| In "Performing Underground Sounds" I investigate how Japanese make music in Tokyo's hardcore clubs, in which individuals create a multiplicity of meanings through performance. Based on two years of ethnographic study, the dissertation confronts traditional conceptions of how underground music is made, serves to build communities, and relates to mainstream Japanese culture and global popular culture. The underground Tokyo hardcore scene itself results from extensive interaction amongst diverse performers---the musicians, audience members, stagehands and managers---in the context of contemporary Tokyo and Japanese popular music.; Deep analysis of the performance of the underground hardcore scene in Tokyo reveals how individuals create localized meaning through interpretation and appropriation of global cultural forms. Bands such as Jug, Sports, and Music from the Mars, for example, though performing a musical style found globally, position themselves within the Tokyo hardcore scene, with distinct musical practices, thus finding unique meanings. Individuals share intersecting meanings, both consonant and dissonant, thus creating communities.; Drawing from Japanese and gender studies, as well as anthropological and cultural theory, my research contributes to debates in popular music and ethnomusicology on the nature of localized musical communities in an increasingly global moment. "Performing Underground Sounds" expands our view of contemporary Japanese society and popular culture with deep ethnographic detail of this specific musical moment. Indeed, it offers the first ethnographic description of this social setting. Ethnography's changing role in contemporary scholarship, as well as in creating a "sense of scene," is an undercurrent running throughout the dissertation. Its highly reflexive tone at times, and attention to minute detail, not only supports the overarching argument that the scene is in part created through the work of the ethnographer, but also continues debates on the role of ethnography generated by postmodern anthropological epistemologies. |
