More thinking about my last post

Last night I went out to a metal club with my friends (one of the few in brisbane), to see if what I'd read about scene in Keith Kahn-Harris's article played out in real life. Given what I saw, I have to say I'm still on the fence.

From my own personal experience, I don't necessarily agree with him - I do very much enjoy extreme metal, but I am in no way reliant on the scene for transgressive pleasure in any sense. If anything, my enjoyment of extreme metal occurs very much alongside my every day life, without any real demarcation existing between it and the mundanity of every day existence. I realize in a sense I've just agreed with Kahn-Harris's point, that most EM fans make their musical enjoyment coincide with their non-scenic engagements, but that isn't at all how it is with me - I have no scenic engagements. Sure I might go to the occasional gig, or hang out with friends who enjoy EM, but that isn't really engaging in the scene with the same fervor Kahn-Harris seems to expect from EM fans within his article. As such, I don't think he, in that article anyway, accounts for those who may simply just enjoy the music without the transgressive experience within the scene. No doubt, listening to EM provides me with a transgressive experience, but it is rarely anything to do with the scene - I am much more likely to be rocking out to some decapitated in my room of an evening than I am going out to a club to headbang and drink with the local EM scene dudes.

On the other hand, a lot of people I saw last night could have walked straight out of Kahn-Harris's article. There were a group of large, long-haired, patch-jacketed lads covered in all sorts of metal paraphernalia, drinking heavily, shouting at each other and at one point, even punching each other along to the music. I realized I knew one, got to talking to the rest of them and noticed very quickly how they conformed to Kahn-Harris's article's ideas. They seemed to live their entire lives within the scene, between them they ran a message board, organized the odd gig for friends' bands, recorded their own EM, wrote regular reviews on a metal community site, and went out to gigs or clubs several times a week. One told me he had repeatedly been fired for various jobs simply because he had trouble living the normal life of a worker...he was apparently, generally too drunk and sore to do anything useful 9-5.

Again, on the opposite side of that, I ran into several of my friends who have successfully balanced their EM-scene commitments with their non-scenic lives. By day he wears a suit and tie, goes to work in the city, and has a family, and by night, he goes to metal clubs, gets drunk and headbangs, and goes to every EM gig that goes on. When I asked him about it, he joked with me that he had a roster for what he does - work or go crazy. But when I told him about Kahn-Harris's ideas about the logic of mundanity and the need to successfully balance the scene and non-scenic lives, he was in total agreement. Though EM had essentially become just part of his everyday life, its transgressive experience at gigs and the like gave him the excitement and joy his outside life sometimes lacked, but at the same time, his job and family gave him the stability and support to continue to engage in the EM scene without detriment.

So there we have it - the briefest ethnographic research ever performed, but one that I think does reveal some interesting stuff. Kahn-Harris was proved correct in some senses, but myself, and those like me seem to prove exception to his theory. Though it would be foolish of me to expect that anyone could even attempt to completely classify scene interaction and member types within any group, let alone one as diverse and diffuse as EM, that Kahn-Harris didn't qualify his statements at all leaves me uneasy. at the same time, it was very gratifying to see examples straight from his article of how various members balance their scenic and non-scenic lives, and for that, I shall call my expedition a success in the name of scene theory, Keith Kahn-Harris and science.