White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock

Matthew Bannister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351218009
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

To what extent do indie masculinities challenge the historical construction of rock music as patriarchal? This key question is addressed by Matthew Bannister, involving an in-depth examination of indie guitar rock in the 1980s as the culturally and historically specific production of white men. Through textual analysis of musical and critical discourses, Bannister provides the first book-length study of masculinity and ethnicity within the context of indie guitar music within US, UK and New Zealand 'scenes'. Bannister argues that past theorisations of (rock) masculinities have tended to set up varieties of working-class deviance and physical machismo as 'straw men', oversimplifying masculinities as 'men behaving badly'. Such approaches disavow the ways that masculine power is articulated in culture not only through representation but also intellectual and theoretical discourse. By re-situating indie in a historical/cultural context of art rock, he shows how masculine power can be rearticulated through high, avant-garde, bohemian culture and aesthetic theory: canonism, negation (Adorno), passivity, voyeurism and camp (Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground), and primitivism and infantilism (Lester Bangs, Simon Reynolds). In a related vein, he also assesses the impact of Freud on cultural theory, arguing that reversing binary conceptions of gender by associating masculinities with an essentialised passive femininity perpetuates patriarchal dualism. Drawing on his own experience as an indie musician, Bannister surveys a range of indie artists, including The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and The Go-Betweens; from the US, R.E.M., The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü, Nirvana and hardcore; and from NZ, Flying Nun acts, including The Chills, The Clean, the Verlaines, Chris Knox, Bailter Space, and The Bats, demonstrating broad continuities between these apparently disparate scenes, in terms of gender, aesthetic theory and approaches to popular musical history. The result is a book which raises some important questions about how gender is studied in popular culture and the degree to which alternative cultures can critique dominant representations of gender.

Chapter 1
Reviewing theories and representations of masculinities

White men in Western society, historically, have not theorised themselves, but assumed that masculinity is a universal norm – ‘mankind’ (Easthope, 1986, pp. 1–2; Rutherford, 1988, p. 23; Seidler, 1989, pp. 3–4, 14). Moreover, discourses of scientific objectivity and rationality, legacies of the Enlightenment, Descartes and Newton, have perpetuated patriarchal hegemony through insistence on detached objectivity and their consequent reduction of the world to an object outside the mind (Brennan, 2004, pp. 4, 94; Horkheimer, 1994, p. vii). Rational analysis, proceeding by an ‘either/or’ method (the same as used in binary code) performs an analytical splitting of the world into dichotomies – subject and object, feeling and reason, feminine or masculine: ‘Abstract masculinity … is a mode of conceptualisation that emphasises mutually exclusive dualities’ (Humm, 1995, p. 163; see also Hartsock, 1983).

The detached, scientific mode of observation artificially splits off the consciousness and subjectivity of the researcher from the ‘object’ of study. But increasingly, commentators suggest that observation reveals the truth not only of the thing observed, but also of the observing subject.¹ ‘Most of what has been perceived as universal in the observed system (gender or sex) may in fact have been part of the observing system’ (Holter, 1995, p. 102). Social structures, according to Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 7), lead a ‘double life’ and both objective and subjective (observers’ and actors’) perspectives are part of their totality, so an absolute separation between observer and observed is epistemologically problematic, especially in the social sciences, which are, after all, about people studying other people. In arguing for the interconnection of subject and object, Bourdieu implicitly suggests that we are not obliged to choose one as ‘better’ than the other, but rather to listen to both. Any theorisation of masculinities has to take into account the way in which taken-for-granted empirical epistemologies and methodologies may reproduce existing models of power relations. I contend that studies of masculine behaviour are in turn limited to the degree that they adopt a scientific/empirical or binary approach. Masculinity is reproduced through epistemology, not just through ‘male bonding’.

Binary systems are not timeless and ahistorical because hegemony is never an established fact. There is continuous renegotiation of boundaries as circumstances change, and some terms may be prioritised over others. For example, Mulvey (1989) posits a primary identification of spectatorship with masculinity and of spectacle with femininity. But today male bodies are also objectified and eroticised: masculinity is also becoming an object of the gaze (Faludi, 1999, pp. 34–40; Rutherford, 1988, pp. 38–9). This complicates the gender positioning of the spectator, and shows us how binary boundaries can shift over time. However, I would argue that the constant here is the gaze itself and the consequent process of objectification. Behind the shifting gender positions of the binary there is a meta-discourse – and it is thoroughly masculinised – the idea of the gaze itself as a way of looking at the world. The salient characteristic of the gaze is the split between the subject and the object – and it is in this area that gender is most often naturalised, especially in intellectual discourse.

Masculinity is not just one half of this binary system, it is also present in the binary ‘mode of conceptualisation’ itself; it is not an essence, but rather a hegemonic position, a powerful way of seeing or describing the world (Hartsock, 1983, pp. 130–32; Humm, 1995, p. 163). As such, it is often not directly observable by empirical methods – rather it is in the way such accounts are constructed, and the implicit theories of representation at work in them. As such, there is also a feminine position, in which such splits can be re-envisaged in terms of a continuum or relationship. My central concern is the role played by subjectivity in theoretical approaches to masculinities; particularly the subjectivity of the researcher or writer. It is customary to identify subjectivity with the merely personal and unverifiable, but I argue that it is not possible to separate subjective and objective modes of knowledge. As I indicated in the introduction, acknowledging my subjectivity in my research on New Zealand masculinities helped me move away from finger-pointing dualism towards a more inclusive and progressive approach.

This theorisation of subjectivity may be used to critique each of the main approaches to gender study: sociology, psychology and social construction (discourse theory). Sociological theories and studies, it has been argued, historically suffer from the problem that they centre on public and male-defined domains and ignore the private, for example Marxism’s stress on economics as excluding domestic, unpaid and usually feminine labour (Hearn, 1992, pp. 25–7, 80; Morgan, 1992, pp. 60–2). They are often about men, but this does not mean that gender is theorised; rather it is assumed (Morgan, 1992, p. 19). Moreover, the groups studied are often constructed as subordinate or oppressed. As such, researchers tend to identify with them (Hebdige, 1979), which can lead to simplification of power relations, or against them, in which case we are left with the impression that the subjectivity of those researched is simply ‘wrong’, ‘false consciousness’ (Hills, 2002, p. 64). Whatever the case, they are objectified in a way that does not expose the practices of the observers, leading to the question of whether socially dominant groups are really observable, a point particularly relevant to masculinities research (Shumway, 2001). We will see examples of this in sociological and subcultural studies of masculine groups below. Similarly, psychological approaches to masculinity are based on Freud, who explicitly identifies masculinity with objectivity and reason, thereby removing it from analysis. A critique of Freudian dualism is required. Finally, social constructionist approaches to gender, which typically proceed by problematising the very notion of the subject, are limited if they simply replace the masculine, autonomous self with a fragmented, feminine subject. I try to resolve this dualism by introducing Jessica Benjamin’s concept of intersubjectivity, which asserts that ‘shared’ subjectivities can constitute a form of reality which is not reducible to an objective/subjective binary (not to be confused with Habermas’s use of the term) (Benjamin, 1988, pp. 19–24; Habermas, 1970).

Straw men

R.W. Connell is a prominent masculinities scholar who uses sociological methods and approaches. He argues against a psychologising or universalising approach, and cites recent close-focus, ethnographic research on masculinities, emphasising the plurality and hierarchy of masculinities and their collective and dynamic character (Connell, 2000, p. 23). Connell has made many valuable contributions to the field (1987, 1995), but I want to focus on a recent work that highlights some problems in his assertion that gender is basically ‘an empirical question, not one to be settled in advance by theory’ (2000, p. 23).

In his account of ‘Aussie iron man’ Steve Donoghue, Connell demonstrates some of the contradictions of being a ‘poster boy’ for hegemonic masculinity, for although Steve has ‘realised a schoolboy dream’ by making a living out of sport, his training regime is ‘like being in jail’ (2000, p. 71). Being a male role model means denying himself sport-associated masculine social pleasures like drinking, sparring, womanising and carousing (p. 73). Ironically, one of his major sponsors is a brand of beer (p. 85). Indeed, he doesn’t even really have time for a girlfriend (p. 72). So Connell establishes how Steve’s public performance of ideal masculinity involves renouncing many of the pleasures of the ‘patriarchal dividend’ (p. 35).

Throughout, Steve’s body is the focus – his physical size as a child, his involvement in swimming and the development of his body through discipline and practice, so that this ‘natural’ physical endowment is shown to be instrumental: ‘The magnificent machine of Steve’s physique has meaning only when subordinated to the will to win’ (2000, p. 85). To keep earning, Steve has to keep winning; thus sport, far from being a natural propensity for participation in organised physical activity, is presented as part of a larger capital- and media-fuelled engine of economic production. In other words, he is being exploited. The final implication drawn is his immaturity – shielded from adult responsibilities by his highly specialised lifestyle, his success and his coach, he remains rather childlike, with ‘a severely constricted social world and an impoverished cultural world’. Steve ‘confirms’ this by his predictable responses to questions about feminists, homosexuality and politics (pp. 78–9). Connell summarises: ‘Steve certainly enacts in his own life some of the main patterns of contemporary hegemonic masculinity: the subordination of women, the marginalization of gay men, and the connecting of masculinity to toughness and competitiveness. He has … been celebrated as a hero [and] … is being … constructed as a media exemplar of masculinity by the advertisers who are sponsoring him’ (p. 84).

Steve may be an iron man, but he’s a soft target. What disturbs me about this account is the way it is structured around a mind/body dichotomy, which invisibly connects Steve’s body with his ‘false consciousness’. In the same way that mass culture critique connects feminine body with lack of talent or intellect, it is implied that Steve’s inarticulacy needs to be interpreted by a superior, intellectual awareness. We have to ask ‘How valid would we find ethnographic discourse about others if it were used to describe ourselves?’ (Rosaldo, 1993, p. 107). A degree of connection between researcher and researched is needed for ethnography to be successful – this is lacking in Connell’s study. Connection may introduce new issues of personal bias, but the inclusion of the researcher’s subjectivity in the discussion is clearly relevant, especially when the subject is something both parties share.

Instead, Connell identifies masculinities in terms of a working-class model of physical strength and inarticulacy: ‘masculinity refers to male bodies’ (2000, p. 29). ‘Exemplary masculinities in Western society are typically defined by a specific body-reflexive practice: sport, violence, heterosexual performance, bodybuilding’ (p. 86). This view confirms the superiority of the observers (Donaldson, 2003, pp. 158–9). But many men don’t imagine their masculinity mainly in terms of their bodies. My masculinity is largely in my head; that is, in my pride in my intellectual and creative abilities. Writing about masculinities in terms of the body is a way for male intellectuals to avoid considering themselves as masculine (Morgan, 1992, p. 4). It elides all the apparently ungendered ways in which masculinity is articulated – intellectual ability, creativity, reason and objectivity – and how these link to practices of power.

Ethnographic and subcultural studies of rock

Sociological methods have been hugely influential on popular music studies, mainly via the Birmingham School’s 1970s investigations into youth and working-class subcultures as ‘resistance’ to mass culture. Popular music provides some spectacular examples, such as Paul Willis’s rockers, and Dick Hebdige’s punks. However, the power/resistance paradigm can lead to simplifications, especially about rock, masculinity and the working class (Hebdige, 1979; Willis, 1978). Paul Willis’s study of British working-class biker culture suggests that ‘the touchstones of this world were manliness, toughness and directness of interpersonal contact … they lived in the unreified world of the present and its immediate relations’ (1978, p. 13). Willis connects masculinity with an ideal of ‘unreified’ existence, a working-class reality that represents an implicit left-wing critique of the ‘straight’, capitalist world: ‘This absolute security of identity was characteristically expressed through a distinctive style. There was a rumbustious extroversion, a rough bonhomie, sometimes a bravado … their sense of security was enacted through an essentially masculine style’ (1978, p. 18). This sense of ‘ontological security’ is maintained at least partially by attacking other social groups as ‘feminine’, including women but also blacks, ‘Pakis’, mods, hippies and even subordinate members of the group: ‘if there were other ways of living, then there were other ways of being masculine’(p. 33). Willis defends these attitudes by claiming they are preferable to ‘bloodless humanism’: the rockers’ sexism and racism is more honest than an intellectually correct but abstract worldview (pp. 34–5).

Willis relates the bikers’ lifestyle to their preferred music – 1950s and 1960s rock and roll – by the concept of homology: ‘the loud, strident tones of the music symbolically held and generated all the important values – movement, noise, confidence’ – fast, ‘driving’ rock and roll simulates the adrenalin rush one gets from rapid acceleration (1978, p. 36). ‘The music did have a distinctiveness, a unity of construction, a special and consistent use of techniques, a freshness and conviction of personal delivery, a sense of the “golden” age which could parallel, hold and develop the security, authenticity and masculinity of the bike culture’ (p. 63). Their listening is selective, preferring the ‘golden greats’ of the first rock and roll boom and some 1960s British groups, as long as they perform in an authentically rock and roll style: they distinguish between early Beatles (good), their psychedelic period (‘daft’) and their later returns to a more roots style (good again) (p. 65). Clearly considerations of style are valued above unquestioning allegiance to one artist. Willis’s observations on the musical practices of the group suggest that the rockers’ musical canon is as closely guarded as their masculine identity as a group: the bikers’ cultural choices consistently re-enact their social practice: no women, no blacks, a rigorous policing of the remainder for stylistic correctness and authenticity. Other aspects of their musical practice, such as the preference for singles over albums, are explained in terms of the need for ‘action’. LPs encourage passivity and ennui; besides, one no longer ‘controls’ the music (p. 64). This could also be read in terms of gender.

Willis understands masculinity in terms of a working-class paradigm of toughness, which has nothing to do with his identity as a social researcher. But at the same time, as a left-wing intellectual, Willis wants to see ‘hope in the proles’ (glamour) but can’t help projecting on to them the qualities that he feels he (the middle class) lacks (fear). But this view of the bikers as ‘noble savages’ raises the question of why Willis is studying them; as Angela McRobbie suggests, for ‘(male) sociologists … to admit how their own experience has influenced their choice of subject matter … seems more or less taboo’ (McRobbie, 1990, p. 68). In contrast, his complementary study of hippy culture doesn’t mention masculinity at all, although almost all the participants are male (Willis, 1978, pp. 83–169). Perhaps because of his closer class identification with them, Willis doesn’t ‘see’ them as masculine.

Dick Hebdige’s Subculture (1979) follows and expands Willis’s approach, analysing the behaviour and apparel of youth groups – punks, mods, skins, Rastas – and their formulation in signifying practices as style. His study is based on men, but like Willis, masculinity as such is not theorised (McRobbie, 1990, p. 73). Instead, their fandom is envisioned as ‘resistance’ – creating styles and using commodities in their own ways, unlike the ‘masses’ who passively consume ‘vacuous disco-bounce and sugary ballads’ (Hebdige, 1979, p. 60; see also Clarke, 1990, p. 85). Hebdige takes punk’s dismissal of ‘pop’ at face value, but we should be more critical of this implicitly gendered identification (Thornton, 1995, p. 95). Moreover, his concentration on leisure activities in the public domain, or, in rock parlance, ‘the street’, means the domestic sphere is excluded, along with the institutional sites of hegemony (school, work, home), opening the text to charges of being self-referential and apolitical (McRobbie, 1990, p. 69).

The focus on the UK raises the question of how far these subcultures exist overseas – even in the British context the book was criticised as being London-centred (Clarke, 1990, p. 86; McRobbie, 1990, p. 75). Is it possible to generalise about punk without including the USA, for example (Gendron, 2002, pp. 264–5)? But this would compromise the purity and originality of the scene, and Hebdige’s highly selective account of its influences. His insistence on its autonomy is masculinist. Music, while it is the organising principle of the subcultures Hebdige discusses, is curiously absent from the text, which leads to false generalisations: ‘judging punk as a reaction to glam rock … This is simply wrong’ (Clarke, 1990, p. 88). But in homosocial terms, it makes perfect sense – the ‘foppishness’ of glam rock alienated youth who formulated the ‘scruffiness and earthiness’ of punk as a reaction (Hebdige, 1979, p. 63). Hebdige highlights the extent to which social practices around popular music are often typed as masculine, and this doesn’t extend only to ‘macho’ behaviour. He also implicitly demonstrates how subcultures offer a specific kind of identity, security or subcultural capital, which appears to be important to male self-definition.

Subcultural studies represented rock masculinities as working-class, physical, expressive, aggressive and resistant. Pop music journalism, especially in the UK, incorporated many aspects of the subcultural approach, and punk provided a phenomenon amenable to such interpretation. However, rock journalists’ commitment to punk meant that, like Hebdige, they tended to downplay its more misogynistic aspects, which were projected onto unfashionable musical genres: ‘The Blues had a grandson … a malformed idiot thing that stays chained up in the cellar … it gibbers and hoots, flexing its muscles and masturbating frantically … it brags incessantly of its strength and masculinity … this thing’s name is heavy metal’ (Murray, 1992, p. 604). Heavy metal became a male scapegoat, a caricature of rock – suitable for comic treatment, as in This is Spinal Tap (1983; Chambers, 1985, pp. 122–4; Hebdige, 1979, p. 155). For UK punk and post-punk critics, metal was an example of ‘rockism’, which incarnated all the perceived excesses of 1970s rock – commercialism, supposed self-indulgence and distance from the audience, ‘cock rock’ machismo and drug excess (Christgau, 1990; Frith and McRobbie, 1990, p. 374; Woods, 2001).

The second way in which UK pop journalists distanced themselves from the contradictions of rock masculinity’s supposed proletarianism was by placing it in US rock, hence Jon Savage’s dismissal of Bruce Springsteen as ‘a reassertion of “traditional” masculine virtues’ (Savage, 1997, p. 174). Masculinity correlates to old-fashioned, essentialist ideologies of rockism (Frith, 1988, pp. 98–101; Laing, 1997, pp. 117–18). Michael Azerrad notes how Seattle indie Sub Pop exploited UK projections about masculinity and Americana, when in March 1989, label owners Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman flew Melody Maker journalist Everett True over to write up the burgeoning grunge scene. ‘Pavitt’s hunch that Sub Pop’s “white trash” aesthetic would win over the English panned out just as he’d hoped … The UK press believed that such raw rock & roll could only be played by Neanderthals, and Sub Pop obligingly played to their preconceptions. “Our bands are all lumberjacks,” Poneman declared. “Or they painted bridges.” And if they didn’t, Sub Pop made it seem like they did’ (Azerrad, 2001, pp. 441–2). So UK projections about American masculinity were double-edged: on the one hand, they deplored...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: White boys …
• 1 Reviewing theories and representations of masculinities
• 2 Powerless power: masculine intellectualism and aesthetics
• 3 What does it mean to be alternative? Indie guitar rock as a genre
• 4 The singer or the song? Homosociality, genre and gender
• 5 ‘Someone controls electric guitar’: indie and technologies
• 6 What will I do if she dies? Music, misery and white masculinities
• Conclusion: … white noise
• Bibliography
• Index