Page 62 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Processes of elective belonging 53

to processes of historical change occurring within a larger international
musical culture will also be a significant basis of the way in which
such forms are positioned within a scene at a local level.
Shank (1994) traces the development of the music scene in Austin,
Texas, in some detail – filling in the way in which the different influences have
come together to produce a changing musical patchwork. In more theoretical
terms, Shank argues that the boundaries between producers and consumers
break down in the sort of scene that is represented in Austin. Thus, as Shank
argues ‘within the fluid stream of potential meanings, the audience and the
musicians together participate in a nonverbal dialogue about the significance of
music and the construction of their selves’ (p. 125). To develop and summarize
this idea, Shank suggests that:
Spectators become fans, fans become musicians, musicians are always
already fans, all constructing the nonobjects of identification through
their performances as subjects of enunciation – becoming and dissemin-
ating the subject-in-process of the signifying practice of rock ‘n’ roll
music.
(Shank 1994: 131)
This captures the way in which the participants in a scene can take on a
number of different roles or can change their roles within it. This sort of
change is also captured by Hodkinson (2002) in his study of Goth, where he
shows how the Goth subculture can involve the promotion of gigs, tape swap-
ping, the sale and purchase of clothing, and so on – suggesting the sort of
fluidity and complexity of the construction of meaning theorized by Shank. It
is illustrative that, in this context, Hodkinson often refers to the Goth scene.
Building on this sort of approach, where the idea of scene ‘has increas-
ingly been used as a model for academic research on the production, per-
formance, and reception of popular music’ (Peterson and Bennett 2004: 3),
Peterson and Bennett (2004) identify three types of scene: local, translocal and
virtual. Local scenes are those based around a particular place and has been the
most common use made of the term. A local scene is:
A focussed social activity that takes place in a delimited space and over a
specific span of time in which clusters of producers, musicians, and
fans realize their common musical taste, collectively distinguishing
themselves from others by using music and other cultural signs often
appropriated from other places, but recombined and developed in ways
that come to represent the local scene. The focussed activity we are inter-
ested in here, of course, centers on a particular style of music, but such
music scenes characteristically involve other diverse lifestyle elements as
well. These usually include a distinctive style of dancing, a particular
range of psychoactive drugs, style of dress, politics and the like.
(Peterson and Bennett 2004: 8)
The translocal scene involves the communication between local scenes
and it refers to ‘widely scattered local scenes drawn into regular communication
around a distinctive form of music and lifestyle’ (Peterson and Bennett 2004: 6).