Alternative Scene Research Articles

The underground: Alternative scenes and clothing styles in Costa Rica during the 1990s

During the 1990s, Costa Rica experienced a growth in young bands performing emergent music genres. From a post-subcultural approach, this article argues that a varied array of young bands from different musical genres and scenes created a sense of unity and support that led to the creation of what was known as ‘the underground scene’ during the 1990s. The ‘underground scene’ served as a platform that opened up a series of spaces that were alternative to the mainstream, where youth groups were able to perform their music and create new styles. In these new spaces, members of the underground developed new clothing styles linked to their musical tastes. By interviewing members of different alternative rock and reggae bands, information was gathered and analysed to visualize the development of these scenes. Members of the scene established their clothing styles based on their icons and could be identified within a specific genre due to their dress. Aesthetics were a mix of influences and bands that came directly from western countries. Americanas (thrift stores) was youth’s primary outlet for clothing hunting and they adopted current styles directly from the United States.

This is Your Roof: Willoughby Sharp’s Lost Video Show

In 1972, Willoughby Sharp participated in the international Encuentros de Pamplona festival in Spain with a video show entitled This is your Roof, a highly representative selection of videos by sixteen New York artists from SoHo’s dynamic alternative scene. All but five of the videotapes have since disappeared. Drawing upon the existing documentation, this paper reconstructs their history and context while also offering certain lines of interpretation.

Three in One: Three Different Molybdates Trapped in a Thiacalix[4]arene Protected Ag72 Nanocluster for Structural Transformation and Photothermal Conversion.

Polyoxometalates (POMs) represent crucial intermediates in the formation of insoluble metal oxides from soluble metal ions, however, the rapid hydrolysis-condensation kinetics of MoVI or WVI makes the direct characterization of coexisted molecular species in a given medium extremely difficult. Silver nanoclusters have shown versatile capacity to encapsulate diverse POMs, which provides an alternative scene to appreciate landscape of POMs in atomic precision. Here, we report a thiacalix[4]arene protected silver nanocluster (Ag72b) that simultaneously encapsulates three kinds of molybdates (MoO4 2- , Mo6 O22 8- and Mo7 O25 8- ) in situ transformed from classic Lindqvist Mo6 O19 2- , providing more deep understanding on the structural diversity and condensation growth route of POMs in solution. Ag72b is the first silver nanocluster trapping so many kinds of molybdates, which in turn exert collective template effect to aggregate silver atoms into a nanocluster. The post-reaction of Ag72b with AgOAc or PhCOOAg produces a discrete Ag24 nanocluster (Ag24a) or an Ag28 nanocluster based 1D chain structure (Ag28a), respectively. Moreover, the post-synthesized Ag28a can be utilized as potential ignition material for further application. This work not only provides an important model for unlocking dynamic features of POMs at atom-precise level but also pioneers a promising approach to synthesize silver nanoclusters from known to unknown.

Three in One: Three Different Molybdates Trapped in a Thiacalix[4]arene Protected Ag72 Nanocluster for Structural Transformation and Photothermal Conversion

AbstractPolyoxometalates (POMs) represent crucial intermediates in the formation of insoluble metal oxides from soluble metal ions, however, the rapid hydrolysis‐condensation kinetics of MoVI or WVI makes the direct characterization of coexisted molecular species in a given medium extremely difficult. Silver nanoclusters have shown versatile capacity to encapsulate diverse POMs, which provides an alternative scene to appreciate landscape of POMs in atomic precision. Here, we report a thiacalix[4]arene protected silver nanocluster (Ag72b) that simultaneously encapsulates three kinds of molybdates (MoO42−, Mo6O228− and Mo7O258−) in situ transformed from classic Lindqvist Mo6O192−, providing more deep understanding on the structural diversity and condensation growth route of POMs in solution. Ag72b is the first silver nanocluster trapping so many kinds of molybdates, which in turn exert collective template effect to aggregate silver atoms into a nanocluster. The post‐reaction of Ag72b with AgOAc or PhCOOAg produces a discrete Ag24 nanocluster (Ag24a) or an Ag28 nanocluster based 1D chain structure (Ag28a), respectively. Moreover, the post‐synthesized Ag28a can be utilized as potential ignition material for further application. This work not only provides an important model for unlocking dynamic features of POMs at atom‐precise level but also pioneers a promising approach to synthesize silver nanoclusters from known to unknown.

Ad hoc Screen Translation in Soviet Estonian Film Clubs

In Soviet Estonian official cinemas, foreign films were always dubbed into Russian with Estonian subtitles. Founded at the end of the Thaw, film clubs and other semi-official screening locations became popular as part of the alternative scene and unauthorised discourse. They screened uncensored original Western European and Hollywood films and thus the works of forbidden film directors and cinema movements from the West were introduced to a limited audience of film enthusiasts. Compared to other Soviet Socialist Republics, Estonia was in a privileged geographical and linguistic position to be able to access the films of the West via Finland. Film clubs looked beyond the Iron Curtain and opened up a cultural dialogue between the West and Soviet Estonia. This article analyses the repertoire of foreign films and different translation modes, social relations and the agency of the interpreters, and it looks at their interpretative act from theoretical perspectives discussed by Juri Lotman and Naoki Sakai. Lay Summary: In the era of Soviet Estonia, where foreign films were typically re-edited and dubbed into Russian, film clubs emerged as underground screening locations that offered uncensored original Western European and Hollywood films. These clubs played a crucial role in introducing the works of forbidden film directors and cinematic movements from the West to a limited audience of film enthusiasts. Soviet Estonia stood out in three significant aspects: 1) it was the only SSR to subtitle all films in the official cinema into Estonian; 2) it had a vibrant film club culture in universities with diverse repertoires from Finland, and all films had a live translation into Estonian, 3) and it had access to Finnish television broadcasting Western movies that were otherwise not shown in the Soviet Union (Estonian and Finnish are closely related languages that share many semantic and grammatical structures). Compared to other Soviet Socialist Republics, Estonia had the advantage of its geographical and linguistic position, facilitating a socio-cultural dialogue with the West. The various translation methods employed, often conducted on an ad hoc basis, social dynamics, and the role of interpreters in the film clubs, played a transformative role in dismantling the barriers of the Iron Curtain. Interpreters, by navigating the boundaries between the original films and their translations, significantly influenced the understanding of Western cinema and culture in Soviet Estonia.

Them and Us – Pintér Béla’s Blood-Red, Off-White, Dark Green and András Urbán’s Sacra Hungarica in Context

The paper wishes to document a recent trend visible in the Hungarian independent theatre scene – a turn towards social, political issues, as well as a growing sensitivity towards the visible tensions in Hungarian political discourse. It does so through the analysis and the contextualization of two recent Hungarian independent theatrical productions. Studio K’s 2019 Sacra Hungarica is an in-your-face attempt to portray the current distortion of the language and the abuse language is used for, while Béla Pintér’s Blood Red, Off-White, Dark Green, a clever Oedipus Rex paraphrase that depicts marginalization, racism, and nationalism in a pointedly non-pc allegory. The essay introduces the status of independent theatre vis-à-vis politics after 1989 and will delineate the changes the conservative governments brought into the alternative scene. Then, through an in-depth analysis of the above-mentioned two productions, it discusses the various means of theatricality they use to comment on contemporary Hungary.

“It’s actually a job you are married to”

The tattoo, once an indicator of belonging to subculture, deviant, and marginalized groups, or specific occupations, has become mainstream. Given that their social world has not yet been studied in much detail, this research aimed to explore the work experiences of tattoo artists. For the purposes of the research, semi-structured interviews with tattoo artists were conducted. The results show that for tattoo artists, tattooing is more than just a job – rather, it is integral to their lifestyle. Tattoo artists give particular importance to family and friends and support and belonging in both tattoo-specific and broader alternative scenes. With regard to cultural capital, a specific type of cultural capital, “alternative cultural capital,” proved to be important.

Czech Underground from a Musical Historical Point of View

The first part of the article summarises and comments on the literature on the Czech music underground. It proves that professional research of the phenomenon was previously carried out by foreign authors, whose focus was mainly on the social and political contexts in Eastern Europe. Memoirs and published interviews predominated in the domestic reflection of the phenomenon. Theoretical studies, including monographic treatises, appear only on an ongoing basis. However, the underground is still more in the field of view of historians than musicologists. This article also traces the changes in understanding the “underground” category in the Czech environment. It leads to defining it compared to the “alternative scene” and “grey zone” categories, which gradually gained a specific significance in Czech public awareness in the 1970s and 1980s. The second part of the article places the Czech musical underground in the context of the general development of rock and popular music in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Location of Suicide: Cultural Parameters of a Public Health Territory

ABSTRACT The impetus driving this article is the uncritical uses of ‘culture’ as an explanatory variable in public health research of ‘suicide’, regarding its conceptualization and operationalization as a mentally riddled phenomenon clamped in nomothetic and epidemiological nomenclature. This reduction of suicide to its presumed ‘evidence based’ figures and graphs under the guise of the lingo of culture requires and yields not only ‘thin’ understandings but also non-committal conclusions. Thus, ‘culture’ merely appears as a ‘thing’ made of shared norms and values that arguably can be measured, computed, and even predicted in relation to tables of suicide rates. With the aim of critically un-disciplining and unleashing these two intersecting fuzzy concepts from the straits of their epistemological habitus, we set an alternative scene of relations between them that contribute to the re-conceptualization of both. ‘Suicide cultures’, a term we coined for highlighting temporal, agentive, performative, and social justice questions of suicide and culture, place the preoccupation with mortality and terminality at its core. This turn in the analysis of public health sheds a non-perfunctory light on the cultural parameters of counting of and accounting for the incidence of suicide in different social settings.

A State Avant-Gardism: Alternative Spaces and Cultural Policies in the United States

It is well known that the development of alternative spaces in the United States during the 1970s benefited from government subsidies. However, either this fact is downplayed because it seems to taint the image of radical subversion on which the prestige of these spaces is based; or it is criticized as one of the main causes of the institutionalization of the alternative scene, or even as a pernicious way to co-opt and neutralize it. In this article, I examine in more detail the programs set up to support alternative spaces by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. I also study the interesting case of Artists Space, an alternative space that was directly founded by the second of these two government agencies. I show that this public support, far from having betrayed the original spirit of alternative spaces, has been from their beginnings a necessary condition for their development. This implies revising or, at least, qualifying the common narratives of an institutionalization or a co-option of the alternative spaces by the “art establishment.” However, this unexpected assistance from the state, traditionally rather hostile to experimental art, did result in eroding the critical and antagonistic dimension of the alternative (or avant-garde) art scene – but not in the way it is usually portrayed.

The political economy of fanzines on the threshold of state socialism and post-socialism: The story of Czech(o)slovak fanzines

In this article, I analyse Czech and Slovak fanzine-making during the transition from state socialism to post-socialism. The regime change ushered in new dominant forms of cultural production, and thus a situation emerged in which cultural hierarchies were being negotiated and new ways of collective action being formed. Fanzines played a crucial role in building up alternative communities in the new neoliberal system, when there was strong demand for Western subcultural styles and the need of safe space of domestic scenes. Independent publishing depends heavily upon that which it opposes, and when major social changes occur, fanzine-making provided a space for negotiating cultural hierarchies, resulting in specific ways in which fanzines help build and maintain alternative scenes.

So close yet so far: DIY cultures in Portugal and Brazil

ABSTRACT This article analyses how different forms of involvement in underground punk and/or alternative scenes develop into specific do-it-yourself (DIY) careers. From a corpus of 214 interviews, the various DIY representations of social practices held by Portuguese punk scene members are studied, especially regarding the way they experience and develop knowledge, networks, and skills. These social representations are particularly important in terms of their insertion into the labour market. At the same time, the centrality of DIY in Brazil’s funk, electronica, and alternative rock scenes is compared with the Portuguese punk context through a recent analysis carried out in Brazil with 32 members of those scenes – mostly women – showing the importance of DIY beyond punk and the Global North.

Creatividad, autonomía y autenticidad: un estudio de los músicos indie en España.

Este artículo estudia a los músicos indie en España. A partir de treinta entrevistas a músicos, se discuten los conflictos sobre la autenticidad en el espacio alternativo contemporáneo. Los músicos indie conforman un espacio de creación propio, un “subcampo” en la terminología propuesta por Pierre Bourdieu. Es un espacio cruzado por relaciones múltiples y maleables con la industria y reconocido dentro de las músicas populares, en donde conviven convergencias artísticas con patrones de conflicto. El análisis revela la transformación de las preocupaciones de muchos de estos músicos. Para gran parte de ellos, lo relevante es remarcar las diferencias con otros músicos desde la perspectiva de la reputación y la autenticidad. Esas barreras de diferenciación, que entendemos como una expresión de capital subcultural, se construyen sobre una serie de estrategias, centradas en la experimentación, el conocimiento y el tránsito por espacios alternativos. En última instancia, el artículo sitúa a los músicos indie como altavoces privilegiados de conflictos valorativos e ideológicos en torno a la definición social de la independencia, y también como agentes relevantes en la articulación de dicha definición.

Transnational cinema and cultural adaptation in early 1930s Europe: the four language versions of ‘The Private Secretary’

A comparison of the German film Die Privatsekretärin/The Private Secretary (Wilhelm Thiele, 1931) and its three other-language versions (French, Italian, British) provides a case study for a topic that has been little examined: the relationship between transnational cultural adaptation and the purported national identity and ‘nationalizing’ of films in the early sound period. The level and scope of these adaptations varied from retaining and modifying the original to remaking the film entirely. In some cases the adaptations were undertaken prior to export by the company that produced the original, in others by companies in the country that had imported the film. A brief discussion of the changing relationship between these factors from the silent era through the early sound period provides the historical context for our study. The malleability of silent films enabled a high degree of cultural adaptation to be undertaken relatively cheaply for different markets. The intertitle was a crucial element in this process, as its ‘translation’ offered considerable scope for creating ‘appropriate’ meanings for the target audience. Large studios established their own departments for translating intertitles, but they were also often translated in the countries of exhibition. Other methods of alteration in silent films included strategies such as re-editing and adding new scenes to create, for example, a sad rather than a happy ending. New or alternative scenes were provided by the exporter, but excisions and rearrangements of shots and scenes were also made by distributors and exhibitors in the importing country, in an effort to accommodate local censorship rules and cater to audience expectations. Exhibitors provided musical accompaniments that were familiar, and as the visual cues of silent films were particularly amenable to different readings, audiences were able to contribute to the ‘nationalizing’ of a film through their interpretations and frequent vocal participation.1

Una cohorte de artistas-gestores

We propase a cohort analysis (Mason and Wolfinger, 2001) of a group of argentine writers/directors/actors who start working in the alternative scene by 2001. The concept of cohort can help to visualize common characteristics in individuals entering a system at the same time and its use aims to overcome sorne limitations of the more common but less defined use in literary, dramatic and cultural theory of the concept of generation. We highlight a specific use of management by these artists as a main feature, which facilitates their international projection and resembles the profile of young entrepreneurs belonging to other contexts, such as Mexico or England.

Efervescências musicais e noturnidades no Beco das Artes

In the most liquid environments that characterize nightlife and parties, we generally live in a slower and more marked time: on the one hand, by relevant, varied and often intense sensitive experiences; and, on the other hand, for expectations of more freedom and social interaction between the actors. This article sought to problematize the direct and indirect repercussions - not only socioeconomic, but especially in the imagination of the city - of the nightly cultural experiences that take place at the festive events held at Beco das Artes (in the city center of Rio de Janeiro), which it presents itself as an open territory for serendipities, capable of mobilizing an expressive segment of actors who gravitate towards a musical production associated with the local alternative scene (and who, in general, participate in the current street culture in Rio). In view of the objectives outlined, our investigation is not only based on the theoretical-methodological procedures of the Sociology of Senses (and of the Imaginary) founded by Georg Simmel, but also employs cartographic methodological strategies (in the process of carrying out fieldwork and monitoring the dynamics aggregation of actors in the territories) inspired by the Actor-Network Theory, noted in Bruno Latour's seminal work.

Las gentes vascas también bailan. Experimentación y conflictos en torno a la música electrónica en Euskal Herria

Este articulo explora las escenas de música electrónica en tierras vascas, en relación con la escena alternativa y rock, muy potente en los últimos cincuenta años. La consolidación en los años 90 del siglo XX de esta identidad y espacios alternativos dio lugar a procesos de cierre simbólico y estético en torno al rock. La experimentación estética generará conflictos en estos espacios. Este trabajo explora esta experimentación cultural en los márgenes de este marco, combinando el análisis de contexto y de entrevistas en profundidad. Analizamos a tal efecto la escena vasca de música electrónica, desde el bakalao de los 90 a los grupos y escenas Dj de comienzos del siglo XXI.

Sounding Dublin

This article interrogates ideas of popular music "sound(s)" linked to place by interpreting data gathered during the applied research project Mapping Popular Music in Dublin (MPMiD) 2015-16. An outline background, rationale and framework for MPMiD is presented, followed by a review of methods developed and overall themes that emerged. Focusing on the project's "Sounding Dublin" strand, the article analyses the responses of 366 participants from a section of MPMiD's e-survey relating to music, musicians, sounds and soundtracks that might be considered "typical" (or otherwise) of Dublin. Although a substantial minority of participants eschew notions of sonic uniqueness linked to place in the abstract sense, the data reveal a rich tapestry of experiences and standpoints linked to ideas of a Dublin sound or sounds. Some appear to concur with conventional hagiographies of rock and folk, with others challenging received narratives and proposing alternative viewpoints, scenes and pathways. "Dublin-specific" associations emerging across various genres are based on appraisals of performer engagement, accent and timbre, and narrative/lyrical style.

“Turbo-folk Rocks!”: New Readings of Turbo-folk

The subject of this paper is the ethnographic mapping of the origins of the new alternative scene, based on turbo-folk. Mainly located in Belgrade, this alternative scene has been swindling, over the last couple of years, as the circle of artists (Mangulica FM, Lenhart Tapes, Mega Denke, Gianni Druid, Bombe Devedesetih and others), who freely combine turbo-folk genre with other music forms (electronic music, rap and others) to fulfill modern audience needs. In this research, we will rely on the standpoint that the term “turbo-folk” is not only a tool for music genre’s description, but also a value connotated “floating signifier”, which pumps its content from the certain community’s symbolic repertoire. Turbo-folk showed its symbolic strength in the academic and non-academic discourse, as a tool for cultural switching on/switching off during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, when it was instrumentalised as the constitutive otherness of “urban” (“elite”, “civilised”, “educated”, “cosmopolitan”) population. The basic assumption of this paper is that the disagreement about classifications, the focus of which is turbo-folk, is rehabilitated, recontextualized and revaluated. In this study, we will re-examine the hypothesis saying that the new alternative scene, which is the subject of this research, endeavours to instrumentalise turbo-folk as an arbor of “urban elite’s” cultural critique, its authority and legitimacy of its classification categories.

John Donne and Baroque Allegory: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation. Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2017. Pp. viii+228.

<i>John Donne and Baroque Allegory: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation</i>. Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2017. Pp. viii+228.