Andy Bennett

Researching youth culture and popular music:a methodological critique

ABSTRACT

In this article I argue the need for critical evaluation of qualitative researchmethodology in sociological studies of the relationship between youth cultureand popular music. As the article illustrates, there is currently an absence ofcritical debate concerning methodological issues in this � eld of sociologicalresearch. In the � rst part of the article I begin to account for this absence by illus-trating how early research on youth and music rejected the need for empiricalresearch, relying instead on theories and concepts drawn from cultural Marxism.The second part of the article illustrates how the legacy of this early body of workin youth and music research manifests itself in current research which, althoughempirically grounded, is characterized by an almost total lack of engagement withmethodological issues such as negotiating access to the � eld, manangment of� eld relations and ethical codes. Similarly problematic is the uncritical accept-ance on the part of some researchers of their insider knowledge of particularyouth musics and scenes as a means of gathering empirical data. In the � nal partof the article I focus on the issue of insider knowledge and the need for criticalevaluation of its use as a methodological tool in � eld-based youth and musicresearch.

KEYWORDS: Methodology; ethnography; youth culture; popular music;access; insider knowledge

Since it � rst became a focus for sociological interest during the mid-1970s,the relationship between youth culture and popular music has been thesubject of a great number of books, journal articles, conferences andcourses taught as part of university degree programmes. While early studieswere primarily theoretical, more recent work has sought to empiricallyengage with issues of youth culture and popular music as these relate tosociological themes such as postmodernism (Redhead 1993; Muggleton2000), cultural capital (Thornton 1995), social geography (Skelton andValentine 1998) and local identity (Finnegan 1989; Cohen 1991; Shank1994). If early studies of youth culture and popular music can be criticized

British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 53 Issue No. 3 (September 2002) pp. 451–466© 2002 London School of Economics and Political Science ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 onlinePublished by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the LSEDOI: 10.1080/0007131022000000590

because of their lack of empirical engagement, in much of the later, moreempirically focused work little attempt is made to re� ect on the researchprocess itself. Although it is clear that the research process impacts both onthe � eldwork setting and the data produced (see Hobbs and May 1993),critical, analytic overviews of the research methods used rarely feature in� eld-based accounts of youth and music. In this article I begin to engagewith such methodological issues. I start by charting the development ofyouth culture and popular music as an object of sociological studygrounded in a discourse of cultural Marxism, which deemed empiricalresearch an unnecessary element in the analytical project of understand-ing the stylistic responses of youth, before going on to critically evaluatesubsequent, empirically focused work on youth and music. In the � nal partof the article I focus on a speci� c methodological aspect of contemporary� eld-based research on youth culture and popular music, the use of‘insider’ knowledge as a means of gaining access to and researching musicand style-based youth cultural scenes. Although this approach is nowcommonly applied, particularly among younger researchers, there iscurrently an absence of critical debate concerning the methodologicaljusti� cation for the use of insider knowledge in this area of sociologicalresearch.

FLITTING ACROSS THE SCREEN

The lack of attention to methodological detail in current research on youthand music is a legacy of the formative sociological work on this aspect ofcontemporary social life. In ‘Symbols of Trouble’, the specially writtenintroduction to the third edition of his highly in� uential book Folk Devilsand Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, Stanley Cohenpresents a critical overview of British research on music and style-basedyouth cultures in the � fteen year period between the book’s original publi-cation in 1972 and the appearance of the third edition in 1987. An under-lying theme throughout Cohen’s account is the failure of British youthresearchers to engage with the perceptions of the social actors at the centreof their work. This begins with Cohen’s critical self-assessment of Folk Devilsand Moral Panics: ‘In� uenced by labelling theory, I wanted to studyreaction; the actors themselves just � itted across the screen’ (1987: iii). Inmany respects this constitutes a highly telling criticism of research on youthand music during the 1970s and early 1980s. With the exception of PaulWillis, whose work I will presently consider, little attempt was made byyouth researchers to engage with the social actors at the centre of theirwork using ethnography or other qualitative � eldwork methods.

A major obstacle to the development of a � eldwork tradition in youthand music research at this time was the theoretical framework under-pinning much of the research conducted. In the now widely criticized workof the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)

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(see, for example, McRobbie 1980; Clarke 1981; Harris 1992; Bennett1999), post-Second World War working-class youth cultures, such as mods,rockers and skinheads, were studied using a structural-Marxist approachincorporating Gramsci’s concept of ideological hegemony. Through theapplication of such a framework, the CCCS argued, it was possible to mapthe stylistic responses of postwar working-class youth cultures against abackdrop of socio-economic forces only weakly comprehended by thesocial actors involved. Thus, as Waters states, according to the theoreticalmodel of the CCCS, the actions of postwar youth cultures represented a‘half-formed inarticulate radicalism’ (1981: 23). The structuralist narra-tives produced by the CCCS served to render � eldwork redundant in socialsettings deemed to be underpinned by irremovable socio-economic deter-minants which, it was argued, fundamentally shaped the consciousness ofsocial actors.

According to the CCCS, the symbolic shows of resistance engaged in bypostwar youth cultures, although at one level indicative of the symboliccreativity of youth, amounted to little more than a spectacular form ofbravado when viewed within the wider context of the social relations ofcapitalism; the teddy boy’s ‘ “all-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go” experienceof Saturday evening’( Jefferson 1976: 48) or the skinhead’s magicalrecovery of community (Clarke 1976) re� ecting the ‘historically located“focal concerns” ’ of the equally trapped working-class parent culture(Clarke et al. 1976: 53). The underlying implication here is that the resortto � eldwork would serve only to reveal something which is already known,the misconception of working-class youth concerning the socio-economicforces which conspire to produce the everyday experience of class. The‘real’ nature of such circumstances, and thus a more accurate understand-ing of youth’s symbolic forms of resistance, it is maintained, can only begrasped through theoretical abstraction. Thus, as Hall notes

. . . to think about or to analyse the complexity of the real, the act ofpractice of thinking is required; and this necessitates the use of the powerof abstraction and analysis, the formation of concepts with which to cutinto the complexity of the real, in order precisely to reveal and bring tolight relationships and structures which cannot be visible to the nakedeye, and which can neither present nor authenticate themselves. (1980:31)

One variation in this trend in youth research during the 1970s is PaulWillis’s book Profane Culture. Transcending the original CCCS concern withworking-class youth, Profane Culture presents empirical case studies of aworking-class motorbike gang and a group of middle-class hippies. Usingethnography, Willis provides highly detailed descriptions of the bikers’ andhippies’ lifeworlds. Incorporating bikers’ and hippies’ own accounts intothe text, Willis begins the process of mapping their symbolic transform-ation of commodities – for example, in the case of the bikers, the motor-bike, in the case of the hippies, marijuana – into group speci� c cultural

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icons. In developing this analysis Willis employs the concept of homologyas a theoretical framing device. Homology is de�ned by Willis as ‘thecontinuous play between the group and a particular item which producesspeci� c styles, meanings, contents and forms of consciousness’ (1978: 191).

Problematically, however, at this point in the text the accounts of therespondents are effectively sidelined, the task of interpretation beingachieved through theoretical abstraction. The result of this is a study whichcomprises two largely incompatible projects: one which seeks to provide thereader with an ethnographic ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973) of theeveryday lives of working-class bikers and middle-class hippies; anotherwhich effectively re-reads the entire � rst section of the book using a narra-tive of homology in which issues of musical taste, personal image, and arange of other consumer choices, which may on the surface appear to holdhighly re� exive meanings, are argued by Willis to be structurally deter-mined. The resulting methodological tensions which arise from Willis’sattempt to ‘bolt’ this homological reading onto his ethnographic study areneatly summed up by Harris who argues that

. . . [homology] has become famous as an account of how particularitems re� ect the structured concerns and typical feelings of a group, as,say, the black leather jacket does for bikers. Each homology arises froman ‘integral’ process of selection and cultural work on an object or item,in a complex dialectical way, naturally. As a result, current members of agroup are not subjectively aware of these structural meanings, embeddedin the history of the black leather jacket in previous cycles of provision,transformation and resistance. (1992: 90)

Agar suggests that what makes ethnography ‘unique among the socialsciences [is its] commit[ment] to making sense out of the way informantsnaturally talk and act when they are doing ordinary activities rather thanactivities imposed by a researcher’ (1983: 33–4). There is a clear sense,then, in which Willis’s application of homology as an interpretative tool inProfane Culture compromises the ethnographic claims of the text.

Similar problems can be identi� ed with Hebdige’s (1979) treatment ofpunk rock in his study Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Although notengaging directly in empirical research, Hebdige pursues what Chaneyterms ‘a quasi-ethnographic research style allied with a sophisticated theor-etical intent in interpretation’ (1994: 39). Using the concept of polysemy(borrowed from the French Tel Quel group1) Hebdige posits an associationbetween the fragmented, ‘cut up’ style of the punk image and the socio-economic decline of Britain during the late 1970s (1979: 26, 87–8).Methodologically, however, the thesis presented in Subculture is problem-atic. On the one hand, Hebdige invests considerable time and effort illus-trating the semiotic linkage between punk’s chaotic visual image and theBritish media’s ‘rhetoric of crisis’ during the late 1970s while at the sametime proclaiming the unlikelihood that those directly involved in the punkrock scene ‘would recognize themselves re� ected here’ (ibid.: 87, 139).

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Overall then, one is left with the distinct impression that the empiricalre� ections offered by Hebdige are being made to � t the bigger picturewhich has already been fashioned at the level of theoretical abstraction.Thus, as Cohen observes in relation to Hebdige’s reading of punk’s appro-priation of the swastika

Displaying a swastika shows how symbols are stripped from their naturalcontext, exploited for empty effect, displayed through mockery, distanc-ing, irony, parody, inversion . . . But how are we to know this? We arenever told much about the ‘thing’: when, how, where, by whom or inwhat context it is worn. We do not know what, if any, difference existsbetween indigenous and sociological explanations. (ibid.: xvii)

Such was the sociological trend in imposing theoretical frameworks onthe cultural signi� cance of music and style from above that, by the mid-1980s, the sociology of youth culture had become, to use Phil Cohen’swords, ‘simply the site of a multiplicity of con� icting discourses . . . [with]no reality outside its representation’ (1986: 20). From the mid-1980sonwards many sociologists of youth and those in related areas of studybegan to reject purely theoretical models of investigation and turned toethnographic research in an attempt to situate their accounts of therelationship between youth culture and popular music more � rmly in thesocial settings where this relationship is formed and where its micro-socialmanifestations could, it was argued, be more readily observed. At the sametime, researchers became more concerned to engage with the accounts ofyoung people themselves and to incorporate such accounts into theirwriting.

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC TURN

Two early studies which begin to redress the absence of ‘ethnographic dataand microsociological detail’ (Cohen 1991: 6) in research on youth andmusic are Finnegan’s (1989) The Hidden Musicians and Cohen’s (1991) RockCulture in Liverpool. Cohen, in particular, weaves extensive interview andobservation material into an analysis of the correlation between youngpeople, music-making, identity and everyday life in the post-industrialsetting of mid-1980s Liverpool. Finnegan’s study, although less focused onrock and pop than Cohen’s, is similarly concerned to ethnographically mapthe relationship between local music-making processes and the broadersocial processes which inform everyday life in local settings. An importantfeature of both Finnegan and Cohen’s work is the way in which each writerre� ects on their role as researcher and the possible impact of theirpresence in the � eld on the data collected. In Cohen’s case this concern ismost saliently expressed in relation to her status as a female researcher ina male-dominated local music scene which, Cohen concedes, may ‘havemade some people uneasy’, especially as wives and girlfriends of musicians

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were systematically barred from attending rehearsals for fear of them beinga distracting or disruptive in� uence (1991: 205). Indeed, such bias on thepart of the research respondents conspired to impose a form of gender-coded ‘outsider status’ on Cohen. Thus, as she observes

. . . my activities obviously con� icted with those normally expected of awoman. I attended gigs alone, expressed interest in the technicalities ofmusic-making and in the attitudes and concerns of those who made it,and contradicted in other respects most women many of the bandmembers were familiar with. (ibid.: 205–6)

For Finnegan, whose presence in the � eld was less temporal thanCohen’s, a different methodological problem emerged, namely, how toretain objectivity in the context of familiar surroundings. Mason suggeststhat

Although the purpose of observation is to witness what is going on in aparticular setting or set of interactions, the intellectual problem for theresearcher is what to observe and what to be interested in . . . [theresearcher] must work out how to tackle the questions of selectivity andperspective in observation, since any observation is inevitably going to beselective, and to be based upon a particular observational perspective.(1996: 67–8)

In the case of Finnegan this problem was exacerbated due to her famili-arity with Milton Keynes, the setting in which she conducted her research.A resident of Milton Keynes, Finnegan was unable to take advantage of there� exive detachment available to those ethnographic researchers whoenter the research setting for a given period of time, ultimately withdraw-ing in order the analyse their data and write up the � ndings. Thus, asFinnegan observes, ‘the well-known issue of how far one should or shouldnot “become native” looks rather different, if still pressing, in one’s owncommunity. Being too much of an insider (and ceasing to be a detachedobserver) was always a danger’ (1989: 343).

It is signi� cant that, with the exception of Finnegan and Cohen, both ofwhom have backgrounds in social-anthropology rather than sociology, littleattempt has been made in empirical research on youth and music to re� ecton the role of the researcher, the relationship between the researcher andthe research respondents and the possible impact of the latter on thenature of the research data produced. On the contrary, in a number ofrecent empirically focused sociological studies of youth and music a subjec-tively informed enthusiasm stands in for any consideration of suchmethodological issues. In this respect, a number of studies warrant criticalattention. Redhead’s Rave Off, an early account of the British house musicphenomenon of the late 1980s and early 1990s, draws together the work ofyoung researchers in a series of papers whose content re� ects � rst handexperience of the UK club scene and the exoticism of Ibiza’s Balearic Beat.2

Redhead’s scene-setting introduction casts a critical postmodern eye on the

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work of the Birmingham CCCS and related studies, suggesting that thelatter’s ‘ “linear” way of thinking about the connections between pop andyouth culture’ (1993: 2), if always problematic, is becoming increasingly soas the quickening circular � ow of musical genres, sub-genres and attendantyouth styles blurs into what Polhemus (1997) terms a ‘supermarket of style’.The burden of empirical proof for Redhead’s grand theoretical claims is,however, placed on a series of quite poorly conceptualized semi-ethno-graphic studies of dance club settings whose privileging of frontline know-ledge of the house music scene over the necessity to critically engage withissues of access, � eld relations, and objectivity of data is treated in anentirely unproblematic fashion by the researchers involved in the work. Asa result, much of the empirical illustration in Rave Off is comparable withthe intelligent ‘fanspeak’ that characterizes underground fanzines; a seriesof ‘in club’ accounts which maintain that the experience of the writer is thecollective experience of the crowd. This tendency is clearly illustrated inMelechi’s essay ‘The Ecstasy of Disappearance’

. . . the trance-dance moves the body between the spectacle of the ‘pose’and the sexuality (‘romance’) of the look into a ‘cyberspace’ of musicalsound, where one attempts to implode (get into) and disappear. (1993:33)

Similar methodological problems can be identi� ed with other work oncontemporary dance music, Richard and Krüger’s (1998) study of theannual ‘Love Parade’ in Berlin and Champion’s (1997) account of thestruggles of Wisconsin ravers with the hostile attitudes of both localcommunities and the police adopting an essentially partisan stance. Noattempt is made to assume a critical distance from the research setting andrespondents, the descriptive authority of the researchers concernedbecoming a one-dimensional voice which echoes the self-assumed ‘right-ness’ of the movement which each study seeks to describe. Such accountsare easy targets for the recent cultural populist critiques of writers such asMcGuigan (1992) who argue that academic writing on popular culture andits audience has become an uncritical celebration of mass culture which,like popular journalism, claims knowledge through an ability to identifywith the ‘street level’ sensibilities of particular scenes and audiences.

However, it is not only in such overtly subjective writing that a lack ofattention to methodological detail is evident. A further study of contem-porary dance music, Thornton’s Club Cultures, is situated more � rmly in theethnographic ‘tradition’. Thornton claims no personal ‘insider’ knowledgeof dance music and concentrates instead upon an attempted engagement‘with the attitudes and ideals of the youthful insiders whose social livesrevolve around clubs and raves’ (1995: 2). Moreover, Thornton is re� ex-ively aware of the various issues which set her, as the researcher, apart fromthe subjects of her research

. . . I was an outsider to the cultures in which I conducted research forseveral reasons. First and foremost, I was working in a cultural space in

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which everyone else (except the DJs, door and bar staff, and perhaps theodd journalist) were at their leisure. Not only did I have intents andpurposes that were different to the crowd, but also for the most part Itried to maintain an analytical frame of mind that is truly anathema tothe ‘lose yourself ’ and ‘let the rhythm take control’ ethos of clubs andraves. Two demographic factors – my age and nationality – furthercontributed to this detachment. (ibid.)

Beyond this introductory assertion, however, very little is said byThornton on the issues of access and acceptance in the research setting.Hammersley and Atkinson suggest that: ‘The problem of obtaining access. . . is often most acute in the initial negotiations to enter a setting . . .though the problem persists, to one degree or another, throughout thedata collection process’ (1995: 54). Given Thornton’s vivid initial descrip-tion of her outsider status in the club culture setting, it is striking that shemakes no attempt to follow this through with a more sustained account ofhow such differences between herself and the research subjects impactedupon the research. Not only are such considerations absent fromThornton’s account, but the research subjects themselves play only a rela-tively minor role in the text. According to Agar: ‘Ethnography is experien-tially rich [drawing on] the experiences that an ethnographer has with theinformants’ (1983: 33). In view of the time which Thornton investedgathering data in club settings one might reasonably expect that more ofthe raw data, for example, the expressed opinions of clubbers and obser-vations of particular club behaviour, would have been used as a basis forthe text’s exploratory analysis of the cultural dimensions of contemporarydance club scenes. As it is, the authoritative voice in Club Cultures ispredominantly Thornton’s, the one exception being a small � ve-pagesection mid-way through the book entitled ‘A Night of Research’ whereThornton offers the reader a brief sample of the ethnographic data shegathered in club settings. In truth, however, the empirical insights offeredby this section into contemporary club culture are relatively few; certainlyno attempt is made to provide thematic linkages between the descriptionsoffered here and other parts of the book, the section existing very much asa ‘stand alone’ piece in the study. Thornton’s personal experience oftaking the designer club drug Ecstasy (see Saunders 1995), a rare andpotentially valuable account of the ethical dilemmas often encountered byyouth and music ethnographers in their attempts to ‘get close’ to theresearch subject, is only thinly related and prematurely concluded. Beyondan account of being given Ecstasy in a dance club, Thornton offers thereader no real insight into how she felt about taking Ecstasy, whathappened when the drug began to take effect, or of how, if at all, it alteredher experience of the dance club environment.

In other cases the use of ethnography as a means of generating data hasbeen accompanied by a seeming disregard for even the most fundamentalmethodological principles of ethnographic research. As Cohen argues,

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many so-called ethnographic studies in the �eld of popular music studies‘rely upon preformulated questionnaires, surveys, autobiographies orunstructured interviews which study people outside their usual social,spatial and temporal context’ (1993: 127). A case in point is Arnett’s studyof heavy metal fandom in the USA which attempts to map the relationshipbetween taste in heavy metal music and the ‘ideology of alienation’ that,according to Arnett, is widely ‘embrace[d]’ by fans of heavy metal music(1995: 71). In many ways, Arnett’s study effectively buys into and exploits awave of public anxiety in the USA concerning teenagers’ interest in heavymetal music, an anxiety fuelled by several high pro� le court cases duringthe early 1990s against heavy metal artists whose songs, it was claimed, hadbeen responsible for a series of teenage suicides (see Richardson 1991;Walser 1993; Weinstein 2000). The style of Arnett’s study, a series of indi-vidual ‘pro� les’ on heavy metal fans, does little to critically engage with themedia’s representation of heavy metal and the ‘narrow ideation of youth’which this produces (Epstein 1998: 1). Through a series of biographicalaccounts, designed by Arnett to illustrate how taste in heavy metal corre-sponds with a need to resolve the restrictive conditions of adolescentteenage lives, typically depicted in terms of broken homes, low educationalachievement and economic hardship, a decidedly forced account of heavymetal’s socio-cultural signi� cance is produced. Crucially absent fromArnett’s reading of heavy metal is any real attempt to place the individualaccounts of heavy metal fans within the wider context of their ‘day-to-dayactivities, relationships and experiences’ (Cohen 1993: 127).

The methodological advancement of qualitative research on youthculture and popular music demands both that researchers be more openabout the various methodological issues confronting them and that theyre� ect more rigorously on the relationship between the researcher and theresearch subject in the � eldwork context. A number of existing studies dealwith these aspects of qualitative research in a more general sense (see, forexample, Burgess 1984; Hobbs and May 1993; Hammersley and Atkinson1995). Clearly, however, every aspect of social life presents its own particu-lar methodological problems for the researcher. In the � nal part of thisarticle I want to focus on one particular methodological issue facing thoseengaged in qualitative research on youth culture and popular music.

RESEARCHING THE FAMILIAR: THE USE OF ‘INSIDER’ KNOWLEDGE INYOUTH AND MUSIC RESEARCH

At times one still hears expressed as an ideal for ethnography a neutral,tropeless discourse that would render other realities ‘exactly as they are’,not � ltered through our own values and interpretive schema. For themost part, however, that wild goose is no longer being chased, and it ispossible to suggest that ethnographic writing is as trope-governed as anyother discursive formation. (Pratt 1986: 27)

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Chumbawamba should never have sold out and recorded ‘Tubthump-ing’. They’re anarchists! (Comment made by a participant in a graduateconference focusing on youth subcultures, Rochester, NY, 1998)

As the references in the � rst part of this article to recent work on contem-porary dance music begin to illustrate, empirical accounts of the relation-ship between youth culture and popular music are increasingly beingprovided by young researchers with an existing, and in some cases exten-sive, ‘insider’ knowledge of their area of study. For many years the notionof � eld-based research being carried out by a person with native or nearnative knowledge of the subject matter of their research was deemed un-ethical given the need for objectivity and detachment, qualities consideredcentral to the social-scienti� c rigour of bona � de ethnographic sociologicalwork. Similarly, many sociologists expressed the view that a relative ignor-ance of the research subject in the � rst instance would ultimately result inthe researcher listening more intently to the accounts of the researchparticipants, thus gaining a more comprehensive insight into the rules andsystems underpinning everyday life in that particular setting than could beachieved by an insider whose views would inevitably be coloured by existingknowledge and value judgments. This position is evident, for example, inWhyte’s Street Corner Society, a seminal study of youth gangs in a 1930s Italianslum in Boston, where the writer offers the following re� ections on his ownsocio-economic detachment from the subject of study

I come from a very consistent upper-middle-class background. Onegrandfather was a doctor; the other, a superintendent of schools. Myfather was a college professor. My upbringing, therefore, was very farremoved from the life I have described in Cornerville . . . We may agreethat no outsider can really know a given culture fully, but then we mustask can any insider know his or her culture. (1993: 280, 371)

In more recent years this once established maxim in ethnographicresearch has been challenged as an increasing number of researchers havedrawn on their ‘insider’ knowledge of particular regions or urban spacesand familiarity with the patterns of everyday life occurring there. As anumber of contemporary ethnographic studies reveal, such knowledge ofand familiarity with local surroundings has substantially assistedresearchers both in their quest to gain access to particular social groupsand settings and in knowing which roles to play once access has beenachieved. This is true, for example, in the case of Hobbs whose ‘common-sense knowledge of East End culture’ proved to be an invaluable asset inhis study of entrepreneurship in East London (1988: 15). Similarly, in amethodological account of his research on the ‘Blades’ (supporters of thefootball team Shef� eld United), Armstrong notes that: ‘A Shef� eld back-ground was vital for taking part in the chat and gossip which took up amajor part of the time when Blades met together’ (1993: 26). Such develop-ments in ethnography resonate with a broader critique of sociological

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research’s claim to ‘provide “objective” or “value-free” analysis’ (Rappert1999: 713). Thus, as Hine observes

The basis for claiming any kind of knowledge as asocial and independentof particular practices of knowing has come under attack, and ethnog-raphy has not been exempt. The naturalistic project of documenting areality external to the researcher has been brought into question. Ratherthan being the records of objectively observed and pre-existing culturalobjects, ethnographies have been reconceived as written and unavoid-ably constructed accounts of objects created through disciplinary prac-tices and the ethnographer’s embodied and re� exive engagement.(2000: 42)

Viewed from this perspective, it could be argued that the use of ‘insiderknowledge’ by contemporary youth and music researchers is simply follow-ing a current methodological trend in ethnographic work, at the centre ofwhich is an open acknowledgment of the researcher’s tiedness to space andplace. Problematically, however, while ethnographers working in otherareas of sociology have countered their use of ‘insider’ knowledge withcritical evaluations of this approach, in studies of youth and music, perhapsbecause of the lack of an ethnographic ‘tradition’ in this sphere of socio-logical work, researchers have tended to display an uncritical acceptance ofinsider knowledge as an end in itself. Thus, for example, in his otherwisehighly insightful account of dance club culture, Malbon suggests that ‘myown background as a clubber was, I believe, crucial in establishing mycredentials as someone who was both genuinely interested in and couldreadily empathise with [clubbers’] experiences rather than merely assomeone who happened to be “doing a project” on nightclubs as his “job” ’(1999: 32). In social-scienti� c terms, this observation tells us very little.What is crucially missing from Malbon’s study is an attempt to evaluate, inanything more than an anecdotal sense, the methodological advantages ofsuch insider knowledge in the research process. To paraphrase Marcus:‘What remains is how to deal with the fact of re� exivity, how to handle itstrategically for certain theoretical and intellectual purposes’ (1998: 190).

There are at least two reasons why this lack of critical engagement withthe methodological soundness of using insider knowledge is signi� cant.First, and most fundamentally, given that research on music and style-basedyouth cultures is set to continue being a focus for young and relatively inex-perienced researchers, the funding opportunities for such researchbecoming increasingly scarce beyond Ph.D. level, a body of work offeringa re� ective, self-analysis of the researcher’s relationship to both theresearch setting and those within it would provide very useful insights tothose beginning such work. Second, given the new approaches which arebeginning to inform ethnography, the use of insider knowledge in researchon youth and music may point the way to a timely deconstruction of theresearcher/fan position. Clearly, it is important for those who becomeresearchers of music and style-centred youth cultures because of prior

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engagement as fans to effect a level of critical distance from the fact ofbeing a fan, and from popular fanspeak contrast-pairings such as ‘under-ground’ and ‘commercial’; ‘authentic’ and ‘packaged’. At the same time, itis equally desirable that such critical distance does not result in theconducting of research from what Jenson refers to as the ‘savannah of smugsuperiority’, that fandom does not come to be perceived as ‘what “they” do’(1992: 25, 19). Indeed, there may be much to learn about the social signi� -cance of contemporary youth cultures and musics using an approach whichcombines critical re� exivity with an intimate knowledge of fan discourse.In a study of music-making practices of three young bands in Sweden,Fornäs et al. note how they were able to ‘augment [their] insights by recall-ing [their] own experiences [as musicians]’ thus achieving an emphaticinterpretation of their subject matter (1995: 15, 10). The broadening ofsuch an approach to encompass music consumption as well as productioncould well provide the key to a more effective mapping of youth culturalalliances, the acquisition of musical taste, scene membership and so forth.

Arguably, the theoretical justi� cation for a more re� exive position inethnographic research on youth and music has been gathering pace forsome time. As noted in the � rst section of this article, early sociologicalwork on the relationship between youth, style and musical taste was basedupon a grounding belief in the proximity of this relationship to the experi-ence of particular class conditions, the direct product of which, it wasargued, were the so-called postwar working-class youth ‘subcultures’ (Halland Jefferson 1976). The subsequent rejection of such explanations hasnecessarily involved a revision in sociological thinking about the nature ofmusical taste and stylistic preference and their articulation at a collectivecultural level. This has led to an abandonment of the concept of ‘subcul-ture’ in favour of terms such as ‘scene’ (Straw 1991), ‘tribe’ (Bennett 1999)and ‘taste culture’ (Lewis 1992) which allow for the greater heterogeneitynow routinely identi� ed with stylistically and/or musically demarcatedgroups. Such new approaches stress the signi� cance of musical taste as oneof a series of inter-related aesthetic values through which individuals bothconstruct their own identities and identify with others who are seen topossess the same or similar values. This, in turn, highlights the value of amore re� exive understanding of popular music’s meaning at a collectivecultural level on the part of researchers. Important in this respect is thework of Frith who has illustrated the dif� culty of analysing and accountingfor the aesthetics of popular music in ‘traditional’ sociological terms

There is no doubt that sociologists have tended to explain away popmusic. In my own academic work I have examined how rock is producedand consumed, and have tried to place it ideologically, but there is noway that a reading of my books (or those of other sociologists) could beused to explain why some pop songs are good and others bad . . . how isit that people (myself included) can say, quite con� dently, that somepopular music is better than others? (1987: 133–4, 144)

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Frith’s observations begin to illustrate how an intimate knowledge of fandiscourse, rather than serving as a distraction from the purpose of youthand music research, may in fact be utilized as a means of understanding thecollective aesthetic values attached by audiences to particular styles ofmusic. The task thus becomes one of systematically assessing how fardiscourse, as a knowledge acquired through the learning of a particular setof stylistic and ‘performative’ (Malbon 1999) conventions, can be recast asa method of researching, analysing and relating musical taste to the broaderissues surrounding the ‘musicalization’ (Shank 1994) of everyday life foryoung people. In her ethnographic research on uses of the internet, Hinesuggests that: ‘Conducting an ethnographic enquiry through the use ofCMC [computer-mediated communication] opens up the possibility ofgaining a re� exive understanding of what it is to be a part of the Internet’(2000: 10). In a similar way, through a consideration of their insider know-ledges and attendant ‘learned’ discourses as an interpretive tool in theresearch process, youth and music researchers could begin to develop are� exive understanding of what it means to be part of a particular scene.

The social scienti� c value of insider knowledge in youth and musicresearch crucially depends, then, upon a critical evaluation of its use as amethod of research – and I have suggested a means by which this mightbegin to be effected. Clearly, however, such an evaluation must also takeinto account the possible limitations of using ‘insider knowledge’. I havealready noted the tendency of youth and music researchers to engage in anuncritical celebration of their insider status as a means by which to distancethemselves from other researchers whose interest is apparently motivatedsimply by the demands of the research project itself. However, as critical,self-re� ective accounts of the research process in other areas of ethno-graphic sociological work reveal, there are contradictions present in the‘insider/researcher’ role which often create tensions in the researchsetting. Thus, as Armstrong explains in relation to his research on Shef� eldUnited football fans

There was certainly some ambiguity in my role. Because I was often outand about with the ‘core’ Blades confusion over my true role could arise;one would joke when I was talking to him: ‘Are we talking Blade to Blade?Which head have you got on, your journalist’s or your hooligan’s?’.(1993: 30)

The scenario described by Armstrong serves as a pertinent illustration ofthe remaining and unavoidable presence of barriers between theresearcher and the researched, even in those cases where the insider know-ledge of the researcher plays a major role in facilitating access to the � eldand the forming of � eld relations. It seems fair to assume that similar draw-backs can also apply to the use of insider knowledge in � eld-based researchon youth culture and popular music. Given that such methodologicalproblems can arise in relation to the use of inside knowledge, theresearcher needs to consider the nature of his/her � eld role very carefully,

Researching youth culture and popular music 463

especially the extent to which he/she is really considered to be an ‘insider’by those who are being researched.

CONCLUSION

In this article I have sought to provide a methodological critique of � eld-based sociological research on the relationship between youth culture andpopular music. I began with an account of how early studies of youth andmusic, in� uenced by a discourse of cultural Marxism, largely rejected theuse of empirical research deeming it unnecessary to the task of under-standing the stylistic and musicalized responses of youth. This was followedby a critical overview of more recent empirically focused youth and musicresearch which, I have argued, is characterized for the most part by a lackof focus on methodological problems and issues arising from the researchprocess. In the �nal section of the article I presented a critical evaluationof the use of ‘insider’ knowledge in contemporary � eld-based research onyouth culture and popular music. Clearly, the analysis I present here is byno means exhaustive. There are, in effect, a whole range of issues that needto be addressed in relation to youth and music research. The pointremains, however, that there is currently an absence of critical debateconcerning methodological procedure in this area of contemporary socio-logical work. There is little to be gained from privileging empirical researchover theory simply on the basis that it is somehow ‘more in touch’ with theobject of study. On the contrary, the movement of research on youthculture and popular music beyond the realm of theoretical abstraction andinto the clubs, streets and festival � elds where young people and musicinteract demands, in addition to written accounts of the research � ndings,a body of work that critically re� ects on the research process itself.

(Date accepted: April 2002) Andy BennettDepartment of Sociology

University of Surrey

NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY

464 Andy Bennett

1. Tel Quel was a French Literary maga-zine, established by novelist Sollers in1960, which became in� uential upon thedevelopment of structuralism and semi-otics during the 1960s.

2. ‘Balearic Beat’ is a style of housemusic pioneered by club DJs in Ibiza whichtransgresses musical boundaries by mixingelements of different music styles such asrap, jazz, soul, pop and rock (see Melechi1993).

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