The Aesthetic Mode of Sociality in Rebetika Subculture Janet Sarbanes Published Online: 18 Feb 2007
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Crete] On: 26 July 2014, At: 11:40 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Popular Music and Society Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpms20 Musicking and Communitas: The Aesthetic Mode of Sociality in Rebetika Subculture Janet Sarbanes Published online: 18 Feb 2007. To cite this article: Janet Sarbanes (2006) Musicking and Communitas: The Aesthetic Mode of Sociality in Rebetika Subculture, Popular Music and Society, 29:1, 17-35, DOI: 10.1080/03007760500142738 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007760500142738 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions Popular Music and Society Vol. 29, No. 1, February 2006, pp. 17–35 Musicking and Communitas: The Aesthetic Mode of Sociality in Rebetika Subculture Janet Sarbanes This essay draws upon concepts of musicking and communitas to argue that, within subculture, an anti-structural mode of sociality takes form in and through aesthetic practices. The argument is perhaps most relevant to ‘‘musicking’’ subcultures such as rebetika, for reasons explored here, but it also speaks to the larger question of how the relation between individual and collective is articulated in a subcultural context. Nobody ever saw a rebetis riding a horse, just as no rebetis would have been seen dead carrying an umbrella. (Elias Petropoulos) Music stands for and encourages resistance to all forms of reification, totalization and reductionism. (Martin Heidegger) In certain contexts, music has a distinctive ability to connect the ‘‘we’’ and the ‘‘I’’ without subordinating one to the other. As Mark Slobin argues in Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West, ‘‘it is both what ‘we’ do, and what ‘I’ do, and the two things are so intertwined as to be inextricable’’ (Slobin 56). Though Slobin does not specifically discuss the Greek urban blues known as the rebetika, nor the subculture associated with it, he refers to Costas Ferris’s 1984 film Rembetiko in order to make Downloaded by [University of Crete] at 11:40 26 July 2014 his larger point: ‘‘Rembetiko uses a local band as a metaphor for the recent past of Greece, particularly stressing the intimate links between the individual singer and the collective ensemble, and their complete interpenetration with the communal ‘audience’’’ (Slobin 108). Following Slobin, my argument identifies a particular mode of sociality with musical or ‘‘musicking’’ subculture, and takes rebetika as an especially cogent manifestation of that social form. But, while I read rebetika through the lens of subculture, I also read subculture through the lens of rebetika, which in its specific features and history has much to tell us about the role music may play in spreading subcultural values and subjectivity. In recent years, an emergent strain of subcultural studies has taken issue with the approach to subculture developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Centre for ISSN 0300-7766 (print)/ISSN 1740-1712 (online) # 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/03007760500142738 18 J. Sarbanes Contemporary Cultural Studies, with its strong emphasis on class-based forms. The Marxist roots of the CCCS perspective, these critics argue, tend to obscure both the dynamic nature of lived subculture (its capacity for change beyond the moment of anti-hegemonic inception) and the crucial role of the individual in subcultural signification. David Muggleton advocates instead a Weberian approach of methodological individualism, which treats collectivities as ‘‘solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in the course of subjectively understandable action’’ (Muggleton 23). Only subjective accounts of subculture, says Muggleton, can help us to understand its unique accomplishment, which he takes to be the ‘‘creation of a collective space where individual difference and freedom is allowed to flourish.’’ What Muggleton seeks to correct are deterministic narratives that ‘‘picture those involved in subcultures as passive pawns of history’’ (3). What he claims to uncover, via an empirical sampling of the subjective meaning, values, and motives of those involved in style subcultures, is an emphasis on flux, plurality, and heterogeneity that cannot adequately be represented by the collectivist paradigm of working-class subcultures advanced by the CCCS. What he occludes, however, is the explicit acknowledgment in certain CCCS texts, particularly Dick Hebdige’s 1979 Subculture: The Meaning of Style (which he heavily critiques), that something about subculture has always escaped collectivist interpretations—and that that something has to do with aesthetic practice. A ‘‘homology’’ of subcultural activity was first posited by CCCS critic Paul Willis in Profane Culture (1978) and taken up a year later by Hebdige, who defines it as ‘‘the symbolic fit between the values and lifestyles of a group, its subjective experience and the musical forms it uses to express or reinforce its focal concerns’’ (Hebdige 112). As wild and anarchic as they may appear to the dominant culture, Hebdige argues, subcultures possess their own ‘‘extremely orderly’’ internal structure, such that ‘‘each part is organically related to other parts’’ (113). Obviously, this homology subtends the structuralist reading of subculture—and yet, Hebdige suggests toward the end of Subculture, since the ‘‘semiotic facts’’ created through subcultural practices are constantly changing, they are perhaps better understood by emphasizing the position Downloaded by [University of Crete] at 11:40 26 July 2014 of the speaking subject over structure and system—‘‘the process of meaning- construction rather than… the final product’’ (118). Searching for a more dynamic formulation of subcultural homology, he turns briefly but suggestively from semiotics to art, more specifically to ‘‘the notion of art as ‘work,’ as ‘practice,’ as a particular transformation of reality’’ (118). The static homology model has been similarly challenged within the field of sociology of music, which in the 1980s and 1990s began to study music not as text, i.e. a symbolic reflection of society, but as practice, ‘‘an active ingredient of social formation’’ (DeNora 3). Studies such as Ruth Finnegan’s The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (1989), Simon Frith’s Performing Rites (1998), and especially Tia DeNora’s Music in Everyday Life (2000) all explore music’s role as a social technology, worked by and upon individuals to shape subjectivity and social Popular Music and Society 19 interaction. DeNora suggests that music performs two interrelated functions, the first of which is semiotic: music carries ‘‘secondary significations,’’ connotes certain values and concerns. Music’s other function, which I largely focus on here, is experiential: it offers ‘‘an exemplar for styles of being’’ through sonic parameters such as ‘‘pace, rhythm, the vertical and horizontal ‘distances’ between tones,’’ etc. (DeNora 123). Music links the individual and the collective via modes of action, feeling, and embodiment, forms of relating capable not merely of reflecting existing social structures, but of generating forms of interaction that exceed and contest those structures. For the most part, however, DeNora, with Frith and Finnegan, tends to focus on the prescriptive role of music—that is to say, music as a device of social ordering. As Frith himself notes, this approach is more typical of anthropology than subcultural studies, where the emphasis is usually on social disordering (Frith 179). But what if we were to go a third route, not eschewing a harmonious paradigm of the social for subcultural ‘‘noise,’’ but locating in subcultural aesthetic practice an(other) mode of sociality altogether, one that, pace Muggleton, allows for both collectivity and individual difference and freedom? What if the unique ability of subculture to allow for different ‘‘styles of being’’ derives from a different style of being together that takes form in and through aesthetic practices? Musicking Manges: Rebetika’s Primal Scene Rebetika music