DIY

Do-it-yourself - and the related concept of
release-it-yourself - has been the ideological and
practical underpinning of radical music for at
least a half-century. Often identified with the
punk rock movement, the DIY imperative actually
predates punk by more than a decade, and it has
arguably propagated and flourished even more with
later genres such as industrial music, underground
hip hop, rave + electronica, and extreme metal.
Because DIY is usually equated with a rough-hewn,
low-budget aesthetic, it's easy to miss the fact
that for all its emollient slickness of sound New
Age music in the 1980s - produced in home studios,
distributed largely on cassette through an
alternative circuit of head shops and health food
stores - was one of the DIY success stories of the
late 20th Century.

In this course, we examine a diverse range of
eruptions of do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself
culture across the last 50 years, exploring how
ideology and aesthetics have intertwined and
sometimes come into contradiction. As well as
music and its means of production, we'll look at
ancillary expressions of DIY such as fanzines,
cooperatively-run performance spaces, independent
labels, and alternative media channels from pirate
radio to the internet. We'll be attentive to the
different ideological inflections of DIY at
different historical junctions and for different
communities. For some, DIY is more or less a form
of micro-capitalism, street-level hustling that
cultivates and satisfies niche markets and
minority populations. For others, it comes
freighted with utopian aspirations to collectivity
and autonomy. For yet others, it is a refusal of
the professionalism and polish of top-down,
unidirectional culture, an abrasively
self-liberating form of riposte and retaliation
towards the mainstream media.

Running through most of these sonically various
expressions of the DIY spirit is a nebulous yet
still potent and seductive notion of the
"underground". As we approach the present day,
we'll examine how that notion of alternative
culture has altered in the context of corporate
platforms such as YouTube, Soundcloud, and TikTok
that - far from being challenged by homegrown,
grass-roots culture-making - actively encourage
and enable people to generate their own content
(YouTube's slogan is "broadcast yourself"). Yet
what could be dubbed "the desire called
'underground'" persists as a musically generative
impulse, an ideal that has spawned a swarm of
online microgenres like vaporwave, Soundcloud rap,
and hyperpop, and shows no sign of fading.

Key eras / areas of DIY music culture covered in
the class likely to include: '70s
post-psychedelic underground, free jazz, improv
and experimental music, postpunk, the cassette
culture of industrial and "minimal synth" in the
1980s and onward, New Age and ambient, indie and
lo-fi in 80s / 90s, the dilemma of crossover
(grunge, riot grrl etc)
underground hip hop from the 1980s to 2000s,
Detroit techno / Underground Resistance, hardcore
rave, IDM, extreme metal, 21st Century alt-genres
- freak folk (aka the New Weird America), noise,
drone, grime, road rap, and UK drill, hypnagogic
pop / chill-wave, vaporwave.

The course will culminate in an assessment of the
dematerialized present - available almost entirely
as downloads or streams, and, despite Bandcamp
etc, increasingly circulating outside retail
mechanisms and the exchange economy, online
microgenres proliferate in uncontrollable number
and mutate / rename themselves at incredible
speed. As exciting as much of this music is,
there are nagging doubts about possible downsides:
"excess of access" leading to unmanageable
overload, art as a necessarily public activity
versus "the no audience underground", and the
question of whether DIY in the 21st Century often
means the absence of support systems,
institutional facilities, the structures and
resources that enable creativity. In an
oversupplied attention economy, how do you find
listeners, let alone a livelihood?