By closely analyzing "embedded" research from several different worlds of popular music—including British trip-hop, neo-folk, postindustrial, and American hip-hop—Peter Webb’s sweeping book, Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Culture, seeks to provide a "comprehensive" analysis of different popular music worlds in order to complete what he considers to be the "partial" analyses of different popular cultures and sub-cultures composed in and around the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Webb offers, for example, the following critique of the oft-cited works of Dick Hebdige (1979) on sub-cultures: "It is telling that Hebdige hardly ever refers to individual accounts of Punk subculture from those involved in it. This omission limits Hebdige’s ability to actually ’read’ the full impact of the subculture on its participants" (13). Webb adds later, "What is missing from the CCCS accounts is a self-articulation from the actors and agents in the subculture and a sense of their life histories and the cultural currents and developments around them" (20). More specifically, Webb’s book proposes the inherent worth of ethnographic narrative to a cultural studies audience.

Webb grants his movement toward Bourdieu’s notion of reflexive sociology, but he contends that his theory of milieu cultures, which the book develops extensively, is more nuanced than Bourdieu’s habitus as it recognizes "a number of different areas of understanding to habitus" (31). Specifically, Webb prefers the theoretical abstraction of a milieu because it denotes both a "momentary milieu" and a "milieu structure." In this way, Webb’s notion of milieu cultures "stresses the relations and process rather than structure and semiotics" of the complex worlds of popular music. Folklorists can find relevance in Webb’s framework; for example, Bourdieu and Wacquant’s capitalist lexicon is applicable to the process of musical production much the same as Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs have found Bourdieu’s capitalist lexicon to be applicable to the Grimms’ collection of symbolic forms for insertion into "a capital-dominated textual market" (Bauman and Briggs 217).

The book is organized into seven chapters. The first and second chapter outline the historical and theoretical development of the notion of milieu cultures. Chapter 3 considers as its focal point a geographic place, Bristol—a city with about 420,000 residents in southwest England. Since the middle of the twentieth century, Bristol’s music scene has produced a plethora of successful musical groups in a number of genres—including pop, new wave, reggae, alternative rock, and jazz. Webb explores, in this chapter, how these global musical trends morphed and mutated in and around the musical milieu of the city and created the Bristol sound. All the while, he parallels that historical/theoretical analysis with narratives from key figures involved in the genesis of the Bristol sound.

The work shifts in the fourth chapter from focus on a place to focus on a genre: neo-folk, or postindustrial (both are extensions of 1960s and 70s British Punk). Webb highlights the shared political interests and dynamic relations permeating the neo-folk musical milieu during the late seventies through an analysis of his interviews with the founders of the neo-folk group, Crisis. Tony Wakeford and Douglas P formed Crisis in 1977 and their second group, Death in June, in 1981. Webb relays Tony’s thoughts on neo-folk and politics: "The politics came before the music.... It was a very political thing right from the outset. Ideologies and music are very comfortable bed fellows" (71). What proceeds is a skillful amalgamation of lyrics and ethnographic narratives that relay the importance of spiritual and philosophical as well as political reference points for the key figures creating art within the neo-folk milieu.

In chapter 5, Webb takes on the daunting task of analyzing the global cultural and artistic effects of hip-hop. The chapter’s essential thesis that hip-hop is a hugely successful, popular American export that is actively appropriated by very different cultures in Europe, Britain, South America, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa in ways that meet those particular cultures’ needs is well taken. Further, Webb correctly identifies the issues which hip-hop’s exportation raise in relation to "the dialectic between objective structure and subjective experience" as both pertinent and pervasive. The folklorist, however, will be disappointed to find that the chapter’s expansive subject is analyzed alongside very little ethnographic narrative. Scholars of American popular hip-hop, moreover, may also take to task Webb’s identification of mainstream hip-hop, including artists like Eminem, Dr. Dre, Nas, and 50 Cent, as only an artistic movement that "celebrates empty consumerism, visions of sexuality that are emptied out of feeling and emotion, and a concentration of violence and self aggrandizement that distorts the legacy of the [early] political hip-hop" (129).

But the final two sections of Webb’s work return to narrative-driven analysis with first-hand accounts of the cut-throat nature of the music industry. The section entitled "The Great in the Small," which espouses that the "Do-it-yourself" (D-I-Y) milieu associated with Punk bands, like the Bristol band Crass, "provides an operational zone where music can be an arena to not just develop interesting musical forms but also one where ideas, lifestyles, philosophies, politics, and outlooks can be directly accessed and discussed through the music itself and the community that interacts with it" is particularly insightful. In this section, Webb allows the subjects to clearly define success in relation to both their art and their politics. The chapter’s star, Penny Rimbaud, provides a lucid account of Crass’ legacy which includes—alongside their music—a successful introduction to the Bristol streets of the highly politicized and ethical discussions of the 70s peace movements, the animal-rights movement, and the feminist movement (149).

Ultimately, Webb’s book is an ethnographic contribution to the study of the Bristol sound. Folklorists working within British sub-cultures will find beneficial detail and analysis in the text, even if Webb’s cross-cultural analyses reach, at times, beyond the depth and scope of his empirical data.

WORKS CITED

Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.

--------

[Review length: 1012 words • Review posted on April 6, 2010]