Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual.(Book Review)

Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Edited by Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. [xvi, 264 p. ISBN 0-8265-1451-0. $24.95.] Illustrations, index.

"Scene" is one of the most frequently-used--and therefore murky--terms in popular music studies and, before this volume, has scarcely been sorted out thoroughly, save for a trenchant article in Cultural Studies by Will Straw ("Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music," Cultural Studies 53 [1991]: 368-88). But that was 1991. Scenes have come and gone, and, more to the point for the purposes of this volume, the explosion of popular music studies has meant that more and more people are studying these amorphous entities most of us call "scenes."

So the time is right for such a book. Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson's edited volume Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual offers portraits of a variety of music scenes which, they hope, "together ... present something that approaches a complete view of scenes" (p. 1). Their introduction offers a useful, though brief, overview of the literature on scenes and a general forecasting of the essays to come (specific overviews are included in the table of contents as abstracts for each essay). The introduction is only 12 pages, however, and the authors in their brevity and interest in taxonomy of scenes missed an opportunity to make a more robust theoretical intervention in the sparse literature on scenes.

The book is divided into three sections around scenes that the editors call "local," "translocal," and "virtual," which are briefly introduced by the editors. These are reasonably useful divisions, though it isn't always clear why a particular scene is in one category and not another. There are few local music scenes in the U.S. and the U.K., where the book is largely concentrated, that are strictly local. Many scenes, as the various authors of the included essays show, have extensions beyond their locality via the press and the Internet.

So I think the editors' use of these categories is a bit inflexible. Editor Richard Peterson and Steve S. Lee offer an essay on an "Internet-based Virtual Music Scene," about an alternative country music e-mail list, which begs a number of questions. First, one wonders whether a scene around music--a fan-based scene--is the same thing as a music scene. More significantly, however, Lee and Peterson seem determined to cram a "virtual scene" into pre-existing notions of what a scene is, intent on expanding the concept of the scene. Their argument for including a de-territorialized group of individuals who converse electronically about music under the rubric of "scene" isn't as convincing as it should be. It would probably be more useful to argue that a scene is a local phenomenon but can be extended via print, broadcasting, or digital technologies beyond itself into a larger network.

There are some useful moments, however. David Grazian's discussion of the Chicago blues scene makes a useful contribution to the notion of what he calls the "symbolic economy of authenticity" (p. 34) in that scene, the dominant ideology of fans who seek what they believe to be "real" urban blues music. Ken Spring's discussion of an evanescent rave scene outside of Detroit has a tangible sense of space that is lacking in many discussions of scenes.

One of the running themes of the book, at least for me, was the question of methodology, and, in particular, ethnography. Some of the authors attempt full-scale ethnographic studies, with varying degrees of success. The lone musicologist in the group, Melanie Lowe, claims to have conducted an ethnography, but this proves to be a focus group study instead; the two are not the same. An ethnography is a long-term investigation that is open-ended and not questionnaire-driven, ideally yielding a rich body of data. The studies ...