Empire of Dirt. Wendy Fonarow
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structure, one’s physical placement and comportment indicate a level of orientation to the performance, the types of activities one will engage in and expect others to engage in, and one’s affiliation with the band performing.
While the first two audience zones are highly focused on the performance, the orientation in zone three is not toward the stage but toward the peripheries of performance. In chapter 3, “Zone Three and the Music Industry,” I discuss the audience members who for various reasons—lack of interest, preference, or dissatisfaction—are not interested in watching the show. I also examine the professionals who comprise the music industry and whose attention often veers from the stage. The activities of the habitual denizens of zone three have enormous consequences for the transnational commerce of music. Gigs are where the status relationships among a professional coterie are established, articulated, and altered. At gigs, professionals portray themselves in opposition to fans by utilizing a system of freebies that includes guest passes and guest lists. This system is part of a general professional ideology of gaining gratis goods and services. A temporary status hierarchy is articulated in the gig setting, where access to privileged space and performers expresses the relative degree of status of a professional at this specific event. Within this context, the band functions as a valorized commodity, where access to performers is a marker of status in a hierarchical system of power and influence peddling.
In chapter 4, “The Participant Structure and the Metaphysics of Spectatorship,” I consider the totality of participant structure and examine how the differing spectorial positions become meaningful in relationship to each other. As audience members age and gain experience, their mode of engagement changes. In the course of an individual’s participation in gig culture, the audience member typically moves from a hot, physical engagement to a cool, composed spectorial mode. The meaning of comportment comes from its cultural and historic context. The gig, ostensibly about music and entertainment, reenacts the broader culture’s ritual drama about metaphysic conversion. The movement from zone one to zone two that appears over time in the gig’s participant structure represents a conversion narrative between the two primary metaphysical systems that combined to form rock music: West African and Western artistic and religious traditions. I argue that the active, bodily engaged comportment of zone one embodies a non-Western metaphysic in which the deployment of the body in danced ritual is essential for spiritual enlightenment. The circumscribed comportment of zone two embodies a Western European metaphysic of transcendence through the control and abnegation of the body and the amplification of contemplation. The understanding of these metaphysical systems and their relationship to each other is filtered through a Protestant perspective that ultimately views non-Western religions as inferior, immature, and heathen. Here, we find one of the primary narratives of Christianity, the conversion of the non-believing “other,” acted out on the secular stage of musical performance, where audience members are to be transformed into adults who sublimate the pleasures of the flesh for the pleasures of the mind. Thus, gigs are both an expression of excess and the subjugation of it. This phenomenon is both religious and secular, artistic and commercial, inextricably intertwined.
Every ritual consists of a series of relationships—among audience members, between audience members and the performance, between the audience and the performers, and between the performers and the performance. My early chapters analyze audience members’ relationships to each other. In chapters 5 and 6, I turn to the relationships between musicians and audience members. In chapter 5, “Performance, Authenticity, and Emotion,” I deal with indie’s performance conventions and the relationship between performers and audience members as a collective. Indie is an art form that is concerned with verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is often considered to have a visual connotation, but here I use it in the broader sense of the appearance or semblance of truth. Authenticity and credibility are connected to the notion of believability, the faith that audiences invest in the veracity of the musical performance. This chapter covers how credibility is conveyed in the indie genre by a lack of stress on virtuosity, an avoidance of the performance postures of other genres, and a valuing of innovation. In indie, emotions are considered to be the essential source of meaning. Indie music values verisimilitude and novelty within a circumscribed generic form. Within this system, emotions are initially valorized by the audience member’s experience of the performance and then, ultimately, denigrated and devalued.
Chapter 6, “Sex and the Ritual Practitioners,” is dedicated to indie’s ritual specialists—musicians, professionals, crew, those audience members who do not opt out of the community, and those audience members who repeatedly seek intimate relations with performers. These participants continue to look to music for meaning long after their peers have left it behind; they believe in the value of music’s emotional epiphanies and often devote their lives to the transitory rewards of participating in gigs. In refusing to leave music behind, ritual practitioners defy the Western Christian cosmology that values the mind over the body, reason over emotion, and capital commerce over nonproprietary experience. To understand the constellation of performer/audience/performance, I examine the relationship between performers and segments of the audience according to the distinctions made among spectorial modes within the indie community’s spectacle and discourses. I discuss mainstream rock imagery and the moral distinctions made by indie audiences about issues of gender and sex. The stereotypes of the “groupie” and mainstream “musician” threaten how intimacy is displayed in the indie community, as well as indie’s austere morality. There is a reciprocal relationship between music’s ritual practitioners, between band members and sexual acolytes. I demonstrate that the gig is a sexual spectacle where male and female powers are symbolically joined onstage in performance and concretely enacted offstage in sexual communion.
I conclude with some final comments in the afterword. Because I come to explicit conclusions at the end of each chapter, the afterword is an overview and provides some final thoughts on indie music, spectatorship, performance, and the role of indie music fans transnationally and beyond.
Conclusion
Leave it all behind … Ride
Subjectivity needs to be understood not just in terms of the internal structures of cultural productions but in embodied practice. In looking at social actors and their roles in a participant structure, we see in indie the articulation of a participatory spectatorship that is inscribed with religious ideology. Indie music performances enact a fundamental Western cultural dichotomy between sentient sensuality and a contemplative mode of sensual abrogation, between emotional expression and stoic internalization. In this economic and institutional sector that is considered to be wholly secular, one finds a community shaped by metaphysical concerns regarding authority, exploitation, and the nature of “authentic” experience.
Metaphysics is a theory of the manner in which one experiences the numinous, where essential meaning is found. Here, music stands in for an experience of divinity. Does one access the divine through bodily circumspection and mental contemplation, or does one access the divine through sacred dance and trance? Does meaning lie in the sacred text of the composer, an already existent meaning, which a conductor and musicians can enliven, or does meaning lie in the temporary improvisational interface between artist, sound, and audience, whereby the body is given over to sacred song and true apprehension is achieved? These are just two of the myriad metaphysical philosophies and possibilities. Indie finds itself wedged between these two, in the live performance of a pre-existing text where value is nevertheless found by momentarily capturing emotion and meaning in the temporary interface between audience, performer, and sound. The arguments regarding indie use a vocabulary of music that camouflages the metaphysical battle being waged. Indie produces the broader cultural narratives that arise from the West’s own conflicts.
In rituals, contradictions can temporarily coexist—the extended family that must break down can be reconstructed, new and old identities can exist side by side. Indie inhabits a contradiction between Puritan asceticism and Romantic emotionalism, between Western and West African metaphysics, between