Diy Cultures and Underground Music Scenes

The concept of DIY ‘do-it-yourself’ cultural production gained critical momentum during the late 1970s with the emergence of punk. This proved to be a catalyst for the creation of a broader DIY aesthetic that has underpinned a succession of punk and post-punk music styles since the late 1970s. Indeed, to talk about DIY music scenes and cultures in a contemporary context is to talk about a phenomenon that is truly global; an alternative realm of cultural and artistic production, mediation and consumption which has a creative and inventive vitality that has endeavoured to assert itself in response to the economic and social crisis of the western world. The purpose of this book is to critically consider how the concept of DIY can be used as a means of studying contemporary underground music scenes with reference to themes such as local and trans-local connections, technological change, cultural policy, memory and heritage.

Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology at Griffith University and Director of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research. Prior to his appointment at Griffith, he held posts at Brock University in Canada and at the Universities of Surrey, Kent, Glasgow, and Durham, UK. He was a co-founder of the British Sociological Association’s Youth Study Group and is a Faculty Associate of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. He is a former editor-in-chief of Journal of Sociology (2009 – 2012) and serves on the Editorial Board of the journal Cultural Sociology among others. He is author of Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place (2000), Cultures of Popular Music (2001), Culture and Everyday Life (2005) and Music, Style and Aging (2013).

Paula Guerra is Professor of Sociology at the University of Porto. She is also Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Porto, Centre for the Study of Geography and Spatial Planning and the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research. She has coordinated and participated in various (national and international) research projects subordinated to the themes of youth culture, popular music, sociology of arts and culture and especially the particular case studies of indie rock, underground music scenes, DIY and punk. Paula Guerra has some published works, including A instavel leveza do rock. Genese, dinamica e consolidacao do rock alternativo em Portugal (1980-2010) [The unstable lightness of rock: genesis, dynamics and consolidation of the alternative rock in Portugal] (2013), Keep it rocking: the social space of Portuguese alternative rock (1980–2010) (Journal of Sociology, 2015), Music and more than music: The approach to difference and identity in the Portuguese punk (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2014) and Punk, expectations, breaches, and metamorphoses: Portugal, 1977-2012 (Critical Arts, 2014).