Musical Scenes and Social Class

This volume considers the relationship among punk, metal, and the politics of social class in Britain and France. Contributions from a range of disciplines are organized into three thematic sections. The first section addresses the volume's core issue, class domination and agency in the genres' origins in the 1970s and 1980s. The second section examines the sub-divisions within both the punk and metal scenes, both from the early days of these scenes in the 1970s and in the contemporary period, in an attempt to grasp the relations between social change and the constant historical process of division and reconfiguration into ever-evolving subcultures or “sub-scenes”. The third section deals with the most contemporary evolutions among punk and metal audiences, focusing on issues of ageing, feminization and, possibly, what one may tentatively seek to address as a possible “gentrification”. This collection of chapters shows both the persistence of at least some aspects of working-class or “social underdog” or “proud pariah” value-systems of these subcultures throughout different stages of their histories, while also highlighting the current trend towards a form of gentrification of both punk and metal.  

Romain Garbaye is Professor of British Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He is the author of three books, including Getting Into Local Power, the Politics of Ethnic Minorities in British and French Cities, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, which won the prize for Best Book on Urban Politics of the American Political Association (APSA) in 2006. He has also co-edited 7 volumes or journal issues, including The Politics of Ethnic Diversity in the British Isles (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014, with Pauline Schnapper) and Progressive Cities East and West (Springer, Singapore, with Mike Douglass and K.C. Ho).

Gérôme Guibert is Professor of Sociology at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France, and currently serves as the director of its Institute for Communication and the Media (ICM) and is a member of the French Laboratory of Excellence ICCA (Cultural industries and artistic creation). He is the co-author of severalbooks on the sociology of culture and popular music. He is one the founding members and member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Volume! and a member of the editorial board of the journal Metal Music Studies.