Cultural Sociology

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Music Scenes, Space and the Body Christopher Driver and Andy Bennett Cultural Sociology published online 22 September 2014 DOI: 10.1177/1749975514546234

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Cultural Sociology 17–1 Music Scenes, Space © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: and the Body sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1749975514546234 cus.sagepub.com

Christopher Driver Griffith University, Australia

Andy Bennett Griffith University, Australia

Abstract The concept of scene is now a primary conceptual framework for studying the production and consumption of popular music. In a formative essay, Straw (1991) offered the important observation that scene could be theorized as both a local and trans-local phenomenon. Peterson and Bennett (2004) have added a new dimension to this conceptualization of music scenes through positing virtuality as a further medium for scene involvement. Missing from each element of this tripartite model of scene – local, trans-local, and virtual – is any consideration of how music scenes are enacted through the process of embodiment. In this article, we argue that embodiment is critically important for how music scenes are constructed, enacted and maintained by participants. The corporeal element of scene introduced through its embodiment by social actors, we argue, is key to our understanding of the music scene as an anchoring place within everyday urban, regional and, increasingly, rural landscapes.

Keywords body, bodies, embodiment, music, scene, music scene, popular music, space

Introduction The concept of scene has long been associated with popular music, most typically in the context of music journalism and as a vernacular, everyday descriptor for various manifestations of collective musical life (Peterson and Bennett, 2004). Often, this use of scene has involved its marrying up with a particular urban setting, well known examples here

Corresponding author: Christopher Driver, PhD Candidate, Arts & Education, 1 (G30) 4.06A, Gold Coast Campus, Griffith University, QLD, 4222, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC) on October 7, 2014 2 Cultural Sociology being the Chicago blues scene (Grazian, 2003) and the London pub rock scene of the early 1970s (Laing, 1985). In such instances, the notion of music scene becomes a form of collective association and a means through which individuals with different relationships to a specific genre of music produced in a particular space articulate a sense of collective identity and belonging. As Peterson and Bennett observe, scene in this sense denotes ‘contexts in which clusters of producers, musicians, and fans collectively share their common musical tastes and collectively distinguish themselves from others’ (2004: 1). Only in more recent times has ‘scene’ been developed as a theoretical framework in academic studies of popular music, its local and global infrastructures, producers, per- formers and audiences. In the 20-odd years since Straw’s (1991) formative and highly influential essay on scenes was first published, an ever growing canon of research has presented a wealth of theory and data on music scenes, variously conceptualizing the latter as local, trans-local and virtual socio-cultural phenomena. While such work has done much to map the spatial elements of music scenes – in both physical and cyber contexts – to date there has been very little engagement with the question of music scenes as embodied phenomena. However, as Driver (2011) observes, if music scenes exist as spaces of collective socio-cultural engagement with music, then the bodies that occupy those spaces also have a part to play in the way that music scenes are enacted and sustained over time. The purpose of this article is thus to begin the task of re-theorizing the concept of scene in a way that acknowledges the importance of the body. The first section of the article reconsiders the key studies that have examined music scenes and their contribution to our understanding of the music scene as a socio-cultural phenomenon. The following section offers a detailed critique of the music scene literature’s failure to engage with issues relating to the body and the need to effect this conceptual shift in order to develop a deeper understanding of music scenes and their place within contemporary, late modern societies. The final section of the article presents a case study demonstrating the importance of the body for our understanding of music scenes using original empirical data generated through research conducted by one of the authors on the Hardcore scene in Southeast Queensland, Australia. In presenting this case study we argue that bodies are not just the ends of doing music scenes – they are also the means by which scenes must be continuously re-produced.

Theorizing Music Scenes As noted above, the first academic study to systematically position scene as a theoretical framework for use in the study of popular music was Will Straw’s (1991) ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music’. Published in the journal Cultural Studies, Straw’s article brought a new and innovative perspective to bear on popular music research which, up until that point, had tended either to ignore the spatial dynamics of popular music’s socio-cultural reception altogether, or to frame it in terms of subcultural or counter-cultural enclaves (see, for example, Hebdige, 1979). According to Straw, such conceptualizations of music reception were too narrow to account for the diverse ways in which popular music is appropriated and re-articulated by audiences. Similarly, argues Straw, in the case of concepts such as subculture and community, the focus on localized style-based reactions to music overlooks the ways in which clusters

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC) on October 7, 2014 Driver and Bennett 3 of collective music appropriation are trans-locally connected. Thus, according to Straw, a key value of scene as a conceptual framework is the more affective, emotive, fluid and trans-local qualities that it brings to our understanding of musicalized meaning and practice in everyday life. For Straw, scenes often transcend particular localities ‘reflect[ing] and actualiz[ing] a particular state of relations between various populations and social groups, as these coalesce around particular coalitions of musical style’ (1991: 379). Straw’s work must be located in the context of a debate regarding musical affect that had been ongoing for several years before the publication of his study. Thus, for some theorists musical affect, like collective responses to style and other aspects of popular culture, was grounded in social class and the way this was experienced by social actors at an everyday level. This is seen quite strikingly in Willis’s (1978) study of early 1970s bikers and hippies whose respective preferences for rock ‘n’ roll and progressive rock are, according to Willis, a direct reflection of their working-class and middle-class back- grounds. Willis applies the concept of homology to explain the interlocking of class and taste in music and associated stylistic resources. Thus, he argues, what may on the sur- face appear as spontaneous responses to cultural objects such as, in the case of the bikers, a leather jacket or a rock ‘n’ roll 45, are in reality the manifestation of pre-coded and pre-digested ways of responding to a particular genre of music and its associated stylistic resources that firmly fixate around male working-class values of camaraderie. In this case, the straightforward rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll provide an uncluttered soundtrack for social dancing. For Willis, however, such bodily engagement with the music is seemly set apart in a large sense from the subjectivity of the bikers themselves. There is no sense in Willis’s argument that a deeply reflexive and subjectively articulated form of musical embodiment is occurring here. Rather, through the conceptualisation of the dance as a straightforward homological response to the music and its stylistic trappings, Willis depicts the act of social dancing as a response that is as pre-programmed as those he perceives in relation to the other stylistic assemblages of the bikers. Countering such class-based analyses of musical affect, other theorists argued that one primary effect of post-1945 popular music’s nature as a globally mediated form was to shift the relationship between music and community from a more physical basis to one based around the notion of affective communities. Thus, observes Frith: ‘“Community” became something that was created by the music, that described the musical experience’ (1981: 166–7; emphasis in original). Frith’s notion of affective communities shaped around shared understandings of musical experience dramatically cuts across Willis’s homological interpretation of musical taste and affect. According to Frith, rather than music eliciting narrow and uniform responses based around common experiences of class, and class-based communities, popular music itself is capable of driving particular aestheticized responses, the latter underpinning collective judgements regarding music’s intrinsic value as a cultural form. Straw’s study of scenes effectively picks up this thread of Frith’s work through positioning music scenes as socio-cultural phenomena that are not tied to pre-existing notions of community grounded in class and tradition but rather facilitating new forms of collectivity and connectivity that centre upon shared participation in more recent forms of material culture. Straw’s work has, in turn, inspired a range of subsequent studies that have significantly broadened the remit of the scene’s perspective. Kruse (1993), although retaining the term

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC) on October 7, 2014 4 Cultural Sociology subculture in her work, broadens the concept of ‘trans-local’ connectivity. Taking Straw’s lead, Kruse moves beyond the notion of subculture as a locally-bounded construct, recast- ing it as a trans-local phenomenon whose members, despite being dispersed across a wide geographic area, share aesthetic attachments to specific genres of music as well as common understandings of how these musics are appropriately consumed. Shank (1994) further adapts Straw’s idea of music scenes as loci for local-global interchange, by consid- ering how the local punk scene in Austin, Texas, has drawn inspiration and creative nour- ishment from globally-profiled punk acts, such as the Sex Pistols, who played a show in the nearby city of San Antonio on 8 January 1978 as part of their now legendary tour of the southern USA (see Savage, 1992). A further important aspect of Shank’s work is his analysis of the often conflicting dynamics that frame the relationships of diverse music scenes existing within the same local space. Shank uses the examples of punk and Texan Cowboy song as illustrative examples of how the cultural and political economies of different music genres existing in the same physical location can result in widely contrasting discourses of space and place in a late modern urban context. Moving beyond the concept of scene as bespeaking coalitions of musical taste and associated manifestations of collective cultural identity, a number of researchers have examined the broader significance of local music scenes as loci for forms of DIY (do-it- yourself) cultural labour and DIY economic activity. An effective example of this is seen in Stahl’s (2004) work on the indie music scene in the Canadian city of Montreal. As Stahl illustrates, local music scenes invariably embrace a broad range of activities, including music-making, production, promotion – as well as the necessary infrastructure of physical resources, such as venues, clubs, rehearsal space, recording studios, and record/music shops, needed to sustain such activities. Again, there is a firm focus in Stahl’s work on scenes not as isolated, parochial and peripheral cultural phenomena, but as trans-locally connected nodes of cultural production and consumption. The diversity and complexity of contemporary music scene activity is also addressed by Peterson and Bennett (2004), who introduce a three-tier model of music scenes. This comprises the already familiar terms ‘local’ and ‘trans-local’ scene, but adds a new category in the form of ‘virtual’ scene. As this term suggests, virtual scenes utilize internet communication technology, thus allowing geographically dispersed fans to interact online. As Peterson and Bennett observe:

Whereas a conventional local scene is kept in motion by a series of gigs, club nights, fairs, and similar events, where fans converge, communicate and reinforce their sense of belonging to a particular scene, the virtual scene involves direct net-mediated person-to-person communication between fans … This may involve, for example, the creation of chat-rooms or list-serves dedicated to the scene and may involve the trading of music and images on-line. (2004: 11)

The notion of the ‘virtual’ scene thus opens up a new means of conceptualizing scene membership, not as a necessarily face-to-face activity but one that is conducted primarily, if not exclusively, in the virtual spaces of the internet. In this way the internet becomes an important new medium for forms of musicalized association, the physical, face-to- face forms of interaction that characterize the local scene being replaced with new forms

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC) on October 7, 2014 Driver and Bennett 5 of interaction that centre primarily on articulations of knowledge, taste and authority that go along with a prolonged commitment to a particular genre or genres of music. Although offering a highly comprehensive series of ways in which to conceptualize music scenes, none of the above work pays very much attention to the role and significance of the body in the socio-cultural construction of music scenes. To paraphrase Cohen’s similar criticism of subcultural theory, the existence of bodies as an aspect of music scenes is cursorily acknowledged in current research on music scenes to the extent that they merely ‘[flit] across the screen’ (1987: iii). Indeed, the legacy of subcultural theory is writ large in the scant attention that scene scholarship has paid to the importance of the body. Thus, if Willis’s (1978) work displays an interest in the stylized body, then this interest is one that locates the body firmly in a matrix of underlying structural circumstances that override the body’s reflexive agency; the agency of the individual is here effectively the product of a symbolic dance with a predetermined repertoire of cultural responses. Similarly, if Hebdige (1979) regards the body of the punk as a cutting spectacle in the austere landscape of post-war Britain, little regard is paid to individual agency. Rather, the human body is cast as a canvas, a site for the sartorial display of post-war youth cultural history in ‘cut-up and mix’ fashion from which meaning can be extracted using similar methods to those applied in deciphering the meaning of works of abstract art. If the theorization of music scenes has avoided strait-jacketing human subjects in quite the same ways as subcultural theory, by the same token it is yet to develop a means of integrating music scenes and human bodies in ways that fully recognize their interdependency.

Music Scenes and the Body Almost by design, the notion of ‘scene’ has fostered little philosophy regarding the corporeal investment that is entailed in the ongoing development of distinctive youth- cultural spaces. While the body, as a vehicle for temporal cultural experience (Bennett, 1999; Kahn-Harris, 2007), has been well worked into the literature on music scenes, the issue of its ‘ontogenetic’ development (see Ingold, 1990: 214) in relation to social- cultural experience has still to be fully engaged. Yet much has been written regarding the ‘mind/body problematic’ (Crossley, 2007: 81) in wider cultural sociology, where sociological interest in specific embodied competences and the ‘body pedagogics’ (Shilling, 2007; Crossley, 2007; Lande, 2007) through which they are incorporated has been more fully developed. These studies recognize how skilled practice does not manifest from innate human potential. Rather, distinctive ‘body techniques’ (Mauss, 2006 [1935], cited in Crossley, 2007) imply a culturally-enacted process of becoming-other (see Lande, 2007). At the same time, such processes refer to a particular interrelationship between people and their environments that, even in work concerned to emphasize the importance of bodies, remains relatively unexplored. There has been little attempt in studies of music scenes to acknowledge not only that ‘culture’ constitutes an important part of the environment in which organisms grow (Ingold, 1990; Ingold and Kurttila, 2000), but that organisms play a co-constitutional role in the shaping of the environments they inhabit (see Casey, 2001).

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There are numerous (and systemic) reasons for these oversights. While we intend to address these here, in truth they are inherited from broader epistemological discourse nurtured by a deep-rooted ethnocentrism in modern Anglo-American social science. Scholarly attitudes to studying those cultures and traditions of indigenous peoples destroyed by colonialism or under threat from globalization have been quite different to scholarly attitudes applied to forms of ‘popular culture’ in contemporary Western societies. The former tends to position its subjects as essentially passive receivers of cultural knowledge and sensibilities (Ingold and Kurttila, 2000), the latter as free- thinking creative appropriators of material culture. Epistemological questions have then tended not to be too rigorously interrogated by scholars of popular (Western) forms of culture who have practised their scholarship according to increasingly unten- able divisions between structure and agency, nature and culture, mind and body (see Crossley, 2007). While scholars of less musically-centred youth cultures have read more broadly on developing theories in the geographies and anthropologies (see, for instance, Evers, 2009), sociologically-oriented scholarship on music scenes has tended to look almost exclusively inward for inspiration. It is no coincidence then that, in studies of popular music-centred cultural groupings, bodies occupy a kind of theoretical ‘no man’s land’ between the structuralist interpretations of the Birmingham School and the polarized postmodern conceptual landscape of post-subcultural theories. In both cases, the foci of analyses tended to be the processes of signification that were the point of doing cultural activity (in the West). The former, through its relentless emphasis on class, read into the activities and textual production of actors a collective articulation of group identity and resistance. The latter has tended to pursue the multiplicity that characterizes these articulations at the level of the individual and what this might mean for subjectively lived out cultural identities. Straw’s theoretical introduction to the concept of scene established from the outset a focus on the simul- taneous flow of local and trans-local information and discursive resources that could be deployed in order to achieve an ‘expressive unity of musical practices’ (1991: 369). Despite validly noting ‘the preoccupation of music sociologists with the expressive substance of musical forms’, Straw’s concern with musical taste owes more to an interest in the political salience of ‘cultural texts’ and ‘commodities’ within local ‘systems of articulation’ than to the actual forms of sociality within and towards which they are deployed. Rather than reading musical communities – as earlier writ- ers did – as locked into a particular cultural aesthetic, the aim here is to develop a sense in which shifting aesthetic orientations are made relevant by a locally-specific relational positionality within a globalized field of cultural consumption. The catch, as it were, is that the aesthetic dimensions of musical practice are seen to provide the cultural impetus for subjective expressions or articulations of social experience. On the other hand, having been primarily developed alongside work on reflexive modernization in broader sociological thinking (Giddens, 1991), other proponents of ‘scene theory’ were much more interested in tearing down what were perceived as the archaic limitations of structuralism than in repositioning the parameters of agency to account for the eclectic consumption patterns of postmodern subjects. This is no coincidence, since an important touchstone of structuralist work was that participants of music scenes were supposed to be locked into particular ‘ways of being’ determined

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC) on October 7, 2014 Driver and Bennett 7 largely – in fact, exclusively – by the conditions of social class (Bennett, 1999: 607). It was imperative, then, that the theoretical development of alternative spatial concepts, such as ‘scenes’, regard ‘individuals as active consumers whose choice reflects a self- constructed notion of identity’ (Bennett, 1999: 607). In this sense, the deployment of the concept of agency alongside the new enthusiasm for ‘scenes’ was greatly impacted by the political imperatives of works aimed at overhauling the orthodoxy of earlier structuralist interpretations of youth cultural activity. Likewise, as new researchers sought to distance themselves from the structural rigid- ity of the subculture model (see Hall and Jefferson, 1976), the spatial malleability of scenes and the temporal and performative nature of contemporary cultural affiliations helped to illustrate both the fluidity and the ephemerality of post-subcultural sites (Bennett, 1999, 2000; Muggleton, 1997, 2000). Indeed, as Bennett writes, ‘the term “subculture” is also deeply problematic in that it imposes rigid lines of division over forms of sociation which may, in effect, be rather more fleeting, and in many cases arbitrary’ (1999: 603, our emphasis). Bennett’s point, underpinned by a strong programme of ethnographic fieldwork, was that young members of music scenes were not as locked into these identities as had previously been supposed, and that identity performances were rather more temporal and playfully-enacted phenomena. It was on the back of these observations that Bennett suggested Maffesoli’s notion of ‘neo-tribe’ as a much more adequate way of conceiving of the social formations that populate (and propagate) music scenes (1999: 603). Correctly posited as the collective epicentre of distinctive leisure practices, scenes have often been analysed as cut off from the everyday practices of social obligation and ‘growing up’. Such reasoning stems from an emphasis on the multiplicity of identity, where the reflexively aware agent is supposed to be able to meet the performative demands of whatever identity is required in any given context (see Robards and Bennett, 2011). Focusing on the multiplicity of identity in this way may serve to affirm the observation that youth cultural activity is not all that scene members do but, in doing so, it glosses over the ways in which the ‘action-potential’ (see Duff, 2010) of human bodies structures possibilities for, and repertoires of, everyday practice. It is worth noting that these ideas are not too distant from Bourdieu’s social praxeology, a link that Driver (2011) has previously explored through the concept of ‘habitus’. As Driver (2011: 984) writes, habitus:

…is a way of reintroducing the ‘immediate, lived experience of agents in order to explicate the categories of perception and appreciation (dispositions) that structure their action from inside’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p.11, their emphasis). To access the habitus is to access the embodied residue of lived histories, for bodies are defined by their dynamic powers of perception and action incorporated from their being-in-world (Casey 2001).

For all this emphasis on the temporality of the neo-tribal experience, there is plenty of credible empirical evidence to suggest that doing music scenes entails, at least for some, a much deeper connection to self and to social orientation. For instance, Fox’s (1987) study of a suburban American punk scene identified how, while some members of the scene exemplified rather part-time modes of participation, others – the ‘hardcore’

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC) on October 7, 2014 8 Cultural Sociology punks – experienced their identities across the various contexts of their everyday lives. Indeed, despite the obvious point that doing music scenes is not all that scene members do, the ‘concept of everyday life draws attention to the ways in which individuals, who may spend their lives moving within a plurality of contexts, may nonetheless experience these contexts as part of a seamless flow’ (Kahn-Harris, 2007: 55). Kahn-Harris, in his work on the global extreme metal scene, describes how scene members embark on various programmes of participatory engagement which gradually come to be more involved than merely attending musical performances and maintaining the appropriate visual signifiers. As members of music scenes develop more active participatory sche- mas, observes Kahn-Harris, they seek increasingly creative ways to practise their scene identities in more mundane ways, thus merging the gap between scene practices and everyday life. While there are certainly observations to make here about the struggles of maintaining such forms of identification beyond adolescence and young adulthood, what we can see developing is a sense in which investments in distinctive leisure activities may deepen over time. These kinds of trajectories across scene/s have been similarly articulated in numerous studies since the ‘ethnographic turn’ (Bennett, 2002). In mapping the internal distribu- tion of power and prestige among members of certain youth cultures, Thornton’s notion of ‘subcultural capital’ (1995) emphasized how scene-specific knowledge and embodied forms of ‘clubculture’ competences accorded with individuals’ perceived degree of authenticity in the eyes of their peers. In contrast to earlier work on ‘subcultures’, Thornton located the diffusive role of the media as an essential resource for all participants of music scenes. In doing so, the criteria for membership of such enclaves shifted from one’s prescribed locatedness in society to reflexively pursued trajectories of participation and identification. Though Thornton did not specifically address the corporeality of knowledge in her work, it is easy to see how this kind of stratification intersects with thinking about bodies. Key here is the sense in which competence is posited as a trajec- tory with no finite beginning or end; participation moves from an initial period of jarring, cognitively-designed action towards a cultural competence characterised by the fluent, sensuous negotiation of the dance music club. Driver (2011: 981), for instance, has observed how subcultural capital in the hardcore scene is bound up in bodily comportment or the way scene members ‘carry themselves’ and embodied competences, pre- cisely because they are perceived to emerge from reflexively-unavailable knowledge. This logic of authenticity is founded on the assumption – widespread among his respondents – that such techniques only emerge via a sustained programme of participation and ‘concernful absorption’ (Casey, 2001: 684) of experience. Recently, this logic has been extended in work concerning the broader biographical trajectories of youth subculturalists (Bennett and Hodkinson, 2012; Bennett, 2013). As researchers emphasize the various ways in which ageing participants of music scenes maintain their identities into adulthood, a fuller picture is emerging of a much less ‘arbitrary’ relationship between youth and their cultural investments in leisure spaces. Indeed, there is evidence that the ‘continuation in taste patterns among ageing individuals is symbolic of the transformation of consumer lifestyles into modes of cultural empowerment through which ageing individuals continue to construct and articulate identities and claim distinctiveness in contemporary everyday life’ (Bennett and

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Hodkinson, 2012: 3). Such evidence is also being collated by scene members themselves, where the topic of members of supposedly ‘alternative’ music scenes meeting the responsibilities of parenthood has featured in several recent books and documen- tary-style films (Lindberg, 2009; Nevins, 2011). Similarly, this bridging of the gap between the historically disparate studies of youth culture and transitions (to adulthood) is yielding renewed interest in the former as a field of micro-economic and entrepreneurial production (Luvaas, 2012; Bloustien and Peters, 2011). Inevitably, these interests have driven an effort to theorize the relationship between youth cultural practice and the decidedly ‘adult’ activity of work and employment. To this end, draw- ing on recent multinational research on creative careers, Bloustien and Peters have argued for the concept of ‘serious play’ (2011: 17) in grasping the impact of young people’s ‘microworlds’ in the process of becoming-adult. The concept is useful because it provides a way of conceptualizing the corporeal impact of cultural experience on both learning to perform music scenes and, through its transferability to economic fields of action, the dynamism of embodied ‘action-potential’ (Duff, 2010). Similar observations emphasizing the corporeal impact of subcultural participation have been made concerning practitioners of certain lifestyle-oriented sports (Evers, 2009). Indeed, Evers has observed how surfers must develop an ‘affective attunement’ (2009: 899) to their quite particular local ecologies in order to competently ride the waves, effectively learning to ‘feel’ their way along the wave. This kind of metamorpho- sis of perception implies more than a skilled feel for bathymetry; it speaks to bodily comportment, emotional predisposition and modes of desire that surfers acquire across a multitude of sustained cultural practices. In short, it speaks to a way of being-in-the- world that transcends reflexive motivation and cognitively designed action.

Case Study: The Local Hardcore Scene in Southeast Queensland We will now advance this argument through data gathered as part of a recent research project on self-identifying members of the hardcore scene in Queensland, Australia. Hardcore refers to a style of music with roots in American iterations of punk rock during the late 1970s. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of sustained participation in the hardcore scene upon the everyday lives of scene members. The empirical data for this research was collected over a 12-month period between 2011 and 2012. Respondents were generated using the ‘snowballing’ method (Noy, 2008), the idea of employing this method of sampling being that the criteria for participation ‘in the scene’ would be determined by the collective perception of the research sample, rather than by the pre-existing prejudices of those doing the research. Since this data was gathered from a position of ‘initial cultural proximity’ (Hodkinson, 2005) to the Queensland Hardcore scene, circumventing these prejudices was imperative to the integrity of the research (although it did produce a sample that suffered greatly from the patriarchal structures of the scene). In all, 30 semi-structured one-to-one interviews were conducted with research participants between the ages of 20 and 34. As noted by numerous scholars of heavy music cultures, hardcore is performed in an overwhelmingly male-dominated space (Haenfler, 2006; Williams, 2011; Riches, 2011; Sewell, 2012). Indeed, after pressing

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC) on October 7, 2014 10 Cultural Sociology interviewees for referrals to female hardcore scene members, only five respondents were women. This bias reflects the close interrelationship between ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (see Connell, 2005) and the logic of authenticity that operates within the scene – one explicated in detail elsewhere (Driver, forthcoming). Interviews were recorded with respondents’ prior consent using a portable digital recording device, stored on a pass- word-encrypted external storage drive and subsequently transcribed in full. This process was conducted in accordance with the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research and full approval was obtained from our university’s Human Research Ethics Committee before the research began. Further to the conditions of these provisions, and to protect the identities of respondents, all data used throughout this article has been de-identified. One of the interventions it was hoped the above programme of research would make within scholarly work on distinctive youth cultural groupings was to investigate how the long-term participation in such activity is characterized by a more permanent or at least wider impact on participants’ general behaviours and dispositions. For one of the prob- lems with contemporary investigations of youth culture is the tendency to treat the actions and practices of adherents as an ongoing effort to develop themselves as a subjectively-constructed locus of meaning and representation. At the root of this problem is the implicit assumption in contemporary ethnographic studies of music scenes that the motivations for participation in and forms of attachment to them are reflexively available to the actors themselves, their actions and practices the result of their having encountered certain ‘cultural’ resources that offer opportunities for creative appropriation. Here, ‘culture’ is positioned as something that exists ‘in the heads’ of actors, and the process of its transmission figured as one of the cognitive apprehension of a codified system of ‘rules and representations’ (Ingold and Kurttila, 2000: 193). Such definitions are incongruous with the testimony of participants of youth cultural groups themselves, who often stress the corporeal development of such knowledge. The difference is one between what Ingold and Kurttila have described as ‘LTK (traditional knowledge as generated in the practices of locality)’ and ‘MTK (traditional knowledge as enframed in the discourse of modernity)’ (2000: 184), invoking, to recall an earlier discussion, an important (and prolific) juxtaposition between the ways in which indigenous peoples understand ‘traditional’ knowledge and the discourses of cognitive apprehension that underpin modern Western conceptions of what it means to ‘know’. For instance, focusing on the ways in which the Sami – a people indigenous to Northern Finland – learn their culture through the routines of inhabiting the forests of Lapland, Ingold and Kurttila explain how becoming-Sami requires that individuals are presented by their community with particular opportunities for perception and action that allow them to develop a sensory repertoire which facilitates suitable ways of being in the forest, as defined by their particular farming and agricultural requirements and needs. The main example offered concerns the tasks allocated to various individuals in the forest, since it is through the completion of these that specific sensitivities to ‘movements of the wind, of deer and of other people’ (2000: 189) are developed. ‘What happens, in effect, is that people develop their own way of doing things, but in environmental contexts structured by the presence and activities of predecessors’ (2000: 193). It is, thus,

Downloaded from cus.sagepub.com at Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (IMBC) on October 7, 2014 Driver and Bennett 11 this attunement to the ebb and flow of their environment upon which their cultural knowledge, of ‘how we do things here’, hinges (2000: 192).

… a really traditional person is one who knows the country ‘like the back of his hand’. This does not mean that he carries it in the form of a cognitive map inside his head. But is does mean that, through having grown up there, he has learnt to ‘know’ it rather as an experienced craftsman might be said to know his raw material. That is, he is acutely sensitive to its forms and textures, can respond creatively to its variations, and is ever alert to the possibilities these afford – and the hazards they present – for pursuing different kinds of tasks. Such, in short, is the nature of LTK. (Ingold and Kurttila, 2000: 186)

Of course, what it means to be of the Sami is very different to what it means to be of the hardcore scene. Yet similar narratives are commonplace in work on youth cultures and music scenes, not least in research on hardcore (see, for instance, Haenfler, 2006). Below, Michael, a 25-year-old construction worker and musician, describes his experience of becoming competent (read:culturally knowledgeable) in the mosh pit:

I feel like if you’re in there getting amongst the energy it’s something you didn’t think about, it just started to happen. Obviously you’ve seen other people do it and said that looks like a way to get it out but when it’s happening to me, if it’s authentic, you didn’t even think about it, it just started. And when it’s finished you don’t know why it happened – it just did … It didn’t instantly captivate me in a way that I wanted to get in there immediately. I understood the message but I still enjoyed every part of that aggression standing still on the side of the stage. But then one day the aggression takes over and, uncontrollably, you end up in there.

In this instance, the sustained exposure to the visceral intensity (Ingold and Kurttila might say, ‘textures’) of Hardcore is what drives the ability to ‘just move’ into Hardcore kids’ action-repertoires. Of course, not all such participatory trajectories are as abrupt and symbolic interactionists may point to how such testimony appeals to the discursive construction of ‘authenticity’ around the respondent’s own trajec- tory through the Hardcore scene (see Williams, 2011). Yet, what is implied here, by Michael, is less a process of reflexive observation and more a slow, experientially- driven development of a distinctive form of dexterity. Dexterity here implies something akin to Bourdieu’s notion of a ‘feel for the game’ (see Jenkins, 2002), in the ability of the agent to enact ‘the continual adjustment or “tuning” of movement in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the emergent task’ (Bernstein in Ingold, 2001: 21). Of course the entirety of the pedagogical process towards the development of this sense of dexterity is not reflexively available to the respondent. Just as important as learning the appropriate movement/s at a Hardcore show is becoming able to weather the relentless col- lisions between (often) hulking bodies (see Weinstein’s discussion of ‘mesomorphic’ and ‘ectomorphic’ body types (2000, cited in Sewell, 2012: 115)), to defend against wayward head-high karate-style kicks and developing the sheer stamina required to endure what is often – at least in sub-tropical Australia – a small, crowded and heat-filled industrial ware- house with little to no ventilation; it is, in a more holistic sense, about being affected by one’s environment.

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Just as important as the music, then, are the myriad practices – from moshing and stagediving, to fist-pumping and shouting-along, to simply inhabiting the ‘place-event’ (Pink, 2009) – that lend the show environment its particular feel. The impact of such experience has been philosophised via the notion of ‘affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009). Anderson (2009, p.80) observes how ‘atmospheres are interlinked with forms of enclosure – the couple, the room, the garden – and particular forms of circulation – enveloping, surrounding and radiating’. Scene members themselves often deploy the concept of ‘atmosphere’ (alongside other, similarly colloquial spatial concepts) when evaluating the success or failure of a musical performance to incite action. In this way, collectively doing music (scenes) can be considered an example of what Tia DeNora calls ‘aesthetic technologies’ (2000: 7). According to DeNora, ‘music is in dynamic relation with social life, helping to invoke, stabilize and change the parameters of agency’ (2000: 20). In this sense, DeNora does not uncritically construct ‘agency’ as the exercise of choice, but refers to ‘feeling, perception, cognition and consciousness, identity, energy, perceived situation and scene, embodied conduct and comportment’ (2000: 20). In other words, De Nora is talking about agency as a way of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Casey, 2001). Defining agency in this way accounts for the way in which individuals are impacted by their socio-cultural experiences, without reducing the notion of structure to the kinds of broad sociological variables at the centre of contemporary criticisms of earlier studies of youth cultural activity. Such issues may appear peripheral to theorizing about music scenes, the immediate focus being the individual and not the production of the cultural phenomena itself. Yet making such distinctions, between individuals and cultures, ignores the role of bodies as the medium of affective exchange in the co-constitution of self and place (Casey, 2001). Key here is the process whereby the affective richness of scene (as a cultural phenomenon) is produced in the first place. In the Queensland hardcore scene, participants themselves are all too aware that realizing a visceral experience of hardcore is contingent upon competent practice. As Robert, a 28-year-old male creative industries worker, observes:

It’s mainly the kids’ energy. We could be playing our guts out and … going mental on stage and that kind of thing, and we could play every song absolutely note-perfect, tighter than it’s ever been. But if the crowd’s standing there and they don’t really give a fuck and they’re not getting energetically or actively involved then it’s a shit show. But we could play sloppy as fuck; fuck up half our songs and hit a million wrong notes. But if the crowd’s getting into it and kids are jumping on stage and dancing and doing all that, then it’s a great show!

Similarly, Michael described how an authentic production of the hardcore experience hinged on the collective ability of those present in a particular space to conjure a distinctive feel, capable of triggering embodied mechanisms for particular action. Indeed, ‘the use of atmosphere in everyday speech and aesthetic discourse provides the best approxi- mation of the concept of affect – where affect is taken to be the transpersonal or preper- sonal intensities that emerge as bodies affect one another’ (Anderson, 2009, p.78). In such data, it is not difficult to observe the similarities with the pedagogical mechanisms that Ingold and Kurttila (2000) observed among the Sami. As Michael recounted:

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… it was a little shed; there was a handful of kids there, maybe a hundred kids. But it was packed out and the vibe was great … That’s what separates the whole aggressive vibe of Hardcore as opposed to, say, a rock band that has just as heavy and punchy sort of hard-hitting songs … If a hardcore band plays, they’ll bring the vibe.

A ‘great’ or ‘aggressive’ hardcore ‘vibe’ rests on the coming-together of participants’ movements at the show, as facilitated by the musical environment. The perceived pro- ductiveness of scenes is couched in practical terms, of both the social and economic potential of a finite population of (economically) active participants (including perform- ers). But it is also articulated in terms of the competence of those inhabiting hardcore space. This phenomenon has been widely noted in studies of music scenes, not least in work on heavy music audiences (see Sewell, 2012). As Sewell observes, ‘While bands are the primary point of attention at every HC … show, the audience is integral to the success or failure of a performance’ (2012: 51). Thus the scene is cast as the ongoing production of ‘instances when individuals coalesce as a singular entity – allowing, at least for a thrilling and ephemeral flash of time – for all involved to imagine this shared elation as a doorway to new ways of being’ (Dolan, 2006 in Sewell, 2012: 52). As Steve, a 27-year-old male student, explained:

For me, hardcore would be honesty, intensity and emotion. I heard someone describe the hardcore scene as where white middle-class boys come to share their feelings. And that’s kind of like, you know, in a condescending way, that’s quite an apt description. It’s that feeling like I’m a part of this … If people are jumping all over each other and not caring, like, I guess this is your poster for hardcore, people from all different walks of life and … you’re not friends with these people on a personal level, but here you are jumping all over them to get to the microphone and you fall over and they pick you back up. This is what … this is the whole hardcore unity, resilience, solidarity, that’s what it is there.

Here we see just how central the intimacy that arises from the collision of bodies is for the realisation of a sense of community in Hardcore. As Ahmed has previously pointed out, ‘emotions do things, and work to align individuals with collectives – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments’ (2004: 20). Yet, as Ahmed notes, to posit that emotions are the product solely of external forces which bring together the experience of place is an oversimplification;

Sensations are mediated, however immediately they seem to impress upon us. Not only how we read such feelings, but also how the feelings feel in the first place may be tied to a past history of readings, in the sense that the process of recognition (of this feeling or that feeling) is bound up with what we already know. Furthermore, to be touched a certain way by an encounter with an other, may involve a reading, not only of the encounter, but of the other that is encountered as having certain characteristics. (Ahmed, 2004: 30)

Despite this complexity the respondent above tells us something about cultural competence by emphasising how important it is that the mosh pit should not devolve into aggression between participants. The production and continuity of the spatiality of the Hardcore show depends on it. Steve is appealing to the sense in which the collective

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The Hardcore shows I remember is like going to ‘The Youthy’ and seeing bands play on the floor or whatever, or like a tiny stage in a tiny room and everyone just going nuts and having fun… that’s what Hardcore is: ‘stage dives and high fives!’

It is problematic to use these data to peg authenticity to specific body techniques – that is, ‘stage dives and high fives’ – which, in no uncertain terms, work to margin- alise the participation of women (and feminised ‘Others’) who do not conform to the demands of masculinities that operate as hegemonic within the Hardcore scene (see Haenfler, 2006; Sewell, 2012). Yet, in broader terms, these data emphasise how the ultimate loci of music scenes exist in the corporeality of skilled practice. If the production of Hardcore subjectivities depends on the provision of suitable opportunities for becoming, such opportunities themselves depend on affective exchange between moving bodies, impacted as they are by their own highly individualised socio-cultural trajectories.

Conclusion In this article, we have endeavoured to illustrate that, while the concept of scene has become key to the theoretical and empirical study of popular music, its theorization has suffered significantly from broader epistemological projects that leave no room for bodies. As we have argued, where issues concerning the corporeality of social actors have been broached in the scenes literature, they have only resulted in the casting of the body as a vessel through which scene identities are acted out in particular spaces and at particular times. In this sense, bodily gestures, comportments and dispositions that characterize participants of various music scenes have typically been regarded as products wholly of the temporal circumstances in which such scenes manifest themselves at a physical level – in clubs, venues, festivals and so on. In this article we have attempted to recast the body not purely as a product of such physical enactments of music scenes but, rather, through the constitutional role of its movements in such enactments, as pivotal to the ways in which scene identities and scene behaviour are embedded in the individual to the extent that they become significant at an existential level. In this sense, the body becomes critical to our understanding of how music scenes are constructed and maintained over time, the affective fecundity of settings of cultural practice being contingent on the unique composition of participants who are present for their production at any given time. Moreover, the cultural competencies acquired by individuals through their engagement in such settings become ingrained in the body to such an extent that they come to appear ‘natural’ to the individual and thus come to define who they are as

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Notes 1. While Bennett uses both ‘scene’ and ‘neo-tribe’ in his formulation of a counter- approach to subcultural theory, it is important to note that following the publication of this study a bifurcation occurred in the way that scene and neo-tribe were subsequently deployed in what came to be known as post-subcultural theory (see Bennett, 2011).

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biographies Christopher Driver is a PhD student at the School of Humanities, Griffith University, on the Gold Coast, Australia. His doctoral research focuses on the hardcore music scene in Southeast Queensland and Northern New South Wales and the young people whose biographies it helps to shape. Andy Bennett is Director of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University, Australia. He has published widely on various aspects of youth culture and popular music, including recent work on youth culture, popular music and ageing.

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