Sounds of the Underground

Front matter

poa

A $ : i eal BAS

A Cultural, Political —

Part II— The Political and Cultural Underground

5 Cultural Policy and Underground/Fringe Music 6 Artists and Music, Improv and Noise

Part I— Listening to the Underground

9 Noise as Concept, History, and Scene 10 The Politics of Underground Music and Noise 11 The Sounds of Noise 12 Extreme Metal

Conclusion

List of Interviewees Notes

Index vii

Preface

The underground is an enticing concept. It suggests ideas of shadowy struggle and esoteric doings, whether we think of wartime resistance in France, of the nineteenth-century Underground Railroad in the United States, or of any number of obscure cultural movements. “Underground” has long served as a potent metaphor, suggesting as it does concealment, dissidence, and subversion. Cultural and political movements around the world have noticed this; right-wing extremist groups such as National Socialist Underground and leftist organizations like Weather Underground have eagerly seized upon “underground” as a readymade label implying stealth subversion and dissenting resistance.

Music has been no exception, with “underground” being adopted by practitioners and accorded by critics across many different genres as a marker of cultural distinction. Use of the term typically follows a loose sort of logic. Underground hip-hop or dance musics, for example, are positioned as distinct from supposedly compromised commercial forms (“straight from the underground!”), This is a kind of relative use of “underground” that plays on the term's suggestions of subversion and distinction. I have something different in mind in this book, even if I’m also calling up suggestions of obscurity and, to a point, subversion.

I'm writing specifically about noncommercial forms of music making that exist in a kind of loosely integrated cultural space on the fringes and outside mainstream pop and classical genres. What I'll call “underground” musical forms—noise, improv, and extreme metal but also fringe practices like post-noise experimental pop and even some kinds of sound art—share a world of practitioners burrowing away independent of mainstream culture. They may be trying to resist that culture politically, but they might also just be satisfying themselves by making music for small audiences and little to no profit.

My argument here is that due to shared practical, musical, and in many

VIII PREFACE cases political allegiances, these practices can be described collectively using the guiding metaphors of the “underground” and the “fringe.” The first describes ultra-marginal music and the second closely related music that fringes onto either high-art institutions or the commercial marketplace. I use critical analysis and interviews with practitioners in drawing up a map of this broad territory. Those interviews are dotted throughout the book but concentrated across Part II, which develops the contextual introduction of Part I ahead of the closer focus on music in Part III.

‘This expansive and seemingly definitive organizing framework is used even while acknowledging that my version of the underground and its fringes is personal and partial. I'm offering a set of signposts rather than a hard proof, a starting point rather than a destination. There are other undergrounds, just as there other versions of this particular underground. I’m simply trying to provide some useful categories and details and in this way to open up conversation and spur further thought about a desperately neglected realm of musical activity.

PART I

What Is the Underground?