What is Punk Rock? What is DIY? Masculinities and politics between l’art pour l’art and l’art pour la révolution (2025)

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS International Conference Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! Underground Music Scenes and DIYCultures

Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! Crossing Borders of Underground Music Scenes. Book of Abstracts.pdf

Dear colleagues, We are delighted to meet you all at the third KISMIF International Conference ‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast!’ (KISMIF) International Conference, here at Porto, this year dedicated to the theme ‘DIY Cultures, Spaces and Places’. This initiative follows the great success of the two first KISMIF Conference editions (held in 2014 and 2015), seeking to voice the will of the many researchers who have sought to promote an annual scientific meeting for the discussion of underground music scenes and do-it-yourself culture at the highest level . The KISMIF Conference 2016 is once again focused on underground music, directing its attention this time towards the analysis of DIY cultures’ relationship to space and places. Thus, we challenge students, junior and senior teachers/researchers, as well as artists and activists, to come to the KISMIF International Conference and present works which explore the potential of the theoretical and analytical development of the intersection of music scenes, DIY culture and space under a multidimensional and multifaceted vision. We hope with this to enrich the underground scenes and DIY cultures analysis by producing innovative social theory on various spheres and levels, as well as focusing on the role of DIY culture in late modernity. Indeed, the role of music and DIY cultures is once more an important question – taking place in a world of piecemealed yet ever-present change. The space, spaces, places, borders, zones of DIY music scenes are critical variables in approaching contemporary cultures, their sounds, their practices (artistic, cultural, economic and social), their actors and their contexts. From a postcolonial and glocalized perspective, it is important to consider the changes in artistic and musical practices with an underground and/or oppositional nature in order to draw symbolic boundaries between their operating modalities and those of advanced capitalism. Territorialization and deterritorialization are indelible marks of the artistic and musical scenes in the present; they are related to immediate cosmopolitanisms, to conflicting diasporas, new power relations, gender and ethnicity. As in previous KISMIF Conferences, it is our intention to welcome reflexive contributions which consider the plurality that DIY cultural practices demonstrate in various cultural, artistic and creative fields and to move beyond music in considering artistic fields like film and video, graffiti and street art, the theatre and the performing arts, literature and poetry, radio, programming and editing, graphic design, illustration, cartoon and comics, as well as others.

Other Scenes, Other Cities and Other Sounds in the Global South: DIY Music Scenes beyond the Creative City

Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy / Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement und Kulturpolitik, 2020

This article explores how the different forms of youth involvement in underground music scenes tend to develop into do-it-yourself (DIY) careers by triggering acquired expertise resulting from a long immersion in these scenes. It begins with an analysis of the representations of Portuguese punks about DIY and the ways in which they experience and develop networks and skills. Concomitantly, through a recent analysis carried out in Brazil in different underground music scenes, I examine the importance of DIY showing the approximation of two different musical, social, and geographical universes. This focus, besides amplifying the glimpse outside the Anglocentric look into creative cities, serves to understand how underground music scenes are a breath of fresh air when it comes to creative activity beyond mainstream cultural industries. Dieser Beitrag untersucht, wie sich verschiedene Formen jugendlicher Initiativen in Underground-Musikszenen zu langjähriger Expertise in diesen Szenen u...

Doing-it-Yourself or Doing the Right Thing: Tensions within Creative Labor in Underground Music Scenes

In his oral history of the American underground rock scene in the 1980s, journalist Michael Azerrad traces the development of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos within punk and indie rock. When asked by Azerrad why his punk band, Minutemen, followed a DIY ethos in producing their own records, spurning labels, booking their own tours, and sleeping on floors when necessary, singer-bassist Mike Watt casually remarked, "Because that was our version of punk." 1 Punk and DIY, in this way, became linked through the practice and labor of bringing punk spaces and shows into existence. This association has produced DIY as "a loose signifier of radicalism," with a conceptual ambiguity mirroring that surrounding punk. 2 Such ambiguities have enabled the privileging of a specific type of white, male, subcultural labor. Our Band Could Be Your Life, serving as a memory of a specific type of DIY culture, is haunted by inevitable cooption by mainstream culture, as embodied in Azerrad's epilogue. 3 Azerrad's lamentation immediately folds under scrutiny: the 'youth culture' pined for is a white, heterosexual male youth culture; the underground a safe haven for those discarded by mainstream white culture; cooption as the return of the underground to mainstream white culture.

Review: Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! Crossing Borders of Underground Music Scenes, International Conference, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal, 13–17 July 2015

Now in its second year, Keep it Simple, Make it Fast (KISMIF) is probably one of the largest conferences of underground music/culture of its kind. Convened by Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra the conference, accompanied by the pre-emptive Summer School, was a week-long event with core themes revolving around the many global underground scenes and drawing upon an impressive international range of established subcultural scholars and postgraduate researchers. As members of the conference scientific committee, and as founders of the Punk Scholars Network, we were invited to deliver keynotes at the preceding Summer School, to chair panels and to convene on a number of Summer School sessions, offering ad hoc summative commentaries to those in the panel. The Summer School offered 'an opportunity for all students (bachelor, masters, doctorate, post-doctorate) to attend specialist master classes and discuss their research work in seminars'. Its inclusion, therefore, was based upon a clear pedagogical model whereby students could discuss, disseminate and contemplate their own research. More than that, it was also important in empowering students to gain control of the academic arena, often a space solely for the 'academic'. Here, postgraduate students presented papers that ranged from political activism to urban communities, from aesthetics to mediation , and from identities to authenticity. As an academic environment, the Summer School beat many a conference: papers were presented in an often-informal basis, with students helping and signposting each other towards unknown areas of research.

The Appearance of an Underground Electromusic Subculture in the Cultural Sphere of the City

Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 2003

The author analyses the existence of a youth subculture, as it appears in two subcu ltural spheres on the basis of interviews and her experience of fieldwork carried out in a city in Ce ntral Europe. Values and experiences which are connected to the underground electromusic actions are discussed, while the places and modes of cultural actions are studied. The subcultural patterns which increasingly influence the youth of the cities reflect an estrangement from the city life. The liminal phases of estrangement recur in the life of the individual, they provide a possibility to gain communal experiences and to establish special subcultural values. These are possible only with the adaptation to the cultural pattern and with the acceptance and usage of subcultural activities.

Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! An approach to underground music scenes. Volume 1

2015

This article analyses Circuit-Bending and its relation to the Do-it-yourself (DIY) culture. Circuitbending is an experimental music practice which consists of opening up low voltage (battery powered) electronic devices (musical toys, radio devices, cd players, etc.-mostly technological waste) and of changing (bend) the way electricity flows through their circuits in order to achieve an 'interesting' result. After presenting the work of some artists who make use of this methodology we introduce the concept of proletarianisation by philosopher Bernard Stiegler and how such methodologies can act as de-proletarianisation tactics. Then, we present the Do-it-together (DIT) or Do-it-with-others (DIWO) discussion to bring into scene the notion of Relational Aesthetics.

Reviving DIY: the importance of do it youself to the portuguese alternative rock scene

2016

The approach of DIY music careers lies in the premise that music is a unifying pole of activities, clustering a diversity of practices and lifestyles around it. The analysis of musical production is usually based on an entrepreneurial perspective about creative workers and, specifically, about the musicians. In this context, it can be useful to revisit one of the core values of the punk subculture, the DIY ethos, based on empowerment, on taking possession of the means of production, as an alternative to mainstream production circuits. Starting from the case of three projects-Filho Único, Haus and Hey, Pachuco!-we explore the relevance of do it yourself logics and procedures in the construction and maintenance of musical careers in the alternative rock, considering their impact on Lisbon metropolitan area's music alternative scenes.

KISMIF An Approach to Underground Music Scenes Vol.4

2019

Digital platforms and the professionalization of DIY in popular music

Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! An approach to underground music scenes (vol. 4), Paula Guerra and Thiago Pereira Alberto (eds.), 2019