These included sharing of food and equipment among DIY houses, local and translocal exchange of venues, the system of free boxes (see Figure 1),Footnote1 donations at shows, and participatory organiser-performer-audience interactions practices that enabled the creation of alternative cultural DIY worlds, and which in turn informed DIY sounds and aesthetics. Figure 2. However, it is also possible to identify more hierarchical and individualist practices and outcomes in contemporary DIY music-making (Verbu Citation2021: 189; see below). 3099067 It would be make-shift [spaces]like, divide room in half, [] cubbies that people are living in, and so this house it supposed to be for a couple, like a small studio apartment, [but] divided into like eight or nine [liveable] spacesand just insane things like that. The strong reciprocal relations between different houses of the DIY community was emphasised to me in an interview with Jai and Dylan from Glitterdome house, who explained that they had friends visit pretty constantly. And I feel the same about house shows. (Personal communication, 28 February 2012; see Figure 6; emphasis in original). The San Francisco bands' music was everything that AM-radio pop music wasn't. However, Scott also clarifies that DIY reciprocity is not about direct one-for-one reciprocation but can apply to anybody (somebody else), as long as participants are dedicated to sustaining the scene (keep the energy moving). It features a house Hammond B-3 organ, played by the areas best organists, along with a huge record collection. And its time to show that creativity is still valued over money. Both Grace Slick (singing with Jefferson Airplane) and Joplin (singing initially with Big Brother & the Holding Company) gained a substantial following locally and, before long, across the country.[17]. It was associated with the counterculture community in San Francisco, particularly the Haight-Ashbury district, during these years. A whole society, with its own economic system even. Jai Milx performing at her house, Glitterdome, in Portland, 4 February 2012. When I asked Rick Ele, who used to be one of the most active DIY organisers in Davis and Sacramento between late 1990s, and early 2010s, about the perception of making it within the DIY scenes in the US, he replied: I mean, a lot of people that don't know about underground music, they just think that every band is trying to make it. The light and charming One Hundred Men and a Girl, from 1937, starred Deanna Durbin as the daughter of an unemployed trombonist and the conductor Leopold Stokowski, whose character almost accidentally finds himself conducting an orchestra of the unemployed. DIY zines, comic books, and blogs from the whole US).Footnote3 This particular DIY culture is an outgrowth of late 1970s British and US punk culture, which later expanded into more transnational and heterogeneous scenes that today also encompass aspects of indie rock, experimental music and certain singer-songwriters.Footnote4 It also has ties to other similar formations, most particularly 1960s counterculture, and various historical and contemporary anarchist, feminist, and sustainability movements (cf. Donations of money for live performances at DIY shows (a form of balanced gift economy) might be seen to function in a similar way, where a marketable exchange commodity (the live performance) is transformed into a DIY commodity with symbolic and material use value through a process of diversion and enclaving. Secondly, I discuss the cultural and aesthetic levels of this phenomenon, before finally focusing on the complexities and contradictions surrounding the coexistence of both alternative and dominant economic systems within American DIY scenes (highlighting some of the co-dependencies involved with italics, for greater conceptual clarity). "[7] The entire tone of the new subculture was different. Several scholars have discussed how DIY methods of music production result in lo-fi (low fidelity) sounds and aesthetics that reflect a DIY materiality of scarcity, independence, self-reliance, and amateurism (Fonarow Citation2006: 3950; Kruse Citation2010: 633). Registered in England & Wales No. Permission will be required if your reuse is not covered by the terms of the License. Furthermore, there exists a tension between these diverse activities within the DIY sphere, since more ideologically oriented DIY participants often foster a resentment towards more pragmatic and market-oriented DIY musicians. Similar venue-performer, venue-audience, and performer-audience relations and forms of boundary-making have been present at most DIY shows I have attended. So, before you pack your bags to visit the Bay Area and once you return home, tune into KCSM/91.1 online to hear what is happening when you are in town and what you're missing after you have left your heart in San Francisco. Its funny how people put on house shows and they do it because theyre compelled to create that space. Really thats just a fraction of why theyve been noticed. Lesh had developed his style on the foundation of having studied classical, brass-band, jazz, and modernist music on the violin and later the trumpet.[10]. However, the poles of reciprocal vs capitalist economy (and use vs exchange value), as reflected also in the organisation of shows (egalitarian vs hierarchical), and in the DIY aesthetics (support vs quality), are not so much in opposition as they are in dialogue with each other within the American DIY scenes and communities (as a dialogue between the forms of emergent and residual practices, respectively). The tactics that shape this alternative economic model (reciprocity, collective action, DIY methods) permeate DIY scenes on all levels: cultural, economic, and political; from music organisation, music performance, and sound aesthetics, to everyday social practices and interaction. 13 See, for example, Moore Citation2004b: 313; Oakes Citation2009; Wehr Citation2012: 14, 15; Worley Citation2017: 5261, 141, 174; Verbu Citation2021: 5, 8, 879, 136, 1401, 194. Moreover, this inserted our tour to a wider reciprocal network of DIY houses and spaces across the US and beyond, run by a large and intimate assemblage of DIY participants who mutually exchanged places and favours.Footnote7 Nonetheless, there was a disparity between DIY ideology and practice in the scene. One of the citys live music gems, Club Deluxe, located at the famed corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, presents a wide array of local jazz and blues bands, as well as monthly burlesque and comedy shows. American DIY shows similarly function as enclaved zones and rituals of decomoditization. Thats what they think. The DIY scenes I studied were constituted materially through alternative economies of DIY practice, collective participation, and reciprocity. "Rock & roll" was the point of departure for the new music. We had this idea that it was a three-way tie [also the title of one of their albums] and not some hierarchy or aristocracy of guitar. Thornton Citation1996). Food not bombs), DIY participants thus also enable the neoliberal premise of outsourcing of public services and governmental responsibilities to private entities and individuals (Dean Citation2015: Kirsch Citation2017). Moreover, they are also seen to engage in rituals of decomoditization by diverting capitalist products into enclaved zones of DIY spaces and shows. They're smaller, more intimate, your gear is at stake because of this, but its worth it because were fucking punk [] Its louder, youre in the crowd, its in your face. Moreover, some venues and houses often collectively organised festivals and larger multi-venue events. Because there is no place for local bands to play, or what else [sic]. Appadurai uses the term tournaments of value to refer to those, often calculative, movements of paths and diversions that actors instigate in order to negotiate the value of circulating commodities (Citation1986: 20, 21). Figure 6. When you see the Tony Bennett statue outside of theFairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, you will gain a better understanding of how San Francisco has embraced its jazz history. (Personal communication, 22 November 2011). It is true that many of the San Francisco bands did record "three-minute" tracks when they desired pop-music station airplay for a song. Some DIY participants, for instance, argue that low-fee and non-profit oriented economic approaches to touring and shows also negatively affect the sustainability of American DIY scenes, because musicians and venues often struggle to survive or even have to abandon their activities due to a lack of adequate material support. This is not only when they refer to the practices of DIY local participants helping touring bands with venues, accommodation, company, and food, or to the system of donations for music performances at DIY shows, but also in relation to everyday musical and non-musical collaborations among the DIY participants. This kind of diversion from the capitalist market economy and experience is vividly expressed by DIY participant James from Davis, California: [at DIY house shows] we are experiencing music outside of the [dominant] modes of exchange that we are used to, even if we still pay donation money [] For me, something that exists outside the normal form of exchange you go to a venue, bar making money, going buying drinks; this [DIY show] is much more visceral, conducive to real interchange between people. 2023 Hyderabad Media House Limited/The Hans India. All Rights Reserved. He also gives advice about how to straddle both worlds, and how to pay up (reciprocally) for what bands owe to the community. E.g. In this article, I examine the alternative economics of reciprocity in American DIY (do-it-yourself) culture. To some extent they also do this for wider society (e.g. They contain freely available discarded items that DIY participants desire to redirect into reuse by other DIY participants, who visit or pass by their houses. The history of San Francisco is deep-rooted in its bond with the Black community. Hence, DIY participants often repair, reuse, and repurpose discarded music equipment (Flood Citation2016), or they utilise scrap materials for DIY production. For example, as I also experienced, not all DIY house members helped organise shows or other activities in their spaces. Thus, the music promoted or listened to in DIY spaces is often less about whether anybody likes it, as Scott put it earlier in this article, than about community-building, and mutual support. (Calvin Johnson, in Baumgarten Citation2012: 133; cf. Register a free Taylor & Francis Online account today to boost your research and gain these benefits: A whole society, with its own economic system: the reciprocal and capitalist configurations of American DIY music scenes, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic, Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value, Noise Records as Noise Culture: DIY Practices, Aesthetics, and Trades, Conceptualizing the Relationship Between Youth, Music, and DIY Careers: A Critical Overview, A Sense of Togetherness: Music Promotion and Ethics in Glasgow, The Growth and Disruption of a Free Space: Examining a Suburban Do It Yourself (DIY) Punk Scene, Volunteering, the Market, and Neoliberalism, Feeling Pain/Making Kin in the Brooklyn Noise Music Scene, Feeling the Vibe: Sound, Vibration, and Affective Attunement in Electronic Dance Music Scenes, Amiguismo: Capitalism, Sociality, and the Sustainability of Indie Music in Santiago, Chile, Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for Other Worlds, The Anatomy of a Dumpster: Abject Capital and the Looking Glass of Value, Post-Punks Attempt to Democratize the Music Industry: The Success and Failure of Rough Trade, Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre, Do It Yourselfand the Movement Beyond Capitalism, Value, Waste, and the Built Environment: A Marxian Analysis, Performing the Common Good: Volunteering and Ethics in Non-State Crime Prevention in South Africa, Local Identity and Independent Music Scenes, Online and Off, Punk Positif: The DIY Ethic and the Politics of Value in the Indonesian Hardcore Punk Scene, The Logics at Work in the New Cultural Industries, Postmodernism and Punk Subculture: Cultures of Authenticity and Construction, Break on Through: The Counterculture and the Climax of American Modernism, Accession and Association: The Effect of European Integration and Neoliberalism on Rising Inequality and Kin-neighbor Reciprocity in the Republic of Macedonia, Seeing Sapa: Reading a Transnational Marketplace in the Post-Socialist Cityscape, If There Isnt Skyscrapers, Dont Play There! Rock Music Scenes, Regional Touring, and Music Policy in Australia, Punk Rock Entrepreneurship: All-Ages DIY Music Venues and the Urban Economic Landscape, Neoliberalisms Moral Overtones: Music, Money, and Morality at Thailands Red Shirt Protests, Creativity, Precarity, and Illusio: DIY Cultures and Choosing Poverty, Theory and Ethnography of Affective Participation at DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Shows in the US. there is a diversity of possible causal factors that extend beyond the influence of the DIY system), as it is also implicated in the examples above. A musician who was a leading example of this, Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane (and the offshoot Hot Tuna) pioneered the approach, perhaps best represented on the album Bless Its Pointed Little Head. do-it-together (seattle diy.com Citation2009: 1). Nicks and Buckingham went on to bring that San Francisco sound to established British rock band Fleetwood Mac when they both joined in 1975. Great American Music Hall (859 O'Farrell St.). There are evidently numerous innovative practices existing within American DIY scenes that work persistently and continuously, on a daily basis, and in multiple interconnected locales, toward demystification and destabilisation of capitalist processes, both on discursive and material levels, but which they also simultaneously sustain the capitalist system in different ways. 2023 San Francisco Travel Association. San Francisco has a long history with jazz music. Numerous scholars have discussed the coexistence of different economic systems within particular cultures and societies, mainly juxtaposing capitalism against alternative economic systems, such as a sustenance economy or gift-economy.Footnote16 While these latter systems may emerge as alternatives or in opposition to the dominant capitalist mode, many analysts also highlight the co-dependent and co-constitutive dimensions of this relationship. 7 For more on DIY touring in the US, and the notion of translocal reciprocity, see Verbu Citation2021 (chapter 8). Third, the co-existence and interrelatedness of DIY/reciprocal and dominant/capitalist systems extends beyond a simplistic resistance vs power dichotomy. Taylor Citation2016: 15476). While it is still a great spot to enjoy cheap beer in a low-key setting, the Saloon is now best known as an intimate venue to enjoy some of the best jazz and blues in the city. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. However, since the simple fact of attending shows, or because still and quiet listening to music can also count as valid forms of audience participation at DIY shows (see Figure 2), I argue for an understanding of American DIY communities that is open to a variety of different approaches and interpretations of active audience participation. A hideaway on Fell Street, Mr. Tipples presents live jazz nightly alongside inventive cocktails in a dark and sophisticated space. This DIY reciprocal cultural system endeavours to transcend the mainstream aesthetics of quality and individual competition, and instead fosters the idea of support aesthetics, based on reciprocal communal solidarity.Footnote9 Consider, in this regard, the following evaluative criteria offered by various DIY participants: OP [fanzine from Olympia] wasnt about loving a lot of weird kinds of music; it was about supporting the idea that you could put out lots of weird kinds of music. Catch a show at one of San Francisco's legendary music venues, gems with a rich history and a lineup boasting fresh local artists and music's biggest names.