Culture, Class, Distinction

I’ve been following for some time the research by Tony Bennett and his team, working on a large-scale project to see how Pierre Bourdieu’s famous book Distinction plays out for Britain, and forty years after Bourdieu’s research in 1960s France. Bourdieu always stresses that he is not making a general theory about culture and social class, but is describing a particular society at a point in time. For example, giving a lecture on Distinction in Japan he stressed that the research results in Japan would be quite different.

It says something about the crisis in retail bookselling that the only ways to get this book is through the library or online.  http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415560771/

I’m still reading the book. But the main finding seems to be that whereas Bourdieu finds the main axis is volume of capital (economic and cultural) this research in Britain finds that the primary axis is participation in a variety of cultural forms (popular culture and high culture) versus not participating (except for watching television). Bennett seems to argue that Bourdieu’s concept of class-based habitus is not relevant in Britain in the 2000′s. Though class and education are sometimes relevant, for example, when it comes to listening to classical music, or reading books on a regular basis.

I suspect that I have been reading Bourdieu on social class in a different way than Bennett. Bourdieu got attacked a lot in the 1970s and 1980s for NOT having a Marxist concept of class (the workers vs the capitalists). Its clear that by class Bourdieu does not mean a lifestyle or identity. He means a position in the social field. His discussion of the dominant sector stresses differences between old money and new money, and between industrialists and professors and writers. Similarly, he describes several different fractions of the middle-class. There are important differences between the (declining) sector of shopkeepers, office workers, and the new middle-class who are more or less selling a lifestyle (television presenters, therapists, etc.)

The section on the working class in Distinction is the shortest in the book. Not because of the lack of manual workers in France in the 1960s, but because the survey of legitimate cultural activities done by Bourdieu pretty much excludes most working people. As in Bennett’s findings, they don’t participate. What Bourdieu falls back on in this chapter is a kind of memoir, or ethnographic description of working-class lives. I’ve always found this section of the book deeply moving because I always thought Bourdieu is describing his own family. (Its no accident he had Richard Hoggart’s memoir of working-class life in Britain published in France.)

So my initial response to the book (I’m blogging as I read it) is yes: of course Great Britain in the 2000′s is not the same as France in the 1960s. There are lesbians in Bennett’s book! But I don’t see that the finding that people are excluded from legitimate kinds of culture, or that they exclude themselves, in any way contradicts the general drift of Bourdieu’s work: symbolic violence works to exclude people from culture and from public life.

Bennett finds that the working class is positioned in the field where most of the variables are negative:

never visiting museums, stately homes or art galleries; never going to the cinema; nor playing sport; never attending the theatre or concerts; and not having read a book in the last year. Also among tastes, dislikes for reading biographies and modern literature, and listening to classical music and jazz are found. Positive preferences are few: the poorly educated members of the working class are disproportionately likely to watch more than five hourse television per day, to like soap operas and listening to country and western  music, and to like eating out at fish-and-chip restaurants. (p. 199)

Asked, if for your age is your health good, the professional executive class says yes 81% of the time. The figure for the working class is 67%. (p. 203)

The best book on the Internet

Milton Mueller, Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance (MIT Press, 2010).

This is a serious and detailed look at key issues about the Internet, based on careful research and full of thoughtful assessments. Anyone who has read Mueller’s earlier book Ruling the Root (2002) knows what to expect.

The book starts with a discussion about networks. It is a technique in social research to show nodes and links, such as a map of highschool friends. But there are also a lot of claims about the web as a network and about a network society. The whole point of Mueller’s work is that the Internet today is less a network and more a regulated hierarchy.

Issues of Internet governance were discussed at the World Summit on the Information Society (2002 in Switzerland and 2005 in Tunisia). Many particpants and activists who took part have written about the frustrations of the whole WSIS process. But Mueller makes a convincing case that it had real and lasting effects.

The WSIS conferences put the spotlight on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which has the authority to take key decisions about the Internet. It is not simply a technical organization as Lawrence Lessig claimed at the time. ICANN has real power and a fairly hefty annual budget. But it is registered under California law and is not accountable to nations outside the USA for its decisions. ICANN is the outfit that decides whether we can add to .com, .net and .org. The recent controversy about .gay shows that this is not simply a technical matter. Mueller carefully outlines the many implications  for free expresion of such controls over the Internet.

What to do is more complex. Mueller does not call for an end to ICANN because this would simply cause control to revert to some 200 national governments, many of them unfriendly to freedom of expression. Mueller ends with an interesting discussion of leftist responses to the many issues that he raises. (See link below.) Nobody on the left wants a kind of Stalinist control of the Internet. But most of us have not even begun to understand the issues, much less come up with convincing solutions. Mueller’s book is essential reading.    

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2058/1956

Readings about political blogs

There’s a lot of interest in politics and blogs these days.  You’ll find journalists and information technology corporations making claims about the effects of  social media in the current wave of unrest in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. But experts in the field are more cautious.  I’ve sorted through the huge literature to come up with some good places to begin researching this topic.

The popular revolutions in Egypt and other countries may be more a revolt against neoliberal policies than effects of information technology. Young people are protesting  against cutbacks to education, health and government services. And they’re protesting against rising social inequality between the rich elites and ordinary people in their country.

General introductions to blogs:

These are both written by journalists and are very readable. Loewenstein has a great chapter on blogs in Egypt, good background for what’s happening there today.

Anthony Loewenstein, The Blogging Revolution (2008)

Scott Rosenberg, Say Everything: How Blogging Began… (2009)

 Theoretical academic treatments:

Two books by academics that in their own ways are fairly skeptical about blogging.  Anyone who has read much on the topic will also be skeptical about claims that blogs will make the revolution. It takes more sweat and tears than that.

Jodi Dean, Blog Theory (2010)

Geert Lovink, Zero Comments (2008)

 General articles:

Again, both fairly skeptical about the political potential of social media.

Clay Shirky, “The Political Power of Social Media,” Foreign Affairs (Jan/ Feb 2011)

Bart Cammaerts “Critiques on Web 2.0” Communication, Culture & Critique vol.1 , no. 4.  (December 2008). 

 Online free sources on blogs:

For people without university library access, these items are easy to find and good places to begin. The first three are widely cited in the literature and essential reading.

Clay Shirky, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality” (2003) http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

Rebecca Blood, “Weblogs: A history and perspective” (2000) http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

Lenhart and Fox, “Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers” PEW (2006) http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2006/Bloggers.aspx

Reconstruction vol .6, no.4 (2006) special issue on Theories/Practices of Blogging http://reconstruction.eserver.org/064/contents.shtml

Interesting article on blogging among UK Goths www.paulhodkinson.co.uk/publications/hodkinsonsubculturalblogging.pdf

 Blogs in Iran

Really great research. Who said academics are boring?

Sreberny and Khiabany, “Becoming Intellectual: The Blogestan and the Public Political Space in the Islamic Republic,” British Journal of Middle East Studies (Dec 2007) 34,3

Doostdar, “The Vulgar Spirit of Blogging…” American Anthropologist 106,4 (2004).  

Blogs in Egypt

You’ll find the free online journal Arab Media and Society very useful here. Start with the great piece by Tom Isherwood.

Tom Isherwood, “A new direction or more of the same: Political blogging in Egypt,” Arab Media & Society (Sept 2008). Free online journal. http://www.arabmediasociety.com/topics/index.php?t_article=230

Wendel Steavenson, “Letter from Cairo: On the Square,” New Yorker Feb 28, 2011

Negar Azimi, “Bloggers Against Torture,” The Nation Feb 6, 2007.

Radsch, “Core to commonplace: The Evolution of Egypt’s blogosphere,” Arab Media & Society 6 (Fall 2008).

Elting et al. “Mapping the Arabic blogosphere: politics and dissent online,” New Media & Society 2010, 12 (8).

Blogs in China

Most blogs in China are personal journals. Celebrity blogs are very popular. Only a very small number of blogs have political content that questions the ruling party. They are quite controlled, but sometimes can speak out.  I’d start with Rebecca McKinnon’s well-researched article in the free online journal First Monday.

Rebecca MacKinnon, “China’s Censorship 2.0: How companies censor bloggers,” First Monday vol. 14,  no.2 (2 Feb 2009). Free online journal. http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2378/2089

Xiang Zhou, “The political blogosphere in China,” New Media & Society (2009) vol. 11(6) 1003-1022.

Sima and Pugsley, “The Rise of a ‘me’ culture in postsocialist China: Youth, Individualism and Identity Creation in the Blogosphere,” International Communication Gazette 2010 vol. 72 (3): 287-306. 

Wang and Hong, “Discourse behind the forbidden realm: Internet surveillance and its implications on China’s blogosphere,” Telematics and Informatics 27 (2010) 67-78. 

Han and Zhang, “Starbucks is forbidden in the Forbidden City: Blog…” Public Relations Review 35 (2009): 395-401.

Readings on Neoliberalism

BOOKS

David Harvey’s book is easy to find and easy to read. Everyone who has read it says it really helps to understand the world today.  He draws on work by two French researchers, Dumenil and Levy (they have a very helpful website) who have just published a new book on the financial crisis of 2008-09. Birch and Mykhenko is a great collection of essays. Because many of the contributors are geographers there is an emphasis on differences in neoliberalism around the world.  Michel Foucault lectured on German and American neo-liberalism in 1978-1979, one of the few times he lectured on the contemporary world.   

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2011)

Kean Birch & Vlad Mykhnenko, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse of an Economic Order? (Zed Books, 2010).  Info and additional material   http://www.keanbirch.org/p/publications.html

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-79 (Picador Books, 2008).

ARTICLES

These are all live links. You should be able to click through and read the article without access to a university library.

Birch and Mykhnenko, “Varieties of Neoliberalism?” Journal of Economic Geography vol. 9 (2009): 355-80. Available through http://www.keanbirch.org/p/publications.html

Pierre Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” (December 1998) http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu

Robin Blackburn, “The Subprime Crisis,” New Left Review no. 50 (2008): 63-106  http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2715

Brenner, Peck and Theodore, “Variegated Neoliberalization,” Global Networks vol. 10, no. 2 (2010)  http://as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/222/Brenner_Peck_Theodore_2010_Global_Networks.pdf

David Harvey, On Neoliberalism: An Interview. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/lilley190606.html

John Hollaway, Change the World without Taking Power. http://libcom.org/library/change-world-without-taking-power-john-holloway

Wendy Larner, Guest Editorial: “Neoliberalism?” Environment and Planning 21 (2003): 509-12  http://www.envplan.com/epd/editorials/d2105ed.pdf

Stephanie Lee Mudge, “What is Neoliberalism?” Socio-Economic Review vol. 6 (2008): 703-31  http://ser.oxfordjournals.org/content/6/4/703.full.pdf+html

Emir Sader, “The Weakest Link: Neoliberalism in Latin America,” New Left Review no. 52 (2008): 5-32  http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2730 

Saskia Sassen, “Mortgage Capitalism and Its Particularities: a New Frontier for Global Finance,” Journal of International Affairs vol. 62, no. 1 (2008): 187-212  http://www.columbia.edu/~sjs2/PDFs/MortgageFinance2008.pdf

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: Bibliography  http://www.iippe.org/wiki/images/7/73/NeoliberalBibliography.pdf

Habermas and the German Intellectual Field

Habermas: An Intellectual Biography, by Matthew C. Specter (Cambridge Univ Press 2010)

This is a pretty interesting book and completely different from Thomas McCarthy’s excellent 1981 overview of Habermas. The book argues that Habermas should be understood in the German intellectual field, in particular as an intervention in German constitutional law. So rather than considering Habermas to be a theorist of the “public sphere” (a free space for discussion not controlled by government or business), or the conditions required for non-distorted communication in general, this book shows that Habermas’s work over several decades is an intervention in debates about German constitutional law. This includes a rejection of legal arguments made by students of Carl Schmitt, one of the few Nazi-era jurists to be removed from his public post after the war.

This reading of Habermas confirms the suggestion made by Pierre Bourdieu that the work of Habermas be understood as an intervention in the German intellectual field. Habermas’s rejection of the line from Bataille to Foucault, including the work of Derrida, is a strategy in a particular historical situation. An argument in favor of an uncompleted project of modernity (Habermas is never happy with postmodern theory) may have been the most radical strategy in postwar Germany. What mattered most for the generation of 1958 was open discussion and reason.

Habermas’s position for popular sovereignty in preference to human rights seems pretty abstract. But it makes sense when you realize that the context is judicial activism in Germany by a conservative Supreme Court. In that historical context, on-going public discusssion would be preferable to rulings by Supreme Court judges. Habermas’s work is therefore read as a coded study of the field of constitutional law in Germany rather than only as critical theory.

Is There Punk Rock in China?

There’s an interesting chapter in Jing Wang’s book Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture (Harvard University Press, 2008) about youth culture and marketing. It includes an ad for Motorola cell phones with a Chinese punk, black t-shirt, studded wrist-band, full punk hair and the guy is screaming into his cell phone. But Wang suggests that punk in China is less a committed subculture than an urban neo-tribe with little long-term commitment to punk. This is based on interviews with a small number of urban youth. She describes the offspring of the one-child policy as kids who are the centre of attention for adoring parents and grandparents. Punk or any style is optional, short-term, and not to be taken too seriously. This is interesting but there are hardcore punk scenes in other Asian countries. Scene reports by committed and politically engaged punks appear in zines like Maximumrocknroll. Does this not exist in China?

I’ve received some interesting comments on this, including a link to a report on the activities of a Chinese punk organizer.  http://chinastudygroup.net/2010/12/the-alternative-education-of-a-chinese-punk/

Sociology and Cultural Studies

Loic Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minnesota, 2009)

I bought this at the Bob Miller Bookroom (180 Bloor Street West), one of the few remaining serious bookstores in Toronto. It cost $23 or about half the price of a book of cultural theory that also caught my attention. 

The theme is similar to a famous book in Cultural Studies by Stuart Hall and others called Policing the Crisis (1978) . That thick book documents how in 1970s Britain the state turned from persuasion to hard policing, especially of Afro-Caribbean youth in the cities. The major difference from Wacquant’s book on prisons in the USA and Europe is that Policing the Crisis draws attention to a mass media panic about “mugging” that justified the turn to tough policing.   

In August 2010 Stockwell Day, a rightwing member of the Canadian government, said that the federal government needs to spend billions of dollars on expanding prisons even though crime rates in Canada have been falling since 1991.  Wacquant’s book is a response to this “get tough on crime” conservative agenda and how it spread from the United States to other countries around the world. The extraordinary expansion of prison populations in the USA has little to do with increased crime. It is mostly about disciplining marginalized populations and those out of work. It is part of a conservative business agenda of cutting labour costs and social services.  The “get tough” agenda means that many people in American prisons are there because of minor drug offences and policies of “zero tolerance.”

British Cultural Studies always had a strong influence from sociology (this is also true in Latin America). Stuart Hall is a respected sociologist in Britain. In the United States the influences have been from the Humanities.  In North America it is difficult to imagine Waquant’s Prisons of Poverty as part of Cultural Studies. Why is this the case?

Cultural Studies in the USA and Canada is marked by a turn to theory. This often means books by French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida. In his early work Derrida attacked the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss who wrote Race and History (1952) and contributed to discussions leading to the first UNESCO declaration on race. Derrida uses the tools of deconstruction to undermine social science by insisting on the importance of writing. At the same time he makes claims in Of Grammatology (1976) for his own method as a positive science.

We could indeed pay attention to Wacquant’s Prisons of Poverty as writing. It has echos from the writing style of Pierre Bourdieu, including the use of italics for long sections, and boxes for quotations and other exhibits. It is a book written with irony and passion. People with training in philosophy and the Humanities may notice this more. The problem is when this kind of “deconstruction” is taken to delegitimate the message of the book. The book is a hard-hitting and effective argument against nonsense said and done in the name of “getting tough on crime.” So who benefits from deconstructing  its argument? Wacquant’s book is translated into many languages and helps people around the world to challenge rightwing political rhetoric about crime and prisons. Maybe someone should send Stockwell Day a copy.

Not Writing about Punk Rock

Ryan Moore, Sells Like Teen Spirit: Music Youth Culture and Social Crisis (New York University Press, 2010).

Jack Boulware & Silke Tudor, Gimme Something Better: The profound, progressive, and occasionally pointless history of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day (Penguin, 2009).

Toronto’s best alternative bookstore is no more, a victim of high rent where there used to be hardware stores and crummy bars that would sometimes let punk bands play. So I was lucky to find one of these at the University bookstore, and the other at Type Books further along Queen Street West where the rent is still reasonable.

At first I was puzzled by Ryan Moore’s book Sells Like Teen Spirit because I knew he had written a good study of the alternative music scene in San Diego based on in-depth interviews. I was expecting that kind of detailed ethnography of punk and alternative rock. Instead the book is a general sociology of music and youth along the lines of Simon Frith’s Sound Effects. That classic book is 30 years old, so I began to get interested in what seems an update by a much younger writer, and an American rather than a Brit. Only an American would call someone who writes books on youth subcultures a “scholar.”

In the first chapter I was a bit dismayed by Moore’s generalizations about “the punk subculture” because he knows very well that punk rock is not one thing. British anarcho-punks Crass are quite different from the American straight-edge band Earth Crisis, with their conservative and anti-abortion lyrics. But once he gets into details he starts to make distinctions, for example between 1970s arty bands like Talking Heads and poppy bands like the Ramones, even if their pop sound comes with lots of irony. Little kids love the Ramones.

The key term in this book is cultural intermediary. It comes mainly from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He means people like rock journalists, disc jockeys, record producers. These people play a key role in shaping tastes and Bourdieu has no faith whatsoever in them. In his ideal world, musicians would not have to appear on television talk shows, and poets would judge other poets. Punk rock has plenty of cultural intermediaries: think of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. It always puzzles me how writers like Dick Hebdige could theorize about the meaning of youth subcultures and not recognize the vital role of these older (much older) cultural intermediaries in shaping the subculture. The Sex Pistols would not have existed without their manager Malcolm McLaren.

English punk rock in the 1970s was not just “dole queue rock” (a famous expression from the time). We know today that it was not only a reflection of high youth unemployment. Punk was different in Manchester than in London. Different again in Belfast. It mattered whether you were an experienced band jumping onto the punk bandwagon or whether you were 17 years old and clueless. Quite a few early punks had backgrounds in art school. And you have to take into account the shaping influence of the cultural intermediaries who wrote about the new music, played it on the radio, and encouraged bands in different ways. Once you notice these cultural intermediaries its hard to see punk as a simple or direct expression of society, or hard economic times. You have to examine its workings as a field. The chapters in this book on punk, metal and alternative music of the 1990s offer interesting sketches for this, with an emphasis on the successful bands. 

Boulware and Tudor’s Gimme Something Better is completely different. It belongs to a genre of punk books based on interviews with participants. The interviews are edited together in a way that seems borrow from the style of mainstream documentary films. We get one voice, then a few more, then they start to come back in again. The best known of these books is American Hardcore by Steven Blush (also made into a documentary film) and it gives little weight to the radical or political part of the punk scene. George Hurchalla’s Going Underground: American Punk 1979-1992 is much better in this respect (but I’ve never seen it in a bookstore).

These interview-based books always make claims to authenticity: the people were there. The book tells it like it really was. The problem is that we are never told what is left out. Or on what principles the editors selected bits from the interview transcripts. All the good bits about getting drunk? There is plenty of that in Gimme Something Better. But also a lot of interesting stuff about Maximumrocknroll, Mordam distribution, Gilman Street. The infrastructure of the punk scene. Sometimes we are told the speaker’s background: an army brat or a professor’s kid. But as usual there is no analysis and no attempt to come to any conclusions about the punk scene.

Some parts of the punk music scene are arty and thoughtful and other parts simply appeal in a realist way to youth. We find much the same diversity in book publishing. Ryan Moore writes a serious book for an academic press. Boulware and Tudor are journalists for the New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, SF Weekly.

Dosse on Deleuze & Guattari

Some people I admire make very good arguments against intellectual biographies. The problem, of course, is that the biographical approach separates the subject from their social context, their relations with others in the field. Francois Dosse’s lovely thick book Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (Columbia University Press, 2010) to some extent breaks with the model. After all it is about two intellectuals. 

Guattari is unfairly relegated to second place. Many accounts of their joint books such as Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) reduce them to one figure: Deleuze. But Guattari is an important and sympathetic character. Dosse starts his book with several long chapters about him. Guattari played a vital role in La Borde Clinic, an alternative psychiatric institution in France. Just alternative, because Guattari considers anti-psychiatry to be irresponsible. But La Borde Clinic is way better than today’s dominant model of pharmacy-driven psychiatry. And Guattari created a really interesting model of a theraputic community, breaking down power relations between staff and patients, insisting that people take turns at all jobs, lots and lots of meetings. He was also involved in two important movements of the 1980s: ecology and community radio.

There is a great deal in the book about the intellectual field in France. This provides background that is understood in France, but foreign news in North America. The reception of Anti-Oedipus–a book that is very much a product of the student-worker revolution of 1968–is itself an interesting case study of the workings of the French intellectual field. It is well-known, for example, that Lacan instructed his School to ignore it. Maoists attacked it. This is all described in Chapter 11.

There is also an interesting chapter on Vincennes, an alternative university set up very quickly after 1968 near Paris, on land owned by the military. The faculty included Foucault, Deleuze, Badiou, Ranciere, Henri Weber (who wrote a useful book on the Nicaraguan revolution), Balibar, Lyotard and Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan’s son-in-law and intellectual heir). What is the role of this institution in their work? Dosse describes the differences that emerge: Foucault against the Lacanians, Badiou against Deleuze (with a hilariously titled anonymous polemic on “The Fascism of the Potato”), Deleuze against Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. You come to realize that these are not just texts but position taken by intellectuals against one another. Deleuze never got to make up his quarrel with Foucault and instead spoke at his funeral, reading from one of Foucault’s own books.

Before his collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze wrote a series of books on philosophers such as Kant and Nietsche. It was his apprensticeship. These books are known for offering new and dramatic readings of these philosophers. How far can this be taken? I remember Costas Boundas saying that Badiou’s book on Deleuze is terrible. Dosse describes it as a kind of deliberate misreading: an attempt to turn Deleuze into something like Badiou himself. So maybe there are limits to readings that slide off. After all, you’d probably feel cheated if what I’ve said has absolutely nothing to do with this book.

The Top 13 Indie Record Labels

What does it mean to make a list of the top-10 or thirteen indie record labels? And then to have people comment that the list is cool, or that their favorite label is left out? Are there other ways of thinking about these record labels?

The first problem is this: what is the set from which the top-10 is selected? “Indie” is not a subculture. The list (see below) includes punk, metal, hip hop and other labels. It is true that some university researchers these days have been questioning whether subcultures actually have fixed boundaries. Goth seems to be pretty self-contained, hardcore punk is recognizable but a bit more fuzzy (and a straightedge kid is not the same as an anarchopunk), but punk in the 1990s is pretty ill-defined if you include every kid who listens to Green Day. The hope was that they might discover Propaghandi and then get into Dropdead. Or go to a local underground show where it was $5 at the door and the bands had something to say beyond please buy our record.   

Researchers on youth culture have been pointing out that lots of kids may listen to punk, indie rock AND hip hop. In multicultural Canada we’d generally encourage this interest in hearing different voices. There are many thoughtful writers on hip hop, but I’m going to concentrate on punk record labels, just because I’ve done some serious research on that scene.

Some writers have made thoughtful attempts to describe indie. One of the best is Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. Notice how Azerrad in order to say something meaningful restricts himself to a place and time: the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s. His bands are: Black Flag, The Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Husker Du, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr and Fugazi. This might seem like a list, but I think it is something more thoughtful. The book describes the culture of hardcore punk and bands that took that sound in more experimental directions. Although it was controversal, many also tried to live up to a DIY ethics. The paradigm of this is maybe The Minutemen. Azerrad titles his book in homage to this band. And he pretty much ends his narrative when a band signs up with a major label.

You can see the continuation of this scene in We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet–The Collected Interviews, edited by Daniel Sinker. It still has Black Flag, Dead Kennedys and Fugazi. But the range of voices is broader. More women, like Kathleen Hanna. Some queer and Latino voices. Some artists and designers. And explicitly political voices such as Noam Chomsky and the Ruckus Society. The book even ends with some people who are disillusioned with punk. For a take on the DIY punk scene today have a look a zine like Maximumrocknroll http://maximumrocknroll.com/.

So here’s the list from The Top 13 website:

1. Sub Pop
2. Dischord
3. Factory
4. Touch and Go
5. Matador
6. Megaforce
7. Warp
8. Merge
9. Rawkus
10. SST
11. 4AD
12. Alternative Tentacles
13. Definitive Jux

http://www.thetop13.com/independent-record-labels-L87/

The first thing to notice is that the list mixes quite different types of music labels: punk, hardcore, postpunk, metal, electronic and hip hop. While its good from a music listener’s perspective to be adventurous, a serious researcher would want to say something about what is specific to these different forms of music.

Most of these are pretty established labels (a few don’t exist in the same form anymore). If the compiler of the list was going for a track record of notable releases this makes sense. But there seems to be an unspoken bias against newer labels in the very idea of making a top-10 list. A serious researcher would want to put the successful labels in context: to look at them in relation to labels that no longer exist or started up more recently. In other words, you’d want to look at the whole field (or a reasonable sample) in which these successful record labels operate.

But the really vexed question is one of business independence. This is clearly one of the criteria used in making the list. And here the list-maker really mixes up some distinctions that are meaningful both within music scenes like hardcore punk and for university researchers on record labels. Its just plain wrong to see Sub Pop as the paradigm for DIY ethics.  The expanded post on Sub Pop does tell us that Warner Bros. has a 49% stake in the record label. The issue is not just that for many people that is 49% too much. Sub Pop is just not part of the DIY punk scene.

Dischord is a lot more convincing. And when I did research for my book Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy, a lot of people mentioned Dischord as a model to follow. Full respect to Ian MacKaye and everyone at the record label. But Ian has always done things his own way and the expanded post is a bit misleading. Dischord has access to chain record stores through its arrangement with Southern Records (now distributed by Fontana, part of the Universal Music Group). In a similar way, Touch & Go record label is distributed by ADA (part of Warner Music Group).

The point I’m making is the limitation of lists as a way of organizing how we think. What we’re offered is a list of record labels but the key to understanding the field is actually distribution. Anyone with a couple of thousand dollars can put out a recording. The problem is getting it distributed into stores. The four major labels all have businesses that distribute “indie” record labels.

• Caroline is owned by EMI
• RED is part of Sony BMG
• Fontana belongs to Universal Music Group
• ADA is owned by Warner Music Group

So its a bit misleading to say that an “indie” is not distributed by a major record label when actually it is distributed by Caroline, RED, Fontana or ADA. Most “indie” record labels try to hide the fact that they actually have relations with a major label in this way.

There are alternatives to distributors owned by the major labels.  Among these are Ebullition and Hardcore Holocaust.  Also the Independent Label Collective:  http://www.ilcdistro.com/site/ 

I’m not going to give my list of “real” indie record labels. Because the point I want to make is that serious thought has to move beyond lists to understand the real issues in the field. This means research that actually tries to understand how things work. When we see  a top-10 list our first impulse is to look who made the cut and who didn’t. We might even post a comment to add our own opinion. But what I’m suggesting is that we need to stop this whole game.

Thanks to Liam Young for getting me thinking about lists.