Summary:
Interlude F, the sixth “extra-musical” discussion, explores the myriad and impactful ways that subculture—or “intraculture” as it here called—intersects with our musical taste. The interlude again begins with an anecdote, in this case a tale of a teenage rivalry between the author (a Queen fan) and a friend (a Kiss fan)—as a window into the role that group membership plays in shaping our musical identity. After offering an aid— the “shopping center metaphor”—to underscore the intersecting roles of the mainstream and its intracultures, the interlude continues by dissecting the many ways that one’s native culture operates and interconnects with its constituent subcultures. At that point a detailed, historically-grounded unwinding of “intraculture” is presented via sociology, cultural studies, ethnology, and musicology—in turn yielding a variety of theories and counter-theories: cultural capital, omnivorousness, subculture theory, along with other more recent—and flexible—approaches. The author then offers his own theory: that the prime role of intracultures is to offer each of us access to musical works, styles, and approaches we might otherwise never know; it ends by warning of the dangers of cutting ourselves off to music—or others—simply by virtue of the heuristics of intracultural identity.
Supplements:
( More on Mark Slobin’s use of the terms “superculture” and “landscape” ):
Slobin notes his preference for “superculture” given its nebulous quality, one less laden with complexity and contradiction: (p. 15), it “implies an umbrella-like, overarching structure which could be present anywhere in the system—ideology or practice, concept or performance.” Slobin in turn derives his “landscape” formulation from the work of cultural anthropologist Arjun Appaduarai; see Appadurai, Arjun. "Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy." Theory, culture & society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 295-310.
( More on Pierre Bourdieu’s intellectual development ):
Although sympathetic to Marxist thought, and the inescapable role of wealth in shaping social distribution within a capitalist society, Bourdieu likewise embraced other, more “liberal” forces of social power—building upon ideas posed earlier by sociologists like Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen.
( More on the classical works included in Bourdieu’s cultural capital survey ):
The 16 works are (in order of presentation): Rhapsody in Blue , La Traviata , Concerto for the Left Hand , Eine kleine Nachtmusik, L'Arlésienne, Sabre Dance, Firebird Suite, Scheherazade, Art of Fugue, Hungarian Rhapsody, L'Enfant et les sortilèges, Blue Danube, Twilight of the Gods, Four Seasons, Well-Tempered Clavier, and Marteau sans maître . How many can you name? See following paragraph in main text for several of the answers.
( More on the musico-cultural distinctions in 19th century Vienna ):
More specifically, the upper middle class and aristocracy supported the more “learned” works of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart, thereby distinguishing themselves from the lower middle class preference for Italian opera and works of a similarly “amateur-oriented aesthetic”.
( More on Bourdieu’s bias toward those with a taste for popular music ):
Bourdieu likewise echoes Adorno—as discussed in Interlude D—in defining the uncultivated in part by their predilection for repetition: “with ‘mass market’ cultural products—music whose simple, repetitive structures invite a passive, absent participation…—dispossession of the very intention of determining one's own ends is combined with a more insidious form of recognition of dispossession.” Ibid: 386.
( More on Bourdieu’s own recognition of the influence of changing times on the definitions of cultural capital ):
Indeed, Bourdieu himself had noted that as times change, so too does the taste of those in every class distinction: “the tastes actually realized depend on the state of the system of goods offered; every change in the system of goods induces a change in tastes.” Bourdieu. Distinctions : 231
( More on the “hip hop highbrows” and the influence of place in defining taste ):
“Hip hop highbrows” seem to be especially keen on rap produced in international scenes (e.g., the Middle East)—touted as “crucibles of political and cultural activism, almost impervious to the commercial forces that have overwhelmed the once-potent U.S. urban cores.” This is just one manner in which “place” is updating the omnivore theory: Cutts & Widdop, for example, interviewed 28,000 folks across England and found that “general” omnivores live in higher number in the more populated regions in the Southern England, Manchester, and Yorkshire than in the more rural North; further, they found that “voracious omnivores”—older, high income, high education individuals who are “extremely active” culturally—live almost exclusively in one place: central London. Cutts & Widdop. "Reimagining omnivorousness”: 480-503.
( More on the origins of the term “subculture” ):
Initially, the term “subculture” held a fairly neutral, generic sense, but as adopted by the Chicago school took on the connotation of “deviance.”
( More on the Chicago School of sociologists in the 1920s and 30s ):
The ideas of the Chicago School were based on anthropologist Emile Durkheim’s work on “collective representation”. As Merton put it, youth behavior and motivation was “structural” (class-based) in nature, and involved “differential access to the approved opportunities for legitimate, prestige-bearing pursuit of culture” that in turn resulted in “anti-social conduct.”
( More on the term “neo-tribe ):
English sociologist Kevin Hetherington originally coined the expression “neo-tribes”, after a concept developed in the 1990s by French sociologist Michel Maffesoli.
( More on the academic response to Andy Bennett’s “neo-tribe” theory ):
Despite its insights, a number of subsequent writers have criticized Bennett’s approach—not least his own narrow focus on youth and the urban dance in England. Some, such as sociologists Tracy Shildrick & Robert MacDonald, for example, think that Bennett went too far in dismissing the role of class-based challenges in explaining collective taste, especially among poor minority communities under threat of racism, bad policing, etc. Such populations, they argue, may not have the liberty of choosing a fleeting, fluid, and consumption based lifestyle by virtue of conditions well articulated—they say—in those CCCS studies that Bennett dismissed. And of course, few have heeded Bennett’s call to abandon the term “subculture”—which remains common in popular and academic literature alike. See Shildrick, Tracy, and Robert MacDonald. "In defense of subculture: Young people, leisure and social divisions." Journal of Youth Studies 9, no. 2 (2006): 125-140.
( More on the Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” ):
Referring to national identity, for example, Anderson writes (p. 6): “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”
( More on the use of music as a negative tool to delimit behavior ):
As Lily Hirsch points out, the technique of “weaponizing” classical music has been used effectively in public and commercial sites (e.g., 7-11’s) around the world—even in Santa Rosa, California, near to Dr. Gasser’s home in Petaluma, where the piped-in music of Bach and Rachmaninov has been used to keep teens from congregating in the Old Courthouse Square.
( More on Ulusoy’s research on “Dionysian” interviewees ):
Ulusoy. "Subcultural escapades”: 248. James, a 42 year-old librarian stated: “I’m mainly into metal, but I'm really open-minded, because I'll usually hear something in a form of music that speaks to me, or that I can relate to, or that gets my attention—like ‘Oh, wow, it's pretty neat. Play that again.’ But I have to say my second main love aside from metal is probably jazz and then maybe an ambient type of new age type of sleepy music.”
Principal Bibliography:
Mark Slobin, “Micromusics of the West: A Comparative Approach,” Ethnomusicology 36, no. 1 (1992)
Tony Jefferson and Stuart Hall, eds., Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Routledge, 2003)
Emre Ulusoy, “Subcultural Escapades via Music Consumption: Identity Transformations and Extraordinary Experiences in Dionysian Music Subcultures,” Journal of Business Research 69, no. 1 (2016)
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste , trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)
Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996)
Mike Savage and Modesto Gayo, “Unravelling the Omnivore: A Field Analysis of Contemporary Musical Taste in the United Kingdom,” Poetics 39, no. 5 (2011)
Bernard Lahire, “The Individual and the Mixing of Genres: Cultural Dissonance and Self- Distinction,” Poetics 36, nos. 2–3 (2008)
John Clarke, “The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community,” in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain , 2nd ed., eds. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (Oxford: Routledge, 2003)
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 2006)
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Macmillan, 2011)
External Links:
"Music Subcultures" (Subculturelist.com)