https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0617-8240
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ABSTRACT
This article discusses the notion of amiguismo within Chilean indie music circles. Amiguismo is the contention that indie music in Chile is produced through interpersonal favours, thus hamstringing the sector’s economic and artistic development. The article analyses how two indie music venues in Santiago are composed by interconnected musicians and media workers. It contends that complaints about amiguismo arise as participants seek to make their activities of musical production and circulation economically sustainable. The struggle over resources highlights the politics of sociality underlying music production, which clashes with historical understandings of art, the public sphere, and the market as a-social. The notion of amiguismo thus highlights the political dimension of musical and social life within the ideologies of capitalist modernity that deny such politics. The article argues for the importance of examining economic concerns in analyses of the formation of public culture and musical meaning, and suggests that musical study can contribute to understanding the contradictions of capitalism.
Acknowledgements
I thank Ana María Ochoa, George Yúdice, Javier Osorio, K. E. Goldschmitt, and Timothy D. Taylor for comments on earlier versions of this material. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. This research was conducted with the support of the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Columbia University Institute for Latin American Studies, and an IIE Graduate Fellowship for International Study funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Shannon Garland holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. She is a 2017–2020 postdoctoral fellow in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Examining media circulation and band touring in the context of emerging music industry organisations, Dr. Garland's work addresses affect, aesthetics, and sociality in the production of differential economies of value. Her book project, For the Love: Independent Music, Affect, and Labor in Brazil and Beyond, traces the interrelationships between transnational forms of cultural finance, internet-driven music start-ups, and live performance to probe the tension between desires to enact a particular conceptualisation of love—the pleasure of musical play and the creation of meaningful social ties—amidst the logics of self-management and practical calculation characteristic of subjectivity and labour in neoliberalism. Dr. Garland is the 2017–2019 chair of the Economic Ethnomusicology Special Interest Group within the Society for Ethnomusicology.
ORCID
Shannon Garland http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0617-8240
Notes
1 All interviews were conducted in Spanish in Santiago and all translations have been done by me.
2 While always in flux like any genre category, indie refers to independent or DIY (Do-It-Yourself) music that traces a lineage to US and UK post-punk practices. See Garland (Garland Citation2014) for an elaboration of the term in Chile.
3 This is partly because sustainability is part of my research focus, but it is a focus because of my interlocutors’ own concerns with it.
4 Osorio (Citation2011) notes this tendency for genres considered foreign to Chile, like rock.
5 The idea that capitalist systems do away with interpersonal social relationships in favour of those mediated by money in the public market is, of course, a key contention of Marx. Anthropologists have complicated this narrative, showing how commodities can construct social relationships (Miller Citation2001), and how money can rely on Western metaphysical conceptions (Keane Citation2008; Maurer Citation2005, Citation2006).
6 ‘Resources’ are thus not only monetary reserves or access to real estate or equipment, but include favours, musicians who know how to perform certain instruments, and the social connections through which musical networks expand.
7 In a 2009 post about the band Astro on Super45, for example, 67 people made evaluative comments of the band and the site itself. Examples of chaqueteo included: ‘If MGMT (cool) didn’t exist, or Empire of the Sun (just alright), these kids would be extremely original. Unfortunately, spacey ambiguous songs … arrived some 2 years ago I would say’; ‘How late Super45 is, this note should have come out a year ago’; and ‘shitty little band of idiots imitating the hype of the moment’ (Doveris Citation2009).
8 The social media blurring of boundaries between ‘real’ friends and ‘only’ online friends further complicates distinctions between public and private, socially intimate and socially strange.
9 Föllakzoid, The Holydrug Couple, and other bands associated with the Chilean BYM label.
10 The Plaza Italia, the roundabout marking the centre of the city, separates downtown from uptown, and figures historically as the division point between the high and low classes and their associated musical consumption habits.
11 Bellavista is in the comuna of Providencia and Bellas Artes/Lastarria in that of Santiago.
12 In a grotesque close to this cycle, Suecia has now been ‘renovated’ into ‘New Suecia’, the new financial centre of Santiago. This has been symbolised and actualised with the building of the Costanera Center, a business and commercial complex housing Latin America’s tallest tower, along with the development of other business complexes and gourmet cafés and bars (cf. Zambra Citation2013).
13 Federal regulations have now been amended to do away with many cabaret exigencies, allowing bars and restaurants to more easily obtain a patente for the ‘ performance of live music’ if they already have necessary bar or restaurant licenses (Ley N° 20.591).
14 La Zona and Cellar.
15 This is a reference to the murdered Laura Palmer character of David Lynch’s early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks.
16 Here I draw from Warner’s (Citation2002) notion of ‘discursive publics’, which come into being through attention to texts. Individuals may reflexively identify as the public to which the text is addressed, or consider themselves ‘onlookers’, not included as addressees.
17 Dance party nights are often hosted by online music sites whose writers have channelled their music coverage activities into DJ reputations.
18 I know this because by this point I have spent enough time going to shows and pestering musicians to talk to me that I am included in this ‘freebie’ group.
19 Línea is also related to lineamento, or guidelines. I thank George Yúdice for pointing out this connection.
20 Infrastructures operate on differing levels simultaneously; identifying particular elements of a network as infrastructural is a ‘categorical act’ (Larkin Citation2013: 30).
21 Morcom (Citation2015b), Tsing (Citation2015), and Taylor (Citation2016) have all noted how practices can be part of capitalism while remaining partially outside of or resistant to its logics at different sites. See also Gago (Citation2017).