Ethnographic
Moment: Three Shows in Three Nights
Cultural
Homogeneity and Trans-National Cosmopolitanism
Ethnographic
Moment: Saturday Morning at the Record Store
Case
Study: Producing Punk Planet and Aphasia
Fanzines
and Audience Participation
The
Scene as a Democratic Space
Case
Study: “How Punk Are You?”
Case
Study: Lehigh Valley Punk Rock
The
Trans-Locality of Indie Music
Case
Study: (Inter)Networking with One Zine, Two Bands, and Three Record Labels
Ethnographic
Moment: Just Another Night at the Empty Bottle
The
Encroaching Culture Industry
Case
Study: Keeping Punk Planet DIY
Suggestions
for Further Research
Appendix
A: Description of Interviews (Chronological)
Appendix
B: Description of Interview Topics.
Appendix
C: Survey Dates and Shows
By Way of Introduction
Ethnographic Moment: Three
Shows in Three Nights
It’s about
Before
I moved from
That
show was at the Icehouse in
The
Cursive show on the 20th is nothing like that show was. These are
national touring bands, not local ones. This is a professional venue, not a
local warehouse. Admission is $11, not $6 (or $5 with the donation of a can of
food for the local food pantry). The bands perform on a stage that is at least
three feet higher than the floor. The biggest difference between this show in
I see someone who appears to be at least as old as me, standing in the rear of the crowd, feet shoulder-length apart, arms crossed: the classic jaded indie rocker pose. He’s wearing dark jeans and a canvas jacket, just like me, and appears to be alone. When he walks past me after Small Brown Bike finishes their set I give him a curt nod and he nods back. Next time I see him at a show I might even say “Hello”.
No Knife is
predictably lame. They play pop punk similar to Chicago-based Alkaline Trio,
except they’re from
Seeing Cursive is
always interesting, as they continually change their sound. Their earlier
releases follow in the same low-fi melodic
post-hardcore sound as that exemplified by
The next night I head over to the Fireside Bowl alone for the Her Flyaway Manner / Check Engine / Haymarket Riot / Engine Down show. The doors open at 7 and I pay my $8 before heading to the bar, which is in a separate room. The Fireside used to be an actual bowling alley back when the neighborhood was safer, and they still open the lanes on Mondays for all night bowling with deejays spinning records. These days it’s operated as a do-it-yourself all-ages venue that has between six and eight shows a week (some Saturdays they’ll have two shows). The guys that work the door or run the soundboard don’t look any older than me; actually, the large majority of the audience looks a lot younger than me. All-ages venues in large cities tend to attract more teenagers than you might expect, mainly because there really isn’t anything else for them to do until they turn 21. Just about everyone’s smoking (which makes it hard for those of us trying to quit), and the over-21 fans are drinking cheep beer (I’m on Miller High Life). We’re all wearing work pants, thrift-store button-down shirts, thick black-rimmed glasses, and either Saucony sneakers or Converse All-Stars.[2]
The kids here seem to be more into the music than at the Cursive show the previous night. I’m standing right in front of the stage, on the left side, and there are people with cameras all around, snapping pictures of the bands, presumably for websites or fanzines. The crowd seems like they’re at a party instead of a concert: everyone’s talking between songs. I even spot people dancing, and a smile escapes my lips. It feels like we’ve all known each other for years.
Check Engine is really energetic and tight, and I actually find myself moving a little bit, although you wouldn’t quite call it dancing. The drummer keeps spitting into the audience and hitting this one girl taking pictures—she takes it for about fifteen minutes before getting completely grossed out. The only song of theirs I’ve heard is the one on the Thick Records compilation of local bands (Oil, 2003), but I’m impressed enough by the live performance that I purchase a copy of their self-titled LP (2002) for $8. While talking to Keeley Davis (guitarist/vocalist of Engine Down) at a Denali (his sister’s band) show a few weeks later, I find out that they broke up right after they finished playing and feel somewhat privileged that I saw their last show ever (I can only say that about one other band—well, there are two other bands whose last shows I saw, but then they went off and played “secret gigs” that I hadn’t known about).
When Haymarket
Riot comes on, the crowd immediately starts jeering. I’ve never seen them
before but they’re a
I don’t remember too much about Engine Down’s set because I was ecstatic the entire time. As usual, they rocked my world.
Defining Independence
These three rock concerts (or
shows) consisted of bands that do not have contracts with corporate record
labels playing for a relatively small audience, each of whom paid a fraction of
what they would have paid for a larger arena concert. The audience members were
implicitly aware of certain codes of conduct that signify membership in this
particular subculture (cf. Hebdige 1979, Easton
2001), but the defining characteristic of the bands, audience members, and
surrounding support structure is not one of fashion or performance rules. The
independent music scene is in direct competition with the corporate music
scene, and its defining characteristic is that of economic and ideological independence
from the corporate culture industry.
What is the “culture industry”? Adorno and Horkheimer identified it as a “system [of cultural production] which is uniform as a whole and in every part” (1993:30), and predicted in the 1940s that it would soon enough exist all around us as an integral part of modern society. More recently, Schiller recognizes mergers among media companies as constituting an effective monopoly on the production of culture, suggesting that “material that is unfamiliar, socially critical or seriously antiestablishment” is far less likely to receive attention than product which adheres to the status quo and guaranteed to sell (1989:38). This has quickly become a global phenomena, and when Garnham asks “whether the increasingly global flow of cultural goods and services is creating a series of cosmopolitan cultural identities at the expense of more traditional national or local cultural identities” (1993:253), he poses a broader question regarding the continued validity and vitality of localized media and media culture in the face of large-scale homogenization. The culture industry is no small part of this shift.[3]
In
this paper I will examine to what extent resistance to the culture industry and
its influence exists, through the vehicle of independent music scenes. In the
above depiction of three shows I have already given some examples of
differences: lower ticket prices, smaller venues, audience members taking
photographs unmolested by security guards, and albums being released by
privately-owned record labels; other differences, such as the breakdown of the
culture industry’s artist/audience barrier and the notion of democratic
participation, will also be discussed. My primary focus is on independent music
scenes in suburban and urban
The specific music that forms the basis of my research has developed out of the punk rock movement in the 1970s (commonly referred to as “post-punk”), yet many other genres have developed independent networks modeled after and intertwined with those of the punk rock movement and its legacy. Therefore, an understanding of the cultural legacy of the punk movement is necessary for my larger argument (see McNeil and McCain 1996 for an oral history of the British punk movement in the late 1970s, also see Azerrad 2001 for a history of the American independent movement in the 1980s). One may think of the music itself being opposed to recognizably “popular” music as (aesthetically) analogous to the independent field being opposed to the corporate field, yet discussing the intricacies of each post-punk genre would quickly prove to be burdensome; therefore, like Finnegan (1989), I focus on musical practices (and music cultural practices) instead of musical works and forms.[4]
There are five levels of “independence” (or lack thereof) for bands vis-à-vis major record labels: 1) bands on a major label, 2) bands on major label subsidiaries that operate as if they were independent labels, 3) bands on independent labels that are minority owned by major labels (49% or less), 4) bands on independent labels that have press and distribution agreements with major labels, and 5) bands on independent labels that are self-distributed or distributed by an independent distributor such as Mordam Records or Southern Records.[5] When I refer to “independent music”, I am talking about music that is produced, recorded, and distributed by bands and musicians without the economic assistance (and subsequent control) of the major labels and their subsidiaries, i.e., those only in the last category.[6] The network of exchange within independent music constitutes an informal economy that, at times, exists in an extra-legal manner: unlicensed venues and unincorporated record labels are not uncommon, and many fans have learned about the music through record trading services often found in the classified ads of record collector magazines such as Goldmine or Wire.
Limiting my study has the advantage of examining one extreme in opposition to the other extreme of what is often perceived as a continuum. Many studies are not limited in this manner: Kruse’s (1993, 1995) study of “college music” includes bands that are independent in addition to bands that are major label artists; Finnegan (1989) defines a continuum of musicians with “amateur” and “professional” defining the two extremes, and notes the difficulty of firmly marking a distinction between the two, as she strives to discuss musicians that are more amateur than they are professional; Straw’s (1991) analysis is of “alternative music”, a common identifier during the early 1990s that has since lost any semblance of aesthetic (and productive) differentiation from the mainstream in the face of commercialization; and Slobin’s study of “micromusics” in Europe and Russia includes musical cultures that are seeking “to be co-opted into a mainstream” (1993:28). Other studies that are limited to this notion of “independence” are hindered by a strict genre adherence, typically to punk: Andersen and Jenkins (2001), Goshert (2000), and O’Connor (2002a, 2002b) do not attempt to generalize beyond the specific musical forms (and surrounding cultures) they describe.
Throughout this paper I refer interchangeably to “independent music”, “underground music”, “independent music culture”, the “independent music community”, and the “independent music scene”. In all these instances I am referring to the music and/or its surrounding culture as limited by the above constraint of independence from the major labels. When I discuss the “corporate”, “mainstream”, or “commercial” music “industry”, I am referring to the major labels and the business practices and support structure surrounding their artists (e.g., retail chain stores, monolithic media conglomerates, industry publications [e.g., Rolling Stone, Spin, Billboard], etc.).
Following a note
on methods and an initial discussion of the view of cultural homogeneity and
global cosmopolitanism as a necessary result of globalization and modernity, I
present examples of efforts to retain local culture that often appropriate the
very forms that seek to de-emphasize local culture. I then seek to exemplify
this with a definition of local “scenes” as existing separate from the
political and economic imperatives of the overarching cultural industry, using Bourdieu’s notion of habitus
(1993), a reciprocal artist/audience model, and Habermas’s
“public sphere” (2000). These scenes’ existence as reciprocal communities is
the cultural legacy of punk rock scenes, and a discussion of this legacy along
with the historical problem of punk is crucial for an understanding of various
independent music communities. A theoretical analysis utilizing
Methods
As Easton (2001:41-3) notes, many
independent music fans initially get into the music through a peer group and/or
the influence of a respected, experienced, older friend or relative. Throughout
high school I attended local punk rock and hardcore shows in
In college, joining the staff of the radio station exposed me to an entire other world of independent music. My mentors (upperclass radio deejays) tried impressing on me the political ideologies of the underground, but initially for me, it was simply more fun. The underground was cheaper, more immediate, more exclusive—and somehow more inclusive. If you were willing to put the time and effort into appreciating the music, the history, and the people involved, you were bound to have a good time. Following years of collecting records, going to shows, and submitting random pieces of writing for publication in fanzines, I grew to understand implicitly what it was that made the underground special: it was its own community.
One summer, I got
a job at a local record store in
These many years of participation have provided me with some insights that I decided to pursue with further research. For this project, I have interviewed a number of individuals who are involved in the production and perpetuation of this culture to gain their insights: band members, record label owners, and zine editors (see Appendix A, B). The entrepreneurial spirit of these individuals was continually impressed on me, as they made personal and financial sacrifices in order to get where they are today. As the co-owner of a record label rationalizes (Lunsford and Lunsford 2003), “It’s just great to work with the bands, meet the people, and help the bands out because this is what they want to do. This is what they want to do with their life and we’re just going to try to help them in every way that we can and fulfill that dream… I feel like that’s what I want Polyvinyl to be, I want our bands to be happy, I want to be fair, and I just want it like a big, happy family… I don’t want to jump in bed with a major label where they say ‘Well, we’re not putting that record out’. I like knowing that our bands can put whatever they want out”. Another record label owner (Merritt 2003) notes that “For everybody here, we really like the music, we really like the people involved in it. I don’t think we’d do it otherwise… That’s entirely the reason we do it. It’s what separates what we’re doing from having a job selling insurance and making twice the money, or any other kind of job. I don’t think anybody has illusions or delusions of getting crazy rich off of what we’re doing. But we like what we’re doing”.
I have also surveyed audience members at three different shows for a preliminary audience profile and qualitative assessment of independent resources (see Appendix C, D). The surveys took place (and also I observed shows) at the Empty Bottle, a 250-person capacity independent venue, where the owner’s wife (who works in advertising) informed me one evening that the venue doesn’t do much advertising and isn’t as nice as other venues because it is more authentic—this is the kind of venue that infuses your skin with the smell of stale cigarettes and cheap American beer. I have seen no other study of this subculture that combines such personal experiences with audience opinions and the viewpoints of significant cultural producers.[7]
Cultural Homogeneity and
Trans-National Cosmopolitanism
The notion of cultural homogeneity and the growth of trans-national cosmopolitanism are both closely related to each other, and to the issue of both economic and political globalization. The underwriting of the development of a British-style social realism soap opera in Kazakhstan (Crossroads) by a British governmental institute (Mandel 2002) and the popularity in Shanghai of television shows and televised films produced in America and the commercial centers of Taiwan and Hong Kong (Yang 2002) are two recent examples. Yet the tradition of cultural imperialism and the use of mass media to subsume the local under a de-localized concept of modernity go back even farther: Faris (2002) discusses the dehumanizing effect resulting from the introduction of photography to America’s Navajo population as early as the 1860s; while Anderson (1991) provides insight into the use of print media to provide a common culture (which he terms an “imagined community”) to previously separate locales, resulting in the political construction of nation-states.
Some suggest that the defense of local culture and cultural identity in the onslaught of globalized homogeneity “is more often in the interests of a local cultural elite than of the population at large”, as trans-national culture (and, hence, trans-local culture) has proven “remarkably popular” when compared with local products (Garnham 1993:257). Linking this popularity to fundamental notions of beauty and truth (in a Kantian fashion, as some are wont to do) presupposes a universalist determinism that doesn’t take into account historical context or differentiated values—essentially, this view lands its perpetrators in the same synchronic trap of Saussure’s and Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. This view is further problematized when issues of economic commodification and political self-interests (and the resulting justification and perpetuation of a Western hegemony) are taken into account: regardless of whether or not the preservation of local culture is less in the interests of the general population than a local elite (as suggested above), the products distributed by the global culture industry rarely take into account any local interests whatsoever, aside from that which is readily marketable.
A
Frankfurt School argument might simply blame mass media in its totality and end
it there—after all, this is the necessary result of the loss of aura and
authenticity for Benjamin (1968), and Adorno and Horkheimer (1993) warned us this would happen if the media
industry continued on the track it was headed at mid-century. A
Exceptions to these
deterministic positions exist in droves, however.[8]
Cultures use modern media technologies outside of a Western context to
strengthen local communities: e.g., indigenous radio and television in
Defining the “Scene”
Although often used in a variety of
discourses with a somewhat implicit understanding, it is useful to fully
develop a theoretical basis and definition for the word “scene” as I use it.
Typical ethnomusicological usage tends to either define a scene by means of
geographic locality (e.g., the musical scene in
Ethnographic Moment: Saturday
Morning at the Record Store
On Saturdays I open the record
store at ten in the morning. My first order of business is to call the owner so
that he knows I’m there on time—I’ve been too late too often to skip this. Then
I turn on the lights, turn on the computer and cash register, and count out the
drawer ($100 at all times) and the petty cash bag ($200 at all times). All this
time I’m listening to a CD, usually Ghost and Vodka’s Precious Blood (2001), which has some crazy instrumental
arpeggiated guitar music that never fails to make me smile, even after the
roughest of Friday nights. There’s a little bit of paperwork that needs to be
done, but I usually let it sit until
There
are basically three groups of customers that I deal with on a day-to-day basis:
those whom I’ve never seen before or simply don’t recognize because they don’t
come in very often and rarely need my assistance, the regulars that come in once
a week after they get their paychecks and only bother me when they’re ready to
pay, and the people from the scene whom I consider acquaintances or even
friends that bug me all the time for recommendations and favors.[9]
There are actually quite a lot of these: the
The Valley is also
historically a blue-collar area, home as it is to Bethlehem Steel for eighty or
ninety years. Because of this legacy, working-class values and a sense of
loyalty to one’s community are strong. Yet, even though I attend a college (
The store I work for, Play It Again, has been open for almost twenty years. In the early 1990s, just about everyone that worked there was in a band—everyone in Weston, probably the best-known pop-punk band from the Valley, worked here at one point or another, and their old roadie Chris still works here. Frank Foe, who has been running a zine and small record label continuously since 1984, also worked here back in the day and remains good friends with the owner.
The other main
record store in the Valley is over in
On this particular morning there are three friends hanging out in the store with me: Gina (who works here), her boyfriend Rick, and this guy Herbie who sets up shows about once every other month or so. About halfway through my third cigarette, the phone rings. “Play It Again”, I drawl in my best this-better-be-good sneer. I hate dealing with annoying customers on the phone before I finish my coffee. “Hello? My son was in your store last night and came home with a t-shirt that says ‘Down By Law’ on it and has a picture of what appears to be a policeman beating a guy on the ground. Can you tell me what this means?”
I place my
cigarette in the ashtray and begin. “Down By Law is a
She says, “Oh. Okay. Um, no thanks”, and quickly hangs up. My friends are standing around just listening and nodding. Any one of them could have delivered the same description. “Some people just don’t get it”, I say, before lighting my fourth cigarette.
(Re-)Locating Habitus
“It’s kind of like a different world to some people, like parents”, Roy Ewing, ex-member of Champaign-Urbana-based band Braid and co-owner of Grand Theft Autumn Records, agrees after I tell him this story (2003). Yet, on the other hand, “I think it’s [also] more accessible now”, he says. “You can hear a band and be like, ‘Oh, I kind of like this’, and then go out and buy it… [and] the majority of bands, [you can] just go up and talk to them. It’s like hey, these are normal guys too. You know what I mean? That’s what I really love about the whole do-it-yourself scene, the underground, it’s just a bunch of friends hanging out. Even if you don’t know anybody, you usually just go out and talk to them”. One way we can begin to understand a subculture that is simultaneously exclusive and inclusive in this manner is through Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.
By habitus, Bourdieu means a second nature that develops over an individual’s lifetime. It is constructed through specific objective social conditions that are dependent upon a distinct locality, and it serves to suggest how individuals will act and react without resorting to a strict rule-based adherence. It generates practices and perceptions vis-à-vis specific situations, and suggests a commonality of background and values. One sees a similar habitus across members of the same social class, according to Bourdieu, and thus we can speak of a class habitus that therefore suggests that individual action results in an objective that is for the good of the class (1993:5).
As O’Connor (2002a:225) notes, the notion of habitus in an era of globalization is not strange, as mass advertising recognizes local and localized differences as distinct markets. This practice suggests that individuals from a common background, class, education, etc. have similar tastes in commodities such as sodas, sneakers, automobiles, and prime-time sitcoms, among other things. Locating a habitus of musical tastes, however, has proven difficult to even the most savvy of marketing executives: no matter how much research and money is thrown into promotion, even the biggest stars with the widest audiences have unpredictable flops (scale-wise), to say nothing of smaller artists who receive scant attention (marketing-wise) from their labels in comparison.[10] Yet, independent music scenes form a habitus that relies on components in addition to a common musical aesthetic.
What Hebdige (1979) identifies as the development of musical subcultures around pre-existing cultural forms can be used in the reverse—namely, that common (extra-musical) cultural forms can be developed (or their existence discovered) around pre-existing musical subcultures. Audiences coming together via a shared interest in a specific style of music often find that their commonalities go far beyond music, often into the realms of politics, economic critiques, lifestyle choices, religious beliefs, etc., many times regardless of age, sex, race, education, or economic level; I argue below that this is also regardless of geographic locale: this is the formation of a scene.[11]
The scene revolves around social spaces such as shows or record stores (as described above) or, more and more often, internet message boards. Daniel Sinker (2003), editor of Punk Planet, sees this as well: “Back pre-internet, a strong local scene was great because it meant that much more hype, it meant that much more help for a band or a zine or a distro or whatever. Whereas now, with the internet, it’s more like are they mentioning you in these forums or that, and so—it still stays local, but it’s a different definition of local, to some degree”.
A variety of ages
are involved, both as producers and consumers: 55% of my surveyed audience was
25 or younger, 33% was between the ages of 26 and 30, while a good 12% were 31
or older. Darcie Lunsford, co-owner of Polyvinyl
Records, sees that as well with some of their bands: “Like Matt Pond, that
could expand from our age [mid-to-late 20s] all the way up to 50. My dad likes
them, and he’s 65. Owen, he’s another one—a lot of older people just like his
guitar”. When she recently went to see Bad Religion (a punk band that has been
around since the 1980s) in
Doing-It-Yourself
The specific concept of a concrete scene
is difficult to pin down. Does it solely rely on musical practices? Shank’s
(1994) ethnography describes many different aspects. He defines a scene as “an
overproductive signifying community; that is, far more semiotic information is
produced than can be rationally parsed” (ibid:122). Straw, going a bit further
in laying out musical boundaries, proposes that a scene is “that cultural space
in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other
within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely
carrying trajectories of change and cross-fertilization”, resulting in a sense
of purpose that is “articulated within these forms of communication through
which the building of musical alliances and the drawing of musical boundaries
take place” (1991:373). O’Connor criticizes this opinion, suggesting that Straw’s
viewpoint can be used to define a “
O’Connor, for his part, is aware of these extra-musical identifiers. He uses the term “in the same way it is used within the punk scene”, that is, as “the active creation of infrastructure to support punk bands and other forms of creative activity” (2002a:226).[13] This infrastructure[14] includes record labels, fanzines, record stores,[15] college radio,[16] and venues, all typically operating independently of the commercial music industry. This aesthetic of independence—or “do-it-yourself” (DIY)—is the single largest identifier of a cohesive scene (cf. Kruse 1995:59), one of Finnegan’s “non-musical implications” of music (1989:327).
As an economic system, DIY works much like a remote local village: capital circulates among the members of the scene, providing a common economic base and support system that is necessary to keep the scene economically viable. As a political system, it works much like the field of high art:[17] generally, little outside corporate or commercial influence is tolerated; hence there is little taste and style imposed from without the scene, although the appropriation of external forms from within certainly does occur.[18] One of the most important forums for expression and dissemination of information is the fanzine (or zine).
Case Study: Producing Punk
Planet and Aphasia
Punk Planet is a bi-monthly magazine
published in
His contributors and staff members are from all over—aside from a couple of columnists and the part-time design staff, the associate editors are in San Francisco and L.A., one freelance writer lives in Australia, and the album reviewers send in their material through email. “Punk Planet itself started as an idea I posted to an old America Online message board back in ‘94”, Sinker says, “basically being like ‘Why can’t we do a magazine like this?’… The idea was born in that, look, there are people spread out all over the country. Some of them are kind of well known, some of them are totally no one, isn’t that kind of a distribution already? Couldn’t we utilize that, and all of these people, to write a magazine? That’s existed to this day”.
Punk Planet’s ad rates are reasonable ($450 for a full-age ad),[20] the subscription rates are low ($24 per year), and it’s been getting recognized for its consistently high quality coupled with its non-mainstream approach to publishing (as the cover of issue #53 proclaims: “Nominated for general excellence by the Alternative Press Awards in the ‘Magazine’ category. Three years in a row!”). Because of this, its distribution has also been growing, now up to a print run of 14,000 copies of each issue (as of January 2003)—probably the biggest indicator of this success is that three years ago, Sinker was able to concentrate full-time on the magazine, although it remains a struggle. “[Politically left current events weekly] The Nation wrote a big two page story about us in its music issue [in January 2003], and we just had subscription spike right after that, it was just crazy. A Swedish television show called Media Magazine just came to the States and did a story about alternative publication in the States, and that aired two days ago [i.e., early April 2003], and now it’s Swedish orders like crazy! People that wouldn’t pick up a magazine called Punk Planet are now picking it up… It really couldn’t be easier to get a magazine like Punk Planet into every bookstore in the country, I mean not every one, but a lot of bookstores and record stores in the country, at this point. It’s really pretty easy. There are a lot of magazines that start out, and an issue or two later, they’re everywhere that we are… It’s real easy to get stuff into stores, it’s hard to get people to pick it up. That’s a struggle that we still struggle with, nine years later. How come these people are passing it up? I know they would be interested, how can we help them know that they’d be interested?”
The magazine itself is full-size, 160 pages long (issue #53), and printed black and white on matte (i.e., not glossy) paper stock that’s thin, but not as lightweight as newsprint. The cover is also not glossy, but it’s full-color. The design is quite professional and clean (see Appendix E, Object 3, 4). Flipping through it, it looks like any other magazine, except for the content: large interviews (and ad space) devoted to (solely) independent record labels and bands, material and columns from other independent publishers and writers, a how-to column called the “DIY Files”, and dozens of record reviews.
Aphasia is more like the stereotypical
type of zine that people think of in relation to independent music scenes. It’s
self-published basically whenever Suzanne Ennis (2003), a college student
pursuing a business degree, has enough time in between school and work to eek
out another issue: “Ideally it takes 4 months to do an issue, I put them out
every 4 months (fall semester, spring semester, and summer issues) but I’ve
been poor so I haven’t done any. But when I get back [from a semester abroad
spent in
The first two issues were called Static (changing names is not uncommon for privately-published zines; Cometbus, one of the most popular fanzines, changed its name every issue for the first four years it was published [Cometbus 2002]), and started out as a senior project in high school. Ennis decided to keep it up when she went to college, but knew she didn’t like the name Static—Aphasia was selected from a bunch of reader suggestions sent in when she ran a renaming contest in Static #1. Her topics are quite personal: “I typically include personal writing, done by me and only me. Anecdotes, rants, whatever. No fiction (as of yet). I don’t really write for the zine. I just write, and when it comes time to put an issue together I pick out the things that I like best. I think it comes out better that way. I’m writing for myself, not for the audience, so there isn’t pressure and I’m not bending over backwards to cater to different tastes. Some people like it, some don’t, and that’s fine”. The one piece that she has included that she didn’t write herself was nonetheless about her (see Mall 2001a). She also will include reviews of other zines and short record reviews. This mixture of personal material is typically called a perzine, short for personal fanzine. Her old zine, Dry Ice (four issues, 1998-99), was more of a typical music fanzine in its inclusion of show reports, band interviews, and substantial record reviews. In addition to publishing Aphasia, Ennis has contributed to other local scene and feminist zines, and is also currently working on one-off (single issue) zines with pieces from contributors.
The zine itself is quarter-size (i.e., 4.25 inches wide by 5.5 inches tall), 32 pages long (issue #3), and printed on whatever copier paper is in the xerox machines at the copy shop. The design is cut-and-paste, and not done on a computer. She will print out blocks of text, cut them up, and then rearrange and paste them down on graphics from other magazines or whatever she can find (see Appendix E, Object 1, 2). There is no advertising, although the reviews of other zines (typically acquired through a trade with the writer of the other zine) constitute a sort of word-of-mouth advertising. There are no subscriptions: the only way you can get a copy is directly from Ennis herself, either in person, via email, her PO Box, or from the pile she leaves at the local record store.
Fanzines and Audience
Participation
These two zines, which are extremely different in their content and professionalism, are integral parts of the scene: they constitute a space in which people who aren’t involved in the production or distribution of music nevertheless have a forum in which their voices and thoughts can be heard and appreciated. They have remained DIY in their production, maintain a link to the music through explicit and implicit content (explicit being record reviews, implicit being autobiographical life experiences of a scene participant), and they couldn’t exist without a reciprocal support system between artists and audiences.
This reciprocity
of support simultaneously provides for and produces a situation in which the
boundary between artists and audiences (or senders and receivers) becomes
rather permeable; in a sense, audiences “are treated as … active and skilled
participants” (Finnegan 1989:15), subverting the mainstream’s “pin up culture”
of music as image (Straw 1988:252). The concept of a fanzine (or zine) has been
and continues to be an instrumental part of this system. The term itself had
been in use in science fiction fan discourse for some time before its use for music
was first put forth by Greg Shaw, who independently published a newsletter for
fans of oldies entitled Who Put the Bomp.[21]
In 1970, he defined a “fanzine” as a magazine “written and produced by
amateurs, for little or no profit, out of their love for their hobby” and
claimed Bomp
to be the first music fanzine (cited in Gendron
2002:229). This idea was quickly assimilated into the burgeoning punk culture
of
One contested issue currently is how blogs fit into the culture. Blogs are personal websites that are frequently updated, often daily, with whatever information the writer feels is relevant, be it public or personal affairs. As Sinker sees it (2003), “There are zines that have never gotten written because of the internet, because it’s a whole lot easier to post a website. Or now with blogs, it’s ridiculously easy to just get a blog and have thousands of people see it instantly, versus get a zine, get it xeroxed, printed, whatever, try to get it out there. You’re going to reach a much smaller audience [with zines]… Blogs have decimated the middle-class of zines… Because why keep it up? The perfect example is Jane Hex, who did a zine called Hex for many years, wrote a column for Punk Planet, learned how to program web stuff because she got a temp job working at gap.com, and pretty soon thereafter stopped publishing Hex, just starting doing a weblog. It’s too bad, because I really like zines. I really like holding that, being able to keep it”.
Adam Voith (2003), who edits and publishes the literary zine Little Engines, isn’t quite as
fatalistic: “I think that community is sorta taking
up where the world of zines might have left off after the 90s. It’s a
very community based thing, and very easy to access. I love that sh**. I hope paper printing and books and zines
never go away, but I think the world of blogging is really interesting in the
way folks connect with one another… I do think blogs have stepped on the toes
of mid-level zines for sure. But I’m not seeing that as a bad thing. The key,
of course, is the writing and information. If it’s getting out on blogs, why
raise a fuss? The whole idea behind zines for me was always that you got to
really put your own personality in there and blogs serve that purpose just as
well, and probably help to keep small-time indie writing vibrant as the cost is
next to nothing to maintain a website, while zines can put a big hole in the
pocket of the zinester. However, with that said, I
think print zines have a lot of life in them still, and I don’t think there’s
any real threat of them disappearing. Folks like the feel of paper, like
reading on paper rather than a screen, etc.”
Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh never wrote blogs, but they might as well have: as editors of the magazine Creem, they personally (and idiosyncratically) advocated what would become the punk scene and its music from the early 1970s on. Bangs even went so far as to define a “punk aesthetic” in 1972 as consisting of three qualities: “sheer aggressiveness and loudness”, minimalism, and “defiant rock amateurism” (Gendron 2002:233-4; cf. Bangs 1987:10, 55-6). Songs that otherwise would be criticized as being too simple to be worthwhile he subsequently redefined as (for example) a “consistent sense of structure and economy” (Bangs 1987:56).
However, even more important was his acknowledgement that punk musicians recognized a need to create a dialogue with their audience in order to effectively build a support structure outside of the commercial mainstream, from which they were shut out. Success in punk rock, for Bangs, necessitates musicians figuring “out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience’s mind with their pieties and their sense of ‘community,’ i.e., ram it home that you’re one of THEM” (ibid:67). This “community” was reflected in the pages of Creem, which started to operate more like a fanzine: splitting editorial duties and topics with Shaw and Bomp, printing unsolicited record reviews received in the mail,[22] and championing artists who received little other widespread publicity.[23]
The intimacy of the scene derived from the common problem of not being accepted by the mainstream commercial music industry, but quickly grew to be emblematic of the subculture as a community. As Gendron notes, “a close alliance was emerging in the early 1970s between renegade rock critics and renegade musicians” (2002:246). The musicians, critics, and audiences all depended on each other initially out of necessity, but this concept of an “alliance” evokes a closer relationship and sense of purpose and responsibility than sheer necessity alone could foster. DIY as an ethos became a badge of honor and a lifestyle, and the surrounding scene combined this with an “us against them” mentality (as a reaction against the commercial mainstream’s general malaise and ignorance) in order to define their habitus.[24]
Case
Study: Rainer Maria (.com)
Rainer Maria’s official website is pretty good, as far as independent bands’ websites are concerned. It has a full news archive including links to interviews and record reviews, a complete calendar of past and upcoming shows, a full discography complete with lyrics and music samples, a detailed biography, links to fansites, and an active bulletin board.
A really slick website sometimes serves to turn people off, however. Sean Hulet (2003), guitarist for Chicago-based band The Reputation, puts it this way: “So many bands have websites, and obviously we have one too, but there are a few bands who seem like they’re going the other way and not doing it. If everybody has a website, I question if it really helps. Like, big deal, you have a website, everybody does… So many people are putting the communication thing first, not necessarily like—maybe because I’m old school, I’m an old stodgy guy, but I’m like, ‘Write some songs, play some shows’… It’s like, hours spent writing songs: X, hours spent online: X times 10. So I kind of scratch my head sometimes”.
Rainer Maria hasn’t fallen into that trap, however. Since relocating from Madison to the northeast in late 1999 (all three members now live in Brooklyn), the band has really focused on making things work and develop musically as well: each release has consistently gotten better (and more critical acclaim), their fanbase has continued to grow, their tours are getting bigger (both in length of time on the road and the size of the venues), yet they’ve remained true to their roots. They still put out their records on the independent Champaign-based (originally Danville-based) Polyvinyl Records, they play DIY all-ages venues when they can (sometimes playing sequential dates in the same city to accommodate), they answer emails personally when they have the time, they participate in online chat sessions, and you can always talk to them at shows: Bill Kuehn and Caithlin De Marrais (drummer and singer/bassist, respectively) are typically behind the merchandise table, while Kyle Fischer (guitarist) is not difficult to find near the bar.
The sheer exuberance with which they play is infectious—Rainer Maria is one of the most energetic bands to see live, and their fans are some of the most rabidly devoted fans I have ever experienced: I’ve seen people buy three of their records after seeing them play the first time. I’ve talked to people who’ve driven upwards of 400 miles to see them play. I’ve sparked vehement arguments with a mildly critical remark. The band’s support for other bands (not undeservedly) draws on this devotion—labelmates Owen and Mates of State are two bands whose fanbases have benefited from Rainer Maria’s friendship.
So when Jasper Coolidge, webmaster of www.rainermaria.com, announced that the band was running an online giveaway/contest for their winter 2003 tour, fans jumped at the chance to participate. Anyone that submitted a show review or pictures to be posted on the website received a copy of a live show on CD, and was also put in a drawing for one of two original pieces of art by Allyson Mellberg, who did the cover art for their last album, Long Knives Drawn (2003) (see Appendix E, Object 5, 6). Although the band and Jasper have done this before (see, for example, Mall 2001b, for which I received a copy of their first demo cassette), the response for this tour was much greater than previously. Over the course of the six and a half week tour, there were over one hundred show reviews submitted (see, for example, Mall 2003), and only eleven of the thirty-eight gigs didn’t have pictures submitted. The submissions were uploaded almost every day, so fans could follow the tour around the country and read about and see pictures from each night’s show the next day. This virtual network enabled a large number of reviewers to compare the gig to previous shows that they had read about, especially in regards to the ever-changing setlist, De Marrais’s hairstyle, and Fischer’s on-stage antics. Many reviews ended with a common sentiment: “I can’t wait to read about the rest of the tour”.
This was a chance for fans to give back to Rainer Maria, to document a band that they love but will most likely continue to be largely ignored by the mainstream, and to communicate with other fans they might never see. For many, the free CD and chance to win the artwork was secondary—“I don’t even care about the contest, I just want to let people know how much I love them” was not uncommon. This was a chance for fans to show that they care about the band, and a chance for the band to show they care about their fans.
The Scene as a Democratic
Space
Keeping the scene’s larger goal of community in mind is paramount to its continued validity and existence, and the Rainer Maria example is not unusual at all. As O’Connor recognizes, “a scene is something that takes work to create” (2002b:233); while this may seem like a daunting task on the surface, it is in fact an inherent quality built into the structure of the scene itself. Through common experiences and the breakdown of the strict producer/consumer dichotomy, the members of the scene maintain its viability through active perpetuation of the conditions that primarily define its existence. Bourdieu recognized the importance of the artists’ “relationship to the audience” in evaluating cultural products and maintaining autonomy from outside influence in his discussion of fields of cultural production (1993:46); his argument suggests that the closer this relationship is, the more autonomy the scene (as a field of cultural production) maintains.[25]
A logical conclusion to Bourdieu’s argument would place the artists on equal footing with the audience; while I will not argue that the scene is completely anarchist, it is interesting to note that the common eschewal of performing on a stage in favor of the floor literally does exactly that. The construction of the scene as described comprises a democratic space in which access to communication is open to everyone, in principle, through participation in the discourse. This is the definition of Habermas’s “public sphere”, which is furthermore dependent on the notion of free expression absent of coercion (2000:92). Garnham notes that the concept of the public sphere “stresses the importance for democratic politics of a sphere distinct from the economy and state” (1986:43).
Hulet (2003) recounts one specific example of communicating with a young fan: “It was really cute, someone emailed us the other day about songwriting, like at the very infantile stages of songwriting. She asked, ‘Should I be writing words first, or should I write the drumbeat first, or should I…’, and it was really great. I wrote her a couple of paragraphs and I think Joel [Root, the bassist] did, too. It was kind of humbling, kind of cool, like, ‘Oh, I remember that’. It was really cool, innocent, beautiful”.
For others, simply providing a “personal touch” helps encourage fans they may never even see. As Darcie Lunsford explains (2003): “I feel like I’ve been doing mail-order for so long, and I don’t know, I feel like I have this special touch with mail-order, that I give like buttons, I give candy… This one girl just ordered, she’s like, ‘I just ordered from you guys, I’m a new customer, and you guys sent me a poster and stickers, so now I’m ordering something more’, so then I gave her all this other stuff and I was like, ‘The order next time will be really big!’… The personal touch keeps them coming back”. This often can translate into economic benefits as well, as noted by Voith (2003): “This [being in close contact with my audience] has been key to me. Being able to take orders directly from my website, packing the orders myself, putting [a] note in the orders thanking them for ordering. I like to hope that this fosters some type of ‘word of mouth’ buzz, and hopefully it encourages folks to continue to order direct. Selling books that way puts my margins way up, and gives me a very good idea of what folks are liking and not liking”.
Habermas locates this distinction of the public sphere as distinct from the economy and the state historically in his analysis of the growth of the bourgeoisie and its usage of public communication (i.e., outside of the private sphere) to achieve democratic aims. This was manifested as rational communication among private individuals in a public environment in order to develop a consensus of meaning. The “issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate” (1991:36); the idea that explicit exclusion from participation should be avoided is then not a difficult one to posit. Indeed, “public communication lies at the heart of the democratic process” (Garnham 1986:37), suggesting that any forum which aims for democratization requires a form of public communication, which must consist of coercion-free (and non-hierarchical) expression. This is replicated, for example, in live musical performances (in addition to zines), which Kruse recognizes as a social space where musicians and audience “are united in common activity”, i.e., communication (1995:214).
While Habermas (and Garnham) use the concept of the public sphere specifically in dealing with political circumstances, I believe it is valid to extend the concept to suggest that the breaking down of boundaries between artists and audiences within the indie scene comprises a public space. Appadurai and Breckenridge use a similar idea in defining their “public culture”, in which the use of the word “public” instead of mass, popular, folk, etc. not only links their argument to the larger public sphere discourse but also seeks to escape dichotomies and hierarchies of high culture versus low, or mass culture versus elite—essentially, public culture “reflects the more or less unmediated or pristine practices of a community” without necessarily dividing the culture into a hierarchy (1988:8). Removing (or de-emphasizing) the hierarchies between performer and audience can also be a function of this public culture, and it is this hierarchy to which I turn my attention in the later discussion of “authenticity” within the indie scene.
The Problem with “Punk”
As an exemplar of independent music
scene practices, the early punk scenes are paradigmatic. Detailed discussion of
the growth of the
Case Study: “How Punk Are
You?”
A feature titled “How Punk Are You?” recently appeared on the MSN Kidz Homepage was. This online quiz avoids any questions regarding musical taste, the color of your hair, or whether or not you own a studded belt—issues of style that would be important subcultural identifiers to Hebdige (1979).[26] Instead, it focuses on the idea of non-conformity and situations where the quiz-taker (presumably a “kid”) might be embarrassed into following the crowd. Answering the questions in a certain manner directs one to a screen that certifies one as a “card-carrying punk”, just like seventy-five percent of the people who have taken the quiz so far. Yet, aside from a single question referring to a hand-written Minor Threat tee-shirt,[27] the issue of musical taste is completely avoided.
Attempting
to identify a generic punk musical aesthetic through definitions yields
interesting results. The definition for “punk rock” in the Oxford English Dictionary (9th ed.) reads: “A loud,
fast-moving style of rock music characterized by aggressive and deliberately
outrageous lyrics and performance”.
So, what exactly is punk? Obviously, it has something to do with music. But music isn’t everything in punk, in Hebdige, The New Grove, and the MSN feature. While MSN Kidz is not a typical cultural arbiter, it nonetheless echoes certain ideals that are typical of the punk ethos, reduced and simplified though they may be. O’Connor carefully notes that “the line between the scene and non-punk musical practices is not fixed” (2002a:226), suggesting that there are bands within scenes that don’t subscribe to a typical punk music aesthetic.
Case Study: Lehigh Valley
It seems like every week there’s a new thread on the Lehigh Valley Punk Rock Message Board complaining about people listening to music they call “punk” that isn’t true punk (most recently, Avril Lavigne [on BMG] and Sum 41 [on Def Jam(Universal)] have drawn the biggest complaints, although other indie rock genres often draw the ire of fans who consider themselves “true” punks). Or the different political factions will start arguing about which ideal is the most “punk rock”, i.e., which ideology is the one espoused by first-generation punk. The biggest complaint is: “This is a punk rock message board, but no one talks about punk rock!”
According
to the website’s administrator, out of the 709 registered usernames
(registration is required in order to post; this information is current as of
Often these threads are posted by kids who are too young to have been around the first time “true” punk swept the underground. They’re trying to piece together a legacy that has largely disappeared, relying on word of mouth, hearsay, outdated politics, and out of print records to reconstruct a movement that could only have existed at a certain time (see Sabin 1999). Anything that doesn’t fit into a narrowly-defined field that they construct is often deemed worthless, but no explanations are forthcoming when asked how is it possible to build a vibrant scene on bands that peaked fifteen or twenty years ago.
The legacy of punk rock that’s most visible is one of internal dissent: the substance-free straightedgers picking on the crust punks (or drunk punks), the pacifist emo fans complaining about the über-macho-violent hardcore kids, or the ear-wrenching (and seemingly anti-aesthetic) grindcore fanatics laughing at the ultra-serious artsy avant-noise nerds. The oldheads (older scene members who have been participating for 10-20 years) are the ones who often put a stop to this, reminding the younger participants that punk rock was always about thinking for yourself, being open-minded, fighting complacency, and sticking up for those who can’t adequately stick up for themselves. “Stop complaining”, they say, “and do something about it”. The notion of blindly subscribing to a subcultural style is just as bad as blindly conforming to the mainstream. With this in mind, the music is practically secondary—as long as your opinions and lifestyle are based in these qualities, you’ll be just as punk rock as Sid Vicious (of the Sex Pistols) and Joey Ramone (of the Ramones), though not quite as dead.
Historicizing Punk Rock
As Bohlman suggests,[32] the problem with the term “punk” is one of historicity: that is, its use as an identifier depends on temporal boundaries; hence, punk, like other musical movements, should have a beginning and an ending if it is to have an identity. Perhaps Hebdige is right in some manner to suggest that punk can’t live beyond a certain identifiable endpoint, e.g., the breakup of the Sex Pistols in 1978. This doesn’t necessarily impose a synchronic view; on the contrary, the issue of historical context is of main concern.
For Sabin (1999), punk discourse is marred by narrow frames of reference and the “pressures to romanticise [sic]”. The problem with putting a temporal limit on the punk movement (and, hence, surrounding discourse) is that musical genres which stem from punk (including, but not limited to, hardcore, emo, math rock, twee pop, grunge, riot grrrl) receive scant attention, yet are “all critically important musical/cultural developments”. Criticizing Hebdige, Sabin further notes that “most histories are content to limit themselves to discussion of what happened within the fields of music and fashion”, necessarily avoiding punk’s larger legacy in fields as diverse as “literature, fine art, comics, film, theatre, television, comedy journalism, body modification” (ibid:2-5), and so on.[33] It is these primarily temporal and stylistic limits that lead most accounts and discourse to turn towards a more romantic (or nostalgic) view of the movement.
This nostalgic view of the movement is then culture history as style history, or Hebdige’s assertion that the “tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the [stylistic] surfaces of subculture” (1979:2); part of the problem then becomes looking for defining moments—the Sex Pistols’ first American tour, Nirvana selling ten million copies of Nevermind, Joe Strummer’s (of the Clash) death—and assuming that the punk movement will come into focus once we locate it in history. Others have attempted this, notably McNeil and McCain (1996) and Sabin (ed. 1999), with varying degrees of success.
While I recognize the importance of locating the punk movement historically, it remains beyond the scope of my argument. Yet, its musical and cultural legacy are extremely important to the independent music scenes; for that reason, I therefore subsume the punk scene underneath that of independent music. This practice has another benefit, too, in that indie music is not typically regarded as a genre (even the term “indie rock” has met with significant resistance from within the scene for its use to describe a genre) but more as a mode of production and reception. Independent musical traditions of hip-hop, jazz, electronic music, etc. exist in a similar manner to the punk scene, developing networks of production, distribution, and promotion that not only model but also become intertwined with each other and those of the punk scene. DIY and the building of a music-based community have come to be regarded as important within these genres as it is to punk rock; indeed, even the audiences for these genres overlap.[34]
The Trans-Locality of Indie Music
Both Goshert (2000) and Willis (1993) note that locality of production and practice is important to the scenes on which they report, and certainly a sense of geographic limits informs O’Connor’s approach and his discussion of habitus (1999, 2002a). Yet I assert that these arguments for localization focus on notions of style: Goshert identifies “geographic specificities in musical forms, style of dress, and political practice” (2000:87), and Willis suggests that “in the case of hardcore [commodity] culture such [intensive ethnographic] research would yield a great deal of regional variation” due to the local production of culture “by bands that do not travel extensively” (1993:366). However, the fact that similarities of production, distribution, and reception of this independent culture exist across many distinct local scenes becomes extremely important when dealing with its relationship to the homogenizing influence of the mass media industry. This results, for Kruse, in a situation where “locality and interlocality are inseparable” (1995:289). Therefore, not only do the practices and ethics of independent music cross boundaries of genre, they also cross boundaries of geography.
Imagined Communities
We might do well to think of this
quality of trans-locality through
To picture this trans-local community as imagined is not difficult, given the strikingly similar structural and stylistic examples of local scenes (Goshert 2000; O’Connor 2002a; Willis 1993).[37] Straw notes that separate scenes reproduce “to varying degrees, the range of musical vernaculars emergent within others”, resulting in bands and recordings circulating “from one local scene to another, in a manner that requires little in the way of adaptation to local circumstances” (1991:378-9; also cf. Gilbert 1999:37). Kruse goes so far as to note that “interlocal social networks” help to define local scenes, influencing musical, social, and economic practices (1995:283; also cf. Kruse 1993:34).
These social networks serve to not just disseminate musical vernaculars, but also DIY ideals and practices. Sinker (2003) explains: “When you first start out, it feels like you’re in the middle of nothing and there’s no way to do any of it. You press some 7”s when you’re in high school or early college and can’t figure out for the life of you how the hell they’re supposed to get anywhere but your living room. That’s still a fairly true thing. But it doesn’t take long to realize the fact that there are huge networks out there, and not only are they there, but they’re solid. They are totally there. To me, some of the most exciting stuff happening in the underground are these areas where people are just building new networks, touring people’s films, people that are doing DIY crafts, where the networks aren’t totally entrenched and aren’t totally there, and it still is kind of a struggle to get stuff out there… One of the amazing things about the internet to me, is that there’s just a wealth of information. Especially at the underground, and operating at this kind of seat-of-your-pants level, number one, it helps you to not go down a million dead-end roads. Certainly, I’ve gone down more than I could count at this point. It helps you not to spend the energy and the money, the energy being the number one thing in importance which you don’t have enough of at the time. Money you don’t either, but that’s a given. The other thing about it too is that people that know this stuff are happy to share it, because they know that they’re going to get it back at some point, either from you or from someone else”. Sean Hulet agrees (2003): “It’s kind of easy to find out how to start a label, how to get a zine going, because people who have already done that can share their experiences, which can only help… That’s the best part of it all. Even going back to the person asking me about how—the 15 year old girl emailing me asking me about how she should go about writing this song—not that I enlightened her or whatever, but before, who would she have asked? That’s the beauty of it. You can find out how to do things”.
Case Study: (Inter)Networking
with One Zine, Two Bands, and Three Record Labels
Adam Voith (2003) owns TNI Books, an independent publishing house most known for its Little Engines literary zine (e.g., Voith 2002), but that has also published a number of books (e.g., Voith 1999). In addition, he also books tours for bands, and helps small indie labels with writing press, building websites, and so on. His experiences with networking and getting the job done and the word out are therefore twofold. “The touring circuit relies on promoters at clubs who have been slower than most, I think, in getting on the internet bandwagon. Email is priceless, of course, but the good old telephone still does a lot of the legwork. I’ve found that younger promoters in the ‘all ages’ world have done good things in the way of using the internet to get shows rolling and promoted. Email lists for shows at venues seem to help a lot, raise awareness, etc.”
“The internet has been my key resource with all things publishing: finding writers, getting stories out there, and most importantly, being able to sell books directly to anyone that wants to use their credit card to order. It’s a huge help for the little guy. I don’t know how I’d run my business without the internet… The biggest challenge in both areas [music and publishing] is distribution. While indie music has a few strong outlets for that, indie publishing is still hurting. The big distributors and chains (which are starting to become difficult to tell apart) are killing the indie publishers, there’s no doubt. With music, places like [indie label] Touch and Go, [indie distributor] Mordam, etc. have really created their own network for getting music into stores, and I don’t really see anything like that still for small presses. Of course, music is in much higher demand than books, but I hold out hope that a network for publishers will grow so that independently published books can find a way into stores in a manner that doesn’t have the publisher losing money on a sale”.
Roy Ewing (2003) co-owns Grand Theft Autumn Records with Todd Bell, one of his former bandmates in Braid. Informal, grassroots networking was important early on for the band: “[We] set up a couple of shows, but it was just for touring acts that would come through if we were friends with them, and when they needed a show we’d set it up in our town and just network that way. That’s basically just how Braid, early on, got shows in different places. People would come to town, we’d see the show, make friends with them, network that way… [But these days], I think a lot of bands—a lot of bands that I know now—all have booking agents. So they don’t really do the work. But I still think that people who do zines—there’s zine guides that will tell you, list things, and there’s places online. [The punk zine] Maximum Rocknroll did that Book Your Own [Life] thing [publication]… and there were all the clubs right there, like either independent or punk rock-type clubs. Another good way to do it is to get in with a bigger band, get on a tour that’s already established. ‘Can I hit the road with you guys?’ It kind of varies. It’s different now. It’s a lot easier, I think”.
They started the record label after about a year of being in the band together, but it was really difficult running the label and being in a full-time band: “We started Grand Theft Autumn as a collective, because we really liked Simple Machines [an Arlington, VA-based label that was started by the members of Tsunami and has since gone out of business], stuff like that, we all loved that. ‘Let’s do it! Try and make a label!’ Actually, it didn’t really work out too well. A lot more expenses went into the van and stuff like that than the record label. After a few years I stopped being in Braid and our friend Damon [Atkinson] came and joined, and I started working at Parasol [Records], and I kind of brought the idea to Geoff [Merritt, owner of Parasol]. ‘Hey, would you want to distribute the label and manufacture this stuff?’”
“Before I worked at Parasol, we [Braid] did everything—take all the records on the road with us, stuff like that, just sell them to the local record shops. Then once I started working here and talked to Geoff about picking up Grand Theft Autumn, which means he would help us put out the records and distribute them through Jim and Angie, they would sell them to stores and stuff. So it’s actually worked out pretty well, because we also had Michael, who’s the in-house promotion guy, would do the promo work for us. So it was like, wow, we actually have a label going now, it’s running full-on. It really helped”.
Geoff Merritt (2003), who owns Parasol Records, expresses his networking experiences in terms of promotion, noting how the best promotion comes from the least likely sources: “We don’t do Rolling Stone or Spin. We do mostly major independent magazine. We send [promo copies of records] out to radio stations… We send mostly to CMJ-reporting stations, which are generally smaller stations… We advertise in Magnet, those types of things. We advertise on Pitchfork[media.com], the website. We get a lot of word of mouth. We spend a lot of money on our in-house sampler, give them away to everyone we possibly can. We give out thousands of them. And we get good reviews in places, which is just as good as advertising. Magazines like Mojo, Uncut—when we get good reviews in there, we couldn’t possibly afford their advertising, either of those magazines, but by getting a review in there, that’s phenomenal. The best results we’ve ever seen is being mentioned on NPR [National Public Radio]. NPR did a piece on our second or third compilation CD, a three minute thing on it, and the next day we sold four hundred of them”.
Matt and Darcie Lunsford (2003) have been running Polyvinyl Record Co. since 1996. Some of the biggest changes with their business—and the indie scene in general—they attribute to the greater degree of networking and information gathering that is possible because of the internet. Matt: “The thing I just love about the web and the internet is that it gives people the ability to have discerning taste. People can actually go and seek out what they would like to listen to and what they would like to buy, or whatever they’re into, they can go find it with the internet. I just think that that’s the most amazingly invaluable thing. We did that Rainer [Maria] streaming website [for their new album], people just loved that thing. They heard the record, they got to buy it before it came out, we have a little flow… It’s like a very distinct, thought-out plan. That’s our whole thing, it’s very utilitarian. Things are really laid out: you got step one, step two, step three. You’re basically going through a little series. We put it up on the website, you can check it out, you can order, everything’s really straightforward”.
“[The internet has] made it a lot simpler, not only for labels. It pretty much goes from the bottom all the up the chain of people involved in music. Fans are more able to connect with other people and can chat, on message boards, like ‘Oh, what’s your favorite record?’ People are actually talking about music more, interactively. I think it goes all the way up. Bands are able to book things more effectively, connect with people that might want to do a show for them, or announce last-minute shows. Any of that kind of stuff was just never possible because things are just so much more instantaneous [now]”.
Each of these four experiences demonstrates that having a good distribution network is extremely important to not only getting the product into the hands of the people who care about it, but to get them to know about it in the first place. Lunsford’s observation about the ease of dissemination through the internet is valuable, but even more valuable is his recognition that fans have the ability to search out information on their own, with the implication that they actually will—he later notes that he believes indie audiences and fans to be more tech-savvy than not, and if level of education is any indication, the majority (66%) of my surveyed audience has graduated from college.
While a full 42% of my survey respondents said that they first heard about the show they attended through word of mouth (and another 34% through other forms of print media; the remaining 24% got their information from websites or email lists), a majority (58%) said that they get at least as much information online about indie music and the scene as they do from print resources (including 41% of the total who get more information online than from print). A majority (62%) of the respondents feel that the online resources for indie music are more informative than those for commercial music.
Sean Hulet (2003), guitarist for Chicago-based band The Reputation, agrees that this dissemination of independent music and culture over the internet is crucial to the scene’s survival: “I’m old enough to remember way before all this stuff was going down [the internet] and it was hard to find out—there were no zines, there was one record store within 30 miles of my parents’ place that really had an underground thing going on… It’s so easy to find out about stuff now… As much as I love punk rock and all things underground [now], when I was a kid I listened to a lot of metal because I didn’t really know much better. That’s what was on MTV, that’s what I was exposed to. Kids can only absorb what’s thrown at you, unless you’re seeking it out. But if you don’t know how to seek it out, it’s MTV. And you listen to Creed [a rock band on Wind-Up(Sony) that has been criticized for replicating Pearl Jam’s sound from the early 1990s]. And it’s upsetting… I think overall the internet, and the whole computer communication thing, has definitely helped. Anytime you can have people communicate with each other and get things together, it’s great”.
Dissemination Through Media
The existence of trans-local, mass
produced culture (e.g., bands that tour nationwide, zines and labels that have
national [or international] distribution) is an integral component of the scene
if we are to think of the scene as existing in a manner similar to
On
a small level,
Often this camaraderie is expressed through a (seemingly) pretentious display of knowledge regarding the music in question. In what often denigrates to an “I’m a bigger fan than you” argument, participants show off (or, perhaps more kindly, co-educate) through discussions that typically revolve around obscure trivial facts and extremely specific opinions. Other subcultures practice this as well: I cannot remember the number of times I’ve sat with computer programmers and thrown around acronyms, programming language history, and minute details for hours on end.
This is what Straw terms “connoisseurship”, noting that it is “central to an involvement in alternative musical culture” (1991:377). Although his concept of this phenomenon seems to be gleaned solely from commodity exchange (e.g., “tracking down old albums, learning genealogical roots between bands, and so on” [ibid:378; also cf. Gilbert 1999:36; cf. Kruse 1995:147]), another source is typically the personal networks that members develop through the scene, be it by talking to bands or label personnel, writing features for zines, or simply building friendships among individuals who only interact at shows, record stores, and so on. Simply attending shows gleans knowledge for the participants, from interacting with other attendees and experiencing the music first-hand: over half of my survey respondents attended at least one show a week, while a full 24% averaged more than two shows each week.
Prolonged exposure to this practice of one-up-manship can be extremely tiresome, however. As Sinker (2003) notes, “I don’t need to be talking about bands and shows and all of that every second of my life. It’s great if I can talk about bands and shows with someone who understands the lingo a couple of times a week for any real, hardcore, time. And with the internet, you could do it every second of every day, and that’s why I never go into the Punk Planet message boards anymore because it’s like—I can’t just shoot the sh** about this stuff every waking minute. Like, I don’t understand how the people who are on there can. It’s unreal”.
This camaraderie and
connoisseurship may be viewed in a derogatory manner by opponents and
reductionists outside the community, as a form of proselytization that
essentially “preaches to the choir” and achieves no real gains in the larger
capitalist society while furthering the reliance upon commodities within the
scene; while the scope of my argument precludes a deservedly large answer to
this critique, I will quickly suggest that the mere example of individuals and
independent businesses existing and thriving in modern capitalist society by
adhering to the values espoused in the indie music scene may be rebuttal enough.[40] Indeed,
Shank notes that the growth in popularity of punk in
Ethnographic Moment: Just
Another Night at the Empty Bottle
It’s late on a Monday night—late
enough to be Tuesday morning—and the Blackouts have just finished their set.
They’re a retro/garage-punk band from
I’m about to leave, but before I do, I step up to the bar for one last bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. There’s a guy standing next to me to whom I was talking earlier, and he hands me a flier for his band’s upcoming show at the Beat Kitchen. I’ve never heard of the band so I ask him how long they’ve been around, but he just shakes his head. “I don’t know, man”, he says, “I just joined. The guy sitting next to you, it’s his band”. I turn around and am offered a hand. “Ari. From the Audreys”.
Ari sees my notebook and asks me what I’m doing, and I explain to him that I’m writing a paper on independent music and the internet. “Oh, man, I use the internet all the time with my band”, he tells me. “I’m always looking up promoters, venues, labels, other bands, or trying to talk up the band on message boards”. He writes the website on the back of the flier that his friend had given him. “Why don’t you check it out”, he tells me, “email me if you want to”.
I ask Ari what kind of music his band plays, and he goes off into what seems to be a well-rehearsed speech about how he doesn’t like to categorize the style of music that he plays because he doesn’t want anyone to have preconceptions before they hear them. “There are samples on the website”, he says. “Listen for yourself”. Since he had told me that he’s friends with the Blackouts, I assume that he’s into the whole retro/garage-punk sound, so I ask him if he’s heard the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs record, Fever to Tell (2003). I had heard an advance copy earlier in the week and was anxious to talk to someone about it. “Not yet”, he says, “but the new White Stripes record, Elephant [2003], is really good”.
Well, I just about lose it right there. Fever to Tell is twenty times better than Elephant, if you ask me, and I tell Ari so. We then embark on a conversation regarding each band’s history, the local scenes they came out of, their previous records, and their major label subsidiary contracts (the White Stripes are on V2[Sony], the Yeah Yeah Yeahs recently signed to Interscope[Universal]). I can tell that he isn’t as concerned with the whole major label thing as I am, so I don’t push the issue—but we do agree that, outside any corporate or commercial interest, the music should be allowed to speak on its own. Satisfied with each other’s knowledge, we part ways and agree to meet again at another show, preferably one that his band’s playing at.
The Encroaching Culture Industry
One of the most contested issues
within the indie scene is its relationship to the corporate music industry.
This is commonly observed (and experienced) in discussions of a given band’s
authenticity and aspirations, often resulting in an argument over the merits of
“selling out”. In this section, I examine these and related issues as the indie
scene constantly struggles to remain both viable and valid.
Authenticity
The example of the argument over “true punk” on the Lehigh Valley Punk Rock Message Board is just one of many examples where arguments arise over a band’s (or genre’s) authenticity. With the lure of the corporate music industry just one signature on a contract away, bands must successfully navigate between earning enough money to live, performing the music that they love, and respecting the importance of DIY and community. Yet, few of them explicitly realize that their authenticity is in the hands of the audience, as we will see.
My discussion of
authenticity starts with Benjamin, who argues that the “presence of the
original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (1968:220).[41]
For him, authenticity relies on proximity to the source,[42]
and therefore technological (or mass) reproduction necessarily decreases this
proximity, subsequently destroying this quality in the process. Hebdige’s (1979) analysis of punk asserts a similar
principle, albeit of temporality and locality (and, hence, of the
class-conscious ideology of 1970’s
However, there is no argument within Benjamin which suggests that the communication of this “essence” is inherently impossible. If it, indeed, is possible, and if we recognize that this communication may be separate from the physical instantiation of the original, then reproductions can fulfill Benjamin’s definition of authenticity. This is quite clearly a contradiction of his loss of aura (“that which whithers in the age of mechanical reproduction”), of which authenticity is a part, as he suggests that the “technique of [mechanical] reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” (ibid). In the indie community, not only is live performance in an intimate setting extremely important, but I have also argued that widespread reproduction and distribution is, in fact, responsible for linking the reproduced object to a domain of tradition (both of music and of practice).[43]
In order to
determine authenticity,
According to Grossberg, authentic music must have the “ability to articulate private but common desires, feelings and experiences into a shared public language” which the performer necessitates having a “real relation to his or her audience” (1992:207). Yet, he sees the audience (of rock music) as ultimately unwilling to play its part, for even though it can distinguish between authentic and inauthentic (or co-opted) music, “they do not invest the difference with any power of its own” (ibid:236). The ultimate fallacy of this argument is that it removes agency from the audience, for if the difference between the two extremes is powerless and, hence, meaningless), then it only exists in name only, thus rendering the construction of authenticity and the audience itself powerless and meaningless.
However, in the
indie scene, the audience is not powerless—its role as the constructor of
authenticity means that the audience is responsible for the music created and
accepted by the scene, resulting in the defining (and expanding and contracting
as necessary) of its boundaries. For the audience, then, it is necessary to
recognize that the “music we declare to be ‘authentic’ is the music we
‘appropriate’” (
Case Study: Keeping Punk
Planet DIY
Daniel Sinker(2003), the editor and publisher of Punk Planet, explains some of the challenges of running a DIY publication: “We don’t allow any major label or corporate [advertising]—EMI was the last label that came sniffing around. In addition to that, we actually—it’s not simply the real obvious ones, but Sub Pop can’t advertise with us, because Sub Pop is 49% owned by Warner Brothers. Tooth and Nail, the Christian punk label, we caught sh** forever for running their ads, but they’ve actually just had a 49% deal by EMI, and so now we can’t run their ads… You’ve got to kind of keep track of who’s doing what, especially now because there’s a lot more interest in scooping up labels, since the [commercial] success of [independent label] Vagrant, basically. The majors are just picking up labels whole-hog at this point, and so all of a sudden there’s a lot more of these weird tentacle deals where it’s not even a 49% [ownership] deal, it’s distribution plus promotion.”
“But yeah, we try to keep everything in the magazine as ‘pure’ as possible. Ads slip through, bands slip through. We had, issue 53, literally more than half of the issue ended up being scrapped along the way—actually, it might have been three quarters of the issue. Because, ‘Oh, that band just signed, oh that band just signed, oh that label just got bought up’. I mean, it was literally just like, ‘What the fu**?’, it literally just felt like we could not do possibly anything, because all of a sudden everything was getting scooped up. It was just ridiculous. It was totally ridiculous.”
“But we do try [to keep our advertising independent], because I think it’s important, because it validates the editorial voice. I’ve always had kind of a hard time with a magazine like [politically left current events weekly] The Nation, their advertising policies are different from their editorial policy… It’s inconsistent from what you’re saying the other 51 weeks of the year, to be featuring all of these major label artists [for example] when they are just part of this corporate entity that you’re critiquing throughout the rest of your editorial topics. For me, it’s important to achieve a consistent editorial voice to really make sure that what’s in the magazine, be it ads or content, is, in fact, independent”.
“I certainly feel like the longer I stick with Punk Planet, the more important I feel like it is to keep it independent and to keep the independent flag burning because it is possible, you know? It becomes more and more obvious to me that it is possible, and I think that’s true with a lot of folks who have gotten old doing what they’re doing independently. I’m just some fu***** dude who went to art school, I mean talk about a less valid background! … I’ve been able to pull this off with no journalism degree, no whatever. Ian MacKaye [co-owner of 23-year old independent label Dischord Records] never went to college. To me, it really just enforces the fact that you can really pull it off independently, the longer I’m able to pull it off independently”.
“What it requires
is fu***** work, and that’s what lot of people aren’t really willing to do
ultimately when you get right down it. It’s a lot easier to do it other ways
than this way… The floor’s got to get swept. The trash has got to get taken
out. You’ve got to find a fu***** guy to bring bottles of water in, so I’m
finding that guy. All that kind of sh** falls on me,
whereas at a larger bureaucratic major label type environment or big magazine
type environment, you’re able to do the one thing that you want to do… and
that’s it, and it’s a lot easier. [But] I think you can pull it off, I think
that it can be done, I think that it’s easier now then ever to do it. There are
a lot of bands that I can’t understand how they’re making their living doing it
[independently], that are doing it.”
Hierarchization
The issues to which Sinker refers in the above example relate to the economic hardships of remaining true to DIY, remaining steadfastly against involvement with the commercial music industry. A useful theoretical standpoint with which to understand these issues is that of Bourdieu’s “field” (1993). “A field”, he says, “is a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning independent of those of politics and the economy” (ibid:162). His specific example is that of the modern literary field, but he recognizes the existence of other fields of cultural production that subscribe to this definition. As illustrated above, the rise of the punk scene coincided with the rise of punk bands—this is analogous to Bourdieu’s recognition that the development of the modern literary field and that of the modern writer are necessarily co-dependent.
Again, this is not an anomaly, as other distinct musical genres and their correlative cultures have exhibited similar qualities. We could inspect each as a separate field, which could result in the hardcore, emo, math rock, and twee pop fields in addition to that of punk. Yet we would quickly find that while these fields may be relatively autonomous (and even that wouldn’t be entirely true in a number of senses), they are also structurally homologous. Not surprisingly, Bourdieu anticipates this: it is exactly this simultaneous plurality of locality (including both geographic and aesthetic boundaries) and uniformity of structure that allows him to use the literary field as an exemplar of fields of cultural production and that allows for his examination to be extended to other fields.
However, regardless of the indie scene’s aim to erase the barrier between producers and audience, a power dynamic and hierarchy still exists. Bourdieu defines two principles of hierarchization in order to deal with this: the heteronomous and autonomous principles. He then recognizes a split in the artistic field between those who dominate the field economically and politically (those who ascribe to the heteronomous principle of hierarchization) and those who see themselves as independent from the economy (and thus ascribe to the autonomous principle). This second group sees economic success “as a form of compromise” that devalues the art in question; not surprisingly, Bourdieu sees this group as being representative of “art for art’s sake” (1993:40).[46]
This dialectic then becomes responsible for constant hierarchical struggles within the field of cultural production; this struggle is defined by the degree to which the field under examination remains autonomous, i.e., the degree to which its members ascribe to internal norms as opposed to external influences (i.e., heteronomy). Naturally, it is in the best interests of the economically and politically dominant group to realize only one hierarchy, and thus they seek to impose the heteronomous principle on the cultural producers “most attached to their autonomy” (1993:41).
This struggle is often simplified, overlooked, or ignored altogether in indie music discourse, yet it constitutes a constant battle within the community, sparking arguments on the issue of “selling out”. The notion of selling out is another term that is difficult to define: some indie purists (such as Sinker, above) contend that any dealings whatsoever with the larger corporate music industry is selling out to an extent, while a more moderate opinion holds that selling out doesn’t occur until economics take priority over ethics and free artistic expression (cf. Kruse 1995:64; cf. Gottlieb and Walk 1994:251); another way to articulate it is in terms of the informal economy: selling out is the loss of formality. The separation between members of independent music communities and the corporate music industry is not as complete as we may like to believe, as indie albums and zines are sold in chain stores (e.g., Borders, Virgin), ticket sales for many venues are operated by Ticketmaster, indie music is played on radio stations owned by giant radio conglomerates (e.g., Clear Channel), and bands may cross over to major record labels.[47]
Yet if we follow Bourdieu’s logic, the issue should not be whether or not the corporate industry has a toehold in the community—the issue should be to what extent its influence is allowed to reach, to what extent a degree of cultural autonomy is maintained within the indie scene, and hence to what extent the indie scene appropriates the corporate industry for its own ends. I have argued above that the main concerns of the indie scene are building a sense of community and the DIY ethos. Thus, when members of the scene operate outside of the community explicitly in order to achieve these communal goals (i.e., appropriate corporate music channels as a means to these ends), they are implicitly aware of their relative autonomy from the heteronomous principle of hierarchization and of their need to remain so.
Ideology
Benjamin (1968) and Adorno (with Horkheimer 1993; alone
2000) would suggest that the fact that this culture’s vitality in part depends
on mass production of commodified cultural artifacts is enough of an argument
to render invalid the strive for unmediated culture in the indie scene. The
existence of the scene within free market capitalism necessitates that economic
issues be taken into account at some point, for “it is impossible… to separate
economic and social interaction” (Kruse 1995:231). For the
The commodity quality of cultural artifacts, instead of being a mere component, then becomes the entirety. This leads to a situation where “individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology… without concern for the laws of form demanded by aesthetic autonomy” (ibid:33-4). Any artistic exceptions to the norms imposed by the culture industry are therefore seen as “departures from the norm [that] are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1993:36). Indeed, today, “those few spaces that have escaped incorporation into the market are being subjected to the continuous pressure and, often frontal attack” on the part of the system, both implicitly and explicitly, in order to force conformity through censorship (Schiller 1989:33).
In fact, the system itself embodies an entire language, both literal and figurative, “down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1993:35). Recognizing this as a development of the de facto ruling class and representative of its power, interests, and values, this is then one of the languages that, for Bourdieu, “are in a way primary ideologies which lend themselves more ‘naturally’ to usages conforming to the values and interests of the dominant classes” (1991:148), resulting in a form of ideological censorship that implicitly exists within the structure of the language in question.
The issue of ideology (and the resulting hegemony) is a massive one, but for my purpose here, we may think of the economic imperative as being paradigmatic of the ideology espoused by the culture industry. The logical endpoint of this train of thought is Schiller’s view of independent producers (of which the indie scene is one) as a feeding ground for the larger culture industry, ensuring that “big culture firms insure a constant supply of talent and creativity that otherwise might be ignored or even suffocated in their own bureaucratized, symbol-making factories” (1989:42).[48]
The danger is that the scene may not be as aware of its status as a feeding ground as it thinks it is. As Sinker (2003) recognizes, “One thing about the underground’s response to the mainstream is that it doesn’t give the mainstream enough credit. It doesn’t acknowledge that the mainstream will adapt, and it will change… Fu***** e-street teams and viral marketing and all of that are innovations that the underground came up with not because it was effective, but because it was all you had. Now that’s coming back to us, and some people see that as, ‘Hey cool, they’re learning how to talk to us on our own level, so they’re okay now’, when in fact they’ve just learned how to adapt so you see their message as being okay. That is always going to happen and that is why to some degree you see these blurred lines, because they’re not stupid. You don’t achieve the level of a Sony or MCA by being totally retarded. Most of the people who work there are stupid, but there are enough people who are savvy enough to realize that ‘We need to adapt, we need to start talking like this, we need to pitch like this, and then they’re going to be okay with it’… By and large, multi-national corporations will do whatever it takes to retain their profit margins and at the same time that they’re releasing Christina Aguilera [a Top-40 pop singer on RCA(BMG)] records, they know how to walk the walk in the underground, because they know that that’s probably where their next hit is going to come from, so they better learn how to fu***** speak the language, and speak it seamlessly, or they’re not going to make it”.
By Way of Conclusion
Suggestions for Furth
Over the course of my research, a
number of areas have presented themselves as necessitating
Additionally, an analysis of the scene—both at the local and the trans-local levels—could benefit greatly utilizing social network theory. Social network theory consists of the mathematical analysis of “a finite set of sets of actors [or social entities] and the relation or relations [or collections of ties between two actors] defined on them” (Wasserman and Faust 1994:20). One of the most interesting things I uncovered through my interviews is that the majority of people to whom I spoke know each other through professional and personal ties; it would be interesting to see how this is replicated on a much grander scale.
Comparison
of scene participants (especially label owners, zine editors, etc.) with
entrepreneurial profile models could reveal similarities that are not unique to
the independent scene; indeed, I have a hunch that wherever an informal
economic space exists, the
Finally,
one issue that I believe needs extensive research is the relation of the blog
phenomenon to the
Closing Thoughts
The above arguments regarding ideology bring us back full circle to the opening issues: that of cultural homogeneity and trans-national cosmopolitanism. For if departures from the norm are kept in check, the language of culture reflects the ruling industry’s ideology, and the economic imperative becomes paramount, then what are we to expect but more loss of locality? Yet throughout this paper I have argued that pockets of resistance exist on a local level, and that their common ethical standpoint and devotion to the development of community unite them on a trans-local level, effectively opposing the culture industry on numerous fronts, both literal and figurative. Mere existence in a free market environment necessitates that the economics of a venture must be taken into account at some point, but by and large this is not the determining factor, as the indie music scene must keep its goal of building and maintaining an autonomous community as a priority if it is to survive. Garnham notes that Habermas’s public sphere’s emergence was due to the development of competitive market capitalism (1986:40); the issue then becomes one of not allowing capitalism to supercede democracy.[49] For something (or someone) to be authentic, to transcend mere commodification, to partake in a democratic discourse, to be independent in the manner that I have used that term throughout, the determining factor cannot be commercial profitability.
Appendices
Appendix A: Description of
Interviews (Chronological)
- Daniel
Sinker, editor and publisher (and janitor, according to the masthead) of Punk Planet magazine. Interviewed
on
- Sean
Hulet, guitarist and backing vocals for The
Reputation, with a self-titled release (2002) on Initial Records.
Interviewed on
- Adam
Voith, owner of TNI Books, editor and publisher
of Little Engines zine.
Interviewed on
- Geoff
Merritt, owner of Parasol Records. Interviewed on
- Roy
Ewing, ex-drummer for Braid, staffer of Parasol Records, co-owner of Grand
Theft Autumn Records. Interviewed on
- Matt
and Darcie Lunsford, co-owners of Polyvinyl
Record Co. Interviewed on 28 April at the High Dive in
- Suzanne
Ennis, writer and publisher of Aphasia
zine. Interviewed on
Appendix B: Description of
Interview Topics
- Basic demographic information (age, birthplace, highest level of education).
- Past and present participation in the independent music scene.
- Are you able to make a living off of your participation in the scene?
- Describe your audience.
- How important is it to be in close contact with your audience?
- Describe how you keep in touch with your audience.
- What changes have you seen in the scene that you attribute to the internet?
- How has the internet impacted your participation?
- Describe any negative impacts of the internet on the scene.
- Describe any experience with and opinion of online bulletin boards.
- Describe any experience with and opinion of blogs.
- Describe any experience with and opinion of downloading music.
- How do the major record labels and big business affect your participation?
Appendix C: Survey Dates and
Shows
- All
shows at the Empty Bottle in
- Sound
In Action Trio / TW Walsh / Portastatic,
- The Deadhounds / American Minor / The Blackouts (American
Minor cancelled),
- The
Close / The Race / Slumber Party /
Appendix D: Survey Questions
Please circle
your answer to the following questions:
Sex: male female
Age: 18-20 21-25 26-30 31-35 36-40 41+
Highest level of education:
some high school high school diploma post-high school vocational ed
some college college degree graduate or professional school
How did you first
hear about this show (circle your answer)?
Email from friend
Email list
Online bulletin board
Online chat (including instant messenger)
Official website (record label’s, band’s, venue’s, excluding
bulletin boards)
Unofficial website (newspaper, personal site, fansite, online zine, excluding bulletin boards)
Flyer (excluding zines)
Newspaper (Chicago Tribune, The Reader, Onion A/V Club,
etc., excluding magazines)
Print zine (including magazines, excluding newspapers)
Word of mouth
Other (please describe): _________________________
How many shows do you attend per month, on average?
< 1 1-3 4-6 6-8 > 8
How many hours do you spend online per week, on average?
< 1 1-3 4-7 7-14 > 14
Please rate on a
scale of 1 (least) to 5 (most) the following questions (circle your answer):
What portion of your time online is spent looking up and/or
talking about independent music, bands, and the scene?
1 2 3 4 5
How much information do you get online about independent
music, bands, and the scene compared to print resources such as newspapers,
flyers, print zines, etc.?
1 2 3 4 5
How informative are online resources for independent labels
and bands compared to major labels and their bands?
1 2 3 4 5
Appendix E: Sample Images
Objects 2 and 3: Punk
Planet #53 (February 2003), front cover and table of contents (interior). Cover
art by Jay Ryan (full-color).
Objects 4 and 5: Rainer Maria, Long Knives Drawn (2003), front and back covers. Cover art by
Allyson Mellberg (full-color).
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Discography
Carey, Mariah. 2001. Glitter. Virgin 10797. Compact Disc.
Check Engine. 2002. Check Engine. Sickroom Records 002. Vinyl record.
Cursive. 2000. Cursive’s Domestica. Saddle Creek 31. Compact Disc.
________. 2003. The Ugly Organ. Saddle Creek 51. Compact Disc.
Ghosts and Vodka. 2001. Precious Blood. Six Gun Lover 006. Compact Disc.
Godspeed You Black Emperor. 2000. Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. Constellation 012. Compact Disc.
Haymarket Riot. 2001a. This CD Contains the Self-Titled and Wax! EPs. Divot 023. Compact Disc.
________. 2001b. Bloodshot Eyes. Thick Records 076. Compact Disc.
Jackson, Michael. 2001. Invincible. Epic 69400. Compact Disc.
Nirvana. 1991. Nevermind. DGC 24425. Compact Disc.
Rainer Maria. 2003. Long Knives Drawn. Polyvinyl Record Co. 057. Compact Disc.
The Reputation. 2002. The Reputation. Initial Records 49. Compact Disc.
Set Fire To Flames. 2001. Signs Reign Rebuilder. Alien8 Recordings 30. Compact Disc.
The Strokes. 2001. Is This It?. RCA 68045. Compact Disc.
Various Artists. 2003. Oil. Thick Records 086. Compact Disc.
The White Stripes. 2003. Elephant. V2 27148. Compact Disc.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs. 2003. Fever to Tell. Interscope 000034902. Compact Disc.
Websites
The Audreys: http://theaudreys.net/
The Empty Bottle: http://www.emptybottle.com/
Grand Theft Autumn Records: http://www.grandtheftautumn.com/
MSN Kidz: http://kids.msn.com/
Parasol Records: http://parasol.com/
Pitchfork: http://pitchforkmedia.com/
Polyvinyl Record Co.: http://www.polyvinylrecords.com/
Punk Planet: http://punkplanet.com/
Rainer Maria: http://www.rainermaria.com/
The Reputation: http://reputationmusic.com/
TNI Books: http://www.tnibooks.com/