Club Cultures E-Book

Sarah Thornton

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 349

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This is an innovative contribution to the study of popular culture, focusing on the youth cultures that revolve around dance clubs and raves.

Leseprobe

Club Cultures

Music, Media and Subcultural Capital

SARAH THORNTON

Polity

Copyright © Sarah Thornton 1995

The right of Sarah Thornton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1995 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.Reprinted 1996, 1997, 2001Transferred to digital print 2003

Editorial office:Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:Blackwell Publishers Ltd108 Cowley RoadOxford OX4 1JF, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-6880-2 (Multi-user ebook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.5 on 12.5 pt Palatino by Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong

Printed and bound in Great Britain byMarston Lindsay Ross International Ltd,Oxfordshire

For Jeremy

Contents

List of Plates

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

1  The Distinctions of Cultures Without Distinction

Introduction

Youth and their Social Spaces

2  Authenticities from Record Hops to Raves (and the History of Disc Culture)

The Authentication of a Mass Medium

Industrial Forces, Musician Resistance and ‘Live’ Ideology

‘Real’ Events and Altered Spaces

Disc Jockeys and Social Sounds

The Authenticities of Dance Genres

The Response of the ‘Live’ Gig

Conclusion

3  Exploring the Meaning of the Mainstream (or why Sharon and Tracy Dance around their Handbags)

A Night of Research

Academic Accounts of the Cultural Organization of Youth

The Social Logic of Subcultural Capital

Participation versus Observation of Dance Crowds

Conclusion

4  The Media Development of ‘Subcultures’ (or the Sensational Story of ‘Acid House’)

The Underground versus the Overexposed

Mass Media: ‘Selling Out’ and ‘Moral Panic’

Micro-Media: Flyers, Listings, Fanzines, Pirates

Niche Media: the Editorial Search for Subcultures

Conclusion

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

List of Plates

Plates 1 and 2 Two ‘mould-breaking’ raves held just ten miles apart on 26–7 August 1989(Photographs: David Swindells)

Plate 3 One of the first instances of records made specifically for the public dancefloor(Reproduced by kind permission of the Musicians’ Union)

Plate 4 The death of vinyl(Reproduced by kind permission of DJ magazine)

Plate 5 Front-page coverage of the rave scene, June 1989(Reproduced by kind permission of the Sun)

Plate 6 A selection of flyers from 1989(Photograph: David Swindells)

Plate 7 DJ Danny Rampling and his devotees at Shoom(Photograph: David Swindells)

List of Figures

Figure 1 Dance versus other entertainments 1979–94(Source: Leisure Consultants)

Figure 2 Axes of authenticity

Figure 3 The academic divides of youth culture

Publishers’ note: Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Association of Commonwealth Universities and the British Council (for funding my postgraduate research at the John Logie Baird Centre, Strathclyde University, Glasgow) and of the Coca-Cola Foundation (for financing a research fellowship at the Center for Humanities, Wesleyan University, Connecticut).

I am very grateful to many people for their advice and support during the writing of this book and the PhD dissertation from which it derives. First, my thanks go to those interviewees, informants and guides who spent time with me, on and off the dancefloor, sharing their experience of, and insights into, British dance culture. Thanks also to Andy Linehan at the National Sound Archive for his help with research and to David Swindells at Time Out for kindly allowing me to reproduce his photographs. Second, I want to express my profound appreciation to the following friends, students and mentors for their constructive comments on various chapters and drafts of the book. In alphabetical order, they are: José Arroyo, Brian Austin, Jacob Bricca, Matt Callaghan, Stephi Donald, Alan Durant, Leslie Felperin, Wendy Fonarow, Andrew Goodwin, Reesa Greenberg, Larry Grossberg, Dave Hesmondhalgh, Kate Lacey, Rachel Malik, Martin Montgomery, Mica Nava, Keith Negus, Richard Ohmann, Patria Roman, Kitty Scott, Roger Silverstone, Paul Theberge and John Thompson. I would especially like to thank Angela McRobbie and my dissertation supervisor, Simon Frith, for their invaluable and enduring guidance.

Finally, this book would not have been written without the steadfast support of my parents, Glenda and Monte Thornton, and my ad hoc editor and partner, Jeremy Silver.

1

The Distinctions of Cultures Without Distinction

Introduction

Nothing could better signify the ‘complete disappearance of a culture of meaning and aesthetic sensibility,’ says postmodern cultural commentator Jean Baudrillard, than ‘a spinning of strobe lights and gyroscopes streaking the space whose moving pedestal is created by the crowd’ (Baudrillard 1982: 5). Baudrillard’s dismissal of the discotheque as the lowest form of contemporary entertainment reiterates a well-established view. Dance cultures have long been seen to epitomize mass culture at its worst. Dance music has been considered to be standardized, mindless and banal, while dancers have been regarded as narcotized, conformist and easily manipulated. Even Theodor Adorno, an early theorist of mass culture, reserved some of his most damning prose for the ‘rhythmic obedience’ of jitterbug dancers, arguing that the ‘music immediately expressed their desire to obey’ and that its regular beat suggested ‘coordinated battalions of mechanical collectivity … Thus do the obedient inherit the earth’ (Adorno 1941/1990: 312).

For many years, discotheques and dance music have even been excluded from popular music’s own canons. Rock criticism and much pop scholarship have tended to privilege ‘listening’ over dance musics, visibly performing musicians over behind-the-scenes producers, the rhetorically ‘live’ over the ‘recorded’ and hence guitars over synthesizers and samplers. Until the mid-eighties, successive genres of dance music tended to be dismissed as irrelevant fads or evoked as symbols of all that was not radical or innovative in music. Although these ideas are no longer held by as many music critics as they once were, the old rock canon persists in many spheres. For example, the following entry on disco music from the 1989 edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music typifies the opinion of the old guard:

Dance fad of the 70s with profound and unfortunate influence on popular music … it had a disastrous effect on music for two related reasons, the producers and the technology … producers, who already had too much power, used drum machines, synthesizers and other gimmicks at the expense of musical values … most disco hitmakers were virtually anonymous, and the anonymity has translated into the sameness of pop music in the 80s. (Clarke 1989: 344)

The purpose of this book is not to celebrate the creativity of dance culture (it seems to me that this needs no proving), nor to canonize dance music nor elevate the status of discotheques. In fact, except for some discussion of the taste war between disc-dancers and the Musicians’ Union in the first chapter, I don’t investigate in depth the values of people outside dance culture. Instead, I am concerned with the attitudes and ideals of the youthful insiders whose social lives revolve around clubs and raves.