Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual (review)

If the final contributor to this book, Laura Vroomen, is right, the sociological study of music audiences remains limited by its origins. Over the course of its history, the field has moved from the consideration of audiences as undifferentiated consumers of a culture industry, through an awareness of cultural differences, to the adhesive role of musical style in the constitution of subcultural groupings. The most recent step recognizes that music does not necessarily play an organizing role in such formations, that individuals may inhabit one or more musical scenes. This volume takes that understanding one step further in recognizing that such scenes may not only be physically located, be actual, but that they may operate also in virtual space. The logical outcome of this vectored approach will be the consideration of listeners as individuals, on which basis we might expect a rapprochement with the cognitive psychology of listening as researchers begin to ask the question 'why', as a listener, one chooses to respond in a particular way.

That, however, is outside the scope of this collection. As part of her analysis of how mature, female Kate Bush fans share their interests, Vroomen highlights the focus researchers still have for adolescents, for youth, for music as resistance, with the assumption that 'intense popular-music investments cannot be carried over into adult life, and that contradictory identifications and practices cannot be sustained' (p. 243). She demonstrates the partiality of these views, while showing how such mature listeners' uses of music embody attitudes both of resistance and conformity to their social norms. This essay explores an extreme case, in that for one of her respondents her fandom seems entirely a private matter. This is not the case with the remainder of the volume.

A number of the authors deal with the conventional notion of scenes, as based on specific localities, in the process bringing to the foreground issues which are often theorized. Authenticity, for example, is deeply critiqued in David Grazian's study of recent Chicago blues audiences, as he observes the ways clubs and artists construct the authenticity their audiences crave. Just what the term means for these listeners is elusive, but it certainly has to do with proximity to musicians, to the locations of key performances, and with denying their status as external to the practices they listen in to. Norman Urquia's study of the London salsa scene addresses a similar nexus, but here the authenticity contested is that of the dancer, as elite practioners become identified less with the origins of their moves—Cuba or Colombia—than with the technique they display. As a result, as Urquia concludes, rather than 'cultural knowledge and long-term familiarity with salsa, the key to success in London's clubs has become attending the right dance classes' (p. 110).

The construction of the 'Canterbury scene' (an apparent enclave within 1970s progressive rock) is described by Andy Bennett, in an essay which argues that contemporary local musicians and entrepreneurs attempt to create their own authentic identity with reference to a thirty-year-old set of practices which, at the time, had no such identity. What is harder to determine, of course, is whether contemporary listeners are indeed finding links that were not there, or are simply uncovering links that were obscured at the time: Bennett quotes frequently from the original musicians, privileging their viewpoint. Melanie Lowe's research into teenage female audiences for Britney Spears highlights not the use of the music as resistance, but a simultaneous resistance to and enjoyment of the messages they find in it. It is clear that some of the incipient readings her respondents make are quite sophisticated, distinguishing not only between Britney Spears as singer and as projected persona but also between different projections, and making judgements on the basis of these readings. The conclusion to this valuable essay demonstrates the social value of music such as this: 'the tween scene is a...