The Personal Interview

Focusing on youth cultures that revolve around dance clubs and raves in Great Britain and the U.S., Sarah Thornton highlights the values of authenticity and hipness and explores the complex hierarchies that emerge within the domain of popular culture. She portrays club cultures as "taste cultures" brought together by micro-media like flyers and listings, transformed into self-conscious "subcultures" by such niche media as the music and style press, and sometimes recast as "movements" with the aid of such mass media as tabloid newspaper front pages. She also traces changes in the recording medium from a marginal entertainment in the 50s to the clubs and raves of the 90s. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Thornton coins the term "subcultural capital" to make sense of distinctions made by "cool" youth, noting particularly their disparagement of the "mainstream" against which they measure their alternative cultural worth. Well supported with case studies, readable, and innovative, Club Cultures will become a key text in cultural and media studies and in the sociology of culture.

Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital

The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music's structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies - an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector - as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music's active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

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Music in Everyday Life

he global triumph of capitalism at the millennium, its Second Coming, raises a number of conundrums for our understanding of history at the end of the century. Some of its corollaries—“plagues of the ‘new world order,’” Jacques Derrida (1994: 91) calls them, unable to resist apocalyptic imagery—have been the subject of clamorous debate. Others receive less mention. Thus, for example, populist polemics have dwelt on the planetary conjuncture, for good or ill, of “homogenization and difference” (e.g., Barber 1992); on the simultaneous, synergistic spiraling of wealth and poverty; on the rise of a “new feudalism,” a phoenix disfigured, of worldwide proportions (cf. Connelly and Kennedy 1994).1 For its part, scholarly debate has focused on the confounding effects of rampant

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Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming

© 2005 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 10.1191/0309132505ph531pr I Parameters, definitions and themes This is the first of three reports I will write covering an emergent area of research in cultural geography and its cognate fields. During recent years, ‘non-representational theory’ has become as an umbrella term for diverse work that seeks better to cope with our self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds. In as much as nonrepresentational work allows it, these reports will sketch out common themes of interest, and assess impacts, critics and potentials, variously conceptual, methodological and empirical. Of late, non-representational theorists have asked difficult and provocative questions of cultural geographers, and many others in the discipline, about what is intended by the conduct of research (Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000). What has been identified as deadening effect – the tendency for cultural analyses to cleave towards a conservative, categorical politics of identity and textual meaning – can, it is contended, be overcome by allowing in much more of the excessive and transient aspects of living. Given the scope and force of the original non-representational arguments, it is unsurprising that this theory has been subject to fulsome response. In fact, non-representational theory has become a particularly effective lightning-rod for disciplinary self-critique. Commentaries have emerged from within cultural, feminist and Marxian traditions and the more recent coalition of critical geography. Notably, and anecdotally, some of the most colourful observations have been saved for bi-partisan conversation in the conference or common room. It is important (not to say appropriate) that the nature of the dialogue – variously confrontational, tribal, dogmatic, peevish and full-bodied – goes on record early. Published versions have been concerned predominantly with the theoretical conditions for disciplinary succession or progression that the term ‘non-representational’ would seem to imply and how, in relation, the concept of performance should be understood by geographers. These articles are variously structured as manifesto, critical review, restated challenge, revanchist programme and proposed reconciliation (Thrift, 1996; 1997; 2000; Nelson, 1999; Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000; Nash, 2000; Harrison, 2000; Gregson and Rose, 2000; Crouch, 2001; Dewsbury et al., 2002; Whatmore, 2002; Cresswell, 2002; Smith, 2003; Jacobs and Nash, 2003; Latham, 2003a; Castree and MacMillan, 2004).1 In this report, I would like to treat the flourishing theoretical debate as a significant Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’

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Cultural geography: the busyness of being 'more-than-representational'

Acknowledgments Music Talk The Value Problem in Cultural Studies The Sociological Response Common Sense and the Language of Criticism Genre Rules On Music Itself Where Do Sounds Come From? Rhythm: Race, Sex, and the Body Rhythm: Time, Sex, and the Mind Songs as Texts The Voice Performance Technology and Authority Why Music Matters The Meaning of Music Toward a Popular Aesthetic Notes Index

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

After tracing the evolution of pop music, the book focuses on the roots of rock music and the everchanging components of the modern record making process. By analyzing both the possibilities and the limits of regulating leisure in a capitalist society, the article challenges the prevailing view that media conglomorates' efforts to channel and control their markets have succeeded in turning rock into another plastic readymade product. It is suggested that, in the end, the unpredictable and uncontrollable contradictions peculiar to rock music audiences, both resist and support the system and Other CABI sites 

Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock `n' Roll.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PART I MUSIC TALK: 1 THE VALUE PROBLEM IN CULTURAL STUDIES 2 THE SOCIOLOGICAL RESPONSE 3 COMMON SENSE AND THE LANGUAGE OF CRITICISM 4 GENRE RULES PART II ON MUSIC ITSELF: 5 WHERE DO SOUNDS COME FROM? 6 RHYTHM: RACE, SEX, AND THE BODY 7 RHYTHM: TIME, SEX, AND THE MIND 8 SONGS AS TEXTS 9 THE VOICE 10 PERFORMANCE 11 TECHNOLOGY AND AUTHORITY PART III WHY MUSIC MATTERS: 12 THE MEANING OF MUSIC 13 TOWARD A POPULAR AESTHETIC NOTES INDEX.

Simon Frith

Papers

Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock `n' Roll.

Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music

The sociology of rock

Rock and sexuality