Initial Plan for my Ethonographic Research Project

For my research project, I will be attempting to study the multifarious character of a blog entitled Life Aquatic Blog. The ostensible goal for my research will be to gain insight into the world of the blog through submersion and participation. My initial curiosity revolves around how a virtual community with no proper administrative organization is able to coalesce around a certain defined aesthetic of music, even without the organizing principles of a stated genre, medium, or centralized geographic location.

I will also subsequently be investigating the reflexivity present in the blog, as exemplified by the status of people involved who are both readers and music makers. Furthermore I will attempt to discover how the blog conceives of it's self-identity with regard to music, what online and offline institutions it involves itself with, whether the location of the bulk of the contributors to the blog -- Australia -- has any relationship to the blog.

My methodology will take the form of a virtual ethnography. While the details of this plan are still in the formative stage, I anticipate participating through both making my own music submissions, participating in the active community of frequent blog followers, and direct interviews with members who are involved with the site. Admittedly, the project is a non-traditional approach to the practice of a music ethnography complicated by the vast uncertainties brought on by the transitory nature of the web. Here's to hoping I meet success!

Critical Review: Sarah Thornton's Club Cultures: Music, Media & Subcultural Capital

Sarah Thornton, in the cogent and impressively resilient third chapter of her book, Club Cultures: Music, Media & Subcultural Capita, thoroughly problematizes the concept of the "mainstream". In contrast to what she derides as the obfuscation of " a loaded colloquialism like the 'mainstream with academic arguments," (Thorton 92), Thornton seeks to deconstruct this reductive relationship between the mainstream and the opposition that subcultures have traditionally offered to it. Her methodology has two pillars, principally sociological analysis, including a notable reliance on Pierre Bourdieu, and the experience of a direct ethnography of UK club culture. Her ultimate conclusion is to reject this dichotomy for the way it ignores the impact of social structure, and normative commitments, on a subcultural group's thinking

Discussion Questions:

Thornton, beyond establishing the segregation of clubs and their itinerant subcultures along lines of culture, sexual orientation, and race, goes even further to employ Bourdieu's assertion that the emphasis on subculture itself is a manifestation of the eagerness of "bourgeois adolescents" to establish with respect to their bourgeois setting a "refusal of complicity whose most refined expression is a propensity towards aesthetics aestheticism' " (Bourdieu 1984:55). My question is duo-fold:

1. Is it possible to interpret this aforementioned bourgeois tendency as a more intellectually legitimate normative re-imagination of these youths' attitudes toward culture, rather than emblematic of the existing order?

2. Having accepted the aforementioned assertion, and used it to map subcultural allegiance on a socio-economic plain, is it still possible to transcend this architecture to suggest an objective criterion for judging musical preference?

Opening Post

This is my personal blog for Musical Youth Cultures, a seminar course in the Music Department at Brown University.

Let's start off with a music video from Santiago.This the work of the ultra-talented Alex Andwandte, formely of the band Teleradio Donoso.This man is stealing my walking dance-moves.