Journal articles by Ben Green
This article extends current discussions of ageing through a study of the continuing involvement ... more This article extends current discussions of ageing through a study of the continuing involvement in skateboarding of individuals who are no longer young adults. We qualitatively examine The Tired Video which features older and mostly middle-aged male skaters as our case study. This is done in light of discourses of ageing and a lack of studies examining how older participants remain involved in lifestyle sports typically associated with youth and risk. Our findings reveal four main processes, which we argue assist older skaters to establish an ongoing sense of inclusion in skateboarding. These are modification, dedication, humour and homage. Our study can also contribute insights to other scenes that have reached a ‘coming of age’ where they no longer accurately fit the description of being a youth culture alone, and the need to redirect thinking about ageing away from notions of imminent departure and deficit over to positive adaptations.
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The application of memory studies to music scenes has so far had a material focus, favouring plac... more The application of memory studies to music scenes has so far had a material focus, favouring places and objects. This article critically examines the role of an iconic event in scene identity, through a case study of the ‘Cybernana’ music festival, hosted by Brisbane community radio station 4ZZZfm in 1996 and marked by what has been characterised, alternately, as an audience riot and a police riot. Based on ethnographic research and analysis of cultural texts it is shown that, against official findings and wider disinterest, there exists an intergenerational counter-memory of Cybernana as an iconic event, within a politicised narrative that defines both the radio station and the local music scene. The factors involved in constructing this iconicity are considered, including the role of media. This mediated, cultural memory provides a narrative frame for individual experiences, through which people locate themselves within the scene and reaffirm its collective identity.
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Popular Music, 2017
Hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan sold only one, expensive copy of their album, Once Upon A Time in Shao... more Hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan sold only one, expensive copy of their album, Once Upon A Time in Shaolin. This exemplifies recent strategies by popular music artists to establish their work as art, with what Walter Benjamin calls ‘aura’, in response to the accessibility and dematerialisation enabled by digital technology as well as longstanding cultural condescension. Critics argue that popular music should not be restricted but shared, with digital technology increasing opportunities for shared consumption. This article considers the fate of music's aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, arguing that it does not disappear but is dispersed and diversified. The digital acceleration of mass reproduction has drawn mixed responses from artists, fans and commentators, and Shaolin and similar projects show how the separation of music from its physical commodity form has brought renewed attention to perennial tensions between the popular, artistic and commercial aspects of popular music.
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Sociology 50 (2): 333-348, Feb 19, 2015
The sociological study of music consumption has tended to focus on general and typical experience... more The sociological study of music consumption has tended to focus on general and typical experience instead of discrete or extraordinary experiences, consistently with a wider lack of biographical analysis. However, a popular topic among music fans is the phenomenon of peak music experiences: specific experiences involving music that are especially memorable, influential and even pivotal for the individuals involved. Drawing on the results of a pilot study conducted in Brisbane, Australia, this article shows that participants in the city’s indie music scene cite peak music experiences as central to their biographical narratives of inspiration, influence, conversion and motivation. These experiences make visible the more subtle processes by which musical meaning, taste and identity are constantly made and remade, as well as showing how encounters with music can affect subjectivities in an enduring way. The listeners are conscious of these processes, reflect on them and even try to create them.
Keywords: biography, consumption, epiphanies, indie music, peak music experiences, taste
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Book chapters by Ben Green
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Book Reviews by Ben Green
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Conference proceedings by Ben Green
Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! An approach to underground music scenes, May 2015
A popular topic among music fans is the phenomenon of peak music experiences: particular experien... more A popular topic among music fans is the phenomenon of peak music experiences: particular experiences involving music that are especially memorable and even pivotal for the people involved. These epiphanies with music are sought, remembered and discussed, becoming important in the ongoing construction of taste and identity. They are therefore useful windows for research into music scenes. A case study of musicians, organisers and fans in the DIY/'indie' scene of Brisbane, Australia, finds that peak music experiences are central to their biographical narratives of inspiration, taste and motivation. They describe moments in which distinct meanings are realised and felt with an intensity that leaves an imprint, affecting future interactions. The peak music experience stories of these scene participants reveal that the core values of the Brisbane indie music scene, and the roles these values play in the construction of identities, are inseparable from the embodied pleasures of music listening.
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Conference and symposium presentations by Ben Green
Underground music scenes in Brisbane, Australia do not house themselves on permanent real estate,... more Underground music scenes in Brisbane, Australia do not house themselves on permanent real estate, despite and perhaps because of the city’s sprawling geography and relatively small population. They create and inhabit temporary spaces in shared, borrowed and marginal places: venues with sporadic or rotating “nights”; house and carpark shows; the areas above, below, behind and between the dominant uses of land and buildings. There is a similar lack of precise demarcation at the level of scene membership and musical styles, which are often shifting and sometimes overlap. However, these scenes distinguish themselves through the affective spaces they create by enabling and promoting certain kinds of experience. This paper draws upon a year-long, ethnographic research project among participants in Brisbane’s underground and DIY music scenes in 2015, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, undertaken in the course of a larger project investigating peak music experiences. Peak music experiences are those specific experiences with music that stand out from general experience, becoming part of people’s self-narratives and reproducing collective values and histories (Green 2015). Based on this research and building upon the conception of scenes as local, trans-local, virtual and affective (Bennett and Peterson 2004; Bennett 2013) as well as Anderson’s (2009) concept of affective atmospheres, this paper considers the experiences that unite and define Brisbane’s ungrounded underground music scenes.
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(A presentation of a paper-in-progress, which will be completed and submitted for publication in ... more (A presentation of a paper-in-progress, which will be completed and submitted for publication in 2016.)
The ‘Cybernana’ Market Day music festival hosted by Brisbane community radio station 4ZZZfm in 1996, marked by what has been characterised alternately as an audience riot and a police riot, is a significant event for the community oriented around the station and the local music scene it supports. This paper draws upon ethnographic research including in-depth interviews with people who attended, along with a reading of relevant cultural texts to critically consider the event’s significance at the levels of collective memory and individual experience. It is shown that Cybernana is an iconic event that helps define an alternative music community and promote a specific interpretation of Brisbane’s political history. People’s experiences of this event are consciously informed by collective memory and through these remembered experiences they locate themselves within the community and its history.
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Young lives are mediated by music. Music, in turn, is mediated by technologies of production, dis... more Young lives are mediated by music. Music, in turn, is mediated by technologies of production, distribution and consumption, while remaining uniquely connected to embodied and situated experience. So what is the role of the digital in the way music is experienced as an aspect of youth and locality? Based on a broader study-in-progress of Brisbane’s hip hop, dance and indie music scenes, this paper considers how digital technologies are integrated with these local scenes and the experiences of young people who participate in them. Digital media offer unprecedented access to global culture but also, and partly through this, inspire and enable local activities and allegiances. Online interactions both reproduce and complicate pre-digital scenic narratives of access and exclusion, discovery and taste, sharing and discussion, locality and globalism. Meanwhile, people continue to be motivated through youth and beyond by the more timeless pleasures of musical experience and music scene involvement.
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While digital media have allowed the dematerialisation of music as a commodity and the further di... more While digital media have allowed the dematerialisation of music as a commodity and the further disembedding of music-based relationships from locality, they have not severed music’s dependence on embodied and situated experience for its meanings and effects. Music is constructed and mediated by a variety of factors but only completed in the specific experience of reception, never finally but sometimes memorably. This is what enables it to become uniquely entwined with memories and identities, both individual and collective, in youth and beyond. Some experiences with music stand out and for some music fans these "peak music experiences" can be epiphanies, in which meanings, values and belongings are felt, and which are remembered as a way to explain and maintain those important features of individual and collective identity. A pilot study of peak music experiences in the Brisbane indie music scene demonstrates how youthful experiences with music feature in post-youth narratives of self and shape long-term associations and practices. The findings also emphasise the undying importance, for this scene, of the embodied pleasures of music listening in particular spaces.
Keywords: musical experience, music and place, music and memory, post-youth scene identities
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Musicians, organisers and fans in the DIY/'indie' Brisbane, Australia, cite peak music experience... more Musicians, organisers and fans in the DIY/'indie' Brisbane, Australia, cite peak music experiences as central to their biographical narratives of inspiration, taste and motivation. They describe moments in which distinct meanings were realised and felt with an intensity that left an imprint, affecting future interactions. The peak music experience stories of these scene participants reveal that the core values of the Brisbane indie music scene, and the roles these values play in the construction of identities, are inseparable from the embodied pleasures of music listening.
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Delivered at the Youth: Culture, Identity, Education & Lifestyle symposium, Griffith Centre for C... more Delivered at the Youth: Culture, Identity, Education & Lifestyle symposium, Griffith Centre for Cultural Research, Brisbane, 2 & 3 September 2013.
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Journal articles by Ben Green
Keywords: biography, consumption, epiphanies, indie music, peak music experiences, taste
Book chapters by Ben Green
Book Reviews by Ben Green
Conference proceedings by Ben Green
Conference and symposium presentations by Ben Green
The ‘Cybernana’ Market Day music festival hosted by Brisbane community radio station 4ZZZfm in 1996, marked by what has been characterised alternately as an audience riot and a police riot, is a significant event for the community oriented around the station and the local music scene it supports. This paper draws upon ethnographic research including in-depth interviews with people who attended, along with a reading of relevant cultural texts to critically consider the event’s significance at the levels of collective memory and individual experience. It is shown that Cybernana is an iconic event that helps define an alternative music community and promote a specific interpretation of Brisbane’s political history. People’s experiences of this event are consciously informed by collective memory and through these remembered experiences they locate themselves within the community and its history.
Keywords: musical experience, music and place, music and memory, post-youth scene identities
Keywords: biography, consumption, epiphanies, indie music, peak music experiences, taste
The ‘Cybernana’ Market Day music festival hosted by Brisbane community radio station 4ZZZfm in 1996, marked by what has been characterised alternately as an audience riot and a police riot, is a significant event for the community oriented around the station and the local music scene it supports. This paper draws upon ethnographic research including in-depth interviews with people who attended, along with a reading of relevant cultural texts to critically consider the event’s significance at the levels of collective memory and individual experience. It is shown that Cybernana is an iconic event that helps define an alternative music community and promote a specific interpretation of Brisbane’s political history. People’s experiences of this event are consciously informed by collective memory and through these remembered experiences they locate themselves within the community and its history.
Keywords: musical experience, music and place, music and memory, post-youth scene identities