totally PV, "Totally Go-Go's": the ambitions of Los Angeles new wave

It's Friday night, December 4, 1981, in Palos Verdes Estates, California, and tonight the Go-Go's — the Los Angeles band of the moment — are playing your high school. OMIGAWD! 

Palos Verdes Estates was probably not a big stomping grounds for the Go-Go's. A tiny, coastal municipality sheltered from the rest of Los Angeles County by steep hills, it was, as it remains today, a jewel in the crown of "P.V.", a.k.a. the Palos Verdes Peninsula, an area that also contains the municipality of Rancho Palos Verdes and a handful of gated communities that altogether house about 70,000 residents. That's very small change for the L.A. area, population-wise, and it happened by no mistake. With its lofty coastal views, craggy cliffs, country club, prime beaches, cool climate, and top-rated public schools, P.V. is one of the poshest residential enclaves in the L.A. area outside the conspicuous wealth of your Bel Airs or Beverly Hills. Unlike those notorious residences, P.V. has never been a Hollywood company town. In Reagan's America, aerospace was the biggest employer in the Los Angeles County, and P.V. has long been a chief residence for the corporate executives and retired officers who helmed that cold-war industry. 

Not that affluent L.A. suburbs haven't supported an occasional youthquake. Notably, L.A.'s beachside cities gave rise to thrasher skateboard culture in the 1970s when skaters dove board-first into empty swimming pools — and P.V. has always had more than its share of swimming pools. And no doubt many P.V. kids made their way into Hollywood when punk rock burst on the scene in around 1978, and maybe a few Hollywood punks found themselves partying in big P.V. houses where the parents were out of town. But P.V. has generally been too small and too bourgeois to yield its own scene. If the shit rolls downhill, then in P.V. it rolls into the denser middle- and lower-middle class enclaves of the South Bay — Torrance, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Hawthorne, Lawndale, Long Beach, San Pedro etc. — and further south into Orange County, the original breeding grounds for hardcore punk rock.

By contrast, P.V. would have been a much preppier scene, and in Southern California that would have been a natural constituency for the new wave broadcast on KROQ and (further south) 91X FM. What was the soundtrack at the time? In 1981, the #1 song on KROQ was Missing Persons' "Mental Hopscotch". New British bands like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, OMD, U2 (I know, I know - it's context, people!), Spandau Ballet, and Adam & The Ants had huge hits, and the next year would see breakthrough albums from Human League, Soft Cell, and A Flock of Seagulls. Locally, Hollywood's punk scene was pretty much exhausted by 1981, and it was shit-or-get-off-the-pot time for the region's punk and new wave bands. Look at this remarkable list of albums by L.A.-area bands that were released in 1981: 

X - Wild Gift	Black Flag - Damaged	Joan Jett - I Love Rock'n'Roll	Devo - New Traditionalists	Sparks - Whomp That Sucker
Wall of Voodoo - Dark Continent	The Gun Club - Fire of Love	The Blasters - self-titled	The Flesh Eaters - A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die	Oingo Boingo - Only A Lad
The Plugz - Better Luck	Sparks - Whomp That Sucker	Minutemen - The Punch Line	The Plimsouls - self-titled	TSOL - Dance With Me

Of course, at the top of the list commercially is the Go-Go's debut, Beauty and the Beat. 1981 was the band's most important year: signing with I.R.S. Records in April; releasing the original "We Got the Beat" single in May, "Our Lips are Sealed" in June, and the debut album in July; and beginning a never-ending tour that sees them opening for the Rolling Stones in Illinois then selling out L.A.'s famous Greek Theater in October, then appearing on Saturday Night Live in November. Finally — OMIGAWD! — they play Palos Verdes High School and film the concert for a TV special.

The Go-Go's impact on pop culture is unassailable, and with the recent release of the 30th anniversary edition of Beauty and the Beat we'll hear the claims for their greatness again. Yet the P.V. show, captured on the 1982 video "Totally Go-Go's," highlights the contradictions of the band's ambitions against the metropolitan backdrop. The oral history We Got the Neutron Bomb: the Untold Story of L.A. Punk quotes guitarist Charlotte Caffey: "We didn't want to be just an L.A. band. That was not our goal. I never wanted to fucking stay in L.A. and play clubs." But the liner notes on the 30th anniversary edition reports the band's original dismay at the clean, poppy production that I.R.S. Records imposed on the record. With three decades of hindsight, Caffey makes an observation that almost all the other members repeat in as many words: 

[Producer] Richard [Gotterher] had a certain idea of how to produce us. If we'd done it the way we originally wanted, I don't think we'd have had the career we've had so far. What he did was take the essence of the songs and find the melody. At first we weren't happy with it, but the record did indeed sound like us. We were just a little rougher around the edges when we played live. We played every note on the record, so it was definitely us, but he brought out the cleaner tones as opposed to the more distorted ones. 

So too the choice of preppy Palos Verdes High School as the site of the promotional concert. The specific locational reason remains to be discovered, but almost certainly I.R.S. Records pushed them to perform before a well-scrubbed high school — the better to reach the broadest, "all-American" youth audience. Famously, singer Belinda Carlisle was herself a high-school cheerleader, and maybe for that reason "Totally Go-Go's" presents us with PHVS cheerleaders and jocks in the opening scenes.

But the Palos Verdes Estate setting jars with the L.A. lives led by the band. Native Southland residents Carlisle (from Thousand Oaks, on the other side of the San Fernando Valley), Jane Wiedlin (from Woodland Hills, in the Valley) and Caffey (from inner-ring municipality Glendale) came from bigger suburbs with variably mixed populaces than found in P.V. Willfully throwing themselves into the Hollywood punk scene, their lifestyles and their choices inject a bitter note of sarcasm into the chorus of "This Town" that gets lost in Palos Verdes Estate, where it too easily turns into a cruel boast made by rich kids who've never known anything else: 

This town is our town
It is so glamorous
Bet you'd live here if you could
And be one of us

Yet if "Totally Go-Go's" captures the commercial ambitions of the Go-Go's, and by extension the controversy and backlash they generated from the original punk cognoscenti, the film also, more than any other video document I can think of, presents the band at the peak of their musical powers and cultural relevance. The Go-Go's never burdened themselves with the charge of authenticity. If this isn't exactly how they imagined things turning out, they roll with it anyway with infectious enthusiasm.

So far as I know, "Totally Go-Go's" hasn't been released on DVD yet. For audio-video fidelity, probably the optimal way to view it is on its original Laserdisc format. Myself, I played the commercial VHS release as a teenager and college student. It drags at times, weighed down by somewhat rote interview segments (made perhaps more interesting by the subsequent revelation on their VH1's "Behind the Music" documentary that some members were sinking into debauchery by this point) and that glut of minor-chord tunes from the debut album. But it presents the Go-Go's as I choose to remember them: the massive tom-toms of drummer Gina Schock, the stinging surf-guitar leads of Charlotte Caffey, Jane Weidlin and Kathy Valentine bopping giddily as they propel the tunes forward, and the iconic cool of Belinda Carlisle.  This is all quite evident in their opening number, the great "Skidmarks on my Heart." If you can't make it all the way through, at least check out their encore (the last four songs), with its tasty choice of b-sides and covers.

The videos below are sequenced in the original order to give you more or less the entire film. [Thanks to The Go-Go's Notebook for historical information.]

1. Skidmarks on My Heart

 
2. How Much More


 
3. Tonite

 
4. Fading Fast

 
5. London Boys

 
6. Cool Jerk

 
7. Automatic

 
8. Lust to Love

 
9. Can't Stop the World

 
10. This Town

 
11. Vacation

 
12. You Can't Walk in Your Sleep

 
13. Our Lips Are Sealed

 
14. Let's Have a Party

 
15. We Got The Beat

 
16. Surfing and Spying

 
17. Beatnik Beach

 
18. The Way You Dance

 
19. Remember (Walking In The Sand)

sons of Norway: scratching at the local myth of the Replacements

The Replacements are in the ether again.  Do they ever leave?  Their legend has hardly faded since they broke up in 1991, but it seems now that popular culture, having cycled through late 70s/early 80s new wave and post-punk, is in the midst of a nostalgic phase for late 80s/early 90s college-radio music.  There was just recently a tribute concert to Michael Azerrad's book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991.  New indie-rock bands brandish the sounds of Dinosaur Jr and other old stalwarts.  And of course, we're all heading to the 20th anniversary of college radio's gotterdamerung, the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind. 

Perhaps it should be no surprise there's a documentary about the Replacements in the works.  (There's a documentary about Thelonious Monster's Bob Forrest in the works, ferchrissakes.  Retrospectives on underground rock bands are second only to progressive causes in adopting documentaries as their privileged medium, it seems.)

I was at my local public library a few days ago, which has a ridiculously well-stocked section of music books, and on whim I picked up Jim Walsh's oral history, The Replacements: All Over But The Shouting (Voyageur Press, 2007).  A native Minneapolitan and local journalist, Walsh was around the band for pretty much all of the members' lives, belonging to that generation of local rock bands that were quickly overshadowed by the Replacements and Hüsker Dü (Laughing Stock and REMs [sic], anyone?).  If the teaser to the film documentary above is any indication, then it follows the same method as the Walsh book, drawing heavily on contemporary interviews with music critics and contemporaneous musicians who were inspired at various distances from the band.  The former members themselves were largely absent from the new interviews for the book except for, well, the real replacements: a still-traumatized Slim Dunlap, and the last drummer Steve Foley, who wasn't in the band long enough for most fans to even know he came after Chris Mars, but was in just long enough to burn out like all the other guys.

Sometimes this method works, and sometimes it doesn't.  Walsh's introductory chapter isn't especially reassuring: hagiographic reminiscences from I-was-there Minneapolis scenesters and the odd present-day musician (Billie Joe Armstrong, Craig Finn, Joe Henry) about when they first discovered the Replacements and what the band meant to them.  Is it me, or do the Replacements, more than most other indie-rock icons, particularly inspire this kind of self-indulgent, "man you kids just don't KNOW how great this band was" reverie? 

In fact, I remember the Replacements.  Never got to see them, but I was 16 when Let It Be came out, and "Sixteen Blue" spoke to me like it did so many other lonely, misfit boys.  (Bob's raw solo still gives me the chills.)  I had the cassette-only live recording The Shit Hits The Fans, and 25 years later I'm still trying to figure out who originally wrote "Left Here in the Dark", one of the few songs that the band played through to its approximate end.  I even liked the first major-label album, Tim, although already I was struck by the new heights of sappiness attained by the ballad "Here Comes A Regular" — heights that Paul Westerberg would continually surpass on their remaining albums. 

So I'm not a lifer for the Replacements; I can't bring myself to call them "the Mats" like their devotees do.  That said, I still want to know more about what they achieved, and why they were so important for so many — and Walsh's oral history fails too often in these regards.  We learn fairly little about the influences and elements that went into the Replacements' music.  We don't get to appreciate the stylistic break that the band made with the prior generation of Minneapolis groups that adhered rigidly to the conventions of new wave (the Suburbs, Suicide Commandos, etc.).  It's a truism that the Midwest is the bastion of diehard classic rockers, which seems borne out by the Replacements' style and especially their go-to covers (again, see The Shit Hits The Fans), but then what was the context in which they and their fans got off calling them "punk "?  (And by what stretch of the imagination could Hüsker Dü be portrayed as "more of a Beatles thing" — Bob Mould's own words — in contrast to the Replacements' Stones' thing?)

Except for Jim Walsh's special insight into the late Bob Stinson (he gave a really touching eulogy at Bob's funeral), we get only hints of what made the members of the band tick.  Drawing on quotations from old interviews with the band, the author isn't really able to reconcile the contradictions of Paul, Tommy Stinson, and Chris Mars, or challenge the members to come clean about those contradictions.  Westerberg comes off as a bit of a jerk, a quality that, along with his self-deprecation and ambivalence about success, are chalked up to his environment, the white ethnic neighborhoods in South Minneapolis.  Some suggestive passages:

            [From Jim Walsh's preface:] Paul, like me and Mars, grew up in the Catholic ghetto of South Minneapolis, and it's only very recently that I've come to know what that means.  Some of us read the Bible every day, and others of us did the rosary every night after dinner while the other kids in the neighborhood were outside playing.  Some of our parents were alcoholics; some of our parents treated booze and sex like it was one and the same and the road to hell.

            Every year on Ash Wednesday since we were in first grade, we had a priest rub our foreheads with ashes and say, "Remember man that you are dust and to dust you shall return."  Have that done enough times, and not only will it provide a soul with freedom, inspiration, humility, and beautiful, mysterious ritualistic imagery, but it'll fuck with a boy, and a man (pp. 20-1).

Jay Walljasper:  Paul Westerberg's childhood home is on the next block from my house.  I show it to my son now [in 2007], an aspiring songwriter, and tell him, "Yes, it's possible to make it."  It's funny because it is actually a pretty grand house for a band that fancied itself a bunch of working-class fuck-ups from South Minneapolis.  It's big and brick with an iron fence around it, and looks like some family mansion from the 1910s.  The people living there now say that in the basement young Paul painted the walls with a tribute to his favorite band: "I love the Suburbs" (pg. 51).

Curtiss A: The Stinson family lived in the house [2225 Bryant Avenue in South Minneapolis] next to the house where my band practiced.  I knew [their mother] Anita because she worked at the Uptown.  Bob [Stinson] would come over and watch us, and the thing about him that I loved is that he hated us.  He had this gigantic sneer, like Elvis.  And he just sneered at us.  I didn't know if he just didn't like us, or if he was just one of those kids like that, or if he was maybe jealous that maybe his brother was showing some interest in what we were doing.  At the time, I didn't know either one would be players (pp. 54-5).

Lori Barbero: I knew Anita and I walked in and out of the house freely.  It was just a huge rush.  What are they going to come up with?  What's Bobby gonna do?  Who's gonna get obliterated?  There was so much humor in it, and so much reality, and so much originality (pg. 58).

I could go on — lots of Replacement obsessives are familiar with the details — but two things come to mind.  First, change the city, the ethnic composition, and the cultural pastime, and the emotional arc could resemble almost any given movie about Irish "Southies" from South Boston.  Second, so many other bands came from these same parts, and they weren't obliged to express the South Minneapolis ethos that Walsh tries to evoke.  So why were the Replacements?  In fact, something that generally goes overlooked is the anxious, self-conscious manner in which the Replacements charged themselves to convey a particularly ethnically/class-based outlook on life that's "only from Minneapolis: 

Steve Perry: "Maybe I'm from the working class," Westerberg says, "but I've hardly worked a day in my life."  He and Chris Mars then embark on an explanation of the theory of social classes according to the Replacements, which differs significantly from Karl Marx's version.

            "The middle class is the best," says Westerberg.  "They make the best rock'n'roll.  Elliot Murphy said that.  I don't the exact reason, but I think the lower class is so desperate to rise above where they are that they'll do anything, even to the point where it makes them look stupid.  Like metal, for instance.  They're all stupid, but they want to make it.  The upper class of wealth and affluence will try to make art, 'cause they've already seen money and power, and they go, 'well, we're above that.'"

            "They try to imitate art," says Mars, "where the lower class is doing anything they can to bust out..."

            "And the middle class," continues Westerberg, "doesn't give a shit.  'Cause they're right in the middle.  They've never been rish, they've never been poor.  We don't want to rule the world, but we don't want to be at the bottom of the ladder" (pp. 220-1).

And in this invention of tradition, there's maybe a Minneapolis story still to be told about the Replacements, but local son Jim Walsh might not be the guy to tell it, and the Replacements' reverent fans aren't necessarily the ones to put it in proper perspective.

A final note: The Replacements: All Over But The Shouting just scratches the surface of rock literature about Minneapolis bands from this era.  I'm looking forward to reading Bob Mould's just-published memoir, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody, and if I'm going to try to get the whole Hüsker Dü story, then I'll probably have to read what Mould's bandmates say in Andrew Earles' Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock.  Awhile back on Twitter, I posted this briefer oral history from Magnet Magazine, "A Tale Of Twin Cities: Hüsker Dü, The Replacements And The Rise And Fall Of The ’80s Minneapolis Scene."  And maybe I'll have to dig out Neal Karlen's 1994 book, Babes in Toyland: The Making and Selling of a Rock and Roll Band.

listening alone, together: a review of Pop Music, Pop Culture by Chris Rojek

British sociologist Chris Rojek has just published a major work in the social analysis of pop music.  To say its argument isn't completely satisfying doesn't belittle the remarkable accomplishment of Pop Music, Pop Culture (Polity, 2011), which covers the gamut of musical production, content, and reception from the pre-historic oral tradition to today's P2P networks.  Most distinctively, Pop Music, Pop Culture (hereafter, PMPC) is the first work that I know of in this genre to address the "tectonic" technological and cultural shifts brought about by the rise of the laptop and mobile phone as our main listening devices.  I can't think of any other academic textbook that mentions Spotify or Last.fm, much less gives them the even-handed and thoroughly sociological treatment as Rojek has done here.

 

PMPC works well as a college-level survey of the key empirical developments and scholarly perspectives in popular music.  Sure, there are interesting digressions into specific music groups and industry trends throughout the book, but make no mistake: it's a work of academic theory, and if you're unaccustomed to theorists' generalizing sweep across case studies and the way they pose questions for your consideration by making bold assertions supported elsewhere (i.e., in the bibliography), you may find PMPC a tough read.  Still, many readers eager for something more intellectually substantial than the normal mass-market music book fare will find something stimulating to chew on here.  Or, think about it this way: in a little over 200 pages, you can come away from PMPC with a rather extensive review of the many ways that academics have approached the topic of pop music, no term papers or essay exams necessary.

Cultural de-differentiation and cultural monadism

As for Rojek's own framework, he characterizes it like this: "Pop culture, rather than the biography of the artist, the history of the record corporation or the values of the media, is regarded to be the crucible for understanding pop music" (pg. 9).  His notion of pop culture doesn't actually exclude these other emphases, but rather incorporates them alongside further interest in the evolving technologies of musical performance and dissemination; the diverse yet dynamic ways that listeners consume and come together around music; and the recent diminishment of music into just another multimedia format alongside videogames, film and TV properties, and celebrity branding.  This catholic approach lets Rojek survey the entire circuit of creative production and consumption (encoding and decoding for the cultural studies specialists) with a particular attention to the struggles for creative control between corporations who organize the economic contexts for musical production; the artists, technicians, managers and other professionals who create the music and its (often inseparable) publicity; and the audiences who seek to incorporate music (sometimes as devoted fans, sometimes with little thought) into the practice of their everyday lives.

The trend across the last few centuries toward increasing technological mediation, economic rationalization, and audience expansion in popular music leads toward a contemporary pattern of cultural de-differentiation, in which global networks and digital technologies introduce whole new dimensions of cultural activity that a narrow focus on 'music' is likely to miss.  Cultural de-differentiation, meaning "the collapse of boundaries and the breakdown of genres" (pg. 6), includes some familiar artistic developments celebrated by pop music analysts, such as the re-splicing of genres, references, and performative/compositional techniques illustrated by hip hop, sampling and scratching.  Rojek identifies analogous shifts in the music industry: corporate reorganizations and business strategies centered upon "bespoke aggregation in which recordings are franchised as ringtones, internet streaming, advertising jingles and computer games" (pg. 144).  (I think PMPC provides quite insightful discussion of Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell, those music management/TV programming gurus who can be blamed for several insipid developments in recent pop culture.)  Music fans also drive the engine of cultural de-differentiation via illegal file-sharing, increasing sophistication in the consumption of celebrity and spectacle, and growing expenditures on non-musical multimedia, all of which compel recording artists and music companies to further evolve.  Even our conceptual distinctions between artists, corporations and audiences are complicated by the trend of cultural de-differentiation, as the boundary-crossing examples of Sean Combs, mashups, and music blogs illustrate.

The context of cultural de-differentiation gives rise to an emergent mode of listening that takes active listening and subcultural identifications (traditional subjects in the academic field of cultural studies) to new levels.  Rojek call this cultural monadism, and it's worth quoting his explanation in length:

A cultural monad is someone who distils wider cultural agendas and internalizes and applies them as a private, mobile unit in the form of gestural currency.  Consumption occurs through a combination of multi-media platforms, including television, film, DVD, games and the web.  Because the distillation of culture occurs along many fronts and through multiple media, social unity and collective focus are more elusive.  In order to be regarded as credible, competent and relevant agents, cultural monads need to be well versed in popular culture.  This includes knowing about the deceptions of solidarity as well as the social and cultural potential of togetherness.  In sum, the main characteristics of cultural monadism are as follows:

1. Articulation: knowledge about cultural data and associated powers of expression.

2. Mobility: an ease of movement along many layers and between many fronts of popular culture.

3. Dramaturgy: the competence and credibility to transplate political, cultural and economic issues into gestural culture. By this term I mean a form of cultural articulation that expresses commitment and solidarity as cultural representation rather than a basis for action.  So the cultural monad, unlike the activist, listens to 'Feed the World' (1984), approves of the sentiment with respect to global inequality and the complacency of the advanced industrial countries and uses it as a cultural capital to achieve identification, without engaging in any form of concrete action to transform things.

Might it be that mobility, access (including unlawful access) and privacy are the primary characteristics of the consumption of pop, so that the main consumer type is the cultural monad? (pp. 31-2)

PMPC's implicit urban theory

So far I've discussed the domain of Rojek's pop music analysis on his own terms.  But I'm primarily interested in a question that is of secondary interest in PMPC: what do these cultural shifts portend for musical urbanism?  The digital deterritorialization of music production, exchange and consumption; the decline of brick-and-mortar music retailers; the mobility of digital music collections; the increasing privacy of the settings where we listen to music — all of these trends appear to destabilize the traditional relationship between cities and pop music.

Let me clarify.  Rojek in fact devotes considerable attention to the "urban-industrial backbeat," by which he means the concrete contexts and settings that give meaning and motivation to our uses and activities of pop music.  Consider the following statements:

Urban-industrial society creates a new aesthetics, having to do with the body, that the Romantic division between body and soul cannot encapsulate (pg. 74, characterizing Richard Shusterman's criticism of Theodor Adorno's aesthetic theory).

The idea that popular music is a form of 'enstorying', of encoding personal and collective life experience, connects up with the proposition that some music performers are entry points into the cultural biography of a time and place and the related notion that some popular songs provide a 'window' into a specific 'structure of feeling' that is summative of a discernible geography, history and culture (pg. 80, referencing Paul Friedlander's agency framework on pop music).

In the twentieth century, pop evolved into the urban-industrial backbeat of daily life.  Nearly every home and vehicle has a sound system of some sort.  Canned music is a standard feature of shopping malls, call centre waiting lists, fast-food places, elevators, hotel lobbies and most forms of advertising.  Sports arenas play popular music during half-time intervals and before and after fixtures.  The Super Bowl intermission has become one of the pre-eminent stages for live music in the world (pg. 46).

There's no question, then, that Rojek acknowledges the multidimensional force of the city — its spaces, social relations, economies and institutions — as a structuring context, an independent variable if you will, for pop music.  Rather, it's the collective, public or subcultural nature of city life — the city's status as a dependent variable of pop music, to extend the analogy — that Rojek's analysis questions by implication. 

One of the most compelling cases in PMPC's implicit urban theory comes from the decline of urban musical subcultures.  What effects do deterritorialization, digital networks, and the rise of cultural monadism have on this mode of urbanism?

For example, internet exchange makes it unlikely that regional subcultures, like the Mersey and Madchester scenes of, respectively, the 1960s and late 1980s, or the Compton rap scene in Southern Los Angeles of the 1990s, will emerge with the same force and influence in the future.  Scenes depend upon physical locations.  The effect of the internet is to disembed listening and the production of music from primary spatial locations like the neighborhood or the city and spread them out electronically (pg. 9).

Of course youth subcultures continue to exist, but visual and oral markers are less pronounced.  The main reason for this is the transformation in the supply routes of popular music.  The internet and the iPod have replaced the radio and the club as the prime sources of access.  The mobile, private nature of internet consumption militates against the incubation of strong ties of collectivity and solidarity which are the prerequisites to delineate social inclusion and exclusion.  It encourages forms of flexible consumption.  For consumers are able to download files from many genres, from soul, post-punk, heavy metal, rap, jungle and electronica, without committing to any one of them.  The iShuffle function on the iPod is a metaphor for how popular music is widely accumulated and experienced through downloading, streaming and ripping.... The result is the dilution of metropolitan tribal looks, since access and consumption are often mobile and private rather than public and concentrated in specific social and physical settings (pg. 81).

Or, consider the urban institutions that traditionally support pop music.  Few can argue with Rojek's assertion that the "high street record store" where fans discover new music and absorb aesthetic/subcultural distinctions has generally disappeared from the urban scene.  Even behind-the-scenes infrastructure like recording studios, which organize collective artistic-technical labor and imbue aesthetic-commercial distinction into recordings, is going the way of the dodo bird, increasingly replaced by "the laptop as the main digital compositional tool" (pg. 140).

In sum, the digital/network manifestations of cultural de-differentiation mean that we increasingly listen to music alone, at least where physical settings — the most traditional of urban dimensions — are concerned.  This isn't to say that pop music today portends social isolation and anomie.  As analysts of network society (e.g., Manuel Castells), virtual community (Barry Wellman, Mary Chayko), and the individualization of social structure (Ulrich Beck, John Urry) might anticipate, Rojek asserts that individuals simply carry the channels of musical production, exchange, and consumption on their own backs, or rather in their laptops and mobile phones.  But physical spaces for cultural sharing and collective action around pop music are on the decline.  For Rojek, the only exception is the concert venue, as the erosion of the music-industry model on selling CDs and other material objects has bestowed new cultural value and economic scarcity to live performance.

Theorizing the urbanism of cultural monadism

And this is where Rojek's implicit urban theory leaves us.  Not that the domain of his argument can be faulted (this is a general work of pop music studies, after all), but I think this is ultimately unsatisfying, if only because Rojek doesn't engage the explicit urban theory that touches on many of the developments that PMPC addresses. 

Most obviously, economic geographers and economic analysts would probably reject his implication that cities are unimportant to musical infrastructure and economies.  The research of Allen J. Scott and Richard Florida have documented pretty well that despite the possibilities of digital technologies, recording studios, music corporations and professionals, and musicians themselves are concentrated in a conspicuously small number of cities and regions.  I suspect this might be an issue where the glass can be variously viewed as half-full or half-empty.  How many recordings need to be made on laptop computers in bedrooms and other DIY settings, and how much control needs to be retaken by artists from the economic and geographic centers of the music industry, before we have an "emergent" trend — which is ultimately the kind of argument Rojek is putting forth?  (That said, most electronic music recording artists know that you better get that digital file professionally mastered before you play it at the club, and mastering facilities aren't located just anywhere.)

I'm more intrigued presently by Rojek's argument about cultural monadism, which I find to be a compelling analysis of the ways we often listen to pop music today.  There's no doubt that this activity is increasingly taking place online and on the move.  But does this activity make an imprint upon physical geography and urban life?  I think it does. 

For one thing, I suspect that if you were to locate the people sustaining the cutting edges of cultural monadism — expertise in music knowledge and celebrity culture, an omnivorous appetite for genre, consumption of multiple media (and by necessity competency across multiple technologies), and Rojek's delightfully eggheaded notion of "gestural culture" — you would find them particularly concentrated in the enclaves of young affluent consumers that we associate with bohemian enclaves and college towns.  Here urban space plays a vital role in not only supporting flexible consumption economically and infrastructurally, but symbolizing flexible consumption and signaling it to other cultural monads as well.  As real estate agents and college admissions staff might tell you, there's no simpler lifestyle cue for today's cultural monad than a coffeeshop with wi-fi and loads of young people walking around with iPods and cool band t-shirts.

Of course, cultural monadism isn't exclusive to hipsters; middle-age bloggers like myself and high-school American Idol viewers texting their votes for Scotty also fit the definition.  But if the locational visibility of these demographics don't in fact trigger bona fide investments and developments in brick-and-mortar urban space (your Best Buys, American Apparel outlets, Starbucks, etc.), at the very least they colonize community life with the ever-evolving constellations of remote affiliations, secondary group identities, and superficial relatings that have been associated with urbanism since Georg Simmel and Louis Wirth.  The latter famously theorized that urbanism could no longer contained within cities.  Might PMPC reveal the latest textures of "urbanism as a way of life"?

And what of the public nature of urban life?  Anyone who's shared a subway car crowded with iPod zombies knows that cultural monads are indeed attuned to their own individualized, cognitive space and unavailable for social exchange.  For my money, the best conceptualization of this is "chill urbanism," as explained by Michael Bull in his book Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge, 2007):

Isolation in the midst of connectivity — this is the urban tale to unravel and conceptualise, demanding a theoretical articulation of the twin phenomena of urbani isolation and connectivity.  iPod culture embodies a dialectical relationship between the desire for an ever-present intimate or personal connectivity and the impoverishment of the social and geographical environment within which it occurs.  This dynamic is expressed theoretically in the present work through the concepts of 'warm' and 'chilly' — 'warm' representing the proximate, the inclusive; 'chilly' the distant and exclusive....  iPod culture represents an expression of personal creativity coupled with a denial of the physicality of the city.  The city becomes individualised in iPod culture — a unique and pleasurable experience, as one New Yorker commented: 'This [New York] is a great city where you might not wat to be infiltrated by anyone else's distracting or disruptive energy'....  iPod use makes the city what it is for users — rather than the city as inhabited by embodied 'others'.  iPod culture is a culture in which individual experience is cultivated, fostered and attended to through the micro-management and filtering of experience (Bull, pp. 8-9).

Significantly, iPod culture — a useful concept to emphasize the physical, interactive manifestations of cultural monadism — lets its participants aestheticize the city and its spaces with an individualized, on-demand soundtrack that enchants their sensory engagements with the physical environment.  Our sympathies with Jane Jacobs' standards for public space (from The Death and Life of Great American Cities: "an almost unconscious assumption of general street support when the chips are down — when a citizen has to choose whether he will take responsibility, or abdicating it, in combating barbarism or protecting strangers") might hinder us from seeing how the chill urbanism of cultural monads isn't necessarily (only) an impoverishment of public space but (also) an affirmative redefinition of it.  In turn, the underlying context here is one Rojek might recognize, I think: the ordinary accomplishment of daily life in an urban setting of ontological, social, and lifestyle insecurity.

my guest blog on Social Shutter re: Maryland Deathfest 2011

This week the visual urban sociology blog Social Shutter ran my photos and a new essay about Maryland Deathfest.  If you didn't see the post, I've reprinted it below.  And do check out Social Shutter, where Georgia State University sociologist Deirdre Oakley and her students offer some compelling and provocative photoessays.

Deathfest

Posted by Leonard Nevarez, BALTIMORE, MD -- The Maryland Deathfest (MDF) is the biggest festival for "extreme heavy metal" in the U.S. – and, so far as I know, the only urban festival in North America for heavy metal of any kind.  Since 2003, the event has drawn performers and fans from metal's most controversial sub-genres: death metal, grindcore, black metal, doom metal, crust punk, stoner rock, and their various hybrids.  These are the sounds that make parents around the world freak out if discovered in their kids' iPods.  On the whole, this music is bracing in its volume, speed, and discordance; the bands' names and lyrical content are intentionally blasphemous or stomach-churning; and vocalists' guttural growls and raspy screams convey the experience of eternal damnation and the despair at humanity's inevitable extinction. 

Needless to say, none of this music comes within miles of the music charts.  This is metal's deepest underground, historically overlooked by the corporate music industry. Yet it has become a significant industry of independent recording labels, music distributors, merchandise companies, music periodicals and blogs across the world.  While few of these bands could play to sizable crowds by themselves, MDF provides them a rare critical mass of consumers and media attention.  In turn, bands and listeners alike have lauded MDF for its discerning taste and global scan in selecting the most exciting and obscure bands in extreme metal.  This year the 63 bands on the festival schedule came from 17 nations across 4 continents.  Predictably, Scandinavia was well represented (Satanic black metal being almost synonymous with Norway), but even Greece and Saudi Arabia yielded excellent groups.

Admittedly, I'd lost touch with heavy metal's evolution since the 1980s and early 90s, the years when thrash metal (the first extreme sub-genre: Metallica, Slayer, etc.) flourished, and hardcore punk crossed over subculturally into the metal underground.  By that time, as cultural critics and sociologists of subculture have observed retrospectively, those musical developments contributed to the consolidation of the peculiarly omnivorous yet ironic cultural sensibility associated with the post-punk "neo-bohemia", captured so well in Richard Lloyd's Neo Bohemia and Ryan Moore's Sells Like Teen Spirit. Metal has since fallen largely under the pop-cultural radar, so I was eager for a quick submersion back into its underground.

As an urban sociologist, I was also interested in MDF’s social and geographic insertion into central-city Baltimore. Like so many other American rustbelt cities, Baltimore has continually lost population over the post-WWII era, having shrunk by almost a third since 1950.  Yet since 2000, according to the most recent American Community Survey, the 25-34 age group has increased, and now represents 16.7 percent of the city's total population. Evidence of a thriving bohemian enclave can be found around Baltimore, particularly the neighborhoods surrounding Johns Hopkins University. In these neighborhoods independently-owned coffeeshops flourish, along with renown record and zine stores; fashion boutiques and giftshops that incorporate with a wink the city's 1960s-era aesthetic (best captured by the films of local hero John Waters); and a small but celebrated local indie-rock scene (epitomized by Beach House, Dan Deacon, and Wye Oak).  Traditionally, heavy metal isn't associated with urban music scenes so much as state/national distinctions and the suburban landscapes of adolescent alienation.  However, I wondered if the elevated degree of musical/subcultural connoisseurship illustrated by MDF’s organizers and attendees reveals an emerging identification with the distressed-brick exteriors and haunted cityscapes favored by so many contemporary urban bohemians.

Three days in Baltimore at Deathfest provided much food for thought, if only speculative at this stage, as well as ringing ears.  Video footage from this year's MDF can be found all over the internet. Decibel Magazine's videos are a good place to start but watch the volume.

Leonard Nevarez is an associate professor of sociology at Vassar College.  He is the author of two books, Pursuing Quality of Life and New Money, Nice Town.  You can read more about Maryland Deathfest and view the rest of Leonard's photostream on his blog Musical Urbanism. He can be contacted at lenevarez@vassar.edu.