Journal articles on the topic 'Punk rock movement'

Our time has come Tio/ I'm Basque and I'm proud/ That's enough Tio, say it loud/I'm Basque and I'm proud! (Negu Gorriak, 1989)The relationship between popular music and social movements does not in itself constitute an exceptional phenomenon. However, Basque Radical Rock (as Basque punk has come to be called) has emerged as a peculiar phenomenon of the history of political mobilisation in Euskadi (the Basque name for Basque country). This peculiarity is due to the fusion of an eminently anti-establishment music of anglo-saxon origin with a nationalist patriotic movement. The ‘alliance’ between these two such diverse spheres is the theme of this article. Such an alliance is of interest because it reveals how the discursive and organisational linkages which formed Basque radical rock defined a common struggle shared by punks and nationalist activists.

The intersection between music and social movements is a fertile area of research. We present three case studies taken from punk-the Rock Against Racism campaign in Britain during the late 1970s, the American hardcore scene of the 1980s, and the riot grrrl feminism of the early 1990s-as instances where music and subculture have not simply figured as symbolic forms of resistance and identity formation but also as a means of organizing protest, raising consciousness, and creating change. The central mechanism that has allowed punk subcultures to achieve high levels of mobilization has been the do-it-yourself ethic, which demands that punks take matters of cultural production into their own hands by making music, fanzines, and record labels, creating a network of venues for live music performance, as well as creating other forms of micromedia that are commercially independent of the corporate culture industry. We use these case studies to both draw attention to neglected areas of empirical research and as a means to intervene in theoretical debates that have tended to polarize social movement studies between paradigms that emphasize structural phenomena and those that emphasize cultural factors.

Eskorbuto was one of the most important Spanish-speaking punk bands and the most extreme among those belonging to the ‘Basque Radical Rock’ movement in the 1980s. This article aims to analyse the ideological components of Eskorbuto’s discourse in relation to the political philosophy of anarchism. More specifically, the objective is to ascertain whether Eskorbuto’s music represents key anarchist values, and whether their discourse may be characterized as anarcho-punk. The study focuses on a context-sensitive discourse analysis of Eskorbuto’s lyrics. Results indicate that, through punk music, Eskorbuto’s discourse was linked to anarchism, to the extent that the Basque band was energized by punk’s anti-establishment attitude. However, results also reveal that the socially constructive values of anarchism – such as the belief in a natural order, or the vision of a self-managed collectivist economy – were not clearly conveyed in the band’s nihilistic lyrics. The scope and limits of Eskorbuto’s anarcho-punk characteristics are considered, before discussing the relationship of the band’s raw and confrontational message with the concept of punk-anarchism.

This article explores hardcore punk as a form of nihilistic creation—an approach that goes far beyond its usual characterisation as simply a faster, harder form of punk rock. From an existential perspective, the hardcore punk movement embodies the nihilism of its time, notably in the temporal structure of the songs, thereby forging a singular aesthetic. While the radical simplification introduced by the Ramones paved the way, it was through bands such as Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Bad Brains and D.R.I. that the phenomenon took a more definite shape, using condensed temporality, rhythmic breaks and lack of progression, while maintaining a basic pop-song structure—thus simultaneously calling into question the very idea of innovation. This nihilism gave rise to an aesthetic of urgency, in which temporality became a vehicle for protest. This article therefore proposes a re-reading of nihilism as a paradoxical form of creation, redefining the link between music and meaning.

This essay chronicles the career of pioneering Mexican rock band Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del 5° Patio. I argue that in a post–Chicano movement period, Maldita has become a borderless cultural institution infl uencing a generation of Mexicans on both sides of the border. Maldita has sought linkages with Mexicans from north and south through manifestos and music and through the revitalized figure of the pachuco. With its rock anthem “Pachuco,” Maldita looked back to Mexican film actor Germán Valdés and his hybrid pachuco character, el Tin Tan, to explain a new rebellious Mexican punk spirit that drew inspiration from past musical fusions. Maldita returned to the same working-class musical milieu, the “quintopatiera” tradition, that gave rise to 1940s music of the pachuco phenomenon evident in compositions by Mexican Americans Don Tosti and Lalo Guerrero. Thus Maldita combines rumba, mambo, bolero, and danzón with new rock genres, infusing its music with cultural openness.

"Zine," shortened from "fanzine," is the current term for publications published outside the conventional channels. These publications address issues of less-than-mainstream interest and provide a creative outlet for people whose tastes differ from those of the general population. Zines have been around in one form or another since the beginning of the printing press, though the amount of interest they generate tends to go in waves. The latest wave of zines starts with the punk rock movement and was accelerated by the publication of Factsheet Five, the zine of zines. Factsheet Five was started in 1982 by Mike Gunderloy, a science fiction enthusiast who was also interested in anti-authoritarian politics. He sent out a one page mimeographed newsletter to his friends in an attempt to cross-pollinate their interests. He reviewed zines on both topics for his friends hoping that they would become interested enough to get the zines themselves. That way his science fiction friends could learn more about the antiauthoritarian movement and vice-versa.

An enjoyable overview of the world of pop, rock and politics in Beijing, accessible for students of Chinese culture and popular music studies. This is an area that has been exceptionally well covered in the literature, and Baranovitch's claim to originality lies mainly in his focus on ethnicity and gender. The overview of the development of pop from 1978–97 does a useful job of drawing together the various strands, though most of this is very familiar from the writings of Geremie Barmé, Andrew Jones et al. We begin with the introduction of Gangtai (Hong Kong and Taiwan pop) to the mainland, led by Deng Lijun whose ‘coquettish nasal slides,’ Baranovitch rightly suggests, were more truly subversive in China in 1978 than any of the subsequent rock and punk styles. Baranovitch chronicles the rise of the xibeifeng, the Shaanbei folk-infused rock style, linking it into the xungun roots movement and Tiananmen. An interesting section on qiuge or ‘prison songs,’ popular in 1988, explores somewhat less well-known territory. We follow the rise of the commercial, the karaoke craze and Mao fever, and the co-option of at least some of the rebellious rockers by the state. Baranovitch enthusiastically reveals the significance of music in the political arena, and its ability to prefigure, even shape the political.

Anyone who was not familiar with Michael Muhammad Knight’s oeuvreand picked up his Why I Am a Salafi based upon the title, thinking it wouldbe a straightforward explanation and defense of Salafism, would be quicklydisabused of that impression. Knight begins this memoir/theological exploration/postmodern deconstruction with an extended anecdote abouthis experience of praying at a Los Angeles mosque while coming downfrom a drug-induced hallucination brought on by his intentional consumptionof Amazonian ayahuasca tea, and the book gets stranger from there.This transgressive episode of praying while high becomes a touchstone forKnight in his rethinking of his own Muslimness, the origins of the Islamictradition, and his life-journey through a variety of controversial and eccentriccommunities on the fringes of the American Muslim community.In Knight’s previous body of work—from his 2004 novel The Taqwacores(Soft Skull Press) about punk-rocking, countercultural American Muslimsto his insider-white-man narrative of an esoteric offshoot movement of theNation of Islam in Why I Am a Five Percenter (Penguin, 2011)—he has longcast himself as an experimental Muslim writer challenging established traditionsand organized religion of all kinds. Like some of his other books,Why I Am a Salafi is difficult to categorize. Framed around Knight’s odysseywithin American Islam and the diffuse trends that contributed to thedevelopment of his distinct perspective, it is part religious autobiography,part analysis of the nebulous concept of Salafism, and part therapy session.Indeed, drawing upon his well-established tendency toward bucking trendsand upsetting orthodoxies, Knight quips that in the progressive Muslimcircles he tends to run in, labeling himself a Salafi could itself be a form ofrebellion. “Depending on whom you want to irritate, Salafis could look likethe new punk rock” (29) ...

The study is about Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which aimed to explore ideology in protest songs of Punk Rock music. The protest emerges due to dissatisfaction with any program or policy of the government or other organization. The musician sees these relevant parties as superior who have overused their power and ideology to control people and cause them suffered. Their music is a representation of their rejection of the condition and the system. Through their lyrics, they intent on raising people’s awareness of the existing issue and persuading them to agree with their beliefs and to fight for a change. The study has to investigate two research questions such as 1) What are the dominant ideologies revealed in Anti-Flag's song lyrics? 2) How are the ideologies revealed in the songs through the use of linguistic features? The study is library research that used CDA and Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as basic theories. Under three dimensional framework of CDA: social practice, discourse practice, and textual analysis the study is directed to find out the social issues inside the 15 songs lyrics of Anti Flag and analyze the text with the help of SFG. The significance of this study is that it informs two main ideologies presented in selected songs of Anti-Flag are the anti-authoritarianism: anti-capitalism and anti-nationalism and the social movement and explains how the linguistic features work to present the ideologies.

Punk rock performance consciously draws on popular theatre forms such as music hall and stand-up comedy – as was exemplified on the occasion when Max Wall appeared with Ian Dury at the Hammersmith Odeon. Oliver Double traces the historical and stylistic connections between punk, music hall and stand-up, and argues that punk shows can be considered a form of popular theatre in their own right. He examines a wide range of punk bands and performers – including The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Devo, Spizz, The Ramones, The Clash, and Dead Kennedys – to consider how they use costume, staging, personae, characterization, and audience–performer relationships, arguing that these are as important and carefully considered as the music they play. Art movements such as Dada and Futurism were important influences on the early punk scene, and Double shows how, as with early twentieth-century cabaret, punk performance manages to include avant-garde elements within popular theatre forms. Oliver Double started his career performing a comedy act alongside anarchist punk bands in Exeter, going on to spend ten years on the alternative comedy circuit. Currently, he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent, and he is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005).

Abstract The officially sanctioned popular music genre of Soviet estrada has traditionally been an industry where both male and female performers have been able to achieve high levels of success and public exposure. Meanwhile, within the genres of underground and unofficial popular music – rock, punk, and rap – the male-dominated gender disparity has been much more pronounced. This article investigates the reasons behind this dynamic within a Russo-Soviet context. In dialogue with Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity as well as recent scholarship on gender in Western rock and punk movements, the present essay considers the evolution of performative strategies of female artists in Russo-Soviet popular culture. The discussion spans the Soviet, late-Soviet, and post-Soviet historical periods, focusing on the gendered performative dimensions in the musical careers of Alla Pugacheva, Yanka Diagileva, and the art-punk collective Pussy Riot, in an effort to account for the glaring dearth of female performers in traditionally “transgressive” popular genres. I present the argument that Russian and Soviet women performers working in rock, punk, and rap, or when forging new directions in estrada, have evolved to mitigate the genres’ prescriptive masculinity by relying on performing “otherness” as a conduit to mass appeal, celebrity status, and acclaim for artistic individuality.

“Who’s going to dangle there?” – Peasant revolt in urban imagination. On the Gore album by R.U.T.A. and on its receptionThe author presents a review of a recent album “Gore: Songs of Rebellion and Misery from 16th to 20th Century” by a Polish punk rock / hardcore group R.U.T.A. The album, which combines traditional peasant lyrics with modern arrangements and folk instruments, has received acclaim from both fans and critics, while the band declared their commitment to struggles of contemporary progressive social movements. The author analyses the lyrics situating his reflection in sociological-historical framework to discuss realities of peasants’ lives and revolts during the second serfdom in early modern Poland. The author interprets the musical form of the songs as “punk-rock assimilation” of folklore themes. The final section contains critical reflection on the album’s marketing strategy and reception with the key dissected categories being “rebellion” and “authenticity.”

AbstractAny study of punk rock in Russia will in some way come into contact with the massive influence of Egor Letov, his band Grazhdanskaia Oborona, and their extensive output during the late 1980s. Academia has thus far been reluctant to study the band because of its leader's involvement with dubious right-wing movements and his many tasteless and provocative media stunts during the 1990s. By taking its point of departure in Letov's songs from four stages of his band's development, this article seeks to shed light on Grazhdanskaia Oborona's contribution to the development of punk in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. When it comes to Letov's extremist views in the latter half of his career it attempts to venture beyond reductionist notions of fascism, into the complex landscape of the paradoxical and often confusing mixture of extreme ideologies that sprang out of the Soviet collapse. It will argue that Letov's work – his songs – come over as a lot less contradictory and ideologically extreme than their author's political stunts would suggest. Their aesthetics and ideology are first and foremost punk.

Social networks act as a metaphor for discussion about many historical and contemporary music worlds. Much of the literature on feminist music movements like riot grrrl, ladyfest and Girls Rock camps conceptualize collective action and participation in network terms. However, in doing so, the approach is almost exclusively qualitative. Individuals tie movements, collectives and organizations together and help their cultural spread across cities and countries. Yet individuals can also cause ruptures in networks that may lead to their collapse or fracturing. This article uses mixed-methods social network analysis (SNA) to unpack the structure, development and impact of a riot grrrl-associated music network across geographical space and time. By investigating the strong ties of shared band membership and playing together, the centrality of key bands and musicians across overlapping music movements associated with riot grrrl are explored at micro, meso and macro levels of network interaction. The ability to visualize music collaboration networks allows us to see patterns and connections that may not have been previously apparent. Whilst there is a small but growing body of work on punk using SNA methods, these have overwhelmingly been male dominated. This is the first formal network application on punk-inspired feminist music worlds that redresses the gender imbalance.

<strong>Introduction:</strong>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;A landslide is&nbsp;a mass movement of material down a slope, such as rock, earth, or debris. They can happen suddenly or more slowly over long periods of time. When the force of gravity acting on a slope exceeds the resisting forces of a slope, the slope will fail and a landslide will occur.&nbsp;Landslides are natural hazard which is caused by several geophysical &amp; anthropogenic factors Landslides are caused by&nbsp;disturbances in the natural stability of a slope. They can accompany heavy rains or follow droughts, earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions. Mudslides develop when water rapidly accumulates in the ground, resulting in a surge of water-saturated rock, earth, and debris.<strong>&nbsp;</strong>The four main types of movement are fall topples. Slides (rotational and translational) flows.&nbsp;The impact of a landslide can be extensive, including&nbsp;loss of life, destruction of infrastructure, damage to land, and loss of natural resources. Landslide material can also block rivers and increase the risk of floods. Pune One of the biggest landslides in the state has occurred here. Raigad recently a landslide, named the biggest after 2016 in Pune, occurred here. Satara a huge landslide took place near Pratapgarh Fort and Ambeghar Village in Patan tehsil recently. These landslides are dangerous, occur suddenly and cause significant damages (Guzzetti et al., 1999). It plays a significant role in the evaluation of landforms while constituting a severe natural hazard in many regions&nbsp;

Young residents of East Los Angeles neighborhoods use their involvement in punk rock cultures to forge new social identities and new social relations. The essay introduces the concept of the “mission,” a term that barrio youths use to describe their efforts to forge an oppositional cognitive mapping of space. The mission serves as a node in a network of tactics that utilize seemingly obscure and forgotten places as key sites for community congregation and self-definition. Putatively private spaces in backyards and abandoned public areas like alleys and freeway underpassesin East Los Angeles get turned into public performance venues by young people who are cut off from other sites for creativity and congregation. City streets, public transit vehicles, and alleys become part of a complex process of cognitive mapping for young people who own no property of their own, whose movements are aggressively policed, and who must create unexpected uses for seemingly routine and functional places and spaces.

This study seeks to delineate the highly convoluted relationship between (rock) musicians and the state in late socialist Romania (1975–1985). By investigating extensive archival files originating from the Securitate records, Agitprop branches, and the ideological committees of the Romanian Communist Party, we examine how the Romanian regime employed its mechanisms of creative control and how it made sense of Romanian musicians’ attempt to navigate them. First, such intricate mechanisms ranged from rewards and penalties in order to ensure ideological compliance, to repression by means of surveillance, recruitment, and harassment. Second, in our exploration of the margins of consent and dissent, the relationship between musicians and the state fluctuated between one of duplicity (that proved beneficial for both entities) and (symbolic) resistance (through collective and individual forms of dissent). Successful dissent came mostly from abroad, while, domestically, musicians were much more rigidly controlled; without being able to articulate coherent forms of dissent through their music, musicians challenged the Securitate through issues of morality. Music also led to the formation of subcultures—csöves and punks—which practiced anti-proletarian rituals of dissent. Thus, this research throws considerable light on broader sociological debates, such as the role of musicians in totalitarian settings, the hidden mechanisms employed by the state, and the ongoing literature concerning the configuration of subcultural movements in the Eastern bloc.

The quantity of municipal solid waste (MSW) generation is escalating at an alarming rate with every passing year alongside the modernization of our economy. Unfortunately, the majority of this waste remains uncollected or ends up in open dumping and followed by uncontrolled burning. Citing the deep-rooted consequences, open dumping should be absolutely abandoned and scientific interventions should be aggressively exercised to reclaim the municipal brownfields. The present research work undertook the judicial task of assessing the comparative feasibility of biomining and scientific capping as a technology selection for reclamation of about a decade old 120 million tons of waste chunk laying at Jawahar Nagar dump yard. Primary dump samples were collected from various locations, considering depth as a variable. While leachate and groundwater samples were collected from Malkaram lake and preinstalled borewells receptively. Additionally, the ambient air quality and noise level also been ascertained within the buffer zone. The blended representative solid sample was segregated using a 70 mm mesh size trommel into organic and inorganic fractions. The organic fraction was composted using a lab-scale aerobic static pile composting (ASPC) while the trommel reject was processed as refuse derived fuel (RDF). Evidently, the compost lagged quality and depicted nutrient deficiency. While the burning of RDF produced siloxane gas, significantly due to elevated silicon level in the primary waste. Furthermore, due to the prolonged leaching tenure and seasonal dilution, the concentration of legacy leachate was relatively weaker. Borewell samples collected from a depth of 20 feet also portrayed minor contamination up to 500 meters horizontal radius. The issue of leachability can solely be resolved with the capping of the existing dump and the end product quality derived from the biomining process is highly questionable. Thus, handling such large quantity capping is a befitting option over biomining for Jawahar Nagar dumpsite. &#x0D; INTRODUCTION&#x0D; Presently, in India due to rapid urbanization and industrialization, the generation of MSW has been increasing tremendously and also expected to continue a similar trend in the future (Scott, 1995; Bhat et al., 2017; Sethurajan et al., 2018; Sharma et al., 2018). Annually, the comprehensive urban MSW generation in India is more than 62 million tons. Metro cities are the mammoth contributor of the entire chunk and waste production had already reached an alarming figure of 50,000 tonnes/day. While the waste generation from the tier 2 cities is also rigorously escalating and presently contribute up to 20,000 tones/day (Sharma et al., 2018). A study conducted by the central pollution control board (CPCB) revealed MSW generation in India is increasing at a distressing rate of 5 % per annum with a sharp escalation in the quantities of domestic hazardous waste (Sharma et al., 2018). With major financial constraints, inefficacy of collection, treatment, and disposal incurs further reasons to worry. &#x0D; So far India has miserably failed to set up wholesome source segregation and collection method. Presently, the country spends more than 60% of its annual waste management budget only in collection. Besides, only 20% or less of the collected materials are scientifically handled and treated. Citing the statistics, it is evident that the majority of the MSW is simply gets dumped on the low laying grounds located somewhere on the outskirts of the cities. The precipitation, infiltration, surface water runoff, bird menace, rodent interference etc. triggers the vulnerability of waste and leads to mal odor, ground and surface water contamination, human and environmental health deterioration (Jayawardhana et al., 2016). Further, the perseverance of the inorganic and inert fractions leads to soil contamination, poses a fire threat, and also may incur carcinogenicity and acute toxicity among the animals (Mir et al., 2021).&#x0D; There are numerous techniques for the reclamation and remediation of the dumpsites, includes processes such as capping and closure, in-situ vitrification, sub-surface cut-off walls, and waste biomining (Chakrabarti and Dubey, 2015; Thakare and Nandi, 2016). Waste biomining is a stable way to get rid of the entire range of problems associated with open dumping and reclaim valuable land (Kaksonen et al., 2017). There are several instances including reclamation of Mumbai Gorai dump yard by IL &amp; FS Environment, 70 – 80 years old 12,00,000 tons of dump clearance by Nagar Nigam Indore within a minute span of 3 years and many more. But the process of biomining is highly sensitive and case-specific. The success of the process solely depends on factors such as characteristics of the waste, efficacy of the effective microorganism culture, acceptability of the processed end product at the local market etc. (Jerez, 2017; Banerjee et al., 2017; Venkiteela, 2020). Contrarily, though the scientific capping is not an end-to-end solution but still advisable in the cases where the quantity of waste is gigantic, land scarcity is prevalent, no nearby industries to consume the end products etc. Mehta et al. (2018) have also supported the above claim based on the assessment of locations specific MSW dump reclamation case studies. While in another Nagpur-based case study conducted by Ashootosh et al. (2020) reported the superiority of the biominingprocess over simple land capping due to the favorability of the local conditions. Capping eliminates the environmental interference and thereby reduces biosphere contamination and leachate generation. Further, it captivates rodent and vector breeding and thereby curtails the spreading of communicable diseases and improves aesthetics. But right consolidation through compaction and execution is utmost necessary in the above case. As non-compaction and faulty sloping will easily lead to heavy settlement and slope failure (Berkun et al., 2005; Al-Ghouti et al., 2021).&#x0D; The present study has been pursued with the primary objective to run a techno-commercial assessment between scientific capping and biomining. While the secondary objective was to ascertain the level of contamination and propose mitigative measures. &#x0D; MATERIALS AND METHODStudy Area &#x0D; Spanning over 350 acres of a precious piece of land at the outskirts of Hyderabad city, Jawahar Nagar dumping yard was brutally utilized by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) for open dumping for a prolonged tenure of 10 years. It housed nearly 12 lakh metric tons of heterogeneous solid and domestic hazardous waste and continues polluting until 2015, until the Ramky group was offered to cap the legacy dumping and scientifically handle the site. The present study has been facilitated at Hyderabad Municipal Solid Waste Limited, formerly known as Jawahar Nagar dump yard to analyze and assess the feasibility of bio-mining as handling and management alternate to the existing practice of scientific capping. The epicenter of processing and disposal facility is lying approximately on the cross-section of 17°31'24.45"N and 78°35'23.37"E. As per the contract, the comprehensive legacy dumping to be capped in three phases over about 150 acres of area and Ramky has significantly entered the phase two of the operation only within a span of five years by successfully capping more than half of the legacy footprint.&#x0D; Sampling Methodology &#x0D; The waste pile was divided into three layers namely, base, middle, and top. A uniform amount of sample was collected from the successive layers of all five different corners which cover north, south, east, west, and central of the garbage pile. Sampling inspections were performed using a manual auger besides large samples were collected using a JCB excavator. The top six-inch layer of the pile was removed to avoid any contamination while collecting the samples and 5-10 kg of sample was collected from each of the locations. Further, intermediate and bottom layer samples were collected by digging a 500 mm diameter hole through the heap. A composite was prepared by a homogenized blending of all the fifteen grub samples. The blend was distributed into four equal quadrants and the top and bottom quadrants were eliminated diagonally while the left-over quadrants were mixed thoroughly. This process was repeated until a sample of the required bulk of 20 kg is obtained. &#x0D; Surface and subsurface water samples from borewell were collected in and around the facility. Piezometric monitoring borewells located near the landfills were utilized for the subsurface sample collection. While a rainwater pond turned leachate lake named Malkaram was determined as the primary source for leachate collection. Buffer samples were collected from Ambedkar Nagar, the nearby colony exiting at a distance of only 300 meters. &#x0D; Lab-scale Experimentation &#x0D; The representative sample was characterized for composition and further screened through a 70 mm mesh size trommel. The trommel permeate was considered as the organic fraction while the reject was mostly inorganics and inert. The organics were subjected to ASPC. The quantity of the air required is arrived using the method delineated below (Figure 1).&#x0D; MSW Pile size: 2m x 0.5m x 0.5m&#x0D; Volume of pile: 0.5 m3&#x0D; Average Density of MSW: 620 Kg/m3&#x0D; Weight of pile: 310 Kg&#x0D; Nitrogen required for matured compost: 9300 mg/kg dry&#x0D; : 9300 X 310 mg&#x0D; : 2.88 x 106 mg&#x0D; : 2.88 Kg&#x0D; Total air required: 2.88 x 100/76 [as Nitrogen in air is 76% by weight]&#x0D; : 3.79 Kg of dry air&#x0D; : 3.79/1.225 m3 [@ 15 deg C density of air 1.225 kg/m3]&#x0D; : 3.1 m3&#x0D; This air is to be supplied for 100 min / day for 0.5 m pile&#x0D; Air flow rate required: 3.1 x 60/100 = 1.86 m3/h (for practical purpose a flowrate of 2 m3/h was maintained). &#x0D; The maturation period was considered as 28 days and post-maturation, the stabilized material was further cured for 24 hours and screened using 12 mm and 4 mm trommel respectively to obtain the desired product quality and particle size.&#x0D; Whereas, the trommel reject was evenly spreader on the copper trays and dried in an oven at 1050C for 2 hours. The dried material was micronized to the size of 50 mm or below using a scissor and inert such as glass, sand, stone etc. were segregated manually (Mohan and Joseph, 2020).&#x0D; Concurrently, a bench-scale capped landfill prototype was built using the below-mentioned procedure to evaluate the factors such as settlement and slope stability. A 30 mm thick low permeable soil was laid on the top of the waste, followed by a 60 mm layer of compacted clay liner (CCL). Each join between successive liner material was closely monitored. A 1.5 mm thick HDPE liner was placed on the top of the CCL. A 285 GSM geotextile membrane was placed as the successive above layer followed by a 15 mm thick drainage media layer. A further layer of geotextile membrane was placed on top of the drainage media for better stabilization, grip, and strength. The top vegetative soil layer of 45 mm thickness was laid off on top of the geotextile media and St. Augustine grass was rooted (Cortellazzo et al., 2020; Ashford et al., 2000).&#x0D; 2.4 Sample Analysis&#x0D; pH, Electrical Conductivity (EC) and Turbidity of the samples were analyzed using pH, EC-TDS, and Nephelometer of Mettler Toledo. The pH meter was calibrated with the buffer solution of 4.0, 7.0 &amp; 9.12 at a controlled temperature. EC-TDS meter was calibrated with 0.1 M KCL having 12.8 mS/cm of conductivity. Nephelometer was calibrated with Formazine solution of 10 &amp; 100 NTU. Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), (mg/L) was performed using the gravimetric method at 1800C in the oven.&#x0D; Titrimetric parameters such as Total Alkalinity as CaCO3 (mg/L), Total Hardness as CaCO3 (mg/L), Chloride as Cl- (mg/L), Calcium as Ca2+ (mg/L), Residual Free Chlorine (RFC), (mg/L) were analyzed using APHA (American Public Health Associations) method, 23rd Edition, 2017. Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen (mg/L) and Ammonical Nitrogen (mg/L) were performed through distillation followed by titration with H2SO4 as a titrant. Sulphide as S2- was done with the Iodometric method after distillation. Each titrimetric parameter was analyzed in triplicate after standardizing the titrant with required reagents and crossed checked by keeping a check standard.&#x0D; Sodium as Na (mg/L) and Potassium as K (mg/L) were performed using Flame Photometer. The photometer was calibrated with different standards from 10 to 100 (mg/L) standard solutions. The leachate sample was diluted enough to get the value within the standard range and cross-checked with check standards at the same time.&#x0D; Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), (mg/L) was performed using the open reflux method for 2 hours at 1500C in COD Digestor. Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), (mg/L) was performed using the alkali iodide azide method for 3 days. The samples were kept in a BOD incubator at 270C for 3 days. It was kept in duplicate to have a check on quality control.&#x0D; Sulphate was analyzed by the gravimetric method instead of turbidimetric or through UV-Visible spectrophotometer as its concentration was found more than 40 mg/L. Nitrate as NO3- was analyzed after filtration at 220-275 nm, while Hexavalent Chromium as Cr6+ was analyzed at 540 nm in the UV-Vis. Parameters like Cyanide as CN-, Fluoride as F-, and Phenolic Compounds were gone through a distillation process followed by UV-Vis. The distillation process ensures the removal of interferences presents either positive or negative. For the parameters like Total Iron or Ferric Iron, the samples were digested properly with the required reagents on the hot plate before analyzing in UV-Vis.&#x0D; For the metal analysis the water samples were digested at a temperature of 1000C using aqua regia as a media. The samples were digested to one-fourth of the volume on a hot plate. The recommended wavelengths as per APHA 3120 B were selected for each of the metals. The standard graph was plotted for each of the metals before analysis and crossed checked with the check standard at the same time.&#x0D; Parameters such as bulk density and particle size were performed through the certified beaker and sieve. The percentage of moisture content was estimated using the oven by keeping the compost sample for 2 hours at 1050C. C/N ratio was estimated through CHNS analyzer keeping sulfanilamide as a check standard. The analysis was performed by extracting the desired component in the desired solution prescribed in the method followed by converting the same from mg/L to mg/Kg.&#x0D; RESULTS AND DISCUSSION&#x0D; An exhaustive bench-study has been pursued and real-time samples were collected and analyzed for all possible parameters to determine the pros and cons attributed to both processes. The investigation begins by collecting the samples and concluded by impact assessment studies inclusive of the buffer zone. Both solid, liquid, and gaseous samples were precisely investigated to opt for the best solution. A detailed finding of the investigation is summarized below. &#x0D; Primarily, the representative solid sample was characterized through a manual separation process and the results are portrayed in Figure 1. &#x0D; Compost Characterization &#x0D; ASPC of the organic fraction has resulted in a recovery of 46.7% of the initial load. While 53.3% of the influent mass were inert and barely degradable fraction contributes to reject, the rest 4.1% is miscellaneous process loss. The processed compost was extensively analyzed including for metal contamination and the same is tabulated in Table 1. &#x0D; The value of C/N ratio, OC, TN, K2O, P2O5, and NPK evidently portrays the shortcoming in terms of nutrient availability. Though it is highly enriched in organic carbon and thus the same can be effectively utilized as a soil preconditioner. Ayilara et al. (2020) also reported a similar finding, where the city compost sourced from MSW lagged major plant nutrients. &#x0D; RDF Characterization &#x0D; Processed trommel rejects constitute cloth, rexine, leather, jute, paper, plastics, coir and other inert contributed to RDF. The fraction of inert was as high as 37.2% of the overall RDF mass and it mostly constituted glass and sand. The combined weight of sand and glass fragments contributed 73.5% of the total inert, while the rest was stone and small brickbats. The higher level of silicon associated with the presence of glass and sand yielded siloxane and triggered the possibility of kiln corrosion. A detailed RDF analysis report is enclosed in Table 2. &#x0D; The values explicitly portray the quality of RDF is moderately lower and higher salts concentration is extremely prevalent. With relatively lower NCV and such high salt concentration, the above specimen will certainly pose a corrosion threat to the kiln and shall be either neglected as kiln feed or can be utilized after dilution with Grade III RDF quality. Further, such high ash generation will also induct high transportation and landfill charges. &#x0D; Leachate Characterization&#x0D; The Malkaram leachate lake is the end result of prolonged, slow, and steady mixing of the legacy leachate through the existing fissure cracks in the sheath rock bottom profile. Apparently, the concentration of leachate is significantly lower due to the dilution. Samples were analyzed in triplicates and the mean value is tabulated here in Table 3. &#x0D; The metal concertation and rest of the parameter values are well within the secondary treatment influent range, except for TDS. Thus, a modular aerobic biological treatment unit such as moving bed biofilm bioreactor (MBBR) or membrane bioreactor (MBR) would be a well-suited pick. However, a reverse osmosis (RO) system needs to be installed to get rid of the high TDS content. The permeate of RO can be reused back into the system. Whereas, the reject can be converted into dried powder through forced evaporation mechanisms. The higher concentration of salts in RDF collaterally justifies the elevated TDS level in leachate. In a leachate impact assessment study performed by El-Salam and Abu-Zuid (2015) the reported BOD/COD ratio of 0.69 is greater than double the value of 0.301 reported in Table 3. Though the difference in both the values are quite high, it is relatable and justifiable by the huge age difference of the source waste. The primarily characterized data is of a fresh leachate generated from regular MSW, while the later one is from a decade old waste that barely has any unstabilized organic content. &#x0D; Groundwater Contamination &#x0D; The obvious reason for downward leachate infiltration and osmotic movement facilitates groundwater contamination. Both surface and subsurface water samples were collected within the dump yard and the buffer zone and analyzed using the standard methods. The results are portrayed in Table 4. &#x0D; The slightly alkaline pH of the borewell sample is an indication of the ongoing anaerobic process. The dissolved oxygen value of 3.5 mg/L further validates the correlation. Higher TDS and hardness values are self-indicative of elevated salt concentration in source waste. Eventually, the same interfered with the RDF quality. Positively in the case of all the parameters, a successive decrement in pollution concentration has been spotted from dump ground towards the buffer zone. In a similar study conducted by Singh et al. (2016) at Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh the reported concentration of the parameters is significantly higher than reported in Table 4. The basic reason behind variation is the dissimilarities of the local soil profile. The sandy and clay loam soil profile of Varanasi allows a greater rate of percolation and infiltration. While the bottom sheath rock profile at Jawahar Nagar permits the only a minute to little percolation rate. The difference in percolation rate is directly correlated to the concentration levels in this case. Contrarily, Kurakalva et al. (2016) have reported much-elevated pollutant concertation both in ground and surface water for a study conducted at the same site in 2016. The higher concentration is relatable to the fact of the non-closure of the open dump back then. Capping activity had at Jawahar Nagar gained its pace 2018 onwards and capping for the primary section of 70 acres got concluded only during mid of 2019. Due to the decrement in runoff and percolation, the quality of both surface and subsurface water has improved drastically. &#x0D; Impact Assessment&#x0D; The odor and groundwater contamination are two of the primary issues that triggered a massive public agitation initially. The root causes of both the issues are identified as rainwater percolation and anaerobic digestion respectively. Eventually, the completion of the capping process would resolve both the problems effectively. Other non-tangential impacts include nausea; headache; irritation of the eye, nasal cavity, and throat; diarrhoeal diseases; vector-borne disease, cattle toxicity etc. Scientific capping can easily cater as the wholesome solution for all (Cortellazzo et al., 2020). Yu et al. (2018) had performed an extensive study to comprehend the relativity of respiratory sickness and MSW borne air pollution. The study made a couple of dreadful revelations such as gases released due to the anaerobic digestion of MSW such as methane, hydrogen sulphide, and ammonia incur detrimental impact on Lysozyme and secretory immunoglobulin A (SIgA). While SO2 was reported as the lung capacity and functionality reducer. Further, a gender-specific study executed by the same research group revealed, air pollution impacts more severely on male children than the female and retards immune functions. &#x0D; Presently, the area of 351 acres has been developed as Asia’s one of the largest state of the art municipal solid waste processing and disposal facility by Ramky Enviro Engineers Limited. This ensured zero dumping and no further environmental interventions. As legal compliance, the facility monitors the quality of groundwater and ambient air quality in and around the facility on monthly basis to assure the biosafety. The variation in concentration of various monitoring parameters between 2012 to 2020 is summarized in Figure 2.&#x0D; The concentration of each of the parameters are showcased in ppm and a standard equipment error was settled at 3% for respirable dust sampler and multi-gas analyzer (Taheri et al., 2014). Despite all parameter values have gradually increased except for methane, the facility still managed to maintain them well under the regulatory limits. The decrement in methane concentration is directly correlated to the practice of aerobic composting and aeration-based secondary treatment that prevented the formation of the anaerobic atmosphere and henceforth methane generation. While for the rest of the parameters the increment in values is quite substantial and predictable due to the sudden escalation in MSW generation in the past decade in correlation with Gross domestic product (GDP) enhancement. The observed and interpreted impacts due to the elevated pollutant level are in-line with the georeferenced findings reported by Deshmukh and Aher (2016) based on a study conducted at Sangamner, Maharashtra. &#x0D; CONCLUSION&#x0D; The study critically analyzed and investigated every techno-environmental and socio-economic aspect correlated to open dumping. The bench-scale experimentation revealed the efficiency of the single liner scientific capping is fair enough to eliminate any further rainwater infiltration, however, it has no control over the generation of leachate due to the inherent moisture. Internal moisture related issue was anyhow compensated with pertinent compaction prior to dispose of the waste. Contrarily, both the products derived through the biomining process namely, compost and RDF lagged quality due to scantier nutrient content and higher salt and silicon content respectively. 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Within the realm of punk music, little attention has been paid the musical and cultural movement of political punk rock within the Canadian context. The Vancouver-based punk band D.O.A. has achieved recognition within the punk community both for their music, their political consciousness, and for their role in labour activism in the 1980s. Their 1983 song “General Strike” was written about, and produced as a benefit for, a group of leftists in British Columbia known as the Solidarity Movement, who were fighting against the provincial Social Credit Government headed by Premier Bill Bennett. Using the theoretical framework of Simon Frith’s “Towards and Aesthetic of Popular Music,” this essay analyzes the way in which punk music and leftist politics intersected during the 1983 Solidarity Protests and how D.O.A. contributed to the construction of a unified communal identity among protestors. Furthermore, in exploring mainstream and underground media coverage surrounding D.O.A and the Solidarity Movement, this essay examines the way in which the political events of 1983 have been viewed in years since and have become part of a national political narrative.

AbstractPrior analyses have examined various elements of punk rock as an aggressive anti‐establishment cultural and social movement that arose in post‐WWII America and flourished in the 1970s. The unique gender dynamic of punk, however, has been less of a focus of historical investigation. This essay examines the lives and music of three women involved in the early years of the emergence of punk, an era overwhelmingly dominated by men. By focusing on the creative expression and Penelope Houston of Avengers, Debbie Harry of Blondie, and Wendy O. Williams of Plasmatics, this paper seeks to analyze how certain women in the punk movement explicitly sought to challenge the conventional narratives of women's social, political, and sexual roles in the late 1970s and in so doing helped to carve out new paths for women's expression and ways of being in American society.

This article seeks to investigate the ways punk and representations of juvenile delinquency interact in cinema and to explore the aesthetic, narrative and ideological quality of those depictions of youthful rebellion positioned as in dialogue with punk culture. By initially considering portrayals of delinquency in cinema existent outside of and/or predating the punk movement, this article will think through the specific ways punk is used to signify and fortify acts of rebellion. Beginning in the 1950s and with the reinvigoration of the term ‘juvenile delinquent’ in the post-war period, this article examines cinematic responses to the moral issue of ‘youth-crime’ in the context of a supposedly evaporating family unit. From here it considers the ‘skate-film’ of the 1980s and 1990s and its relationship to punk to explore the way other subcultural expressions of juvenile delinquency manifest on film. Subsequently, it moves to consider films that use, in different ways, the ethos and aesthetic of punk rock as a constitutive element in the depiction of adolescent rebellion. It argues that these films work to articulate the role punk plays in expressions of rebellion on-screen – utilizing both its violent and anarchic potential but also its inherent irony to express an oppositional philosophical framework with its own idiosyncratic ideology that is ultimately geared towards social change.

The pervasive Eurocentric model of music education in the United States is hegemonic, pursuing a model of performance excellence in large ensembles that, by the time young people reach high school, excludes most from music making opportunities in school. Despite numerous efforts to challenge the dominant paradigm since the 1960s, little change has happened from within the music education profession. Since 2002, nonprofit organization Little Kids Rock (Music Will) has leveraged outsider perspectives and philanthropic resources to galvanize momentum nationally towards adoption of curricula and musicking practices that focus more on popular musics and lifelong learning. Through a programme of professional development, curriculum provision and instrument donations, Little Kids Rock has both engaged in active resistance against, and established strategic partnerships with, state governments, university departments, school districts, major industry players including the National Association of Music Merchants, and education brands such as Berklee College of Music. Little Kids Rock promotes a new stream of music making called “modern band” as a disruptive phenomenon that emphasizes creativity, cultural relevance and student-centred learning while reinforcing entrenched hegemonic structures. Drawing on the history of Little Kids Rock and the modern band movement, the authors use Kahn-Egan’s (1998) five tenets of punk to frame a critical examination of the modern band phenomenon and the ways which Little Kids Rock operates at various points along punk’s ideological spectrum in attempting to “transform lives through restoring, expanding and innovating music education” in US schools.

The Two Tone movement appeared in the wake of punk in the late 1970s and was based on the commercial success of The Specials and other ska revival bands such as Madness, The Selector and The Beat. It quickly became a mass movement, one of the fundamental particularities of which was its multiracial nature as it attracted young black people of Caribbean origin and white youngsters. There has consequently been a tendency to celebrate Two Tone and to see it as the culmination of the anti-racist struggles of Rock Against Racism. Twenty years later the Asian Underground scene appeared, as British Asian artists ranging from Asian Dub Foundation to Nitin Sawnhy came to the fore. Comparing the two movements and the contexts in which they emerged allows the dominant vision of Two Tone to be challenged and suggests that Asian Underground developed, at least partly, as a reaction to the limited nature of Two Tone’s appeal to all ethnic minorities.

Whereas most of Nintendo’s music from the 1990s used basic looping structure and simple chiptune-reminiscent sounds, Donkey Kong Country (1994), composed by British composer David Wise rather than by Nintendo’s in-house composition team, featured texturally more complex music, including features characteristic of the 1970s/80s progressive rock style such as short repeated melodies and chord progressions with layering (Collins 44).&#x0D; For example, in “Fear Factory” (Figure 1), we hear a repeated chord progression of (VI, iv, i) underneath a faster eighth-note melody. Very little harmonic movement occurs and the focus is more on the melodic layers that occur in this top voice. In addition, “Fear Factory” includes unconventional punk, “mechanic/industrial”, and “glitch” noises that emphasize melodic content (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v18pEFQb3EM&amp;t=45s). As William Cheng discusses in Sound Play, the use of such unconventional sounds often contribute to a feeling of dissociation and alienation in the player, and create a divide between diegetic (that is, music the characters are aware of) and non-diegetic (that is, “background” music) soundscapes (Cheng 98-9). While this is not a direct element of prog-rock, both industrial and prog-rock music styles feature a strong focus on texture. Collins speculates that this may have been an attempt by Nintendo to capitalize on the ‘edgier’ market of other game producers such as Sega (Collins 46).&#x0D; In this paper, an analysis of form, melodic structure, and instrumentation from Donkey Kong Country’s “Treetop Rock” and “Fear Factory” will demonstrate features atypical of Nintendo style, which normally features catchy tunes, simple instrumentation, and pop-inspired harmonies.&#x0D; Figure 1:&#x0D; &#x0D; e-: VI iv I VI ivBibliography&#x0D; Cheng, William. Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. The Oxford Music/media Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.&#x0D; Collins, Karen. Game Sound an Introduction to the History, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.

With some notable exceptions, research on the far-right and music has historically focused on rock-derived genres such as punk and metal. As the far-right have shifted political emphasis and sought to mainstream their political views, so, too, has research into the contemporary far-right demonstrated a distancing among political ideologues and parties as well as groups from both extreme lyrics and ‘harsher’ sounding elements. This has gone hand-in-hand with an embracing of a wider range of musical styles. Focusing on the music associated with the Alt-Right, a broad movement which sought to mainstream far-right politics, this article suggests that a cultural shift within the far-right went hand-in-hand with a mode of aesthetic appreciation among Alt-Right adherents, which has implications for the mainstreaming of far-right politics in relation to musical cultures and aesthetics. This form of musical metapolitics emphasized dissonant principles of irony and aesthetic pluralism as a form of strategic ambiguity, but still retained notions of racial superiority at its core despite an avowed openness to genre-based pluralism. Importantly, this process has implications for the mainstreaming of far-right messaging today using a wide variety of musical aesthetics.

ABSTRACTAutogestión (self‐management), has been a popular articulation of radical politics since its emergence in the 1960s. This article examines how Mexico City's anarcho‐punk scene transformed autogestión in the 1990s from an anarcho‐syndicalist principle into a unique ethical practice detached from industrial material production. It was then popularized and made more mainstream through university rock festivals. As these were Zapatista benefit concerts, autogestión became inadvertently attached to Zapatismo and detached from anarchism and punk. This history is a crucial one for understanding the political development of an entire generation of the political left in Mexico City who were young in the 1990s. This article presents materials and oral histories at the intersections of punk and Zapatismo that are broadly relevant to an understanding of Mexican social movements but are not widely known or accessible. It is essential for understanding how autogestión practice and discourse is deployed in the 21st century.

Introduction – Polish GrungeThe main objective of this article is to examine the grunge scene of the 1990s in Poland in the context of acculturation and assimilation processes. Polish grunge was, on the one hand, the expression of trends that were observable in music industry since the late 1980s. On the other hand, it was symptomatic of a rapid systemic transformation. Youth culture was open for the diffusion of cultural patterns and was ready to adopt certain patterns from the West.Thus, we suggest that the local grunge scene was completely modelled on the American one: the flow of cultural practices and subcultural fashion were the manifestations of the assimilation processes in Poland, observable not only in art (i.e. rock music), but also in the domains of politics and economy, as well as in the broader social sphere. We explore how young people were ready to adopt only the surface level of the phenomenon as they were familiar with it through the media coverage it received. Young people in Poland circa the early ‘90s primarily wanted to gain access to an imaginary Western lifestyle rather than learn about real living conditions in capitalist societies, and they could do this through their involvement in grunge culture.Grunge as a Cultural PhenomenonGrunge as a popular music trend arose in the USA during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the work of bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains. Grunge was initially opposed to consumerism and capitalist values. Nevertheless, A&amp;R scouts recognised the commercial potential of this music: for example, Nirvana’s Nevermind was released by Geffen Company, and Pearl Jam’s Ten by Epic. As Grzegorz Brzozowicz and Filip Łobodziński put it (313),the success of Nirvana was a post-mort triumph of punk rock and, more importantly, it indicated the potential of alternative music, which suddenly stepped outside an aesthetic ghetto and became a hot stuff. This influence was also visible as regards fashion and customs – Dr. Martens’ shoes, flannel shirts, frayed jeans, and wool caps became an outfit common for the young (…). Grunge influenced visual art, film and photography.In Poland, grunge as a subculture and sub-genre of rock music emerged in the early 1990s following the international commercial success of bands such as those listed above, and it entailed the assimilation of the Western cultural patterns. Although assimilation processes were typical primarily for youth culture, they were observed in the wider context of the changes and adaptations that Polish system underwent after the fall of the centrally planned economy and subjugation to the communist party power after the Yalta agreements (1945-1989/1990).In this context, the concept Centre/Periphery (Gopinathan, Saravanan and Altbach; Hannerz; Langholm; Pisciotta) appears as the field for the dissemination of popular culture. Popular culture is a battlefield for creating and negotiating the meanings that are inherent within cultural practices (Barker). Cultural practices play a double role in the dissemination of ideas or objects. Firstly, they come as a result of adaptation in a defined culture, and secondly, they make new cultural patterns stabile, visible, and easy to practice by people as flexible patterns of behaviour. This point is clearly visible in the context of the East European states that underwent rapid acculturation processes in which new patterns of economic and social solutions were established in centre-planned economies: the tensions of the “old” and the “new” patterns dominating in the political and social systems of those countries (e.g. Poland, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.) were visible and affected societies to a considerable degree (Pisciotta). Thus, the practices generated in cultural Centres tend to disseminate easily and to “conquer” other cultural systems, especially in the Periphery.In the case of popular culture, the flow of influences usually takes a one-dimensional form and is disseminated from the Centre to the Periphery. As Marek Jeziński (162-163) argues, both Centre and Periphery are functional systems. These systems have generated their own mythology, which separates one from another. However, as in the case of mythological systems in general, Centre and Periphery tales overlap frequently, and there are evidence that the bands that originated in the Periphery were assimilated by the Centre. For example, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were both successful in market terms and both built their own status based on the Peripheral components that were skilfully overtaken by the Centre narrative. While the Peripheral narratives are concentrated mainly on the undermining of the definition of situation and present dysfunctional character towards cultural system as such, the Centre narratives aim to maintain the definition of situation supporting mainstream values and their prevailing position in a system (Jeziński 164). Grunge is the epitome of such an implementation of cultural patterns. That is, grunge started as a fringe peripheral cultural phenomenon. The major records companies, however, recognised its potential and provided the space in the music market to support the new bands. Most of the groups in the US started as independent local acts related to independent record companies that built their status.In relation to the assimilation of grunge culture in Poland, we can distinguish two key phenomena. The first is concerned with the adaptation of general subcultural components, e.g. fashion and group identification. Here, the acculturation processes run as a primary form of mimicry, as the Polish grunge scene adopted elements typical of the grunge subculture, such as oversize sweaters, flannel shirts, Dr. Martens shoes or Converse trainers, long hair, and beanies. A newly formed subculture was different from the others popular in the 1990s. For example, punk and metal subcultures implied strong group identity, style homogeneity, rigid group limitations, and firm membership rules. Conversely, it seems that the grunge subculture was based more on a level of liquid and fragmented patchwork identity than on very inflexible group values and internal ideology or political attitudes (cf. Muggleton). Such patchwork identity formation was a result of a rapid clash between the adaptation of grunge cultural patterns from the West and the Polish economic transformation of the early 1990s.Poland underwent rapid changes that were also visible in the politics, culture and social domain, joining liberal democracies and liberal free market economies of the West. These changes resulted from a transformation of the system as a whole: from a central planned system to decentralisation of the power at both local and state levels (Sarnecki). Equally important were the changes in the political culture of Poles and their value system: they accepted the democratic changes but simultaneously, the mentality of Poles remained traditionalist (which is visible in surveys— the most important values for them were “family” and “work”), and their attitude towards the processes of cultural and institutional changes was impermanent (Garlicki; Jasińska-Kania).During the transformation, the changes were visible in the everyday lives of Polish citizens: examples include the shortages in the market that were evident after the socialist regime ended, and the easy availability of Western clothes such as jeans, shirts, denim jackets in ordinary stores. Consequently, the economic rates in the 1990s were higher in comparison to the previous decade (Bałtowski and Miszewski). Those changes resulted in a phase shift in the modernisation process, where patterns of economic and cultural development and were faster than the enculturation and socialisation processes.On the one hand, the free market allowed for almost unlimited commodification with unprecedented access to goods and services. On the other hand, the low cultural capital and economic possibilities of the citizens evolved rapidly. The communist-shaped social division fell apart, and the new class designations based of consumption/commodification patterns were established (Jeziński; Wojtkowski). Those factors resulted in high cross-generational mobility, lower entrance barriers, and higher openness indicators (cf. Polska klasa średnia; O ruchliwości społecznej w polsce).Hence, in cultural conditions based on capitalist consumption practices, the grunge subculture evolved with a commodified sense of style rather than with a firm identity. Yet, in the case of grunge style, relatively high costs of subculture commodities (e.g. Dr. Martens shoes, Converse trainers, or band t-shirts) led to DIY practices such as buying cheaper no-name shoes, and sewing badges with the names of bands and albums on jackets or backpacks.The second phenomenon encompasses the adaptation of music patterns. The Polish grunge scene was not as diversified in terms of genre variations as its US counterpart. In the beginning, the Polish grunge scene was more distressed geographically, with no specific Centre-Periphery relations. However, one of the most important bands, Hey, was established in the Northwest. When one looks at Polish grunge evolution as a ‘clash’ of American genre and the specific character of a time and place where Polish bands were recording, she or he will notice multiple similarities with the US scene.Firstly, we could name two approaches to grunge music among Polish performers: ‘intellectual’ and ‘rebel’. The ‘intellectual’ approach encompasses the group Hey. This band was established in Szczecin (the Northwest Poland), but after the success of their first album – Fire (1993), they moved to Warsaw. Hey released 11 studio records, but only the first three could be classified as “grunge” (cf. Sankowski). On the level of musical references, Fire sounds like a mixture of early Pearl Jam combined with Alice in Chains. With English lyrics and song topics that were typical for grunge— e.g., The Choice (“You’ve got a gun/You can use it now”)—similarities with Pearl Jam, in particular, are striking. The band evolved, and on their second album, Ho! (1994), Hey mixed equally Polish and English lyrics with the dynamic and specific Seattle sound (cf. Prato). Hey’s most distinctive feature comparing with other Polish grunge bands is its highly developed melodic approach to music and the poetic, sensual style of its lyrics. The third record, ? (1995), closes the band’s early stage. The next album, Karma (1997), opens the period when the amalgamation of electronics, hard rock and grunge dominated Hey’s music, with the album [sic!] (2001) representing the turning point in the group’s music style. The band suspended their work in 2017 and will probably never reunite.Over time, Hey gained one of the most dedicated audiences in Polish rock music. The music industry and critics have acknowledged Hey as one of the best Polish groups in the post-communist period. Hey has received the most nominations in the history of Fryderyki, the key Polish music awards. The group and Nosowska have won twenty-three times in multiple categories. As the longest-operating grunge-origin band in the country, Hey could be considered as a most important trend setting and scene-forming group.The more “rebellious” approach to grunge encompasses bands such as Illusion (1992-1999, 2014-present) and Houk. The former was based on the grunge and hardcore mixture of influences from Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Rage Against the Machine (especially in terms of rap-oriented lyrics). With the preservation of certain consistency, the band named first three albums: Illusion (1993), Illusion II (1994), and Illusion III (1995). Illusion marks the band’s aggressive style and lyrics simplicity but the studio production flattens the whole and gives an impression of a post-punk DIY venture rather than a coherent composition. The second record, however, is entirely conceptualised and thought out in terms of music and lyrics. Sharp riffs, hard rock tuning of instruments and aggressive lyrics that were focused on Polish life gave the album a needed consistency. The band’s third record is the most varied stylistically and politically engaged in their history. The harder-edged tunes from previous releases are accompanied by more psychedelic compositions (Wrona) that recall Alice in Chains’ slow songs and Layne Staley’s voice.Houk’s music similarly to other Polish grunge bands was the amalgamation of various genres and their style evolved in time. Initially, the band was regarded as an example of alternative rock music. The first album Soul Ammunition (1992) was named by music monthly Tylko Rock as a debut of the year (polskirock.art.pl). The combination of grunge, hardcore, hard rock, reggae and socio-politically engaged lyrics helped the group to establish a strong fan base. The band’s unique style was recognised internationally and Houk supported New Model Army and Bad Brains during the performances in the mid-1990’s (polskirock.art.pl). The band’s second studio release Generation X (1995) was recorded prior the multiple membership reorganizations that finally ended the grunge-orientation period of Houk’s history. One of the songs, Sleep, was dedicated to Kurt Cobain and reflected Nirvana’s approach to songwriting, which can be heard in songs such as “Lithium” (1991). Such a commemoration of Cobain’s figure is characteristic of Polish grunge culture’s establishment of strong ties with the American equivalent. Here and in many similar cases, Cobain serves not only as a grunge hero (or even a martyr) but also as a commodified pop culture figure (cf. Strong). Concerning both spheres - that is, the adaptation of grunge subculture and a development of the music scene -Polish grunge follows a different pattern to the US genre. Grunge was introduced to Poland after it was popularised and commodified by the major labels and media industry in the USA, so the adopted version was the mainstream one rather than the underground movement. Hence, the simplistic dichotomy between “underground” and “mainstream” culture does not function in terms of the Polish grunge culture, and probably is misstated even when it comes to the American phenomenon. Grunge could be perceived in Poland as both the first and the last “true” subcultural trend. At the same time, though, it was an affirmation not of ‘the rebel’ and ‘the underground’ but of capitalism and the cultural values of the West. Indeed, the Polish grunge culture couldn’t be fully aware of what grunge was warning us against while Polish society faced the rapid market and cultural transformation that allowed for its opening to Western trends.Conclusion – Is Grunge Really Dead?Although the popularity of grunge phenomenon in Poland was relatively short, the most important groups of this sub-genre - Illusion, Hey, Ahimsa, Houk, and Kr’shna Brothers - widely contributed to the emergence of the new wave of fashion for rock and hard-rock music in Poland in the mid-1990s. The most successful group of the era, Hey epitomises the transformation of grunge in Poland. Starting as a typical grunge band (modelled heavily on the US groups), they underwent a serious transition, substantially changing their music into more mainstream-oriented rock (that is, as music that was considered acceptable by rock music and AOR-focused radio stations). At the same time, grunge as a rock sub-genre underwent the contrary changes: it broke into the mainstream relatively quickly in the first half of the 1990s, establishing new rock stars of the scene (Illusion, Houk, Ahimsa, Hey), but in the late 1990s it went back to being a rock niche again. It seems that today grunge serves as a point of reference (in fact, it was an important period of rock history) for the new bands that intentionally use this sub-genre as a form of commodified, media-friendly nostalgia.ReferencesBałtowski, Maciej, Miszewski, Maciej. Transformacja gospodarcza w Polsce. Warszawa: PWN, 2006.Biografia Houk. 25 Nov. 2018 &lt;https://www.polskirock.art.pl/houk,z346,biografia.html&gt;.Brzozowicz, Grzegorz, and Filip Łobodziński. Sto płyt, które wstrząsnęły światem: Kronika czasów popkultury. Warszawa: Iskry, 2000.Domański, Henryk. Polska klasa średnia. Wrocław: FNP i W. Wrocławskie, 2002.Domański, Henryk. O ruchliwości społecznej w Polsce. Warszawa: IFiS PAN, 2004.Garlicki, Jan. “Tradycje i dynamika kultury politycznej społeczeństwa polskiego.” Dylematy polskiej transformacji. Ed. Jan Błuszkowski. Warszawa: DW Elipsa, 2007. 155-174.Gopinathan, Saravanan, and Philip G. Altbach. “Rethinking Centre–Periphery.” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 25.2 (2005): 117-123.Hannerz, Ulf. “Culture between Center and Periphery: Toward a Macroanthropology.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 54.3-4 (1989): 200-216.Houk. Soul Ammunition. 23 Nov. 2018 &lt;https://www.polskirock.art.pl/soul-ammunition,houk,3051,plyta.html&gt;.Jasińska-Kania, Aleksandra. “Dynamika zmian wartości Polaków na tle europejskim: EVS 1990-1999-2008.” Polska po 20 latach wolności. Eds. Marta Bucholc, Sławomir Mandes, Tadeusz Szawiel and Joanna Wawrzyniak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2011. 225-239.Jeziński, Marek. Mitologie muzyki popularnej. Toruń: WN Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2014.Jeziński, Marek, and Łukasz Wojtkowski. “Nostalgia Commodified: Towards the Marketization of the Post-Communist Past through the New Media.” Medien und Zeit 4 (2016): 96–104.Langholm, Sivert. “On the Concepts of Center and Periphery.” Journal of Peace Research 8.3-4 (1971): 273-278.Muggleton, David. Inside Subculture. The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Pisciotta, Barbara. “The Center-Periphery Cleavage Revisited: East and Central Europe from Postcommunism to Euroscepticism.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 22.2 (2016): 193-219.Sankowski, Robert. “Hey, czyli któtka historia polskiego popu.” Wyborcza.pl, 3 Nov. 2012. 1 Aug. 2018 &lt;http://wyborcza.pl/1,75410,12788097,Hey__czyli_krotka_historia_polskiego_popu.html&gt;. Sarnecki, Paweł. “Od kumulacji do podziału władzy.” Transformacja ustrojowa w Polsce 1989-2009. Eds. Maria Kruk and Jan Wawrzyniak. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar, 2011. 37-58.Strong, Catherine. Grunge and the Memory. London: Routledge, 2016.

The article examines the attitude of society in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to youth informal movements in the 1950s – the first half of the 1980s. Public opinion in modern Russian historiography is interpreted as public sentiments expressed in value judgments. A brief analysis of the literature shows that the identified topic remains poorly studied. As sources, the work uses letters from citizens, memoirs, published in periodicals and unpublished, deposited in the archive, as well as documents of the Bashkir regional committee of the Komsomol. In general, a negative attitude towards informal youth movements prevailed in the periodical press. At the same time, the genre of reviewing received letters implied the publication of opposing opinions, as a result we often have very valuable material for studying public sentiment. The article examines the public opinion of citizens using the example of attitudes towards dudes in the 1950s and early 1960s and to the rock movement in the first half of the 1980s. According to recollections, adults treated dudes with indifference, while among chil dren and teenagers they aroused interest and surprise. The behavior of the dudes was discussed at Komsomol and student meetings, and voluntary people's squads worked with them. At the same time, a certain part of the youth had a positive attitude towards the dudes. In the 1980s Many were alarmed by the disintegration of the Komsomol and the emergence of new informal movements: hippies, punks, rock groups. The authorities, in particular, did not persecute rock musicians at first, but also did not approve of their work. However, in the mid-1980s an attempt was made to condemn the activities of the DDT group, and “devastating” articles appeared in periodicals under the names of figureheads. The population of Bashkiria including young people, in the first half of the 1980s. didn’t know work well Shevchuk. Many condemned him for being “anti-Soviet,” while at the same time there were relatively “loud” voices in support of the DDT group.

“Power often comes in deceptive packages” (Myers, 2002) Hello Kitty is the ultimate icon of Japanese cuteness. She/it is simply the image of a cat with black eyes, a button nose and no mouth wearing a pink bow on her head. A product without context, Hello Kitty is a blank signifier with the potential to be loaded with codes and meanings as diverse as the ideas of those who consume her/it. Yet Hello Kitty encompasses, and holds contradictory associations with, discourses as diverse as debates over reappropriation of symbols, consumerism and nationalism. As a symbol of cuteness, with her inability to communicate verbally and her pink bow, Hello Kitty has become a player in the wider debate on “girlie” culture and whether symbols traditionally (by feminists) held to play a part in the oppression of women, can now be used as tools of cultural subversion (Greer, 1999). Riot grrrl was a movement which came to prominence in the early 1990s with all-female punk rock bands such as Bikini Kill, L7 and Babes in Toyland, and incorporated gender politics in to rock music, creating a new girl-focused subculture. The scene is still going strong now, although it receives less mainstream media attention (see Live Journal riot_grrls on-line community). It is often associated with the “girlie” look and many current riot grrrls consider themselves third-wave feminists. Girlie culture and riot grrrl are not to be confused with the girl power propagated by pop music, which is seen to be “insipid spice girl shit” (Riot Grrrl London) by riot grrrl feminists. A common mistake of older feminist’s criticisms is to equate mainstream “girl power” with the sub-cultural movement of riot grrrl, incorporating within it girlie feminism (See for examples the chapter on Girl power in Greer, 1999). Girlie Feminism: Separate But Equal Within the riot grrrl movement there has been a reappropriation of girliness as demonstrated by the use of “grrrl” as opposed to “girl”, severing its connotations of weakness and femininity and, thus, transforming its meaning. Hello Kitty and the debate around her/its consumption by riot grrrls can been used to examine the debates, contradictions, criticisms, reappropriations and ironies which are central to third-wave feminisms. One more sympathetic reading of the current “girlie” culture and its use of Hello Kitty as a logo assumes that it is highly ironic and that the girls involved have all the cultural savvy natural to the third-wave generation who have been raised in a pop culture driven world. From this point of view, young women/girls are naturally wielding signifiers like semiotics professors in their everyday lives. For example see the on-line “What fucked version of hello kittie are you?” Quiz (Sarcasticwhore, 2003) which uses Hello Kitty as a blank signifier that can represent many different types of subcultural image (interestingly the username of the creator of this quiz, “sarcasticwhore” is itself reappropriation of the word “whore”). Certainly there are some self-professed third-wave riot grrrls who are aware of the meanings of their actions: like the hello kitty pink fluffy thing - on the one hand if you're 'grown up' it can be a way of going against what's expected of you - to be respectable, orderly, lookin like you stepped out of Gap. on another hand it's a way of 'reclaiming yr femininity' which i am dubious about . . . . i feel that wearing particular things to convey an idea such as in this case reinforces the whole girl = one thing boy = another. But i totally agree, whole - heartedly, that women shouldn't bow down to the way of the man and attempt to be/look like them (i.e. deny their 'femininity' or wear suits and attempt to charge around blowing up the world like george bush) (Sabotage, 2003) My research with the riot grrrl Birmingham collective suggests that many of the girls involved understand the political implications of their behaviour and that their aim is not assimilation in to the “male” identity but a “separate but equal” identity wherein femaleness does not equate to weakness. Riot Grrrl foremother Kathleen Hanna explains that the original philosophy of riot grrrl had the same basic principles as those expressed by Sabotage above: dressing like a little girl . . . was also about being people who are oppositional to the whole American system, and not wanting to look like adults and our parents, who we saw as fucking up the world. And it was also when that Carol Gilligan book came out about how girls lose their self-esteem around twelve or thirteen, so everyone was talking about being nine. Like trying to go back there, and remembering what it was like when we were friends with each other, and we weren't totally competitive, and we were creating our own weird games and ideas. (Hanna in Hex, 2000) As Hanna pointed out, psychological research which focused on the negative effects of adolescence on girls showed that “the secrets of the female adolescent pertain to the silencing of her own voice, a silencing enforced by the wish not to hurt others but also by the fear that, in speaking, her voice will not be heard” (Gilligan, 1982, 51). This lead to a return to, and positivisation of, girlhood, a “nod to our joyous youth” (Baumgardner &amp; Richards, 2001, 136) and a rejection of hegemonic ways of adult female behaviour. In relation to this psychological context, the mouth-less Hello Kitty takes on even more interesting connotations as a logo for third-wave riot grrrl feminism, as a logo which could also be seen to represent the voicelessness of girls, a logo re-contextualised by parody. Criticisms: Irony and Context Linda Hutcheon, a postmodern / feminist theorist, sees parody and irony as defining features of postmodernism and feminisms in the age of post modernism: It seems to me that . . . women are often in the position of defining themselves AGAINST a dominant culture or discourse. One way to do that, a way with great subversive potential, is to speak the language of the dominant (which allows you to be heard), but then to subvert it through ironic strategies of exaggeration, understatement, or literalization (1998). The main criticism of reappropriating symbols of oppression is the question of who creates the meaning and whether it is redundant if misinterpreted by the majority of people who see it. Moreover does postmodernism in relation to feminism suggest an acceptance of post-feminism or even an acceptance that ideas of girliness are no longer symbols of patriarchal oppression? The wearers may not think so, but the majority of “readers” may be oblivious to the complex connotations of a Hello Kitty t-shirt. Thus, the issue of context creates some problems for the effective use of girliness and, specifically, for Hello Kitty as a subversive tool, “The test of irony is that people get the joke – and if they had enough understanding to ‘get it’ in the first place, then this type of humour wouldn’t need to exist” (Direct Action 23, 2002). In response to criticism that the ironic “girlie” use of Hello Kitty may be misinterpreted, I suggest juxtaposition of signifiers in order to upset hegemonic readings in a similar way to that suggested by Paul Sweetham (1990). That is, it seems more effective to confuse the signified of the reader by taking elements of, for example Hello Kitty with its connotations of girliness, and simultaneously incorporate signs of punk imagery. This serves to create a look which cannot be read as merely girly or as merely punk, which changes the function of both signifiers. Consumerism Another element of the use of Hello Kitty as a logo for third-wave riot grrrl feminists is that Hello Kitty is the ultimate symbol of pure irrational consumerism and commodity fetishism, a “trap of material slavery” (Ko, 2000, 9). The uniqueness of Hello Kitty as a commodity is that the logo is the product; there is no (or at least was not originally) any story or context. This is especially problematic for Hello Kitty as a logo for Riot Grrrl, as this is a culture which sets itself apart from, and as a critique of, mainstream culture. This does not necessarily entail, however, a complete rejection of material culture and could simply mean an alternate or subverted form of it. Conclusion Despite its flaws, Hello Kitty can be seen to effectively, semeiologically speaking, represent a subculture inextricably set within and created from a pop-culture driven society. And while this use of Hello Kitty is entirely reliant on its context, in the context I have suggested it seems to effectively symbolise the ideologies of third-wave riot grrrls. Works Cited Baumgardner, Jennifer and Richards, Amy. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future. Farrar Straus &amp; Giroux, 2000. Direct Action. ‘Travelling Backwards? (No, we're just being ironic)’ Direct Action 23, Culturejam. (http://www.directa.force9.co.uk/back%20issues/DA%2023/articl... ...es.htm), 2002. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Massachusetts: Harvard, 1982. Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Doubleday, 1999. Hex, Celina. Fierce, Funny, Feminists: Gloria Steinem and Kathleen Hanna talk shop, and prove that grrrls – and womyn - rule. (**from the Winter 2000 "Feminist" issue of BUST) cited on http://busygrrrl.homestead.com/files/Bust_Interview.doc, 2002. Hutcheon, Linda in O’Grady, Kathleen. Theorizing Feminism and Postmodernity: A conversation with Linda Hutcheon http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Hutcheon.html, 1998 Ko, Yu-Fen. Hello Kitty and Identity Politics in Taiwan. Hsih-Shin University, October 2000 http://www.international.ucla.edu/cira/paper/TW_Ko.pdf , Live Journal riot-grrls community http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=riot_grrls Myers, Holly. ‘Hello Kitty finally gets to talk back’. L.A. Times, Fri Oct 25 2002. Riot Grrrl London. Riot Grrrl: a manifesto. www.gurlpages.com/riotgirl.london. 2002. Sabotage. RGBham smartgroup. http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/rgbham. 2003. Sarcasticwhore. ‘What fucked version of hello kitty are you?’. Quizilla.com. http://quizilla.com/users/sarcasticwhore/quizzes/what%20fuck... ...ed%20version%20of%20hello%20kittie%20are%20you%3F/ Sweetman, Paul. ‘Marked Bodies, Oppositional Identities? Tatooing, Piercing and the Ambiguity of Resistance’.in Roseneil, S &amp; Seymour, J (eds.) Practising Identities: Power and Resistance. London: Macmillan Press, 1999. Links http://busygrrrl.homestead.com/files/Bust_Interview.doc http://quizilla.com/users/sarcasticwhore/quizzes/what%20fucked%20version%20of%20hello%20kittie%20are%20you%3F/ http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Hutcheon.html http://www.directa.force9.co.uk/back%20issues/DA%2023/articles.htm http://www.gurlpages.com/riotgirl.london http://www.international.ucla.edu/cira/paper/TW_Ko.pdf http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=riot_grrls http://www.smartgroups.com/groups/rgbham Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Nicholas, Lucy. "“What fucked version of hello kitty are you?” " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture&lt; http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/07-hellokitty.php&gt;. APA Style Nicholas, L. (2003, Jun 19). “What fucked version of hello kitty are you?” . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,&lt; http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/07-hellokitty.php&gt;

IntroductionThe death of Chris Cornell in the spring of 2017 shook me. As the lead singer of Soundgarden and a pioneer of early 1990s grunge music, his voice revealed an unbridled pain and joy backed up by the raw, guitar-driven rock emanating from the Seattle, Washington music scene. I remember thinking, there’s only one left, referring to Eddie Vedder, lead singer for Pearl Jam, and lone survivor of the four seminal grunge bands that rose to fame in the early 1990s whose lead singers passed away much too soon. Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley died in 2002 at the age of 35, and Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994 had resonated around the globe. I thought about when Cornell and Staley said goodbye to their friend Andy Wood, lead singer of Mother Love Bone, after he overdosed on heroine in 1990. Wood’s untimely death at the age of 24, only days before his band’s debut album release, shook the close-knit Seattle music scene and remained a source of angst and inspiration for a genre of music that shaped youth culture of the 1990s.When grunge first exploded on the pop culture scene, I was a college student flailing around in pursuit of an English degree I had less passion for than I did for music. I grew up listening to The Beatles and Prince; Led Zeppelin and Miles Davis; David Bowie and Willie Nelson, along with a litany of other artists and musicians crafting the kind of meaningful music I responded to. I didn’t just listen to music, I devoured stories about the musicians, their often hedonistic lifestyles; their processes and epiphanies. The music spoke to my being in the world more than the promise of any college degree. I ran with friends who shared this love of music, often turning me on to new bands or suggesting some obscure song from the past to track down. I picked up my first guitar when John Lennon died on the eve of my eleventh birthday and have played for the past 37 years. I rely on music to relocate my sense of self. Rhythm and melody play out like characters in my life, colluding to make me feel something apart from the mundane, moving me from within. So, when I took notice of grunge music in the fall of 1991, it was love at first listen. As a pop cultural phenomenon, grunge ruptured the music and fashion industries caught off guard by its sudden commercial appeal while the media struggled to galvanize its relevance. As a subculture, grunge rallied around a set of attitudes and values that set the movement apart from mainstream (Latysheva). The grunge sound drew from the nihilism of punk and the head banging gospel of heavy metal, tinged with the swagger of 1970s FM rock running counter to the sleek production of pop radio and hair metal bands. Grunge artists wrote emotionally-laden songs that spoke to a particular generation of youth who identified with lyrics about isolation, anger, and death. Grunge set off new fashion trends in favor of dressing down and sporting the latest in second-hand, thrift store apparel, ripping away the Reagan-era starched white-collared working-class aesthetic of the 1980’s corporate culture. Like their punk forbearers who railed against the status quo and the trappings of success incurred through the mass appeal of their art, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, and the rest of the grunge cohort often wrestled with the momentum of their success. Fortunes rained down and the media ordained them rock stars.This auto-ethnography revisits some of the cultural impacts of grunge during its rise to cultural relevance and includes my own reflexive interpretation positioned as a fan of grunge music. I use a particular auto-ethnographic orientation called “interpretive-humanistic autoethnography” (Manning and Adams 192) where, along with archival research (i.e. media articles and journal articles), I will use my own reflexive voice to interpret and describe my personal experiences as a fan of grunge music during its peak of popularity from 1991 up to the death of Cobain in 1994. It is a methodology that works to bridge the personal and popular where “the individual story leaves traces of at least one path through a shifting, transforming, and disappearing cultural landscape” (Neumann 183). Grunge RootsThere are many conflicting stories as to when the word “grunge” was first used to describe the sound of a particular style of alternative music seeping from the dank basements and shoddy rehearsal spaces in towns like Olympia, Aberdeen, and Seattle. Lester Bangs, the preeminent cultural writer and critic of all things punk, pop, and rock in the 1970s was said to have used the word at one time (Yarm), and several musicians lay claim to their use of the word in the 1980s. But it was a small Seattle record label founded in 1988 called Sub Pop Records that first included grunge in their marketing materials to describe “the grittiness of the music and the energy” (Yarm 195).This particular sound grew out of the Pacific Northwest blue-collar environment of logging towns, coastal fisheries, and airplane manufacturing. Seattle’s alternative music scene unfolded as a community of musicians responding to the tucked away isolation of their musty surroundings, apart from the outside world, free to submerge themselves in their own cultural milieu of rock music, rain, and youthful rebellion.Where Seattle stood as a major metropolitan city soaked in rainclouds for much of the year, I was soaking up the desert sun in a rural college town when grunge first leapt into the mainstream. Cattle ranches and cotton fields spread across the open plains of West Texas, painted with pickup trucks, starched Wrangler Jeans, and cowboy hats. This was not my world. I’d arrived the year prior from Houston, Texas, an urban sprawl of four million people, but I found the wide-open landscape a welcome change from the concrete jungle of the big city. Along with cowboy boots and western shirts came country music, and lots of it. Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Straight; some of the voices that captured the lifestyle of my small rural town, twangy guitars and fiddles blaring on local radio. While popular country artists recorded for behemoth record labels like Warner Brothers and Sony, the tiny Sub Pop Records championed the grunge sound coming out of the Seattle music scene. Sub Pop became a playground for those who cared about their music and little else. The label cultivated an early following through their Sub Pop Singles Club, mailing seven-inch records to subscribers on a monthly basis promoting new releases from up-and-coming bands. Sub Pop’s stark, black and white logo showed up on records sleeves, posters, and t-shirts, reflecting a no-nonsense DIY-attitude rooted in in the production of loud guitars and heavy drums.Like the bands it represented, Sub Pop did not take itself too seriously when one of their best-selling t-shirts simply read “Loser” embracing the slacker mood of newly minted Generation X’ers born between 1961 and 1981. A July 1990 Time Magazine article described this twenty-something demographic as having “few heroes, no anthems, no style to call their own” suggesting they “possess only a hazy sense of their own identity” (Gross &amp; Scott). As a member of this generation, I purchased and wore my “Loser” t-shirt with pride, especially in ironic response to the local cowboy way of life. I didn’t hold anything personal against the Wrangler wearing Garth Brooks fan but as a twenty-one-year-old reluctant college student, I wanted to rage with contempt for the status quo of my environment with an ambivalent snarl.Grunge in the MainstreamIn 1991, the Seattle sound exploded onto the international music scene with the release of four seminal grunge-era albums over a six-month period. The first arrived in April, Temple of the Dog, a tribute album of sorts to the late Andy Wood, led by his close friend, Soundgarden singer/songwriter, Chris Cornell. In August, Pearl Jam released their debut album, Ten, with its “surprising and refreshing, melodic restraint” (Fricke). The following month, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed in stores. Now on a major record label, DGC Records, the band had arrived “at the crossroads—scrappy garageland warriors setting their sights on a land of giants” (Robbins). October saw the release of Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger as “a runaway train ride of stammering guitar and psycho-jungle telegraph rhythms” (Fricke). These four albums sent grunge culture into the ether with a wall of sound that would upend the music charts and galvanize a depressed concert ticket market.In fall of 1991, grunge landed like a hammer when I witnessed Nirvana’s video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time. Sonically, the song rang like an anthem for the Gen Xers with its jangly four-chord opening guitar riff signaling the arrival of a youth-oriented call to arms, “here we are now, entertain us” (Nirvana). It was the visual power of seeing a skinny white kid with stringy hair wearing baggy jeans, a striped T-shirt and tennis shoes belting out choruses with a ferociousness typically reserved for black-clad heavy metal headbangers. Cobain’s sound and look didn’t match up. I felt discombobulated, turned sideways, as if vertigo had taken hold and I couldn’t right myself. Stopped in the middle of my tracks on that day, frozen in front of the TV, the subculture of grunge music slammed into my world while I was on my way to the fridge.Suddenly, grunge was everywhere, As Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam albums and performances infiltrated radio, television, and concert halls, there was no shortage of media coverage. From 1992 through 1994, grunge bands were mentioned or featured on the cover of Rolling Stone 33 times (Hillburn). That same year, The New York Times ran the article “Grunge: A Success Story” featuring a short history of the Seattle sound, along with a “lexicon of grunge speak” (Marin), a joke perpetrated by a former 25-year-old Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, who never imagined her list of made-up vocabulary given to a New York Times reporter would grace the front page of the style section (Yarm). In their rush to keep up with pervasiveness of grunge culture, even The New York Times fell prey to Gen Xer’s comical cynicism.The circle of friends I ran with were split down the middle between Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a preference for one over the other, as the two bands and their respective front men garnered much of the media attention. Nirvana seemed to appeal to people’s sense of authenticity, perhaps more relatable in their aloofness to mainstream popularity, backed up with Cobain’s simple-yet-brilliant song arrangements and revealing lyrics. Lawrence Grossberg suggests that music fans recognise the difference between authentic and homogenised rock, interpreting and aligning these differences with rock and roll’s association with “resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, and so on” (62). I tended to gravitate toward Nirvana’s sound, mostly for technical reasons. Nevermind sparkled with aggressive guitar tones while capturing the power and fragility of Cobain’s voice. For many critics, the brilliance of Pearl Jam’s first album suffered from too much echo and reverb muddling the overall production value, but twenty years later they would remix and re-release Ten, correcting these production issues.Grunge FashionAs the music carved out a huge section of the charts, the grunge look was appropriated on fashion runways. When Cobain appeared on MTV wearing a ragged olive green cardigan he’d created a style simply by rummaging through his closet. Vedder and Cornell sported army boots, cargo shorts, and flannel shirts, suitable attire for the overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest, but their everyday garb turned into a fashion trend for Gen Xers that was then milked by designers. In 1992, the editor of Details magazine, James Truman, called grunge “un fashion” (Marin) as stepping out in second-hand clothes ran “counter to the shellacked, flashy aesthetic of 1980s” (Nnadi) for those who preferred “the waif-like look of put-on poverty” (Brady). But it was MTV’s relentless airing of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden videos that sent Gen Xers flocking to malls and thrift-stores in search grunge-like apparel. I purchased a pair of giant, heavyweight Red Wing boots that looked like small cars on my feet, making it difficult to walk, but at least I was prepared for any terrain in all types of weather. The flannel came next; I still wear flannos. Despite its association with dark, murky musical themes, grunge kept me warm and dry.Much of grunge’s appeal to the masses was that it was not gender-specific; men and women dressed to appear unimpressed, sharing a taste for shapeless garments and muted colors without reference to stereotypical masculine or feminine styles. Cobain “allowed his own sexuality to be called into question by often wearing dresses and/or makeup on stage, in film clips, and on photo shoots, and wrote explicitly feminist songs, such as ‘Sappy’ or ‘Been a Son’” (Strong 403). I remember watching Pearl Jam’s 1992 performance on MTV Unplugged, seeing Eddie Vedder scrawl the words “Pro Choice” in black marker on his arm in support of women’s rights while his lyrics in songs like “Daughter”, “Better Man”, and “Why Go” reflected an equitable, humanistic if somewhat tragic perspective. Females and males moshed alongside one another, sharing the same spaces while experiencing and voicing their own response to grunge’s aggressive sound. Unlike the hypersexualised hair-metal bands of the 1980s whose aesthetic motifs often portrayed women as conquests or as powerless décor, the message of grunge rock avoided gender exploitation. As the ‘90s unfolded, underground feminist punk bands of the riot grrrl movement like Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland expressed female empowerment with raging vocals and buzz-saw guitars that paved the way for Hole, Sleater-Kinney and other successful female-fronted grunge-era bands. The Decline of GrungeIn 1994, Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in memoriam after committing suicide in the greenhouse of his Seattle home. Mass media quickly spread the news of his passing internationally. Two days after his death, 7,000 fans gathered at Seattle Center to listen to a taped recording of Courtney Love, Cobain’s wife, a rock star in her own right, reading the suicide note he left behind.A few days after Cobain’s suicide, I found myself rolling down the highway with a carload of friends, one of my favorite Nirvana tunes, “Come As You Are” fighting through static. I fiddled with the radio to clear up the signal. The conversation turned to Cobain as we cobbled together the details of his death. I remember the chatter quieting down, Cobain’s voice fading as we gazed out the window at the empty terrain passing. In that reflective moment, I felt like I had experienced an intense, emotional relationship that came to an abrupt end. This “illusion of intimacy” (Horton and Wohl 217) between myself and Cobain elevated the loss I felt with his passing even though I had no intimate, personal ties to him. I counted this person as a friend (Giles 284) because I so closely identified with his words and music. I could not help but feel sad, even angry that he’d decided to end his life.Fueled by depression and a heroin addiction, Cobain’s death signaled an end to grunge’s collective appeal while shining a spotlight on one of the more dangerous aspects of its ethos. A 1992 Rolling Stone article mentioned that several of Seattle’s now-famous international musicians used heroin and “The feeling around town is, the drug is a disaster waiting to happen” (Azzerad). In 2002, eight years to the day of Cobain’s death, Layne Staley, lead singer of Alice In Chains, another seminal grunge outfit, was found dead of a suspected heroin overdose (Wiederhorn). When Cornell took his own life in 2017 after a long battle with depression, The Washington Post said, “The story of grunge is also one of death” (Andrews). The article included a Tweet from a grieving fan that read “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in” (@ThatEricAlper).ConclusionThe grunge movement of the early 1990s emerged out of musical friendships content to be on their own, on the outside, reflecting a sense of isolation and alienation in the music they made. As Cornell said, “We’ve always been fairly reclusive and damaged” (Foege). I felt much the same way in those days, sequestered in the desert, planting my grunge flag in the middle of country music territory, doing what I could to resist the status quo. Cobain, Cornell, Staley, and Vedder wrote about their own anxieties in a way that felt intimate and relatable, forging a bond with their fan base. Christopher Perricone suggests, “the relationship of an artist and audience is a collaborative one, a love relationship in the sense, a friendship” (200). In this way, grunge would become a shared memory among friends who rode the wave of this cultural phenomenon all the way through to its tragic consequences. But the music has survived. Along with my flannel shirts and Red Wing boots.References@ThatEricAlper (Eric Alper). “The voices I grew up with: Andy Wood, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell, Kurt Cobain…only Eddie Vedder is left. Let that sink in.” Twitter, 18 May 2017, 02:41. 15 Sep. 2018 &lt;https://twitter.com/ThatEricAlper/status/865140400704675840?ref_src&gt;.Andrews, Travis M. “After Chris Cornell’s Death: ‘Only Eddie Vedder Is Left. Let That Sink In.’” The Washington Post, 19 May 2017. 29 Aug. 2018 &lt;https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsmorning-mix/wp/2017/05/19/after-chris-cornells-death-only-eddie-vedder-is-left-let-that-sink-in&gt;.Azzerad, Michael. “Grunge City: The Seattle Scene.” Rolling Stone, 16 Apr. 1992. 20 Aug. 2018 &lt;https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/grunge-city-the-seattle-scene-250071/&gt;.Brady, Diane. “Kids, Clothes and Conformity: Teens Fashion and Their Back-to-School Looks.” Maclean’s, 6 Sep. 1993. Brodeur, Nicole. “Chris Cornell: Soundgarden’s Dark Knight of the Grunge-Music Scene.” Seattle Times, 18 May 2017. 20 Aug. 2018 &lt;https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/chris-cornell-soundgardens-dark-knight-of-the-grunge-music-scene/&gt;.Ellis, Carolyn, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd ed. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000. 733-768.Foege, Alec. “Chris Cornell: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 28 Dec. 1994. 12 Sep. 2018 &lt;https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/chris-cornell-the-rolling-stone-interview-79108/&gt;.Fricke, David. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 18 Sep. 2018 &lt;https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-251421/&gt;.Giles, David. “Parasocial Interactions: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Media Psychology 4 (2002): 279-305.Giles, Jeff. “The Poet of Alientation.” Newsweek, 17 Apr. 1994, 4 Sep. 2018 &lt;https://www.newsweek.com/poet-alienation-187124&gt;.Gross, D.M., and S. Scott. Proceding with Caution. Time, 16 July 1990. 3 Sep. 2018 &lt;http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,155010,00.html&gt;.Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There a Fan in the House? The Affective Sensibility of Fandom. The Adoring Audience” Fan Culture and Popular Media. Ed. Lisa A. Lewis. New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. 50-65.Hillburn, Robert. “The Rise and Fall of Grunge.” Los Angeles Times, 21 May 1998. 20 Aug. 2018 &lt;http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/31/entertainment/ca-54992&gt;.Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interactions: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Process 19 (1956): 215-229.Latysheva, T.V. “The Essential Nature and Types of the Youth Subculture Phenomenon.” Russian Education and Society 53 (2011): 73–88.Manning, Jimmie, and Tony Adams. “Popular Culture Studies and Autoethnography: An Essay on Method.” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3.1-2 (2015): 187-222.Marin, Rick. “Grunge: A Success Story.” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1992. 12 Sep. 2018 &lt;https://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/15/style/grunge-a-success-story.html&gt;.Neumann, Mark. “Collecting Ourselves at the End of the Century.” Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. Eds. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner. London: Alta Mira Press, 1996. 172-198.Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Nevermind, Geffen, 1991.Nnadi, Chioma. “Why Kurt Cobain Was One of the Most Influential Style Icons of Our Times.” Vogue, 8 Apr. 2014. 15 Aug. 2018 &lt;https://www.vogue.com/article/kurt-cobain-legacy-of-grunge-in-fashion&gt;.Perricone, Christopher. “Artist and Audience.” The Journal of Value Inquiry 24 (2012). 12 Sep. 2018 &lt;https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00149433.pdf&gt;.Robbins, Ira. “Ten.” Rolling Stone, 12 Dec. 1991. 15 Aug. 2018 &lt;https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/ten-25142&gt;.Strong, Catherine. “Grunge, Riott Grrl and the Forgetting of Women in Popular Culture.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 398-416. Wiederhorn, Jon. “Remembering Layne Staley: The Other Great Seattle Musician to Die on April 5.” MTV, 4 June 2004. 23 Sep. 2018 &lt;http://www.mtv.com/news/1486206/remembering-layne-staley-the-other-great-seattle-musician-to-die-on-april-5/&gt;.Yarm, Mark. Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge. Three Rivers Press, 2011.

There are many ways to construct, shape and frame a history of popular music. From a focus on performers to a stress on cities, from theories of modernity to reveling in ‘the post,’ innovative music has been matched by evocative writing about it. One arc of analysis in popular music studies focuses on the record label. Much has been written about Sun, Motown, Factory and Apple, but there are many labels that have not reached this level of notoriety and fame but offer much to our contemporary understanding of music, identity and capitalism. The aim of this article is to capture an underwritten history of 21st century music, capturing and tracking moments of collaboration, movement and contact. Through investigating a specific record label, we explore the interconnectiveness of electronica and city-based creative industries’ initiatives. While urban dance culture is still pathologised through drug scares and law and order concerns, clubbing studies and emerging theories of sonic media and auditory cultures offer a significant trigger and frame for this current research. The focus on Off World Sounds (OWS) traces a meta-independent label that summons, critiques, reinscribes and provokes the conventional narratives of capitalism in music. We show how OWS has remade and remixed the collaborations of punk to forge innovative ways of thinking about creativity, policy and popular culture. While commencing with a review of the origin, ideology and intent of OWS, the final part of the paper shows where the experiment went wrong and what can be learnt from this sonic label laboratory. Moving Off World Popular cultural studies evoke and explore discursive formations and texts that activate dissent, conflict and struggle. This strategy is particularly potent when exploring how immigration narratives fray the borders of the nation state. At its most direct, this analysis provides a case study to assess and answer some of Nabeel Zuberi’s questions about sonic topography that he raises in Sounds English. I’m concerned less with music as a reflection of national history and geography than how the practices of popular music culture themselves construct the spaces of the local, national, and transnational. How does the music imagine the past and place? How does it function as a memory-machine, a technology for the production of subjective and collective versions of location and identity? How do the techniques of sounds, images, and activities centered on popular music create landscapes with figures? (3) Dance music is mashed between creativity, consumerism and capitalism. Picking up on Zuberi’s challenge, the story of OWS is also a history of what happens to English migrants who travel to Australia, and how they negotiate the boundaries of the Australian nation. Immigration is important to any understanding of contemporary music. The two proprietors of OWS are Pete Carroll and, one of the two writers of this current article, Stephen Mallinder. Both English proprietors immigrated to Perth in Australia. They used their contacts to sign electronica performers from beyond this single city. They encouraged the tracks to move freely through lymphatic digital networks for remixing—‘lymphatic’ signalling a secondary pathway for commerce and creativity where new musical relationships were being formed outside the influence of major record companies. Performers signed to OWS form independent networks with other performers. This mobility of sound has operated in parallel with the immigration policies of the Howard government that have encouraged insularity and xenophobia. In other eras of racial inequality and discrimination, the independent record label has been not only an integral part of the music industry, but a springboard for political dissent. The histories of jazz and rhythm and blues capture a pivotal moment of independent entrepreneurialism that transformed new and strange sounds/noises into popular music. In monitoring and researching this complex process of musical movement and translation, the independent label has remained the home of the peripheral, the misunderstood, and the uncompromising. Soul music in the United States of America is an example of a sonic form that sustained independence while corporate labels made a profit. Labels like Atlantic Records became synonymous with the success of black vocal music in the 1960s and 1970s, while the smaller independent labels like Chess and Invicta constructed a brand identity. While the division between the majors and the independents increasingly dissolves, particularly at the level of distribution, the independent label remains significant as innovator and instigator. It retains its status and pedagogic function in teaching an audience about new sounds and developing aural literacies. OWS inked its well from an idealistic and collaborative period of label evolution. The punk aesthetic of the late 1970s not only triggered wide-ranging implications for youth culture, but also opened spaces for alternative record labels and label identity. Rough Trade was instrumental in imbuing a spirit of cooperation and a benign mode of competition. A shift in the distribution of records and associated merchandizing to strengthen product association—such as magazines, fanzines and T-Shirts—enabled Rough Trade to deal directly with pivotal stores and outlets and then later establish cartels with stores to provide market security and a workable infrastructure. Links were built with ancillary agents such as concert promoters, press, booking agents, record producers and sleeve designers, to create a national, then European and international, network to produce an (under the counter) culture. Such methods can also be traced in the history of Postcard Records from Edinburgh, Zoo Records from Liverpool, Warp in Sheffield, Pork Recordings in Hull, Hospital Records in London, and both Grand Central and Factory in Manchester. From the ashes of the post-1976 punk blitzkrieg, independent labels bloomed with varying impact, effect and success, but they held an economic and political agenda. The desire was to create a strong brand identity by forming a tight collaboration between artists and distributors. Perceptions of a label’s size and significance was enhanced and enlarged through this collaborative relationship. OWS acknowledged and rewrote this history of the independent label. There was a desire to fuse the branding of the label with the artists signed, released and distributed. No long term obligations on behalf of the artists were required. A 50/50 split after costs was shared. While such an ‘agreement’ appeared anachronistic, it was also a respectful nod to the initial label/artist split offered by Rough Trade. Collaboration with artists throughout the process offered clear statements of intent, with idealism undercut by pragmatism. From track selection, sleeve design, promotion strategy and interview schedule, the level of communication created a sense of joint ownership and dialogue between label and artist. This reinscription of independent record history is complex because OWS’ stable of performers and producers is an amalgamation of dub, trance, hip hop, soul and house genres. Much of trans-localism of OWS was encouraged by its base in Perth. Metaphorically ‘off world’, Perth is a pad for international music to land, be remixed, recut and re-released. Just as Wellington is the capital of Tolkien’s Middle Earth as well as New Zealand, Perth is a remix capital for Paris or New York-based performers. The brand name ‘Off World Sounds’ was designed to emphasise isolation: to capture the negativity of isolation but rewrite separation and distinctiveness with a positive inflection. The title was poached from Ridley Scott’s 1980s film Bladerunner, which was in turn based on Philip K. Dick’s story, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Affirming this isolation summoned an ironic commentary on Perth’s geographical location, while also mocking the 1980s discourses of modernity and the near future. The key was to align punk’s history of collaboration with this narrative of isolation and independence, to explore mobility, collaboration, and immigration. Spaces in the Music Discussions of place dictate a particular methodology to researching music. Dreams of escape and, concurrently, intense desires for home pepper the history of popular music. What makes OWS important to theories of musical collaboration is that not only was there a global spread of musicians, producers and designers, but they worked together in a series of strategic trans-localisms. There were precedents for disconnecting place and label, although not of the scale instigated by OWS. Fast Products, although based in Glasgow, signed The Human League from Sheffield and Gang of Four from Leeds. OWS was unique in signing artists disconnected on a global scale, with the goal of building collaborations in remixing and design. Gripper, from the north east of England, Little Egypt from New York, The Bone Idle from Vienna, Hull and Los Angeles, Looped for Pleasure from Sheffield, Barney Mullhouse from Australia and the United Kingdom, Ooblo from Manchester, Attache from Adelaide, Crackpot from Melbourne and DB Chills from Sydney are also joined by artists resident in Perth, such as Soundlab, the Ku-Ling Bros and Blue Jay. Compact Disc mastering is completed in Sydney, London, and Perth. The artwork for vinyl and CD sleeves, alongside flyers, press advertising and posters, is derived from Manchester, England. These movements in the music flattened geographical hierarchies, where European and American tracks were implicitly valued over Australian-derived material. Through pop music history, the primary music markets of the United Kingdom and United States made success for Australian artists difficult. Off World emphasised that the product was not licensed. It was previously unreleased material specifically recorded for the label and an exclusive Australian first territory release. Importantly, this licensing agreement also broadened definitions and interpretations of ‘Australian music’. Such a critique and initiative was important. For example, Paul Bodlovich, Director of the West Australian Music Industry (WAM), believed he was extending the brief of his organisation during his tenure. Once more though, rock was the framework, structure and genre of interest. Explaining the difference from his predecessor, he stated that: [James Nagy] very much saw the music industry as being only bands who were playing all original music—to him they were the only people who actually constituted the music industry. I have a much broader view on that, that all those other people who are around the band—the manager, the promoters, the labels, the audio guys, the whole shebang—that they are part of the music industry too. (33) Much was absent from his ‘whole shebang,’ including the fans who actually buy the music and attend the pubs and clubs. A diversity of genres was also not acknowledged. If hip hop, and urban music generally, is added to his list of new interests, then clubs, graf galleries, dance instructors and fashion and jewelry designers could extend the network of musical collaborations. A parody of corporate culture and a pastiche of the post-punk aesthetic, OWS networked and franchised itself into existence. It was a cottage industry superimposed onto a corporate infrastructure. Attempting to make inroads into an insular Perth arts community and build creative industries’ networks without state government policy support, Off World offered an optimistic perspective on the city’s status and value in a national and global electronic market. Yet in commercial terms, OWS failed. What OWS captures through its failures conveys more about music policy in Australia than any success. The label has been able to catalogue the lack of changes to Perth’s music policy. The proprietors, performers and designers were not approached in 2002 by the Western Australian Contemporary Music Taskforce to offer comment. Yet Matthew Benson and Poppy Wise, researchers for that report, stated that “the solution lies in the industry becoming more outwardly focused, and to do this, it must seek the input of successful professionals who have proven track records in the marketing of music nationally and globally” (9). The resultant document argued that the industry needed to the look to Sydney and Melbourne for knowledge of “international” markets. Yet Paul Bodlovich, the Director of WAM, singled out the insularity of ‘England,’ not Britain, and ‘America’ in comparison to the ‘outward’ Perth music industry: To us, they’re all centre of the universe, but they don’t look past their walls, they don’t have a clue what goes in other parts of the world … All they see say in England is English TV, or in America it’s American TV. Whereas we sit in a very isolated part of the world and we absorb culture from everywhere because we think we have to just to be on an equal arc with everyone else. We think we have to absorb stuff from other cultures because unless we do then we really are isolated … It’s a similar belief to the ongoing issue of women in the workplace, where there’s a belief that to be seen on equal footing you have to be better. (33) This knight’s move affiliation of Perth’s musicians with women in the workplace is bizarre and inappropriate. This unfortunate connection is made worse when recognizing that Perth’s music institutions and organisations, such as WAM, are dominated by white, Australian-born men. To promote the outwardness of Perth culture while not mentioning the role and function of immigration is not addressing how mobility, creativity and commerce is activated. To unify ‘England’ and ‘America,’ without recognizing the crucial differences between Manchester and Bristol, New York and New Orleans, is conservative, arrogant, and wrong. National models of music, administered by Australian-born white men and funded through grants-oriented peer review models rather than creative industries’ infrastructural initiatives, still punctuate Western Australian music. Off World Sounds has been caught in non-collaborative, nationalist models for organising culture and economics. It is always easy to affirm the specialness and difference of a city’s sound or music. While affirming the nation and rock, outsiders appear threatening to the social order. When pondering cities and electronica, collaboration, movement and meaning dance through the margins. References Benson, Matthew, and Poppy Wise. A Study into the Current State of the Western Australian Contemporary Music Industry and Its Potential for Economic Growth. Department of Culture and the Arts, Government of Western Australia, December 2002. Bodlovich, Paul. “Director’s Report.” X-Press 940 (17 Feb. 2005): 33. Zuberi, Nabeel. Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brabazon, Tara, and Stephen Mallinder. "Off World Sounds: Building a Collaborative Soundscape." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/13-brabazonmallinder.php&gt;. APA Style Brabazon, T., and S. Mallinder. (May 2006) "Off World Sounds: Building a Collaborative Soundscape," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/13-brabazonmallinder.php&gt;.

Introduction As street protests and clashes between citizens and authorities in places as different as Ferguson, Missouri and Hong Kong in autumn 2014 demonstrate, everyday life in many parts of the world is characterised by conflicting and competing sets of cultural norms, values, and practices. The idea that groups create cultures that stand in contrast to “mainstream” or “dominant culture” is nothing new—sociology’s earliest scholars sought cultural explanations for social “dysfunctions” such as anomie and deviance. Yet our interest in this article is not about the problems that marginalised and non-normative groups face, but rather with the cultures that are created as part of dealing with those problems. Milton Yinger begins his 1982 book, Countercultures: The Promise and Peril of a World Turned Upside Down, by contrasting multiple perspectives on countercultures. Some thinkers have characterised countercultures as not only a mundane feature of social life, but as a necessary one: Countercultures and the many types of intentional communities they commonly create are not social aberrations. For thousands of years there have been attempts to provide alternatives for the existing social order in response to the perennial grounds for dissent: hierarchy and privilege […,] disgust with hedonism and consumerism […, and] a decline in the quality of life. (Yinger, Countercultures 1) Others, however, have discursively delegitimised countercultures by characterising them as something in between naiveté and unschooled arrogance. Speaking specifically about hippies in the 1960s, Bell argued that the so-called counter-culture was a children’s crusade that sought to eliminate the line between fantasy and reality and act out in life its impulses under a banner of liberation. It claimed to mock bourgeois prudishness, when it was only flaunting the closet behavior of its liberal parents. It claimed to be new and daring when it was only repeating in more raucous form […] the youthful japes of a Greenwich Village bohemia of a half century before. It was less a counter-culture than a counterfeit culture. (xxvi-xxvii) If Bell is at all right, then perhaps countercultures may be better understood as subcultures, a term that may not require the idea of opposition (but see Gelder; Williams, Subcultural). To tease this distinction out, we want to consider the value of the counterculture concept for the study of oppositional subcultures. Rather than uncritically assuming what counter means, we take a more analytical view of how “counter,” as similar to other terms such as “resistant” and “oppositional,” has been articulated by social scientists. In doing this, we focus our attention on scholarly works that have dealt explicitly with group cultures “that sharply contradict the dominant norms and values of the society of which that group is a part” (Yinger, Countercultures 3). The Relationship between Counterculture and Subculture Many scholars point to the Chicago School of sociology as developing the first clear articulation of subcultural groups that differed clearly from mainstream society (see for example, Gelder and Thornton; Hannerz, E.; Williams, Youth). Paul G. Cressey, Frederic Thrasher, and later William Foote Whyte each provide exemplary empirical studies of marginal groups that were susceptible to social problems and therefore more likely to develop cultures that were defined as problematic for the mainstream. Robert Merton argued that marginalised groups formed as individuals tried to cope with the strain they experienced by their inability to access the cultural means (such as good education and good jobs) needed to achieve mainstream cultural goals (primarily, material success and social status), but Albert Cohen and others subsequently argued that such groups often reject mainstream culture in favour of a new, alternative culture instead. Within a few years, conceptual distinctions among these alternative cultures were necessary, with counterculture and subculture being disambiguated in American sociology. Yinger originally employed the term contraculture but eventually switched to the more common counterculture. Subculture became most often tied either to the study of religious and ethnic enclaves (Mauss) or to deviance and delinquency (Arnold), while counterculture found its currency in framing the cultures of more explicitly political groups and movements (see for example, Cushman; George and Starr). Perhaps the clearest analytical distinction between the terms suggested that subculture refer to ascribed differences based upon socio-economic status, ethnicity, religion (and so on) in relation to the mainstream, whereas counterculture should refer to groups rooted in an explicit rejection of a dominant culture. This is similar to the distinction that Ken Gelder makes between subcultures based upon marginalisation versus non-normativity. Counterculture became best used wherever the normative system of a group contains, as a primary element, a theme of conflict with the values of the total society, where personality variables are directly involved in the development and maintenance of the group's values, and wherever its norms can be understood only by reference to the relationships of the group to a surrounding dominant culture. (Yinger, Contraculture 629) Even at that time, however, such a neat distinction was problematic. Sociologist Howard S. Becker demonstrated that jazz musicians, for example, experienced a problem shared in many service occupations, namely that their clients did not possess the ability to judge properly the value of the service rendered, yet nevertheless sought to control it. As a consequence, a subculture emerged based on the opposition of “hip” musicians to their “square” employers’ cultural sensibilities. Yet Becker framed their experiences as subcultural rather than countercultural, as deviant rather than political (Becker 79-100). Meanwhile, the political connotations of “counterculture” were solidifying during the 1960s as the term became commonly used to describe aspects of the civil rights movement in the US, hippie culture, and the anti-Vietnam or peace movement. By the end of the 1960s, subculture and counterculture had become analytically distinct terms within sociology. Cultural Studies and the Class-ification of Counterculture The reification of subculture and counterculture as ontologically distinct phenomena was more or less completed in the 1970s through a series of publications on British youth cultures and subcultures (see Hall and Jefferson; Hebdige; Mungham and Pearson). The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in particular expended a great deal of collective mental energy theorising the material base upon which cultures—and in particular spectacular youth subcultures such as mods and punk—exist. As with Marxist analyses of culture more generally, class was considered a key analytic variable. In the definitive theoretical statement on subculture, Clarke, Hall, Jefferson, and Roberts argued that “the most fundamental groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations will be […] ‘class cultures’” (13). Subcultures were thus seen as ideological reactions to the material conditions experienced and made meaningful within working class “parent culture.” This is what made youth subcultures sub—a part of the working-class—as well as cultural—the process of expressing their structural position. Given the Marxist orientation, it should go without saying that subcultures, as working-class youth cultures, were seen as naturally in a state of conflict with bourgeois culture. But that approach didn’t account well for counter-currents that emerged from within the middle-class, whose relationship with the means of production was markedly different, and so the concept of counterculture was appropriated to describe a distinctly middle-class phenomenon. The idea that counterculture represented an overtly political response from within the dominant culture itself fitted with work by Theodore Roszak and Frank Musgrove, and later Yinger (Countercultures) and Ulf Hannerz, who each defined counterculture through its political and activist orientations stemming from a crisis within the middle-class. To further differentiate the concepts, the CCCS dismissed the collective aspect of middle-class resistance (see Clarke et al., 58-9, for a list of phenomena they considered exemplary of middle-class counterculture), describing it as more “diffuse, less group-oriented, [and] more individualised” than its working-class counterpart, the latter “clearly articulated [as] ‘near’ or ‘quasi’-gangs” (Clarke et al. 60). And whereas subcultures were centred on leisure-time activities within working-class environments, countercultures were concerned with a blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure. This conceptualisation was problematic at best, not least because it limits counterculture to the middle-class and subculture to the working class. It also gave considerably more agency and consequence to middle-class youths. It seemed that countercultures, with their individualist tendencies, offered individuals and groups choices about what and how to resist, as well as some expectations for social change, while subculturalists, locked within an unfortunate class position, could only resist dominant culture “at the profoundly superficial level of appearances” (Hebdige 17). Beyond the Limits of Class Cultures By 1980 cultural studies scholars had begun disassembling the class-basis of subcultures (see for example, G. Clarke; McRobbie; Griffin). Even though many studies still focused on stylised forms of opposition, subcultural scholarship increasingly emphasised subcultures such as punk as reflecting a more explicitly politicised resistance against the dominant or mainstream culture. Some scholars suggested that “mainstream culture” was used as a contrastive device to exaggerate the distinctiveness of those who self-identity as different (see U. Hannerz; Copes and Williams), while others questioned what subcultures could be seen as existing independently from, or in assumed opposition to (see Blackman; Thornton). In such cases, we can see a move toward reconciling the alleged limits of subculture as a countercultural concept. Instead of seeing subcultures as magical solutions and thus inevitably impotent, more recent research has considered the agency of social actors to overcome social divisions such as race, gender, and class. On the dance floor in particular, youth culture was theorised as breaking free of its class-binding shackles. Along with this break came the rhetorical distancing from CCCS’s definitions of subculture. The attempted development of “post-subculture” studies around the Millennium focused on consumptive behaviours among certain groups of youths and concluded that consumption rather than opposition had become a hallmark of youth culture broadly (see Bennett, Popular; Huq; Muggleton). For these scholars, the rave and club cultures of the 1990s, and others since, represent youth culture as hedonistic and relatively apolitical. “Post-subculture” studies drew in part on Steve Redhead’s postmodern approach to youth culture as found in The Clubcultures Reader and its companion text, From Subcultures to Clubcultures (Redhead). These texts offered a theoretical alternative to the CCCS’s view of oppositional subcultures and recognition that subcultural style could no longer be understood as a representation of ideological strain among working-class youths. Carried forward in volumes by David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl,,among others, “post-subcultural” scholarship criticised prior subcultural research for having objectified/reified mainstream/subcultural boundaries and authenticities, echoing Gary Clarke’s remark that the sharp distinction between us and them “rests upon [subculturalists’] consideration of the rest of society as being straight, incorporated in a consensus, and willing to scream undividedly loud in any moral panic” (71). Instead, the mixtures of punk, mod, skinhead and/or hippy styles among club-goers signalled “entirely new ways of understanding how young people perceive the relationship between music taste and visual style…revealing the infinitely malleable and interchangeable nature of the latter as these are appropriated and realised by individuals as aspects of consumer choice” (Bennett, Subcultures 613). Reincorporating the Counter into Subculture Studies The postmodern focus on cultural fluidity, individuality, and consumption highlights to some extent the agency that individuals have to make choices about the cultures in which they participate. To be sure, the postmodern and post-subculture critiques of class-based subculture studies were quite influential in the development of more recent subcultural scholarship, though not necessarily as they were intended. Much of the theoretical rhetoric of post-subculture scholarship (over-)emphasised heterogeneity, contingency, and play, which drew attention away from the collective identities and practices that continue to characterise many subcultures and groups. Fortunately, other scholars over the last decade have been critical of that approach’s failure to deal with perennial concerns related to participation in alternative cultural groups, including consumption (Buckingham), voice (Bae and Ivashkevich), education (Tuck and Yang), and group affiliation (Pilkington), among others. We want to follow this trajectory by explicitly reiterating the continuing significance of the “counter” aspects of subcultures. Two trends in social theory are exemplary in this reiteration. The first trend is a growing interest in re-theorizing resistance to refer to “a contribution to progressive transformations and radical changes in social and cultural structures” (Johansson and Lalander) rather than to a set of styles and practices through which working-class youth impotently rage against the machine. Resistance is qualitatively different from rebellion, which is often framed in terms of unconscious or irrational behaviour (Raby); resistance is first and foremost intentional. Subcultures articulate resistance to mainstream/dominant culture and may be measured across several continua, including passive to active, micro to macro, covert to overt, individual to collective, and local to global (see Williams, Resistance; E. Hannerz). Participants in countercultures see themselves as being more critically aware of what is happening in the world than the average person, believe that they act on that critical awareness in their thoughts, words, and/or deeds, and electively detach themselves from “involuntary or unconscious commitments” (Leary 253) to mainstream culture, refusing to uncritically follow the rules. The concept of resistance thus gives some momentum to attempts to clarify the extent to which members of alternative cultures intentionally break with the mainstream. The links between resistance and counterculture are explicitly dealt with in recent scholarship on music subcultures. Graham St John’s work on electronic dance music culture (EDMC), for example, offers a complex analysis of resistant practices that he conceptualizes as countercultural. Participation in EDMC is seen as more than simple hedonism. Rather, EDMC provides the scripts necessary for individuals to pursue freedom from various forms of perceived oppression in everyday life. At a more macro level, Madigan Fichter’s study of counterculture in Romania similarly frames resistance and political dissent as key variables in the articulation of a counterculture. Some recent attempts at invoking counterculture seem less convincing. Noting that counterculture is a relatively “unpopular term in social scientific research,” Hjelm, Kahn-Harris, and LeVine nevertheless proceed to theorize heavy metal as countercultural by drawing on the culture’s “transgressive” (14) qualities and “antagonistic […] attempts to shock and provoke [as well as] those occasions when metal, by its very presence, is shocking” (15). Other studies have similarly articulated “countercultures” in terms of behaviours that transgress mainstream sensibilities (see for example, Arthur and Sherman; Kolind). It is debatable at best, however, whether hedonism, transgression, or provocation are sufficient qualities for counterculture without concomitant cultural imperatives for both resistance and social change. This leads into a brief comment on a second trend, which is the growing interconnectedness of social theories that attend to subcultures on the one hand and “new” social movements (NSMs) on the other. “Traditional” social movements, such as the civil rights and labour movements, have been typically organised by and for people excluded in some way from full rights to participate in society, for example the rights to political participation or basic economic protection. NSMs, however, often involve people who already enjoy full rights as members of society, but who reject political and economic processes that injure them or others, such as marginalised groups, animals, or the environment. Some movements are contentious in nature, such as the Occupy-movement, and thus quite clearly antagonistic toward mainstream political-economy. NSM theories (see Pichardo), however, also theorize the roles of culture and collective identity in supporting both opposition to dominant processes and strategies for alternative practices. Other NSMs foster lifestyles that, through the minutiae of everyday practice, promote a ground-up reaction to dominant political-economic practices (see Haenfler, Johnson, and Jones). Both contentious and lifestyle movements are relatively diffuse and as such align with traditional conceptualisations of both subculture and counterculture. NSM theory and subcultural theories are thus coming together in a moment where scholars are seeking distinctly cultural understandings of collective lifestyles of resistance and social change. Conclusion Recent attempts to rephrase subcultural theory have combined ideas of the Birmingham and Chicago Schools with more contemporary approaches such as social constructivism and new social movements theory. Together, they recognise a couple of things. First, culture is not the determining structure it was once theorised to be. The shift in understanding subcultural groups as rooted in ascribed characteristics—being naturally different due to class, ethnicity, age, or to location (Park; Cohen; Clarke et al.)—to one in which subcultures are intentional articulations created by people, highlights the agency of individuals and groups to create culture. The break with realist/objectivist notions of culture offers promising opportunities for understanding resistance and opposition more generally. Second, the “counter” continues to be relevant in the study of subcultures. Subcultural participation these days is characterised as much or more by non-normativity than by marginalisation. As such, subcultures represent intentional protests against something outside themselves. Of course, we do not mean to suggest this is always and everywhere the case. 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Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&amp;B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&amp;B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith &amp; Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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IntroductionThe “North” is given explicitly “Nordic” value in extreme metal, as a vehicle for narratives of identity, nationalism and ideology. However, we also contend that “Nordicness” is articulated in diverse and contradictory ways in extreme metal contexts. We examine Nordicness in three key iterations: firstly, Nordicness as a brand tied to extremity and “authenticity”; secondly, Nordicness as an expression of exclusory ethnic belonging and ancestry; and thirdly, Nordicness as an imagined community of liberal democracy.In situating Nordicness across these iterations, we call into focus how the value of the “North” in metal discourse unfolds in different contexts with different implications. We argue that “Nordicness” as it is represented in extreme metal scenes cannot be considered as a uniform, essential category, but rather one marked by tensions and paradoxes that undercut the possibility of any singular understanding of the “North”. Deploying textual and critical discourse analysis, we analyse what Nordicness is made to mean in extreme metal scenes. Furthermore, we critique understandings of the “North” as a homogenous category and instead interrogate the plural ways in which “Nordic” meaning is articulated in metal. We focus specifically on Nordic Extreme Metal. This subgenre has been chosen with an eye to the regional complexities of the Nordic area in Northern Europe, the popularity of extreme metal in Nordic markets, and the successful global marketing of Nordic metal bands and styles.We use the term “Nordic” in line with Loftsdóttir and Jensen’s definition, wherein the “Nordic countries” encompass Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Finland, and the autonomous regions of Greenland: the Faroe Islands and the Aland Islands (3). “Nordic-ness”, they argue, is the cultural identity of the Nordic countries, reified through self-perception, internationalisation and “national branding” (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2).In referring to “extreme metal”, we draw from Kahn-Harris’s characterisation of the term. “Extreme metal” represents a cluster of heavy metal subgenres–primarily black metal, death metal, thrash metal, doom metal and grindcore–marked by their “extremity”; their impetus towards “[un]conventional musical aesthetics” (Kahn-Harris 6).Nonetheless, we remain acutely aware of the complexities that attend both terms. Just as extreme metal itself is “exceptionally diverse” (Kahn-Harris 6) and “constantly developing and reconfiguring” (Kahn-Harris 7), the category of the “Nordic” is also a site of “diverse experiences” (Loftsdóttir &amp; Jensen 3). We seek to move beyond any essentialist understanding of the “Nordic” and move towards a critical mapping of the myriad ways in which the “Nordic” is given value in extreme metal contexts.Branding the North: Nordicness as Extremity and AuthenticityMetal’s relationship with the Nordic countries has become a key area of interest for both popular and scholarly accounts of heavy metal as the genre has rapidly expanded in the region. The Nordic countries currently boast the highest rate of metal bands per capita (Grandoni). Since the mid-2000s, metal scholars have displayed an accelerated interest in the “cultural aesthetics and identity politics” of metal in Northern Europe (Brown 261). Wider popular interest in Nordic metal has been assisted by the notoriety of the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s, wherein a series of murders and church arsons committed by scene members formed the basis for popular texts such as Moynihan and Søderlind’s book Lords of Chaos and Aites and Ewell’s documentary Until the Light Takes Us.Invocations of Nordicness in metal music are not a new phenomenon, nor have such allusions been strictly limited to Northern European artists. Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden displayed an interest in Norse mythology, while Venom and Manowar frequently drew on Nordic imagery in their performance and visual aesthetics.This interest in the North was largely ephemeral–the use of popular Nordic iconography stressed romanticised constructions of the North as a site of masculine liberty, rather than locating such archetypes in a historical context. Such narratives of Nordic masculinity, liberty and heathenry nevertheless become central to heavy metal’s contextual discourses, and point to the ways in which “Nordicness” becomes mobilised as a particular branded category.Whilst Nordic “branding” for earlier heavy metal bands was largely situated in romantic imaginings of the ancient North, in the late 1980s there emerged “a secondary usage” of Nordic identity and iconography by Northern European metal bands (Trafford &amp; Pluskowski 58). Such “Nordicness” laid far more stress on historical context, national identity and notions of ancestry, and, crucially, a sense of extremity and isolation. This emphasis on metal’s extremity beyond the mainstream has long been a crucial component in the marketing of Nordic scenes.Such “extremity” is given mutually supportive value as “authenticity”, where the term is understood as a value judgement (Moore 209) applied by audiences to discern if music remains committed to its own premises (Frith 71). Such questions of sincerity and commitment to metal’s core continue to circulate in the discourses of Nordic extreme metal. Sweden’s death metal underground, for example, was considered at “the forefront of one of the most extreme varieties of music yet conceived” (Moynihan and Søderlind 32), with both the Stockholm and Gothenburg “sounds” proving influential beyond Northern Europe (Kahn-Harris 106).Situating Nordicness as a distinct identity beyond metal’s commercial appeal underscores much of the marketing of Nordic extreme metal to international audiences. Such discourses continue in contemporary contexts–Finland’s official website promotes metal as a form of Finnish art and culture: “By definition, heavy metal fans crave music from outside the mainstream. They champion material that boldly stands out against the normality of pop” (Weaver).The focus on Nordic metal existing “outside” the mainstream is commensurate with understandings of extreme metal as “on the edge of music” (Kahn-Harris 5). Such sentiments are situated in a wider regional narrative that sees the Nordic region at the geographic “edge” of Europe, as remote and isolated (Grimley 2). The apparent isolation that enables the distinctiveness of “Nordic” forms of extreme metal is, however, potentially undercut by the widespread circulation of “Nordicness” as a particular brand.“Nordic extreme metal” can be understood as both a generic and place-based scene, where genre and geography “cross cut and coincide in complex ways” (Kahn-Harris 99). The Bergen black metal sound, for example, much like the Gothenburg death metal sound, is both a geographic and stylistic marker that is replicated in different contexts.This Nordic branding of musical styles is further affirmed by the wider means through which “Nordic”, “Scandinavian” and the “North” become interchangeable frameworks for the marketing of particular styles of extreme metal. “Nordic metal”, Von Helden thus argues, “is a trademark and a best seller” (33).Nordicness as Exclusory Belonging and AncestryMarketing strategies that rely on constructions of Nordic metal as “beyond the mainstream” at once exotify and homogenise the “Nordic”. Sentiments of an “imagined community of Nordicness” (Lucas, Deeks and Spracklen 279) have created problematic boundaries of who, or what, may be represented in such categories.Understandings of “Nordicness” as a site of generic “purity” (Moynihan and Søderlind 32) are therefore both tacitly and explicitly underscored by projections of ethnic purity and “belonging”. As such, where we have previously considered the cultural capital of the “Nordic” as it emerges as a particular branding exercise, here we examine the exclusory impetus of homogenous understandings of the Nordic.Nordicness in this context connotes explicitly racialised value, which interpellates images of Viking heathenry to enable fantasies of the pure, white North. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the context of Norwegian black metal, which bases its own self-mythologising in explicitly Nordic parameters. Norwegian black metal bands and members of the broader scene have often taken steps to continually affirm their Nordicness through various representational strategies. The widespread church burnings associated with the early Norwegian black metal scene, for instance, can be framed as a radical rejection of Christianity and an embracing of Norway’s Viking, pagan past.The ethnoromanticisation of Nordic regions and landscapes is underscored by problematic projections of national belonging. An interest in pagan mythology, as Kahn-Harris notes, can easily become an interest in racism and fascism (41). The “uncritical celebration of pagan pasts, the obsession with the unpolluted countryside and the distrust of the cosmopolitan city” that mark much Norwegian black metal were also common features of early fascist and racist movements (Kahn-Harris 41).Norwegian black metal has thus been able to link the genre, as a global music commodity, to “the conscious revival of myths and ideologies of an ancient northern European history and nationalist culture” (Lucas, Deeks and Spracklen 279). The conscious revival of such myths materialised in the early Norwegian scene in deliberately racist sentiments. Mayhem drummer Jan Axel Blomberg (“Hellhammer”) demonstrates this in his brief declaration that “Black metal is for white people” (in Moynihan and Søderlind 305); similarly, Darkthrone’s original back cover of Transylvanian Hunger (1994) prominently featured the phrase “Norsk Arisk Black Metal” (“Norwegian Aryan Black Metal”). Nordicness as exclusory white, Aryan identity is further mobilised in the National Socialist Black Metal scene, which readily caters to ontological constructions of Nordic whiteness (Spracklen, True Aryan; Hagen).However, Nordicness is also given racialised value in more tacit, but nonetheless troubling ways in wider Nordic folk and Viking metal scenes. The popular association of Vikings with Nordic folk metal has enabled such figures to be dismissed as performative play or camp romanticism, ostensibly removed from the extremity of black metal. Such metal scenes and their appeals to ethnosymbolic patriarchs nevertheless remain central to the ongoing construction of Nordic metal as a site that enables the instrumentality of Northern European whiteness precisely through hiding such whiteness in plain sight (Spracklen, To Holmgard, 359).The ostensibly “camp” performance of bands such as Sweden’s Amon Amarth, Faroese act Týr, or Finland’s Korpiklaani distracts from the ways in which Nordicness, and its realisations through Viking and Pagan symbolism, emerges as a claim to ethnic exclusivity. Through imagining the Viking as an ancestral, genetic category, the “common past” of the Nordic people is constructed as a self-identity apart from other people (Blaagaard 11).Furthermore, the “Viking” itself has cultural capital that has circulated beyond Northern Europe in both inclusive and exclusive ways. Nordic symbolism and mythologies are invoked within the textual aesthetics of heavy metal communities across the globe–there are Viking metal bands in Australia, for instance. Further, the valorising of the “North” in metal discourse draws on the symbols of particular ethnic traditions to give historicity and local meaning to white identity.Lucas, Deeks and Spracklen map the rhetorical power of the “North” in English folk metal. However, the same international flows of Nordic cultural capital that have allowed for the success and distinctiveness of Nordic extreme metal have also enabled the proliferation of increasingly exclusionary practices. A flyer signed by the “Wiking Hordes” in May of 1995 (in Moynihan and Søderlind 327) warns that the expansion of black and death metal into Asia, Eastern Europe and South America posed a threat to the “true Aryan” metal community.Similarly, online discussions of the documentary Pagan Metal, in which an interviewee states that a Brazilian Viking metal band is “a bit funny”, shifted between assertions that enjoyment should not be restricted by cultural heritage and declarations that only Nordic bands could “legitimately” support Viking metal. Giving Nordicness value as a form of insular, ethnic belonging has therefore had exclusory and problematic implications for how metal scenes market their dominant symbols and narratives, particularly as scenes continue to grow and diversify across multiple national contexts.Nordicness as Liberal DemocracyNordicness in heavy metal, as we have argued, has been ascribed cultural capital as both a branded, generic phenomenon and as a marker of ancestral, ethnonational belonging. Understandings of “Nordic” as an exclusory ethnic category marked by strict boundaries however come into conflict with the Nordic region’s self-perceptions as a liberal democracy.We propose an additional iteration for “Nordicness” as a means of pointing to the tensions that emerge between particular metallic imaginings of the “North” as a remote, uncompromising site of pagan liberty, and the material realities of modern Nordic nation states. We consider some new parameters for articulations of “Nordicness” in metal scenes: Nordicness as material and political conditions that have enabled the popularity of heavy metal in the region, and furthermore, the manifestations of such liberal democratic discourses in Nordic extreme metal scenes.Nordicness as a cultural, political brand is based in perceptions of the Nordic countries as “global good citizens”, “peace loving”, “conflict-resolution oriented” and “rational” (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2). This modern conception of Nordicness is grounded in the region’s current political climate, which took its form in the post-World War II rejection of fascism and the following refugee crisis.Northern Europe’s reputation as a “famously tolerant political community” (Dworkin 487) can therefore be seen, one on hand, as a crucial disconnect from the intolerant North mediated by factions of Nordic extreme metal scenes and on the other, a political community that provides the material conditions which allow extreme metal to flourish. Nordicness here, we argue, is a crucial form of scenic infrastructure–albeit one that has been both celebrated and condemned in the sites and spaces of Nordic extreme metal.The productivity and stability of extreme metal in the Nordic countries has been attributed to a variety of institutional factors: the general relative prosperity of Northern Europe (Terry), Scandinavian legal structures (Maguire 156), universal welfare, high levels of state support for cultural development, and a broad emphasis on musical education in schools.Kahn-Harris argues that the Swedish metal scene is supported by the strength of the Swedish music industry and “Swedish civil society in general” (108). Music education is strongly supported by the state; Sweden’s relatively generous welfare and education system also “provide [an] effective subsidy for music making” (108). Furthermore, he argues that the Swedish scene has benefited from being closer to the “cultural mainstream of the country than is the case in many other countries” (108). Such close relationships to the “cultural mainstream” also invite a critical backlash against the state. The anarchistic anti-government stance of Swedish hardcore bands or the radical individualism of Norwegian black metal embodies this backlash.Early black metal is seen as a targeted response to the “oppressive and numbing social democracy which dominated Norwegian political life” (Moynihan and Søderlind 32). This spurning of social democracy is further articulated by Darkthrone founder Fenriz, who states that black metal “…is every man for himself… It is individualism above all” (True Norwegian Black Metal). Nordic extreme metal’s emphasis on independence and anti-modernity is hence immediately troubled by the material reality of the conditions that allow it to flourish. Nordicness thus gains complex realisation as both radical individualism and democratic infrastructural conditions.In looking towards future directions for expressions of the “Nordic” in extreme metal scenes, we want to consider how Nordicness can be articulated not as exclusory ethnic belonging and individualist misanthropy, but rather illustrate how Nordic scenes have also proffered sites for progressive, anti-racist discourses that speak to the cultural branding of the North as a tolerant political community.Imaginings of the North as ethnically homogenous or pure are complicated by Nordic bands and fans who actively critique such racialised discourses, and instead situate “Nordic” metal as a site of heterogeneity and anti-racist activism. The liberal politics of the region are most clearly articulated in the music of Swedish hardcore and extreme metal bands, particularly those originating in the northern university town of Umeå. Like much of Europe’s underground music scene, Umeå hardcore bands are often aligned with the anti-fascist movement and its message of tolerance and active anti-racist, anti-homophobic and anti-sexist resistance and protest. Refused is the most well-known example, speaking out against capitalism and in favour of animal rights and civil liberties. Scandinavian DIY acts have also long played a crucial role in facilitating the global diffusion of anti-capitalist punk and hardcore music (Haenfler 287).Nonetheless, whilst such acts remain important sites of progressive discourses in homogenous constructions of Nordicness, such an argument for tolerance and diversity is difficult to maintain when the majority of the scene’s successful bands are made up of white, ethnically Scandinavian men. As such, in moving towards future considerations for Nordicness in extreme metal scenes, we thus call into focus a fragmentation of “Nordicness”, precisely to divorce it from homogenous constructions of the “Nordic”, and enable greater critical interrogation and plurality of the notion of the “North” in metal scholarship.ConclusionThis article has pointed towards a multiplicity of Nordic discourses that unfold in metal: Nordic as a marketing tool, Nordic as an ethnic signifier, and Nordic as the political reality of liberal democratic Northern Europe–and the tensions that emerge in their encounters and intersections. In arguing for multiple understandings of “Nordicness” in metal, we contend that the cultural capital that accompanies the “Nordic” actually emerges as a series of fragmented, often conflicting categories.In examining how images of the North as an isolated location at the edge of the world inform the branded construction of Nordic metal as sites of presumed authenticity, we considered how scenes such as Swedish death metal and Norwegian black metal were marketed precisely through their Nordicness, where their geographic isolation from the commercial centre of heavy metal was used to affirm their “Otherness” to their mainstream metal counterparts. This “otherness” has in turn enabled constructions of Nordic metal scenes as sites of not only metallic purity in their isolation from “commercial” metal scenes, but also ethnic homogeneity. Nordicness, in this instance, becomes inscribed with explicitly racialised value that interpellates images of Viking heathenry to bolster phantasmic imaginings of the pure, white North.However, as we argue in the third section, such exclusory narratives of Nordic belonging come into conflict with Northern Europe’s own self image as a site of progressive liberal democracy. We argue that Nordicness here can be taken as a political imperative towards socialist democracy, wherein such conditions have enabled the widespread viability of extreme metal; yet also invited critical backlashes against the modern political state.Ultimately, in responding to our own research question–what is the cultural capital of “Nordicness” in metal?–we assert that such capital is realised in multiple iterations, undermining any possibility of a uniform category of “Nordicness”, and exposing its political tensions and paradoxes. 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I first came across etoy in Linz, Austria in 1995. They turned up at Ars Electronica with their shaved heads, in their matching orange bomber jackets. They were not invited. The next year they would not have to crash the party. In 1996 they were awarded Arts Electronica’s prestigious Golden Nica for web art, and were on their way to fame and bitterness – the just rewards for their art of self-regard. As founding member Agent.ZAI says: “All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 16) The etoy story starts on the fringes of the squatters’ movement in Zurich. Disenchanted with the hard left rhetorics that permeate the movement in the 1980s, a small group look for another way of existing within a commodified world, without the fantasy of an ‘outside’ from which to critique it. What Antonio Negri and friends call the ‘real subsumption’ of life under the rule of commodification is something etoy grasps intuitively. The group would draw on a number of sources: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Manchester rave scene, European Amiga art, rumors of the historic avant gardes from Dada to Fluxus. They came together in 1994, at a meeting in the Swiss resort town of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. While the staging of the founding meeting looks like a rerun of the origins of the Situationist International, the wording of the invitation might suggest the founding of a pop music boy band: “fun, money and the new world?” One of the – many – stories about the origins of the name Dada has it being chosen at random from a bilingual dictionary. The name etoy, in an update on that procedure, was spat out by a computer program designed to make four letter words at random. Ironically, both Dada and etoy, so casually chosen, would inspire furious struggles over the ownership of these chancey 4-bit words. The group decided to make money by servicing the growing rave scene. Being based in Vienna and Zurich, the group needed a way to communicate, and chose to use the internet. This was a far from obvious thing to do in 1994. Connections were slow and unreliable. Sometimes it was easier to tape a hard drive full of clubland graphics to the underside of a seat on the express train from Zurich to Vienna and simply email instructions to meet the train and retrieve it. The web was a primitive instrument in 1995 when etoy built its first website. They launched it with a party called etoy.FASTLANE, an optimistic title when the web was anything but. Coco, a transsexual model and tabloid sensation, sang a Japanese song while suspended in the air. She brought media interest, and was anointed etoy’s lifestyle angel. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “it was as if the Seven Dwarfs had discovered their Snow White.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 33) The launch didn’t lead to much in the way of a music deal or television exposure. The old media were not so keen to validate the etoy dream of lifting themselves into fame and fortune by their bootstraps. And so etoy decided to be stars of the new media. The slogan was suitably revised: “etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 34) The etoy boys were more than net.artists, they were artists of the brand. The brand was achieving a new prominence in the mid-90s. (Klein: 35) This was a time when capitalism was hollowing itself out in the overdeveloped world, shedding parts of its manufacturing base. Control of the circuits of commodification would rest less on the ownership of the means of production and more on maintaining a monopoly on the flows of information. The leading edge of the ruling class was becoming self-consciously vectoral. It controlled the flow of information about what to produce – the details of design, the underlying patents. It controlled the flows of information about what is produced – the brands and logos, the slogans and images. The capitalist class is supplanted by a vectoral class, controlling the commodity circuit through the vectors of information. (Wark) The genius of etoy was to grasp the aesthetic dimension of this new stage of commodification. The etoy boys styled themselves not so much as a parody of corporate branding and management groupthink, but as logical extension of it. They adopted matching uniforms and called themselves agents. In the dada-punk-hiphop tradition, they launched themselves on the world as brand new, self-created, self-named subjects: Agents Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein. The etoy.com website was registered in 1995 with Network Solutions for a $100 fee. The homepage for this etoy.TANKSYSTEM was designed like a flow chart. As Gramazio says: “We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 51) One tank was a cybermotel, with Coco the first guest. Another tank showed you your IP number, with a big-brother eye looking on. A supermarket tank offered sunglasses and laughing gas for sale, but which may or may not be delivered. The underground tank included hardcore photos of a sensationalist kind. A picture of the Federal Building in Oklamoma City after the bombing was captioned in deadpan post-situ style “such work needs a lot of training.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 52) The etoy agents were by now thoroughly invested in the etoy brand and the constellation of images they had built around it, on their website. Their slogan became “etoy: leaving reality behind.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 53) They were not the first artists fascinated by commodification. It was Warhol who said “good art is good business.”(Warhol ) But etoy reversed the equation: good business is good art. And good business, in this vectoral age, is in its most desirable form an essentially conceptual matter of creating a brand at the center of a constellation of signifiers. Late in 1995, etoy held another group meeting, at the Zurich youth center Dynamo. The problem was that while they had build a hardcore website, nobody was visiting it. Agents Gooldstein and Udatny thought that there might be a way of using the new search engines to steer visitors to the site. Zai and Brainhard helped secure a place at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts where Udatny could use the computer lab to implement this idea. Udatny’s first step was to create a program that would go out and gather email addresses from the web. These addresses would form the lists for the early examples of art-spam that etoy would perpetrate. Udatny’s second idea was a bit more interesting. He worked out how to get the etoy.TANKSYSTEM page listed in search engines. Most search engines ranked pages by the frequency of the search term in the pages it had indexed, so etoy.TANKSYSTEM would contain pages of selected keywords. Porn sites were also discovering this method of creating free publicity. The difference was that etoy chose a very carefully curated list of 350 search terms, including: art, bondage, cyberspace, Doom, Elvis, Fidel, genx, heroin, internet, jungle and Kant. Users of search engines who searched for these terms would find dummy pages listed prominently in their search results that directed them, unsuspectingly, to etoy.com. They called this project Digital Hijack. To give the project a slightly political aura, the pages the user was directed to contained an appeal for the release of convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick. This was the project that won them a Golden Nica statuette at Ars Electronica in 1996, which Gramazio allegedly lost the same night playing roulette. It would also, briefly, require that they explain themselves to the police. Digital Hijack also led to the first splits in the group, under the intense pressure of organizing it on a notionally collective basis, but with the zealous Agent Zai acting as de facto leader. When Udatny was expelled, Zai and Brainhard even repossessed his Toshiba laptop, bought with etoy funds. As Udatny recalls, “It was the lowest point in my life ever. There was nothing left; I could not rely on etoy any more. I did not even have clothes, apart from the etoy uniform.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 104) Here the etoy story repeats a common theme from the history of the avant gardes as forms of collective subjectivity. After Digital Hijack, etoy went into a bit of a slump. It’s something of a problem for a group so dependent on recognition from the other of the media, that without a buzz around them, etoy would tend to collapse in on itself like a fading supernova. Zai spend the early part of 1997 working up a series of management documents, in which he appeared as the group’s managing director. Zai employed the current management theory rhetoric of employee ‘empowerment’ while centralizing control. Like any other corporate-Trotskyite, his line was that “We have to get used to reworking the company structure constantly.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 132) The plan was for each member of etoy to register the etoy trademark in a different territory, linking identity to information via ownership. As Zai wrote “If another company uses our name in a grand way, I’ll probably shoot myself. And that would not be cool.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler:: 132) As it turned out, another company was interested – the company that would become eToys.com. Zai received an email offering “a reasonable sum” for the etoy.com domain name. Zai was not amused. “Damned Americans, they think they can take our hunting grounds for a handful of glass pearls….”. (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 133) On an invitation from Suzy Meszoly of C3, the etoy boys traveled to Budapest to work on “protected by etoy”, a work exploring internet security. They spent most of their time – and C3’s grant money – producing a glossy corporate brochure. The folder sported a blurb from Bjork: “etoy: immature priests from another world” – which was of course completely fabricated. When Artothek, the official art collection of the Austrian Chancellor, approached etoy wanting to buy work, the group had to confront the problem of how to actually turn their brand into a product. The idea was always that the brand was the product, but this doesn’t quite resolve the question of how to produce the kind of unique artifacts that the art world requires. Certainly the old Conceptual Art strategy of selling ‘documentation’ would not do. The solution was as brilliant as it was simple – to sell etoy shares. The ‘works’ would be ‘share certificates’ – unique objects, whose only value, on the face of it, would be that they referred back to the value of the brand. The inspiration, according to Wishart &amp; Boschsler, was David Bowie, ‘the man who sold the world’, who had announced the first rock and roll bond on the London financial markets, backed by future earnings of his back catalogue and publishing rights. Gramazio would end up presenting Chancellor Viktor Klima with the first ‘shares’ at a press conference. “It was a great start for the project”, he said, “A real hack.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 142) For this vectoral age, etoy would create the perfect vectoral art. Zai and Brainhard took off next for Pasadena, where they got the idea of reverse-engineering the online etoy.TANKSYSTEM by building an actual tank in an orange shipping container, which would become etoy.TANK 17. This premiered at the San Francisco gallery Blasthaus in June 1998. Instant stars in the small world of San Francisco art, the group began once again to disintegrate. Brainhard and Esposito resigned. Back in Europe in late 1998, Zai was preparing to graduate from the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. His final project would recapitulate the life and death of etoy. It would exist from here on only as an online archive, a digital mausoleum. As Kubli says “there was no possibility to earn our living with etoy.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 192) Zai emailed eToys.com and asked them if them if they would like to place a banner ad on etoy.com, to redirect any errant web traffic. Lawyers for eToys.com offered etoy $30,000 for the etoy.com domain name, which the remaining members of etoy – Zai, Gramazio, Kubli – refused. The offer went up to $100,000, which they also refused. Through their lawyer Peter Wild they demanded $750,000. In September 1999, while etoy were making a business presentation as their contribution to Ars Electronica, eToys.com lodged a complaint against etoy in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The company hired Bruce Wessel, of the heavyweight LA law firm Irell &amp; Manella, who specialized in trademark, copyright and other intellectual property litigation. The complaint Wessel drafted alleged that etoy had infringed and diluted the eToys trademark, were practicing unfair competition and had committed “intentional interference with prospective economic damage.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 199) Wessel demanded an injunction that would oblige etoy to cease using its trademark and take down its etoy.com website. The complaint also sought to prevent etoy from selling shares, and demanded punitive damages. Displaying the aggressive lawyering for which he was so handsomely paid, Wessel invoked the California Unfair Competition Act, which was meant to protect citizens from fraudulent business scams. Meant as a piece of consumer protection legislation, its sweeping scope made it available for inventive suits such as Wessel’s against etoy. Wessel was able to use pretty much everything from the archive etoy built against it. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “The court papers were like a delicately curated catalogue of its practices.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 199) And indeed, legal documents in copyright and trademark cases may be the most perfect literature of the vectoral age. The Unfair Competition claim was probably aimed at getting the suit heard in a Californian rather than a Federal court in which intellectual property issues were less frequently litigated. The central aim of the eToys suit was the trademark infringement, but on that head their claims were not all that strong. According to the 1946 Lanham Act, similar trademarks do not infringe upon each other if there they are for different kinds of business or in different geographical areas. The Act also says that the right to own a trademark depends on its use. So while etoy had not registered their trademark and eToys had, etoy were actually up and running before eToys, and could base their trademark claim on this fact. The eToys case rested on a somewhat selective reading of the facts. Wessel claimed that etoy was not using its trademark in the US when eToys was registered in 1997. Wessel did not dispute the fact that etoy existed in Europe prior to that time. He asserted that owning the etoy.com domain name was not sufficient to establish a right to the trademark. If the intention of the suit was to bully etoy into giving in, it had quite the opposite effect. It pissed them off. “They felt again like the teenage punks they had once been”, as Wishart &amp; Bochsler put it. Their art imploded in on itself for lack of attention, but called upon by another, it flourished. Wessel and eToys.com unintentionally triggered a dialectic that worked in quite the opposite way to what they intended. The more pressure they put on etoy, the more valued – and valuable – they felt etoy to be. Conceptual business, like conceptual art, is about nothing but the management of signs within the constraints of given institutional forms of market. That this conflict was about nothing made it a conflict about everything. It was a perfectly vectoral struggle. Zai and Gramazio flew to the US to fire up enthusiasm for their cause. They asked Wolfgang Staehle of The Thing to register the domain toywar.com, as a space for anti-eToys activities at some remove from etoy.com, and as a safe haven should eToys prevail with their injunction in having etoy.com taken down. The etoy defense was handled by Marcia Ballard in New York and Robert Freimuth in Los Angeles. In their defense, they argued that etoy had existed since 1994, had registered its globally accessible domain in 1995, and won an international art prize in 1996. To counter a claim by eToys that they had a prior trademark claim because they had bought a trademark from another company that went back to 1990, Ballard and Freimuth argued that this particular trademark only applied to the importation of toys from the previous owner’s New York base and thus had no relevance. They capped their argument by charging that eToys had not shown that its customers were really confused by the existence of etoy. With Christmas looming, eToys wanted a quick settlement, so they offered Zurich-based etoy lawyer Peter Wild $160,000 in shares and cash for the etoy domain. Kubli was prepared to negotiate, but Zai and Gramazio wanted to gamble – and raise the stakes. As Zai recalls: “We did not want to be just the victims; that would have been cheap. We wanted to be giants too.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 207) They refused the offer. The case was heard in November 1999 before Judge Rafeedie in the Federal Court. Freimuth, for etoy, argued that federal Court was the right place for what was essentially a trademark matter. Robert Kleiger, for eToys, countered that it should stay where it was because of the claims under the California Unfair Competition act. Judge Rafeedie took little time in agreeing with the eToys lawyer. Wessel’s strategy paid off and eToys won the first skirmish. The first round of a quite different kind of conflict opened when etoy sent out their first ‘toywar’ mass mailing, drawing the attention of the net.art, activism and theory crowd to these events. This drew a report from Felix Stalder in Telepolis: “Fences are going up everywhere, molding what once seemed infinite space into an overcrowded and tightly controlled strip mall.” (Stalder ) The positive feedback from the net only emboldened etoy. For the Los Angeles court, lawyers for etoy filed papers arguing that the sale of ‘shares’ in etoy was not really a stock offering. “The etoy.com website is not about commerce per se, it is about artist and social protest”, they argued. (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 209) They were obliged, in other words, to assert a difference that the art itself had intended to blur in order to escape eToy’s claims under the Unfair Competition Act. Moreover, etoy argued that there was no evidence of a victim. Nobody was claiming to have been fooled by etoy into buying something under false pretences. Ironically enough, art would turn out in hindsight to be a more straightforward transaction here, involving less simulation or dissimulation, than investing in a dot.com. Perhaps we have reached the age when art makes more, not less, claim than business to the rhetorical figure of ‘reality’. Having defended what appeared to be the vulnerable point under the Unfair Competition law, etoy went on the attack. It was the failure of eToys to do a proper search for other trademarks that created the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, in Federal Court, lawyers for etoy launched a counter-suit that reversed the claims against them made by eToys on the trademark question. While the suits and counter suits flew, eToys.com upped their offer to settle to a package of cash and shares worth $400,000. This rather puzzled the etoy lawyers. Those choosing to sue don’t usually try at the same time to settle. Lawyer Peter Wild advised his clients to take the money, but the parallel tactics of eToys.com only encouraged them to dig in their heels. “We felt that this was a tremendous final project for etoy”, says Gramazio. As Zai says, “eToys was our ideal enemy – we were its worst enemy.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 210) Zai reported the offer to the net in another mass mail. Most people advised them to take the money, including Doug Rushkoff and Heath Bunting. Paul Garrin counseled fighting on. The etoy agents offered to settle for $750,000. The case came to court in late November 1999 before Judge Shook. The Judge accepted the plausibility of the eToys version of the facts on the trademark issue, which included the purchase of a registered trademark from another company that went back to 1990. He issued an injunction on their behalf, and added in his statement that he was worried about “the great danger of children being exposed to profane and hardcore pornographic issues on the computer.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 222) The injunction was all eToys needed to get Network Solutions to shut down the etoy.com domain. Zai sent out a press release in early December, which percolated through Slashdot, rhizome, nettime (Staehle) and many other networks, and catalyzed the net community into action. A debate of sorts started on investor websites such as fool.com. The eToys stock price started to slide, and etoy ‘warriors’ felt free to take the credit for it. The story made the New York Times on 9th December, Washington Post on the 10th, Wired News on the 11th. Network Solutions finally removed the etoy.com domain on the 10th December. Zai responded with a press release: “this is robbery of digital territory, American imperialism, corporate destruction and bulldozing in the way of the 19th century.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 237) RTMark set up a campaign fund for toywar, managed by Survival Research Laboratories’ Mark Pauline. The RTMark press release promised a “new internet ‘game’ designed to destroy eToys.com.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 239) The RTMark press release grabbed the attention of the Associated Press newswire. The eToys.com share price actually rose on December 13th. Goldman Sachs’ e-commerce analyst Anthony Noto argued that the previous declines in the Etoys share price made it a good buy. Goldman Sachs was the lead underwriter of the eToys IPO. Noto’s writings may have been nothing more than the usual ‘IPOetry’ of the time, but the crash of the internet bubble was some months away yet. The RTMark campaign was called ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It used the Floodnet technique that Ricardo Dominguez used in support of the Zapatistas. As Dominguez said, “this hysterical power-play perfectly demonstrates the intensions of the new net elite; to turn the World Wide Web into their own private home-shopping network.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 242) The Floodnet attack may have slowed the eToys.com server down a bit, but it was robust and didn’t crash. Ironically, it ran on open source software. Dominguez claims that the ‘Twelve Days’ campaign, which relied on individuals manually launching Floodnet from their own computers, was not designed to destroy the eToys site, but to make a protest felt. “We had a single-bullet script that could have taken down eToys – a tactical nuke, if you will. But we felt this script did not represent the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 245) While the eToys engineers did what they could to keep the site going, eToys also approached universities and businesses whose systems were being used to host Floodnet attacks. The Thing, which hosted Dominguez’s eToys Floodnet site was taken offline by The Thing’s ISP, Verio. After taking down the Floodnet scripts, The Thing was back up, restoring service to the 200 odd websites that The Thing hosted besides the offending Floodnet site. About 200 people gathered on December 20th at a demonstration against eToys outside the Museum of Modern Art. Among the crowd were Santas bearing signs that said ‘Coal for eToys’. The rally, inside the Museum, was led by the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping: “We are drowning in a sea of identical details”, he said. (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 249-250) Meanwhile etoy worked on the Toywar Platform, an online agitpop theater spectacle, in which participants could act as soldiers in the toywar. This would take some time to complete – ironically the dispute threatened to end before this last etoy artwork was ready, giving etoy further incentives to keep the dispute alive. The etoy agents had a new lawyer, Chris Truax, who was attracted to the case by the publicity it was generating. Through Truax, etoy offered to sell the etoy domain and trademark for $3.7 million. This may sound like an insane sum, but to put it in perspective, the business.com site changed hands for $7.5 million around this time. On December 29th, Wessel signaled that eToys was prepared to compromise. The problem was, the Toywar Platform was not quite ready, so etoy did what it could to drag out the negotiations. The site went live just before the scheduled court hearings, January 10th 2000. “TOYWAR.com is a place where all servers and all involved people melt and build a living system. In our eyes it is the best way to express and document what’s going on at the moment: people start to about new ways to fight for their ideas, their lifestyle, contemporary culture and power relations.” (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 263) Meanwhile, in a California courtroom, Truax demanded that Network Solutions restore the etoy domain, that eToys pay the etoy legal expenses, and that the case be dropped without prejudice. No settlement was reached. Negotiations dragged on for another two weeks, with the etoy agents’ attention somewhat divided between two horizons – art and law. The dispute was settled on 25th January. Both parties dismissed their complaints without prejudice. The eToys company would pay the etoy artists $40,000 for legal costs, and contact Network Solutions to reinstate the etoy domain. “It was a pleasure doing business with one of the biggest e-commerce giants in the world” ran the etoy press release. (Wishart &amp; Boschler: 265) That would make a charming end to the story. But what goes around comes around. Brainhard, still pissed off with Zai after leaving the group in San Francisco, filed for the etoy trademark in Austria. After that the internal etoy wranglings just gets boring. But it was fun while it lasted. What etoy grasped intuitively was the nexus between the internet as a cultural space and the transformation of the commodity economy in a yet-more abstract direction – its becoming-vectoral. They zeroed in on the heart of the new era of conceptual business – the brand. As Wittgenstein says of language, what gives words meaning is other words, so too for brands. What gives brands meaning is other brands. There is a syntax for brands as there is for words. What etoy discovered is how to insert a new brand into that syntax. The place of eToys as a brand depended on their business competition with other brands – with Toys ‘R’ Us, for example. For etoy, the syntax they discovered for relating their brand to another one was a legal opposition. What made etoy interesting was their lack of moral posturing. Their abandonment of leftist rhetorics opened them up to exploring the territory where media and business meet, but it also made them vulnerable to being consumed by the very dialectic that created the possibility of staging etoy in the first place. By abandoning obsolete political strategies, they discovered a media tactic, which collapsed for want of a new strategy, for the new vectoral terrain on which we find ourselves. Works Cited Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Continuum, London, 2003. Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again. Picador, New York, 1984. Stalder, Felix. ‘Fences in Cyberspace: Recent events in the battle over domain names’. 19 Jun 2003. &lt;http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.php&gt;. Wark, McKenzie. ‘A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]’ 19 Jun 2003. http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Harper Collins, London, 2000. Wishart, Adam &amp; Regula Bochsler. Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com &amp; Other Battles to Control Cyberspace Ecco Books, 2003. Staehle, Wolfgang. ‘&lt;nettime&gt; etoy.com shut down by US court.’ 19 Jun 2003. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.html Links http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.htm http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wark, McKenzie. "Toywars" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture&lt; http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php&gt;. APA Style Wark, M. (2003, Jun 19). Toywars. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,&lt; http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php&gt;

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Rather than trying to lead an audience into a suspension of disbelief, cornball artists who get their own joke hope everyone will play along, or anyway enjoy the joke, which suggests that successful corn involves a suspension of embarrassment, or else a revel in it. (Marcus 323)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Sure, it was corny as anything, pretentious, and silly beyond reason. But it felt so refreshing to see a band so absolutely devoid of irony and hipster chic, to see them perform and actually have enough sense and gravitas to not take themselves so damned seriously. And I think that, for a lot of people (myself included), that was a breath of fresh air. If there had been even the slightest trace of irony in the Illinoisemakers’ performance, the crowd would have picked up on it, and I doubt Sufjan and Co would have made it out with their pom-poms intact. (Morehead)&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The club was packed tight but I managed to find a spot to stand for the next two hours, squeezed along the rail of the upstairs balcony, looking down almost directly at the top of Sufjan Stevens’s head and, in front of him, an unusually hushed audience of fresh-faced indie rock kids. In conversation with some of the club’s staff a few days after the show, they would confide in me that they were unnerved by the evening’s crowd: “Where did these people come from?”, just “too well-behaved” for an all-ages show, there was something vaguely eerie about the level of rapt attention, about their/our unembarrassed affection for the on-stage spectacle. After all, with his gender-split six-piece back-up band (why have just one glockenspiel when two could be better?) dressed in matching cheerleader uniforms (offering between-song cheers and “spirit fingers” and a show-closing human pyramid) and himself all decked-out in a silk American flag jumpsuit, which may or may not have also had a cape, it would be tempting to see and hear 30-year-old Sufjan Stevens and his band – known, on this tour, as the Illinoisemakers – as “kitsch” or “camp”, but that’s not quite it. The affective tone is a bit too far off the mark – the archly self-ironic quotation marks – to qualify as camp or kitsch (or, for that matter, it is also far too waxing to fit any thesis about the waning of affect, such as Fredric Jameson’s notion of “blank parody”). Migrating elsewhere, this affect locates its heartfelt kernel, unabashedly, as corn. &#x0D; &#x0D; Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay Notes on “Camp”, helped to set out the critical coordinates for the camp sensibility. Among them, an affection for the affectations of artifice and exaggeration, a rewiring of the logics of taste (bad can be good!) in order to account for an excessiveness and/or a “failed seriousness” that doubles back to slip quotation marks around itself, often undertaking a kind of historical salvage operation whereby the once-banal might now be redeemed as fantastic. As a significant subset of (non-naïve) camp, kitsch pertains to the more intentionally frivolous or ostentatious, and it inheres, most immediately, in the practices/objects produced through the camp sensibility. In sum, camp and kitsch take pleasure and refuge in affectedness, and regularly draw upon a particular relationship to the past: a past not to be conserved as it once was but to be transformed toward different, potentially more liberating ends within the present. &#x0D; &#x0D; The sensibility of corn occupies an almost coincidental space in our contemporary moment (where else could it be?) but its initial impulse faces in the other direction: rather than a past, it seeks to redeem a future for the present. Although by no means bypassing the powers of being affected (though without ironically turning this affectedness upon itself), cornball art sets to work by fictively divulging capacities to affect among existing constellations of forces and aesthetic figures, finding hidden-in-plain-sight alliances and branchings, offering a glimpse of a future not quite in view. That is, if camp and especially kitsch are the sound of a world chortling in the mirror at the sight of its own enlightened cynicism, corn gives voice to the near-impossible belief, in the face of all-available evidence to the contrary, that traversing the dreadfully familiar still holds the chance potential for imagining (and perhaps creating) a world that is decidedly otherwise. A work of (“successful”) corn actively dedicates itself to conjuring up an affective topography – opening the way for the possibility of collective inhabitation or contagion – within and around the hollows and shadows of the cliché and the commonplace, extracting from the field of its circulation the tiniest differences and variations.&#x0D; &#x0D; Although camp and kitsch are “statistically” on the political left (in the same way that Roland Barthes claims that “myth” is statistically on the right), corn has no intrinsic political valence. Making itself at home in the midst of the already known and patently obvious, corn’s stubborn (“silly beyond reason”) act of faith in the conversion of the banal becomes the future-oriented task of the always-to-be-made. The fabulist potential of corn then is that, beginning in the middle of nowhere, it can deliver us somewhere else: even if somewhere else is inevitably right here (no-where turned now-here). Corn’s politics don’t arrive in advance but only through its own act of creative, patchwork assembling. Rather than camp’s self-inoculating wink of solidarity (often delivered from arm’s length), whatever might be the coming politics of corn, it is precisely in its articulations and the expanse of its arms-wide embrace.&#x0D; &#x0D; Sufjan Stevens is already a fairly complex tangle of articulations all by himself: a plainly quirky musical composer-arranger and multi-instrumentalist (imagine Philip Glass writing “twee lo-fi” scores for a local community theater) / simultaneously straightforward balladeer and goofy-assed cheerleader-bandleader / fabulating geo-philosopher / practicing Christian (Episcopalian) of the non-evangelical variety / undeterred and affectionate chronicler of an increasingly unsettled America. What keeps this tangle of articulations from falling into a mess of contradictions is his earnestly cornball conceit as a musical surveyor – with or without a cape – of the vast American landscape. Stevens’s new Come on Feel the Illinoise and his 2003 release Greetings from Michigan serve merely as the first two states in an ambitious and admittedly foolhardy “50 States” project. Stevens re-conjures these states as immensely intimate geographies of the everyday mundane (folding laundry, wasp stings, zoo visits), of the cosmically mythic (UFOs, God, ghosts), and through figures, events and places, both past and present (Mary Todd Lincoln, the Black Hawk War, Decatur, his stepmother). In and across his musical compositions, there are no conceptual, lyrical or moral hierarchies (no above or below, including God); everything is situated alongside each other. Nothing is subordinated to anything else, and all are linked as one. &#x0D; &#x0D; Describing his “poetics of landscape”, Stevens says: &#x0D; &#x0D; I think this is a complicated subject, this idea of environment and geography shaping our doctrines, our behavior, our memory, even our inclinations … Now, our life is not a series of compartments. Here is our health. Here is our diet. Here is our genealogy. Here is our religion. Here is our politics. Here is our job. No, these things are all one big thing. Landscape is the palate of all activity. We live and move on the surface of this planet. Of course the character of that geography informs us. Even more, it determines us, and we affect it as well. It’s correlative … (Dodd). &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Although everything is already in immanence, it is also always to be articulated. Or, in the case of Sufjan Stevens’s rewrite of the United States’ national anthem, it is still all to be re-articulated: reclaiming God from the religious right while declaiming America’s militarism. The affective-aesthetic resonance of these articulations, through corn’s familiar traversal of the recurring same, serves as a selective ontology that comes to guide what falls out or rises up – the difference in repetition – into resources for hope in the present (Massumi). By nurturing these hopeful fall-outs and rise-ups into their next iterations, and by sustaining them into ever-expanding and self-varying accumulation, corn’s peculiar affective sensibility invokes its ethical task and, thus, its capacity to deliver its audience – though there are no guarantees – from nowhere (especially given the present sorry state of affairs on the US political left). It takes landscape as the palate of its activity, and then “populate[s] it with other instances, with other poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial or musical entities” (Deleuze and Guattari 66-7), populates it with a people to come. &#x0D; &#x0D; At present, it is safe to say that Sufjan Stevens is almost precisely nowhere, a mere speck on the popular music landscape of North America – at least as such matters might be determined through sales statistics or mainstream radio airplay. But a growing number of US music critics, journalists, and music bloggers have begun to take notice. See, for example, the critics at Amazon.com in the US or Metacritic.com – a Website that cross-tabulates critical reviews (mostly US and British) of film, television, music, etc – where, in both, Stevens’s Illinoise stands as the number one music release for 2005. All of which might add up, of course, to next to nothing (a temporary crush, this year’s model, a critical darling). Except that, wedged along the balcony rail as I observed the evening’s crowd in resonant conjunction with Stevens and his band, there seemed and still seems every reason to believe or every reason to want to believe that a reconfigured, newly-weird and corn-fed America may be nudging its way onto the horizon as an emergent, fledgling generational sensibility. Or, so, that’s the infectious hope anyway … admittedly as naïve as any before it. &#x0D; &#x0D; Think of it as a manifestation of what Deleuze calls the need for belief (and not its suspension) in the world. In this world (this world now: no waiting for a next one) belief that operates, in one way, through “the powers of the false” (fabulation): supplanting the close-to-expired effectivity of “speaking truth to power” anytime too soon. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that, “belief becomes a genuine concept only when it is made into belief in this world and is connected rather than projected” (92). To connect. To fabulate. To pass into the landscape. To create the conditions for a people-who-are-missing. But, more than any other ingredient to be drawn as political necessity from the contemporary moment, it is belief – unembarrassed by its open expression, unfettered by irony’s built-in self-protection mechanism – that sets corn apart from camp and kitsch.&#x0D; &#x0D; It is belief in this world that sets Sufjan Stevens’s music and its live performance, as corn, into motion: belief as force for belonging. Corn lends itself, almost by its very nature (albeit its fictive nature), to such gathering-up, to collective enunciation. “All things go / All things go / To re-create us / All things grow / All things grow”, Stevens sings in part of the chorus of his Chicago (arguably the centrepiece of Illinoise), his voice supported – both live and on record – by what feels like every other voice in its vicinity. But, in the song, Chicago serves as just a momentary passing through on the way to somewhere else, on the way to New York and beyond that: “Freedom from myself and from the land”. In the sliver of this moment (beyond one state or two, a nation or land dissolving into what develops), the affect of corn reveals its opening on to a boundless expansion of landscape, out past the amber waves of grain, the majesty of purple mountains, and God shedding his grace, pom-poms intact.&#x0D; &#x0D; References&#x0D; &#x0D; Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. H. Tomlinson, and G. Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Dodd, J. “Feature Interview with Sufjan Stevens.” Bandoppler #5. 10 Oct. 2005 http://www.bandoppler.com/5_F_Sufjan.htm&gt;. Marcus, G. Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92. New York: Anchor, 1993. Massumi, Brian. “Navigating Movements.” In M. Zournazi, Hope: New Philosophies for Change. New York: Routledge, 2002. This interview with Massumi is also available online: http://www.21cmagazine.com/issue2/massumi.html&gt;. Morehead, J. “Omaha, Lift Up Your Weary Head.” OpusZine.com 23 Sep. 2005. http://www.opuszine.com/blog/entry.html?ID=1276&gt;. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp’.” Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, 1966.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Citation reference for this article&#x0D; &#x0D; MLA Style&#x0D; Seigworth, Gregory J. "The Affect of Corn." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/12-seigworth.php&gt;. APA Style&#x0D; Seigworth, G. (Dec. 2005) "The Affect of Corn," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/12-seigworth.php&gt;. &#x0D;

Over the past two decades in the West, practices of ethical consumption have become increasingly visible within mainstream consumer culture (Lewis and Potter). While they manifest in a variety of forms, such practices are frequently articulated to politics of anti-consumerism, environmentalism, and sustainable consumption through which lifestyle choices are conceived as methods for investing in—and articulating—ethical and social concerns. Such practices are typically understood as both a reflection of the increasing global influence of neoliberal, consumer-oriented modes of citizenship and a response to the destabilisation of capitalism’s certainties in the wake of ongoing climate change and the global financial crisis (Castells et al.; Miller). Consume less, consume differently, recycle, do-it-yourself: activities that have historically been associated with explicitly activist movements (see Bryner) are now increasingly accessible and attractive to people for whom these consumption choices might serve as their first introduction to countercultural practices. While the notion of “counterculture” is today a contested concept—one that no longer refers only to “the” (i.e. 1960s) counterculture, but also to a range of radical movements and practices—it is one which is useful for thinking about the ways in which difference from, and resistance to, the “mainstream” can be asserted. Within contemporary consumer culture, resistance is now often articulated in ways which suggests that the lines between the “countercultural” and the “mainstream” are no longer clear cut (Desmond, McDonagh and O’Donohue 263). For Castells et al. (12), this is especially the case when the structures of capitalism are under strain, as this is when alternative and countercultural ways of living increasingly enter the mainstream. The concept of counterculture, then, is useful for understanding the ways in which progressive political values may be reimagined, rearticulated and represented within the mainstream, thereby offering access points to political participation for people who may not necessarily describe their activities as resistant or even as politically engaged (Barnett et al. 45). One of the most interesting aspects of this phenomenon is how a progressive politics of consumption is expressed through images and aesthetics that are culturally coded as conservative. Across a range of contemporary media and popular cultural forms, notions of ethical consumption are often paralleled by resurgences in practices associated with domesticity and traditional femininities. From retro fashions referencing 1940s and 1950s femininity to the growing popularisation of crafting and cooking, many of the “old-fashioned” practices of domesticity that had been critiqued and rejected by second wave feminism (see Brunsdon The Feminist 216), are being reimagined as simultaneously nostalgic and politically progressive choices for women (and, sometimes, for men). This paper explores how the contemporary mobilisation of traditional femininities can activate progressive, countercultural politics of gender and consumption. Specifically, it will examine the popularisation of the “nanna” as a countercultural icon that exemplifies the contemporary politics of retro femininities. Drawing upon data from our larger, more comprehensive studies, this paper uses two case studies—the rise of “nanna-style” cookbooks and the “nanna culture” of indie lifestyle magazine Frankie—to explore the ways that traditional femininities can be reworked to prompt a rethinking of current consumption practices, foster connection (in the case of nanna-style cookbooks) and challenge the limitations of contemporary gender norms (in the case of Frankie). While we are not suggesting that these politics are necessarily deliberately encoded in the texts (although sometimes they may be) or that these texts are inevitably interpreted in the way that we are suggesting, this paper offers preliminary textual “readings” (Kellner 12) of the ways that countercultural values can be uncovered within mainstream cultural forms. Nanna-style cookbooks and Frankie magazine are each examples of a broader resignification of the nanna that has been occurring across a number of sites of contemporary popular culture. Previous associations of the nanna as old, conservative or uncool are being replaced with new images of nannas as active, skilled, funky women. For example, this is evident in the recent resurgences of craft cultures, which reshape the meanings of contemporary knitting as being “not your grandma’s knitting” (Fields 150), but as a “fun, hip, and political” new hobby (Groeneveld 260). Such craft activities have been described using discourses of “revolution and reclamation” (Groeneveld 266) to mobilise countercultural practices ranging from explicitly activist “craftivism” (Corbett and Housley) to more ordinary, everyday politics of consumption and time management. Through activities such as “knit ins”, yarn bombing, and Stitch “N” Bitch circles, contemporary craft practices can be seen as an expression of the “historically reflexive and community minded new amateur”, whose craft practices facilitate new connections between amateurs to enable “alternative values and ways of living” and reject negative aspects of modern consumer society (Hackney 187). Even for women with less explicit activist commitments, an investment in the practices of retro femininities can provide opportunities for community-building, including across generations, in which participants are offered not only a “welcome respite from the rush and hurry of everyday life”, but also access to a suite of activities through which they can resist dominant approaches to consumption (Nathanson 119). Consequently, nostalgic images of grandmotherly practices need not signal only a conservative marketing strategy or desire to return to a (patriarchal, pre-feminist) past as they are sometimes interpreted (see Trussler), but a means through which images of the past can be resignified and reinterpreted in the context of contemporary needs and politics. Cooking Nanna-Style Nanna-style cookbooks are an example of “emergent uses of the past” (Bramall 15) for present purposes. “Nanna-style” is a currently popular category within the cookbook publishing and retailing industries that, for many critics, has been understood as an essentially conservative response to the financial uncertainties of the economic downturn (Orr). Certainly, nanna-style cookbooks are, on one level at least, uncritically and unreflexively nostalgic for a time when women’s cooking was central to providing the comforts of home. In Nonna to Nana: Stories of Food and Family, grandmothers are presented as part of a “fast-disappearing generation of matriarchs” whose recipes must be preserved so that “we [can] honour the love and dedication [they] give through the simple gift of making and sharing their food” (DiBlasi and DiBlasi, book synopsis). Merle’s Kitchen, written by 79-year-old author and Country Women’s Association (CWA) judge, Merle Parrish, is littered with reminisces about what life was like “in those days” when the “kitchen was the heart of the home” and women prepared baked treats each week for their children and husbands (Parrish vii). Sweet Paul Eat &amp; Make: Charming Recipes and Kitchen Crafts You Will Love is filled with the recipes and stories of author Paul Lowe’s grandmother, Mormor, who doted on her family with delicious pancakes cooked at any time of the day. Such images of the grandmother’s selfless dedication to her family deploy the romance of what Jean Duruz (58) has called “Cooking Woman,” a figure whose entire identity is subsumed within the pleasure and comfort that she provides to others. Through the medium of the cookbook, Cooking Woman serves the fantasies of the “nostalgic cosmopolitan” (Duruz 61) for whom the pleasures of the nanna reflect an essentially (albeit unacknowledged) conservative impulse. However, for others, the nostalgia of Cooking Woman need not necessarily involve endorsement of her domestic servitude, but instead evoke images of an (imagined, utopian) past as a means of exploring the pleasures and contradictions of contemporary femininities and consumption practices (see Hollows 190). Such texts are part of a broader set of practices associated with what Bramall (21) calls “austerity chic.” Austerity chic’s full political potential is evident in explicitly countercultural cookbooks like Heidi Minx’s Home Rockanomics, which invokes the DIY spirit of punk to present recycling, cooking and craft making as methods for investing in an anti-corporate, vegan activist politics. But for Bramall (31), even less challenging texts featuring nostalgic images of nannas can activate progressive demands about the need to consume more sustainably in ways that make these ideas more accessible to a broader range of constituencies. In particular, such texts offer forms of “alternative hedonism” through which practices of ethical consumption need not be characterised by experiences of self-denial but by a reconceptualisation of what constitutes the “good life” (Soper 211). In the practices of austerity chic as they are presented in nanna-style cookbooks, grandmotherly practices of baking and cooking are presented as frugal and self-sufficient, but also as granting access to experiences of pleasure, including the pleasures of familial warmth, cohesion and connection. Specifically, these books emphasise the ways in which cooking, and baking in particular, helps to forge connections between generations. For the authors of Pass It Down and Keep Baking, the recipes of grandmothers and great-aunts are described as “treasures” to be “cherished and passed on to future generations” (Wilkinson and Wilkinson 2). For the authors of Nonna to Nana, the food of the authors’ own grandmother is described as the “thread that bound our family together” (DiBlasi and DiBlasi 2). In contrast to some of the more explicitly political retro-inspired movements, which often construct the new formations of these practices as distinct from those of older women (e.g. “not your grandma’s knitting”), these more mainstream texts celebrate generational cohesion. Given the ways in which feminist histories have tended to discursively pit the various “waves” of feminism in opposition to that which came before, the celebration of the grandmother as a unifying figure becomes a means through which connections can be forged between past and present subjectivities (see Bramall 134). Such intergenerational connections—and the notion that grandmotherly practices are treasures to be preserved—also serve as a way of reimagining and reinterpreting (often devalued) feminine domestic activities as alternative sources of pleasure and of the “good life” at a time when reducing consumption and adopting more sustainable lifestyle practices is becoming increasingly urgent (see Bramall; Soper). While this might nonetheless be interpreted as compliant with contemporary patriarchal and capitalist structures—indeed, there is nothing inherently countercultural about conceiving the domestic as a site of pleasure—the potential radicalism of these texts lies in the ways that they highlight how investment in the fantasies, pleasures and activities of domesticity are not available only to women, nor are they associated only with the reproduction of traditional gender roles. For example in Sweet Paul Eat &amp; Make, Lowe’s adoption of many of Mormor’s culinary and craft practices highlights the symbolic work that the nanna performs to enable his own commitment to forms of traditionally feminine domesticity. The fact that he is also large, hairy, heavily tattooed and pictured with a cute little French bulldog constructs Lowe as a simultaneously masculine and “camp” figure who, much like the playful and excessive femininity of well-known figures like Nigella Lawson (Brunsdon “Martha” 51), highlights the inherent performativity of both gendered and domestic subjectivities, and hence challenges any uncritical investment in these traditional roles. The countercultural potential of nanna-style cookbooks, then, lies not necessarily in an explicitly activist politics, but in a politics of the everyday. This is a politics in which seemingly conservative, nostalgic images of the nanna can make available new forms of identity, including those that emerge between generations, between the masculine and the feminine, and between imagined utopias of domesticity and the economic and environmental realities of contemporary consumer culture. Frankie’s Indie Nanna The countercultural potential of the nanna is also mobilised in fashion and lifestyle publications, including Frankie magazine, which is described as part of a “world where nanna culture is revered” (“Frankie Magazine Beats the Odds”). Frankie exemplifies both a reaction against a particular brand of femininity, and an invitation to consume more sustainably as part of the indie youth trend. Indie, as it manifests in Frankie, blends retro aesthetics with progressive politics in ways that present countercultural practices not as explicitly oppositional, but as access points to inclusive, empowering and pleasurable femininities. Frankie’s version of nanna culture can be found throughout the magazine, particularly in its focus on retro styles. The nanna is invoked in instructions for making nanna-style items, such as issue 46’s call to “Pop on a Cuppa: How to Make Your Own Nanna-Style Tea Cosy” (Lincolne 92-93), and in the retro aesthetics found throughout the magazine, including recipes depicting baked goods served on old-fashioned crockery and features on homes designed with a vintage theme (see Nov.-Dec. 2012 and Mar.-Apr. 2013). Much like nanna-style cookbooks, Frankie’s celebration of nanna culture offers readers alternative ways of thinking about consumption, inviting them to imagine the “satisfactions to be had from consuming differently” (Soper 222) and to construct ethical consumption as both expressions of alternative critical consumer culture and as practices of “cool” consumer connoisseurship (Franklin 165). Here, making your own items, purchasing second-hand items, or repurposing old wares, are presented not as forms of sacrifice, but as pleasurable and fashionable choices for young women. This contrasts with the consumption practices typically promoted in other contemporary women’s magazines. Most clearly, Frankie’s promotion of nanna chic stands in opposition to the models of desirable femininity characteristic of glossies like Cosmopolitan. The archetypal “Cosmo Girl” is represented as a woman seeking to achieve social mobility and desirability through consumption of cosmetics, fashion and sexual relationships (Oullette 366-367). In contrast, the nanna, with her lack of overt sexuality, older age, and conservative approach to consumption, invites identification with forms of feminine subjectivity that resist the patriarchal ideologies that are seen as typical of mainstream women’s magazines (see Gill 217). Frankie’s cover artwork demonstrates its constructed difference from modes of desirable femininity promoted by its glossy counterparts. The cover of the magazine’s 50th issue, for example, featured a embroidered collage depicting a range of objects including a sewing machine, teapot, retro glasses, flowers and a bicycle. This cover, which looks handcrafted and features items that evoke both nanna culture and indie style, offers forms of feminine style and desirability based on homecrafts, domestic self-sufficiency and do-it-yourself sustainability. The nanna herself is directly referenced on the cover of issue 52, which features an illustration of a woman in an armchair, seated in front of vintage-style floral wallpaper, a cup of tea in her hand, and her hair in a bun. While she does not possess physical features that signify old age such as grey hair or wrinkles, her location and style choices can each be read as signifiers of the nanna. Yet by featuring her on the cover of a young women’s magazine—and by dressing her in high-heeled boots—the nanna is constructed as subject position available to young, potentially desirable women. In contrast to glossy women’s magazines featuring images of young models or celebrities in sexualised poses (see Gill 184), Frankie offers a progressive politics of gender in which old-fashioned activities can provide means of challenging identities and consumption practices dominant within mainstream cultural industries. As Bramall (121) argues of “retro femininities in austerity,” such representations provide readers access to “subjectivities [that] may incorporate a certain critique of consumer capitalism.” By offering alternative modes of consumption in which women are not necessarily defined by youth and sexual desirability, Frankie’s indie nanna provides an implicit critique of mainstream consumerism’s models of ideal femininity. This gender politics thus relies not simply on an uncritical “gender reversal” (Plumwood 62), but rather reworks and recombines elements of past and present femininities to create new meanings and identities. Much like nanna-style cookbooks’ grandmotherly figures who unite generations, Frankie constructs the nanna as a source of wisdom and a figure to be respected. For example, a two-page spread entitled “Ask a Nanna” featured Polaroid pictures of nannas answering the question: “What would you tell your 20-year-old self?” (Evans 92-93). The magazine also regularly features older women, such as the profile describing Sonia Grevell as “a champion at crochet and living generously” (Corry 107). The editors’ letter of a recent issue describes the issue’s two major themes as “nannas and dirty, dirty rock”, which are described as having a “couple of things in common”: “they’ve been around for a while, you sometimes have to talk loudly in front of them and they rarely take shit from anyone” (Walker and Burke 6). The editors suggest that such “awesomeness” can be emulated by “eating a bikkie while gently moshing around the living room” or “knitting with drum sticks”—both unlikely juxtapositions that represent the unconventional nanna and her incorporation into indie youth culture. This celebration of the nanna stands in contrast to a mainstream media culture that privileges youth, especially for women, and suggests both common interests and learning opportunities between generations. While neither Frankie nor nanna-style cookbooks present themselves as political texts, when they are read within their particular historical and social contexts, they offer new ways of thinking about how countercultural practices are—and could be—mobilised by, and made accessible to, constituencies who may not otherwise identify with an explicitly oppositional politics. These texts sometimes appear to be located within a politically ambiguous nexus of compliance and resistance, but it is in this space of ambiguity that new identities and new commitments to progressive politics can be forged, normalised and made more widely available. These texts may not ultimately challenge capitalist structures of consumption, and they remain commodified products, but by connecting oppositional and mainstream practices, they offer new ways of conceiving the relationships between age, gender, sustainability and pleasure. They suggest ways that we might reimagine consumption as more sustainable and more inclusive than currently dominant modes of capitalist consumerism. References Barnett, Clive, Nick Clarke, Paul Cloke, and Alice Malpass. “The Political Ethics of Consumerism.” Consumer Policy Review 15.2 (2005): 45-51. Bramall, Rebecca. The Cultural Politics of Austerity: Past and Present in Austere Times. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Brunsdon, Charlotte. The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Brunsdon, Charlotte. “The Feminist in the Kitchen: Martha, Martha and Nigella.” Feminism in Popular Culture. Eds Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley. Oxford: Berg, 2006. 41-56. Bryner, Gary C. Gaia’s Wager: Environmental Movements and the Challenge of Sustainability. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Castells, Manuel, João Caraça, and Gustavo Cardoso. “The Cultures of the Economic Crisis: An Introduction.” Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis. Eds. Manuel Castells, João Caraça, and Gustavo Cardoso. Oxford University Press, 2012. 1–16. Corbett, Sarah, and Sarah Housley. “The Craftivist Collective Guide to Craftivism.” Utopian Studies 22.2 (2011): 344-351. Corry, Lucy. “Stitches in Time.” Frankie Jan.-Feb. 2014: 106-107. Desmond, John, Pierre McDonagh and Stephanie O’Donohoe. “Counter-Culture and Consumer Society.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 4.3 (2000): 207-343. DiBlasi, Jessie, and Jacqueline DiBlasi. Nonna to Nana: Stories of Food and Family. Melbourne: Jessie and Jacqueline DiBlasi, 2014. Duruz, Jean. “Haunted Kitchens: Cooking and Remembering.” Gastronomica 4.1 (2004): 57-68. Evans, Daniel. “Ask a Nanna.” Frankie Mar.-Apr. 2010: 92-93. Fields, Corey D. “Not Your Grandma’s Knitting: The Role of Identity Processes in the Transformation of Cultural Practices.” Social Psychology Quarterly 77.2 (2014): 150-165. Frankie. Mar.-Apr. 2013. ---. Nov.- Dec. 2012. “Frankie Magazine Beats the Odds.” The 7.30 Report. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 8 June 2010. Transcript. 30 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2921938.htm›. Franklin, Adrian. “The Ethics of Second-Hand Consumption.” Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction. Eds Tania Lewis and Emily Potter. London: Routledge, 2011. 156-168. Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Groeneveld, Elizabeth. “‘Join the Knitting Revolution’: Third-Wave Feminist Magazines and the Politics of Domesticity.” Canadian Review of American Studies 40.2 (2010): 259-277. Hackney, Fiona. “Quiet Activism and the New Amateur: The Power of Home and Hobby Crafts.” Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 169-194. Hollows, Joanne. “Feeling like a Domestic Goddess: Postfeminism and Cooking.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6.2 (2003): 179-202. Kellner, Douglas. “Towards a Critical Media/Cultural Studies.” Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches. Eds Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. 5-24. Lewis, Tania, and Emily Potter (eds). Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2011. Lincolne, Pip. “Pop on a Cuppa.” Frankie Mar.-Apr. 2012: 92-93. Lowe, Paul. Sweet Paul Eat &amp; Make: Charming Recipes and Kitchen Crafts You Will Love. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Miller, Toby. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism and Television in a Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2007. Minx, Heidi. Home Rockanomics: 54 Projects and Recipes for Style on the Edge. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009. Nathanson, Elizabeth. Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping. New York: Routledge, 2013. Orr, Gillian. “Sweet Taste of Sales Success: Why Are Cookbooks Selling Better than Ever?” The Independent (7 Sept. 2012). 29 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/sweet-taste-of-sales-success-why-are-cookbooks-selling-better-than-ever-8113937.html›. Oullette, Laurie. “Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and Girl-Style American Dreams.” Media, Culture and Society 21.3 (1999): 359-383. Parrish, Merle. Merle’s Kitchen. North Sydney: Ebury Press, 2012. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Soper, Kate. “Rethinking the ‘Good Life’: The Citizenship Dimension of Consumer Disaffection with Consumerism.” Journal of Consumer Culture 7.2 (2007): 205-229. Trussler, Meryl. “Half Baked: The Trouble with Cupcake Feminism.” The Quietus 13 Feb. 2013. 29 Sep. 2014 ‹http://thequietus.com/articles/07962-cupcake-feminism›. Walker, Jo, and Lara Burke. “First Thought.” Frankie Jan.-Feb. 2014: 6. Wilkinson, Laura, and Beth Wilkinson. Pass It Down and Keep Baking. Melbourne: Pass It On, 2013.

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Preface&#x0D; &#x0D; In the last twelve years of following copyright developments, I have witnessed an accelerating growth in the agitation over its application and increasing cries for reform. This was triggered by a mounting corporate hysteria for strengthening copyright which seems to mask other anxieties and other issues of bad faith beside the one at hand. This is in contrast with the more reasonable stance of the U.S. government in the 1980s when Congress refused to regulate video rentals and the Courts refused to cite the video recorder for ‘contributory infringement.’ In the 1990s, the Republican-controlled Congress passed several pieces of legislation extending copyright and punishing reverse engineering. Congressional giveaways and corporate shrillness has inspired a progressive movement to defend the intellectual ‘commons.’ The reality is that intellectual property is not owned by intellectuals, and so people are realising that further extensions of copyright no longer benefits the sciences and useful arts.&#x0D; &#x0D; Developments in copyright are driven by the challenges of new technologies of communication. This is a problem for the law, which does not like surprises and certainly proceeds by analogising new situations to old ones in order to build continuity. Case law (which is law that is developed by judges’ decisions and interpretations) proceeds by precedent. Yet old technologies are not the accurate precedents for new technology and this is particularly the situation today.&#x0D; &#x0D; The new technologies have a particular impact on the situation since they change not just one variable in the earlier balance of copyright, but all the variables. While the courts and the corporations have concentrated on the one variable of easy reproduction of content, we should also pay attention to how the new technologies have changed the very balance between the so-called ‘real world’ and cultural expression. The material world is now composed to a significant extent by cultural expression. We walk through physical landscapes dominated by billboards and other totems of the marketplace, while our mentalscapes are filled with trademarks and other commodity bits. This was not the case as copyright law developed; it is the case now, and the various underpinnings of copyright law have become embarrassingly ineffective in this new world.&#x0D; &#x0D; Edelman&#x0D; &#x0D; Bernard Edelman pushes back to find the moment of embarrassment. He finds it in photography. As Paul Hirst points out, ‘[Edelman’s title] Le Droit saisi par la photographie puns on the law being seized or caught by photography, surprised or caught out by it. Photography, a technical innovation developing independently of law, contradicts the existing formulations of property right in representations of things’ (Hirst 1-2).&#x0D; &#x0D; Prior to photography, representation inherently had stamps of personality that allowed such representation (painting, drawing, engraving et alia) to be easily and significantly distinguished from that part of the material world it was representing, as well as from other artistic representations (even of the same referent). The earliest French legal pronouncements on photography were reluctant to grant it copyright protection, precisely because it was thought to have no personality and to be a mechanical copy of nature. When the court did extend copyright protection to photography and admitted its personality, it was faced with how to distinguish it from the natural. The camera could no longer be interpreting as transparently reproducing the real. Edelman calls this the subjectivisation of the machine. The camera can no longer be both a transparent reproducer of the real; it has been found always to invest the real with the personality of its subject (the photographer). This has resulted in a number of ad hoc decisions to prevent ‘over-appropriation’ of the real.&#x0D; &#x0D; Anglo-American versus French Law&#x0D; &#x0D; Anglo-American writing about copyright has never wasted much time on subjectivisation of the machine. The basis of British copyright was pragmatic and economic to begin with, having originated with the Tudors’ desire to encourage printing by granting monopoly rights to printers, and to control and censor printing. The relocation of copyright ownership from printer to author in the 18th century was also an economically driven consideration reflecting the new spirit of competitive capitalism. Certainly the language of the U.S. Constitution that authorised the federal prerogative in setting copyright law was very pragmatic in its emphasis on promoting the progress of science and the ‘useful’ arts (Article 1 Section 8). The French tradition, which is somewhat paralleled by the German and those of other continental nations, was born out of a more courtly regard for the rights of genius. Although France recognised that works ‘made for hire’ were owned by the employer, it vested certain inalienable moral privileges in the real person of the artist. This legal doctrine is known as droit d’auteur. (see Ginsburg)&#x0D; &#x0D; Idea/Expression&#x0D; &#x0D; Yet the American tradition is not totally pragmatic. The balance between copyright and the First Amendment commitment to an absolute freedom of speech calls for a certain degree of abstraction. It was Thomas Jefferson who cautioned about the chilling effect copyright law might have with the spread of ideas. Fortunately in written language it was rather easy to work out that the way to protect ideas from property claims was to distinguish between the expression, which can be copyrighted, and the idea, which cannot.&#x0D; &#x0D; Siva Vaidhyanathan (109-15) goes over Judge Learned Hand’s development of the test to distinguish the idea from the expression in the 1920s and 1930s as particularly instructive for striking the balance. In Nichols v. Universal (1929), Hand develops the theme of ‘patterns of increasing generality’ as more incident is left out. At some point the abstraction is too great to be protected, since it now is more in the realm of idea then of particular expression. (45 F.2d 120)&#x0D; &#x0D; But Edelman’s work poses the question whether this works, as we move from machines of writing to machines of visual reproduction.&#x0D; &#x0D; Doesn’t Apply to Mechanical Mimetic Reproduction&#x0D; &#x0D; Photographs can be taken of the imaginary world and indeed the subjectivisation model holds that every photograph is determined by the imagination of the author. But it is commonsensical that photographs begin as traces of the material world. This is not analogous to the written word. The structural nature of language removes the written word from a direct relationship with its physical referent. Indeed, the entire linguistic turn in post-war philosophy is premised on the lack of any transparent or even determined relationship between language and things. Even in pre-war jurisprudence it was this lack of coincidence that allowed the easy split of the idea from its expression. As the expression floats above the idea, the word floats above the physical.&#x0D; &#x0D; Vincent Porter argues that in contrast to language, visual and audio recordings do not have this split, they do not float above the physical. He noted sound/image recordings have presented a problem in that they are speech acts without a language system, or in a distinction borrowed from Saussure ‘a series of paroles without a langue.’ (Porter 12) After all does a photograph fit into a grammar of images? Are there photographs that are ‘patterns of increasing generality?’ Where is the photograph that is the same idea as another photograph without being the same photograph? Is there a photograph that can do the same work as the word ‘mother?’ No. Every photograph will be of a particular mother of a particular age and particular ethnic group and the same difficulty applies even if we photograph a group of mothers or edit a montage of mothers. This has the effect of making the idea the same as the expression. If you protect one you have protected the other.&#x0D; &#x0D; At this point I was not certain how decisive an intervention these concepts could make in the current copyright ferment. Certainly the most exciting argument was the one mounted at the Berkman Institute at Harvard by several lawyers and argued before the Supreme Court by Lawrence Lessig in Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003). This presented the argument that the government had strayed from the original Constitutional mandate to allow exclusive rights only for a limited time.&#x0D; &#x0D; But as I read Lessig’s Free Culture and as I re-read Edelman, it strikes me that the idea/expression test does not adequately help the First Amendment rights of technologies of mimetic reproduction (film, audio recordings). It is that these technologies allow reproductions to easily re-enter the material world. When these reproductions do re-enter they will naturally become part of the domain of creative expression. Our artists must be allowed to freely comment on the world in which we live and the world in which we live is now visually and aurally full of copyrighted material. This image came to mind forcefully when Lessig explained the difficulties of documentarians when they film their subjects watching TV and then have to edit out the TV image rather than deal with the risk of being sued for infringement (Aufderheide and Jaszi 95-8).&#x0D; &#x0D; This image also comes to mind when reading of farmers who are not allowed to harvest their seed because they come from patented plants. But I will defer to patent philosophers on that apparent travesty of natural rights. I wish to stay focused on the argument that is the corollary of Edelman’s subjectivisation of the camera. The camera records the physical world and in turn that recording enters that world. This is to say that the genius of copyright is in the literary domain because written language never re-enters the material world. When copyright was extended beyond the literary, policy makers should have noticed that earlier tests were no longer capable of maintaining balance between our divine right to express our lives and the practical right to own our own expressions (for a limited time).&#x0D; &#x0D; The new test is almost already present in the law: it is the protection of parody from copyright infringement violation. The courts recognise that parody positions the original expression as an artifact of the world in order to comment on it. If only the policy makers could extend that view to documentarians and others who film the world and include in their film the physical fact of other videos being displayed in the world. Just as in parody they ought to consider the intent of the video makers is to comment on the original, not to plagiarise it.&#x0D; &#x0D; References&#x0D; &#x0D; Aufderheide, P., and P. Jaszi. Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers. 2004. 25 April 2005 http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/rock/index.htm&gt;. Edelman, B. Ownership of the Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law. London: Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul, 1979. Eldred v. Ashcroft, Attorney General. United States Supreme Court decision, 15 January 2003. http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/02pdf/01-618.pdf&gt;. Ginsburg, J. C. “A Tale of Two Copyrights: Literary Property in Revolutionary France and America.” Tulane Law Review 64.5 (1990): 991-1032. Hirst, P. Q. “Introduction.” In Bernard Edelman, Ownership of the Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law. London: Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul, 1979. Lessig, L. Free Culture. 2004. 8 April 2005 http://free-culture.org/get-it&gt;. Porter, V. “Copyright: The New Protectionism.” InterMedia 17.1 (1989): 10-7. Vaidhyanathan, S. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: NYU Press, 2001.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Citation reference for this article&#x0D; &#x0D; MLA Style&#x0D; Wasser, Frederick. "When Did They Copyright the World Without Us Noticing?." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/05-wasser.php&gt;. APA Style&#x0D; Wasser, F. (Jul. 2005) "When Did They Copyright the World Without Us Noticing?," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?&gt; from &lt;http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/05-wasser.php&gt;. &#x0D;