The old days of Press Release Policing are looking decidedly numbered. No longer can you just get some coppers and cameras together on the 6pm news unleashing a bit of the ultraviolence in an effort to scare the kids and reassure the olds. Once you bring web into the foray, you’re putting the narrative at risk, not only for the reasons Mark has discussed here but because you rely on Journalists. Take the author of Daily Terrorgraph story “Riot police break up Facebook party” – the headline aims to elide the Corey moral panic with the latest in series of very well organised and, crucially, free warehouse parties. She describes her job on her own Facebook profile thusly:
Employer: News Ltd/ Manly Daily
Position: Journalist
Location: Manly, Australia
Description: I write shit.
Such as her ‘about me’:
i’m 20-something going on 7eventy, i laugh at inapproPriate moments especially during dramatic/romantic movies, i love to sing but am utterly tone deaf, i dance like peter garrett out of the oils/frank spencer, i dress like a bliNd person who thinks the charity bin is their wardrobe, i claim to want to be a writer but have questionable skills, i watch morE tv then i should, i MaKe obscure movie referances and fail 2 notice that no one gets them, im a journalist but i was in sPecial spelling at school, i pick my nose while i’m driving and i’ll think so much my brain hurts but i do/$ay things without thinking…………………….
Then there’s the problem of your keystone antics being recounted to all the people who visit the forum mentioned in the terrorgraph:
the funniest was when the cops thought it was the punters who blocked the door to MITC stage and were bashing it in only to smack another cop in the head holding the door on the other side HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
And of course there’s this beautiful allegory for the whole exercise:
just saw the channel 7 report, they had footage of 6 cops ontop of some guy on the road who’s motionless and they’re going “stop resisting”
and guy is going, “do i look like i’m resisting you fucking idiot?” – awesome
The backstory to the free party, including some other corrections to the Terrorgraph Reportage and some poetic accounts from participants fed up with the sanitized extortion (ie.$130 tix and $6 drinks) that passes for ‘festivals’ these days, the inthemix forum thread is worth a read from about here.
Can you put a link up to the article in question?
lawlz…
this post has been the highlight in recent blogging history!
Interesting how the allegedly legit promoter on the ITM forums, who cops much abuse by others, falls back on a true/false dichotomy to legitmate his views on how the scene should be run but completely misunderstands the anti-entreprenuerial dimension of the comments in reply.
Similarly, the various critical replies unfortunately have to rely on a ‘taste’ based discourse (‘your parties are bad because they are mc dance parties’, etc) which also obfuscates the real critique of entreprenuers.
I’ll be using this as an example in a lecture I have to give in a few weeks about subcultural scenes and the commodification of enthusiasm.
GW I’ve added the link to the text. See also this story http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24272157-5006009,00.html Note the bullshit caption. Angry??? Noooo, it was only the Neanderthal Police who were angry – hitting equipment with batons to silence the music, and throwing girls against walls without justification.
Glen, what do you mean by “[obfuscating] the real critique of entreprenuer”?
Hold the front page – it’s teens gone beserk!
As someone much older and wiser once said (or more accurately shouted): “You’ve got to Fight! For your Right! To paaaaaaaaaaarty!”
dk.au, there are two ways to approach popular music (amost many others). One way examines the character of the music in terms of various identifiable qualities in relation to other musical works and their qualities. Another way is to appreciate popular music not as merely a sonorous thing, but as necessarily involving means of production, distribution and consumption.
Similarly, these sort of cultural events that constitute a scene, such as dance parties and music festivals, can be understood in terms of the qualities of the music or the material conditions that allow works of music to be listened to and enjoyed according to the means of organisation.
If the means of organisation is organised around producing a surplus value from the enjoyment of the music that punters bring to the event, then the punters become alienated from their own experience of the event. However, the means of organisation can also be determined by a desire to bring people together because of a shared ‘love of music’ without any consideration of profit. The capitalist entrepreneurial mode of organisation seeks to provide a service-based commodity (‘we have 40 artists over 9 hours’ or whatever), while obfuscating the role of punters who actually constitute most of the experience (perhaps best understood as a sense of belonging to the event) being produced and consumed at the same time.
Real enthusiasts of any scene intuit this alienation from there own sense of belonging and often refuse to participate in events where their enthusiasm becomes commodified as a mystified part of the DJ-based spectacle on offer. DJ as god refrain is derided because all participants in a scene who are real enthusiasts know that it are the punters that make a scene, not the alleged ‘drawcards’. Drawcards draw crowds because members of the crowd have been trained to expect a crowd, this circulates in hegemoci discourses of a scene as a magical property of, for example, DJ gods, rather than appreciating it as the experience-based efficiacy of the crowd.
Note how the comments in the ITM thread condemn the dickheads that attended (ie Lads, taggers, bottle throwers, etc) as they pollute the event with having an ressentiment-fueled enthusiasm for disruption that has nothing to do with the music, similar to an entreprenuerial enthusiasm for profit, in that they are both different to an enthusiasm congruent with an awesome night of simply dancing and laughing, etc.
there their ffs
Any two things are ’similar’ if the only requirement is they both be different to a third thing, glen. I think you’re overcomplicating the difference between a party (always free, very rarely public) and a gig/show/festival/event/night (always “organised around producing a surplus value from the enjoyment of the music”).
People love parties. Complementary services, including the music, are provided for the enjoyment of the party goers, so naturally un-commodified: gifts. For that reason and many others, parties can’t happen regularly or for everybody.
Most people seemed to be saying, do we really have to state the obvious? Don’t compare your super-expensive/awesome value for money festival with the free party we went to last night. Any benefits you try to sell are missing the point.
Maybe, I was explaining what I meant, I did express it quite simply in the first comment I thought.
The difference between the commons and commodities in relation to the infrastructure of a scene and their correlatiing mode of organisation (gift economy versus entreprenuerial) does need to be staked out. I am not talking about separate categories of events and their differences, but different events happening in what is ostensibly a single scene. I don’t think this is unwarranted as some forum posters invoke memorialised conceptions of bygone ‘eras’ (late 1980s, early 1990s) and ‘dance parties’ and ‘raves’, compared to this recent party, as a critique of the current commodified events for emerging out of these earlier events.
As a generalisation, I don’t agree with your ‘people love’ ‘always free’ assessment. Most punters are happy to pay money if it means they get to attend events for the purpose of the event, not someone else’s profit. However, some punters prefer to go to hyper-commodified events because they are allegedly safer, cleaner, better organised, etc. Yet, such events are plagued with numbskulls who attend for the purpose of their own enjoyment, as that is what they are ‘consuming’, rather than helping produce an event to share and belong to. It has little to do with whether something is a ‘free’ event for punters or rip-off/’value for money’ event for the purposes of making someone money, but the expectations of consumers as soon as someone is organising these events for profit.
Plus, are the people commenting on the boards and in response to the news article are simply saying “don’t compare”? Rather aren’t they saying “don’t use your hegemonic capitalist models of valorisation to judge how we want the scene” (for the reasons I argue above)? I don’t know? Perhaps this is what you meant?
(complimentary of course…but more complementary too)
this stuff has been going on since the 1990s. think about the sydney park riot!
Glen, I’m not sure I take the comments about lads ‘polluting’ the scene entirely at face value. I’m sure there’s an element of excitement with at least some people – the ones trying to keep it ‘underground’ – that there will be the kind of sensationalist, eminently predictable coverage we’ve seen to reinforce a transgressive element.
By contrast, in Berlin I went to plenty of warehouse parties that just kept going all through the weekend in places that literally fell apart around is. Some of the best times of my life.
Tyro Rex, indeed http://www.inthemix.com.au/forum/showpost.php?p=392002045&postcount=268
Glen, are you familiar with Angela McRobbie’s work on the mode of organisation of 80s dance parties in Britain being commodified by the self same people and later used as a template for creative work?
I can hunt down the ref for you if interested – it’s also in Hartley’s CI reader.
Ps – dk, I deleted
Roger Bacon’sJohn Greenfield’s comment.thanks kim, i’ll follow it up. i’ve flicked through the book at work when it came out to see if I could use it for my diss and it was related but not really relevant. I totally missed the mcrobbie piece!
Now is a good time to return to it and other books I dismissed for instrumental (diss completion) reasons. that and i have book reviews overdue for mark, eeek…
Yikes, Glen!
Here’s the ref – it’s a reprinted journal article so it might be easier to find that way:
McRobbie, Angela (2002), ‘Clubs to Companies: Notes on the Decline of Political Culture in Speeded Up Creative Worlds’, Cultural Studies, 16(4), pp 517-31.