(from dance music first page 5)
"Writing about punk rock, Jesse Prinz argues that the identities it fosters and its roles as a subculture are a part of its aesthetic interest. unlike punk aficionados of dance music who don’t tend to make visible their affiliations but nonetheless dance music depends on scenes, and clubbers demonstrate significant commitment to their scenes"
(dance music first page 5)
"In the uk the term subculture is closely associated with the Birmingham school of subcultural studies, according to which subcultures are inherently dissenting ; forms of (youth) protest against hegemonic conservative forces, often class based"
"This fits in with the critical writing about dance music that theorises clubs and parties as spaces for expression of disruptive political identities and ideas"
(from studying popular music page 231) (links to dick hebidge)
"The title of this book, Subculture: the meaning of style (Hebidge, 1979) gives some clues to the approach he took. He argued that subcultural groups like teds, or mods or punks (and by extension all musical subcultures) construct a style - of dress, music, forms of transport, and forms of dancing or listening or buying - that is meaningful to them and others. To do this, subcultural groups take products that are available in the mainstream society and transform their meanings through ‘bricolage’ : a process of improvisation where conspicuous consumption is organised in distinctive ways to transform the meanings of the objects. Through this transformation of meanings, these styles begin to reinforce each other to create coherent whole that Hebidge, following Barthes calls ‘homology’"
(from studying popular music page 233) (argument against subcultures)
"Gary Clarke (1981/1990) has investigated the selection process of the subcultural studies, arguing that they have privileged certain spectacular groups at the expense of ‘ordinary youth’ who consume mainstream music and wear chain-store clothes."
"This, he believed, would allow us to examine the sorts of options that are available to different young people, and would avoid viewing the spectacular subculture as some sort of original, which is then watered down for exploitation and mass consumption."
(from studying popular music page 234) (characteristics of consuming music)
"First, taste and choice in music is not arbitrary or haphazard, nor simply a matter of subjective choice. Rather it is culturally generated. we dot not choose the music we consume in isolation. Our choices of music and the ways we consume them are meaningful to us and those around us."
"Second, the way in which music is meaningful is not simply reducible to ‘the music’ but is produced in the particular ways that we consume it. Hebdige shows us that the ‘sense of style’ generated by the ways we consume music transforms its meanings. this was how hebidge utilised the notion of bricolage. while his examples are most often about music, the same idea can be applied to other forms of consumption. For instance, acquiring our music as vinyl LP from a second hand market stall, as a CD single from a high street store, as a 12 inch vinyl single from a specialist dance music shop or as MP3 file over the internet are all meaningful choices."
"Finally, the meaningfulness of one act of consumption relates to other acts of consumption (or other social practices) to form a whole style. This was how Hebidge used the notion of homology. So, the vinyl LP is usually collected, categorised, organised on shelves, listened to in relation to other collected records and the sense of popular music history produced by the collector. The CD is bought on a saturday morning shopping trip to the mall, which also includes buying clothes from certain shops, and is undertaken with friends as a social occasion. The 12 -inch single is tucked into a record bag to be mixed on a set of home record decks as practice for its use in a big club night. The MP3 file is added to hard disk in a bedroom to be discussed over the internet late into the night. Each of these constitutes a particular and coherent set of ways to consume music and each is distinctive in its meanings and related associations."
(from studying popular music page 235) (Fandom, a way of consumption)
"In an alternative reading of the interviews, fandom is revealed as an active process with its own forms of consumption and meaning making. The accounts are full of references to the texts of fandom - records, pictures, memorabilia, fanzines, fan meetings - the activities of listening, watching and discussion, as well as indications of the individual and collective pleasures of fandom."
(from studying popular music page 235&236) (cultural capital)
"A number of theorists of fan culture have drawn upon the concept of ‘cultural capital’ (bourdieu, 1984). This refers to those forms of cultural knowledge that allow intellectuals to create and circulate distinctions between ‘good’ culture (the high arts they like to consume) and ‘bad culture’ (popular culture that subordinate groups consume). For the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the intellectuals who run the education and legal systems, the media and other cultural industries, construct hierarchies of what is good and is bad in culture. This power to make distinctions is a source of social power that he sees as corollary to the marxist idea of ‘economic capital’, the power derived from the ownership of the means of production. By analogy, just as capitalist factory owners invest in more capital to increase production, wealth and ultimately power for themselves, intellectuals invest in forms of restricted education that give them more cultural capital and so more cultural power."
"Music fans usually know an enormous amount of detail about their favourite groups or artists. They distinguish ‘their’ artist from others, and often distinguish them between different records produced by that artist, and give significance to the artists and music and their lives. Fiske’s approach is useful to our study in so far we can look at fan activity in a new light, in which fandom becomes a set of creative, productive and empowering practices."
"In bourdieu’s own work, the idea of cultural capital is a means of to explain how certain forms of knowledge and practice make groups of individuals powerful. In Fiske’s version, education in the high arts is simply an investigation in something that already assigns power in society. Further, fan self-education is simply a way of achieving prestige within a peer group."
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