For three years I’ve been visiting essentially the same places on College Hill and surrounding neighborhoods. The names have changed slightly, but the essence of the places has stayed the same. I’ve seen the same faces from freshman year, with new additions joining the multiple circles within this subculture each year. I’ve heard the same artists, their new songs hits of course, but their old songs have sustained popularity and request frequency. I’ve done similar rituals with the many of the same people before arriving at our destination on the same nights (Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and sometimes Sunday.) One would think that me and my group members would all be incredibly bored of these rituals by now, our senior year; however, we’re not. The truth is, we’re just a small subset of what we’re a part of, and many of us newly being 21 can now explore it even further. It, of course, is the club/dive bar culture that a sub-set of Brown students has been frequenting for years and shows no signs of stopping.
It is true that the different circles overlap somewhat, casual “hello”s, but little understanding of the other groups and their rituals comes into this overlap. The convergence in this Venn diagram is slight. By taking an ethnographic look at this club/dive bar culture I hope to further understand this interplay and answer the questions that I am not able to answer by myself. By bringing in outside sources, outside interviewees and by studying the music that ties all of the circles together, I will attempt to be able to gain a complete understanding of which sub-groups make up this sub-culture. I will ask questions such as: How do the groups converge? What are the central values that the groups revolve around? Are the values always about music? How does the music differ week-to-week? Month-to-month? Year-to-year? Are there people who dislike the music but like the culture that is based off it/How does that dynamic work/can it be applied vice-versa? How do those outside the subculture entirely view it? How do the people within it self-reflect? By delving into the answers and stories brought up by these questions I hope that this will help both those within and outside of the sub-culture be able to gain an understanding of the how/what/where/when/why of jouissance sans innocence.
This sounds like a really fascinating idea, as I think many of us tend to stick to a particular routine here without really analyzing or dissecting why we do so. However, I'm a bit curious to see how you are able to deal with the difficulties of beings so embedded within a scene but at the same time able to distance yourself from it to study it. Also would you consider comparing where Brown students go to the places that perhaps locals typically frequent?-Alex
ReplyDeleteI'm super excited to learn more about this particular scene. Very creative way to organize a music/youth/subcultural theme. I am curious to know how issues of race and gender impact the disparate "circles" in the Venn Diagram of nightlife on and around College Hill; how do bands' stylistic differences attract or reflect the various identities that their patrons inhabit? What are these identities, and do they matter in constructing a unique and divided College Hill music scene?
ReplyDeleteI'm always happy when projects for this class lead people to look beyond their own normal routines/scenes and get to know Providence a little better. As you move forward with this, I think you might find that the "subculture" concept is a bit less useful than the "scene" concept (it's worth thinking a little bit about the different connotations of these terms). There are certainly intersecting scenes/communities/affinity groups that cross paths and sometimes interact (as you describe here), but I'd hesitate to refer to the sum total of those intersecting groups as a "subculture" that defines Providence nightlife. Here are a couple of readings that might be useful in thinking about this:
ReplyDeleteSkelton, Tracey, and Gill Valentine, eds. 1998. Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures. New York: Routledge.
Webb, Peter. 2007. Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures. New York: Routledge.
Great project. Focusing on a group or network of people and looking at the clubs and bars they frequent is an unconventional though I think potentially very productive approach. This shifts the emphasis from one location to the social movements of your informants. If you continue with this approach, you'll want to narrow your topic by focusing around a couple of fundamental questions or lines of inquiry. You'll also want to pay close attention not just to your interviewees, but to the larger social makeup of these clubs/bars. Otherwise, I would recommend focusing around one or two specific clubs or dive bars to ground your fieldwork. It's also not entirely clear to me how music fits into these various spaces. Are some of these spots dance clubs? Is there live music? Are there DJs? Or are these bars with recorded music, and if so, who chooses this music and how does it affect who comes to the bars and their experiences there? In other words, I'd like to see you thinking more specifically about the role of music and/or dance in these spaces. Moreover, is this a particular 'subculture' or is this rather a network of Brown students many of whom are your friends? Is 'subculture' the right term here? Like the above reviewer, you'll need to be reflexive in considering your own position within this 'scene.' Sometimes it is in fact more challenging to interview close friends and you might want to consider this in your choice of interviewees as well as how you evaluate those interviews. I look forward to seeing what direction you decide to take.
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