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Introduction

As if you had a choice … Snow Patrol

Beginnings

This project began in 1991 at a small, grotty underage club called Jabberjaw, off Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. I went to see Teenage Fanclub, a band from Glasgow, play one of its first West Coast dates. This club had only one entrance, located just behind the stage. To face the band, one needed to walk through the narrow corridor between the slightly raised stage and the coffee bar. On this particular spring evening, just like many nights at Jabberjaw, the place was packed to capacity. Equipped with neither air conditioning nor ventilation, the venue was unbearable—a maelstrom of heat and sweat. When the band finished its set, the musicians jumped off the back of the stage and went through the only exit into the cool night air outside. I could see the door from the front of the stage where I was standing. Desperate to get outside and into fresh air, I began to file out like everyone else, around the stage and into the little corridor that led to the exit. However, one member of the audience who was standing right behind me did something different. He stepped up onto the stage, walked across, and jumped off at the doorway just as the band had done. Why hadn’t I taken the same route? There was nothing to prevent me from choosing the most direct path to the door to get much-needed relief. For some reason, I had perceived the stage as off limits. Even in my need to get outside, I could not imagine stepping up onto it and walking to the door. In that moment, I realized that I had internalized rules for being an audience member that stopped me from even entertaining the possibility of walking across the stage. While no one ever explicitly taught these rules to me, I had learned them through my participation in innumerable events like this one.

I recognized the audience member who had crossed the stage. He was in the Los Angeles band Redd Kross. Although we were both members of the audience, our different experiences in going to gigs had produced different relationships to the space of the stage. This fellow audience member and professional performer saw the stage as accessible to him. I saw the stage as off limits to me. Did our different histories affect the way we viewed the event? How did my behavior as an audience member affect my experience of the performance? What cultural precepts were expressed by this distinction between performers and audience members? It was this moment that ultimately led me to Britain, to a study of audiences and to the international indie music community.

In an effort to answer these questions, what follows is an ethnography of audience members’ behavior at the performances of a particular type of music—British indie music. Specifically, this is a study of multiple subjectivities and the spectacle of music performance in the independent music community. It is about what audience members do. It is also about how they think about what they do. This art form is a passionate concern to members of the community, who look to music not just as entertainment but as an expression of significant cultural sentiments and as a nexus of moral ideals of profound consequence.

In this book, I treat musical performance as a ritual.¹ Rituals address cultural conflicts and contradictions. Indie music performances and ideology are an expression of cultural values regarding the role of art, emotion, the body, asceticism, youth and the nature of creativity in modern Western industrial society. A part of the “youth” phenomenon, which is by definition a transitory category, indie music requires an understanding of the youth community, why people enter it, why people leave it, and what it means when it has been left behind.

Anthropologists have long noted the intersection of a culture’s metaphysics and its aesthetic productions. Metaphysics is a culture’s a priori philosophy of the nature of being based on its religious ideology. Metaphysics and aesthetics both address a culture’s valued forms of creativity. The quintessential model of creativity is the divine creation of the world, and there is generally a resemblance between the concept of divine creation in a particular culture and what is considered valuable or important in aesthetic creations by that same culture. For example, in Islam, where divine creativity is manifested in the Word and there is a prohibition against the representation of human figures, artistic expression takes the forms of calligraphy and abstract visual designs. In West African societies, where divine creativity is seen in the unpredictable temporary manifestation of the gods on earth, there is a value placed on impromptu verbal skills. For the Pintupi, Aboriginals of Australia, the aesthetic productions of value are depictions of hereditary stories of the Dreamtime, the period when the world was created by supernatural creatures. Conceptions of divine creativity intersect with the how, what, and why of art. The power of artistic performances and forms comes from their ability to display, and play with, cultural themes that are meaningful to culture members. In turn, religious notions shape our conceptions of human creativity. While this connection has been well examined in other societies, scholarship devoted to Western music and art seems mostly blind to how Western artistic productions express our own metaphysical themes. It is a Western conceit to think that only in other societies do religious notions pervade all domains of life. We consider our own secular spheres free of metaphysical concerns. Our notion of art is that it exists in a separate domain from religious philosophy. This book will challenge that notion and demonstrate how religious ideology shapes Western aesthetics and artistic practices, focusing on the British indie music scene in particular.

Theoretical Frame: From Observation to Communication

Contemporary anthropological theory has focused on intersecting themes in the rethinking of the ethnographic enterprise: a concern for communication, the rise of performance theory as a way of understanding culture, the reassertion of the importance of the body, and the constructed nature of subjectivity (Conquergood 1991). This reconceptualization has resulted in a major shift in the ethnographic endeavor from a subject/object dialectic to a subject/subject dialectic (Clifford 1988, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Geertz 1988, Rosaldo 1989). Ethnography is now thought of as a subjective interaction in which the once-privileged ideal of a detached observer neutrally describing culture has been replaced by a notion of ethnography as communication. There is no all-seeing perspective; rather, there is a multiplicity of perspectives. The anthropological viewpoint of culture has moved from a static one to one concerned with processes, from observation as monologic to interaction as dialogic, from an understanding that is abstract and atemporal to one that is concretely located in time and space (Bakhtin 1981, Jackson 1989, Rosaldo 1989, Theunissen 1984).

The focus on the dialogic nature of interaction has drawn renewed attention to performance theory as an idiom for studying culture. Victor Turner, whose groundbreaking work on ritual pervades performance theory, recognized performance as a process, one that is co-constructed in the relationships between performance, performers, and audience (Turner 1969, 1974, 1986, 1988). The incorporation of performance theory in anthropology has occurred, in large part, because it permits recognition of the agency of social actors (Geertz 1983); the performance paradigm “privileges particular, participatory, dynamic, intimate, precarious, embodied experience grounded in historical process, contingency, and ideology” (Conquergood 1991: 187). In short, a performance paradigm requires cultural productions from the grand and spectacular to the mundane and intimate to be examined in situ (Palmer and Jankowiak 1996). Here, performance theory links with practice theory, which locates culture in the concrete practices of individuals in real circumstances and actual settings (Bourdieu 1977). Both position culture not in abstractions but in situated, co-constructed activity.

Rethinking interaction as mutually constructed, Erving Goffman introduced the notion of a participant framework (Goffman 1974).² The notion of a participant structure was a way of thinking about speakers and hearers not as discrete, exclusive units but as mutual interlocutors in a co-constructed enterprise. A participant structure is the social recognition of an event and the expected behaviors within it. It provides a frame for the interpretation of activities, a context that allows participants to understand the behavior of other people. The participant structure is shared, and all parties are active in the unfolding of an event. Further, one’s role in a participant structure compels a particular use of the body, whether one is controlled or wild, whether one speaks or is silent. However, this is not to say that a participant structure dictates interaction. Individuals have vested interests. They can and do break codes of conduct, and this can result in innovation and/or a reframing of expectations. However, these actions are interpreted by others according to their shared notions of an event (Auer and di Luzio 1992, Goodwin and Goodwin 1995, Philips 1983). These shared notions are learned over time through actions that embody them, and actions have consequences. Performance theory, practice theory, and the sociolinguistic interactive paradigm all emphasize the importance of examining culture as a set of active and situationally located processes.

Active Bodies

Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio … Joy Division

Social scientists have recognized the need to address the body and incorporate the sensate dimensions of experience for the past two decades. History, sociology, ethnic studies, communication studies, film theory, and, in particular, feminist studies have all called for the “embodiment” of our understanding of human activities, a notion that incorporates the biological, the psychological, and the cultural. This can be seen clearly in the vast number of anthologies devoted to the topic of embodiment (Csordas 1994, Dunn et al. 1996, Welton 1998, Weiss and Haber 1999, and so on). Paying attention to the body is a way of approaching cultural practices and addressing phenomenology—the sensual, emotional, and physical aspects of experience (Turner 1986, Schechner 1988, Csordas 1993).³ Some of the best work locating the body in practice has been done by linguistic and medical anthropologists. Linguistic anthropologists analyze language as it is actually used, focusing on the unfolding of interaction in time and space. This has necessitated looking at all modes of communication, including the use of the body as a physical instrument in the production of meaning (Hanks 1990). However, the internal, phenomenological, and sensate dimensions of activity are not as interesting to linguistic anthropologists as the interactive, external, and collaborative dimensions of activity. Medical anthropologists, whose research on healing requires an examination of the phenomenology and physiology of the body as well as performance, have produced some of the best material dealing with the cultural body (Csordas and Harwood 1994, Laderman 1995, Strathern 1996, Strathern and Stewart 1999).

Social actors are physical sensate interlocutors. What one does with one’s body can concretely affect the experience of an activity and impact subjective perception (Crapanzano and Garrison 1977, Deren 1953, Greenbaum 1973, Kapferer 1983, LaBarre 1970, Locke and Edward 1985, Turner 1982a, Wasson 1971, Zuesse 2005). For example, in spirit possession rituals, repetitious physical movements accompanied by rhythmic drumming are used to induce altered states of consciousness (Rouget 1985). Such practices are central to our understanding of ritual, in which the body is deployed in specific ways in order to produce particular sentiments and sensations appropriate to the occasion. Not eating, eating “special” foods, dancing all night, not moving, or using pharmacological substances are just a few of the ways sensations are produced in ritual and associated with the cultural relationships that are enacted within ritual events.

Popular music studies are uniquely situated to address these concerns of embodiment because music performance and its communities of practice require an examination of sensate experience and aesthetic ideological systems (Shank 2003). The ethnography of musical performance that follows attends to the body, performance, and interaction in a detailed way. I examine how the body is used and read by participants in situated interaction (Hymes 1972, 1974b, 1975). I also follow Turner’s phenomenological call for embodiment in performance studies by considering the potential psychosomatic consequences of the different uses of the body within the context of musical performance. This ethnography attends to the physical and communicative aspects of interaction with a concern for phenomenology—the sensation, the ideation, the subjectivity of participation in a situated event.

The Audience and Subjectivity

Since the performance paradigm emphasizes the roles of all participants, it requires an examination of how the performance, performers, and audience influence one another. In the social sciences there has been a movement away from the creator, author, or artist as the preeminent analytic focus. Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault in “What Is an Author?” locate meaning not in the creator of a work but in the work itself in its receptive context (Barthes 1977, Foucault 1986):

It has been understood that the task of criticism is not to reestablish the ties between an author and his work or to reconstitute an author’s thought and experience through his works and further, that criticism should concern itself with the structures of a work, its architectonic forms, which are studied for their intrinsic and internal relationships. Yet, what of a context that questions the concept of a work? (Foucault 1986: 140)

Thus critical theorists have included the audience and context in their consideration of cultural productions such as reading (Derrida 1974), watching a film (Mulvey 1989), being inside a prison (Foucault 1979), or walking through a museum (Wilson 1994). Cultural studies, cognitive film theory, reader response criticism, and other contemporary theoretical movements have come to characterize all media spectators as active (Cho and Cho 1990, Fiske 1992, Iser 1980, Jenson 1992, Jones 1990). Thus, in the theoretical shift from looking to the author as the source of meaning to looking at a dialogic relationship between the work and its audience, receptive subjectivity has become a central concern in cultural studies.

The literature devoted to subjective reception has developed the notion of spectatorship as an analytic category. Spectatorship is a theoretical concept derived from a combination of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and film theory. Following Jacques Lacan’s and Julia Kristeva’s notions of subjectivity, the spectorial position has been characterized as “the inscription of a place for the reading or viewing subject within the signifying chain” (Doane 1987: 34). The subjective reading position creates a relationship between the viewer and the viewed. However, the enunciation of spectorial positionings is not necessarily explicit or obvious. The spectorial subject has been seen in point-of-view (Bellour 1979), voice-over (Metz 1986), and the use of the “generalized male third person singular” in writing (Mulvey 1989). For, example, in an advertisement for an American sitcom, a male character is shown sitting behind a desk in a room looking down at some papers. A conventionally attractive woman wearing a trench coat enters the room. The camera focuses on the woman as she throws open the trench coat to reveal a sexy black dress. The camera cuts to the shocked and elated reaction of the male character and then returns to linger on the woman. In this short segment, we can see the articulation of the spectator position as male, viewing a female undressing. The male, shown first, is passive. However, the female enters and disrobes, becoming the object of not only the male character’s active gaze but the audience’s as well. That is, the two gazes blend in the camera’s “look” at the female character. In the process, the audience has been placed in a similar viewing position as the male character who watches and reacts to a woman undressing. Thus, spectatorship refers not to the perspective of an individual in the audience but rather to a structural subjectivity articulated by a work in relation to its audience.

Research on spectatorship has demonstrated that this subjectivity can be inscribed by various social categories. As Donna Haraway notes in her introduction to Primate Visions, “The themes of race, sexuality, gender, nation, family, and class have been written into the body of nature in Western life sciences since the eighteenth century” (Haraway 1989: 1). Yet in the copious discussions of spectorial inscriptions across different disciplines, there is a major omission: metaphysic inscriptions have been left largely unexamined and unmarked. But to imagine that religious ideology would not also be inscribed in spectorial positions is almost inconceivable when so many of our tacitly held assumptions about the nature of the world and our place in it have their foundations in religious philosophy.⁴ Perhaps this oversight is due to the fact that the religious foundations of Western thought are so ingrained that they are treated as utterly transparent by Western scholars. If anthropologists studying another culture ignored the religio-ideologic narratives that underlie social institutions, it would be considered a significant oversight. Yet in our own culture we are loathe to recognize or discuss them. The mind/body split that pervades Western scholarship is a fundamental dichotomy that emerges from a Western religious tradition. Franz Boas, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott Parsons, and Edward Evans-Pritchard, key figures in the development of anthropological theory, have all discussed how metaphysic ideology pervades cultural institutions and practices. Yet critical theory and spectatorship studies remain decidedly averse to ascribing religious ideology to Western subjectivity. In large part, this book works to correct this omission and constitutes an examination of the metaphysics of spectorial embodiments.

One of the limitations of the scholarship devoted to spectatorship is that it examines a common receptive context and makes generalizations from this context. Spectatorship has generally been examined in settings of passive comportment, such as cinema. Western cinematic norms require audience members to maintain a controlled, contemplative bodily composure during the experience of the film. However, this is by no means essential to film viewing. The norms of the bodily comportment of film audiences vary between and within cultures. In India, audiences are much more proactive and kinetically involved. Audience members wander around, stand up and yell at the screen, or engage in public dialogue with fellow audience members.⁵ This Western emphasis on contemplative and composed comportment extends to the experience of other artistic productions and settings, such as museums or symphonic concerts. It is far easier to ignore a still body in silent contemplation than it is to ignore a body engaged in vigorous physical and verbal activity. Thus, the majority of the examinations of spectatorship have been devoted to the intrinsic and internal relationships of film or literature as they inscribe subjectivity, rather than to what audience members actually do while interacting with these artistic productions. As Janice Radway has noted, these formulations have kept the media text, rather than the audience’s use of it, as the primary object of inquiry (Radway 1984). By examining events and narratives in which the audience or viewer is physically passive, spectatorship studies have overlooked the significance of comportment and its role in the production of audience subjectivity.

Music as Activity

Spectatorship occurs and develops in activities such as storytelling, television watching, cinema going, and concert attending. Theories of spectatorship that attempt to explain the structure and content of a particular medium must take into account actual practice. This is a notion of “participatory” spectatorship. In his article “Professional Vision,” Charles Goodwin shows how an individual becomes trained to apprehend and interpret events while engaging in professional activity (Goodwin 1994). For cinema studies, it is important to consider how the viewing subject is physically situated; for music performances, it is important to consider whether the viewing subject stands or sits, dances or is motionless, or is near to or far from his peers. Participant structure is a necessary component of spectatorship studies, because the experience of an event is constituted by the cultural production on display and its participant structure.

The idea that the experience of music is located in activity is central to Christopher Small’s work, in which he considers music not only as sounds but as the setting, behaviors, and comportment of performers and audience members. Small reframes music from a noun into a verb, taking advantage of the useful term musicking. Musicking is the activity of music in a specific cultural context, from production to consumption in its particular social spaces. Small writes:

To music is to take part in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing, or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They too are all contributing to the nature of the event that is a musical performance. (Small 1998: 9)

Small sees the meaning of musicking as located in the relationships manifested in and articulated by the production of culturally meaningful sounds, in specific cultural settings, and in the relationships of participants in the ritual event of music performance:

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning, but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world. (Small 1998: 13)

Small’s dissatisfaction with symphonic musical performance, as opposed to symphonic music, relates in part to the requirements for a high degree of body control and the limited physical responses allowed in the modern/postmodern symphonic concert participant structure. In his book Music of the Common Tongue, he contrasts the modern symphonic performance code to West African–influenced music forms, in which the line between performer and audience is often so blurred that the division appears arbitrary and irrelevant (Small 1987). Improvisational performances respond to the contingencies of the occasion—the particular individuals present, the artistic motifs introduced by the musicians, the dances of the dancers, and the verbal and sonic interjections of the “audience.” This produces a musical experience where all present are active co-producers of an aesthetic experience. Small clearly recognizes the importance of participatory spectatorship, which significantly impacts subjective experience in musical performances.

Subjectivity in Action

The indie music performance offers a prime opportunity for examining participatory spectatorship. It is an explicitly receptive context, where the audience plays a conspicuous role in the construction of the event. Unlike cinema or symphonic audiences, indie music audiences have very different norms for bodily comportment. Indie audience behavior is often intensively active and dynamic. At indie music performances, the social space near the front of the stage is characterized by a high degree of direct contact between strangers and, at times, by spirited activity. Indeed, for a portion of the audience, the music performance is a physically taxing experience. However, not all audience members participate in vigorous activity. Some use a mode of comportment similar to that of cinematic audiences; that is, they are physically circumspect and interiorly oriented. For indie music performances, the situated use of the body by audience members entails the positioning of different spectatorships. Since bodily deployment is a constitutive part of spectatorship, it is essential to attend to the different behaviors and activities of audience members and to the relationships these different spectorial positionings have to one another.

Different spectorial modes have been a problem for film theory (Doane 1987). Since concrete practice was originally ignored in the development of spectorial theory, film theory often presented a monolithic model of subjective positionings in which all participants were seen to view the event (Mulvey 1989). When we introduce the notion of participatory spectatorship, a plethora of communicative modalities appear, far greater than the singular, conquering, all-seeing “eye/I” of cinematic spectorial articulations. In participation, subjective relationships can be articulated along other modalities. Participatory spectatorship does not replace or supersede the spectatorship of textual structures. It is just another code of communication. Spectatorship inscribed in the structure of spectacle is yet another. Embodied spectatorship requires an understanding of the intersection of the structural and narrative components of spectacle with the bodies of participants; in other words, the ways we organize and are organized by activity. Both discourse and practice need to be examined in order to understand the nature of subjectivity. Meaning does not come from a symbol itself, but from the interaction between symbol and social action, or the intersection of ideology and practice. To understand the social world, we must look at both internal narratives and practical actions for the consistencies and contradictions between them, and for the ways they can each reinforce or obviate the other.

Turn On the Bright Lights ⁶

This ethnography is meant to add to the growing body of ethnographic and sociohistoric literature that addresses local music communities (Cohen 1991, Finnegan 1989, Shank 1994, Urquia 2004), music genres (Forman 2002, Grossberg 1992, Keil 1966, Negus 1999, Oliver 2001, Rose 1994, Walser 1993), the experience of music (Berger 1999, Grossberg 1997), and the meaning of music as cultural practice in other societies and transnationally (Basso 1985, Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000, Chernoff 1979, Emoff 2002, Feld 1982, Lipsitz 1994, Taylor 1997).⁷ In popular music studies, the general trend has been to focus on the performance, the music performed, the artists, and the music’s production and consumption. Several ethnographies include some examination of audience behavior. There is also literature examining the cultures of fans that seems to vacillate between abstraction and discussions based on interviews with subjects who were asked about their memories of their experiences. Some of the most interesting work in this area has come from those who examine the representations of fanship and fan behavior (Brooker and Jermyn 2002, Hills 2002, Lewis 1992). This ethnography is in a vein similar to the ethnographic writings of Small on classical music and Travis Jackson on jazz, both of whom write detailed examinations of audience practices and subjective responses (Jackson 2003, Small 1998).

Positing the music performance as the unit of analysis necessitates attending to the meaning-making activities of all participants—performers, crews, and audience members. A defining characteristic of the participant structure for indie gigs is that audience members get to choose where they locate themselves within the venue. Unlike traditional symphonic or arena rock concerts with assigned seating, indie gigs have relatively few seats.⁸ This opens up a variety of organizational constructs. Concerts that occur in seated halls place participants in positions where they are equidistant from each other and generally discourage or limit physical contact between audience members. This setting fosters a contemplative and comfortable comportment. In contrast, at non-seated venues, audience members have the opportunity to be close or distant and active or passive. This difference in participant structure has a significant impact on how the event is experienced. While the music performance in the two different kinds of settings may be the same, the range of experiences of the audience in concert halls and gigs is quite varied.⁹ This demonstrates why it is insufficient to merely examine the spectacle on stage. It is not just the spectacle that constitutes an event but a dynamic relationship among an audience, performers, and the performance.

Furthermore, the event space does not in and of itself determine participant structure. The same venue used for a gig one night may be used for ballroom dancing the next. Different music cultures have different notions of appropriate interaction between audience members and performers, and different genres of music frame expectations of appropriate activities in a performance space. For example, piggybacking or taking off one’s shirt are extremely rare for indie shows but are frequent at metal or mainstream rock shows. At indie gigs, activity levels are segmented, highly marked, and disparate. For dance bands, there is a greater amount of movement shared over the entire venue space. In his discussion of southern medicine shows in the early part of the twentieth century, Paul Oliver notes that audience members were expected to interject and respond verbally during the performance, and the performer was expected to be responsive to these interjections (Oliver 1995). In indie, by contrast, verbal interjections are eschewed while music is being performed, and there is some expectation that performers will not respond at all to interjections from audience members.¹⁰ Thus, different genres have different notions of what is appropriate and expected in the performance setting. Not paying attention to the norms of a particular community using a space is similar to not paying attention to cultural differences. It ignores the specific rules that different communities use to accomplish interaction. The physical space is the same, but the participant structure alters how the space is used.

The activities I observed in my ethnography of the British indie music scene were part of a specific community with a specific history. The term “indie” is a diminutive for “independent” rock and pop music. In a broad sense, it refers to the music on independently owned record labels. Indie music is considered to be more experimental, and it tends to appeal to a particular fan base or local community as opposed to a mass audience. Indie music fans are composed almost entirely of adolescents and young adults. Students comprise the majority of British indie music’s fan base.

Indie fans come from a cross-section of classes, from unemployed youth on government relief to affluent private school students. However, much of the indie fan base comes from a middle-class background. In Britain, two-thirds of the indie community is male, one-third female.¹¹ Indie is also primarily a white phenomenon that has very little participation from Britain’s other ethnic communities, which comprise on average only between 1 and 3 percent of an audience on any given night.¹²

Indie music is just one of the genres of music. Yet its members and its events transcend national boundaries. Indie music is played all over the world. The community’s discourse can be found in the international music press and in online chat. Yet indie performances in different cultural settings have different participant structures. Bands report that Japanese fans behave very differently during shows than their European and American counterparts. The participant structure of British and American indie audiences, however, has much in common. Movements that originate in one country are soon found in the other.¹³

Several factors played in the decision to focus my study on independent music in Britain. The first is the comparatively greater cultural focus on music in Britain. In Britain, music and football (soccer) are national passions. However, while football is a passion that takes its fans from childhood to old age, an interest in music is considered to be a youthful pursuit (Frith 1981, Hornby 1992). In Britain, there is a great depth of musical knowledge among the general population. Musical performances are an important part of Britain’s festival cycle. In summer, there are several large music festivals that fans travel from all over the country to attend (Reading, Glastonbury, Gathering of the Tribes, the V Festival, Finsbury Park, T in the Park). These festivals are held so dear that in 1991 the two major weekly music papers (Melody Maker and New Musical Express) listed the Reading festival as the event of the year, two places over the fall of the Berlin Wall. Music is also extensively covered in the British press. At the onset of my research, the aforementioned weekly magazines had a combined circulation of approximately 175,000.¹⁴ Several glossy monthlies were devoted to music, and there was a substantial variety of televised music programming. During my research, I was consistently surprised by people’s passion for music. When having a drink in a nondescript pub in my neighborhood of Islington (a borough of London), I found that the people who befriended me, sometimes fifteen years my senior and whom I would never have suspected of being music enthusiasts, were avid gig goers in their teens and twenties. People told of how they religiously watched Top of the Pops growing up, and of the excitement of listening to the BBC’s weekly countdown of the Top 40. Musical landmarks were everywhere. It even turned out that my local pub, the Hope and Anchor, selected for its proximity to my flat and its particularly fine pinball machine, was one of the key sites for the embryology of the London punk and new wave movements.

This project required attending a considerable number of performances, and I wanted to select music for which I felt some affinity. Having been to hundreds of shows in America, I knew how important it was to choose music I found appealing. While indie bands come from the United States too, Britain is truly the cradle of indie music.¹⁵ I therefore elected to study the music I already loved, the community for which I had a passion, and an event I knew to be centrally important to the experience of music—the British indie music scene.

Indie musical performances that occur in non-seated, indoor venues are called “gigs,” and this is the term I will use.¹⁶ Gigs are staged in all regions of Great Britain—rural, suburban, and urban. They take place in a variety of settings: indoor halls without seats, school gyms, or pubs. The number of participants at a single event can range from under ten to tens of thousands.

In the last few years, several exceedingly readable works have come out that document many aspects of British post-punk and indie music cultures. These books, which address the music’s history, political implications, and connections to local communities’ identities, have been written by scholarly journalists who have graduated from the British weekly music press—David Cavanagh on Creation Records (Cavanagh 2000), John Harris on Britpop (Harris 2003), and Dave Haslam on Manchester (Haslam 2000). As an enthusiast of the British weekly music press’s style of writing about music—intellectually engaged, passionate, but with a playful disregard for formality and highbrow affectations—I find that their writing reflects the vitality of these contradictory impulses within the community. These books are excellent companions for those who are interested in independent music.

Methodology

I really, really wish I could be somewhere else … Razorlight

Conceiving of spectatorship in terms of both empirically detectable signs and phenomenological components requires the application of more than one methodological approach. My methods included: (1) participant observation; (2) interviews (directed and conversational); and (3) text analysis using media produced by and representing the indie community.

The initial study comprised fourteen months of research in Great Britain from July 1993 to September 1994, when I observed and participated in more than one hundred gigs and five festivals.¹⁷ These gigs and festivals varied in size—from small basement clubs to huge festival stadiums—in a variety of locations throughout the United Kingdom that ranged from small villages to urban sprawl.¹⁸ I did not want my sample to reflect merely my own personal taste, so the majority of shows included in the study were bands currently being supported by the weekly music press. I went to shows regardless of how much I thought I would like or dislike them. A majority of the gigs were in London, because this is where I was based. At these gigs, I documented setting features and participant interaction as well as the interactions between performers and audience members, and between audience members and other audience members, before, during, and after a performance. I also went on tours and documented audiences all over England, Scotland, and Wales on a regular basis. I continue to participate actively in the indie community, and this research includes material up to 2005.

I supplemented my participant observation with the video recording of data. Because I was using interaction as my primary text, it was imperative that this interaction be rigorously documented. Video data collection is a useful tool to make interactional strategies accessible. More than forty hours of audience behavior was taped from a location on the side of the stage or some other vantage point that would include both performers and audience members.

I further supplemented these observation techniques with interviews. While observation can give information about what is occurring, it cannot tell us what people think (Obeyesekere 1981). I conducted interviews with a broad range of indie community members from a variety of age groups and experience levels. I spoke to young fans who had just started to go to gigs, fans who followed bands on the road, fans who went to shows for a good night out, and fans who had been going to shows for years. I also interviewed people who had made indie music their lives and livelihoods: journalists, record label executives, booking agents, musicians, band managers, tour managers, road crew, distributors, promoters, and publicists. These interviews were conducted in private and audiotaped. But I also gleaned information from everyday conversations, such as listening to a journalist at a birthday party lament his age or overhearing a professional stammer an excuse for entering a club in the line for paying patrons rather than the line for guests. Their insights and perspectives are spread throughout this work. I have adhered to the anthropologist’s convention of concealing informant identities by using initials. Since anthropologists ask people to reveal some of the most intimate and personal details of their lives, this convention was developed to provide some semblance of privacy and also to free informants to discuss personal topics. I have provided additional information such as age or professional position when it is relevant to the discussion.

My sources have also included the critical discourses and representations of music in popular media. Media and popular characterizations influence people’s conceptions of their own participation. The media sources include documentary and cinematic representations of concerts in addition to British and international music press sources.

From Plus One to A&R

There is no single objective view of gigs because there is no neutral positioning. A person’s placement, activities, and comportment are all read by other participants. Thus, a participant observer is not a neutral eye but an individual positioned in and engaged with an event. Those we try to understand actively try to understand us as well, and to locate us within their cultural landscape (Duranti 1994). In general, most communities do not feature the social scientist within the domain of their normal categories, and therefore she will be positioned by community members within a category they do have. It is imperative that the ethnographer know how she is understood within the community because this ultimately influences the type of data she acquires. My work in the United Kingdom was greatly facilitated by being an American and having an American accent. Britain is a deeply class-conscious society, and the various regional accents are generally associated with particular socioeconomic classes. A Briton speaking to another Briton with a native accent is immediately perceived as being part of a particular social class and having a particular local identity. My American status allowed me to talk to people from all over Britain and from a variety of social classes without the baggage or suspicion that is attached to specific socioeconomic brackets. At various times I was read as an American foreigner, journalist, female fan, tour manager, roadie, friend of the artists, band manager, record company employee, “scenester,” or as a member of the very first category I was put in to—plus one.

Plus one is the amorphous category for the person who is a guest of someone who is on the guest list. The plus one is the companion of someone with status in the community. Plus ones gain all the privileges but bear none of the responsibilities. They get into the venue for free. They get the same privileged access as the person on the guest list without any risk to their status. The plus one’s presence is not questioned and at times is even ignored, which is useful for observation. I spent the beginning of my fieldwork as a plus one. I was fortunate during my years of going to shows in Los Angeles to meet a large number of American and British music professionals. Upon my arrival in London, I was taken to shows as a guest. To most, I was seen as just another American indie music enthusiast who wanted to talk to everyone about music and had no sense of irony.

Before long my constant presence was questioned. The idea that I was a social scientist treating this entertainment form as something worthy of serious consideration was met with a variety of responses, ranging from joyous relief that someone concurred with their opinion of the significance of gigs to friendly chiding that someone would treat this frivolity so earnestly. There was even outright anger that I had somehow perpetuated a scam—shouldn’t I be in a hut somewhere in Papua New Guinea? Wasn’t anthropology something to do with people in third world countries? How could anything as enjoyable as going to shows have anything to do with science? Science should be sterile and unpleasant and have nothing to do with pleasure.

My desire to undermine these prejudices has been a consistent factor in my selection of subject matter. Anthropology is a comparative science. The stereotypical anthropologist studies a remote and small-scale community. However, our own culture should not be ignored or left to other fields. Without a comparative element, the tendency has been to generalize the case study to the ubiquitous. Additionally, the fact that a cultural spectacle is locally considered to be popular entertainment does not preclude its cultural relevance. If this were Balinese shadow theater, its anthropological value would be recognized immediately, but when we transfer these concerns to the institutions of our own society, which we otherwise tend not to question, the legitimacy of studying cultural forms that are characterized as low or popular is disputed.

What people presumed from my interest in music as a social scientist was that I would eventually be writing about it in some public forum; therefore, I was considered to be similar to a journalist. Many fans reacted positively, seeing a chance to talk with me as an opportunity to voice their opinions. My research also resulted in a change of attitude among some music professionals, who exhibited some caution in conversations with me. The British music industry is savvy regarding issues of journalistic and media representation. People wanted to know what my angle was.

About five months into my fieldwork, I was asked to help out at Domino Records, a then-fledgling independent. I felt that this was a chance to give back to the indie community, but working at Domino had many unforeseen consequences. Given the threadbare staff, I wore several professional hats, which gave me new perspectives on indie music. In the office, I participated in many of the challenges involved in running a record company, negotiating press coverage for artists, dealing with issues around musicians’ royalties, and organizing guest lists. I took Domino’s bands out on tour and experienced gigs as work, booking hotel rooms and making sure that bands were safely transported from one venue to another, and that equipment was set up on time. I experienced first hand the difficulties involved in putting on a live show. I quickly understood the cynicism that so many longtime crew members had about touring, and even the boredom that bands would speak of when they had to wait for six hours upon arriving in a new city with nothing to do until showtime.

Working at Domino had other unexpected consequences. It changed the way I was perceived by those in the community. It changed my role from one fraught with ambiguity to one that could be easily understood. I was no longer a vague plus one, or an anthropologist, whatever that meant. I was now seen as having vested interests rather than being a disinterested observer. I was still working as an anthropologist, but now I was “the American I talked to on the phone at Domino.” The caution that I had observed while I was considered an unknown quantity disappeared. Now I was just another record industry person. I became affiliated with Domino’s pedigree of staunch independence. I found out how a person is treated when she is perceived to have credibility, the cultural capital of the indie world. I saw people’s faces light up when I said the name of an independent company rather than a major corporation. Suddenly, I was immersed in the large labyrinth of favors and indebtedness. At the Reading festival one year earlier, I was happily left alone to videotape audiences from the side of the stage. The next year, when I was working at Domino, it was “Can you get a ticket for my friend?” and “I’ll just use your production pass for a minute to get into the photo area.” I was now seen to be responsible for other people rather than someone that required caretaking.

When I returned to America to resume academic pursuits, my friends in the American music industry thought of me differently. My work at the British record company now meant that I was a potential colleague. The following summer I was hired by Reprise Records in Burbank and returned to London to work for the artists and repertoire (A&R) department. A year later I was working full time at MCA Records in Los Angeles as an A&R manager, and this went a long way toward funding my writing. Working for a major corporation in America, I saw that these industry professionals seemed more concerned with keeping their jobs than with getting the job done.

During the initial period of my research, the music movements of the new wave of new wave, Britpop, lo-fi, and trip-hop were lauded and bashed in the pages of the British weekly music press. Since indie music is led by a weekly press that constantly looks for new musical trends to fill its pages, these microscenes have been fast and furious—gothic, industrial, shoe-gazing, T-shirt bands, Madchester, crusty, Britpop, emo, or the early indie shambling scene, to name just a few of the most well known. During the period of my research, the British Phonographic Institute’s rules for the formatting of singles have changed four times.¹⁹ Writing about indie often seems like trying to hit a moving target: as soon as you hit one part, another part has already moved. I entered the field during the festival season of 1993 and returned home near the end of 1994. I continued to gather information on my many subsequent trips to the United Kingdom. I spend several more summers and autumns in London and Manchester. To date, several elements of indie have already changed. In 2005, indie is far more receptive to dance music, and there are far fewer prohibitions on synthetic technologies than was the case in the early to mid-1990s. The two weekly papers are now one. The gender ratio of females to males has begun to approach greater parity, though it is still strongly skewed toward males. Yet I still feel gleeful when I pick up a New Musical Express and find the same kinds of arguments from years ago, reframed in terms of a new band or the “new” trend of “miserabilism.” My research hasn’t ended. I continue my annual pilgrimages to the British music festivals, and my home in the United States is often co-opted by visiting friends, colleagues, or even friends of colleagues who have appeared in Los Angeles only to find that their hotels haven’t been booked. In 2002, I finally made it to the Big Day Out tour, the premier independent festival of the Australian circuit, and I have an eye on going on tour in Japan.

Your Itinerary

Outsiders often represent contemporary rock music as a heathen, immoral, degenerate, hedonistic enterprise filled with idolatry for false idols (Cohen 1971, 1980, Denisoff and McCaghy 1973, Hall 1979, Martin and Segrave 1988, McRobbie and Thornton 1995, Rublowsky 1967, Young 1971). However, for those who participate in the indie community, music, music practices, and one’s participation are meaningful cultural enterprises with ethical implications. Chapter 1 deals with the question of how to define the parameters of indie culture. I examine each of the contested, non-exclusive definitions of indie. Indie extols local/independent authority, the direct experience of music in a live setting, simplicity, the ordinary, asceticism in consumption, and a nostalgic gaze that looks back at a mythologized past of childhood innocence. Indie calls for a return to an imagined “golden age” of music prior to its debasement by the corpulent Leviathan music industry. Indie views its own aesthetic practices and the practices of others through a screen of ethics. It demonstrates at its core that aesthetics is a matter of morality. Indie, like cultural systems in general, has its share of contradictory impulses and practices. At a fundamental level, indie articulates the complementary and opposing principles of Puritanism, Romanticism, and pathos, which I review in detail in chapter 1.

Chapters 2 through 4 detail participatory spectatorship and the participant structure of indie gigs. Chapter 2, “The Zones of Participation,” sets forth the basic outline of the participant structure of the indie gig and its three discrete zones of activity. For the audience members at an indie gig, there are different modes of participation, depending on where one locates oneself within the venue. At successful performances where there are abundant spectators, the area closest to the stage is usually characterized by vigorous movement and high density. Immediately behind is a less compact group of spectators standing relatively still, watching the performance, drinking, and/or smoking. In the back of the venue, in the areas around the bars, people mill about, chatting, ordering drinks, and paying attention to things other than what is occurring on the stage. Within the gig’s participant structure, one’s physical placement and comportment indicate a level of orientation to the performance, the types of activities one will engage in and expect others to engage in, and one’s affiliation with the band performing.

While the first two audience zones are highly focused on the performance, the orientation in zone three is not toward the stage but toward the peripheries of performance. In chapter 3, “Zone Three and the Music Industry,” I discuss the audience members who for various reasons—lack of interest, preference, or dissatisfaction—are not interested in watching the show. I also examine the professionals who comprise the music industry and whose attention often veers from the stage. The activities of the habitual denizens of zone three have enormous consequences for the transnational commerce of music. Gigs are where the status relationships among a professional coterie are established, articulated, and altered. At gigs, professionals portray themselves in opposition to fans by utilizing a system of freebies that includes guest passes and guest lists. This system is part of a general professional ideology of gaining gratis goods and services. A temporary status hierarchy is articulated in the gig setting, where access to privileged space and performers expresses the relative degree of status of a professional at this specific event. Within this context, the band functions as a valorized commodity, where access to performers is a marker of status in a hierarchical system of power and influence peddling.

In chapter 4, “The Participant Structure and the Metaphysics of Spectatorship,” I consider the totality of participant structure and examine how the differing spectorial positions become meaningful in relationship to each other. As audience members age and gain experience, their mode of engagement changes. In the course of an individual’s participation in gig culture, the audience member typically moves from a hot, physical engagement to a cool, composed spectorial mode. The meaning of comportment comes from its cultural and historic context. The gig, ostensibly about music and entertainment, reenacts the broader culture’s ritual drama about metaphysic conversion. The movement from zone one to zone two that appears over time in the gig’s participant structure represents a conversion narrative between the two primary metaphysical systems that combined to form rock music: West African and Western artistic and religious traditions. I argue that the active, bodily engaged comportment of zone one embodies a non-Western metaphysic in which the deployment of the body in danced ritual is essential for spiritual enlightenment. The circumscribed comportment of zone two embodies a Western European metaphysic of transcendence through the control and abnegation of the body and the amplification of contemplation. The understanding of these metaphysical systems and their relationship to each other is filtered through a Protestant perspective that ultimately views non-Western religions as inferior, immature, and heathen. Here, we find one of the primary narratives of Christianity, the conversion of the non-believing “other,” acted out on the secular stage of musical performance, where audience members are to be transformed into adults who sublimate the pleasures of the flesh for the pleasures of the mind. Thus, gigs are both an expression of excess and the subjugation of it. This phenomenon is both religious and secular, artistic and commercial, inextricably intertwined.

Every ritual consists of a series of relationships—among audience members, between audience members and the performance, between the audience and the performers, and between the performers and the performance. My early chapters analyze audience members’ relationships to each other. In chapters 5 and 6, I turn to the relationships between musicians and audience members. In chapter 5, “Performance, Authenticity, and Emotion,” I deal with indie’s performance conventions and the relationship between performers and audience members as a collective. Indie is an art form that is concerned with verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is often considered to have a visual connotation, but here I use it in the broader sense of the appearance or semblance of truth. Authenticity and credibility are connected to the notion of believability, the faith that audiences invest in the veracity of the musical performance. This chapter covers how credibility is conveyed in the indie genre by a lack of stress on virtuosity, an avoidance of the performance postures of other genres, and a valuing of innovation. In indie, emotions are considered to be the essential source of meaning. Indie music values verisimilitude and novelty within a circumscribed generic form. Within this system, emotions are initially valorized by the audience member’s experience of the performance and then, ultimately, denigrated and devalued.

Chapter 6, “Sex and the Ritual Practitioners,” is dedicated to indie’s ritual specialists—musicians, professionals, crew, those audience members who do not opt out of the community, and those audience members who repeatedly seek intimate relations with performers. These participants continue to look to music for meaning long after their peers have left it behind; they believe in the value of music’s emotional epiphanies and often devote their lives to the transitory rewards of participating in gigs. In refusing to leave music behind, ritual practitioners defy the Western Christian cosmology that values the mind over the body, reason over emotion, and capital commerce over nonproprietary experience. To understand the constellation of performer/audience/performance, I examine the relationship between performers and segments of the audience according to the distinctions made among spectorial modes within the indie community’s spectacle and discourses. I discuss mainstream rock imagery and the moral distinctions made by indie audiences about issues of gender and sex. The stereotypes of the “groupie” and mainstream “musician” threaten how intimacy is displayed in the indie community, as well as indie’s austere morality. There is a reciprocal relationship between music’s ritual practitioners, between band members and sexual acolytes. I demonstrate that the gig is a sexual spectacle where male and female powers are symbolically joined onstage in performance and concretely enacted offstage in sexual communion.

I conclude with some final comments in the afterword. Because I come to explicit conclusions at the end of each chapter, the afterword is an overview and provides some final thoughts on indie music, spectatorship, performance, and the role of indie music fans transnationally and beyond.

Conclusion

Leave it all behind … Ride

Subjectivity needs to be understood not just in terms of the internal structures of cultural productions but in embodied practice. In looking at social actors and their roles in a participant structure, we see in indie the articulation of a participatory spectatorship that is inscribed with religious ideology. Indie music performances enact a fundamental Western cultural dichotomy between sentient sensuality and a contemplative mode of sensual abrogation, between emotional expression and stoic internalization. In this economic and institutional sector that is considered to be wholly secular, one finds a community shaped by metaphysical concerns regarding authority, exploitation, and the nature of “authentic” experience.

Metaphysics is a theory of the manner in which one experiences the numinous, where essential meaning is found. Here, music stands in for an experience of divinity. Does one access the divine through bodily circumspection and mental contemplation, or does one access the divine through sacred dance and trance? Does meaning lie in the sacred text of the composer, an already existent meaning, which a conductor and musicians can enliven, or does meaning lie in the temporary improvisational interface between artist, sound, and audience, whereby the body is given over to sacred song and true apprehension is achieved? These are just two of the myriad metaphysical philosophies and possibilities. Indie finds itself wedged between these two, in the live performance of a pre-existing text where value is nevertheless found by momentarily capturing emotion and meaning in the temporary interface between audience, performer, and sound. The arguments regarding indie use a vocabulary of music that camouflages the metaphysical battle being waged. Indie produces the broader cultural narratives that arise from the West’s own conflicts.

In rituals, contradictions can temporarily coexist—the extended family that must break down can be reconstructed, new and old identities can exist side by side. Indie inhabits a contradiction between Puritan asceticism and Romantic emotionalism, between Western and West African metaphysics, between commerce and art—all within a leisure pursuit viewed by the wider culture as frivolous, base, or even worthless. Rituals address cultural conflicts. Some rituals, like rites of passage, address resolvable conflicts. Others, like rites of intensification, address irresolvable conflicts and, therefore, need to be repeated ad infinitum. For most in the indie community, participation in gigs is a rite of passage. As a youth phenomenon, it is temporary; the majority of participants eventually decide to leave the community. The issues and meanings of “youth” addressed and reproduced by participation in this community are resolved by entering the adult world of family and work. The rejection of the community is accompanied by a rejection of its values—that music and emotion matter or that the body is a reliable vehicle for experiencing meaning. What was once meaningful to the insider is worthless to the outsider, which the insider has now become. This ritual event enacts over time an embrace of indie’s values and then a subsequent thwarting of them. Members resolve the conflicts by leaving the community behind. However, nothing repressed is fully resolved, and this conflict will find expression in other ritual forms.

Not all members reject the community, however. For some, this rite of passage becomes a rite of intensification, presenting profound and irresolvable conflicts that only find temporary resolution in the liminal space of performance. For them, the liminal space of the gig is the only place that feels like home. These individuals have difficulty exiting the community and many become professionals—record industry personnel, musicians, or sexual acolytes—dedicating their lives to this art. These individuals represent a critique of society’s cultural precepts. They persist in valuing emotions, revering art that is viewed by mainstream society as not art at all, and demonstrating that sex is not a commodity to be exchanged for material goods.

In the end, this book is essentially about how people make meaning in their lives in day-to-day activities. Meaning does not exist outside of culture but is created within it. Meaning is constructed in a multitude of ways, in mundane interactions, in cultural narratives, and in grand spectacles. These ways of making meaning may initially be imperceptible to the casual observer, but they are there, organizing and making appear ordered a meaningless and unpredictable world.

Here we go … Jon Brion