These four essays were written in the spring of 1998 as part of an independent study course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, under the supervision of Dr. Nick Spencer, professor of English. The goal of the course was to apply the methods of cultural studies — then in full bloom as an academic discipline — to the local independent music scene – and more specifically, the subculture animating the ascendant Saddlecreek record label.
Course readings included the canonical texts of the moment: Hebdige on subculture and style, Gramsci on hegemony and the war of position, de Certeau on the tactics of everyday life, Barthes on mythology, Adorno on the culture industry, Frith on the sociology of rock. Each essay is informed by and in dialogue with the readings.
What emerges is less a unified argument than an ongoing negotiation between method and subject. The theory, as it happens, arrives a bit late to an all-too self-aware scene. Gramsci’s subaltern classes don’t quite fit a group of upper-middle-class kids in army-surplus pea coats performing poverty. And while Adorno’s passive consumer is nowhere to be found — the oppositional alternative we’re presented with (i.e., creative consumption as political resistance) starts to look uncomfortably like just another way of buying things.
The papers are preserved here as written: academic in register, earnest in their ambitions, occasionally self-aware about the impossibility of the project. They capture a 21-year-old trying to wield intellectual concepts and a form of exposition that he neither fully understood nor ever learned to master. But nevertheless, herein lies a good-faith effort to articulate why a scene in a medium-sized Midwestern city felt like it mattered.