Club Night Research Articles

The DIY Careers of Techno and Drum ‘n’ Bass DJs in Vienna

My empirical research on electronic dance music scenes in Vienna, Austria, explores an area of cultural production that unites the ideology of creativity with the aspirations of social networks and individual entrepreneurship. The model for a DJ's career is a hybrid of inspired musician, compelling performer, marketing genius and business strategist. An economically successful career depends not only on performing in clubs; DJs are also involved in music production, making records, marketing themselves through the media, organizing club nights and running labels. Social and cultural capital is invested in creative freedom, a do-it-yourself ethos, and collective enjoyment, yet these DJs tend to promote the neoliberal economic ideal of the autonomous cultural entrepreneur combining self-organisation and self-marketing with unregulated labour and gendered constructions of artist identity. Taking Bourdieu's work on the field of cultural production as a theoretical framework, my analysis of the DJs' modes of self-(re)presentation suggests that the opposition Bourdieu made between art and commerce tends to blur.

Consuming Chavs: The Ambiguous Politics of Gay Chavinism

Paul Johnson’s (2008) article ‘Rude Boys’, published in an earlier issue of Sociology , scrutinizes critically the commodification of the male chav for consumption by middle-class homosexual men. This phenomenon, which Andrew Fraser (2005) calls ‘chavinism’, takes a number of different forms: pornography, sex lines, club nights etc. In part as a response to Johnson’s arguments concerning the ways in which chavinism ‘further devalue[s] the individuals and groups’ it depicts, creating a form of ‘symbolic violence’ (2008: 67), our article speculates further on the ambiguous implications of this minority consumer culture. To do this, we develop Connell’s (1992, 2002; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005) concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to discuss what gay chavinism might mean for ‘hegemonic homosexuality’.

Adapting Femininities

Adapting Femininities

Riding the Dialectical Waves of Gay Political Economy: A Story from Birmingham's Commercial Gay Scene

In this paper I aim to contribute to work addressing the relationship between dissident sexuality and gay political economy by providing a reconfigured Marxist exploration into the ambivalence of commercial gay space. Through the application of a central theme from Marx's Grundrisse—the civilising influence of capital—I propose a means to move beyond an Althusserian view of commercial gay space as a contained ideological incorporation of capitalist hegemony, to that of a capitalist embodiment of constraints and radical possibilities. Focusing on the commercial gay scene of the UK's second largest city, Birmingham, and the survival of a monthly British Asian gay club night therein, I explore the dialectical waves of capitalism. These waves drive conditions which both differentiate identity-based production/consumption to the assimilative relations of exchange value, and accommodate moments of cultural creativity that feed off this continual differentiation and escape its economic relations in the formation of radically new use-values.

Identity Dub: The Paradoxes of an Indian American Youth Subculture (New York Mix)

The crowd thickens on the small dance floor at S.O.B.'s, a world music club and the venue of Bhangra Basement, the first regular bhangra night at a mainstream club in New York, hosted by the ubiquitous DJ Rekha. The insistent beat of the dhol, the percussion base of the traditional North Indian folk dance known as bhangra in Punjab, pounds out over the techno and reggae tracks reverberating amidst the tightly packed bodies. Shoulders shrug and arms flail in semblances of bhangra moves, here, far from the wheat fields of the Punjab, far from the Californian orchards where early Punjabi migrants first settled in the early 20th century. Tonight, most faces are various shades of South Asian, but there are a few African Americans and whites getting down on the dance floor, too, for this is one of the few bhangra club nights that draws a noticeably racially mixed crowd. One of the past Bhangra Basement events featured a booth with mehndi, lacy designs in henna, traced on palms by a young white woman riding the current fascination with Indian body art. On this night, there is an appearance by a live dhol drummer all the way from Lahore, his yellow turban and sequined kurta presumably authenticating the Indian elements of this musical fusion. The drummer has an astonished, if delighted, expression on his face, as if simultaneously bewildered and excited by his performance for a frenzied crowd of young South Asian professionals and party goers, women in hip huggers twisting their arms in movements learned partly from Hindi films and partly from other bhangra nights like this, perhaps in college or at the Indian remix music parties that began springing up six or seven years ago. A young turbaned Sikh man leaps onto the stage beside the sweating musician, spinning and bouncing with acrobatic, break-dance-like agility. Jumping back into the crowd, he is joined by another young Sikh man, and as the crowd parts in a rapt circle, the two men circle around each other in exuberantly coordinated precision. Then three young women who have various degrees of classical dance training come forth, challenging