Empire of Dirt. Wendy Fonarow

enthusiasts, were avid gig goers in their teens and twenties. People told of how they religiously watched Top of the Pops growing up, and of the excitement of listening to the BBC’s weekly countdown of the Top 40. Musical landmarks were everywhere. It even turned out that my local pub, the Hope and Anchor, selected for its proximity to my flat and its particularly fine pinball machine, was one of the key sites for the embryology of the London punk and new wave movements.

      This project required attending a considerable number of performances, and I wanted to select music for which I felt some affinity. Having been to hundreds of shows in America, I knew how important it was to choose music I found appealing. While indie bands come from the United States too, Britain is truly the cradle of indie music.¹⁵ I therefore elected to study the music I already loved, the community for which I had a passion, and an event I knew to be centrally important to the experience of music—the British indie music scene.

      Indie musical performances that occur in non-seated, indoor venues are called “gigs,” and this is the term I will use.¹⁶ Gigs are staged in all regions of Great Britain—rural, suburban, and urban. They take place in a variety of settings: indoor halls without seats, school gyms, or pubs. The number of participants at a single event can range from under ten to tens of thousands.

      In the last few years, several exceedingly readable works have come out that document many aspects of British post-punk and indie music cultures. These books, which address the music’s history, political implications, and connections to local communities’ identities, have been written by scholarly journalists who have graduated from the British weekly music press—David Cavanagh on Creation Records (Cavanagh 2000), John Harris on Britpop (Harris 2003), and Dave Haslam on Manchester (Haslam 2000). As an enthusiast of the British weekly music press’s style of writing about music—intellectually engaged, passionate, but with a playful disregard for formality and highbrow affectations—I find that their writing reflects the vitality of these contradictory impulses within the community. These books are excellent companions for those who are interested in independent music.

Methodology

      I really, really wish I could be somewhere else … Razorlight

      Conceiving of spectatorship in terms of both empirically detectable signs and phenomenological components requires the application of more than one methodological approach. My methods included: (1) participant observation; (2) interviews (directed and conversational); and (3) text analysis using media produced by and representing the indie community.

      The initial study comprised fourteen months of research in Great Britain from July 1993 to September 1994, when I observed and participated in more than one hundred gigs and five festivals.¹⁷ These gigs and festivals varied in size—from small basement clubs to huge festival stadiums—in a variety of locations throughout the United Kingdom that ranged from small villages to urban sprawl.¹⁸ I did not want my sample to reflect merely my own personal taste, so the majority of shows included in the study were bands currently being supported by the weekly music press. I went to shows regardless of how much I thought I would like or dislike them. A majority of the gigs were in London, because this is where I was based. At these gigs, I documented setting features and participant interaction as well as the interactions between performers and audience members, and between audience members and other audience members, before, during, and after a performance. I also went on tours and documented audiences all over England, Scotland, and Wales on a regular basis. I continue to participate actively in the indie community, and this research includes material up to 2005.

      I supplemented my participant observation with the video recording of data. Because I was using interaction as my primary text, it was imperative that this interaction be rigorously documented. Video data collection is a useful tool to make interactional strategies accessible. More than forty hours of audience behavior was taped from a location on the side of the stage or some other vantage point that would include both performers and audience members.

      I further supplemented these observation techniques with interviews. While observation can give information about what is occurring, it cannot tell us what people think (Obeyesekere 1981). I conducted interviews with a broad range of indie community members from a variety of age groups and experience levels. I spoke to young fans who had just started to go to gigs, fans who followed bands on the road, fans who went to shows for a good night out, and fans who had been going to shows for years. I also interviewed people who had made indie music their lives and livelihoods: journalists, record label executives, booking agents, musicians, band managers, tour managers, road crew, distributors, promoters, and publicists. These interviews were conducted in private and audiotaped. But I also gleaned information from everyday conversations, such as listening to a journalist at a birthday party lament his age or overhearing a professional stammer an excuse for entering a club in the line for paying patrons rather than the line for guests. Their insights and perspectives are spread throughout this work. I have adhered to the anthropologist’s convention of concealing informant identities by using initials. Since anthropologists ask people to reveal some of the most intimate and personal details of their lives, this convention was developed to provide some semblance of privacy and also to free informants to discuss personal topics. I have provided additional information such as age or professional position when it is relevant to the discussion.

      My sources have also included the critical discourses and representations of music in popular media. Media and popular characterizations influence people’s conceptions of their own participation. The media sources include documentary and cinematic representations of concerts in addition to British and international music press sources.

From Plus One to A&R

      There is no single objective view of gigs because there is no neutral positioning. A person’s placement, activities, and comportment are all read by other participants. Thus, a participant observer is not a neutral eye but an individual positioned in and engaged with an event. Those we try to understand actively try to understand us as well, and to locate us within their cultural landscape (Duranti 1994). In general, most communities do not feature the social scientist within the domain of their normal categories, and therefore she will be positioned by community members within a category they do have. It is imperative that the ethnographer know how she is understood within the community because this ultimately influences the type of data she acquires. My work in the United Kingdom was greatly facilitated by being an American and having an American accent. Britain is a deeply class-conscious society, and the various regional accents are generally associated with particular socioeconomic classes. A Briton speaking to another Briton with a native accent is immediately perceived as being part of a particular social class and having a particular local identity. My American status allowed me to talk to people from all over Britain and from a variety of social classes without the baggage or suspicion that is attached to specific socioeconomic brackets. At various times I was read as an American foreigner, journalist, female fan, tour manager, roadie, friend of the artists, band manager, record company employee, “scenester,” or as a member of the very first category I was put in to—plus one.

      Plus one is the amorphous category for the person who is a guest of someone who is on the guest list. The plus one is the companion of someone with status in the community. Plus ones gain all the privileges but bear none of the responsibilities. They get into the venue for free. They get the same privileged access as the person on the guest list without any risk to their status. The plus one’s presence is not questioned and at times is even ignored, which is useful for observation. I spent the beginning of my fieldwork as a plus one. I was fortunate during my years of going to shows in Los Angeles to meet a large number of American and British music professionals. Upon my arrival in London, I was taken to shows as a guest. To most, I was seen as just another American indie music enthusiast who wanted to talk to everyone about music and had no sense of irony.

      Before long my constant presence was questioned. The idea that I was a social scientist treating this entertainment form as something worthy of serious consideration was met with a variety of responses, ranging from joyous relief that someone concurred with their opinion of the significance of gigs to friendly chiding that someone would treat this frivolity so earnestly. There was even outright