Andy Bennett

Researching youth culture and popular music: a methodological critique

ABSTRACT In this article I argue the need for critical evaluation of qualitative research methodology in sociological studies of the relationship between youth culture and popular music. As the article illustrates, there is currently an absence of critical debate concerning methodological issues in this eld of sociological research. In the rst part of the article I begin to account for this absence by illustrating how early research on youth and music rejected the need for empirical research, 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 work in youth and music research manifests itself in current research which, although empirically grounded, is characterized by an almost total lack of engagement with methodological issues such as negotiating access to the eld, manangment of eld relations and ethical codes. Similarly problematic is the uncritical acceptance on the part of some researchers of their insider knowledge of particular youth musics and scenes as a means of gathering empirical data. In the nal part of the article I focus on the issue of insider knowledge and the need for critical evaluation of its use as a methodological tool in eld-based youth and music research.

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 the subject of a great number of books, journal articles, conferences and courses taught as part of university degree programmes. While early studies were primarily theoretical, more recent work has sought to empirically engage with issues of youth culture and popular music as these relate to sociological themes such as postmodernism (Redhead 1993; Muggleton 2000), cultural capital (Thornton 1995), social geography (Skelton and Valentine 1998) and local identity (Finnegan 1989; Cohen 1991; Shank 1994). 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. 451466 2002 London School of Economics and Political Science ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online Published by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the LSE DOI: 10.1080/0007131022000000590

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because of their lack of empirical engagement, in much of the later, more empirically focused work little attempt is made to re ect on the research process itself. Although it is clear that the research process impacts both on the 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 engage with such methodological issues. I start by charting the development of youth culture and popular music as an object of sociological study grounded in a discourse of cultural Marxism, which deemed empirical research an unnecessar y element in the analytical project of understanding the stylistic responses of youth, before going on to critically evaluate subsequent, empirically focused work on youth and music. In the nal part of 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 music and style-based youth cultural scenes. Although this approach is now commonly applied, particularly among younger researchers, there is currently an absence of critical debate concerning the methodological justi cation for the use of insider knowledge in this area of sociological research.

FLITTING ACROSS THE SCREEN

The lack of attention to methodological detail in current research on youth and music is a legacy of the formative sociological work on this aspect of contemporary social life. In Symbols of Trouble, the specially written introduction to the third edition of his highly in uential book Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, Stanley Cohen presents a critical overview of British research on music and style-based youth cultures in the fteen year period between the books original publication in 1972 and the appearance of the third edition in 1987. An underlying theme throughout Cohens account is the failure of British youth researchers to engage with the perceptions of the social actors at the centre of their work. This begins with Cohens critical self-assessment of Folk Devils and Moral Panics: In uenced by labelling theor y, I wanted to study reaction; the actors themselves just itted across the screen (1987: iii). In many respects this constitutes a highly telling criticism of research on youth and music during the 1970s and early 1980s. With the exception of Paul Willis, whose work I will presently consider, little attempt was made by youth researchers to engage with the social actors at the centre of their work using ethnography or other qualitative eldwork methods. A major obstacle to the development of a eldwork tradition in youth and music research at this time was the theoretical framework underpinning much of the research conducted. In the now widely criticized work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)

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(see, for example, McRobbie 1980; Clarke 1981; Harris 1992; Bennett 1999), post-Second World War working-class youth cultures, such as mods, rockers and skinheads, were studied using a structural-Marxist approach incorporating Gramscis concept of ideological hegemony. Through the application of such a framework, the CCCS argued, it was possible to map the stylistic responses of postwar working-class youth cultures against a backdrop of socio-economic forces only weakly comprehended by the social actors involved. Thus, as Waters states, according to the theoretical model of the CCCS, the actions of postwar youth cultures represented a half-formed inarticulate radicalism (1981: 23). The structuralist narratives produced by the CCCS served to render eldwork redundant in social settings deemed to be underpinned by irremovable socio-economic determinants which, it was argued, fundamentally shaped the consciousness of social actors. According to the CCCS, the symbolic shows of resistance engaged in by postwar youth cultures, although at one level indicative of the symbolic creativity of youth, amounted to little more than a spectacular form of bravado when viewed within the wider context of the social relations of capitalism; the teddy boys all-dressed-up-and-nowhere-to-go experience of Saturday evening( Jefferson 1976: 48) or the skinheads magical recovery 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 resort to eldwork would serve only to reveal something which is already known, the misconception of working-class youth concerning the socio-economic forces which conspire to produce the everyday experience of class. The real nature of such circumstances, and thus a more accurate understanding of youths symbolic forms of resistance, it is maintained, can only be grasped through theoretical abstraction. Thus, as Hall notes . . . to think about or to analyse the complexity of the real, the act of practice of thinking is required; and this necessitates the use of the power of abstraction and analysis, the formation of concepts with which to cut into the complexity of the real, in order precisely to reveal and bring to light relationships and structures which cannot be visible to the naked eye, and which can neither present nor authenticate themselves. (1980: 31) One variation in this trend in youth research during the 1970s is Paul Williss book Profane Culture. Transcending the original CCCS concern with working-class youth, Profane Culture presents empirical case studies of a working-class motorbike gang and a group of middle-class hippies. Using ethnography, Willis provides highly detailed descriptions of the bikers and hippies lifeworlds. Incorporating bikers and hippies own accounts into the text, Willis begins the process of mapping their symbolic transformation of commodities for example, in the case of the bikers, the motorbike, 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 homology as a theoretical framing device. Homology is de ned by Willis as the continuous play between the group and a particular item which produces speci c styles, meanings, contents and forms of consciousness (1978: 191). Problematically, however, at this point in the text the accounts of the respondents are effectively sidelined, the task of interpretation being achieved through theoretical abstraction. The result of this is a study which comprises two largely incompatible projects: one which seeks to provide the reader with an ethnographic thick description (Geertz 1973) of the everyday lives of working-class bikers and middle-class hippies; another which effectively re-reads the entire rst section of the book using a narrative of homology in which issues of musical taste, personal image, and a range of other consumer choices, which may on the surface appear to hold highly re exive meanings, are argued by Willis to be structurally determined. The resulting methodological tensions which arise from Williss attempt to bolt this homological reading onto his ethnographic study are neatly summed up by Harris who argues that . . . [homology] has become famous as an account of how particular items re ect the structured concerns and typical feelings of a group, as, say, the black leather jacket does for bikers. Each homology arises from an integral process of selection and cultural work on an object or item, in a complex dialectical way, naturally. As a result, current members of a group are not subjectively aware of these structural meanings, embedded in 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 social sciences [is its] commit[ment] to making sense out of the way informants naturally talk and act when they are doing ordinary activities rather than activities imposed by a researcher (1983: 334). There is a clear sense, then, in which Williss application of homology as an interpretative tool in Profane Culture compromises the ethnographic claims of the text. Similar problems can be identi ed with Hebdiges (1979) treatment of punk rock in his study Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Although not engaging directly in empirical research, Hebdige pursues what Chaney terms a quasi-ethnographic research style allied with a sophisticated theoretical intent in interpretation (1994: 39). Using the concept of polysemy (borrowed from the French Tel Quel group1) Hebdige posits an association between the fragmented, cut up style of the punk image and the socioeconomic decline of Britain during the late 1970s (1979: 26, 878). Methodologically, however, the thesis presented in Subculture is problematic. On the one hand, Hebdige invests considerable time and effort illustrating the semiotic linkage between punks chaotic visual image and the British medias rhetoric of crisis during the late 1970s while at the same time proclaiming the unlikelihood that those directly involved in the punk rock 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 empirical re ections offered by Hebdige are being made to t the bigger picture which has already been fashioned at the level of theoretical abstraction. Thus, as Cohen observes in relation to Hebdiges reading of punks appropriation of the swastika Displaying a swastika shows how symbols are stripped from their natural context, exploited for empty effect, displayed through mockery, distancing, irony, parody, inversion . . . But how are we to know this? We are never told much about the thing: when, how, where, by whom or in what context it is worn. We do not know what, if any, difference exists between indigenous and sociological explanations. (ibid.: xvii) Such was the sociological trend in imposing theoretical frameworks on the cultural signi cance of music and style from above that, by the mid1980s, the sociology of youth culture had become, to use Phil Cohens words, simply the site of a multiplicity of con icting discourses . . . [with] no reality outside its representation (1986: 20). From the mid-1980s onwards many sociologists of youth and those in related areas of study began to reject purely theoretical models of investigation and turned to ethnographic research in an attempt to situate their accounts of the relationship between youth culture and popular music more rmly in the social settings where this relationship is formed and where its micro-social manifestations could, it was argued, be more readily observed. At the same time, researchers became more concerned to engage with the accounts of young people themselves and to incorporate such accounts into their writing.

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC TURN

Two early studies which begin to redress the absence of ethnographic data and microsociological detail (Cohen 1991: 6) in research on youth and music are Finnegans (1989) The Hidden Musicians and Cohens (1991) Rock Culture in Liverpool. Cohen, in particular, weaves extensive interview and observation material into an analysis of the correlation between young people, music-making, identity and ever yday life in the post-industrial setting of mid-1980s Liverpool. Finnegans study, although less focused on rock and pop than Cohens, is similarly concerned to ethnographically map the relationship between local music-making processes and the broader social processes which inform ever yday life in local settings. An important feature of both Finnegan and Cohens work is the way in which each writer re ects on their role as researcher and the possible impact of their presence in the eld on the data collected. In Cohens case this concern is most saliently expressed in relation to her status as a female researcher in a male-dominated local music scene which, Cohen concedes, may have made some people uneasy, especially as wives and girlfriends of musicians

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were systematically barred from attending rehearsals for fear of them being a distracting or disruptive in uence (1991: 205). Indeed, such bias on the part of the research respondents conspired to impose a form of gendercoded outsider status on Cohen. Thus, as she observes . . . my activities obviously con icted with those normally expected of a woman. I attended gigs alone, expressed interest in the technicalities of music-making and in the attitudes and concerns of those who made it, and contradicted in other respects most women many of the band members were familiar with. (ibid.: 2056) For Finnegan, whose presence in the eld was less temporal than Cohens, a different methodological problem emerged, namely, how to retain objectivity in the context of familiar surroundings. Mason suggests that Although the purpose of observation is to witness what is going on in a particular setting or set of interactions, the intellectual problem for the researcher is what to observe and what to be interested in . . . [the researcher] must work out how to tackle the questions of selectivity and perspective in observation, since any observation is inevitably going to be selective, and to be based upon a particular observational perspective. (1996: 678) In the case of Finnegan this problem was exacerbated due to her familiarity with Milton Keynes, the setting in which she conducted her research. A resident of Milton Keynes, Finnegan was unable to take advantage of the re exive detachment available to those ethnographic researchers who enter the research setting for a given period of time, ultimately withdrawing in order the analyse their data and write up the ndings. Thus, as Finnegan observes, the well-known issue of how far one should or should not become native looks rather different, if still pressing, in ones own community. Being too much of an insider (and ceasing to be a detached observer) was always a danger (1989: 343). It is signi cant that, with the exception of Finnegan and Cohen, both of whom have backgrounds in social-anthropology rather than sociology, little attempt has been made in empirical research on youth and music to re ect on the role of the researcher, the relationship between the researcher and the research respondents and the possible impact of the latter on the nature of the research data produced. On the contrar y, in a number of recent empirically focused sociological studies of youth and music a subjectively informed enthusiasm stands in for any consideration of such methodological issues. In this respect, a number of studies warrant critical attention. Redheads Rave Off, an early account of the British house music phenomenon of the late 1980s and early 1990s, draws together the work of young researchers in a series of papers whose content re ects rst hand experience of the UK club scene and the exoticism of Ibizas Balearic Beat.2 Redheads scene-setting introduction casts a critical postmodern eye on the

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work of the Birmingham CCCS and related studies, suggesting that the latters linear way of thinking about the connections between pop and youth culture (1993: 2), if always problematic, is becoming increasingly so as the quickening circular ow of musical genres, sub-genres and attendant youth styles blurs into what Polhemus (1997) terms a supermarket of style. The burden of empirical proof for Redheads grand theoretical claims is, however, placed on a series of quite poorly conceptualized semi-ethnographic studies of dance club settings whose privileging of frontline knowledge of the house music scene over the necessity to critically engage with issues of access, eld relations, and objectivity of data is treated in an entirely unproblematic fashion by the researchers involved in the work. As a result, much of the empirical illustration in Rave Off is comparable with the intelligent fanspeak that characterizes underground fanzines; a series of in club accounts which maintain that the experience of the writer is the collective experience of the crowd. This tendency is clearly illustrated in Melechis 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 musical sound, where one attempts to implode (get into) and disappear. (1993: 33) Similar methodological problems can be identi ed with other work on contemporary dance music, Richard and Krgers (1998) study of the annual Love Parade in Berlin and Champions (1997) account of the struggles of Wisconsin ravers with the hostile attitudes of both local communities and the police adopting an essentially partisan stance. No attempt is made to assume a critical distance from the research setting and respondents, the descriptive authority of the researchers concerned becoming a one-dimensional voice which echoes the self-assumed rightness of the movement which each study seeks to describe. Such accounts are easy targets for the recent cultural populist critiques of writers such as McGuigan (1992) who argue that academic writing on popular culture and its audience has become an uncritical celebration of mass culture which, like popular journalism, claims knowledge through an ability to identify with the street level sensibilities of particular scenes and audiences. However, it is not only in such overtly subjective writing that a lack of attention to methodological detail is evident. A further study of contemporary dance music, Thorntons Club Cultures, is situated more rmly in the ethnographic tradition. Thornton claims no personal insider knowledge of dance music and concentrates instead upon an attempted engagement with the attitudes and ideals of the youthful insiders whose social lives revolve around clubs and raves (1995: 2). Moreover, Thornton is re exively aware of the various issues which set her, as the researcher, apart from the subjects of her research . . . I was an outsider to the cultures in which I conducted research for several reasons. First and foremost, I was working in a cultural space in

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which ever yone else (except the DJs, door and bar staff, and perhaps the odd journalist) were at their leisure. Not only did I have intents and purposes that were different to the crowd, but also for the most part I tried to maintain an analytical frame of mind that is truly anathema to the lose yourself and let the rhythm take control ethos of clubs and raves. Two demographic factors my age and nationality further contributed to this detachment. (ibid.) Beyond this introductory assertion, however, very little is said by Thornton 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 the data collection process (1995: 54). Given Thorntons vivid initial description of her outsider status in the club culture setting, it is striking that she makes no attempt to follow this through with a more sustained account of how such differences between herself and the research subjects impacted upon the research. Not only are such considerations absent from Thorntons account, but the research subjects themselves play only a relatively minor role in the text. According to Agar: Ethnography is experientially rich [drawing on] the experiences that an ethnographer has with the informants (1983: 33). In view of the time which Thornton invested gathering data in club settings one might reasonably expect that more of the raw data, for example, the expressed opinions of clubbers and observations of particular club behaviour, would have been used as a basis for the texts exploratory analysis of the cultural dimensions of contemporary dance club scenes. As it is, the authoritative voice in Club Cultures is predominantly Thorntons, the one exception being a small ve-page section mid-way through the book entitled A Night of Research where Thornton offers the reader a brief sample of the ethnographic data she gathered in club settings. In truth, however, the empirical insights offered by this section into contemporar y club culture are relatively few; certainly no attempt is made to provide thematic linkages between the descriptions offered here and other parts of the book, the section existing very much as a stand alone piece in the study. Thorntons personal experience of taking the designer club drug Ecstasy (see Saunders 1995), a rare and potentially valuable account of the ethical dilemmas often encountered by youth and music ethnographers in their attempts to get close to the research subject, is only thinly related and prematurely concluded. Beyond an account of being given Ecstasy in a dance club, Thornton offers the reader no real insight into how she felt about taking Ecstasy, what happened when the drug began to take effect, or of how, if at all, it altered her experience of the dance club environment. In other cases the use of ethnography as a means of generating data has been accompanied by a seeming disregard for even the most fundamental methodological 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 or unstructured interviews which study people outside their usual social, spatial and temporal context (1993: 127). A case in point is Arnetts study of heavy metal fandom in the USA which attempts to map the relationship between 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, Arnetts study effectively buys into and exploits a wave of public anxiety in the USA concerning teenagers interest in heavy metal music, an anxiety fuelled by several high pro le court cases during the early 1990s against heavy metal artists whose songs, it was claimed, had been responsible for a series of teenage suicides (see Richardson 1991; Walser 1993; Weinstein 2000). The style of Arnetts study, a series of individual pro les on heavy metal fans, does little to critically engage with the medias representation of heavy metal and the narrow ideation of youth which this produces (Epstein 1998: 1). Through a series of biographical accounts, designed by Arnett to illustrate how taste in heavy metal corresponds with a need to resolve the restrictive conditions of adolescent teenage lives, typically depicted in terms of broken homes, low educational achievement and economic hardship, a decidedly forced account of heavy metals socio-cultural signi cance is produced. Crucially absent from Arnetts reading of heavy metal is any real attempt to place the individual accounts of heavy metal fans within the wider context of their day-to-day activities, relationships and experiences (Cohen 1993: 127). The methodological advancement of qualitative research on youth culture and popular music demands both that researchers be more open about the various methodological issues confronting them and that they re ect more rigorously on the relationship between the researcher and the research subject in the eldwork context. A number of existing studies deal with these aspects of qualitative research in a more general sense (see, for example, Burgess 1984; Hobbs and May 1993; Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). Clearly, however, every aspect of social life presents its own particular methodological problems for the researcher. In the nal part of this article I want to focus on one particular methodological issue facing those engaged in qualitative research on youth culture and popular music.

RESEARCHING THE FAMILIAR: THE USE OF INSIDER KNOWLEDGE IN YOUTH 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 the most part, however, that wild goose is no longer being chased, and it is possible to suggest that ethnographic writing is as trope-governed as any other discursive formation. (Pratt 1986: 27)

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Chumbawamba should never have sold out and recorded Tubthumping. Theyre anarchists! (Comment made by a participant in a graduate conference focusing on youth subcultures, Rochester, NY, 1998) As the references in the rst part of this article to recent work on contemporary dance music begin to illustrate, empirical accounts of the relationship between youth culture and popular music are increasingly being provided by young researchers with an existing, and in some cases extensive, insider knowledge of their area of study. For many years the notion of eld-based research being carried out by a person with native or near native knowledge of the subject matter of their research was deemed unethical given the need for objectivity and detachment, qualities considered central to the social-scienti c rigour of bona de ethnographic sociological work. Similarly, many sociologists expressed the view that a relative ignorance of the research subject in the rst instance would ultimately result in the researcher listening more intently to the accounts of the research participants, thus gaining a more comprehensive insight into the rules and systems underpinning ever yday life in that particular setting than could be achieved by an insider whose views would inevitably be coloured by existing knowledge and value judgments. This position is evident, for example, in Whytes Street Corner Society, a seminal study of youth gangs in a 1930s Italian slum in Boston, where the writer offers the following re ections on his own socio-economic detachment from the subject of study I come from a very consistent upper-middle-class background. One grandfather was a doctor; the other, a superintendent of schools. My father was a college professor. My upbringing, therefore, was ver y far removed from the life I have described in Cornerville . . . We may agree that no outsider can really know a given culture fully, but then we must ask can any insider know his or her culture. (1993: 280, 371) In more recent years this once established maxim in ethnographic research has been challenged as an increasing number of researchers have drawn on their insider knowledge of particular regions or urban spaces and familiarity with the patterns of everyday life occurring there. As a number of contemporar y ethnographic studies reveal, such knowledge of and familiarity with local surroundings has substantially assisted researchers both in their quest to gain access to particular social groups and settings and in knowing which roles to play once access has been achieved. This is true, for example, in the case of Hobbs whose commonsense knowledge of East End culture proved to be an invaluable asset in his study of entrepreneurship in East London (1988: 15). Similarly, in a methodological account of his research on the Blades (supporters of the football team Shef eld United), Armstrong notes that: A Shef eld background was vital for taking part in the chat and gossip which took up a major part of the time when Blades met together (1993: 26). Such developments in ethnography resonate with a broader critique of sociological

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researchs claim to provide objective or value-free analysis (Rappert 1999: 713). Thus, as Hine observes The basis for claiming any kind of knowledge as asocial and independent of particular practices of knowing has come under attack, and ethnography has not been exempt. The naturalistic project of documenting a reality external to the researcher has been brought into question. Rather than being the records of objectively observed and pre-existing cultural objects, ethnographies have been reconceived as written and unavoidably constructed accounts of objects created through disciplinar y practices and the ethnographers embodied and re exive engagement. (2000: 42) Viewed from this perspective, it could be argued that the use of insider knowledge by contemporary youth and music researchers is simply following a current methodological trend in ethnographic work, at the centre of which is an open acknowledgment of the researchers tiedness to space and place. Problematically, however, while ethnographers working in other areas of sociology have countered their use of insider knowledge with critical evaluations of this approach, in studies of youth and music, perhaps because of the lack of an ethnographic tradition in this sphere of sociological work, researchers have tended to display an uncritical acceptance of insider knowledge as an end in itself. Thus, for example, in his otherwise highly insightful account of dance club culture, Malbon suggests that my own background as a clubber was, I believe, crucial in establishing my credentials as someone who was both genuinely interested in and could readily empathise with [clubbers] experiences rather than merely as someone who happened to be doing a project on nightclubs as his job (1999: 32). In social-scienti c terms, this observation tells us ver y little. What is crucially missing from Malbons study is an attempt to evaluate, in anything more than an anecdotal sense, the methodological advantages of such insider knowledge in the research process. To paraphrase Marcus: What remains is how to deal with the fact of re exivity, how to handle it strategically for certain theoretical and intellectual purposes (1998: 190). There are at least two reasons why this lack of critical engagement with the methodological soundness of using insider knowledge is signi cant. First, and most fundamentally, given that research on music and style-based youth cultures is set to continue being a focus for young and relatively inexperienced researchers, the funding opportunities for such research becoming increasingly scarce beyond Ph.D. level, a body of work offering a re ective, self-analysis of the researchers relationship to both the research setting and those within it would provide ver y useful insights to those beginning such work. Second, given the new approaches which are beginning to inform ethnography, the use of insider knowledge in research on youth and music may point the way to a timely deconstruction of the researcher/fan position. Clearly, it is important for those who become researchers 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 of being a fan, and from popular fanspeak contrast-pairings such as underground and commercial; authentic and packaged. At the same time, it is equally desirable that such critical distance does not result in the conducting of research from what Jenson refers to as the savannah of smug superiority, 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 which combines critical re exivity with an intimate knowledge of fan discourse. In a study of music-making practices of three young bands in Sweden, Forns et al. note how they were able to augment [their] insights by recalling [their] own experiences [as musicians] thus achieving an emphatic interpretation of their subject matter (1995: 15, 10). The broadening of such an approach to encompass music consumption as well as production could well provide the key to a more effective mapping of youth cultural alliances, the acquisition of musical taste, scene membership and so forth. Arguably, the theoretical justi cation for a more re exive position in ethnographic research on youth and music has been gathering pace for some time. As noted in the rst section of this article, early sociological work on the relationship between youth, style and musical taste was based upon a grounding belief in the proximity of this relationship to the experience of particular class conditions, the direct product of which, it was argued, were the so-called postwar working-class youth subcultures (Hall and Jefferson 1976). The subsequent rejection of such explanations has necessarily involved a revision in sociological thinking about the nature of musical taste and stylistic preference and their articulation at a collective cultural level. This has led to an abandonment of the concept of subculture in favour of terms such as scene (Straw 1991), tribe (Bennett 1999) and taste culture (Lewis 1992) which allow for the greater heterogeneity now routinely identi ed with stylistically and/or musically demarcated groups. Such new approaches stress the signi cance of musical taste as one of a series of inter-related aesthetic values through which individuals both construct their own identities and identify with others who are seen to possess the same or similar values. This, in turn, highlights the value of a more re exive understanding of popular musics meaning at a collective cultural level on the part of researchers. Important in this respect is the work of Frith who has illustrated the dif culty of analysing and accounting for the aesthetics of popular music in traditional sociological terms There is no doubt that sociologists have tended to explain away pop music. In my own academic work I have examined how rock is produced and consumed, and have tried to place it ideologically, but there is no way that a reading of my books (or those of other sociologists) could be used to explain why some pop songs are good and others bad . . . how is it that people (myself included) can say, quite con dently, that some popular music is better than others? (1987: 1334, 144)

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Friths observations begin to illustrate how an intimate knowledge of fan discourse, rather than serving as a distraction from the purpose of youth and music research, may in fact be utilized as a means of understanding the collective aesthetic values attached by audiences to particular styles of music. The task thus becomes one of systematically assessing how far discourse, as a knowledge acquired through the learning of a particular set of stylistic and performative (Malbon 1999) conventions, can be recast as a method of researching, analysing and relating musical taste to the broader issues surrounding the musicalization (Shank 1994) of ever yday life for young people. In her ethnographic research on uses of the internet, Hine suggests that: Conducting an ethnographic enquir y through the use of CMC [computer-mediated communication] opens up the possibility of gaining 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 knowledges and attendant learned discourses as an interpretive tool in the research process, youth and music researchers could begin to develop a re exive understanding of what it means to be part of a particular scene. The social scienti c value of insider knowledge in youth and music research crucially depends, then, upon a critical evaluation of its use as a method of research and I have suggested a means by which this might begin to be effected. Clearly, however, such an evaluation must also take into account the possible limitations of using insider knowledge. I have already noted the tendency of youth and music researchers to engage in an uncritical celebration of their insider status as a means by which to distance themselves from other researchers whose interest is apparently motivated simply by the demands of the research project itself. However, as critical, self-re ective accounts of the research process in other areas of ethnographic sociological work reveal, there are contradictions present in the insider/researcher role which often create tensions in the research setting. Thus, as Armstrong explains in relation to his research on Shef eld United football fans There was certainly some ambiguity in my role. Because I was often out and 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 journalists or your hooligans?. (1993: 30) The scenario described by Armstrong serves as a pertinent illustration of the remaining and unavoidable presence of barriers between the researcher and the researched, even in those cases where the insider knowledge of the researcher plays a major role in facilitating access to the eld and the forming of eld relations. It seems fair to assume that similar drawbacks can also apply to the use of insider knowledge in eld-based research on youth culture and popular music. Given that such methodological problems can arise in relation to the use of inside knowledge, the researcher needs to consider the nature of his/her eld role very carefully,

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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 eldbased sociological research on the relationship between youth culture and popular music. I began with an account of how early studies of youth and music, in uenced by a discourse of cultural Marxism, largely rejected the use of empirical research deeming it unnecessary to the task of understanding the stylistic and musicalized responses of youth. This was followed by a critical overview of more recent empirically focused youth and music research which, I have argued, is characterized for the most part by a lack of focus on methodological problems and issues arising from the research process. In the nal section of the article I presented a critical evaluation of the use of insider knowledge in contemporary eld-based research on youth culture and popular music. Clearly, the analysis I present here is by no means exhaustive. There are, in effect, a whole range of issues that need to be addressed in relation to youth and music research. The point remains, however, that there is currently an absence of critical debate concerning methodological procedure in this area of contemporary sociological work. There is little to be gained from privileging empirical research over theory simply on the basis that it is somehow more in touch with the object of study. On the contrar y, the movement of research on youth culture and popular music beyond the realm of theoretical abstraction and into the clubs, streets and festival elds where young people and music interact 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 Bennett Department of Sociology University of Surrey

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Tel Quel was a French Literary magazine, established by novelist Sollers in 1960, which became in uential upon the development of structuralism and semiotics during the 1960s. 2. Balearic Beat is a style of house music pioneered by club DJs in Ibiza which transgresses musical boundaries by mixing elements of different music styles such as rap, jazz, soul, pop and rock (see Melechi 1993).

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