Producing *Class: Indie Rock and Cultural Studies

Abstract

229 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.This study examines the operational logic of the indie rock formation. Indie rock, a relatively autonomous sphere of rock culture, is defined as a cultural formation. Using a cultural studies approach I show how the operational logic (the complex articulation of forces that organize cultural formations) of indie rock produces class elitism in its participants. Chapter one introduces indie rock as a cultural formation and cultural studies as an interdisciplinary intellectual practice. Chapter two critiques interpretive models of academic popular music scholarship, arguing that a contextually-based, analytical method is more useful for cultural studies. Chapter three deals with theoretical and methodological concerns, promoting cosmopolitan ethnography as the best way to understand the material forces that structure the indie rock formation. Chapter four is a Foucauldian genealogy of indie rock that reconstructs the contingent set of contextual conditions that produce the indie rock formation. Chapter five details the operational logic of the indie rock formation, demonstrating how it produces class difference. Chapter six uses ethnographic data to understand the status of gender in the indie rock formation.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD