Extreme Scenes

Music, Genres, and Online Communities

Szerkesztő:
Tamás Tófalvy

Since the turn of the millennium, the internet has become one of the most important tools and medium of not only the production, diffusion and consumption of music but also that of the reflections and communication on music. In the last four-five years the spread of the online community media, also known as the web 2.0, further accelerated by these processes: among others, by the emergence of Myspace and Last.fm, and by the radical expansion of file sharing networks.

In the world of the production and consumption of music, scenes are emerging – beside pop music trends attended by the popular media – that otherwise rarely mobilize masses of millions, yet from several aspects they have an important role not only in the transformation of online musical practices but also in the better understanding of tendency itself. The worlds of the extreme genres constitute such relatively hidden musical scenes. Taking either the various subgenres of the extreme metal, or the hardcore, or psytrance, all these genres evolve mostly “unspectacularly” from the perspective of public audience. However, with the emergence of the internet as a new channel of communication the “unspectacularity”, the musical extremes and that of genres informing new meanings may also provide us with several lessons to be learnt.

The present selection of Replika, on the one hand, explores the attributes of the musical communities built on online applications that operate through the active cooperation of users; while on the other, it introduces how certain extreme scenes of genres function and change. Beyond this dual thematic, another important thread that binds these texts to a larger of smaller extent together is the demand for the reinterpretation or even transcendence of the concept of “subculture”.

Peter J. Martin’s treatise approaches the question of reinterpreting the concept from the wider perspective of sociology and the history of theories. The papers attempt to exhibit some of the new possibilities of interpreting communities organized around musical preferences: Sean Ebare through the analysis of the online practices of digital music sharing, Keith Kahn-Harris through the interpretation of the everyday life of extreme metal scenes, Tracy Greener and Robert Hollands as well as Tamás Tófalvy through case studies investigating the online practices of psytrance and deathcore scenes.

Released: Replika 64–65, 133–246.
Replika block: