To what extent do indie masculinities challenge the historical
construction of rock music as patriarchal? This key question is
addressed by Matthew Bannister, involving an in-depth examination
of indie guitar rock in the 1980s as the culturally and
historically specific production of white men. Through textual
analysis of musical and critical discourses, Bannister provides the
first book-length study of masculinity and ethnicity within the
context of indie guitar music within US, UK and New Zealand
'scenes'. Bannister argues that past theorisations of (rock)
masculinities have tended to set up varieties of working-class
deviance and physical machismo as 'straw men', oversimplifying
masculinities as 'men behaving badly'. Such approaches disavow the
ways that masculine power is articulated in culture not only
through representation but also intellectual and theoretical
discourse. By re-situating indie in a historical/cultural context
of art rock, he shows how masculine power can be rearticulated
through high, avant-garde, bohemian culture and aesthetic theory:
canonism, negation (Adorno), passivity, voyeurism and camp (Andy
Warhol and the Velvet Underground), and primitivism and infantilism
(Lester Bangs, Simon Reynolds). In a related vein, he also assesses
the impact of Freud on cultural theory, arguing that reversing
binary conceptions of gender by associating masculinities with an
essentialised passive femininity perpetuates patriarchal dualism.
Drawing on his own experience as an indie musician, Bannister
surveys a range of indie artists, including The Smiths, The Jesus
and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and The Go-Betweens; from the
US, R.E.M., The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr, HA1/4sker DA1/4, Nirvana
and hardcore; and from NZ, Flying Nun acts, including The Chills,
The Clean, the Verlaines, Chris Knox, Bailter Space, and The Bats,
demonstrating broad continuities between these apparently disparate
scenes, in terms of gender, aesthetic theory and approaches to
popular musical history. The result is a book which raises some
important questions about how gender is studied in popular culture
and the degree to which alternative cultures can critique dominant
representations of gender.
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