Metal, Rap, and Electro in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

A Fragile Underground

Stefano Barone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351046091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Metal, Rap, and Electro in Tunisia is a trip into the music scenes of Tunisia after the Arab Springs. Based on extensive field research, the book explores the social life of heavy metal, rap, and electronic music in a North African country whose mass revolution of 2010/2011 led the way to a troubled and yet unique democracy. What is it like to be part of a music scene in a place affected by poverty and inequality? How do the many conflicted souls of Tunisian Islam shape local metal, rap, and electro? What are the social and cultural stakes for music in a nation constantly represented as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East? How do music scenes articulate the complex political scenario that followed the Tunisian revolution of 2011? Barone answers these questions by offering new theoretical reflections on youth cultures and popular music in a global perspective, and thus pushing the debate on "post-subcultures" and scenes forward. At the same time, the book offers a dense sociological analysis of youth and music in reality - the Tunisian one - whose society, culture, religion, and politics are at stake in a historical transformation.

Part 1

Fragile scenes

1 From subculture to sceneness

This is a book on Tunisian music scenes. Talking about scenes implies precise empirical and theoretical choices. On the empirical side, it means taking seriously musicians, fans, and other scenesters when they make reference to scenes as social formations in which they are involved. My informants lived their scenes: their cultural production was articulated through scenes’ networks, they discussed the definition and boundaries of their own scene, and they often worked for its improvement. On the theoretical side, using the framework of scene means engaging with a wide spectrum of debates on youth culture. In fact, the concept of scene has been one of the key resources “post-subcultural” theorists have applied in order to overcome the weaknesses they attributed to subcultural theory, for decades the hegemonic paradigm in the fields of youth culture and popular music. Scene is relevant exactly as it sums up the forces and flaws of post-subcultural theories: on the one side, elasticity and non-essentialism; on the other, a certain theoretical vagueness. Moreover, the analysis of scenes in a reality such as Tunisia calls into question the intertwining of global, regional, and local dimensions: in so doing, it challenges the western/global north boundaries that have been incubating most of the debate on youth subcultures and post-subcultures. Research happening outside of the “comfort zone” of Europe and the United States requires theoretical tools that can account for the asperities of global diversity.

In this chapter, I will present a theorisation of music scenes that stems from such preoccupations. I will begin by outlining the features of subcultural and post-subcultural paradigms, and I will then expand reflections on youth culture (and its analysis) to the so-called global south. I will thus propose a reworking of the scene framework, one that can both overcome the weaknesses attributed to it by its critics, and represent the specific features of Tunisian scenes, accounting for the hardships and shifting equilibriums of the Tunisian context.

1. Subculture, post-subculture, and their critics

After the Second World War, British working-class youth found an unprecedented amount of money in their pockets. Their affluence, a product of steady growth rates, soon qualified them as the consumers par excellence. Teenagers became a highly sought-after commercial niche: an array of new goods, forms of leisure, and styles invaded the marketplace and the social scene, producing a highly visible and complex youth culture (Chambers, 1985). In the post-war decades, cities in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere in the global north) witnessed a string of new, spectacular youth groups: teddy boys, mods, skinheads reinvented the use of the post-affluence youth consumption goods creating defiant fashions and “alternative” social identities.

The British understanding of subculture, theorised by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), aimed to make sense of such groups. Subculture, as shaped by scholars in Birmingham, came to dominate scientific reflections on youth culture from its introduction, in the mid 1970s, through to the late 1990s. CCCS scholars produced a critique of the above-cited narrative of post-war affluence, maintaining that economic growth and new consumption possibilities for the working class did not mean the disappearance of inequality and class difference. On the contrary, they reproduced power relationships between the classes in an age in which working class forms of community were gradually disappearing (Cohen, 1972; Hall & Jefferson, 1976). Subcultural groups, with their spectacular clothes, music, and habits, were interpreted as a reaction to this situation: they enacted a manipulation of commodities and youth practices, one that expressed a symbolic defiance to the class order.

The Birmingham scholars took the category of subculture from those proposed by researchers at the Chicago School of Sociology: for these scholars, subcultures were generally developed by marginal male youth in a condition of socio-economic inequality and stigma (Blackman, 2005). Authors at the CCCS presented a diverse use and application of subculture (as also Chicago sociologists did), but their work on this theme can be generally seen as a rethinking of Chicagoan subculture through the lens of Marxist cultural studies (Muggleton, 2005).

According to the CCCS, popular culture was ruled by bourgeois hegemony: the power and the meanings shaped by the upper classes permeated the commercial goods, the fashion styles, and the very sense of normality that organised everyday life. By resignifying clothes, distorting bourgeois trends, parading “dangerous” lifestyles, subcultures turned those very commodities and styles into weapons. They thus fought a battle, albeit a mainly subconscious one (see Waters, 1981), against the hegemonic senses of normality imposed by the dominant classes on everyday life. In this battle, style was used as a tool to reconstruct – in a limited, merely ideological way – a lost sense of working class community (see Hall & Jefferson, 1976, Hebdige, 1979). Subcultures put into place a “resistance” against the bourgeois order, and yet such a resistance was mainly symbolic and did not amount to any tangible political consequences: the recovery of community attempted through subcultural rituals remained a solely “magical” one (Cohen, 1972).

CCCS theorists used a palette of cultural frameworks, taking inspiration from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as well as Levi-Strauss’s conception of bricolage, and – with the exception of Paul Willis (1978) – based their research on the semiological analysis of subcultures rather than on ethnographic methods (which, instead, characterised the Chicago School). Subcultures were thus “read” by subcultural theorists, who interpreted subcultural style and practices as texts in which mass cultural signifiers were reworked and used in an oppositive way.

Although highly influential, the CCCS work was not without its critics.¹ According to Rupa Huq (2007), the criticism directed against subcultural theories can be summed up as covering three core issues: omissions, structural over-determination, and methodological problems. As for the omissions, it has been noted how subcultures were, in the original analyses, a mainly white, male affair: in most early CCCS works, girls and the ethnic Other are either obliterated or treated solely in relation to their white male counterparts. Moreover, Birmingham scholars concentrated on the “spectacular minority”, seeing the most stylised youth as a symbol of an entire class. And yet, most youth were not members of subcultures, or did not rigidly conform to their aesthetic codes; they aligned to mainstream tastes or participated in less rebellious and “spectacular” youth cultures (see Frith, 1981).

Structural over-determination can be understood as a double-faceted issue: tight structuralist theorisation, and excessive emphasis on the structural determinants upon society and individuals. Subcultural studies “imagined” a landscape of sharply defined and internally homogeneous subcultures, whose meanings and purposes directed and eluded their adherents’ voices and choices. In this model there was little room for agency, or for any uses of popular culture that were not determined by class struggle. The frame did not consider the possibility of non-proletarian subcultural youth,² and any practices of these youth reconfirmed their class ties rather than allowing them to restyle their identity, create new communities, or simply “have fun” (see Bennett & Kahn-Harris, 2004).

This feature has been connected to broader methodological problems of the CCCS approach. The scant emphasis on ethnographic data in the CCCS research has been seen as one of the main causes for the muting of subcultural youth. Their stress on top-down textual analysis eluded the voices of subculturalists themselves, in a framework that took the structure of society, and its effects, as research premises rather than research findings (see Muggleton, 2000).

Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, the concept of subculture has been – according to its critics – increasingly watered down, losing many of its Marxist and structuralist underpinnings, and remaining “little more than a convenient ‘catch-all’ term for any aspect of social life in which young people, style and music intersect” (Bennett, 1999, p. 599). Indeed, the most commonly used versions of subculture are more and more designed on hints of group coherence, vague structural ties, and diverse understandings of “resistance”. These characters are more or less the ones that led to the emergence of what became known as post-subcultural theories during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

As with subculture, post-subcultural studies do not represent a coherent approach, but rather a diverse theoretical landscape; and yet, they share relevant critiques and purposes. Post-subcultural frameworks generally converge on the will to challenge the alleged structural determinism of subculture, in the double sense intended above. Such a critique stems in part from an analysis of late modernity as an era in which previous social affiliations (such as class or ethnicity) lose grip over people and cultures are fragmented, thus leaving more room to the possibilities – and the anxieties – of personal agency. It is no case that the first intuitions leading to post-subculture came out, around the late 1980s, from the observation of club cultures. Scholars such as Steve Redhead started to argue that clubbers were not interested in producing a new, tightly codified subcultural style: they rather went to dance in order to get rid of usual group ties and experience new, liberating forms of collective life on the dancefloor (Redhead, 1993).

In the same vein, neo-tribe has later been proposed as a framework for the study of dance cultures. Based on the work of French sociologist Michel Maffesoli (1996), neo-tribes can be seen as temporary groupings based on the common joy of coming together for a purpose, in a flux of social life that favours appearance and momentary pleasure over rationality. Authors like Andy Bennett (1999) and Ben Malbon (1999) have taken neo-tribes as a source of inspiration in their explorations of dance cultures. Although their uses nuance the volatility theorised by Maffesoli, neo-tribes still remain the more radical evolution of post-subcultural studies in framing contemporary youth culture as impermanent and “superficial”.

The idea of late modernity as a time of fragmented identities is at the basis for the re-discovery of lifestyles, a classic sociological concept first introduced by Max Weber (1978). In the 1990s, lifestyles have been employed in the ambit of popular culture to show how people construct their collective identities through consumption (Chaney, 1996; Miles, 2000). Lifestyles display a creative approach on the self, one deeply influenced by reflexivity and irony. This work (and play) on identity resonates with an era in which culture is, at the same time, fragmented and omnipervasive. Such a status of culture in late modernity cannot be adequately described in terms of a monolithic mainstream culture against which subcultures articulate rebellion; and subcultures as coherent forms of identity are replaced by more incoherent and composite lifestyles (Chaney, 2004).

Late modernity has allegedly proved “classic” subcultures anachronistic. And yet, some post-subcultural authors have argued that subculture was an inappropriate description of reality even before the unmaking of modernity and its structures – that is, subcultures have probably never been “subcultural” as in CCCS standards. Redhead (1990, p. 25), for example, claimed that “‘Authentic’ subcultures were produced by subcultural theorists, not the other way around”. A former subcultural youth himself, David Muggleton criticised the idea of subcultures as homogeneous, coherent groups and rather proposed a vision of subcultures as shifting and not clearly bounded social formations: individuals can move across them, and create hybrid identities through practices of creative consumption, as a form of postmodern cultural playfulness (Muggleton, 2000).

The different approaches characterised as “post-subcultural” have received criticism, directed in particular at their downplay of social structures and their representation of contemporary society as excessively fluid. Many post-subcultural approaches share a stance on consumption as an instrument for the creation of new identities that liberate youth from their structural ties. Such a stance has been judged overly optimistic, founded on a neo-liberal utopian view of contemporary individuals as sharing middle-class lifestyles and problems. On the contrary, poverty and collateral forms of marginalisation – from mental illness and drug addiction to the lower standards of living associated with poorer countries – still exist and diversify social opportunities and leisure patterns (Blackman, 2005).

Shildrick and MacDonald (2006) notice how post-subcultural authors continue to highlight the “spectacular few” as the CCCS did, and to map essentially middle-class forms of youth leisure. These studies, according to the authors, tend to avoid the type of “street corner society” that continues to dominate the existence of many poorer youth. Blackman (2005) argues that the political commitment of many youth culturalists (for example, rave scene participants) has been underplayed by post-subcultural accounts. These accounts, notes Blackman, tend to focus on individualism, appearance, and temporary sociality, neglecting the strong proof of more stable, complex, and politically significant youth cultural groupings. The idea of modernity as fluid is, itself, not grounded in much empirical detail, but is rather a product of post-modern theoretical assumptions.

Opponents have individuated in vagueness a further weak point of post-subcultural theories. Thus, it is argued, anxious to liberate themselves from the narrow angle of structuralism, post-subcultural theorists have provided frameworks that lack clear definition and explanatory power. For example, Hesmondhalgh (2005) and Kahn-Harris (2006) observe that neo-tribal frameworks make sense of a particular atmosphere, and the consequent volatile associations, but fail to explain how these groups create their (however ethereal) boundaries.

This book aligns to the post-subcultural turn, and yet it takes the above-mentioned critiques seriously. While social stratification and the politics of youth culture are relevant in the global north, they are even more meaningful in a country like Tunisia, where most youth cannot afford the joys of western middle-class leisure, and even “fun” acquires a strong political dimension. I will thus expand the assessment of youth cultural debates to a more “global” scope, discussing youth culture outside the north, and I will then turn to a re-theorisation of music scenes. Debates on the vagueness and fluidity of post-subcultures gain a particular emphasis when it comes to such a framework, which therefore subsumes the discussion about recent approaches to youth culture. I will thus rethink it by retaining the “true-to-the-informants” character of post-subcultural approaches and their critique of structures acting “as dead weights on young people” (Bennett, 2005, p. 256), and yet I will turn scene in a less vague framework, considering the complexities of the non-western, non-northern ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A note on Arabic transliterations used in the text
• Introduction: Trash in the dustbin, clubbing stormtroopers, and a phoenix that struggles to rise again
• PART 1: Fragile scenes
• PART 2: Shades of the local
• Index