Musical Taste and the Creation of Place-Dependent Capital: Manchester and the Indie Music Field

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative interviews with indie music fans in Manchester, UK, we explore how experiences in the indie music field inform spatial and place-specific understandings of musical taste. Inspired by Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, the concept of place-dependent capital incorporates the interplay of the experiential dimensions of taste, and the overall structures in which they are embedded. We develop our findings into three themes, which allow us to highlight the diversity of ways in which our participants create place-dependent capital: exploring the taste of place; dwelling in place; and creating a sense of place. We propose the usefulness of place-dependent capital as an alternative theoretical tool, which acknowledges both structural and experiential dimensions of musical taste, allowing us to demonstrate the situatedness of indie music fans’ tastes.

Keywords

Bourdieu indie music Manchester place place-dependent capital popular music taste

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson

(2009) Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society 2(2): 77–81.

Anderson

(2014) Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

Arsel

Thompson

(2011) Demythologizing consumption practices: How consumers protect their field-dependent identity investments from devaluing marketplace myths. Journal of Consumer Research 37(5): 791–806.

Augé

(1995) Non-places: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. London; New York: Verso Books.

Bannister

(2006) ‘Loaded’: Indie guitar rock, canonism, white masculinities. Popular Music 25(1): 77–95.

Bennett

(1999) Subcultures or neo-tribes? Rethinking the relationship between youth, style and musical taste. Sociology 33(3): 599–617.

Bennett

Peterson

(2004) Music Scenes: Local, Translocal and Virtual. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Benson

(2014) Trajectories of middle-class belonging: The dynamics of place attachment and classed identities. Urban Studies 51(14): 3097–3112.

Benson

Jackson

(2013) Place-making and place maintenance: Performativity, place and belonging among the middle classes. Sociology 47(4): 793–809.

10.

Benzecry

Collins

(2014) The high of cultural experience: Toward a microsociology of cultural consumption. Sociological Theory 32(4): 307–326.

11.

Blackman

(2007) Hidden ethnography: Crossing emotional borders in qualitative accounts of young people’s lives. Sociology 41(4): 699–716.

12.

Bourdieu

(1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

13.

Bourdieu

(1985) The social space and the genesis of groups. Theory and Society 14(6): 723–744.

14.

Bourdieu

(1986) The forms of capital. In: Richardson

(ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood, 241–258.

15.

Bourdieu

(1989) Social space and symbolic power. Sociological Theory 7(1): 14–25.

16.

Bourdieu

(1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.

17.

Bourdieu

(2003) Participant objectivation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(2): 281–294.

18.

Bourdieu

Wacquant

(1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

19.

Carson

(2017) Manchester’s iconic Twisted Wheel keeps Northern Soul alive. Humanity Hallows. Available at: https://aah-magazine.co.uk/2017/manchesters-iconic-twisted-wheel-keeps-northern-soul-alive/ (accessed 19 February 2019).

20.

Casey

(1997) Smooth spaces and rough-edged places: The hidden history of place. The Review of Metaphysics 51(2): 267–296.

21.

Casey

(2001) Between geography and philosophy: What does it mean to be in the place-world? Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91(4): 683–693.

22.

Cohen

(2001) Popular music, gender and sexuality. In: Frith

Straw

Street

(eds) The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 226–242.

23.

Connell

Gibson

(2003) Sound Tracks: Popular Music Identity and Place. London: Routledge.

24.

Cons

(2013) ‘Gaychester’: Remembering Manchester’s early 1990s gay scene. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/the-northerner/2013/feb/07/manchester-gay-scene-paul-cons (accessed 20 September 2018).

25.

Cresswell

(2004) Place: An Introduction. London: John Wiley.

26.

Crossley

(2001) The phenomenological habitus and its construction. Theory and Society 30(1): 81–120.

27.

Crossley

(2009) The man whose web expanded: Network dynamics in Manchester’s post/punk music scene 1976–1980. Poetics 37(1): 24–49.

28.

Crossley

(2015) Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

29.

Denzin

(2001) The reflexive interview and a performative social science. Qualitative Research 1(1): 23–46.

30.

Downes

(2012) The expansion of punk rock: Riot grrrl challenges to gender power relations in British indie music subcultures. Women’s Studies 41(2): 204–237.

31.

Entwistle

Rocamora

(2006) The field of fashion materialized: A study of London Fashion Week. Sociology 40(4): 735–751.

32.

Ewens

(2017) Dance of death: Are the days of the moshpit numbered? The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/may/05/dance-of-death-are-the-days-of-the-moshpit-numbered (accessed 15 September 2018).

33.

Fonarow

(2006) Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

34.

Fonarow

(2010) Ask the Indie professor: Are gender stereotypes still present in Indie music? The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/sep/01/gender-stereotypes-indie-music (accessed 25 April 2018).

35.

Friedman

(2011) The cultural currency of a ‘good’ sense of humour: British comedy and new forms of distinction. British Journal of Sociology 62(2): 347–370.

36.

Frith

(1996) Music and identity. In: Hall

Du Gay

(eds) Questions of Cultural Identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 108–128.

37.

Gillett

(2011) The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock & Roll. London: Souvenir Press.

38.

Halfacree

Kitchen

(1996) ‘Madchester rave on’: Placing the fragments of popular music. Area 28(1): 47–55.

39.

Hanquinet

Savage

Callier

(2012) Elaborating Bourdieu’s field analysis in urban studies: Cultural dynamics in Brussels. Urban Geography 33(4): 508–529.

40.

Hennion

(2001) Music lovers: Taste as performance. Theory, Culture & Society 18(5): 1–22.

41.

Hesmondhalgh

(1999) Indie: The institutional politics and aesthetics of a popular music genre. Cultural Studies 13(1): 34–61.

42.

Hibbett

(2005) What is indie rock? Popular Music and Society 28(1): 55–77.

43.

Johnston

Rodney

Szabo

(2012) Place, ethics, and everyday eating: A tale of two neighbourhoods. Sociology 46(6): 1091–1108.

44.

Kruse

(1993) Subcultural identity in alternative music culture. Popular Music 12(1): 33–41.

45.

Kruse

(2010) Local identity and independent music scenes, online and off. Popular Music and Society 33(5): 625–639.

46.

Le Roux

Rouanet

Savage

, et al. (2008) Class and cultural division in the UK. Sociology 42(6): 1049–1071.

47.

McCracken

(1988) The Long Interview. London: SAGE.

48.

McKenzie

(2015) Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain. Bristol: Policy Press.

49.

Maconie

(2015) The privileged are taking over the arts – without the grit, pop culture is doomed. New Statesman. Available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/01/privileged-are-taking-over-arts-without-grit-pop-culture-doomed (accessed 25 April 2015).

50.

Magaudda

(2011) When materiality ‘bites back’: Digital music consumption practices in the age of dematerialization. Journal of Consumer Culture 11(1): 15–36.

51.

Malpas

(1999) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

52.

Malpas

(2012) Putting space in place: Philosophical topography and relational geography. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30(2): 226–242.

53.

Milestone

(2008) Urban myths: Popular culture, the city and identity. Sociology Compass 2(4): 1165–1178.

54.

Millward

(2012) Reclaiming the Kop? Analysing Liverpool supporters’ 21st century mobilizations. Sociology 46(4): 633–648.

55.

Nettleton

(2013) Cementing relations within a sporting field: Fell running in the English Lake District and the acquisition of existential capital. Cultural Sociology 7(2): 196–210.

56.

Nevarez

(2013) How Joy Division came to sound like Manchester: Myth and ways of listening in the neoliberal city. Journal of Popular Music Studies 25(1): 56–76.

57.

Newman

(2009) Indie culture: In pursuit of the authentic autonomous alternative. Cinema Journal 48(3): 16–34.

58.

Nolan

(2006) I Swear I was There: The Gig that Changed the World. Church Stretton: Independent Music Press.

59.

Owen

(2015) Booze, blood and noise: The violent roots of Manchester punk. Available at: https://medium.com/cuepoint/booze-blood-and-noise-the-violent-roots-of-manchester-punk-af8092bcaac3 (accessed 19 February 2019).

60.

Patton

(2002) Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods. London: SAGE.

61.

Robb

(2009) The North Will Rise Again: Manchester Music City 1976–1996. London: Aurum Press.

62.

Savage

(1991) England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London: Faber and Faber.

63.

Savage

(2008) Histories, belongings, communities. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 11(2): 151–162.

64.

Savage

(2011) The lost urban sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. In: Bridge

Watson

(eds) The New Blackwell Companion to the City. London: John Wiley and Sons, 511–520.

65.

Savage

Silva

(2013) Field analysis in cultural sociology. Cultural Sociology 7(2): 111–126.

66.

Savage

Bagnall

Longhurst

(2005) Globalisation and Belonging. London: SAGE.

67.

Seamon

(2014) Lived emplacement and the locality of being: A return to humanistic geography? In: Aitken

Valentine

(eds) Approaches to Human Geography: Philosophies, Theories, People and Practices. London: SAGE, 35–48.

68.

Skandalis

Banister

Byrom

(2018) The spatial aspects of musical taste: Conceptualizing consumers’ place-dependent identity investments. Marketing Theory 18(2): 249–265.

69.

Spiggle

(1994) Analysis and interpretation of qualitative data in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research 21(3): 491–503.

70.

Stringer

(1992) The Smiths: Repressed (but remarkably dressed). Popular Music 11(1): 15–26.

71.

Thornton

(1996) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press.

72.

Wacquant

(2004) Body & Soul. New York: Oxford University Press.