![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2012\/10\/TheKidsVassarCollege.jpg\")
<\/a>A college band: The Kids, Vassar College, circa 2008<\/p><\/div>\n
Remember the surplus musicians and would-be musicians, the ones who couldn’t get anything musically happening in their college years, although not for the lack of trying? There was the guy who played his acoustic guitar in the quad, the trio trading rhymes at the lunchtable, the roommate whose equipment lay stacked, untouched, in the corner of the apartment.\u00a0 For every thousand great band names brainstormed at parties, dorm rooms, and campus jobs, maybe a hundred “first practices” were ever convened, with less than a dozen ever gelling into a real unit.\u00a0 Out of the frustration or idleness of their college years, a few of these dormant talents established bona fide musical careers, surprising their friends and becoming the talk of alumni gatherings after graduation.<\/p>\n
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WHY WE MIGHT STUDY THE COLLEGE MUSIC SCENE<\/strong><\/p>\n The college music scene is largely overlooked as a site for study.\u00a0 For one reason, many musicians understandably would like to dissassociate themself from their alma mater.\u00a0 Getting a degree from an institution of higher education is increasingly an expensive accomplishment that can suggest a comfortable, bourgeois background.\u00a0 What musician looking to project an image of political rebellion or subcultural sensibility would want to announce that?\u00a0 College is also regarded as an unsettled, transitional period of life when young people try on new ideas, tastes, activities, and fashions.\u00a0 Memories of the clothes we wore, the music we played, and the haircuts we had when we were 19 years old generally make for cheap laughs, not a heroic bildungsroman.\u00a0\u00a0 What musician hoping to convey a confidence of musical self would want to be tied to the place and time of developmental flux and discarded baggage?<\/p>\n Yet aside from the pleasures of nostalgia or laughs, there are intellectually worthwhile reasons to revisit and thinking carefully about the college band scene.\u00a0 Intuitively, we recognize that looking at musicians’ alma mater might shed light on the music and the influences of the lucky few who break out of them.\u00a0 To cite a well-known example, Britain’s legacy in the 1950s and 60s of sustaining and advancing American genres like blues and jazz is often credited to the country’s art schools, where students like Keith Richards<\/a> and Eric Clapton exchanged records and honed their chops with like-minded musos in classroom studios and campus commons.\u00a0 Institutionally, colleges enroll populations of young people in specific socioeconomic and cultural mixes, giving them formal and (probably more important) informal opportunities to ‘come of age’ developmentally, intellectually and creatively.\u00a0 The effects of these institutional settings on the music can be significant, as Owen Hatherley’s thesis about Pulp as Britain’s “last art school band”<\/a> suggests:<\/p>\n From the early 1970s until the 1990s, hundreds of musicians from working or lower-middle class backgrounds, many educated at art schools, claiming state benefits and living in bedsits or council flats weeks before they found themselves staying at five-star hotels, were thrown up in the UK. From Roxy Music to the Smiths, from the Associates to the Pet Shop Boys, all balanced sexuality and literacy, ostentatious performance and austere rectitude, raging ambition and class resentment, translating it into records balancing experimentation with populist cohesion; it was possible to read the lyric sheets without embarrassment. You could dance to it.<\/p>\n At some point in the 1990s this literary-experimental pop tradition disappeared. Some reasons are structural \u2013 workfare schemes meant that claiming the dole as a “musicians’ grant” was less and less practicable, art schools were absorbed by universities, council flats were unobtainable for any but the desperate, and squats became rarer, so the unstable alliance between bohemia and estate was broken. The result was a striking homogeneity of class as much as of sound. In October 2010, according to an oft-cited statistic, 60% of artists in the UK top 10 had been to public school, compared with 1% in 1990<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For many urbanists, an interesting question is: how do college music scenes relate to the cities in which they’re located?\u00a0 The creative-economy paradigm views higher-education institutions as multifaceted assets for urban economic development.\u00a0 They generate talent and innovations to be absorbed by firms, the thinking goes here, while they sustain cultural amenities that attract creative workers at play.\u00a0 This perspective regards college music scenes instrumentally, treating them as one element in a city or region’s amenity infrastructure.\u00a0 In some places, they develop further to anchor or brand a city’s export-oriented cultural infrastructure, as illustrated by the college-music heydays of 1980s Athens, GA (University of Georgia) or 1990s Olympia, WA (Evergreen State College<\/a>).<\/p>\n A variety of other questions pertain to the ways that college music scenes relate to their institutional settings.\u00a0 For instance, how do these scenes affect the ways colleges and universities market themselves? \u00a0\u00a0Today, indie rock seems disproportionately represented by graduates of prestigious eastern institutions<\/a>, but do the latter advertise or otherwise exploit their graduates’ musical careers?\u00a0 For instance, does little Wesleyan University (“the coolest college ever,” states the Village Voice<\/a> with tongue in cheek) include MGMT, Das Racist and Santogold in their materials for prospective students?\u00a0 Bard College (the #1 hipster college, according to a 2012 HuffPost article<\/a>) maintains a website archiving the bands that formed during their college years.\u00a0 Interestingly, the Bard website says nothing on the groups that led to Steely Dan, probably Bard’s most famous popular music success story<\/a> (whose ambivalence about their alma mater is memorialized in “My Old School”).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n TRAJECTORIES OF CREATIVE LIVES<\/strong><\/p>\n The level of analysis in such questions are collective or institutional.\u00a0 They might be answered through aggregate statistics by counting graduates in musical occupations, measuring a college town’s musical infrastructure, surveying universities’ admissions\/alumni offices, and so on.\u00a0 By contrast, a deeper historical\/ethnographic examination into particular college music scenes could offer rich qualitative insights into the mobilization of creative lives.<\/p>\n A guiding concept here is status attainment<\/em>, which refers to how people enter occupations, move through their careers, and take on distinct sets of values, worldviews and self-understandings.\u00a0 These dimensions are implicit in the occupational prestige scales that sociologists study, or at least used to back when occupations were stable and widely understood categories.\u00a0 In today’s mercurial world of work, where ‘value-adding’ creative pursuits shouldn’t necessarily be confused with full-time jobs, status attainment highlights how individuals acquire the technical skills, aesthetic distinctions, and cognitive frameworks that make for musical lives.\u00a0 To put this in the language of contemporary urban debates, status attainment is about the longer-term development of the “creative ethos” (or, for critics of Richard Florida’s concept, the yuppie\/hipster weltanschauung<\/em>) that has revitalized many urban economies and polarized many cities of late.<\/p>\n So far as I know, no one has studied the college music scene as a context for status attainment in this sense.\u00a0 But this is a line of inquiry pursued more broadly by scholars like Bill Bielby, who study the organizational dynamics<\/em> of status attainment in people’s careers: how far people can go in a line of work, where they hit roadblocks and ceilings, and how these trajectories are shaped by specific organizations, industries and professions.\u00a0 (Disclosure: Bielby is my former grad school professor, and I occasion play with his pick-up band of conference-attending sociologists, Thin Vitae.)\u00a0 A relevant study is one that Bielby presented to the American Sociological Association in his 2003 presidential address<\/a>, in which he examined “grassroots cultural production” by looking at Chicago-area teenage bands “in the early days of rock and roll, [when] grassroots performance was an ’empty field'” (pg. 10).<\/p>\n I define a teenage band as any local teenage rock and roll performance group that had a drummer, at least one electric guitarist, a band name, and a business card.\u00a0 With this definition, I have identified most if not all of the local bands of this region from the post-Elvis, pre-Beatles era (1958 through 1963) (pg. 3).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Of course, 1958-63 was a period when the real-life issues hinted at by sociological terms like “status attainment” and “subcultural involvement” were charged with high stakes for young people and their parents. \u00a0[“YOU’RE GROUNDED FOR LIFE!”]\u00a0 It’s a different world today.\u00a0 Watch a prefab teen punk group execute choreographed stage moves on the Disney Channel, and you’ll quickly appreciate how rock, hip hop and pop music today are thoroughly incorporated into dominant modes of adolescent life and social reproduction.\u00a0 Leaping ahead to the other side of the college years, a whole field of hipster studies revolves around the question of whether participating in often-extreme musical styles and affiliated lifestyles retains any kind of transgressive qualities in today’s consumer\/lifestyle economy.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n MUSICAL STYLES, MUSICAL SELVES<\/strong><\/p>\n In developing a theoretical framework that inserts colleges and universities into the status attainment of musical lives, we might put aside the idiosyncratic dynamics of chance and biography (e.g., Donald Fagen and Walter Becker met at Bard College). \u00a0More systematic influences of college music scenes on musicians can be ascertained in the collective musical style<\/em> that each institution cultivates.\u00a0 By ‘style,’ I don’t mean just the musical idioms, techniques, and inspirations that musicians and music critics usually associate with particular places or eras. \u00a0(Incidentally, I suspect such traditional elements of ‘style’ are less subconsciously absorbed and more directly mediated by the aptitude and agency of individual musicians and groups than is often appreciated).\u00a0 Instead, collective musical style involves the expressive, symbolic components of constructing a musical self in interaction with others<\/em>.<\/p>\n My language here comes straight from the forthcoming book by sociologists Amy Binder and Kate Wood, Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives<\/em><\/a> (Princeton University Press, 2013).\u00a0 (More disclosure: Kate Wood is a former student of mine and graciously showed me the manuscript while still in press.)\u00a0 Comparing the dynamics of college students’ musical development to their political orientations may seem odd, but as Binder and Wood argue, “The learning of group styles by means of shared culture and organizational features on campus is far from limited to the production of conservative selves.”\u00a0 Read these two programmatic statements from Binder and Wood, and substitute “musical” for “conservative” and “political” to see how their framework might apply to an analysis of college music scenes.<\/p>\n In presenting the argument that universities have a large influence on conservative political development, we must introduce two caveats. First, to argue that political style is an organizational accomplishment that occurs on campuses is not to claim that students arrive at college with no ideological commitments derived from family, community, media exposure, or prior political and schooling experiences, or that students are blank slates to be written on by educational institutions. Students\u2019 prior identities are important and must be accounted for, even while we observe that once students enter a university, that institution\u2019s existing organizational structures and cultural repertoires channel them into distinctive types of conservative style. Second, and related, students are not automatons molded seamlessly into these styles. There is plenty of agency to go around, as students take stock of their identities on campus and think strategically about how their actions will ultimately connect with their future careers and social lives. There is evidence in our cases that students assess their options, and then sometimes actively defy dominant styles by taking up submerged styles, or create new hybrid forms of expression out of multiple different styles. They also sometimes decide to opt out of political life on campus if the conservative organizations they are interested in don\u2019t seem like the right fit. Or they plot to put together a new slate of club officers when the time is right. [Chapter 1]<\/p>\n Following work being done by Tim Hallett and Marc Ventresca and a few others in a body of research called inhabited institutions, we see broader cultural repertoires and people in local settings as “doubly embedded,” such that people\u2019s \u201cinteractions take place within, and are shaped by, broader institutional contexts,\u201d but the practical meaning of their actions emerges locally through social interaction. Conservative style is a form of action that both filters from the top down and emerges from the bottom up, getting worked out in the middle. Keeping track of all these levels of meaning\u2014from the most personal and privately held to the most widely shared and disseminated\u2014allows us to comprehend how and why students use different dominant and submerged conservative styles on different campuses. [Chapter 8]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the case of college music scenes, the “top down” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to the campus gates since musicians can also seek audiences outside the student body \u2014 indeed, this is how many bands go about making it big.\u00a0 Geographical location and opportunities to participate in regional music scenes are thus further variables of organizational context, perhaps among the most important ones.\u00a0 To illustrate these factors and the many others at work in college music scenes, let me sketch the scenes at two very different higher-education institutions that I’m familiar with, before concluding on some formal hypotheses for study.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n CASE STUDY #1: VASSAR COLLEGE<\/strong><\/p>\n My current place of employment, Vassar College<\/a> is a highly exclusive four-year liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, a small city in the Hudson Valley area of New York.\u00a0 It’s a good example of the small, private institution type found scattered across the U.S., particularly in the northeast and midwest.\u00a0 The college is small (around 2600 students) and draws from an international body of students.\u00a0 In the latest freshman class, Vassar’s top feeder states were New York (disproportionately from New York City), California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania \u2014 all quite “blue states” politically and culturally.\u00a0 Very few Vassar students come from local high schools.<\/p>\n An incomplete list of bands who came from Vassar College includes Love Child (whose guitarist Alan Licht remains active in avant-rock circles), the Sweet Things, the Bravery, Beach House, Throw Me The Statue, Genghis Tron [and, most recently, MS MR – ed.].\u00a0 Love Child, the Sweet Things, and Genghis Tron made a go of it (in indie rock for the first two, underground metal for the third) as the musical unit they formed in college.\u00a0 The Bravery, who made a splash in alt-rock circles last decade, were formed by three students who played in the college band Skabba the Hutt (a “mock-ska band,” Wikipedia notes).\u00a0 Beach House and Throw Me The Statue were groups formed after their key players (Victoria LeGrand and Scott Reitherman, respectively) graduated.<\/p>\n Two solo musicians of recent note who came from Vassar College are Howard Fishman and Rachel Yamagata. \u00a0Fishman is remembered by some classmates as the proverbial guy on the quad playing a guitar; after graduation, he made a respectable impact as a purveyor of New Orleans-inspired folk and jazz.\u00a0 Yamagata transferred to Vassar College from Northwestern University; having established a career as a performer and songwriter in the confessional vein of Fiona Apple, she’s returned to the region as a part-time resident of Woodstock.\u00a0 Depending on who you ask, famous musical alumni from Vassar College include the Beastie Boys’ Mike Diamond and DJ\/producer Mark Ronson, both of whom spent a short time at the college before moving on superstardom and NYU, respectively.<\/p>\n Vassar College has a reputation for an erudite, critical-minded, worldly and arty student body \u2014 a milieu that possibly manifests in the kinds of music associated with these bands and musicians, whether by college-age socialization or post hoc attribution.\u00a0 At the same time, the institution has little cultural connection to the City of Poughkeepsie, the deindustrialized, stigmatized city outside its front door.\u00a0 Few Vassar students find their way into the small handful of dance clubs featuring hip hop and R&B, or the bars and venues where heavy metal and punk\/emo bands play.\u00a0 The holds true for Vassar bands as well: most never play a gig at a Poughkeepsie nightclub or bar off campus.\u00a0 One reason is that these venues are 21-and-over, alcohol-vending establishments that would necessarily exclude about three-fourths of the student body.\u00a0 But I suspect the main factor has less to do with such supply-side factors, and more with the formal and informal insularity of College, which shapes student life regardless of musical interest.<\/p>\n The college’s insularity begins with its residential policy.\u00a0 Almost all students live in dormitories on campus or (for some seniors) in college-owned student housing across the street.\u00a0 Outside the campus, the Arlington neighborhood provides little in the way of college-town amenities; the handful of bars, caf\u00e9s, restaurants, and tattoo parlors do much better business serving local residents.\u00a0 For concerts, nightlife and cultural identification off campus, Vassar students are more likely to take the commuter rail 90 miles south to New York City.\u00a0 Historically, the college also taps New York City for its extracurricular musical programming, from indie rockers and dance DJs playing late night at the campus bar, to professional jazz musicians and combos performing before students and faculty audiences, to touring alt-rock and hip hop acts playing high profile on-campus concerts once or twice a year.<\/p>\n In this small, enclosed college setting, musically inclined students generally don’t have to look hard to identify others with the same tastes or ambitions.\u00a0 At present, indie rock (i.e., what we used to call college radio in the 80s and 90s) is arguably the favored genre among Vassar bands.\u00a0 Occasionally a student trained in classical music, either at the college or before, will put together a more mannered “chamber pop” group.\u00a0 However, a good number of ensembles play jazz (which is taught in the Music Department) and other styles that require serious chops (funk, afrobeat<\/a>, etc.). The college radio station looms large at Vassar College, both in wattage and as a gathering place for music geeks of an indie-rock persuasion.\u00a0 Meanwhile, the campus bar and student parties are more likely to play hip hop, EDM, pop and alternative rock.\u00a0 There’s also a remarkable number of a capella groups that students can audition for.<\/p>\n These aren’t merely the predominant genres of music heard on campus; at an institution as small as Vassar, they’re the styles associated with students in a close-knit residential community.\u00a0 Someone who favors sounds outside of these genres \u2014 a black metal obsessive or a Juggalo, for instance \u2014 will become quickly known as an afficianado of outr\u00e9 or room-clearing sounds. Fortunately for their social life, they can mitigate this reputation through all the other encounters and roles they have with their fellow students in the 24\/7 total institution of the residential college.<\/p>\n Many students appropriate dorm rooms and basements for band practice and jamming, although complaints by fellow students can bring an end to sonically extreme collaborations. \u00a0Intrepid bands can find practice space well off campus; monthly rents are fairly cheap, making access to a car the more likely limiting factor.\u00a0 (Few Vassar students have cars on campus, a reflection of how self-contained residential life is.) \u00a0Occasionally an off-campus building (not college owned) becomes designated a “band house,” complete with shabby instruments and equipment, that is passed on among exclusive cohorts of students (see the video below).\u00a0 These residences often double as crash pads for low-profile touring bands who play campus gigs; out of such DIY generosity, contacts are established that can reciprocate at a later date with gig support, technical advice, or basic exposure to cool new sounds that can advance Vassar students’ musical lives.<\/p>\n