Making a Scene

Abstract

What makes ‘a scene’? Is it a collective attitude, a distinctive argot (‘you dig it?’), a shared look, a common drug-of-choice? Or is it a physical space? A place to congregate and just to ‘be’? It is hard to imagine the New York punk and New Wave scene of the late 1970s without CBGBs in the Bowery, or to imagine the New York disco scene without Studio 54. But while a specific venue might feel like the centre of a scene, it soon becomes apparent that one site quickly connects to other places and practices: to rehearsal rooms and recording studios, to record shops and cafés, to apartments and boutiques, to lofts and bars. It would be difficult to say where the hard infrastructure of sticky floors and speaker systems ends, and the seemingly immaterial world of feelings and attitudes begin. To see them as interlaced and mutually constituting would...