It’s about 2 PM on a lazy Sunday afternoon.[1] After breakfast at the Original Pancake House in Hyde Park and grocery shopping at the Whole Foods Market in Lakeview with my girlfriend, I drive over to the Metro in Wrigleyville, parking right on Clark Street at Grace. The Clubhouse is a little independent record store next door that sells advance tickets for all the shows at the Metro, and we buy two for the upcoming show on March 20^th: Cursive is headlining, with opening bands The Ghost, Small Brown Bike, and No Knife. On the way over, I had been telling my girlfriend about the bands, overwhelming her with knowledge and random facts. I keep forgetting that she’s not an indie rock chick and I don’t have to impress her, but then I justify it by imagining that I’m divulging important information.

Before I moved from Bethlehem to Chicago, I was going to two or three shows a week, driving upwards of ninety minutes to New York, Wilkes-Barre, and Philadelphia. I had friends that would convince me to go to shows the night before an exam. I often went to weekend shows alone, where I would unavoidably meet people whom I only knew through attending shows. At times I felt like a celebrity: one night I went to a local pop-punk show and the kids were whispering and pointing at me until one had enough courage to actually approach me. “Are you the guy that works at the record store?” I recognized her from coming in every other Saturday or so with her dad, and remembered that she had pretty good taste. I told her so, and she walked away beaming.

That show was at the Icehouse in Bethlehem. The Icehouse lies on the north bank of the Lehigh River, and used to be an ice warehouse back when freezers weren’t common household appliances. These days it serves as a civic cultural center, and is sometimes rented out for local shows. All the bands were local (except for one from Central New Jersey) and loaded in their equipment through the same entrances the audiences used. There was no stage: they performed on the same level as the audience, often with fans screaming along a mere twelve inches away.

The Cursive show on the 20^th 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 Chicago and a local show in Bethlehem, however, is the fact that I don’t know anyone else here. Everyone looks familiar, though, and that’s reassuring—but no one’s interacting, no one’s moving. No one seems to be excited about the music, but the fact that they’re here means that their musical taste is similar to mine, so that’s a start.

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 Southern California (San Diego, to be exact) and therefore have a better excuse for being so formulaic. When I saw them open for Sunny Day Real Estate in the summer of 2000, they blew me away with how mediocre they were. Tonight is no better, there’s only scattered applause after each song. Also, their guitarist looks like he belongs in some frat-rock jam band.

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 North Carolina’s Archers of Loaf, only with more distortion and more depressing lyrics, which makes complete sense when you realize that they’re from Nebraska. Their last record, Cursive’s Domestica (2000), featured a new guitarist (the old one went back to Duke for law school), a much cleaner production, and a tighter, heavier sound. The lyrics focused on the breakdown of lead singer Tim Kasher’s marriage, and it was one of my favorite albums of 2000. They recently added a cellist, which really enhances their sound and frees up the guitars on their newest album for Omaha’s Saddle Creek Records, The Ugly Organ (2003). Tonight, Tim’s voice is straining, and the guitars are a little sloppy, but I mark it down to this gig being relatively early in their tour. The new songs are great, and I buy a red t-shirt afterwards to show my support, chatting a little bit with their merchandise guy.

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 Chicago band, so I figure they can’t be too hated—sure enough, the jeering stops halfway through the first song. About midway through their set, I hear what can only be described as a stereotypical sorority girl’s voice say, “I can’t believe you made me come to this—I seriously just wasted $8”. I swing around to shoot her an annoyed glance and see three or four other older audience members doing the same, before turning back to concentrate on the music. I have Haymarket Riot’s one full-length (2001b) and two of their EPs (on one CD, 2001a) and know the music pretty well, and I’m really enjoying myself watching them play, but something feels off. When I get home later that night I check their website and discover that this is their first tour after replacing half the band (the second guitarist and the drummer). Now I understand what the jeering was about.

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 North America, although examples of music cultural production outside of the culture industry do exist around the world in different circumstances (see Cohen 1991, Manuel 1993, and Slobin 1993).

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 Anderson’s “imagined community” (1991) serves to demonstrate how local scenes emulate trans-local practices, and what the consequences of this are. The closing analysis of the extent to which the ideology of the culture industry has infiltrated the independent music scene revolves around a discussion of “authenticity” which closely follows that of Moore (2002), and an examination of hierarchization through Bourdieu’s “field” (1993).

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 Northern New Jersey with my peer group, which contained many musicians. Many of the bands that I saw play contained friends of mine, while some others were non-local bands that toured regionally or nationwide. My initial understanding of what it meant to be independent and underground was derived from these experiences.

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 Bethlehem, PA. This is a powerful and respected position, often almost as powerful and respected as being in a band or working at a record label. Record store staffers, through their idiosyncratic opinions and knowledge, control what music the store orders and what the clientele buys. Over the course of the year that I worked at the store, I got further involved with the local scene and scene participants, and my show attendance and record purchases skyrocketed: by the end of the year, I was averaging one new album a day and two shows a week.

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 Birmingham School argument might suggest that local subcultural interests survive and, indeed, thrive through the co-option of mainstream commodities—yet Hebdige’s (1979) subculture-as-commodified-style argument stops just short of allowing for oppositional agency, granting participants just enough autonomy to perpetuate a commodified aesthetic. Media theory does no better than cultural theory: when McLuhan asserts that “the medium is the message” (1994:7), and Kittler (1999) (who, in many respects, has continued where McLuhan left off) ties the development of media technologies to the military industrial complex of the modernized Western world and polemicizes about the future convergence of the two fields, the only choice we seem to have left is to be fatalistic about the entire process.

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 Australia (Ginsburg 1995) and video recording among the Kayapo people in Brazil (Turner 2002). Cultures appropriate Western media forms to affirm their local practices: e.g., the use of a radio as a status symbol in Zambian villages (Spitulnik 2002) and the re-interpretation of Hollywood films according to local customs in the Polynesian country of Tonga (Hahn 2002). Outside of the Hollywood film industry, independent production and distribution of videos serve to maintain a sense of community among Hmong diaspora (Schein 2002). I propose that another exception to these views—one that opposes the culture industry directly on its home turf—can be seen in an illustration of independent music scenes.

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 Liverpool as described by Cohen [1991]), by genre (e.g., the scene of locally produced and distributed popular music across Northern India in Manuel [1993]), or by both (e.g., the community singing groups [among others] in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, in Finnegan [1989]). While I am not suggesting that this usage is not without its benefits, my analysis depends on a more developed concept derived from the usage of the term within the community itself.

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 noon or so. By the time I’m done counting the money it’s 10:05. I throw the deadbolt open, light a cigarette, and ease onto the counter behind the register, magazine and coffee in hand.

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 Lehigh Valley is somewhat of an insular area, lodged as it is between Central New Jersey, the Philadelphia metro region, and the Poconos—as a result, a vibrant underground music scene has managed to thrive here for years.

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 (Lehigh University) that’s scorned as being a breeding ground for yuppies, I’ve managed to gain a fair amount of respect over the years. I support the scene and go to local shows and events pretty frequently, order hard-to-find records and CDs for kids at the store, am friends with a couple of local bands, and have become acquainted with some of the older scene participants (in the Valley they call themselves “oldheads”).

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 Allentown. Scene kids tend to frequent Double Decker more than my store these days, probably because the vinyl selection is better, the store actively supports the local underground, and the owner isn’t as big of a jerk. But it’s also kind of intimidating: extremely close quarters, racks and racks of semi-organized LPs, an owner (and cat) who never leaves, and the ever-present older punks on the Sony Playstation in the back. By comparison, Play It Again is downright cheerful. A lot of the kids I recognize and talk to in my store are high-school-age, or are from my college (and hence feel ostracized by the locals), or they’re looking for a major label release that Double Decker doesn’t stock. (I asked Jaime Holmes, Double Decker’s owner, about this once, and he said that he never orders major label releases from his distributors, relying instead on the bi-annual friends and family discount days at Barnes and Noble.) I also get a number of people who stop by just to talk and hang out with me, have a cigarette, listen to some new music, and browse through our distributors’ catalogs so they know what new releases are coming out.

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 Southern California [So-Cal] band that started off as a side-project for singer/guitarist Dave Smalley in the early 1990s. He used to play in the D.C.-based post-hardcore band Dag Nasty, which had formed right after the Revolution Summer of 1985 that basically spawned emo-core. Afterwards he sang on the first two albums by the So-Cal pop-punk band All. In 1991, Smalley fused the two sounds into a melodic hardcore group with enough hooks to make the music interesting, releasing records on L.A.-based Epitaph Records, best known for So-Cal pop-punk from the likes of NOFX, Bad Religion, and The Offspring. His lyrics are typical emo-core with a dash of socio-political criticism: alienation, depression, damn-the-man, anti-capitalism, and so on. I would guess that the image you’re referring to is a graphic reference to the societal status quo as being inherently restrictive, alienating, and dangerous—he’s probably read a fair amount of Marx. I’m sorry you’re not pleased with your son’s purchase; we have a no-censorship policy here, but if you haven’t washed the shirt I can exchange it for you. Sorry, but we don’t do refunds”.

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 Chicago with her husband and colleague, Matt, she was afraid of being the oldest woman there. But, as Matt recalls (2003), “They have a massive, huge, widespread audience, it’s ridiculous. Like 15-year old kids, and like 35-year old, 40-year old people”.

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 “Montreal sound” which makes no sense, and is therefore useless as a descriptor (2002a:226). However, not only is his example inaccurate,[12] but he explicitly misses the main criticism: that Straw leaves no room for extra-musical identifiers, when in fact, even the genre-defining Sex Pistols’ tour of America in 1978 was “more of a manipulation thing, more of a spectacle than music” (Shank 1994:103). As a local guitarist explains, “You have to live the whole experience. The music is almost an aside, for me. It’s definitely more about the experience” (Hulet 2003).

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 Chicago, Illinois. Daniel Sinker (2003), the editor/publisher, started the zine halfway through his college years while completing an arts degree. The magazine is devoted to many styles of underground music (not just punk),[19] the do-it-yourself ethos, and certain political stances that stem from the two (e.g., critique of large media conglomerates and their relation to the government). While Sinker himself has been able to live off of the magazine for the past three years (after years of working up to 100 hours per week to support himself), the rest of his staff is part-time and freelance.

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