Embodying hardcore: rethinking ‘subcultural’ authenticities

Abstract

Much of the debate surrounding the scholarship of music-based youth cultures has been organised around an epistemological assumption that focuses upon the discursive and representational value of cultural practices and artefacts. As such, contemporary writers are widely polarised on the issue of the degree to which young people commit to the cultural meanings that are attached to such performance, and divided on questions about how such meaning is manufactured in the first place. But understanding cultural performance as a solely symbolic undertaking is not only methodologically problematic; it marginalises the felt and affective experiences of participants and misses the significance of the shifting limitations and potentialities that define subcultural bodies. Contra all of this, and drawing on interviews with participants of the hardcore music scene on Australia's Gold Coast, this article instead seeks to position ‘subcultural’ attachment as an embodied process of becoming, where perceptions of ‘authenticity’ are grounded in the ongoing enactment of incorporated practical (rather than symbolic) competencies. For it is only in the transformative potential of embodied performances that identities are (re)produced. In considering such competence as contingent upon predispositions towards particular modes of action – that is, ‘what a body can do’ – I argue that Pierre Bourdieu's concept of ‘habitus’ offers a way of moving past the quotidian sociological emphasis on the symbolic and towards an engagement with youth cultural forms at the level of affect and emotion.

Keywords:

• subculture
• hardcore
• habitus
• body
• authenticity

Acknowledgements

I thank, for their advice and support in the writing of this article, Professor Andy Bennett, Dr Sarah Baker and my colleagues at the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research, Griffith University, Australia.

Notes

1. This article does not pursue analysis of the gendered nature of the space/s of hardcore. This is not to suggest that the deeply problematic discourses that comes through so sharply in the data included herein is not important – or even central – to the fieldwork process. Indeed, it seems to me that such language offers myriad affective resources that afford, in complex ways, both the gendered histories of participants’ bodies and the (re)production of masculinities in and of the hardcore scene. This is, however, peripheral to the central argument of the paper, which is far too broad in scope to broach the complex empirical terrain of doing gender and sexuality. For gender is produced along the specific embodied practices that give rise to unique, situated emergences of subculture (see Evers 2009).

2. Bennett and Kahn-Harris (2004, p. 11) have noted how ‘post-subcultural’ theory was introduced by Steve Redhead (1990) nearly a decade before David Muggleton (1997, 2000) developed the concept with any real vigour. I reference both writers for their equally important role in coining the phrase, as it defines work which stresses the unboundedness of contemporary ‘subcultural’ attachments.