Living and Touring With American DIY Youth: Participation and Ethnography in Western Popular Music Research
Abstract
In this paper, I focus specifically on the research of Western popular music cultures, which has its own histories, methodologies, perspectives, and repertories. I consider both ethnomusicological as well as popular music studies approaches in this regard, and provide a critique of some of their methods.
My main aim in this article is not to propose a new method, but a return to the old, to revitalize some of the fundamental ethnographic and ethnomusicological approaches, and to suggest their application in studying Western popular music cultures. These include participatory observation, grounded ethnography, materialism, thick description, and cultural relativism.
To substantiate these arguments, I examine in this article my own ethnographic research of American DIY ("do-it-yourself") cultures as an example of a participatory research of living with the 'natives' and studying their everyday lives. As a central task of this paper, I recount my fieldwork methods and experiences and demonstrate how the focus on non-musical and private aspects of American DIY cultures can produce a better understand of their musical and public sides.
Finally, I also argue how this proposed methodological (re)turn to some of the fundamental ethnographic and ethnomusicological approaches can also help in decolonizing both ethnomusicology and Western popular music studies.