DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes

Andy Bennett, Paula Guerra, Andy Bennett, Paula Guerra, Andy Bennett, Paula Guerra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351850322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

This volume examines the global influence and impact of DIY cultural practice as this informs the production, performance and consumption of underground music in different parts of the world. The book brings together a series of original studies of DIY musical activities in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Oceania. The chapters combine insights from established academic writers with the work of younger scholars, some of whom are directly engaged in contemporary underground music scenes.

The book begins by revisiting and re-evaluating key themes and issues that have been used in studying the cultural meaning of alternative and underground music scenes, notably aspects of space, place and identity and the political economy of DIY cultural practice. The book then explores how the DIY cultural practices that characterize alternative and underground music scenes have been impacted and influenced by technological change, notably the emergence of digital media. Finally, in acknowledging the over 40-year history of DIY cultural practice in punk and post-punk contexts, the book considers how DIY cultures have become embedded in cultural memory and the emotional geographies of place.

Through combining high-quality data and fresh conceptual insights in the context of an international body of work spanning the disciplines of popular-music studies, cultural and media studies, and sociology the book offers a series of innovative new directions in the study of DIY cultures and underground/alternative music scenes. This volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students in the above-mentioned fields of study, as well as an invaluable resource for established academics and researchers working in these and related fields.

Chapter 1

Rethinking DIY culture in a post-industrial and global context

Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra

From a point during the mid-1970s, the notion of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture has developed from a punk-focused ethos of resistance to the mainstream music industry into a more widely endorsed aesthetic underpinning a broad sphere of alternative cultural production (Bennett, 2018). While by no means eschewing anti-hegemonic concerns, this transformation of DIY into what might reasonably be termed a global ‘alternative culture’ has also seen it evolve to a level of professionalism that is aimed towards ensuring aesthetic and, where possible, economic sustainability. During a period in which the very concept of culture is the object of various attempts at hyper-commodification under the ever-broadening banner of the ‘cultural industries’ (Power and Scott, 2004), many of those cultural practitioners who wish to remain independent have at the same time benefited from the increasing emphasis in urban centres on cultural production, performance and consumption. Indeed, such individuals are often able to hone creative skills acquired as participants in underground and alternative cultural scenes for use in ongoing careers as DIY cultural entrepreneurs. This chapter examines the longevity of the DIY cultural aesthetic and its evolution in a global context. As the chapter will illustrate, from its roots in the punk movement, the concept of DIY has grown to encapsulate a highly complex and vibrant alternative sector of cultural production and consumption on a global scale. The concluding section of the chapter will consider how such exponential growth in DIY practices presents new questions about the nature and prevalence of the DIY aesthetic and whether we need to reposition it as an increasingly pivotal aspect of contemporary urban life.

DIY culture in a historical context

The term ‘DIY’ first begun to be heard at the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was used and understood in the context of home improvement (Gelber, 1997). Referring to the practice of creating, repairing and/or modifying things without the use of an expert craftsperson, the meaning and currency of DIY gradually evolved over subsequent decades to embrace a range of creative cultural practices. As part of this evolution, DIY assumed a critical resonance during the 1950s, with the Situationist International, an artistic and cultural movement that sought to satirize and denounce the contradictions of capitalist consumer society (Debord, 1992; Downes, 2007; Frith and Horne, 1987) through the creation of countercultural artistic objects that opposed dominant cultural representations and used new forms of communication, such as manifestos, zines and other mediums, to awaken a feeling that the ordre des choses (system) could be changed. Moreover, the claims of the Situationist movement extended to using the symbols and forms of the status quo as a means of symbolic and ideological resistance. Owing much to the Dadaist movement of the early twentieth century, the Situationist International appropriated everyday images and objects, repositioning them in new contexts that stripped them of their original meaning in ways that served to question both the nature of art and the state of the wider society.

Twenty years later, the DIY ethos of the Situationist movement was dramatically resurrected in punk, a scene that coalesced youth sensibilities and aesthetic understandings of music and style at a critical point of socioeconomic crisis (Hebdige, 1979). Although its origins were in the United States during the mid-1970s (Laing, 1985; Lentini, 2003), punk’s salience as a statement of resistance among disenfranchised and disillusioned youth was realized several years later when punk music and culture were first experienced by British audiences. During a period that saw salaries frozen, a plummeting of trade rates and economic stagnation, and high unemployment – particularly among youth – the rising discontent of various layers of society made itself felt. In this context, punk became a spectacular platform, both in a visual and sonic sense, for the anger and dissatisfaction of youth while simultaneously acting as an unwilling vehicle for fear and moral panic (Holtzman, Hughes and Van Meter, 2007). What also made punk appealing to musicians and audiences was its DIY quality. While earlier musical styles – notably skiffle (Stratton, 2010) and rock ’n’ roll (Bielby, 2004) – had also displayed a distinctive DIY quality, punk’s entire musical and cultural ethos was heavily invested with a strong and distinctive DIY aesthetic (McKay, 1998). By the time of punk’s arrival, the popular-music industry had grown to a point where the production and distribution of popular music were both tightly regulated and heavily routinized, with music created on a mass scale and calculated to appeal to mass audiences. From a punk perspective, the consequence of such regulation was that music lost touch with its audience, and in doing so also became divested of value – socially, culturally and politically. The key mission of punk, therefore, was to reinvest music with an aesthetic more akin to what it saw as the excitement of the rock ’n’ roll years while also reinstalling a political message (Laing, 1985).

As the initial punk scene of the 1970s diversified and give rise to a range of new musical and stylistic scenes, including anarcho punk (Gosling, 2004), Gothic punk (Hodkinson, 2002) and hardcore (Driver, 2011), the DIY principles that had been at the core of punk continued to be reflected in the way that these newer styles were created, performed and consumed. Although, in a mainstream context, pop and rock became reinstated as dominant forms of live and recorded music entertainment – not least because of the emergence of MTV (Kaplan, 1987) and the increasing prominence of live music mega-events such as Live Aid (Garofalo, 1992) – punk’s splitting of the music world continued to manifest itself in the form of alternative networks of music production, performance and consumption that characterized a proliferation of local, translocal and, from the mid-1990s, virtual scenes (Peterson and Bennett, 2004). Indeed, in addition to giving rise to a number of punk subgenres, it would also be accurate to say that since the 1970s the DIY aesthetic of the early punk scene has become a key source of influence and inspiration for a successive range of other genres, among them rap (Rose, 1994), indie (Bannister, 2006) and dance (Thornton, 1995).

DIY and global ‘alternative’ culture

During the same period in which these later, post-punk genres have emerged, deindustrialization in the Global North has further contributed to the prevalence of DIY discourses in music and associated forms of cultural practice. In a study of the local Liverpool music scene conducted in the mid-1980s, Cohen (1991, p. 2) notes how,

in a city where the attitude of many young people was that you might as well pick up a guitar as take exams, since your chances of finding full-time occupation from either were just the same, being in a band was an accepted way of life and could provide a means of justifying one’s existence.

In the decades since Cohen’s study was published, the socioeconomic scenario she describes in relation to Liverpool has become more commonplace, not merely in the United Kingdom but in a wider global sense. Similarly, the ease with which young people, and indeed post-youth generations, can view music and other forms of creative practice as viable occupations has also evolved globally, often in tandem with a strongly articulated DIY code of cultural politics and practice. This evolution of DIY culture in a broader global sense is highly significant, not least of all because of its demonstration of DIY as a more commonly embraced language of action and intent among an increasingly broad range of cultural producers and their audience. Once used as a means of denoting pockets of resistance to mainstream forms of music and broader cultural production in a mainly localized sense (e.g. McKay, 1998), DIY has now become synonymous with a broader ethos of lifestyle politics that bonds people together in networks of translocal, alternative cultural production.

While the Global North has perhaps led the way in terms of establishing the core qualities and parameters of DIY cultural practice, the prevalence of DIY sensibilities is by no means restricted to these regions of the world. On the contrary, as music styles and scenes such as punk, metal and dance have found their way into countries in the Global South, this has had a critical bearing on the evolution of DIY culture in a broader global context. Thus, just as it is now legitimate to talk about punk, rap, indie and various other musical and stylistic genres as global forms of culture (e.g. Nilan and Feixa, 2006), so too is it possible to see how the strong heritage of DIY culture interwoven with such genres has accompanied their global mobility, finding a voice in various local cultures around the world to produce a rich array of distinctively localized yet at the same time translocally connected DIY cultural scenes.

In the same period, the rapid emergence of creative digital technology, while not democratizing the process of cultural production in a universal sense, given the cost implications involved in acquiring such technology for personal use, has made it easier for increasing numbers of people – including young people – to obtain the means to create and disseminate their own cultural products, be they music, literature, art, film or associated artefacts. As this suggests, the combined effect of such socioeconomic and technological shifts has significant ramifications for the position and status of DIY as both cultural discourse and cultural practice in the post-industrial era. Indeed, akin to Cohen’s (1991) Liverpool musicians in the mid-1980s, as post-industrialization has laid the ground for a new, seemingly unshakable era of neoliberalism, what could legitimately be termed a global risk generation (Bennett, 2018) has embraced music-making and similar creative cultural practices as a way of life, frequently regarding them as viable career pathways in a socioeconomic context where each career trajectory can appear as precarious as the next. In this way, successive generations of young people on a global scale are striving to work against the pathological potentialities of biographical drift brought about by risk and uncertainty through flexing self-honed entrepreneurial skills – both musical and extra-musical – in ways that are geared towards the establishment of satisfying, if not always necessarily economically fulfilling or even sustainable, DIY careers (Threadgold, 2018). While the more mainstream cultural industries, which are also largely a product of post-industrialization, are primarily driven by a profit motive, this is far less the case with DIY cultural practices, which are often driven by motives of creative and aesthetic gratification (Ferreira, 2016).

Artistic self-production and DIY cultural practices

As indicated in the foregoing sections of this chapter, the notion of DIY culture has undergone significant transformations since the mid-1970s, when its associations with youth, music and style first manifested themselves in the shape of punk. In this section, we set about the task of beginning to delineate and define a new framework of DIY culture and cultural practice that can be applied in more contemporary global settings. On the basis of ethnographic work conducted by the authors on the Portuguese punk scene (Guerra and Bennett, 2015), it seems clear that if DIY in the early years of punk was a relatively spontaneous gesture of resistance to capitalism, this has now evolved into an essentially pre-digested understanding of what punk, and by definition those musical and other cultural scenes that have come after punk and been inspired by it, are seen to symbolize. Indeed, one of the critical findings of our research is that, while theoretically rich, such a portrayal of DIY culture is also highly compatible with the way social actors reflexively perceive themselves and their agentic relationship with the everyday practice of DIY culture. Thus, when we questioned our interviewees about the effective nature of DIY, they pointed out numerous roles, tasks, functions and competences associated with meaning-making mechanisms, in practice allowing the participants of different scenes to see themselves precisely as participants of a particular scene in a way that is analogous to Thornton’s (1995) club cultures. In the case of Thornton’s work, and in ours, a common thread is the way scene competence is connected with artefacts and knowledge (implicit and symbolic) that are recognized and esteemed in a given culture (Jensen, 2006).

The question of authenticity and its response/alternative to the mainstream are key configurations in the DIY ethos of Portuguese punk (Guerra, 2017; Silva and Guerra, 2015), as indeed they are in numerous other DIY cultural scenes around the world. These self-producing strategies, founded on displays of scene competence, have consolidated over the last 30 years, meaning that two-thirds of the interviewees say they have acquired DIY competences through participating in local punk scenes, and that cooperation networks (Becker, 1982; Crossley, 2015) played a key role in facilitating this. In essence, what this reveals is the ongoing presence of a strong underground scene, sustained through the engagement of young musicians, amateur and professional gatekeepers and deeply loyal, albeit small, audiences. The underground – the loose term that brings together notions of youth conviviality, artistic production, mainstream defiance, ritual performance – is in essence a collective creative network (Willis, 1977), which expresses everyday aesthetics in youth-culture contexts. Several variables appear that are crucial to our understanding of these realities: musical pathways (Finnegan, 2007, p. 297) or the initial design of leisure careers (Blackman, 2005; MacDonald, 2011) as entry routes to local punk music scenes stand out as critical elements in understanding the individual and collective trajectories of social actors. In that sense, the most common career profiles can be discussed as combinations of key roles in the scene, such as music agent/promoter, including a wide array of profiles such as fan, distributor, editor/musician, educator and so on.

The roles and tasks that these scenes and musical pathways entail in Portuguese punk are marked by heterogeneity and flexibility. The DIY ethos is represented as a strongly valued asset in community-based amateur music practice that goes hand in hand with the underground world (Guerra and Bennett, 2015; Guerra and Silva, 2015). The musical underground appears, then, as a claim from young musicians to a unique artistic expression, or a counterpointed authentic experience – not without its internal contradictions and ambiguities – against the market and dominant music conventions. It is, however, possible to analyse this space as including multiple socialization processes in a social sphere in which stratification factors, such as class or school capital, are played in a symbolic experimentation, opening up the possibility for new cultural practices and trajectories. The circuits of music-making make up a plurality of socializing spaces, characterized by diverse symbolic codes according to different music genres, youth cultures, social backgrounds, urban contexts and approximation to professional means, among others (see Gelder and Thornton, 1997).

As a general framework for use in addressing this issue, we can loo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Rethinking DIY culture in a post-industrial and global context
• PART I: Underground music scenes between the local and the translocal
• PART II: Music and DIY cultures: DIY or die!
• PART III: Art, music and technological change
• PART IV: Music scenes, memory and emotional geographies
• Index