"Every Home Is Wired": 1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures

"Every Home Is Wired":
1 -- The Net in Relation to Music Subcultures

The Demise of the Mainstream
By its very nature, of course, fragmentation can be regarded as a move away from the mainstream, since it causes increasing numbers of marginal groups to disassociate themselves from the centre; in music it initially means a move away from pop, as Frith noticed in 1984 already -- "the ordering of the music public into a series of discrete, serviceable markets means that the centre of cultural arguments drifts, inevitably, back in the rock direction" ("All Wrapped Up", 193) --, but the drift does not end here. Rock itself, Grossberg writes, "cannot be defined in musical terms. There are, for all practical purposes, no musical limits. ... Its musical limits are defined, for particular audiences at particular times and places, by the alliances constructed between selected sounds, images, practices and fans" (Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 131), and the differences between the various fans and fan groups thus already provide the breaking points at which rock itself separates into what can be called "a plethora of new musical genres and subgenres." Thus, "many popular music critics now feel that this amazingly varied musical array no longer has a centre, in other words, a dominant genre such as rock" (Campbell Robinson et al. 143).	Bit 20
This confirms Fornäs's prediction "that the dethroning of rock will not be at all like its first break-through, when in some ways it seemed to replace jazz. It will be, rather, a diffuse process of fragmentation and hybridisation, in which rock will in fact not die (anymore [sic] than jazz died in the 1950s), but become one of several elastic threads in the increasingly motley web of popular music" (123); there is, therefore, indeed no centre anymore, and centre-periphery models of musical genres thus fail. Rather, "musical-knowledge territories now encompass the world. Because of modern communication technology, increased travel, and the formation of a single world marketplace, musicians now know not only about the popular musics present in their own communities or countries but also about popular musics from the farthest-flung regions of the earth" (Campbell Robinson et al. 24-5).	Bit 21

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