A long time ago (in fact, a half a year ago or so), I was interested in book "Breakcore: Identity and Interaction on Peer-to-Peer" written by Andrew Whelan. It's kinda the paper in sociology and music culture, and what was more important to me at that moment, that it's completely about breakcore. I mean, how many books on breakcore do you know (except PencilBreak)? - That what I'm saying. I thought, how it would be great to talk with its author, or maybe to take an interview with him for this website. Andrew was so kind as to answer all of my questions, and even more, he made this interview really exciting and very inspirational.
To be honest, this book is still beyond to my understanding, and, yes, it's absolutely your own choice to read it or not. But I'm sure that if you're interested in breakcore culture, you have to read about this book and its author.
This interview was made in January, 2009. Not long ago Andrew moved to Australia, so now he lives here and works at the University of Wollongong. Visit Andrew's Blog.
Andrew, tell us about yourself and your current activities.
- I'm 34 and I live in Dublin, Ireland. I teach sociology part-time at Trinity. I took a roundabout route to get to where I am: I dropped out of school as soon as I could, but came back to education as a 'mature student'. I did sociology at Ruskin, and then PPE at Somerville. From there I went to Trinity and did my PhD at the Sociology Department.
In each of these places I had the good fortune to be taught and mentored by some great people: Dr. Mavis Bayton (Ruskin), who writes on gender and rock music, and Dr. Lois McNay (Somerville), who writes on French theory – notably Foucault – and feminism. Without their inspiration I wouldn't have had a hope of going down this road. Also my PhD supervisor at Trinity, Dr. Barbara Bradby, who has a wide-ranging academic interest in popular music in general.
Aside from teaching, I'm also currently involved in a project at Trinity called the Internet Research Group. We're putting together a paper at the moment but it's not about music, it's about technology use and migration.
Why did you choose 'breakcore subculture' and 'interaction on soulseek' for your scientific research?
- There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, why breakcore:
There were some sort of intellectual reasons why I was interested in it: I started off thinking about a guy called Max Weber and his idea of rationalisation, and the rationalisation of music, and my first research questions were about whether or not technology is rationalising or democratising music – is it making music more boring, or more accessible? And breakcore seems like a pretty good genre with which to start thinking about these sorts of questions, given that it is so closely tied to technology, to sampling, to p2p and so on.
Also, when I was about 18 (around 1992) I started listening to a lot of techno and especially jungle, which was really kicking off in England around that time where I lived.
So I remember the free party / rave scene getting politicised, in 1994 that scene became criminal, it became illegal to attend a gathering at which music was played that was "wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats". A lot of people, including myself, found themselves in legal difficulties around this time as a result of this.
So anyway, not only was I always personally interested in this music, but it also always seemed to me that this music had some political potential: why else would the state respond to it in that way?
As for why 'interaction on Soulseek': there are a couple of reasons for this also! The most important is that it generated tons of good data. Soulseek is really uniquely placed in relation to all sorts of genres, but especially genres of electronic music. Also, I was completely broke, so going to a lot of gigs or travelling to interview people was not an option to me. And finally, there was an interest in my department on research involving computer-mediated communication, once I had started with that kind of material, they wanted me to go as far as I could with analysing it, and so I did.
Your book is based generally on your thesis "Coprolalia and Shibboleths", am I right? When did you start your research and how long did you work on thesis and book?
That's right, yeah. It took me 4 years basically to do the PhD; I started in 2002 and submitted it in 2006. It took about a year for the thesis to be examined (one of my examiners lives in Chicago and it was difficult to organise) and for me to complete the corrections. So it was finally accepted in 2007. It took me another year to develop and revise it for publication and find a publisher I was happy with.
What are the fundamental findings you made working on your book? How did the 'bedroom producers' evolve in the meantime?
There are a few linked things which the book is basically about.
In a nutshell, the argument is that in order to participate in an online scene like breakcore on p2p, you need to be familiar with certain interactional styles, certain ways of doing interaction. And these ways of doing interaction draw on gendered uses of language. A consequence of this is that not everyone can participate equally, if you don't know how to do it, you don't get to participate fully. This is common to any community, that it has a set of linguistic and discursive norms, this is one of the ways you actually identify a community.
What I'm saying, though is that we can't just assume breakcore is democratic - as you might think it would be, given that anyone can download the music and the software to make it for nothing - where these particular norms are in play. And in some ways this could be a problem for breakcore insofar as it is supposed to be a politically 'conscious' scene.
My approach was that to understand anything, you have to understand how the people involved produce it and define it and negotiate it, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how this is done in chatroom dialogue.
We know about the debates in the genre and relating to the genre, about authenticity and selling out, about copyright, sampling, and the (over)use of Jamaican dancehall samples, and should we use the amen or not, all these debates, but as a sociologist my approach was that we have to come to these debates through considering how the people involved actually talk about them, and I was lucky enough to find a place where I could document how these debates are engaged in.
In some kinds of cultural studies approaches, it is enough to say 'oh, I listened to these tunes and now I know something about what this music "means" or what is going on here', in sociology this is not enough, we need to know how the people involved approach it and deal with it.
So really I'm working with the idea that interaction can be thought of as a struggle over language and within language.
For instance, every time I tag an artist on last.fm, I am engaging in a fight to determine a certain definition for that type of music, trying to fix a word for that type of music. And we're all doing it all the time in our interaction. The idea really is that language and communication are the central areas where, individually and collectively, we produce social meaning, produce a collective meaning that makes life comprehensible and valuable for us.
At another level, I'm using this kind of idea of speech genres to criticise sociology and academic writing, which is another discourse with another set of norms, and with another set of problems coming out of that.
This stuff about language and interaction is for me at the centre of the book.
But I also gave quite a lot of space to the kinds of identities we can understand as emerging from breakcore and from the talk around it, to 'bedroom producerness'. I think of that as being related to large-scale systems, there is a massive cultural context for that, and so some of the book is dedicated to that, the contemporary situation for copyright and creativity, the changing cultural context which breakcore can be thought of as responding to and emerging from.
As for bedroom producers, well, I kind of feel like the scene moves very quickly and very slowly at the same time. Also, people move in and out of it all the time. I think there is some stability there in that it is quite well established, but also because everyone is connected in the way they are, the scene is very flexible and can change and develop very quickly. And maybe it is actually speeding up in this way, that everyone can know now very quickly what is going on, if there is some new artist people are interested in or whatever.
We have also, I think, seen some changes in where the exciting music seems to be coming from, and I think there are now some really quality netlabels up and running that weren't around when I started my research. Also, I think we are now much more used to really very complex and sophisticated music, some of the stuff we are hearing now is just nuts, and that raises the bar for everyone.
What did the 'bedroom producers' think about your book? Did you get feedback from them?
Some people thought it was a really funny idea, some people thought it was a waste of time, some people totally didn't get it, some people thought it was great. Mostly people's responses were pretty positive, although I think it wasn't quite what they were expecting when they actually had a look at it. As I say, lot of it is concerned with chatroom text and what it could tell us about social identity, about gender, about masculinities. I was quite interested, for instance, in what exactly is going on when someone dismisses something by saying it is 'gay'.
Nobody who was actually quoted in the book asked to be removed from it, but a couple of people wanted their usernames changed. It was up on archive.org from the time the thesis was accepted to the time that the final version of the book was sent to print. When you're doing this kind of research, research ethics is important, and it was important to me that everyone in it knew about it and was ok with it.
I'm pleased to say, basically, the book has had more or less zero effect on the online places it is about.
For whom do you recommend your book? Btw there ain't so many books on breakcore. I know only of yours and PencilBreak. It's a kind of art book with artworks of different breakcore artists. What do you think about it?
I've heard about this book PencilBreak but I haven't seen it yet. I think it's interesting and indicative that the two books we know about so far that are 'about' breakcore address kind of odd aspects of the 'scene': the visual elements around it, and the backstage online chat around it. It is useful to compare Notes on Breakcore in this regard, it's like slowly people are assembling a documentary history of breakcore, but it will always be partial this history. There's a great review and critique of PencilBreak at Datacide, which probably does the book more justice than I could do even if I had seen it.
The one thing I would say about it is that addressing the visual culture of the 'scene' with reference to the artwork associated with commercial releases tends to exaggerate the sense in which the 'scene' is mediated by commodities. A lot of people, of course, do not buy these releases, and may only ever see this artwork, if at all, when they are looking something up online. How do we decide what is and isn't breakcore artwork? Are producers' MySpace pages 'breakcore artwork'?
This is related to the old argument that by defining the 'scene' with examples, we artificially restrict it by saying some things are to be included (and others, by omission, aren't). The hardcore line for this argument is that by trying to define the scene, we actually kill it. Once we know exactly what it is (and isn't), it's already formulaic and therefore dead (some people might say this about ragga jungle for instance).
But to get back to PencilBreak and the visual artwork around breakcore: it seems to me that the visual element, like the music, is actually incredibly eclectic, it doesn't seem to me that breakcore has a particularly unified style in terms of visuals, sound, or style of dress; this is one of the things that makes it so appealing, the diversity. It is really more of an approach and an aesthetic than a 'genre' as genre is usually thought of.
As for who I would recommend my book for? If you know breakcore and breakcore online, it is probably a fun read, though some of it might seem like it is stating the obvious. The book is written with a certain audience in mind: people who are interested in 'popular' music, interested in sociological perspectives, and interested in the impact the internet is having on music and musical aesthetics. Also people who are interested in how people communicate online about something like music, where this can be extended to thinking in general about how a chatroom can be like a 'community'. As I say, it is also useful to people who are interested in how gender relates to music, and how gender relates to language, how gender is manifested in the ways in which people communicate.
So there are a few people working right now on similar stuff. If you were interested, there's the likes of danah boyd on youth and social networking sites, there's Wayne Marshall and Larissa Mann on music, copyright, and related issues, Keith Kahn-Harris' stuff on metal, there's Nancy Baym, Lori Kendall's book, some of the people on Dancecult, or an older book called The Language of Youth Subcultures. Actually, that book is not so exciting to read, but it is at least an empirical book about subcultural language and how young people talk about their scenes!
Are you going to continue your research about the 'breakcore subculture'? What are you working on at this moment?
I will always have a personal and an academic interest in electronic music, and particularly the 'heavier' sounds I guess. Having spent about 6 years thinking about breakcore, peer-to-peer, sampling, how they're related and things like that, I think I need to think about something else for a while!
Words like 'breakcore' come and go, but there will always be certain types of kicking sound which get people thinking, and there will always be developments in the way music is produced, socially organised, and distributed.
At the moment I'm working on this pretty 'straight' sociological project about migration and technology use, it's a collaborative project and it's pretty cool, we'll hopefully have a paper in press in a couple of months. As far as my own stuff on music goes, I've been reading, talking to people, and listening for a while to put together a paper on grindcore and the grotesque and abjection. This kind of follows the interest in how masculinities are performed in breakcore, how music relates to or expresses gender; it's also about how music produces meaning, and actually whether it does, whether it 'means' what it 'says'.
I'm not sure how much you know about these types of metal, but if you look at a site like Brutal Death Metal or Brutal Zone, you'll get a pretty good idea pretty quickly that grind seem to be basically 'about' murder, sexual violence, these kinds of things. This has made some people want to describe this kind of music by drawing on abjection, and on Kristeva. This has been done a couple of times, it happens in the book The Sex Revolts, and also in Kahn-Harris' chapter in Policing Pop.
So what I want to do is push this line as far as possible, 'reading' grind in this way, and using Bakhtin also. These are some great resources for talking about that music, or that music is a great way to get to talk about those resources :)
Also, it'd be nice to emphasise the history of the grotesque, and how grind really uses very longstanding critical conventions for talking about life and talking about the human body.
But then I'm also interested in just totally demolishing this whole line of argument. Maybe there are good reasons to argue that this is really just a formality of the genre, that it seems to be about that stuff. I'm not certain it's about anything. And probably it is the same in other genres, I mean, is gangsta rap really about being a hustler or whatever? What is gabber 'about'? These are old questions but they come up in new ways in relation to different genres. One of the things I've been thinking about for a while is, where we don't necessarily have lyrics to guide an interpretation, and even where we do, how is it that music signifies, why do we think it signifies what it does? It kind of melts your brain to think about that sort of thing for a long time, but it's also a lot of fun.
At some stage, I'd also like to research power electronics / harsh noise or whatever you want to call it (people like Mutant Ape, Prurient, Macronympha, that kind of thing if you know it). There's not a lot in print about that scene that I know of, and if you're interested in how music 'means' things, it seems the logical thing to do, to go and listen to the most deliberately nonmusical music, and think about what it means or how it does it. But this will be something I get round to in the future.
One of your articles covers a famous amen break. Can you say something about it? What is the main idea of this article?
Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. I talked a bit in the book about the amen, but for that article I tried to do something different, to talk about the amen in relation to different theoretical perspectives, and to try to underline the kind of social meanings the amen has, how the amen acts as a social cohesive if you like. So for the article I used Durkheim and Levi-Strauss and a few other references, to basically argue that the amen is like a totem, it is an example of the sort of thing that ties 'the tribe' together. The article is actually called "The Amen Breakbeat as Fratriarchal Totem". The idea is, that in breakcore, the amen is one of the principal ways for us to decide what is and isn't breakcore, and who is and isn't breakcore. One of the things I'm emphasising about the amen, though, is that it has associations with certain forms of masculinity, that it signfies masculinities in a certain way. I don't want to give it away (there's a sort of a punchline), and probably I'm not explaining it very well right now anyway, but there's a link to the article on my blog, see for yourself. It'll be out this spring in an anthology on gender and music.
Are you watching over breakcore scene? What kind of breakcore sound (labels and artists) do you prefer?
I sure am; this is my favourite part but I'll try to keep it brief!
Some netlabels:
Sociopath Recordings
Illphabetik
Black Hoe Recordings
Rus Zud
I'll listen to anything put out by Sozialistischer Plattenbau (Istari Lasterfahrer's label), Death$ucker (Parasite's label), Peace Off and sublabels (Rotator), Acid Samovar, and Deathchant (Hellfish).
Some artists:
In the UK
Ely Muff - banging stuff
Shitmat
Stivs, Ed Cox (life4land)
Australians:
Dysphemic
Epsilon is a fucking legend. Same with
Passenger of Shit and
DJ Rainbow Ejaculation
Toecutter
Xian
Japan:
Doddodo
Ove-Naxx
I also like the Control Freak stuff put out on Heavy 7 (Chaos Royale's label)
Poland
I:gor
Strog
PZG / Depizgator
France:
Krumble
Les Secretions Romantiques
and in a more experimental style:
Igorrr
Russian Federation:
Atarix
Gabbenni Amenassi
Noize – I think the stuff these three people are doing is wicked.
US:
I've always thought Abelcain was amazing.
Blaerg
Oxygenfad
And of course I love the Cardopusher stuff!
And finally, tell a few words to Ukrainian breakcore massive =)
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
Respect to all breakcore people, and last but not least Brutallo for inviting and translating me!
interviewed by Brutallo
(c) 2009, breakcore.com.ua
p.s.: translation to russian will be done soon =)