Cleaning up the Grunge

Abstract

In 1996, Triple J's ‘Unearthed’ competition awarded the Central Queensland prize to Andalusion, a grunge band of four young high school students. Since winning this award, the band has been transformed from a group of musical amateur-enthusiasts to a semi-professional band with an industry manager, recording contracts, video and CD recordings, steady (paid) gigs in public venues and a clear career trajectory. The band's music is also changing from semi-heavy grunge, deeply inflected by teenage angst, to a more reflective and developed sound. In other words, it seems that they have been relocated from the private sphere to a position as one of the providers of public culture.

This paper focuses on the conditions under which, and the institutional arrangements through which, relatively marginalised subjects can become legitimated as agents of the cultural industries and creators of authorised cultural products. By drawing on discussions with the band members and a reading of their audio and visual work, and through theoretical perspectives offered by Pierre Bourdieu, it investigates the logic of creative production and its agents, and identifies the capital necessary to enter the field. The paper also discusses the extent to which artists operating within the cultural industries are necessarily products of its discourses.