Page 193 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 187

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determined by those who make it), and his argument overemphasizes the role of
musicians and music-making in shaping musical subcultures—so much so that
audiences and the music industry often appear to be standing somewhere outside
the realm of culture looking in at the music-makers who are the real story here.
And while Slobin’s comments on the music and the people who make it are
generally quite sharp, there is still much more to a musical subculture than
musicians. After all, though the lines between performers and fans can become
exceptionally blurry at times (as in the case of the British punk subculture of the
1970s), even the most marginalized Western micromusic possesses some variety
of audience: concertgoers; dance-hall patrons; fans who purchase independently
distributed tapes, records, and compact discs of local music, and so on. Similarly,
while many subcultural musics deliberately and explicitly reject the commercial
trappings of ‘mainstream’ music, few (if any) Euro-American micromusics can be
said to exist completely outside the sphere of influence of either that mainstream
or the industry that keeps it alive. 4 Slobin’s book doesn’t actively deny the
relevance or usefulness of questions of audiences and industry, but his own silence
on the crucial roles that fans and institutions play in the formation and maintenance
of local musical cultures leaves an otherwise very strong argument noticeably
vulnerable on some crucial points.
Overall, however, the strengths of Slobin’s project compensate for its
weaknesses very well…though for some readers, one of Subcultural Sounds’
greatest strengths might be seen to be its most fatal flaw. More specifically,
Slobin’s book raises far more questions than it answers, and thus it ‘fails’ to provide
more than the sketchiest of frameworks from which we might better come to grips
with the tangled network of Euro-America’s thousands of local musics. To dismiss
this book on the grounds that it isn’t the definitive text on what a ‘new and
improved’ ethnomusicology or popular music studies might look like, however, is
to do Slobin and his project a gross disservice. Slobin doesn’t pretend to have
solutions for all of the theoretical and methodological problems that he poses (in
fact, providing adequate answers to even a fraction of these questions would be a
formidable task for a multi-volume encyclopedia on micromusics), but this slim
treatise delivers more than admirably on the relatively modest promises that it does
make, insofar as it provides an insightful, provocative, and—by Slobin’s own
admission—preliminary set of guidelines for future scholarly work on the
relationship between music and culture. While Subcultural Sounds may be short
on answers, it asks all the right questions, which makes it a far more valuable
resource than an entire shelf of books that answer all the wrong questions in
extensive detail.
Perhaps the central question that drives this book forward is the thorny (and all
too frequently overlooked) problem of culture. How do we recognize a culture—
particularly a subculture—when we come across one? What are its defining
features? What (if anything) distinguishes a local culture from a mere scene? How
do we identify (or perhaps construct) boundaries between ‘neighboring’ cultures?
How should we think about the interplay that inevitably takes place between