Music Scenes in America

The history of music scenes is a topic that has been misunderstood. Scholarship has tended to focus on sociological theory as a basis for understanding how and why music scenes exist and motivate youth. While accomplishing important work and connecting the study of scenes to academia, theory has left uncovered the narrative history of music scenes. Setting scenes in their specific historical, social and cultural context allows them to be examined by a different set of research goals and methods. In this paper, I outline a historiography of music scenes, from the original implications of subcultural research to ethnography in the early 1990s. Tracing the literature on scenes, I argue that studying scenes from my position in 2009 must be accomplished with a historical point of view, not ignoring theory, but placing narrative history as the primary methodology. The growth of post-punk music scenes in America throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s had extensive effects on popular culture, and through understanding the history first, I propose researchers will have a better grasp on what a scene is, why it functions in society, and how it has affected regional and national subcultural identity. I used Gainesville, Florida as an example of this method. The social characteristics of Florida and the shifts in the national subculture throughout the 1990s are two essential points I bring to bear in the case study of Gainesville. Overall, I hope to introduce Florida's scenes as anomalous instances of subcultural activity and to spur further inquiry on the topic of (re)writing music scenes into the history of youth culture, especially in the 1990s.