The Connected Lives Of Dutch Punks

This book is the first in-depth, ethnographic study of the Dutch punk scene. It questions the artificial boundaries of subcultural research, calling for a critical analysis of the distinctions drawn between subcultural and everyday lives, and between localised and globalised subcultures. The everyday experiences of punk are framed within the mobile and connected global subculture of which they are a part. It traces its emergence in the 1970s and its development through to 2010, with chapters that map Dutch punk historically and spatially. Further chapters explore the meanings and practices attached to punk by its participants before focusing in particular on the political affiliations of punks. This book argues for an approach to social research that recognises the ‘messiness’ and the ‘connectedness’ of punk and of the social world.

Germany has one of the liveliest and well-developed punk scenes in the world. However, punk in this country is not just a style-based music community. This book provides an anthropological examination of how punk reflects the larger changes and contradictions in post-reunification Germany, such as social segmentation, east-west tensions and local politics. Punk in eastern Germany is a reaction to the marginalization of the working class. As a cultural, social and economic niche, punks create their own controversial “substitute society” to compensate for their low status in mainstream society.

This book is the first in-depth investigation of the Goth subculture in Italy, focusing in particular on the city of Milan. It grows out of a three year research project - the first in Italy of this scope on the topic - based on the life histories of two dozen participants. In light of this, Simone Tosoni and Emanuela Zuccalà propose an innovative approach to the study of spectacular subcultures: contrarily to the most common accounts of the spectacular subcultures of the 80s, this book describes the experience of subcultural belonging as plural and internally diversified. In particular, three different variations - or 'enactments' - of goth are described in-depth: the politically engaged one; the one typical of the scene of the alternative music clubs spread all over northern Italy; and the one, common in the little towns surrounding Milan (but not limited to it), where participants used to 'enact' the dark subculture alone or in small groups. Their book argues that while these three different variations of goth shared the same canon of subcultural resources (music, style, patterns of cultural consumptions), they differed under relevant points of view, like forms of socialization, stance toward political activism, identity construction processes, and even their relationship with urban space. Yet, contrarily to the stress on individual differences in 'subcultural' belonging typical of post-subcultural theorists, the Milanese variations of goth appear to have been socially shared, as socially shared were the different 'practices of enactment' of the subculture that characterized each of them.

Drawing on international examples, this book interrogates the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Contributors from six continents, reimagine community development as they consider how aesthetic arts contribute to processes of peacebuilding, youth empowerment, participatory planning and environmental regeneration.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture provides a comprehensive and fully up-to-date overview of key themes and debates relating to the academic study of popular music and youth culture. While this is a highly popular and rapidly expanding field of research, there currently exists no single-source reference book for those interested in this topic. The handbook is comprised of 32 original chapters written by leading authors in the field of popular music and youth culture and covers a range of topics including: theory; method; historical perspectives; genre; audience; media; globalization; ageing and generation.

Ethno-aesthetics of Surf in Florida discusses surf and music as glocal sociocultural constructs. Focusing on Florida's unexplored surfing culture, the book illustrates how musical experience begets representations about the world that highlight ways of acting and being of various sociocultural communities. Based on the conceptualization of ethno-aesthetics, this ethnographic study provides an analysis of the Space Coast surfers community's collaborative effort to build social cohesion through their musicking. This transdisciplinary research in American Studies draws upon various theoretical perspectives from both the humanities and social sciences, including ethnomusicology, social psychology, and sociolinguistics, to propose new ways of exploring the links between surfing and musicking. This monograph looks past the myth of iconic 1960s Californian surf music to show how, as a result of the glocalization of surfing, the musicking of Floridian surfers has allowed them to express their subjectivities and to make sense of their world. This book contributes to the debate on the disputed notions of identity and representations by establishing connections between a local expression of the surf lifestyle and its music. It proposes theoretical models that explain cultural hybridization, appropriation, and belonging in surfing. It also develops concepts and notions, such as surfanization, surf strand, lifestyle crossover, and identity marking, to illustrate how global practices, such as surfing, are endowed with various modes of expression exemplified by the emergence of unique regional subcultures of surfing.

This book explores some of disco’s other lives which thrived between the 1970s and the 1980s, from oil-boom Nigeria to socialist Czechoslovakia, from post-colonial India to war-torn Lebanon. It charts the translation of disco as a cultural form into musical, geo-political, ideological and sociological landscapes that fall outside of its original conditions of production and reception, capturing the variety of scenes, contexts and reasons for which disco took on diverse dimensions in its global journey. With its deep repercussions in visual culture, gender politics, and successive forms of popular music, art, fashion and style, disco as a musical genre and dance culture is exemplary of how a subversive, marginal scene – that of queer and Black New York undergrounds in the early 1970s – turned into a mainstream cultural industry. As it exploded, atomised and travelled, disco served a number of different agendas; its aesthetic rootedness in ideas of pleasure, transgression and escapism and its formal malleability, constructed around a four-on-the-floor beat, allowed it to permeate a variety of local scenes for whom the meaning of disco shifted, sometimes in unexpected and radical ways.

The concept of ’subculture’ is an invaluable tool to frame the study of non-normative and marginal cultures for social and cultural scholars. This international collection uncovers the significance of meaning-making in the processes of defining, studying and analyzing subcultural phenomena. Examining various dimensions of interpretivism, the book focuses on overarching concerns related to interpretation as well as day-to-day considerations that affect researchers’ and members’ interpretations of subcultural phenomena. It reveals how and why people use specific conceptual frames or methods and how those shape their interpretations of everyday realities. This is an unprecedented contribution to the field, explaining the interpretive processes through which people make sense of subcultural phenomena.