David Hesmondhalgh Hesmondhalgh – Subcultures, Scenes Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above Normal Summary In his article Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above, Above , David Hesmondhalgh Hesmondhalgh – – Professor Professor of Media, Music and Culture and Director of Media Industries Research Centre – Centre – offers offers criticism of terms governing research on youth and popular music, such as scenes, tribes (neo-tribes) or subculture and argues that the concept of genre, articulation and homology offer a better way to think of the relationship between music and collective identity and that the assumption that there exists a tight relationship between youth and popular music is just the consequence of a particular historical circumstance. The plenty sources he used – – researchers associated with CCCS, British Sociological Association, Andy Bennett, Paul Willis, Johan Fornas, David Chaney, Maffesoli, Shields, Simon Frith, Richard Middleton, Jason Toynbee – Toynbee – helped him create a rich theoretical framework of explaining how “scene” and “tribe” are not adequate or useful terms useful terms and raise questions about which is the better way to think of musical collectivities in modern societies. This concern with youth and popular music means that “a new paradigm will replace subculture” (23) and how these terms theorise music-making, music -making, such as Hesmondhalgh ends his work by questioning the existence of a relationship between the two fields of study – study – youth youth and popular music – and – and whether this is a desirable one. Bennett wanted to find a term that will capture the “unstable and shifting cultural cultural affiliations which characterize late modern consumer-based consumer-based identities” (24) identities” (24),, followed by Maffesoli’s argument that neoneo-tribalism offers “a recognition of instability and the temporary nature of group affiliation” (24). affiliation” (24). The author argues that genre – – which helps understand the relationship between production and consumption and expresses the collective interest or point of view of a community – – combined with articulation, provide a more adequate way of discussing the links between cultural and social practices in music studies. What I found particularly interesting is how it is argued that youth can do whatever they want with music – which generates “a range of moods and experiences which individuals are able to move freely between” between” (26) and style, a process in which unemployment and marginalisation marginalisation play a big bi g part as an investment in leisure and style.
Fucking Long Summary
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the concept of subculture – heavily – heavily criticized in recent research on youth and popular music 2 concepts emerged in order to offer new ways of conceiving musical collectivities (particularly among young people) – people) – scenes & tribes (or neo-tribes)
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Author
offers criticism of both terms and argues that there is no possibility to return to the concept of subculture (even if it may have some residual use in the sociology of youth) discusses the potential advantages of the concepts of genre and articulation suggests that the assumption that there is a close relationship youth popular music was the result of particular historical circumstances
Past few decades – assumed that the study of popular music is intimately connected to the study of youth culture -
there are good reasons for this link
1. popular music is very important in the lives of young people 2. people seem to lose touch with innovations in popular music as they get older 3. the most famous popular music of the past decades seems to have been created mainly by young-ish people for young people
BUT “ these ideas rely on particular notions of what popular music is, which are derived from an era, that of the 1960s and 1970s, when popular music became tied commercially and discursively to youth”… SO: The author suggests that popular music should not be conceived as the privileged domain of young people Relevant for the relationship between the sociology of youth and the sociology of popular music = the work on youth subcultures carried out in the 1970s by various researchers associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)
There are signs of strain in the relationship!!! those concerned with youth and popular music have tried to find a new term to replace it subculture
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SCENE AND TRIBE:
SCENE
TRIBE
talked about among popular music academics as a term that has replaced subcultures as the key way in which musical collectivities are conceived
has been the basis of a recent effort, by Andy Bennett – rethink the relationship between youth, style and musical taste
has been developed in versions of popular music studies more influenced by cultural studies and cultural geography
has emerged from the interplay between youth research and popular music studies
“indicate a potentially fertile area of debate about the problems with the concept of subculture in research on youth and popular m usic”
raise questions about the best way to conceive of musical collectivities / collective musical identities
The author argues that they are not useful ways to conceive of musical collectivities in modern societies
Important points he will make: -
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critical reading of Andy Bennett ’s adaptation of the term tribe from the work of Michel Maffesoli agrees with Bennett that subculture has problems as a concept in the study of youth and popular music, but he will argue that there are better reasons for thinking that subculturalism is flawed he finds problems which undermine the proposal of “neo-tribalism” as a ”new theoretical framework for the study of the cultural relationship between youth, music and style” (Bennett 1999) SCENE offered useful insights into the role of place and space in musical production and consumption but it’s still a confusing term 3
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questions the search for particular terms that can reunite the study of youth and popular music offers a better way to conceive of the relationship between music and collective identity, based on the concept of genre, articulation and homology is the relationship between the study of youth and the study of popular music really desirable?
Tribes and Neo-tribalism
Andy Bennett – “neo-tribalism” provides a more adequate framework for the study of the cultural relationship between youth, music and style than does the concept of subculture (Bennett 1999)
He then identifies 2 main problems in uses of subculture as a framework: 1. the term is used in increasingly contradictory ways 2. the ‘grounding belief ’ of the subculturalists, that “ subcultures are subsets of society, or cultures within cultures” , overestimates the coherence and fixity of youth groups (Bennett 1999)
HE TRIES to move beyond these limitations and to find a term that will capture the “ unstable and shifting cultural affiliations which characterise late modern consumerbased identities” (Bennett 1999) He finds the basis of such a term in Michel Maffesoli ’s concept of tribe tribe is “ without the rigidity of the forms of organization with which we are familiar, it refers more to a certain ambience, a state of mind, and is preferably to be expressed through lifestyles that favour appearance and form” (Maffesoli, quoted by Bennett 1999) The other is the Canadian geographer Rob Shields – argues that the “performative orientation” among tribes produces temporary groups and circles, rather than the supposedly homogeneous identities of a perceived mass (Bennett 1999)
Maffesoli and Shields are directing their criticisms at the sociology of mass culture!!! Beneath the theoretical language, a simple duality is shared by these writers: fixity and rigidity versus instability and fluidity
Tribes/neo-tribalism: offers a recognition of instability and the temporary nature of group affiliation problematic!
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We need to know how boundaries are constituted , not simply that they are fuzzier than various writers have assumed
Bennett about Lifestyle
the term lifestyles emphasises activity and agency, whereas structuralism emphasises determination and that old devil called class introduces identity lifestyle = freely chosen game identity = self-constructed
according to Bennett: youth can do whatever they want with music and style
How does music fit into Bennett’s theory of neo-tribes? “Music generates a range of moods and experiences which individuals are able to move freely between” (Bennett 1999)
Scenes: A Fruitfully Muddled Concept?
the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) has held an international conference Simon Frith observed that “ [t]he long domination of IASPM (sociology division) by subcultural theory is over. The central concept now (a fruitfully mudd led one) is scene” (Frith 1995) IASPM chair Anahid Kassabian commented that scene was one of the few concepts that popular music studies had made its own
There are two main sources for the widespread use of the concept of scene in popular music studies 1. Influential article by Will Straw
Straw examined the difference between two ways of accounting for the musical practices within a geographical space He set the notion of a stable community that engages with a heritage of geographically rooted forms against the idea of a scene, which for Straw has the advantage of taking account of “ processes of historical change occurring within a larger international music culture” (Straw 1991) 5
draws attention to the way that local processes are dependent on “ a vast complexity of interconnections” (Massey 1998)
2. Barry Shank
Shank’s approach is in contrast to Straw’s
Straw
Shank
shows a Bourdieu-an concern with processes of legitimation and the competition for cultural prestige
working within a framework that draws a contrast between these transformative practices and the dominant or mainstream culture
looks upon musical practices from a distance
The point = the discrepancies not only in how they read the politics of local music-making, but also in how they THEORISE this music-making
SCENE
invokes a notion of the musical practices occurring within a particular geographical space
DANGER!! Other researchers might use the term merely to denote the musical practices in any genre within a particular town or city… Meanwhile, other writers are using the term to denote a cultural space that transcends locality
Back to Subcultures?
In his recent book, Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture, Paul Hodkinson argues that we need to “ differentiate those groupings which are predominantly ephemeral from those which entail far greater levels of commitment, continuity, distinctiveness, or, to put it in general terms, substance” (Hodkinson 2002)
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substance – “consistent distinctiveness of a group over time, commitment, autonomy from wider social and economic relations, and a sense of like-mindedness with others of the same group” (Hodkinson 2002)
Paul Willis – Case Study: Analysis of bikers and their preferred music in Profane Culture (1978)
the relationship between music and the social emphasise the creativity and activity of the biker boys in making connections between pop music and their own lives the relationship was much more than “an arbitrary or random juxtaposition” (Willis 1978) Rather, there was a “real, though limited, dialectic of experience” based on a relationship between the music they liked and their own “ exact and searching selection of music” he suggests that the “dialectic of experience” involved in the biker culture brought about “ very clear basic homologies” between the social group and its music
The term homology is significant here. It derives from the Greek for “same relation”
Marxian sociology – relationships between art and societ Willis – refer to relationships between collectivities of people and cultural forms (music) … of course, there are still problems with this…
Middleton comes in – his analysis suggests that subculture should not be revived as a key concept in the analysis of popular music (although it may have its uses in the sociology of youth) because it was never a concept of much use to socio-musical analysis anyway ***beat that, bitch***
Understanding Musical Collectivities: Genre and Articulation
we need an eclectic array of theoretical tools to investigate subculture, scene and tribes 7
the author proposes genre:
“a much more satisfactory starting point for a theorisation of the relationship between particular social groups and musical styles than are subculture, scene or tribe” “ a term that has been used extensively in media and cultural studies to understand the relationship between production and consumption – a necessary stage in the analysis of audiences for symbolic goods in any society”
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Steve Neale – genres as “ systems of orientations, expectations and conventions” that link text, industry and audience (Neale 1980) rather than as taxonomic lists of texts In music studies – genre: understand the importance of categories in making value judgements about music (Frith 1996) OR how to analyse how genres inform the organisation of music companies and the perceptions of audiences (Negus 1999)
Jason Toynbee Toynbee points out that in popular music, the link between groups of texts and social formations has often been conceived in quasi-political term s as a form of representation:
“ Genre is seen to express the collective interest or point of view of a community ” (Toynbee 2000)
… however… the concept of genre is not sufficient in itself to understand the relationship between social experience of community and musical form/style
The most heavily critiqued aspect of subculturalism’s understanding of this relationship = the notion of homology
BUT a more important element in subculturalism’s efforts to theorise the relationship between symbolic practice and social process, formation or experience is articulation
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articulation (defined by Stuart Hall) = “ the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time”
taken up very widely in cultural studies Middleton uses the concept to discuss the complex, mediated relationships between musical forms and practices and social structure
Georgina Born “ there is a need to acknowledge that music can variably both construct new identities and reflect existing ones” sociocultural identities are not simply constructed in music
a differentiated and gradated range of relationships between music and the social
Combined with the term genre, with its ability to connect up texts, audiences and producers, the notion of multiple articulations provides a much more promising theoretical basis for theorising empirical research
Articulation
General metaphor for complexity of determination
it carries connotations of the importance of agency and struggle combined with the key concept of genre it provides the means to discuss musical collectivities in a more promising way than scenes + tribes
Popular Music Studies and Youth Studies: Time for an Amicable Separation?
the close relationship between the study of youth and that of popular music was the result of particular historical circumstances the privileging of youth in studies of music is an obstacle to a developed understanding of music and society they should be free to go their own ways in an amicable separation 9
there will be times when the two will be reunited because they still have much to learn from each other
CONCLUSION
Bennett: he attempts to maintain the link between the sociology of popular music and the sociology of youth , but….
his notion of tribe makes the connection between young people and particular musics so malleable and fluid that effectively the link could take any form whatsoever this is no adequate theorization
The concept of scene is richer, provides new understandings of musical collectivities in relation to space and place, and offers insights into the formation of aesthetic communities in modern urban life, but…
the concept is imprecise and confused and in fact has little ne cessary relationship with youth
There is no possibility of return to subculture in any adequate sociology of popular music, even if Hodkinson shows it may have some residual utility in the sociology of youth…
Genre offers a better way for understanding the links between cultural practice and social process in popular music studies, when wedded to other theoretical concepts, most notably articulation
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