘technological resources of the dominant order, resources that
tend to be used to create top-down media products that minimize or even dis-
courage participation amongst their consumers’ (Atton, 2002, p. 64) were now
in the hands of mainly unemployed youth with a desire to make, and to make a
difference.
Brisbane in the 1970s was different from the rest of Australia, and these
differences will be examined in this chapter. These were idiosyncratic circum-
stances, and they determined the growth of the underground culture at the time.
The artefacts will also be identified and defined, and finally I will examine ways
of telling the story of Brisbane’s subcultural past, historically and into the future.
Background and approach

The Queensland state election in 1967 saw the rise to power of Premier Joh
Bjelke-Petersen, a Country Party politician and deeply conservative peanut
farmer from Kingaroy (Lunn, 1978). Twenty years later, on 1 December 1987,
‘Here Today’ 161
Bjelke-Petersen resigned in the midst of a wide-ranging inquiry into systemic

corruption in Queensland’s government and the police force (Condon, 2014).
It has been suggested by Worley (2016), Williams (2015), Moore and Roberts
(2009), Stafford (2004) and others that the 1980s was a fertile period for oppo-
sitional culture under repressive Western governments. Although Brisbane was
geographically isolated, Bjelke-Petersen’s last decade in power coincided with
similarly conservative rule by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and
Ronald Reagan in the United States. Stafford (2004) clearly describes the ‘big
country town’ that was Brisbane in the 1970s, with its conservative, Christian
flavour and a government controlled by farmers and property developers. Youth
subculture, spawned by the 1960s cultural revolution and this political repres-
sion, was small but potent. Punk and post-punk were the protest musics of their
time, and their related ephemera – magazines, posters, handbills, recordings,
film and photos – are a rich source of cultural information.
At this point, I put myself in the picture. I am both participant and observer in
this story – a central player in the Brisbane punk/post-punk scene. I joined my
first proper band, Zero, a band of women, in the summer of 1978. They were anar-
chists and feminists, angry and passionate about the state we were in: racist,
homophobic and openly oppressive to women and youth. Over the next decade, I
played in many other bands in both Brisbane and Sydney, and eventually joined
the Go-Betweens – after The Saints, probably Brisbane’s most well-known cul-
tural export from this period. Since 1978, I had designed and printed posters,
recorded music under houses and in sheds and studios, made magazines and
movies, played shows, and written songs and stories. This experience as a parti-
cipant in the Brisbane punk and post-punk scene makes me aware of the tenuous
and temporary nature of some of the artefacts that bind and inform this cultural
story. But if the physical artefacts are often hard to find, this loss is balanced by
the abundance of memories recently revealed on blogs and sites devoted to this
particular scene. As will be discussed later, the curatorial process required to con-
struct versions of history needs to include the artefacts, the memories and new
modes of dissemination that are inclusive and transformative.
In the late 1970s, Brisbane was steeped in change: the destruction of old
parts of the city was rife; the 1960s had shattered the traditional family struc-
ture; and analogue technology was at its peak – cheap and plentiful. The scene
that produced The Saints and The Go-Betweens also grew artists, filmmakers
and writers, and had its own particular, local qualities.
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.
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
Figure 14.1 Mail art, 1978–79.

Source: From the author’s collection.
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
Figure 14.2 Covers of DK/Decay magazines 1979–80.

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:
Those who stayed collaborated in the creation of a distinctive counter-

culture marked by interdisciplinarity, sedition and experiment, whose
potent Dadaist undercurrents Ursula Szulakowska described as ‘a similar
response to the (canonical Dadaists’) destructive political situation and the
inheritance of a stagnant culture’.
(Zuvela, 2008, p. 46)
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
resistance to oppression – and the posters expressed this graphically. Razar:

Young, Fast and Non-boring, curated by Christopher Smith at the QPAC
Museum in 2004, was a show built around ephemera. Two years later, Takin’ It
to the Streets: Two Decades That Changed Brisbane, 1965–1985, curated by Jo
Besley, Louise Denoon and Katie McConnel at the Museum of Brisbane (Besley,
Denoon and McConnel, 2007), was busy not just with posters and banners, but
artefacts like badges and T-shirts. In 2013, the State Library of Queensland
staged a very successful Brisbane music exhibition, Live!, which acknowledged
underground as well as popular-music scenes.
Although many ephemeral items languish in the institutional dark, there are
some avid culture-makers and fans who had been collecting these same items
since the 1970s, and looking for ways to share what they love. Lambert (2008,
p. 148) notes that ‘a specialist collection compiled by an individual … has a
unique value far beyond the sum of its parts and is indispensable’. ARI Remix:
The Scene Issue is a digital magazine with an aesthetic that lies in the early
1980s, where photographs, artwork, posters and handbills are bound together
with edited Facebook comments to create a coherent, powerful story about
memory and Brisbane’s post-punk scene (Andrew, 2017). Similarly, the blog
That Striped Sunlight Sound has digitized music and cover art of more than 800
Australian underground or independent recordings. The comments section of
the blog gives context and authenticity to the collection and agency to the
participants – exercising what Sarah Baker and Alison Huber (2015, p. 112)
would call ‘vernacular expertise’.
All these layers of interest, collection and activation of Brisbane’s cultural
heritage contribute to the quality of the city’s identity. Having been present in
the scene through the late 1970s and 1980s, I began to develop an interest in
extending these methods to include my particular skills as musician and film-
maker in order to tell a more particular story.
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)
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.
References
Andrew, P. (2017). ARI Remix: The Scene Issue [Digital magazine]. Retrieved from
https://issuu.com/ari-remix/docs/ari-remix-issue-1-the-scene-issuu.
Atton, C. (2002). Alternative media. London: Sage.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2001). Australian Social Trends, 2001. Canberra: ABS.
Retrieved from www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834ef
a/855e6f87080d2e1aca2570ec000c8e5f!OpenDocument.
Baker, S. and Huber, A. (2015). Saving rubbish: Preserving popular music’s material
culture in amateur archives and museums. In S. Cohen, R. Knifton, M. Leonard and L.
Roberts (eds), Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places (pp. 112–24).
New York: Routledge.
Besley, J., Denoon, L. and McConnel, K. (2007). Past and present collide: Bringing
together the Museum of Brisbane’s exhibition Taking to the Streets: Two Decades that
Changed Brisbane, 1965–1985. Queensland Review, 14(1): 1–10.
Condon, M. (2014). Jacks and Jokers. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.
Ensminger, D.A. (2011). Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and
Hardcore Generation. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Friedman, K. (1995). The early days of mail art: An historical overview. In C. Welch
(ed.), Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.
Frith, S. (1996). Music and identity. In S. Hall and P. Du Gay (eds), Questions of Cul-
tural Identity (pp. 108–50). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Gross, J. (2011). 2 new books serve as memorials, each in its own way. New Statesman,
25 September. Retrieved from www.statesman.com/news/lifestyles/2-new-books-serve-
as-memorials-each-in-its-own-w-1/nRfmw.
Harley, R. (1986). Know Your Product [Exhibition catalogue]. Brisbane: Institute of
Modern Art.
IMA (2008). The Brisbane Sound. Retrieved from www.ima.org.au/the-brisbane-sound.
Lambert, J.A. (2008). Immortalizing the mayfly: Permanent ephemera – an illusion or a
(virtual) reality? RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage,
9(1): 142–56.
170 J. Willsteed
Lunn, H. (1978). Joh: The Life and Political Adventures of Johannes Bjelke-Petersen. Bris-
bane: University of Queensland Press.
Moore, R. and Roberts, M. (2009). Do-it-yourself mobilization: Punk and social move-
ments. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 14(3): 273–91.
Radical Times (2018). A brief history of Brisbane radio station 4ZZZ-FM. Retrieved from
http://radicaltimes.info/PDF/4ZZZhistory.pdf.
Stafford, A. (2004). Pig City: From The Saints to Savage Garden. Brisbane: University of
Queensland Press.
Szulakowska, U. (1998). Experimental Art in Queensland, 1975–1995: An Introductory
Study. Brisbane: Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University.
Walker, C. (1982). Inner City Sound. Sydney: Wild & Woolley.
Walker, C. (1985). The Next Thing: Contemporary Australian Rock. Beaverton, OR: Kan-
garoo Press.
Walker, C. (2016). Fanzines – 1970s. Retrieved from www.clintonwalker.com.au/
fanzines-1970s.html.
Williams, J. (2015). ‘Rock against Reagan’: The punk movement, cultural hegemony,
and Reaganism in the eighties. Unpublished MA thesis, University of North Iowa.
Worley, M. (2016). Riotous assembly: British punk’s cultural diaspora in the summer of
’81. In K. Andresen and B. Van Der Steen (eds), A European Youth Revolt (pp.
217–28). Dordrecht: Springer Nature.
Zuvela, D. (2008). The Brisbane sound. Art Monthly Australia, 211: 45–8.
Chapter 15
Birth of an underground music

scene?
Creative networks and (digital) DIY
technologies in a Hungarian context
Emília Barna
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.
Online technology and the birth myth of

Budapest lo-f i
Motti Regev (2013) describes how national pop-rock cultures often draw on
‘birth myths’, with events and participants being of symbolic significance in
national pop-rock histories. Important events, as memorable reference points in
time, may feature in the memory of any music world. The year 2011 is invari-
ably mentioned by participants in relation to Budapest lo-fi, described as a
‘focused time’ by one interviewee (Krisztina, musician).2 The artist Piresian
Beach, the first prominent reference point of the scene, had released her debut
songs via Bandcamp in 2010, and by 2011 had simultaneously extended her
presence on Tumblr. Subsequently her music received coverage in the niche
media – that is, online music magazine-blogs, in particular Recorder.
The Budapest lo-fi scene at this time was predominantly organizing via
micro-media, in particular a Tumblr network of musicians and music enthusi-
asts. The Facebook activity of artists also contributed to the spreading of
information and popularization of their music, yet Tumblr is an online space
particularly closely tied to, and identified with, the lo-fi scene. Blogging on
Tumblr is very fast-paced – the lo-fi musicians who used it, including Piresian
Beach, usually posted several items per day. A typical Tumblr post for the scene
was short, and often contained a link to music or video content and/or featured
visual imagery. A crucial function of Tumblr is what is known as ‘reblogging’ –
the reposting of a post by other users on their profiles, optionally adding a
comment or further content. ‘Favouriting’ a post is also an option. The list of
‘favouriters’ and rebloggers, as well as their added content, is visible on the ori-
ginal profile, and this visible interaction lends itself particularly well to the
internal self-representation for participants in the music world. On the other
hand, visibility towards ‘outsiders’ to the scene is limited – in part because
Tumblr profile names are not necessarily known outside the scene. This techno-
logy can therefore serve to maintain exclusivity.
A particular hub of Tumblr bloggers was frequently mentioned by name – ‘a
very broad group of friends, or mates’ (Zita, musician). These included some,
but not all, of the better-known artists of the music world, as well as people who
organized important lo-fi events, including the Rakéta Festival (with a certain
overlap between the two). Moreover, it included new entrants alongside musi-
cians and music critics, who had already been present in the Budapest music
world – in particular, the indie scene, in some cases since the early 2000s. Con-
trary to the implications of the birth myth, the presence, active participation
Birth of an underground music scene? 173
and gatekeeping role of these long-time participants therefore rather maintained

continuity, both in time and across genres.3
The first lo-fi festival held in Budapest in 2012, Rakéta, signified the scene’s
stepping out from the virtual ‘bedroom’ into the offline world. According to the
organizers, ‘[t]he aim of the first Hungarian “DIY festival” [wa]s to enable an
audience so far predominantly recruited online to finally meet the artists at a
live performance event’ (Dívány.hu, 2012). The first occasion was truly low-key,
organized at a musician’s house in harmony with the scene’s DIY values and
ironic downplaying of career ambitions – it resembled a gathering of friends
rather than a music festival. The subsequent, more official events were organized
by people belonging to the aforementioned hub: a loose group of friends who are
musicians, promoters and DJs (fulfilling multiple roles is usual in DIY scenes).
The festival featured free shows at multiple venues, and by 2014 it had grown to
encompass seven days and seven different venues.
The DIY manner of organizing events and activities was conducted in a com-
munity spirit, using one another’s resources and skills while little actual money
exchanged hands. As organizer Péter Fülöp explained in connection with the
Rakéta festival, with a communicative gesture of downplaying characteristic of
the lo-fi discourse: the festival consists of ‘young musicians, our friends, we
invite them to come down and play for us and their own audiences, we listen to
them and we are happy’ (Dívány.hu, 2012). The manner of organization stayed
DIY up to the last festival in 2016, which was the final one because the main
organizer, Ádám Lang, said he no longer had sufficient spare time, and the rest
of the team decided not to continue without him (Inkei, 2016).
The lo-fi musicians interviewed three to four years later seemed to reinforce
their attachment to the music world through retrospection, by maintaining that
at the beginning it was a fairly different scenario from the one that had evolved
by the time of the interviews: ‘it was all really friendly with ambitious young
people who really wanted to create something that would be talked about in ten
years’ (Zita, musician). The quoted musician reflected on the shift in the life-
cycle of the music world, the moving away from the initial enthusiasm, from a
nostalgic perspective, assigning value to the original moment – the ‘focused
time’ – and lamenting the shift. Regarding their own participation, she stated
that their band was in the right place at the right time, yet she felt somewhat
removed now. A sense of nostalgia in fact pervaded all of my interviews with
artists that joined lo-fi around 2010–11 – and although at the time of writing it
may be too early to say, with the announcement that there will not be a Rakéta
2017, 2016 might come to be remembered as the year of the death of the Buda-
pest lo-fi or bedroom pop scene.
Connections and boundaries

The cooperative and aesthetic network focus enabled by the music world
concept helps to reveal synchronous and historical continuities between lo-fi
174 E. Barna
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.
The fine-a rt world and (post-)socialist underground history

The stylistic labels of ‘lo-fi’ or ‘bedroom pop’ were used for a group of bands that
were, according to the musicians themselves, musically quite different from each
other, but still linked by aesthetic characteristics, an ‘attitude’ and shared prac-
tice. The practices of home recording and the use of online platforms for the
distribution and sharing of music, together with an anti-professional aesthetics
– namely ‘bad quality’ recording, a lo-fi sound indicating the home-made, DIY,
non-commercial character of the music – were frequent in the respective insider
discourse. One musician defined lo-fi as ‘regular tracks recorded under irregular
circumstances’ (Zsófia, musician); another stated that, ‘[a]part from the fact that
the recording quality of our songs is bad, I don’t really know what lo-fi is –
perhaps an attitude’ (Zita, musician). Although not explicit in the insider dis-
course, also observable was the Budapest-centredness of the music world,
demonstrating that location remained important regardless of the weight of
online activity. Participants were typically in their twenties and in most cases
either from Budapest or had moved to Budapest – for instance, to study – while
their social background was middle or upper middle class, with a high level of
cultural capital. The music world had connections with the University of Fine
Arts in Budapest, as a significant number of musicians were studying or had
studied there. ‘First and foremost, they are fine artists and not musicians,’ wrote
the popular Hungarian news platform Index.hu of the two songwriters of the
band Mayberian Sanskülotts (Index.hu, 2012).
Observing this primacy of fine art may contain a trace of the traditional hier-
archical distinction between the fine arts as a spatial form of art and music as
performance – thus a temporal form of art (Frith, 1996, p. 116), in which dicho-
tomy music appears as a complementary, even secondary form of expression.
Notably, a marked association between music and the fine-art world already
characterized the underground music world of the 1980s in Hungary, as indi-
cated by the involvement of fine artists in music-making, the influence of the
(neo-)avant-garde on alternative music (this was, of course, also true interna-
tionally, starting with the Velvet Underground), and the merging of various art
forms – fine art, performance art, theatre, music – at counter-cultural events
(Havasréti, 2006; Szemere, 2001), which frequently took place in private spaces
such as the flats of artists in order to remain invisible from the authorities. This
association continued to an extent in the 1990s, as exemplified by the band
Tereskova, led by painter Kriszta Nagy (also mentioned by Szemere, 2001,
p. 208). The first album of the lo-fi artist Unknown Child (Unknown Child,
2015), the project of a fine artist and musician, came with a 90-page zine that
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
same festival in 2014, indicating a strong temporal, scenic connection to the

main offline event of the music world. Through the practice of scene bands,
playfulness is asserted – a downplaying of the importance of band formation and
especially band careers. I understand this gesture of downplaying as the con-
tinuous assertion of underground status, a relentless discursive masking of the
effort to ‘make it’ – in other words, a distancing from commercial
professionalism.
Rakéta itself started out as a kind of an insider joke. A musician narrated the
birth of the festival – another ‘birth moment’ in the life-course of the scene – in
the following words:
[Main organizer-to-be] Ádám Lang talked to me or I can’t remember who

talked to who, that we should do an International Lo-Fi Week – even
though in fact it was only one day. Everyone in the scene – all five people –
came to us to [Budapest suburb] Kápmegyer and there was a sign on our
door saying, ‘International Lo-Fi Week,’ but I think we had omitted ‘Lo-Fi’
and it was only ‘International Week,’ and we had ‘Lo-Fi’ arranged from
Christmas tree lights on our living room wall and everyone took their
photographs there, and we went out to the forest and around the blocks of
flats drinking beer, that was it – then somehow this turned into Rakéta
Festival.
(Zita)
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
manager of Beat On the Brat, who is a well-known indie DJ and promoter –

reinforce the connection between the two.
The continuity in terms of key gatekeepers – bloggers and music journalists
who at times also act as promoters and/or musicians – moreover contributes
towards a continuity in dominant tastes and attitudes. A kind of ‘hipster’ aes-
thetic, underlined by the attitude of ‘coolness’,4 also characterizes lo-fi – an
intellectual ‘detachment, disinterestedness, indifference’ (Bourdieu, 1986,
pp. 237–9, quoted in Jenkins, 1992, p. 61) that can be interpreted as both mas-
culine and bourgeois. This ‘masculine intellectualism’, Matthew Bannister
argues, is a key stance in indie masculinities, as evidenced, among many others,
by perhaps the most important indie reference point, the Velvet Underground
(Bannister, 2006, pp. 25–56).
In addition to the aforementioned association of hipster ‘coolness’ with
Tumblr, ‘coolness’ is also thematized by the well-known – to some, infamous –
annual ‘cool lists’, namely ironic, often sarcastic end-of-the-year compilations of
the 50 ‘coolest’ young people in Budapest. The list has featured lo-fi artist Pire-
sian Beach three times (second place in 2010, sixth in 2011 and seventeenth in
2012), and Benedek Szabó, the singer-songwriter of Zombie Girlfriend, who was
in second place in 2011 at the perceived peak of the scene.
At the same time, lo-fi aesthetics and values are also a site of conflict – there
is evidence of a strong feminist critique of both indie and hipster culture from
within the lo-fi music world.5 One musician spoke with frustration about ‘this
whole hipster culture’ and the constraining ‘iconic’ status gained by some indie
institutions: ‘now the place is Beat On the Brat’ (Zita). Zita criticized the elitism
of the scene and responded to it by avoiding Beat On the Brat and other venues
that were supposed to be ‘cool’ in her understanding. Several of the female
musicians interviewed expressed a strong critique of the male homosocial prac-
tices, as well as the masculine connoisseurship, structuring the taste of the music
world (cf. Straw, 1995).
Boundary work: punk and the mainstream

Part of the punk scene – particularly a community that has labelled itself the
‘defekt’ (defect) scene (Vargyai, 2011) – is linked to lo-fi, mainly through the
appreciation of the former’s music by lo-fi musicians. Piresian Beach, for instance,
expressed her appreciation of punk bands and shows, in particular the groups
centred around the promoter team and record label RNR666. On the basis of the
definitive blog post cited above, such values as community-centredness, low-key
DIY events (symbolized by ‘cheap beer’ and house parties), ‘doing things [from
one’s] heart’, and the discursive practice of downplaying one’s own performance
while simultaneously displaying enthusiasm for the community and for other
groups within the scene are perceived as crucial qualities of both music worlds.
Nevertheless, according to lo-fi musicians, while they enthused over the
punk scene, punks in fact acted in an antagonistic manner towards them at the
178 E. Barna
beginning. According to the insider narrative, this unbalanced relationship later

developed into a harmonious one, to the extent where lo-fi and punk bands now
organize shows together, and Piresian Beach even had a record released by
RNR666. Previously, the ‘no Ádám Lang and friends, no matter how much they
pay’ attitude had dominated punk gigs (Zsófia, musician). Similarly, Vargyai
made a dismissive note regarding ‘lame hipsters’ by Vargyai in his blog post
describing the defekt scene:
[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
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).
References
Bannister, M. (2006). White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Barna, E. (2017). ‘Változás és kontinuitás egy budapesti underground zenei világban a
műfajesztétika, ízlés, technológia és alkotómunka viszonyrendszerén keresztül’. TNTeF,
7(1): 1–20.
Bourdieu, P. (1986 [1979]). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. R. Nice
trans. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Crossley, N. (2015). Networks of Sound, Style, and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk
Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool, and Sheffield, 1975–80. Manchester: Man-
chester University Press.
Davenport, T.H. and Beck, J.C. (2001). The Attention Economy: Understanding the New
Currency of Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Dívány.hu (2012). Elstartolt az első Rakéta Fesztivál. Retrieved from http://divany.hu/
stilfuresz/2012/07/25/raketa_fesztival_a_magyar_off.
Frith, S. (1996). Music and identity. In S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural
Identity (pp. 108–27). London: Sage.
Havasréti, J. (2006). Alternatív regiszterek. A kulturális ellenállás formái a Magyar avantgárd-

ban. Budapest: Typotext.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (1999). Indie: The institutional politics and aesthetics of a popular
music genre. Cultural Studies, 13(1): 34–61.
Hodkinson, P. (2002). Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. Oxford: Berg.
Index.hu (2012). Zenélő hipszterek az alkoholisták körül. Retrieved from http://index.
hu/video/2012/07/25/raketa_feszt.
Inkei, B. (2016). Az idei volt az utolsó Rakéta Fesztivál. Index.hu. Retrieved from http://
index.hu/kultur/zene/2016/10/04/az_idei_volt_az_utolso_raketa_fesztival.
Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York:
Routledge.
Kearney, M.C. (1997). The missing links. Riot grrrl – feminism – lesbian culture. In S.
Whiteley (ed.), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (pp. 207–29). London:
Routledge.
Leonard, M. (2007). Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power. Alder-
shot: Ashgate.
Regev, M. (2013). Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cam-
bridge: Polity Press.
Ross, A. (1989). No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.
Stewart, A. (2007). Making the Scene: Contemporary New York City Big Band Jazz. Berke-
ley, CA: University of California Press.
Straw, W. (1995). Sizing up record collections: Gender and connoisseurship in rock
music culture. In S. Whiteley (ed.), Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (pp.
3–16). London: Routledge.
Szemere, A. (2001). Up from the Underground. The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist
Hungary. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Polity Press.
Vargyai (2011). The Hungarian Defekt Punk Scene Report in MRR #336. We do punk
as … Retrieved from http://punkersblock.blogspot.hu.
Part IV
Music scenes, memory

and emotional geographies
Chapter 16
The inoperative subculture

History, identity and avant-g ardism in
garage rock
Daniel S. Traber
The demands of a community can be a tricky terrain to negotiate, even if you

only want a peripheral connection to the social group. What some view posi-
tively as unity based on a shared sensibility looks to others like compulsory nor-
malcy, wherein difference is a liability. The same applies to musical cultures,
regardless of whether the sense of identity is founded on alterity.
This chapter turns to Jean-Luc Nancy’s (1991) concept of the ‘inoperative
community’ to consider the negotiations of history and community required of
revivalist subcultures. Nancy reconfigures community by recognizing its infinite
number of ‘singularities’, so that our ‘we’ is first and foremost a conglomeration
of others. My example of an ‘inoperative subculture’ will come from what I have
termed contemporary avant-garde garage rock, but the examination will occur
via comparison with New York’s No Wave movement of the late 1970s, thus
marking these two genres as musical styles that are fundamentally defined by
their response to aesthetic ancestry. No Wave’s manifesto of noise insists on
voluntary cultural disinheritance, not only to create an original sound but to
unlock the shackles of tradition. Their antagonistic stance against previous
music also functions as an individualistic challenge to the restrictive, conformist
impulses of community. In contrast, avant-garde garage rock, although already
positioned outside the mainstream like No Wave – due to its ‘low’ recording
quality and abrasive sound – creates its identity through an in-betweenness that
walks the borderline separating old and new. The form draws inspiration from
1960s garage rock and punk in a manner that grants a modicum of authority to
the ideal of a community even as it pushes beyond its influence.
In Nancy’s (1991) vision, subjects break with a defunct notion of community
as a shared identity built on exclusionary ‘origins’, recognizing instead how we
are alike only in our having differences. David Johnson and Scott Michaelsen
(1997, pp. 4, 21) pick up Nancy’s lead by contending that subjects should slip
into a ‘we’ persona for ‘which differences mean nothing, add up without sum …
Differences make no difference … [to] a community, a plurality, that produces
no culture to which “we” belong, no identity “we” can call our own’. Destroying
in order to create, the emptied self welcomes the multiple possibilities for sub-
jectivity, which will dislodge a faith in concreteness. Subjectivity can be opened
186 D.S. Traber
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?
No Wave’s aural patricide

In May 2010, music critic Sasha Frere-Jones (2010) waxed romantic about con-
temporary noise bands in The New Yorker. Although sure to name-check the
Japanese noise maestro Merzbow as a source, he oddly missed mentioning a
group of musicians once considered to be quintessentially of New York City.
Sonic terrorism, rather than revival, aptly describes the short-lived moment in
musical history given the appellation No Wave. These bands did not make the
most frightening, headache-inducing, paradigm-threatening sound, but they
certainly wanted to have that effect. Some called it art-rock, others noise-rock,
but it came out of a specific post-punk New York context and all the bands
sounded as though they shared similar intentions to go beyond punk rock in
deconstructing pop music. Part of No Wave’s grudge was against the corporate
packaging of a consumer-friendly punk under the tag of new wave. By 1977–78,
several of the seminal New York punk bands had moved on from their humbler
roots to scoring record deals, which some fans viewed as the death of the
The inoperative subculture 187
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:
[Taste] unites and separates … Objectively and subjectively, aesthetic

stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing or home decoration are
opportunities to experience or assert one’s position in social space, as a rank
to be upheld or a distance to be kept.
(Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 56, 57)
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.
Lo-f i sound and high theory in garage rock

So what is one to do if, as a music fan, you appreciate the sonic disestablishmen-
tarianism of noise but find yourself still feeling friendly towards the structured
riffs and melodies of rock? Movements like No Wave demand a binary-based
decision: choose us or consider yourself still stuck in the old way. Even punk,
the reigning rebel rock at the time, was dismissed by No Wave as the same old
thing. Music that maintains an attachment to the history of rock conventions is
the death-knell of creativity and artistic practice in the No Wave discourse. If
self-conscious musical deconstruction is defined as presenting something new
and different – something you have never heard before – then its Other is music
that reminds you of something else.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s (1991) theory of the ‘inoperative community’ is a model
meant to counteract this tendency. Community is reconfigured as being ‘formed
by an articulation of “particularities,” and not founded in any autonomous
essence that would subsist by itself and that would reabsorb or assume singular
beings into itself ’ (1991, p. 175). In other words, unity is based on recognizing a
multiplicity of ‘singularities’ in which we are all others. The result is a break
with a notion of community as a shared identity built on exclusionary ‘origins’.
The inoperative community seeks to create a community defined by its ‘resist-
ance to the communion of everyone or to the exclusive passion of one or
several: to all the forms and all the violences of subjectivity’ (1991, p. 35). The
dissolution of the ‘we’, of a unified culture that is ‘ours’, is meant as liberating
news with the intention of helping open subjectivity to consider all sources,
more willing to ingest the diversity within which it is already immersed until
the only sure identity is a fragmented one made ever more uncertain and
unrecognizable.
At the risk of taming it by naming it, what I call contemporary avant-garde
garage rock offers one model of this theory, where we find an opening into com-
munity and historical lineage that suggests neither a complete shackling nor
total freedom. But we have to begin in the early 1960s to arrive at that point.
No Wave claimed to trump punk; however, some say 1960s garage rock was
where punk really began.
Before the predominantly blues-based rock of the British Invasion, American
garage rock already had a healthy existence as a regionalized network of bands
influenced by rhythm and blues, but adding a more raucous and up-tempo rock
vernacular. Michael Hicks (1999) goes so far as to classify garage rock as avant-
garde for being a small musical community that flouts bourgeois conventions
and the deindividualization imposed by mass society. With strong scenes in the
Mid-West, Pacific North-West and Texas, bands could become local superstars
and release cheaply produced singles that would actually receive radio airplay.
Although there were a handful of national hits – The Kingsmen’s iconic version
of ‘Louie, Louie’ in 1963, 1965’s ‘Wooly Bully’ by the Tex-Mex band Sam the
Sham and the Pharaohs, and The Count Five’s ‘Psychotic Reaction’ in 1966 –
190 D.S. Traber
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
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
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)
Whereas No Wave claimed to desire separation, avant-garde garage finds a

negotiable solution. The garage version of forward-thinking music reminds us
that noise can be fun, exuberant, freeing and cathartic rather than simply the
soundtrack for negative destruction, anger or madness (while being equally
capable of inducing catharsis). And while some of the No Wave performers
would certainly have agreed with that statement, their style and persona, taken
as a whole, strikes me as tilting more towards the latter side of it. The Coach-
whips (2003, 2004) acknowledge the historical and cultural roots of identity;
nonetheless, a subjectivity that surges over the barriers meant to contain it
within knowable forms deploys agency – for once the limits are recognized, it
becomes possible to map out their transgression. This counters communitarian-
ism’s advocacy of community taking precedence over individual desire accord-
ing to a notion of the good based on so-called shared values. In that model,
since individuals cannot understand themselves without a society, it is made the
indomitable all with a universalized moral order. Without a serious option of
questioning what constitutes ‘the good’, the communitarian system teeters on
advocating a social principle of ‘that which is, is the good’ no matter what indi-
viduals – or Nancy’s singularities – may think.
In essence, this strategic manoeuvring is the process of all bands dealing with
musical bloodlines, yet the avant-garde leanings speak to a more severe break
with the past. It is an aesthetic negotiation that doubles as an argument for a
specific conception of autonomous identity within a community that shows how
to have a level of respect for an inherited history, tradition, sub/culture or
society without being chained to it in a cycle of unreflective repetition. We are
never completely free in choosing our subjectivity, as it is always formed in rela-
tion to some form of Other. This is applicable to this kind of revivalist music – a
metaphor for social/cultural organization – since it is not utterly original, nor
does its transgression go past the limit that would result in either silence or the
sonic nothingness of unorganized static, all the while holding off being reduced
194 D.S. Traber
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 and individuality in US

free-folk musics
Maximilian Spiegel
This chapter is based on findings of an investigation into manifestations of

gender and politics in late twentieth/early twenty-first‒century psychedelic free-
folk music scenes in the United States, conducted at the University of Vienna
(Spiegel, 2012, 2013).1 The ongoing project maps these ‘local, trans-local, and
virtual scenes’ (Bennett, 2004), focusing on their constitutive musical-social
relations without reducing them to a homogeneous style. The chapter traces
modes of collectivity and individuality in these dynamic, heterogeneous fields.
By free folk, I refer to an ever-shifting web of musicians, labels and other ele-
ments engaging in diverse psychedelic, often experimental and improvisational,
musical practices. ‘Free folk’ is sometimes conflated with ‘freak folk’ and other
terms not necessarily denoting the same scenes. This web most visibly mani-
fested in the United States in the mid-2000s, but consists of numerous artistic
trajectories exceeding conventional understandings of cyclical subcultural life.
When used by Matt Valentine to name the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival in
Vermont in 2003, the term ‘free folk’ was originally meant to denote ‘free think-
ing folk’ (Keenan, 2003) or ‘liberated people’ (Keenan, 2007) instead of a dis-
tinct style. David Keenan (2003) writes that Sunburned Hand of the Man’s set
‘draws from mountain music, country blues, Hip Hop, militant funk and psych-
edelia as much as free jazz’; this description applies equally to the festival’s ‘New
Weird America’ DIY musics in general, as exemplified by Charalambides, Chris
Corsano and Paul Flaherty with Scorces, and MV & EE. Here, ‘improvisation
and the application of the drone open up these new folk musicians to the roar of
the cosmos’ (p. 34); experimentation and improvisation are key elements of this
affective alliance’s sensibility (Grossberg, 1992). Such a sense of the potential of
creativity unshackled by genre connects these diverse protagonists more than a
specific style does. By investigating ‘specific networks and connections’ (Joseph,
2008, p. 52) instead of singular genres/styles, one can analyse power relations in
ways appropriate to the dynamic and heterogeneous character of these scenes.
Musicians connect or reconnect through collaboration in numerous band and
solo projects, releases on the same (and each other’s) labels and appearances at
the same festivals. They often disseminate vast catalogues on various formats,
including CD-Rs2 and, especially nowadays, cassette tapes in limited editions.
196 M. Spiegel
Strong international connections expand the sprawling character of this cul-

tural formation.
Following introductions to Jeremy Gilbert’s work (2014) and the methods
employed in the research field’s analysis, I will lay out several key characteristics
of free-folk scenes: the constitutive importance of relations of support and care
for musicians’ creativity; the multi-voiced character of notionally ‘solo’ projects
irreducible to traditional understandings of authorship; sprawling improvising
collectives and the challenges they face; and the centrality of affinity (instead of
identity) in the form of like-mindedness for these scenes cohesion.
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
clearly in various radically democratic movements and certain cultural forma-

tions. While neoliberal capitalism attempts to benefit from collective creativity
and even creative laboratories of experimentation that try to subvert or counter
it, it also sets constraints to experimental collectivity through cultural, eco-
nomic, legal and other mechanisms. Out of this predicament, a search for modes
of creative collectivity arises. As Gilbert (2008, 2014) points out, the experi-
ments of (sub)cultural formations must be articulated to other movements and
into larger-scale democratic alliances in order not to merely generate isolated,
largely ineffectual cells that may even serve to contain experimentation; yet
leftist politics has often failed to connect to cultural experiments. The investi-
gation of free folk’s joyous affective alliance and community of care, with its
sprawling improvising collectives and irreducibly multiplicitous solo projects, is
consequently a step towards the proliferation of expanded, radically democratic
collectivity. They may serve up clues towards an understanding and practice of
collectivity beyond the confines of the current neoliberal imaginary.
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.
Care and support

Researching how individuality and collectivity manifest in these scenes, one
encounters a complicated but creative tension between them, irreducible to a
binary. When (perceived) individuality becomes visible, it expresses aesthetic,
social and power relations; the artistic individuality emphasized in these scenes
arises out of various modes of collectivity. The friendship so important to these
musicians and their practices manifests as manifold mutual support.
Paul LaBrecque has been a member of sprawling collective Sunburned Hand
of the Man for years while also releasing music solo as Head of Wantastiquet. I
interviewed him at the Karneval im Land der Cetacean festival in Graz, Austria,
the lineup of which consisted of musicians living in Belgium at the time, pre-
senting interconnected regional activities and implicitly showcasing the
international(ized) character of the DIY-based psychedelic, experimental music
scenes discussed here. LaBrecque (personal communication, 27 June 2009) elab-
orated on ‘our own natural network’ without hierarchy or organizational plan
that had developed over the ten years preceding the interview:
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
understand social relations as ultimately limiting the capacity of individuals’

(Gilbert, 2014, p. 147).
The aforementioned Eric Arn has himself been an avid networker in these
scenes. Formerly a member of Crystalized Movements, Arn had been running
his Primordial Undermind project for almost three decades at the time of
writing. He has lived in several parts of the United States and now resides in
Vienna, Austria. Primordial Undermind’s lineup has changed accordingly,
incorporating local musicians from the various areas through which Arn has
moved. Arn (personal communication, 21 June 2009) does important work on
an organizational level, seeking out people and bonding with them over musical
interests that could well be described as idiosyncratic: ‘We’ll have a lot of touch
points together and things in common, even though we’ve never ever contacted
them before, so, it’s a really strong way of building friendships and relationships.’
Such care and mutual support also manifest in shared spaces, such as a notorious
compound of houses in Fishtown, Philadelphia, in which musicians have fos-
tered forms of communal living. A countercultural DIY micropolitics is gener-
ated in friends’ experiments. House shows are based on friendship, reproducing
it and setting the scene for experiences of care and perceived authenticity.
The many voices of solo projects

Through various cultural-technological developments and the accessibility of
certain tools relevant to the genesis of (especially) solo projects, much has
changed for musicians in terms of convenience, economics and the constitution
of musical subjectivities. Whose voices are heard? Who is an author? In free-folk
scenes, these questions are easily tied to a space otherwise often associated with
consumption, not creativity (Kearney, 2006): the bedroom. Britt Brown (per-
sonal communication, 26 July 2009) stated that ‘there’s so many bedroom dis-
tributors just like there are bedroom labels’; this also applies to bedroom
musicians. This is enabled not least by computer software such as Apple’s
GarageBand (Kearney, 2006), but was also very much shaped by the develop-
ment and increasing affordability of loop and delay pedals. Interviewee Glenn
Donaldson (personal communication, 24 July 2009), a member of groups as
diverse as Thuja, Skygreen Leopards and Horrid Red, told me that:
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
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.
While such modes of collectivity can be understood, according to Diederichsen

(2005b), as a reaction to an absence of collectivity in music, the social, cultural
and economic context’s fostering of individualism (Gilbert, 2014) itself hampers
their development. Solo projects empower people who otherwise may not have
played and recorded and toured their musics (Clawson, 1999), but the social-
political potentials of sprawling collectives remain unfulfilled when ‘people are
encouraged to identify themselves and to relate to others purely as individuals’
(Gilbert, 2014, p. 30). If it is easier to ‘go solo’, attempts at sustaining wild,
sprawling collectivity are particularly precarious.
Expressive individualism and affinity

The interplay of modes of collectivity and perceived individuality is complex; it
can be mapped on various levels, along the trajectories of artists, bands and
scenes. One interviewee interested in this relation is Samara Lubelski, a New
York–based musician active in solo as well as various collaborative contexts in
groups such as Hall of Fame, Tower Recordings, Chelsea Light Moving, Metal
Mountains and German collective Metabolismus. As an experienced key figure
in these scenes, she has been able to observe many artists’ trajectories over the
years. Talking about her early years in various groups in New York and
Germany, Lubelski (personal communication, 8 July 2009) recounted:
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 …
Lubelski related notable changes in scene structure to questions of the interplay

of structure and the free. In the following quote, she let her work in Matt Val-
entine and Erika Elder’s more recent groups exemplify how musicians’ indi-
vidual ‘vision’ could become more important or overt over the years:
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
support and care, and for a sustainable ethics of transformations (Braidotti,

2011). These scenes have generated unusual group forms characterized by
greater relevance of horizontal relations between protagonists as well as by wild-
ness, constitutive openness and unconventionality. Such groups are not
divorced from wider power relations, and can at times reproduce problematic
features of other rock sensibilities. Furthermore, cultural and economic con-
straints have been eroding the conditions of possibility for the emergence and
sustenance of such experimental group forms. However, they have not dis-
appeared, and will themselves provide tools for future experiments in collective
creativity. Additionally, although solo projects are now free folk’s dominant
platforms for expression, these projects often themselves undermine any facile
expressive or possessive individualism.
This is just the starting point for further inquiries. Radically contextual
(Grossberg, 2010) research into experimental music practices should continue
to offer valuable insight in how modes of power can be engaged, how groups
function, what democracy can mean and how alliances can be formed (Gilbert,
2008). Researchers must pay close attention to their own relations to the field of
research (e.g. Bennett, 2002), the ways in which they intersect and affect it, and
the ways they themselves change in such encounters. Such questions can be of
great interest for musicians themselves, especially if they want experimentation
and openness to boldly go beyond the more immediately musical – if they want
their creative circles to develop, to quote words used by Eva Saelens (personal
communication, 21 July 2009) of Inca Ore and Jackie-O Motherfucker, ‘com-
munities and lifestyles outside of capitalist failures, outside of mainstream life’.
The diversity of collective and experimental practices in these scenes lends
itself to the forging of new, unexpected alliances.
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.
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.
References
Bayton, M. (1998). Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bennett, A. (2002). Researching youth culture and popular music: A methodological cri-
tique. British Journal of Sociology, 53(3): 451–66.
Bennett, A. (2004). Consolidating the music scenes perspective. Poetics, 32: 223–34.
Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Brown, B. (2013). Streamlined operations. The Wire: Adventures in Sound and Music,
347: 44–5.
Büsser, M. (2007). Free folk: Kollektive improvisation: Kollektivimprovisation und
naturmystik. De:Bug Magazin, 2 February. Retrieved from http://de-bug.de/mag/free-
folk-kollektive-improvisation.
Clawson, M.A. (1999). Masculinity and skill acquisition in the adolescent rock band.
Popular Music, 18(1): 99–114.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2008). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
London: Continuum.
Diederichsen, D. (2004). Die horde als sozialmusikalische Aufgabe. Die Musikforschung,
57: 249–56.
Diederichsen, D. (2005a). Musikzimmer: Avantgarde und Alltag. Köln: Kiepenheuer &
Witsch.
Diederichsen, D. (2005b). Rückkehr des Kollektivs. Ein Hintergrundessay zu ‘collective
identities’. In B.O. Polzer and T. Schäfer (eds), Katalog Wien Modern 2005 (pp. 66–9).
Retrieved from www.wienmodern.at/Portals/0/Galerie/collective_identities/Katalog%20
2005_Diedrich%20Diederichsen,%20R%C3%Bcckkehr%20des%20Kollektivs%20
%28c%29%20Wien%20Modern.pdf.
Froschauer, U. and Lueger, M. (2003). Das Qualitative Interview: Zur Praxis Interpretativer
Analyse Sozialer Systeme. Vienna: Facultas.
Gilbert, J. (2004). Becoming-music: The rhizomatic moment of improvisation. In I.
Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music (pp. 118–39). Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press.
Gilbert, J. (2008). Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics.
Oxford: Berg.
Gilbert, J. (2014). Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism.
London: Pluto Press.
206 M. Spiegel
Grossberg, L. (1992). We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Post-
modern Culture. New York: Routledge.
Grossberg, L. (2010). Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:
Routledge.
Joseph, B.W. (2008). Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage.
New York: Zone Books.
Karnik, O. (2003). Free rock, free folk, free USA: Rockmusik im Zeichen von Auton-
omie und Gemeinschaft. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 23 October. Retrieved from www.nzz.
ch/2003/10/23/fe/article96DAG.html.
Kearney, M.C. (2006). Girls Make Media. New York: Routledge.
Keenan, D. (2003). The fire down below. The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music, 234:
34–41.
Keenan, D. (2007). Both sides = now: The aesthetics of free folk. ExploreMusic talk
[MP3; unavailable at the time of writing]. Gateshead CLC Webradio. Retrieved from
www.ictgateshead.org/radio/2007/02/david_keenan_aesthetics_of_fre.html.
Lutter, C. and Reisenleitner, M. (2002). Introducing history (in)to cultural studies: Some
remarks on the German-speaking context. Cultural Studies, 16(5): 613–17.
Spiegel, M.G. (2012). Gender construction and American ‘free folk’ music(s). Diploma
thesis, University of Vienna. Retrieved from http://othes.univie.ac.at/18384.
Spiegel, M.G. (2013). Politics and American ‘free folk’ music(s). Diploma thesis, Univer-
sity of Vienna. Retrieved from http://othes.univie.ac.at/25987.
Witzel, A. (2000). The problem-centered interview. Forum: Qualitative Sozialforschung/
Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 1(1): art. 22. Retrieved from http://nbn-resolving.
de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0001228.
Chapter 18
The independent record label,

ideology and longevity
Twenty years of Chemikal
Underground Records in Glasgow
J. Mark Percival
This chapter explores notions of independence in the record industry through a

longitudinal case study of Glasgow, Scotland label Chemikal Underground.
Drawing on a series of personal interviews dating back to 2000 with the found-
ers and directors of Chemikal Underground, I explore the development of the
label over 20 years and situate it in a milieu of cultural production that increas-
ingly depends on the power of social and cultural capital to enable and trans-
form economic capital. Chemikal Underground Records was established in late
1994 by Glasgow-based indie band The Delgados (Percival, 2011), and its first
release in February 1995 was The Delgados’ ‘Monica Webster/Brand New Car’,
on 7-inch vinyl.1 In 2018, the label is still in business in Glasgow and is still
wholly owned and run by the original four founders. At the end of August 2014,
Chemikal Underground had completed its curatorial role in organizing and pro-
gramming the East End Social, a series of music-centred events taking place in
East Glasgow before, during and after the 2014 Commonwealth Games, largely
supported by a grant from Creative Scotland. This was a high-profile example of
the label’s gradual transformation from a company whose traditional core activ-
ity is releasing new independent music to one that has diversified into manage-
ment, community engagement and events organization.
This chapter explores the label’s conceptualization of independence and dis-
cusses the ways in which Chemikal Underground has pragmatically adopted a
series of non-ideological constrained strategies as means to ensuring solvency
and ongoing cultural production in a post-digital context. It argues that Chemi-
kal Underground operates in a space of cultural production between the ideo-
logically driven independent labels identified by Dunn (2012), Cammaerts
(2010) and Lee (1995), and the pragmatic, parallel-capitalist model employed
by many independent electronic dance music labels (Hesmondhalgh, 1998;
Smith and Maughan, 1998). The chapter concludes that Chemikal Under-
ground’s pragmatic flexibility and creative-cultural independence have made a
significant contribution to both its longevity and its ability to accumulate cul-
tural and social, if not necessarily economic, capital.
At several points in the chapter, I refer to notions of social and cultural
capital as developed by Pierre Bourdieu (1986), and usefully critiqued by
208 J.M. Percival
esmondhalgh (2006, 2012). One of the interesting contrasts between social

H
capital and economic capital is that social capital doesn’t decrease as it is used –
it may even tend to increase. Indeed, the corollary here is, as Hesmondhalgh
points out, that if social capital isn’t used, it will tend to decrease. For Chemikal
Underground, the label’s (and for around ten years as an active band, The Del-
gados’) embeddedness in Glasgow’s social and cultural networks was central to
the long-term viability of the label – a phenomenon Cammaerts (2010) identi-
fies in his work on Belgian micro-labels.
Punk, post-p unk and indie record labels

In his work on DIY punk labels around the world, Dunn (2012) evaluates the
possibility of political resistance through alternative approaches to cultural produc-
tion. Dunn’s case studies are often clear examples of the indie label as ideological
construct, similar to the structures and practices identified by Lee (1995) in his
work on the Wax Trax! Records label. Lee notes the potential for internal conflict
in ideologically driven indie labels, particularly when confronting the realities of
the global neoliberal economic system within which Dunn’s anti-capitalist labels
practise cultural production as resistance. In her study of the punk/post-punk/indie
UK label Rough Trade and Bondage Records in France, Lebrun (2006, p. 33) also
discusses the problem of creating what she refers to as ‘real independence’, as
defined by the more politicized post-punk intellectual context of the late 1970s and
early 1980s. Strachan (2007), however, argues that micro-label DIY production in
the United Kingdom works under different ideological constraints:
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)
Strachan notes an ongoing reproduction of established art-versus-commerce dis-

course in the labels he approached – a discourse discussed elsewhere by Negus
(1995) and Hesmondhalgh (1999). The discourse of periphery-versus-
mainstream is, of course, central to the reflexive understanding of avant-gardist
cultural production – there must be a mainstream to resist. O’Connor (2008)
addresses the emergence of DIY ideology and labels around punk and hardcore
in North America in the late 1970s, but again there is a focus on the desire to
resist (and to be seen to resist) mainstream capitalist discourse and practice. The
argument made by O’Connor (2008, p. 4) is that ‘punk in 1977 was wide open
to economic pressures but by the early-1980s had become more or less an auto-
nomous [Bourdieu-ian] field’.
The independent record label 209
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
Independent dance music record labels

In his case study of UK dance music record labels in the 1990s, Hesmondhalgh
(1998) explores the argument that dance music production presents a challenge
to the ‘mainstream’ record industry through a network of decentralized produc-
tion centres, enabled by dance audience preferences for genre over personality
and by low promotional costs. He argues that UK dance music does not in fact
present a radical, democratic challenge to existing structures in the record
industries because it often relies on income generated from hits in the main-
stream and the accompanying compilation album sales. Furthermore, Hesmond-
halgh identifies close interdependencies between independent dance labels and
the corporate cultural industries, suggesting that this also undermines claims of
radical resistance. I would not dispute Hesmondhalgh’s conclusions, but I do
suggest that the discourse of radical resistance here is not dissimilar to that
present in the punk and post-punk indie labels discussed by Dunn (2012),
O’Connor (2008), Lebrun (2006) and Strachan (2007). That is to say, it is a
tool used to negotiate social and cultural capital within a particular context of
cultural production, and it works in much the same way as rock’s central
mythology of outsider-ness. Despite some superficial similarities with the struc-
ture of, and discourse in, many punk, post-punk and indie labels, independent
dance-music record labels operate within a system that is not only largely
uncritical of capitalism, but often embraces neoliberal, entrepreneurial free
enterprise.
Cammaerts (2010), in his work on specialist Belgian micro-labels, is concerned
with the impact of new distribution technologies on the production of new, inde-
pendent industrial/experimental and alternative dance music. Given that it is
impossible to stop file sharing Cammaerts notes the increased significance of
building relationships between labels and fans, and so developing fan acquisition
and deployment of social and cultural capital. Cammaerts, citing Webb’s (2007)
work on independent dance labels in the UK agrees that these companies are
more likely to deal effectively with the challenges of digital distribution because
they tend to be comfortable with the underlying structures of capitalism and
market economics. In other words, and as noted by Hesmondhalgh (1998), and
Smith and Maughan (1998) dance labels are more likely to accept the ‘business’
side of cultural production, rather than to attempt to position themselves outside
conventional capitalist models of popular-music production.
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:
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)
Chemikal Underground’s notion of independence was shaped by its owners’

experience as The Delgados when they released their fourth studio album, Hate,
on Mantra Records (one of the Beggars Banquet family of labels), and in using
Beggars as a distributor at various times over the years. Emma Pollock also
212 J.M. Percival
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)
Pollock sees Chemikal Underground’s status as a long-established independent

record label, with a track record of releasing particular artists and sounds, not so
much as a seal of quality sounds in itself (although this is implicit) as a brand
that represents the guarantee of freedom of expression for its artists.
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:
I think there’s a middle ground between employing major label marketing

strategies, not all of them clean, and sticking to a hard and fast independent
ethic. I get tired of the argument, because you’re damned if you do and
damned if you don’t. If you stick to your independent roots, you’re unambi-
tious. If you do it the other way, you’re a capitalist pig. We’re trying to run
a record company that releases records that succeed. I don’t feel the need to
apologize for this. We’re in this business to sell records so that people can
buy that music and it can touch their lives in whatever way it happens
to do.
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
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.
In 2014, Henderson recalled a specific example of a marketing strategy that

brought together two sides of this argument:
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.
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.
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’re an Indie label you have to be very reactive by nature, as opposed

to majors who are proactive and front-load expenses. They pile-drive a mar-
keting message to get people to buy a record. We have to reply on press,
radio and the strength of the record to catch people’s attention, and then
react to that with marketing. We have to put something out and hope for
good reviews, and then react that way.
The traditional, pre-digital distribution model of selling records has become

increasingly difficult to sustain for Chemikal Underground and other inde-
pendent labels, so one of the potential new revenue streams is synchronization
rights (that is, the use of the label’s music in advertising or soundtracks). In
principle, this can be a lucrative revenue stream; however, it is, as Stewart
Henderson put it in 2014, ‘a buyers’ market with a lot of people willing to do
that [license new music for synch] for nothing’.5 Nevertheless, Chemikal Under-
ground music has appeared on the soundtracks of major US TV dramas, The OC
and Grey’s Anatomy, and the requirements of television drama production have
led to a pragmatic approach to the integrity of songs. As Alun Woodward put it
in 2009:
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
Henderson acknowledged the significance of accessing this funding for Chemi-

kal Underground:
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.
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.
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.
References
Behr, A. (2010). Group identity: Bands, rock and popular music. Unpublished PhD
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.
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
Studies at the Turn of the Century, a Special Issue of Studies in Music from the University
of Western Ontario, 22: 91–102.
Scott, D.B. (2010). The Britpop Sound. In A. Bennett and J. Stratton (eds), Britpop and
the English Musical Tradition (pp. 103–22). Farnham: Ashgate.
Smith, R.J. and Maughan, T. (1998). Youth culture and the making of the post-Fordist
economy: Dance music in contemporary Britain. Journal of Youth Studies, 1(2): 211–28.
Strachan, R. (2007). Micro-independent record labels in the UK: Discourse, DIY cul-
tural production and the music industry. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2):
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
Verbal Sound System (1997–98)

Recalling a raver’s DIY practices in
the British free party counterculture
Zoe Armour
On Saturday, 7 December 2013, at the Frog Island concert venue Lock 42 in

Leicester, the not-for-profit underground babble collective sound system1 hosted
an electronic dance music event to celebrate 20 years of grooving to deep house.
It was here among the gathering of ravers that a member of babble called Little
Jon (who was celebrating his 34th birthday) volunteered to share his early
experiences of growing up within the framework of a DIY party ethos in the
1990s. He said, ‘You should talk to me. I did Verbal’ (Armour, 2013a).
The following discussion documents Little Jon’s early experiences from
boyhood to adolescence. In particular, it focuses on what I propose as an organic
DIY pedagogy that is learned through a musically infused East Midlands based
DIY rave peer culture and the temporary creation of Verbal Sound System
(1997–98).2 It also considers moments of socio-cultural access and the personal
enculturation within a grouping. In doing so the chapter takes a critical position
towards using memory (Marsh, 2007) as a methodological tool to trace the
nuances of sound system practices.
To date, very little has been documented on the network of Midlands sound
systems and the culture that embodies ‘niche-rave’ practices, a term I apply to
localized initiatives such as Verbal. For instance, DIY Sound System (1989–
present, Nottingham) is mentioned in both academic texts and in the press
(Arnold 2014; Guest, 2009; Oliver, 2014). Yet many other localized sound
systems such as the Leicester born initiatives that developed from this activity,
babble (1993–present), Elemental (1993–present) and Doji (1999–present)
remain absent. The focus on Verbal Sound System therefore proposes a step
towards mapping the existence of these entities as part of a musically infused
legacy and ‘people’s culture’ in the United Kingdom.
Theorizing the turn to ‘rave’

The radicalism of a political turn in rave culture was due to the nature of free
party DIY practices that existed outside the legislative governmental system. In
particular, a convoy of several hundred New Age travellers attended the Stone-
henge Free Festival in 1985. It resulted in the Battle of the Beanfield, the
220 Z. Armour
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.
Methodological approach to research

A semi-structured interview was conducted with Little Jon on 7 December 2013
(Armour, 2013b), based on a larger project that investigated how ravers and
clubbers recalled developing a taste for electronic dance music. The interviews
with rave members were obtained through a naturally occurring ‘snowball’ effect
and the agency of the researcher as insider. Little Jon therefore knew that inter-
views had been conducted with babblers when he volunteered to be
interviewed.
The personal vignette has been framed in a sequential nature as an oral
retelling and remembering in the present. From a critical position, there are
voluminous works that discuss the fallible nature of memory at the intersection
between culture and society (Assman and Czaplicka, 1995; Fentress and
Wickham, 1992; Kansteiner, 2002; Pickering and Keightley, 2012; Radstone,
2008).
In particular, Marsh (2007, p. 16) notes contentions when relying on such
accounts as ‘conversational retellings [that] depend upon the speaker’s goals, the
audience, and the social context more generally. Because memories are fre-
quently retrieved in social contexts, retellings of events are often incomplete
and distorted’. The process for Little Jon’s articulation of a rave cultural past
also parallels the continual reshaping of his identity in which he ages within
this inner cultural lifeworld.3
While interpretation of the interview data is invaluable, the relationship
between what Little Jon chose to share and was able to recall within a timeframe
Verbal Sound System (1997–98) 221
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).
A reflective ‘vignette’ analysis of three moments

of rave cultural impact
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,
the bedroom as a place of solitude intersected with the activity of listening to

the radio. It was an early point of access for Little Jon, who listened to Leices-
ter’s local pirate radio station, Fresh FM (1991–98), which was also a significant
discovery for anyone interested in expanding their electronic musical taste. This
activity therefore allowed Little Jon to cultivate his musical taste through a
local peer culture at a distance:
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.
This early point of access illustrates a localized intergenerational development

in music appreciation. The original founders were Utty and Tappy. Most of the
Fresh FM DJ’s were regular, local visitors to Sneakers Records (owners: Leroy
AKA DJSS and Edriss) in the Victorian-esque Silver Arcade (Silver Street),
that housed an array of independent shops across three levels in a labyrinth of
pedestrianized lanes (called The Lanes) in Leicester’s city centre. There were
also other acclaimed local-to-international DJs involved in this network parti-
cipation of radio transmission: Schoolboy, Mastersafe, Manic, Dynamo, Black
Magic, Skully, Attraction B, Ratty, and Kaos.4 In 1994, the creative DIY labour
that had been used to deploy weekend transmissions increased to take place
around the clock during the week. This was accomplished through an alliance
between the pirate DJs who had pioneered it and the commercial Leicester Club
DJs’ voluntary participation. Little Jon retains a collection of cassette recordings
from this period that reveal this musical practice in forming a taste for jungle
music and knowledge on DIY and pirate DJ practices, when he was privy to the
sessions’ transmission location from the top of the Towers (now demolished) at
the heart of the St Matthews estate.
From within this intermingling of parallel social worlds, between DJs
working in a DIY culture and labouring in the local club world in the city
centre of Leicester, two legal youth raves (14 to 17 years) were formed: ‘U’
(for underground) at Club Bear Cage and ‘R’ (rave for guidance) at Club Rage
(1991–92). These can be referred to as ‘spectacular spaces of adolescence’ that
ran once a month and were particularly successful with a moderately affluent
underage youth. The entrance fee was £5, and it cost £2 to purchase an ice-
pole that had a retail price of 20 pence. It was a lucrative initiative that
allowed a potential or underage raver temporary access to the adult leisure
industry:
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
In this context, these temporary spaces were opportunities for intergenerational

exchange, since the older peer members (DJs and DIY sound system members
involved in the running and organization of the events) who attended were
involved in alternate DiY music practices beyond the general experience of the
participating youth. At the age of 12, Little Jon was two years below the
licensed age to gain admission to these organized social events, usually reserved
for adult pleasure. However, the challenge to gain access into a forbidden zone
(the indoor club space) was successfully achieved:
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:
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.
To elaborate, Little Jon’s participation in babble’s DiY activities converged with an

intense period of political activism over the pending legislation of the CJB in 1993.
Little Jon became involved in the culture at a time when mobilization against the
CJB materialized in Leicester as part of a nationwide campaign within the free party
network. Little Jon was acting chair at these meetings, which included representa-
tive members from free party sound systems, the Socialist Worker Party, hunt sabo-
teurs and other left wing factions that were a mix of (non)violent and (in)direct
actions. He was also chair for All Systems No6 at the Leicester Branch:
There were so many different factions … typical trying to organize col-

lective hippies, it was just fucking chaos, no one would take lead on it and
no one would organize them, so we needed a chair at the meeting … I was
younger and less likely to get the head kicked off me, so they started making
me the chairperson for all the meetings.
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.
Further to this, his early participation in babble, and inclusion as a rave

member, enabled Little Jon to experience a sense of ‘spectacular access’. This
term encompasses the rave-cultural histories, knowledges, experiences and
memories that are communicated via the interaction of lifeworld conversations.
Within the rave network, it was then an organic DIY free party pedagogy that
was shaped by active members involved in the community as a ‘people’s culture’.
I contextually frame this as a form of rave cultural talk that is derived from the
socialization between members in temporal rave culture environments – the
spaces of domestic DIY interaction and places of rave cultural leisure in which
music, dancing and labour are collective expressions of unity.
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.
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:
The kind of pinnacle of it all … one of the biggest buildings in Leicester

that was very much on police radar … the place itself was totally trans-
formed. We went into a concrete box and created a club.
The temporary occupation of the space involved three weeks of surveillance

monitoring of the routine security patrols in operation in order to organize the
‘niche-rave’ event:
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
emerge as a personal yet collective account. In this case, moments of rave

cultural impact were described through an early fusion between a developing
taste for electronic dance music and the socialization occurring within the not-
for-profit underground and commercial music worlds. This led to a sense of
‘spectacular access’ in which an organic free party DIY apprenticeship occurred
through the meeting of free party peers.
Finally, Little Jon’s experiences and practices were understood as akin to
those of the second wave generation of rave members in the creation of Verbal
Sound System as an example of a temporary ‘niche-rave’ initiative. It illustrated
little Jon’s graduation from an organic DIY pedagogy in the organization of
babble events in which Verbal free parties were mostly run parallel to the com-
mercial electronic dance music world in Leicester. This included the socio-
spatial timeliness of musical access in (pre)teen environments, the urban
(in)visible spaces in the early development of a taste for synthesized genres of
electronic dance music and an enduring countercultural commitment to the
spirit of freedom in localized sound system networks.
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.
References
Armour, Z. (2013a). Field notes. ‘babble party’, 7 December.
Armour, Z. (2013b). Semi-structured interview with Little Jon, 17 December.
Arnold, B. (2014). DiY: Can-do attitude! DJ Magazine, 4 November. Retrieved from
https://djmag.com/content/diy-can-do-attitude.
Assman, J. and Czaplicka, J. (1995). Memory and cultural identity. New German Cri-
tique, Cultural History Studies, 56: 125–33.
Breen, M. (1991). A stairway to heaven or a hell? Heavy metal rock music in the 1990s.
Cultural Studies, 5(2): 191–203.
Fentress, J. and Wickham, C. (1992). Social Memory. London: Blackwell.
Frith, S. (1996). Music and identity. In S. Hall and P. Du Gay (eds), Questions of Cul-
tural Identity (pp. 108–27). London: Sage.
Gordon, A. (2014), Subcultural entrance practices in UK punk culture from 1976-2001.
In The Subcultures Network (eds), Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change
(pp. 155–74). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Guest, T. (2009). Castle Morton and beyond: Fight for the tight to party. Guardian, 11
July. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2009/jul/11/castlemorton-
free-party-scene-spiral-tribe.
Habermas, J. (1981). The Theory of Communicative Action Volume 2 – Lifeworld and
System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style and Subculture. Oxford: Berg.
Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis to European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An
Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press.
Kansteiner, W. (2002). Finding meaning in memory: A methodological critique of col-
lective memory studies. History and Theory, 41(2): 179–97.
Marsh, E.J. (2007). Retelling is not the same as recalling: Implications for memory.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(1): 16–20.
McKay, G. (1996). Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties.
London: Verso.
McKay, G. (1998). DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain. London: Verso.
McRobbie, A. (ed.) (2000). Feminism and Youth Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Oliver, S. (2014). The raving crew who were named ‘the most dangerous people in the
UK’: Nottingham’s DIY collective had a vision for a new society. Vice Magazine, 20
August. Retrieved from www.vice.com/en_uk/article/xd38mq/diy-25th-anniversary-
scott-oliver-125.
Pickering, M. and Keightley, E. (2012). Communities of memory and the problem of
transmission. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(1): 115–31.
Radstone, S. (2008). Memory studies: For and against. Memory Studies, 1(1): 31–9.
Reddington, H. (2003). ‘Lady’ punks in bands: A subculturette? In D. Muggleton and R.
Weinzierl (eds), The Post-Subcultures Reader (pp. 239–52). Oxford: Berg.
Redhead, S. (1993). Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Alder-
shot: Avebury.
Rose, T. (1994), Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
London: Wesleyan University Press.
Polity Press.
Thomson, A. (1999). Making the most of memories: The empirical and subjective value
of oral history. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9: 291–301.
Utty and Tappy (1991), Fresh FM. The Pirate Archive. Retrieved from www.thepirate
archive.net/fresh/.
Weinstein, D. (2000) Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture (2nd ed.). New York: Da
Capo Press.
Willis, P. (1978). Profane Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Chapter 20
A howl of the estranged

Post-p unk and contemporary
underground scenes in Bulgarian
popular music
Asya Draganova and Shane Blackman
In the 1980s, post-punk underground scenes emerged as a distinctive phenom-

enon in Bulgarian popular music. This chapter focuses on their subcultural
meanings, influences and longevity, using ethnographic and participatory
research methods. We argue that the contemporary implications of Bulgarian
post-punk scenes need to be explored and interpreted through the lens of an
extended time perspective.
Bulgaria is situated in south-eastern Europe on the Balkans, at a crossroads
between perceived Eastern and Western cultural constructs (Buchanan, 2007).
Between 1944 and 1989, the country was part of the East European communist
bloc under the political influence of the Soviet Union. After the Cold War,
which divided the ‘communist’ East and ‘capitalist’ West of Europe, transitions
towards democracy began in Bulgaria. In 2007, the country joined the European
Union; nevertheless, post-communist transitions continue to add complexities
to current Bulgarian social and cultural realities. The year the Berlin Wall fell,
1989, acts as a threshold between the communist period and the contemporary
historic epoch of ex-Eastern bloc countries. Although change is a process rather
than an isolated event, the ‘impossible to forget’ year of 1989 (Roberts, 2010,
p. 15) is used to facilitate a comparative aspect to analysis. It allows for tracing
how DIY politics and subcultural values developed and maintained relevance in
changing circumstances.
The term ‘post-punk’ is employed to address a conglomeration of related
scenes. Post-punk in Britain emerged in the early 1980s, after the punk peak in
1976–79 (Savage, 1991). In contrast to early punk, post-punk is inclined
towards a more sophisticated artistic critique of social realities (Laing, 1985;
Marcus, 1993). Rather than being defined by punk’s rejection of musical elitism
and complexity, post-punk is bored with formulaic content and demonstrates an
affinity with experimentation (Reynolds, 2005). Post-punk is a holistic category
referring to new wave, dark wave, no wave, grunge, industrial, Gothic rock and
cold wave. To us, as to Reynolds (2005, p. 517), post-punk represents ‘unfin-
ished business’: it offers unexhausted opportunities for creativity. The DIY
legacy of early punk music is continued throughout post-punk’s aesthetic
approach in music and visual style, and the continued effort to democratize the
A howl of the estranged 231
music industries through DIY and ‘independent’ label politics (Hesmondhalgh,

1997, pp. 255–74). In DIY music culture production, identity – rather than con-
sumer choice – projects agency, creating opportunities for art to dominate profit
(McKay, 1998).
Although popular music cultures are often studied in relation to young
people, their relevance is inclusive rather than necessarily determined by age
categories (Bennett, 2013). Involvement with music cultures after ‘youth’ can
be interpreted as a nostalgic act, reinforced by commercialized reissues: repeti-
tion of ideas, deprived of their original connotations (Reynolds, 2011).
However, ‘older’ generations involved with music cultures – as in the case of
Bulgarian post-punk – allow the inheritance of values, meanings and practices
(Bennett, 2006, pp. 219–35). Intergenerational dialogue through music can be
central to the sociological phenomenon of continuity in culture.
In this chapter, we engage with debates in sociology concerned with the
appropriateness of concepts around scenes, subcultures and their postmodern
projections (Bennett and Kahn-Harris, 2004; Redhead, 1997). While Hesmond-
halgh (2005, p. 38) is critical of the concept of scene outlined by Straw (1991),
he argues that ‘the concept of scene … provides new understandings of musical
collectivities in relation to space and place, and offers insight into the formation
of aesthetic communities in modern urban life’. On a similar basis, Anderson
(2009, p. 14) also uses the term ‘scene’; at the same time, throughout her studies
she also explores the concept of subculture (Anderson, 2009, p. 231), particu-
larly in relation to punk. We want to build on this approach, as it has a close
relationship to our empirical data on post-punk, but we will also take up Ben-
nett’s (2011, p. 504) suggestion to ‘fruitfully collaborate’ using both subcultural
and post-subcultural approaches. We employ the concept of subculture to
describe agentic practices in locations where intergenerational groups perform
and consume music styles, amounting to subcultural substance, where a core of
meanings, cultural practices and political values create and articulate identities
(Blackman, 2005, 2014; Hodkinson, 2002, 2004). We employ the concept of
scene to study the micro-specificities of musical interactions linked to broader
subcultural formations, in order to describe the ways in which the global and
local interact in relation to social, economic, political and historical contexts of
music cultures.
Methodological position: critical insider

The study employs ethnographic strategies, deriving methodological incentives
from the contemporary legacies of the Chicago School of Sociology (Hart,
2010). Namely, it aimed to achieve a ‘mosaic’ of meanings derived through a
variety of methods and the exploration of multitude positions towards the field
(Blackman, 2010, pp. 195–205; Denzin, 1997, pp. xi–xiii). The collection of
data took place within a holistic paradigm, and included 32 extensive interviews
as conversations, alongside ethnographic observations. Participants included
232 A. Draganova and S. Blackman
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).
Music and subcultures in Bulgaria before 1989

Post-punk scenes in Bulgaria emerged in the 1980s, during the communist
regime. The genre developed as part of the subcultural music scenes associated
with the holistic-rock spectrum subjected to censorship, restriction and even
criminalization (Statelova, 2011, pp. 35–45).
Post-punk rock’s contents were incongruous in relation to the aesthetics
imposed by the state’s cultural politics, as audiences were prevented from access-
ing ‘Western noises’ (Taylor, 2006, pp. 121–34). Rock music represented youth
culture styles, individualism and freedom of expression, contradicting the com-
munist ‘ideals’ of youth union in comradeship. The state designed futures for
young people and provided them with the certainty of strictly structured trans-
itions: from compulsory participation in the communist youth organizations to
career paths based on performance and behaviour at school (Kovacheva, 2001,
pp. 41–60). Popular music cultures were state controlled: to be published and
distributed, content had to be approved by specialized commissions. Musician
and composer Christian Boyadzhiev, associated with acts like FSB, said in an
interview:
We didn’t have very active rock music because of political reasons. It is

because rock music represents revolt and comes from America, and the UK,
overall from the Anglo-Saxon spheres … For Bulgarian singers, rock and
pop, those who were in charge of censorship had found very delicate as well
as direct ways to control. Tenors and high male voices were prioritized. The
issue was that ‘low’ voices sounded American somehow. ‘This voice sounds
too American’; ‘and what’s wrong with it? The guy is singing in Bulgarian’.
I know it sounds comic today, but it was in fact a well-established policy.
Pre-1989 Bulgarian-controlled music production and dissemination were con-

centrated in the state-owned music companies Balkantone and National Radio
and Television. Artists wishing to reach audiences had to compromise the
content of their music to ensure access to audiences. Rock artists were permit-
ted to record and perform music lacking raw energy, heavy ‘riffs’, ‘dark’ melodies
or topics, and elements of social critique. Socialist rock, or soc-rock, hardly con-
stituted an alternative to other styles, such as the politically ‘harmless’ Soviet-
ized versions of pop. In such circumstances, DIY – both in relation to accessing
a wider range of music and the creation of new material – offered the single
alternative strategy to the state’s cultural politics.
Prohibition and censorship acted as creative impulses (Statelova, 2011,
pp. 35–45) as rock genres grew to become the aesthetic and musical core of pre-
1989 Bulgarian youth subcultures, including hippie, rocker, punk and post-punk.
Although there were stylistic differences between them, pre-1989 subcultural
scenes associated with ‘Western’ genres were closely related, rather than rivals,
thanks to their shared enemy: the state (Barova, 2004). The themes discussed
here – Bulgarian post-punk’s active relationship with protest and the creation of
a culture of artistically expressed social critique – preserve the longevity of the
scenes’ relevance.
Figure 20.1 The first rock festival in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, 1987; Borisova
Gardens, then called Liberation Park.
Source: Neli Nedeva-Voeva.
Post-p unk into a ‘cold’ wave

In the 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the reformist strat-
egies perestroika and glasnost – ‘restructuring’ and ‘opening up’. These steps
towards change coincided with a wave of post-punk influences and new techno-
logical opportunities for creating music outside official culture production.
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.
Bulgarian post-punk emerged and developed ‘organically’, rather than as a

carefully designed corporate or state-dictated product. At that time, technolo-
gical innovations became more accessible, allowing young people to challenge
the state monopoly over recorded music production. This occurred while post-
punk styles were developing in the West, particularly in the United Kingdom
and United States: Bulgarian post-punk derived inspiration from artists such as
Joy Division, The Cure, The Fall, Depeche Mode and Nick Cave. DIY strategies
were crucial to the enhancement of artistic identities, alongside the diversifica-
tion of post-punk within ‘waves’ of stylistic musical interpretation, and the for-
mation of scenes throughout the country.
Boyko Petkov, frontman of the band Klas, said during our interview:
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.
In Bulgaria, the emergence of post-punk subcultures and styles coincided with a

degree of democratization of opportunities for accessing audiences. Media
remained restricted from playing ‘informal’ music or showing visual styles
outside the ‘decent’ norm – those with piercings, a Mohawk or long hair were
not to be interviewed or to be shown on television, for instance. Nevertheless,
by the late 1980s the first festivals dedicated to alternative music styles were
taking place. They were often interrupted by the militia (police). For example,
when at a music event in Sofia post-punk band Kale sang ‘The world is, oh,
darling, something I piss on’ (Kale, 1987), the electricity was cut off and the
performance promptly stopped.
Bulgarian post-punk enabled the development of subcultural scenes that,
instead of imitating Western styles ‘transplanted’ from distant cultural contexts,
grew into a locally distinctive phenomenon. It embodied young people’s alienation
from the absurdities and limitations of their social realities. Some of the bands
emerging during the early years of post-punk underground scenes in Bulgaria were
Kale, Klas, Revu, Tangra, Hopelessness, Entrance B, Absolute Beginners, Votsek
and Chugra, and Violet General. Many of these early projects were united by one
figure – Dimitar Voev. Poet, composer, bass player and vocalist, Voev became best
known for his band Nova Generatsia (New Generation). He described his band’s
style as something ‘extreme but simultaneously fine and delicate’, and referred to
Bulgarian post-punk using the phrase ‘cold wave’ (interviews, 1990–92).
In the United Kingdom, ‘cold wave’ first featured on the cover of Sounds
music magazine on 26 November 1977, in an interview with Ralf Hutter and
Florian Schneider of German electronic band Kraftwerk. Cold wave focuses on

emotional tension, passion and commitment as a roar against boredom and
complacency. The proposed ‘coldness’ in combination with two other terms
used to describe post-punk – ‘new’ and ‘dark’ wave – synthesizes key topics
under artistic exploration: estrangement and the sense of static desperation. A
key element of Bulgarian post-punk is the sense of a collective, challenging
social realities and cultural hierarchies. Bulgarian cold wave, through artistic
expression, began to construct new readings for the derelict remains of the
passing repressive regime and the heritage it had left behind. Symbolic visual
styles associated with the cold wave are a dynamic source of resistance. Soviet
monuments, identical grey tower blocs, abandoned playgrounds and factories,
street communist propaganda signs with instructions for ‘proper’ citizenship and
‘decent’ behaviour were all at the core of the post-punk visual style articulated
though photography, film and art.
These ‘altered’ texts embodied new readings of Bulgarian realities; with a
sense of sarcasm, they captured the inadequacy of totalitarianism, and its projec-
tions on the urban environment and social life. Neli Nedeva-Voeva, wife of
Nova Generatsia’s Dimitar Voev, played a key role in documenting early post-
punk scene events and shaping the visual style of Bulgarian ‘cold wave’. Inter-
actions with her as part of our fieldwork were essential to accessing valuable
reflections and otherwise non-public materials. Alongside musical and lyrical
content, post-punk’s visual representations sought to grasp and criticize the
aftermath of the collapse of the ‘old’ system: poverty, the degradation of public
spaces, the rise of materialistic needs and desires at the cost of devaluating the
spiritual and intellectual.
Bulgarian post-punk scenes’ contemporary subcultural value is contained in
their artistic continuity and their flexibility in constructing critical alternatives
to dominating paradigms. The unifying figure consolidating post-punk sub-
culture, Dimitar Voev, made a vast artistic contribution. He tragically died from
a brain tumor in 1992, when he was only 27, which reinforced his mythologiza-
tion. His birthdays, anniversaries of his death and key performances have
become occasions for regular music festivals, poetry readings and discussions.
Despite communicating with the roots of Bulgarian ‘original’ cold wave through
the choice of dates and the participation of established post-punk artists, these
events bring together different generations of contemporary Bulgarian under-
ground artists. Inclusivity has acted as an engine of communicating post-punk
heritage alongside the discovery of new content. Contemporary post-punk
events celebrating Voev’s artistic influences feature performances by young
artists such as Zhulti Stukla, LaText and Normalno, who are at the beginning of
their creative paths and seek to connect to subcultural roots, to identify with
them and gain artistic confidence. Post-punk, through its ‘cult’ figures, related-
ness to pre-1989 subcultures and the longevity of its relevance, stands in opposi-
tion to the shallow artistic discontinuities associated with post-communist
transitions.
Figure 20.3 Dimitar Voev challenging the intended interpretation of the Monu-

ment of the Soviet Army in Sofia
The original circumstances within which local post-punk emerged have

changed considerably, although these subcultural scenes have been flexible in
constructing new alternatives. While, in their early days, post-punk scenes
opposed the artificiality of state-controlled music production, today they contra-
dict commercial styles promoted by music industries led by a profit-making
imperative. For instance, scenes influenced by post-punk styles operate in
opposition to the most developed music business in Bulgaria, based on a genre
referred to as pop-folk (Statelova, 2005), the content of which largely revolves
around commodified ‘hypersexual femininities’ (Griffin et al., 2012) and the
celebration of material wealth. Pop-folk is created and disseminated within
infrastructures of big companies, which on a local level resemble entertainment
corporations. In contrast, post-punk underground scenes have retained their
independence through DIY strategies, which have adopted up-to-date technolo-
gies and media platforms for communication (Lingel and Naaman, 2011).
A new generation in a new democracy: ‘informals’,

subcultures, protest
The ‘new generation’ articulated within the ethnographic fieldwork contrasts
with the collectiveness suggested by pre-1989 communist propaganda culture,
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:
We are forever a new generation,

our eyes bleeding in sorrow and pain,
we know we shall expect no compensation,
and we vomit on the hopes for better days
(Voev, 1987, ‘A New Generation Forever’. Translation: A. Draganova)
We are a sick product

of our times and your obedient labour,
Urbanely structured – our empty fates –
bodies naked and heads down. In shame.
(Voev, 1991, ‘A Patriotic Song’. Translation: A. Draganova)
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
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
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.
References
Anderson, T. (2009). Rave Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Atkinson, P. (1990). The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality.
London: Routledge.
Barova, V. (2004). Youth subcultures in Bulgaria during the 80s and early 90s of the 20th
century. Bulgarian Ethnology, 30(1), pp. 92–100.
Baumgartl, B. (1993). Environmental protest as a vehicle for transition: The case of
Ekoglasnost in Bulgaria. Technology, Risk and Society, 7(1), pp. 157–75.
Bennett, A. (2006). Punk’s not dead: The continuing significance of punk rock for an
older generation of fans. Sociology¸ 40: 219–35.
Bennett, A. (2011). The post-subcultural turn: Some reflections 10 years on. Journal of
Bennett, A. (2013). Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully? Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press.
Bennett, A. and Kahn-Harris, K. (eds) (2004). After Subculture: Critical Studies in Con-
temporary Youth Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Blackman, S. (2005). Youth subcultural theory: A critical engagement with the concept,
its origins and politics, from the Chicago School to postmodernism. Journal of Youth
Studies, 8(1): 1–20.
Blackman, S. (2007). ‘Hidden ethnography’: Crossing emotional borders in qualitative
accounts of young people’s lives. Sociology, 41(4): 699–716.
Blackman, S. (2010) ‘The ethnographic mosaic’ of the Chicago School: Critically locat-
ing Vivien Palmer, Clifford Shaw and Frederic Thrasher’s research methods in con-
temporary reflexive sociological interpretation. In C. Hart (ed.), The Legacy of the
Chicago School of Sociology (pp. 195–215). Cheshire: Midrash.
Blackman, S. (2014). Subculture theory: An historical and contemporary assessment of
the concept for understanding deviance. Deviant Behavior, 35(6), pp. 496–512.
Blackman, S. and Kempson, M. (eds) (2016). The Subcultural Imagination: Theory,
Research and Reflexivity in Contemporary Youth Cultures. London: Routledge.
Buchanan, D. (ed.) (2007). Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Empire, Plymouth:
Scarecrow Press.
Denzin, N. (1997). Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Destructive Creation (2011). ‘Moving with the times’ graffiti artwork. Retrieved from
http://destructivecreation.com/?p=152.
Geertz, C. (2000 [1973]). The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Fontana.
Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qual-
itative Research. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction.
Griffin, S., Szmigin, I., Bengry-Howell, A., Hackley, C. and Mistral, W. (2012).
Inhabiting the contradictions: Hypersexual femininity and the culture of intoxication
among young women in the UK. Feminism and Psychology, 23(2): 184–206.
Guerra, P. (2014). Punk, expectations, breaches and metamorphoses: Portugal,
1977–2012. Critical Arts, 28(1): 111–22.
Hart, C. (ed.) (2010). The Legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology. Cheshire:
Midrash.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (1997). Post-punk’s attempt to democratise the music industry: The
success and failure of rough trade. Journal of Popular Music, 41(2): 255–74.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2005). Subcultures, scenes or tribes? None of the above. Journal of

Hodkinson, P. (2002) Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture, London: Berg.
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.
Kale (1986). ‘Epitaph’. Sofia: unreleased.
Kovacheva, S. (2001). Flexibilisation of youth transitions in Central and Eastern Europe.
Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research, 9(1): 41–60.
Laing, D. (1985). One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes:
Open University Press.
Lingel, J. and Naaman, M. (2011). You should have been there, man: Love music, DIY
content and online communities. New Media and Society, 14(2): 332–49.
Lowndes, S. (2016). The DIY Movement in Art, Music and Publishing: Subjugated Knowl-
edges. London: Routledge.
Marcus, G. (1993). The Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–1992. New York:
Doubleday.
McKay, G. (ed.) (1998). DIY Culture: Party and Protest in Nineties Britain. London:
Verso.
Pilkington, H. (1994). Russia’s Youth and its Culture: A Nation’s Constructors and Con-
structed. London: Routledge.
Redhead, S. (1997). Subculture to Clubcultures: An Introduction to Popular Cultural Studies.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Reynolds, S. (2005). Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978–1984. London: Faber and
Faber.
Reynolds, S. (2011). Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addition to Its Own Past. London: Faber
and Faber.
Roberts, K. (2010). 1989: So hard to remember and so easy to forget. In C. Leccardi et al.
(eds), 1989: Young People and Social Change After the Fall of the Berlin Wall (pp. 15–29).
Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
Savage, J. (1991). England’s Dreaming. London: Faber and Faber.
Shein, A. (1990). Kul’turologicheskie Predposylki Formirovaniia i Razvitiia
neformal’nikh Dvizhenii. In A. Bystritskiii and M. Roshchin (eds), Molodezhnii Renes-
sans. Moskv: Nauka
Silverman, D. (2011). Interpreting Qualitative Data (4th ed.). London: Sage.
Sounds magazine (1977). ‘New muzick: The cold wave’, 26 November.
Statelova, R. (2005). The Seven Sins of Chalga. Sofia: Institute for Art Studies.
Statelova, R. (2011 [1990]). Rock and democracy: Prohibition as a creative impulse. In
R. Statelova (ed.), Through the years: Rosemary Statelova at 70 (pp. 35–45). Sofia: Insti-
tute for Art Studies Press.
Straw, W. (1991). Systems of articulation, logics of change: Communities and scenes in
popular music. Cultural Studies, 5(3), pp. 368–88.
Taylor, K. (2006). Let’s Twist Again: Youth and Leisure in Socialist Bulgaria. London:
Transaction.
Voev, D. (1987). ‘A New Generation Forever’ (poem). Sofia: Foundation Dimitar Voev –
Nova Generatsia. Translation from Bulgarian included in text: Asya Draganova, 2014.
Voev, D. (1991). A patriotic song (song lyrics). Retrieved from http://textove.com/text.
php?song=cbe5c844. Translation from Bulgarian included in text: Asya Draganova, 2014.
Index
4ZZZ (Brisbane) 162 ethnogenesis 79; identity redefined

81–2; Martxa eta Borroka campaign 83;
Abbey, Eric 191 music as political medium 79; new
Absolute Beginners 235 community nationalism 79, 82; Radical
ageing and music cultures 56, 227, 231 Rock 80–1, 84; social space 77–8; see
altermodernism 91 also Euskal Kantagintza Berria
Alternative Tentacles 209 Batasuna, Henri 82
amateur music production 102–3; and Battle of the Beanfield 219
Finnish micro-label autonomy 103–7 Baudrillard, Jean 118
anak DIY 125, 126, 127, 129–31, 132 Beat on the Brat 176–7
anarchist-punk 122 Becker, Howard 26, 171
Ancst 157 Benjamin, Walter 32, 96
Animal Collective 200 Bennett, Andy 42–3, 94
anti-hegemonic ideology 1 Berlin cassette culture 150–8; Berlin Tape
Apanhador Só 141 Run 154; Cassette Store Day 153–4,
Arcade Fire 21 155; scene infrastructure 153–5; see also
archives 4 cassette culture
ARI Remix magazine 167 Berurier Noirs 56
Arn, Eric 199 Besley, Jo 167
Artaud, Antoine 32 Bey, Hakim 23–4
Atxaga, Bernardo 84 Bigcartel 155
authenticity 118 Bis Aufs Messer store 155
automodernism 91 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh 160–1, 162
avant-gardes in track to recognition 59–60 Blum, Alan 25
Azerrad, Michael 187 Boa record label 209
body: marked 24; visibility 24
babble parties 226 Bondage Records 208
Baez, Joan 78 Bourdieu, Pierre 188, 207
Bailey, T.B. 156, 157 Bourriaud, Nicolas 91
Balkantone 233 Boyadzhiev, Christian 232
Bandcamp 4, 151, 152, 155 Brattleboro Free Folk Festival 195, 200
Bandung, West Java 125–36 Brazil: DIY practices 145–7; independent
Bannister, Matthew 177 music consumption 139–48
bars à ambiance musicale 27–8 Brill, Dunja 65
Basque Country and Liberty see ETA Brisbane: music scene 161–2; political and
Basque: affirmation of counterculture social background 160–1; underground
84–5; counter-hegemonic mobilization music scene 4, 160–9
82–4, 85, 86; Country 77–86; British Invasion 189
244 Index
Brogan, Gayle 209 Club Rage (Leicester) 223

Brown, Britt 199, 200, 201 Coachwhips 192, 193
Bucharest: club culture 47; gentrification Coal Hook 200
and reconversion of underground spaces Cohen, Sara 9, 10
45–8; gentrification of city centre 47; Colectiv Club fire 41–50; Colectiv effect
Old City 46; social resistance 41, 42, 50; investigation 41
movements 42; underground music collectivity 196–7
scene 43–5, 48; urban culture 2, 41–50 commercial mainstream space 45
Budapest: continuity with indie music Conexão Vivo 140
176–7; cool lists 179; lo-fi bedroom Connell, John 139
music scene 4, 171–80; multitasking Constellation Records 21
175–6; punk and the mainstream 177–9; conviviality 25–6, 28–9
scene bands 175; underground history Corbett, John 200
174–5 Corsano, Chris 195
Bulgaria: cold wave 234–7; impact of Count Five, The 189
censorship and prohibition 233; Crass (band) 113, 131, 209
informals 237–40; music and subcultures Crass Records 209
232–3; post-punk scenes 5–6, 230–40 creative autonomy: privileging of 14; in
Burning Heads 56 punk 130
creative city 14
Cammaerts, Bart 207, 208, 210, 216 creative class 14
Canevacci, Massimo 32 creolization 52
Casa del Popolo 21 critical insider perspective 231–2
cassette culture 4, 112–13; Berlin 150–8; cultural capital 54–9
cassette as calling card 154; cassette as Cultural Front 78
physical object 155–6, 157; connections cultural memory 1
with digital technologies 155–6; Cure, The 235
continuity or revival? 150–2; defining Curran, Kieran 152, 156
genres through 156–7; distribution 156;
DIY aesthetic 112; resurgence of Dadaism 7, 32
cassette tapes 150; underground scenes Dale, Pete 12
152; see also Berlin cassette culture Davidson, Eric 22–3
Castlemorton Common Free Festival 220 Day, Richard 129
Catalonia 2, 31 de Certeau, Michel 102, 146–7
Catarse 141 Dead Kennedys, The 209
Cave, Nick 235 Decay Films 16
Chaney, Damien 118 defect scene 177
Chaney, David 13 deindustrialisation 14
Charalambides 195 Del Ray, Lana 151
Chatterton, Paul 45 Deleuze, Gilles 102–3, 104, 109, 196
Chelasea Light Moving 202 Delgados, The 207, 208, 209, 211
Chelcea, Liviu 48 Deligny, Fernand 102
Chemikal Underground Records 5, 207–8, Denoon, Louise 167
210–11 Depeche Mode 235
concept of independence 211–12; cultural Destructive Creation collective 239
and social capital 213; expertise 214–15; Diederichsen, Diedrich 200, 202
revenue problems 213–14; sale of music digimodernism 91
212–14 digital technology: creative 10
Chicago School 48, 231 Dimitar Voev-Nova Generatsia
Cimon, Erik 22 Foundation: New Life Street festival
Clasquin-Johnson, Michel 91 239
Club Bear Cage (Leicester) 223 Ding Dongs 22
club cultures 11, 48 DIY aesthetic 1, 4, 7, 115–18
Index 245
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
Hardt, Michael 133 Kirby, Alan 91

Hardy, Larry 186 Klas 235
Harley, Ross 166 Klett, Joseph 112
Haters, The 112 Kolektif Balai Kota (BalKot) 125, 126–7;
Haynes, Jo 103 DIY activities 127; repositioning as
Hebdige, Dick 23, 24, 33 collective 129; Terror Project 127
Hein, Fabian 109 Koletif Balai Kota 4
Heinich, Nathalie 118 Komsomol 238
Henderson, Stewart 211, 212, 213, 215 Kortatu 84
Hentchmen, The 190 Koskinen, Jani 106, 108
Herschmann, Micael 139, 145 Kouligas, Bill 113
Hertzainak 82 Kraftwerk 236
Hesmondhalgh, David 25, 208, 210 Kretova, Sasha 107–8
Hives, The 190–1
Hollands, Robert 45 Laboa, Mikel 78, 82
Holloway, John 133 LaBrecque, Paul 198
Home Economics 3, 89–97 Laing, Dave 128
Honey record label 200 Lambert, Julie Anne 166, 167
Hopelessness 235 Lang, Ádám 176, 178
Horrid Red 199 Larsen, GX Jupitter 112
Hotel2Tango 21 LaText 236
Hungary: creative networks and DIY Lebrun, Barbara 208, 210
technologies 171–80 Lee, Stephen 207, 209
Hutter, Rafe 235–6 Lehtisalo, Jussi 105
Leicester 219–28
immaterial labour 12 Lertxundi, Benito 78
in-betweenness 94–5 Les Mauz de la Rue 56
Inca Ore 200, 204 Lessard, Ron 113
indie record labels 208–9 Lete, Xabier 78
Indonesia: hardcore punk scene 4, 125–34 Leviathan logic 196
inoperative community 5, 185, 189 lifestyle 13; urban 25
inoperative subculture 5, 185–94 Lind, Antti 105, 106
Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane) 166; Lindsay, Arto 188
Know Your Product exhibition 166 line of flight 102–3
Iriondo, Lourdes 78 Little Jon 219–28
It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity theatre Little Matt 227
production 168 Live Aid 9
Liverpool rock culture 9, 10
Jackie-O Motherfucker 200, 204 Living Room Tours 141
Jamison, Andrew 85 Lleida 31, 33
Jara, Víctor 78 lo-fi bedroom music scene 174;
Jello Biafra 209 continuities with other music 174;
Jerks, the 187 media boundaries 178; see also Budapest
Johnson, David 185 Lollapalooza Festival 139
Joy Division 235 Lubelski, Samara 202–3
Ludwig von 88, 56
Kale 235, 239 Lunch, Lydia 187
Karneval im Land der Cetacean festival
(Graz) 198 Mafessoli, Michel 14
Karnik, Olaf 203 magazines see fanzines
Kaye, Lenny 190 Maggots, The 191
Keenan, David 195, 200 Maharajas, The 191
Kingsmen, The 189 Makers, The 190
Index 247
Marcus, Greil 21, 32 Negri, Antonio 133

Marsh, Elizabeth 220 Negu Gorriak 85
Marshall, Lee 103 Negus, Keith 114
Martinkauppi, Janne 108 neo-tribes 48
Mauss, Marcel 121 New Basque Music see Euskal Kantagintza
McConnel, Katie 167 Berria
McDonald, Raymond 44 New Bomb Turks 22
McIntosh, Marjorie 161 New Sound, The 188
McMillan, Andrew 163 New Weird Canada 21
memory: DIY music scenes and 5 New Zealand 3, 89–97
Metabolismus 202 Neza York 33
Metail Mountains 202 No Wave movement 185; aural patricide
metamodernism 90–1 186–8; complex minimalism 187;
metamodernism 95, 96 redefinition of taste 188
Metsola, Mirko 105 No-Neck Blues Band (NNCK) 200
Mexico 2, 31 Noise culture 112–22; live nature 112; see
Mexico City 31 also Noise records
Michaelson, Scott 185 Noise records 112–22; advertising at
micro-labels: dance music 210; in Finland concerts 119; DIY entrepreneurship
see Finnish micro-labels; non-profit 113–15; gifts and trading 119–22;
ethos 209; in United Kingdom 208 handcrafting 115; local commitment
Milanov, Petar 238 119; not-for-profit model 113, 114;
Mile End 21–3, 25, 26 circulation 118–19; record aesthetics
Mile End Records 22 115–18; shared culture 117; use of vinyl
militant capital 54–9 115–16; visual elements 117
Mitchell, Helen 44 Normalno 236
Moloney, John 201 Nouvelle Chanson 78
Montreal 21–3; resurgence of Boulevard Nova Generatsia 236, 238, 239
Saint-Laurent 28–9 Novak, Raphaël 152, 157
Montreal New Wave documentary 22 Numbers, The 162
Moore, Ryan 128, 161
Moso, Roberto 81 O’Brien, Paul 168
Mouly, Françoise 165 O’Connor, Alan 114, 201, 208
MTV influence 9 O’Hara, Craig 128, 145
multi-activism 57 O’Neill, Michael 169
Muñoz, José Esteban 132 Offer, Rafe 141
Museum of Brisbane: Takin’ It to the Streets Oi! music 33, 56, 60
exhibition 167, 169 Orbital Raves 220
Music Cities 29 Oteiza, Jorge 78
music distribution: online practices 4–5 Overkampf 56
music ephemera 4, 160, 163–6; handbills
163; mail art 163–4; photographs 166; Pablo the Rotten (Pablo el Podrido) 31,
posters 163, 166–7; radio shows 163; 35–40
recordings 163; video footage 163; see PAN (record label) 113
also Brisbane, fanzines Parra, Violeta 78
MV & EE 195 Pascual, Jakue 80, 82, 83, 84
Pequenas Sessões 140
Nagy, Kriszta 174 perestroika 234
Nancy, Jean-Luc 5, 185, 189, 193 Pestorius, David 166
Nardwuar compilation 209 Peterson, Richard 42–3
National Radio and Television (Bulgaria) Petkov, Boyko 235
233 Pewt’r 200
Nedva-Voeva, Neli 236 Pharaohs, the 189
248 Index
Phase! Records 113 Red Records 186

Pilkington, Hilary 238 Rede Brasil 139
Pires, Victor de Almeida Nobre 140 Regev, Motti 172
Piresian Beach 177, 178 reterritorialization 103
Pits, The 162 Revu 234, 235, 239
Pollock, Emma 211–12, 213 Reynolds, Simon 187, 230
Porrah, Huan 84–5 rhizomatic organization 103, 108, 109, 200
Portugal: punk 10–14; DIY culture 12 RNR666, 177, 178
positive autonomy 133 Roberts, Mike 161
positive punk see punk positif Robertson, Ali 152
post-punk: in Bulgarian popular music Rock in Rio Festival 139
5–6, 230–40; record labels 208–9; in Rogers, Ian 94
United Kingdom 230 Romania 43; underground music scene
Primordial Undermind project 199 43–4; Radio Guerilla 43; post-censorship
Producto Instrumental Bruto 140 47; privatization 46; see also Bucharest
proto-market 103 Rostock 3, 63–71
punk: anarcho punk 8; beat-hippie-punk Roué, Marie 31
32–3; in Brisbane 163; careers 60–1; Rough Trade record label 208
dandy-flâneur punk 31–2; DIY ethos 8, Roy, William 42
53, 61, 128, 129, 131, 230; emergence RRRecords 113
of 1; global population 53; Gothic punk Rumsti Pumsti 156–7
8; histories 31–3; independent punk-
space polarities 53–4, 59–60; Indonesia Saelens 204
125–34; key mission 8; micro-labels Sáenz de Viguera, Luis 79
114; Portuguese 10–14; position-taking Saints, The 160, 161, 162, 167
54–6; positive (see also punk positif) 4; Sam the Sham 189
record labels 208–9; rock-pop-punk 32; Samuels, Robert 91
skinhead-Rastafarian punk 33; as Sanskülotts, Mayberian 175, 179
statement of resistance 8; stories 33–8; Savage, Paul 210
lives 38–40; US pop-punk 12; see also Save Koral 239
hardcore punk Save Pirin 239
punk hardcore see hardcore punk Save Ruse protests 239
punk positif 125–34; dialectics of DIY scenes 23–4, 25–8, 231: food 26; local 5,
132–4; essence of 128 195; sociability 25, 26; support system
26; trans-local 5, 195; urbanizing scene
Qeremos 141 studies 25–8; virtual 5, 195; see also
QPAC Museum: Razar: Young, Fast and conviviality
Non-boring exhibition 167 Schneider, Florian 236
Queensland Art Gallery: Signs of the Times Schneiderman, Ron 200, 201
exhibition 166–7 Scorces 195
Seeger, Pete 78
RAB 56 Semper 162
RABHOP 56 sensescapes 48
Racionero, Luis 32 Sex Pistols 160, 162
Radam, Thomas 153–4 Shein, A. 238
radickal Offene 200 Shukaitis, Stevphen 131, 132
Radio Times 162 Simmel, Georg 14
Rakéta Festival 171–3, 175–6 Situationist International 8
Rastafarians 33 Skaters, The 200
rave culture 24, 219–28 Skiffle 8
RAW Magazine 165 Skygreen Leopards 199
Recording Industry Association of Slater, Don 14
America 150 Slavova, Milena 234
Index 249
Smith, Christopher 167 Thornton, Sarah 11

Sneakers Records 223 Thuja 199
social art 52 Tiger Beat 191
Socialist rock 233 Tower Recordings 202
socialization: learning by doing 53 Toy Watches 162
Sofar Sounds (Songs from a Room) 4, 139, Toynbee, Jason 103
141–4; dissemination of videos 143; Trabant 175
DIY 143–4, 146, 147; headquarters 143; Tumblr 4, 172
production techniques 148 Tuşa, Enache 41
Sónar São Paulo 140 Tyfus, Dennis 113
sound-system culture 220; see also rave
culture Ultra Eczema 113, 119
Soundcloud 155 underground music scenes 2; audience–
Speigelman, Art 165 artist relationship 48–50; modes of
spielraum 96 production and distribution 3;
Spirit of Orr record label 200 urbanization 29
Spoulos, Panagiotis 113 United Cassettes blog 151
Stafford, Andrew 161, 162 Unknown Child 174–5
Stonehenge Free Festival 219 urban spaces 29: in Bucharest 2;
Strachan, Robert 101, 102, 106–7, 109, connections with music 2; connections
208, 210 with youth culture 2; sociability 25, 28;
straight edge 65 see also conviviality, Music Cities
Strollers, The 191
Stukla, Zhulti 236 Valentine, Matt 195, 198, 201, 202–3
style: significance 52 Vama Veche Rock Festival 42
Subcarpaţi 44–5 van den Akker, Robin 91, 95
subcultures 23–4, 52, 231; opposition to Van Impe 209
consumerism 23 Van Zandt, Steven 190
Suharto, General 125 Velvet Underground 174
Sunburned Hand of the Man 195, 198, Verbal Sound System 219–28
200–1 Vermeulen, Timotheus 91, 95
surplus sociality 133 vinyl 115–16
Surrealism 32 Violet General 235
Survivors, The 162 visibility 24
Swell Guys 162 Voev, Dimitar 235–6, 237
symbolic capital 118 Votsek and Chugra 235
Szabó, Benedek 177, 178
Szemere, Anna 175, 179 Walker, Clinton 161–2, 163
Walkman 155
Tabs Out podcast 151 Wallace, David Foster 90
Tagada Jones 56 Warner, Gary 164
Tangra 235 Wax Trax! Records 209
Tanz, Jo 113 Webb, Peter 210
Tanzprocesz 113, 119 Weber, Max 13
Tas, Hakki 42 Wellington (NZ) 3, 89–97; DIY ethic 93;
taste 187–8 musical underground 93–7; musical
technological change: DIY and 4; see also vitality 92–3; sound 92
digital technology White Stripes, The 190
Teenage Jesus 187 Williams, Johnathan Kyle 161
Tereskova 174 Williamson, Clare 166–7
That Striped Sunlight Sound blog 167 Willsteed, John 168x
Thatcher, Margaret 161 Woggles, The 190
Thompson, Stacy 122 Woodward, Alun 215
250 Index
Worley, Matthew 161 Zarama 81

Zero 161
Yonnet, Paul 32 Zherbin, Dmitri 107–8
Yúdice, George 139 Zip magazine 165–6
Yupanqui, Atahualpa 78 Zombie Girlfriend 177

DIY Cult and Underground

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

DIY Cult and Underground

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

DIY Cultures and Underground

The Great Transformation

Populism and the Crisis of Democracy

Populism and the Crisis of Democracy

Populism and the Crisis of Democracy

The Challenge of Modernity

The World Multiple

DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes

For more information about this series, please visit www.routledge.com/

Edited by Andy Bennett and

ISBN: 978-0-415-78698-0 (hbk)

1 Rethinking DIY culture in a post-­industrial and global

2 Visibility and conviviality in music scenes 21

4 Between popular and underground culture: an analysis

5 DIY as a constitutive resource of the specific punk

6 Boys in black, girls in punk: gender performances in the

7 Music, protest politics, DIY and identity in the Basque

8 Home Economics: fusing imaginaries in Wellington’s

9 Proud amateurs: deterritorialized expertise in

10 Noise records as noise culture: DIY practices,

11 Punk positif: the DIY ethic and the politics of value in

12 So far, yet so near: the Brazilian DIY politics of Sofar

13 Cassette cultures in Berlin: resurgence, DIY freedom

14 ‘Here Today’: the role of ephemera in clarifying

15 Birth of an underground music scene? Creative

16 The inoperative subculture: history, identity and

17 Collectivity and individuality in US free-­folk musics 195

18 The independent record label, ideology and longevity:

19 Verbal Sound System (1997–98): recalling a raver’s

20 A howl of the estranged: post-­punk and contemporary

Victor de Almeida Nobre Pires is Professor at the Federal University of

Social Work, University of Bucharest. She is also interested in rural com-

research explores issues related to music, technologies, heritage and genre.

This book is primarily an outcome of the KISMIF (‘Keep it Simple, Make it

Do-­it-yourself (DIY) culture describes a form of cultural practice that is often

grown to encapsulate a highly complex and vibrant alternative sector of cultural

In Chapter 11, Sean Martin-­Iverson draws on ethnographic fieldwork with

while also demonstrating the necessity of studying the network of participants,

underground scenes of the 1980s delivered content incongruous to the aesthetic

Rethinking DIY culture in a

DIY culture in a historical context

DIY and global ‘alternative’ culture

Artistic self-­p roduction and DIY cultural practices

essentially pre-­digested understanding of what punk, and by definition those

to analyse this space as including multiple socialization processes in a social

and family-­building; the rejection of corporations, business chains and multina-

become a template for various punk-­influenced styles, as well as other genres

Visibility and conviviality in music

devoid of any pictures of music, Davidson’s book is the opposite. It is full of

Scenes and subcultures, visible and invisible

Subculture forms up in the space between surveillance and the evasion of

Getting the Temporary Autonomous Zone started may involve tactics of

Urbanizing scene studies

However, this image of public conviviality sits in an uneasy relationship with

My third hypothesis is that, in the contemporary life of cities, music has

Les bars à ambiance musicale are establishments whose principal revenues

In a bar à ambiance musicale, people eat and drink to the accompaniment of

Conviviality and the multi-­p urpose space

nineteenth-­century dandy and the contemporary punk. Massimo Canevacci

Pablo el Podrido (Pablo the Rotten)

26/4/91. Pablo visits me in the afternoon. He seems a sensitive, somewhat

background of desolated streets, without any pavement, with rubbish piling

Between popular and underground

in which clusters of producers, musicians, and fans collectively share their

1 Rethinking DIY culture in a post-industrial and global

2 Visibility and conviviality in music scenes 21

17 Collectivity and individuality in US free-folk musics 195

20 A howl of the estranged: post-punk and contemporary

Do-it-yourself (DIY) culture describes a form of cultural practice that is often

In Chapter 11, Sean Martin-Iverson draws on ethnographic fieldwork with

Artistic self-p roduction and DIY cultural practices

essentially pre-digested understanding of what punk, and by definition those

and family-building; the rejection of corporations, business chains and multina-

become a template for various punk-influenced styles, as well as other genres

Conviviality and the multi-p urpose space

nineteenth-century dandy and the contemporary punk. Massimo Canevacci

p rovisions refer mainly to alcohol and tobacco consumption, noise management

The independent punk-s pace polarities

The space of position-t aking

or hyper-pointed emphasis (Fend, 2005, p. 222; Hübner-Funk, 2003). Exagger-

Youth-c ultural enactment of gender

Youth-c ultural enactment of gender in the Goth scene

Through self-presentation and by playing with bodily displays and emotions,

Youth-c ultural enactment of gender in hardcore punk

Unlike the satisfied cultures of nation-states, our double gap (dependent

It was characterized by punk, assembly-based decision-making, their own

Counter-h egemonic mobilization

Metamodern music-m aking

p erformance spaces is partly due to the lack of infrastructure in terms of record-

Amateurism and Finnish micro-l abel autonomy

objectives of production. The more popular Finnish micro-labels, such as Ektro,

As long as you’re operating on a small-scale, it’s fun … It has always been

Meanwhile, Antti Lind considered running Helmi-levyt to be his main

seems that Finnish micro-labels escape the mainstream in a more Deleuzian,