Interstellar Discussion, Part Two

Popular Music Fans: Show Me The Way, O Lord (1 of 2)

Daniel Cavicchi’s ethnography of Bruce Springsteen fans for the first time places the audience not only in a position of power, but presents them as articulate subjects. He readily admits that he himself is a Bruce Springsteen fan, and draws upon his own encounters nearly enough as the one hundred interviews he conducted as part of his research. From this point of view Cavicchi’s argument authoritatively challenges the academic elites; what Adorno frames as a regression of listening Bruce fans readily admitted was a passion to play Bruce ‘over and over until the tapes just about wore out’ (Cavicchi 1998:47). While Theodor Adorno (2002) and Dick Hedbige (Subculture: The Meaning of Style: 1978) approach rock music as part of ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ culture, Cavicchi notes the fans’ propensity to use ‘high culture theory’ to assess Bruce’s work as a means of separating themselves as ‘fans’ as opposed to ‘listeners’ (1998:122). Cavicchi’s work and innovation in the study of fan cultures, likening fandom to religion in a way that does not paint fans as ‘disordered,’ and using the theories of William James and Sigmund Freud to explain the fans’ relationship to their object of devotion without rendering them perverted.

What Cavicchi has trouble articulating from his ‘insider’s narrative,’ Hills articulates from what he would call the ‘fan-scholar’ point of view. Cavicchi attempts to distance himself as a fan to present fan identity accurately and articulately, but Hills more urgently tries to blend his academic and fan identities. Cavicchi’s research of fans is conducted within the existing framework of academic scholarship, but Hills tries to amend this current paradigm by challenging fan ethnography more explicitly than Cavicchi (by way of a litmus test he calls ‘autoethnography’), and attacking the imagined subjectivities and moral dualisms of academia and fandom.

In his 2005 article about indie rock listeners in Popular Music and Society, Ryan Hibbett discusses social differentiation and intellectual superiority. He notes that indie rock’s increasing popularity in ‘mainstream’ markets forces ‘true’ indie fans to differentiate themselves from ‘posers’ or more casual listeners. Ultimately, the indie label has little to do with music and everything to do with style. Like Hedbige with punk, Hibbett observes that indie rock operates within a system of codes that amount to a form of cultural capital (2005:57). Hibbett argues that indie rock listeners define their identity and community through the ‘ownership’ acquired through ‘knowledge and experience’ of rare and obscure bands, records, and performances (2005:72). While Hibbett’s work does not examine a particular group of fans, his work provides a contemporary companion to Hedbige’s examination of rock music subcultures.

Cavicchi, Hills, and Hibbett all examine various behaviors and beliefs that compose popular music fandom. As a fan of an artist, one assumes a subjective authority over critics and scholars alike, based on both fluency of the artist’s work as well as his or her perceived connection with the artist (Hills 2001:3-5). To become a fan of an artist, argues Cavicchi, one must experience a moment or process of awakening; his ethnography of Bruce Springsteen fans contains quite a few narratives about the ways in which people stopped being listeners and became fans (1998:39-53). Fans often participate in pilgrimages, then, traveling to a place of significance to the artist or the artist’s work. For fans of Springsteen, this may be Asbury Park, or even his New Jersey home; Wilco fans search for The Loft on Irving Park Road or photograph the Marina Towers in Chicago; Ani Difranco fans will visit her church in Buffalo, NY to ask for a tour of her headquarters.