Empire of Dirt. Wendy Fonarow

story: Alex Kapranos, Paul and Ester Thomson, Glen, Nick McCarthy, and Bob Hardy, who encouraged me, asked the right questions, and said the right things at the most crucial moment. When I was in mourning, they showed me everything beautiful in music—deus ex machina.

      Thanks to all the bands that have helped me along the way: Ambulance Ltd., Arcade Fire, Belle and Sebastian, the Blood Arm, the Divine Comedy, Doves, Elbow, Flying Saucer Attack, Folk Implosion, Franz Ferdinand, the House of Love, Idlewild, the Jazz Butcher, the Kills, the Lemonheads, the Libertines, Libido, Locust, Magnetic Fields, Mansun, Mogwai, Mojave 3/Slowdive, New Order, Palace, the Pastels, Pulp, Quasi, the Railway Children, Ride, the Senseless Things, Elliott Smith, Smudge, the Stills, Suede, Swervedriver, Symposium, the Tindersticks, and the White Stripes.

      I would like to express gratitude to my special friends, Marion Sparks and Russell Warby, for always being my home away from home and my beacon whenever I got myself into trouble, as you inevitably do when traversing foreign lands. I appreciate those times when you set my course to your door and made sure that I never felt I was a stranger in a strange land. Thanks to Lou Barlow, the most sensitive man in indie rock, and Kathleen Billus, who not only read and commented as I was writing this book but was my confidante. I owe thanks to Tanya Bernard as well, one of the kindest and most accepting human beings I have ever met.

      To those who died during this project, I miss you all and I will never forget the people you were—our adventures and honesty, our looks of shared understanding in a room full of people. I dream for the Day of the Dead, when in some special ritual moment the dead return and we can be reunited again.

      I would also like to thank everyone in the bands who have made the music I love for the sublime experience of their art and performances, and all the people who got me into shows when I was skint and the ones who got me in when I wasn’t. And a final thanks goes to all those who have not left music behind.

       Empire of Dirt

       Introduction

      As if you had a choice … Snow Patrol

Beginnings

      This project began in 1991 at a small, grotty underage club called Jabberjaw, off Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. I went to see Teenage Fanclub, a band from Glasgow, play one of its first West Coast dates. This club had only one entrance, located just behind the stage. To face the band, one needed to walk through the narrow corridor between the slightly raised stage and the coffee bar. On this particular spring evening, just like many nights at Jabberjaw, the place was packed to capacity. Equipped with neither air conditioning nor ventilation, the venue was unbearable—a maelstrom of heat and sweat. When the band finished its set, the musicians jumped off the back of the stage and went through the only exit into the cool night air outside. I could see the door from the front of the stage where I was standing. Desperate to get outside and into fresh air, I began to file out like everyone else, around the stage and into the little corridor that led to the exit. However, one member of the audience who was standing right behind me did something different. He stepped up onto the stage, walked across, and jumped off at the doorway just as the band had done. Why hadn’t I taken the same route? There was nothing to prevent me from choosing the most direct path to the door to get much-needed relief. For some reason, I had perceived the stage as off limits. Even in my need to get outside, I could not imagine stepping up onto it and walking to the door. In that moment, I realized that I had internalized rules for being an audience member that stopped me from even entertaining the possibility of walking across the stage. While no one ever explicitly taught these rules to me, I had learned them through my participation in innumerable events like this one.

      I recognized the audience member who had crossed the stage. He was in the Los Angeles band Redd Kross. Although we were both members of the audience, our different experiences in going to gigs had produced different relationships to the space of the stage. This fellow audience member and professional performer saw the stage as accessible to him. I saw the stage as off limits to me. Did our different histories affect the way we viewed the event? How did my behavior as an audience member affect my experience of the performance? What cultural precepts were expressed by this distinction between performers and audience members? It was this moment that ultimately led me to Britain, to a study of audiences and to the international indie music community.

      In an effort to answer these questions, what follows is an ethnography of audience members’ behavior at the performances of a particular type of music—British indie music. Specifically, this is a study of multiple subjectivities and the spectacle of music performance in the independent music community. It is about what audience members do. It is also about how they think about what they do. This art form is a passionate concern to members of the community, who look to music not just as entertainment but as an expression of significant cultural sentiments and as a nexus of moral ideals of profound consequence.

      In this book, I treat musical performance as a ritual.¹ Rituals address cultural conflicts and contradictions. Indie music performances and ideology are an expression of cultural values regarding the role of art, emotion, the body, asceticism, youth and the nature of creativity in modern Western industrial society. A part of the “youth” phenomenon, which is by definition a transitory category, indie music requires an understanding of the youth community, why people enter it, why people leave it, and what it means when it has been left behind.

      Anthropologists have long noted the intersection of a culture’s metaphysics and its aesthetic productions. Metaphysics is a culture’s a priori philosophy of the nature of being based on its religious ideology. Metaphysics and aesthetics both address a culture’s valued forms of creativity. The quintessential model of creativity is the divine creation of the world, and there is generally a resemblance between the concept of divine creation in a particular culture and what is considered valuable or important in aesthetic creations by that same culture. For example, in Islam, where divine creativity is manifested in the Word and there is a prohibition against the representation of human figures, artistic expression takes the forms of calligraphy and abstract visual designs. In West African societies, where divine creativity is seen in the unpredictable temporary manifestation of the gods on earth, there is a value placed on impromptu verbal skills. For the Pintupi, Aboriginals of Australia, the aesthetic productions of value are depictions of hereditary stories of the Dreamtime, the period when the world was created by supernatural creatures. Conceptions of divine creativity intersect with the how, what, and why of art. The power of artistic performances and forms comes from their ability to display, and play with, cultural themes that are meaningful to culture members. In turn, religious notions shape our conceptions of human creativity. While this connection has been well examined in other societies, scholarship devoted to Western music and art seems mostly blind to how Western artistic productions express our own metaphysical themes. It is a Western conceit to think that only in other societies do religious notions pervade all domains of life. We consider our own secular spheres free of metaphysical concerns. Our notion of art is that it exists in a separate domain from religious philosophy. This book will challenge that notion and demonstrate how religious ideology shapes Western aesthetics and artistic practices, focusing on the British indie music scene in particular.

Theoretical Frame: From Observation to Communication

      Contemporary anthropological theory has focused on intersecting themes in the rethinking of the ethnographic enterprise: a concern for communication, the rise of performance theory as a way of understanding culture, the reassertion of the importance of the body, and the constructed nature of subjectivity (Conquergood 1991). This reconceptualization has resulted in a major shift in the ethnographic endeavor from a subject/object dialectic to a subject/subject dialectic (Clifford 1988, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Geertz 1988, Rosaldo 1989). Ethnography is now thought of as a subjective interaction in which the once-privileged ideal of a detached observer neutrally describing culture has been replaced by a notion of ethnography as communication. There is no all-seeing perspective; rather, there is a multiplicity of perspectives. The anthropological viewpoint of culture has moved from a static one to