The Rise and Fall of the Subcultural Hero Mara Persello What follows is the analysis of the lyrics of three concept albums of different eras, backgrounds, success, connected with different subcultures. My hypothesis is that there is at least a common theme that subcultures share, namely the theme of authenticity. To define the subculture I will use the model of the lotmanian semiosphere as organizational structure determining center, periphery, boundaries and “other semiotics” (Lotman 2005: 213). The subcultural identity needs boundaries and enemies to manifest itself, and the central myth told in the lyrics here presented functions as a meta-language to set the value of authenticity as founding for the definition of the subcultural being. The three albums I present are: “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, David Bowie, 1972; “Ein kleines bisschen Horrorschau”, Die Toten Hosen, 1988; “Searching for a Former Clarity”, Against Me! , 2005. The considered points are: (1) how subcultures are structured after the lotmanian model (2) why subcultures are so interested in the theme of authenticity (3) how the message is spread (4) the theory of actants of Greimas as applied to the analysis of the social body. The lyrics here analyzed compare the loss of authenticity with death and illness. Authenticity may thus be defined as an embodied truth, an essential value for the subcultures. Losing authenticity means losing the body itself. As subculture lives primarily through the bodies of its members, texts like the ones I present are to be seen as closely connected to the practices. 1 The structure of a subculture The term and definition of subculture developed by the CCCS has been discussed and criticized from the post-modernists, who, parallel to the transformations in the nature of the subcultural forms, suggested new definitions as tribe, post-subculture, scene (which can be local, translocal or virtual) (Bennett 2006: 222f). More than relying on a definition, meant to bound cultural phenomena from an external point of view, it is interesting to understand how the social actors themselves draw the limits of their cultural territory. Instead of on its boundaries, I will focus on the internal system of subcultural constitution. The scheme developed by the sociologists Hitzler, Bucher and Niederbacher (2005) tries to graphically express the internal structure of the scene (fig. 1): Während sich innerhalb von Gruppen Kommunikation verdichtet, ist diese zwischen den Gruppen vergleichsweise niedrig. Dennoch macht gerade die Kommunikation zwischen den Gruppen die Szene aus. Szenemitglieder kennen sich nicht mehr notwendig persönlich (wie das innerhalb von Gruppen der Fall ist), sondern erkennen sich an typischen Merkmalen und interagieren in szenespezifischer Weise (Hitzler, Bucher, Niederbacher 2005: 25). K O D I K A S / C O D E Ars Semeiotica Volume 34 (2011) No. 3 - 4 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Mara Persello 288 Fig. 1 Fig. 3 Fig. 2 As in the definition of Peterson and Bennett (2004), the scene doesn’t need to be geographically circumscribed, the membership doesn’t require a face-toface interaction: this is nowadays obvious, as Internet allows to share music, opinions and self-representations. This was also possible before, through other media as television, fanzines 1 and radio. If we assume that subcultural scenes have always been also music scenes (Moore 2006: 231f), we have to recognize music as a powerful connective and normative tool: through the lyrics of the pop songs, through the behavior of the rock or pop stars, their way to dress and act, to describe themselves and their lives and visions of life in interviews and biographies, the subcultural message is spread, and the geographically distant groups get connected sharing the same contents, even before having personal contacts. Hitzler, Bucher and Niederbacher describe then a more complicated multi-level internal organization of each group (fig. 2), composed of a central core of “experts”, holders of a deep subcultural knowledge and active in the scene, surrounded from a wider group of friends and “heavy users” and then, in a more external section of this concentric system, the sympathizers (Hitzler, Bucher, Niederbacher 2005: 27). Fox (1987), in her observation of the social organization of Punks in 1986, listed almost the same typologies, avoiding, anyway, the concentric scheme: Hardcore Punks, Softcore Punks, Preppie Punks and spectators. For Hitzler, Bucher and Niederbacher, the actors at the core of the scene are the “motors”, creative producers of the subcultural contents, but they are not necessarily the contact to other groups: the connection with members of other groups can be situated at every level (fig. 3). The Rise and Fall of the Subcultural Hero 289 Lauenburg (2008) criticizes this structuring, and argues with Goffman that responsible for the development of the subcultural values are not only the core-members of the subculture: every member of the subcultural area, regardless of his position in the subcultural hierarchy, can bring a contribution to the whole system: jeder Szenegänger gestaltet und verändert seine Szene, aber eben auch nicht nur seine eigene Szene. Zwei feindlich sich gegenüberstehende Jugendszenen orientieren sich in ihrer Abgrenzung eben nicht an einzelnen Szenegängern, sondern am Gesamtkonstrukt dieser Szene (2008: 30). If we consider the social body as a text, it is then possible to draw a parallel between the concept of subculture presented by Lauenburg, Hitzler, Bucher and Niederbacher and the semiosphere of Lotman, that can be useful to systematize their theories in a single structural concept to describe subcultures. The subculture can be seen as a semiosphere, defined by Lotman in these terms: “The semiotic universe may be regarded as the totality of individual texts and isolated languages as they relate to each other” (2005: 208). Beyond the metaphoric intuition of the semiosphere, what is important in Lotman is the nature of relations that are at stake inside this semiotic universe: Semiotic space is characterised by the presence of nuclear structures (frequently multiple) and a visibly organised more amorphous semiotic world gravitating towards the periphery, in which nuclear structures are immersed. If one of these nuclear structures not only holds a dominant position, but also rises to a state of self-description, thereby separating itself from the system of meta-languages, with the help of which it describes not only itself but also the peripheral space of a given semiosphere, than the level of its ideal unity creates a superstructure which itself is above the irregularity of a real semiotic map (2005: 213). This is what happens in the definition of scene made by Hitzler, Bucher and Niederbacher, too. In the semiosphere, due its isomorphic quality, every part is its own whole; even if Lotman never precisely explains the nature of this isomorphism (Lorusso 2010: 76), he suggests it with a poetic image: “It is also like a face, which, wholly reflected in a mirror, is also reflected in any of its fragments, which, in this form, represents the part and yet remains similar to the whole mirror” (2005: 215). The theoretic postulate can be used to reinforce the critic of Lauenburg, that every member of the scene, and not only a subcultural elite, is responsible for its development. Since all levels of the semiosphere - from human personality to the individual text to the global semiotic unity - are a seemingly inter-connected group of semiospheres, each of them is simultaneously both participant in the dialogue (as part of the semiosphere) and the space of dialogue (the semiosphere as a whole) (2005: 225). With an annotation: the subcultural world is not as rigid as described in Hitzler, Bucher and Niederbacher. Lauenburg correctly observes that every member of the subculture can be part of the creative process of the semiosphere; nonetheless, as Lotman (2005: 213) specifies, the new idea has to reach the center of the semiosphere, has to have the chance to gain the attention of the other members and to be able to develop a form of self-reflection to have an influence on the whole subculture. The point of view of Hitzler, Bucher and Niederbacher is opposite to Lotman’s creativity theory: new meanings are not developed in the core of the system, which is, on the contrary, inflexible and immobile because of the rigid rules it has formulated in its selfdescription, but Mara Persello 290 in the periphery, where ideas are still open because not systematized by rules, there is much more flexibility and creative activity. The point made by Lauenburg, that every member of the scene is also responsible for the development of other scenes, brings us a step further in the description of the characteristics of the semiosphere. Lotman is fascinated by the boundaries of the cultural space, aware of the fact that a culture can never exist on its own, and that the boundary is the place where culture is constantly revitalized. On the other hand, boundaries define us, because, as Eco recently reaffirmed, we need an enemy, as there is no “us” without “them”. Avere un nemico è importante non solo per definire la nostra identità ma anche per procurarci un ostacolo rispetto al quale misurare il nostro sistema di valori e mostrare, nell’affrontarlo, il valore nostro (2011: 10). Barbarians are created by Romans: “culture creates not only its own type of internal organization but also its own type of external disorganization”(Lotman 1990: 142). Distinguish and connect: there is a constant exchange with the universe of the enemy, and we always share at least one common language. At least, says Lotman, to be able to declare each other war. The work of Lotman is more focused on the boundaries and the possibilities of cultural translation and creolization. For the analysis of the structure of the subculture we must move back to the center of the system, to understand how the subcultural capital (Thornton 1995) is generated. 2 Subculture as defined from its members: the value of authenticity Mitch Douglas Daschuk, drawing on the concept of cultural capital of Bourdieu, describes the field of cultural production as a restricted group of subcultural actors (artists and critics) “involved in the creation, distribution, and legitimization of artistic works” (2011: 609). This core-group of the subcultural scene, the organizational elite (Hitzler, Bucher, Niederbacher 2005: 27), has distinctive characteristics: they usually have been part of the scene for a longer time, are more active than other in organizing and producing for the scene (Hitzler, Bucher, Niederbacher 2005: 27), possess authenticity, which is “founded largely upon one’s perceived possession of ‘privileged’ cultural knowledge and capacities, function to ensure the value of an actor’s cultural capital” (Daschuk 2011: 608). The idea of a shared cultural capital of Bourdieu, as used in Daschuk, needs an adjustment: it is correct to say that the possession of a cultural sensibility is legitimated by notions of authenticity, but the definition of authenticity as rare value owned only by the core creative members of the group, as in the example of Bourdieu, works for the artistic field, but doesn’t fit in the structure of a subculture, where authenticity is supposed to be a value shared by all members, and is constantly negotiated through dialectic and mutual adjustments. There are respected and admired members of a subculture, that enjoy obviously an higher status; nevertheless, nobody has the power to make the rules, and every subcultural subject has to represent himself at every moment to everybody else as member of the subculture, not only with a discursive but also through a performative identity. While staging himself, the subcultural member reproduces and produces the subcultural semiosphere all the time (Müller et al. ²2009: 139); there is no fixed rule, dress-code or position that can’t be transformed: there is a Weltanschauung that has to be internalized and through which everything else, from personal style to political opinion, has to be interpreted. The Rise and Fall of the Subcultural Hero 291 For this reason, the description of a subcultural “look” is never provided from subcultural members themselves, but only from outsiders. As Driver remarks “Indeed, the young people I interviewed were reluctant to make any comments at all regarding style in terms of subcultural fashion, instead preferring to concentrate on more behavioral aspects” (2011: 980), he then mentions an interesting extract: D: it doesn’t really have anything to do with the way [scene members] look. I mean, it just depends how they act and how they give themselves off to other people - attitude (2011: 980). The persons recently interviewed by Driver during his fieldwork in Australia give the same answers that Fox collected in the United States in 1986: There’s been so much pure bullshit written about punks. Everyone is shown with a safety pin in their ear or blue hair. The public image is too locked into the fashion. That has nothing to do with punk, really … for me, it is just my way of life (1987: 352). The subcultural world can’t be described through style attributes or specific behavioral schemes, because to join a subculture means to find out who one really is, to unveil a natural attitude. Authenticity “is partly dependent on warranting claims not to have been influenced by others” (Widdicombe and Wooffitt 1995: 212) “The authentic self is one that commits to a personal life project and is not controlled by outside influence” (Williams 2006: 178). punk didn’t influence me to be the way I am much. I was always this way inside. When I came into punk, it was what I needed all my life. I could finally be myself (Fox 1987: 353). It makes no difference if those who are talking are Hardcore fans, Punks or Riot Grrrls members, they share this same worldview: “BECAUSE every time we pick up a pen, or an instrument, or get anything done, we are creating the revolution. We are the revolution. (as quoted in Kearney 1998, 155, 161)” (Moore 2007: 463). Subcultural identity is about being and “feeling”: this knowledge cannot be learned or taught; more than that, “trying too hard” (Thornton 1995) is “indicative of one’s lack of authenticity” (Driver 2011: 980). And it is because of this personal physical and autobiographical commitment to subculture that there is no external control system, everyone has to prove constantly one’s authenticity to oneself, acting coherently to one’s cultural beliefs, and to others, maintaining a recognizability, a consistency in social public and private life. Soziale Anerkennung als Voraussetzung für soziale Inklusion wird in Jugendkulturen und szenen in Prozessen der Authentifizierung, also der ‘Echtheits(er)klärung’ gewonnen und ist ständig aufs Neue zu legitimieren. Subjekte sind nie per se authentisch, vielmehr wird ihnen entsprechend des jeweiligen jugendkulturellen Selbstverständnisses Authentizität zugeschrieben (oder nicht) (Müller et al. 2009: 139). Giving boundaries to social phenomena can be challenging, but only for those who research this field from the outside. For insiders boundaries are very clear. 3 The myth of authenticity Authenticity is a central value for the subculture, because, being the subculture a bricolage 2 of meanings and symbols constructed in a dialectic relationship to the mainstream, the risk of misunderstandings and co-option is a potential destructive threat. Mara Persello 292 From rock and roll to the hippies to the punks, the collective identities of deviant youth cultures have depended on their ability to provoke authorities and ‘straight’ people. When commercialization brings alternative culture to the mass market, young people who have developed an identity based on their opposition to mainstream society experience what I have called a liquidation of subcultural capital. Their claims to be indipendent of media hype and consumer conformity are threatened, and so they defend their subcultural capital by distinguishing between the authentic originators and the posers who hopped on the bandwagon (Moore 2006: 249). The authentic members of a subculture are those that have always been like that and define themselves through the bricolage made picking up suggestions found in the mainstream and translated into subcultural terms, in an appropriation that becomes embodiment. For them subculture is a tool to express their true inner self. As mentioned in the interviews collected by Fox, the subcultural members construct a narrative that gives credit to their identity, a founding myth explaining the origins and the state of the subcultural world. The fragmented and incoherent aspects of life that a subject experiences are revised and modified to compose a plot that guarantees identity. “The semantic coherence of narrative segments is what forms plot, and plot is as much the law of a narrative text as syntagmatic ordering is the law for correct speech” (Lotman 1990: 223). Leaving aside the linguistic parallelism, what remains, in the constant revision of memories and personal backgrounds, is the plot as set of rules meant to coherently explain the past and to give a direction to future decisions. In this resettlement, every portion of narration, discourse (Alasuutari 1995) or experience floating in the semiosphere can be useful to our personal bricolage. These pieces are for many subcultural members to be found in the pop-music medium, that, through its emotional value and the narrative scheme of the lyrics, offers a powerful source for identification. 3.1 The concept album The lyrics of songs are one of the innumerable texts at disposal in the semiosphere, ready to be used in the bricolage of everyone’s construction of the self. The association with music, with its suggestive emotional effect, reinforces the connection to the bodily reception of the message. We have then, as a result, a double appropriation of a song. On one side, if we see the lyrics as a useful piece to be taken and resettled in our bricolage to define our world, we have the feeling of being part of the story, because the power of the myth resides in its capability of addressing: “every mythological narration is perceived as intimate, the myth says always something about me” (Lotman 1990: 151ff). On the other hand, the fruition of music is a bodily experience, involving feelings and physical reactions. 3 Not every musician deserves the same respect in the subcultural context, and has the needed qualities to become a trustworthy medium of the subculture. He has to prove to be authentic 4 through the coherence of his music, lyrics, public behavior and interviews (which can already be seen as a metadescription of the subculture: as in Lotman (1990 and 2005), the capability of self-description is peculiar of those cultural systems belonging to the central core of the semiosphere). The artists authors of the three concept albums here listed enjoyed different fortunes: from very well known on a mainstream level, to very obscure, to respected from a small but affectionate fan base. Despite their different fortunes, they have always been perceived as authentic. The Rise and Fall of the Subcultural Hero 293 A concept album, as defined in the pop-music, is a collection of songs unified by a narrative theme, with all songs contributing to the development of a story. Concept albums are traditionally bound to the progressive metal scene of the seventies, as pop tried to reach the quality and virtuosity of classical music (McNeil, McCain 1997). In the glam and punk scene (to whom the artists here mentioned belong), where high musical technical and composition skills, even if present, are not explicitly required, concept albums are very seldom. They are not very common in the pop production also for practical reasons: from early days, artists would mainly produce singles, as pop music had its main distribution channel in radios (and later in music dedicated television channels), that couldn’t allow themselves such a length as for concept albums. The choice to compose a concept album is, then, already a statement: the time-element is central in the production and fruition, and the stories told fit this format, they cover years, describe a development, and, very often, they have some moral intent. The narrator needs time to tell, so the listener is expected to take time to listen and reflect. 3.2 Corpus Composed in different eras, from different backgrounds and of different success, the three albums I present have a story in common, they share the same plot: they all tell about a person slowly moving from a position of self-assertion to a condition of weakness and insecurity and then to the loss of their self. Two of the three stories display events in first person, while Die Toten Hosen use the third person. For this reason, I will not follow the chronological order, but the stylistic one, so that this album will be analyzed last, because the different perspective gives a particular moralistic tone. Anyway, all three albums deal with the object-value of authenticity and with the same opponent, the fame and success in the mainstream, as we will see in the actant analysis (Greimas 1986). The first concept album presented is quite famous: “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”, released by the English author David Bowie in 1972. The story told is about a rock star called Ziggy Stardust, an alien on earth that hears the news of the world ending. In “Five Years” Ziggy refers to some kind of Noah’s ark where he tries to store and rescue humanity, after having been on this planet to gain information: I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies I saw boys, toys electric irons and T.V.’s My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare I had to cram so many things to store everything in there And all the fat-skinny people, and all the tall-short people And all the nobody people, and all the somebody people I never thought I’d need so many people In “Moonage Daydream”, Ziggy presents himself as a “space invader” and a rock star, and asks for attention. He then in “Starman” tries to warn people, not to give up and to find a way out of the catastrophe, and introduces the presence of a star man wanting to meet humanity, which could be the last hope before the end of the world. Ziggy has to be the intermediary, because the world is not ready yet for such a wonder: There’s a starman waiting in the sky He’d like to come and meet us But he thinks he’d blow our minds There’s a starman waiting in the sky Mara Persello 294 He’s told us not to blow it Cause he knows it’s all worthwhile The last song of side A 5 is “It Ain’t Easy”: here Bowie covers a song of the American country musician Ron Davies, who says “It ain’t easy to get to heaven when you’re going down”. We have then basically a comparison between the future offered by the starman and the paradise, and maybe between the starman and God. Such a cover-song is a good example of intertextuality, suggesting a connotative meaning. In “Lady Stardust” the alien-rock star, once laughed at but now famous and getting finally some attention, enthusiastically thinks he can save the world: “I could make it all worthwhile as a rock & roll star”. But Ziggy is distracted from his mission by fame and success. When the parties described in “Hang on to Yourself” are eventually over, someone of his band takes the word in the next song to say that Ziggy got lost in the stardom madness: He took it all too far but boy could he play guitar Making love with his ego Ziggy sucked up into his mind Like a leper messiah When the kids had killed the man I had to break up the band. At the end comes the “Rock’n’roll Suicide”: the alien rockstar has lost himself, the party is over, now the silence is deafening. He feels alone, he has no audience anymore, and he failed to accomplish his mission: No matter what or who you’ve been No matter when or where you’ve seen All the knives seem to lacerate your brain Nothing about death is said in the album, even though this last song suggests Ziggy’s desperation, but David Bowie “killed” his alter ego on stage on the last date of the Stardust Tour, at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, a year later (Pegg 2005). The “rise and fall” depicted in this album show how losing the coherence between beliefs and actions makes the personal world collapse, and Ziggy shows us that the connivance with fame deprives the hero of his authenticity. More recent album composed on the topic of loss of authenticity is “Searching for a Former Clarity”. The Florida punk band Against Me! released it in September 2005 as third full-length album with an independent record label, before signing with a major in December same year. The mistrust and doubts of the band relating their musical career to come are clearly recognizable in the lyrics. They had been playing in squats and dealing with political topics in their lyrics since 1997, now they find themselves in a new situation they can’t really anticipate. 6 The offices of the major where the contract negotiation took place are in Miami: We charge into danger. No guarantees or safe places. No one can be trusted, everyone is a suspect. […] Sharks circling for the feeding. All hope has been abandoned, like ballots drifting into the ocean. […] All the public is buying, it’s business as usual, and the business is capitalizing on your fear, your greed, your perversions and vices. The Rise and Fall of the Subcultural Hero 295 Mistrust on one side, and sense of guilt on the other, as actually most of their fans criticized their decision in “Mediocrity Gets You Pears (The Shaker)” Vampires! We’re only in it for the money. Diluted! We took the movement to the market. So fuck us! We totally sold out the scene.[…] It’s packaged! It’s just fashion and rebellion. Mainstream! It was better in the basement. In the band’s forum and everywhere in internet 7 where the songs and lyrics of the band are to be seen, there’s the same disappointment, here just an example: If you’ve ever felt a sense of camaraderie singing along to songs, knowing that you too were going to one day absolve yourself from the capitalist society you were stuck in at the time, and become something more than a nine to five worker for some corporation that doesn’t do anything worth, then maybe you could understand why some ex fans feel so betrayed. It’s disappointing. It’s like the disillusioned child who grows up and finds out people aren’t as good as they were told they are. What happens when our favorite bands who reinforced our decision not to let our lives be run by consumerism sell out to the same system they used to (and we still) oppose? 8 The lyrics of “Unprotected Sex with Multiple Partners” compare in a metaphor the dealing with the entertainment industry with dangerous sexual behavior that can eventually lead to a severe contagious disease. The only hint to this metaphor is in the title, the lyrics themselves just repeat typical phrases as heard in the music industry. Coordinate the marketing, label, publicity, touring. Consult on, timing and presentation. Go ahead put this in context. It’s 3 points on production, 15% to management, 10% to the agent, 5% to legal representation. We call it our insurance plan to stretch the inevitable as far as we can. Gotta make your money while you got the chance, do whatever it takes to sell this. We’re completely irrelevant on LP and compact disc. The narrator realizes that he is “completely irrelevant”, in this context his identity is lost, as he lost his authenticity, his truth to himself. He tries to find a way to give sense to this new situation, but he’s living a life that doesn’t belong to him, like a “menschmaschine” (we will find this definition in Die Toten Hosen). Now I wake up around 4 or 5. Eat, shower, and get dressed in about an hour’s time. I’m sick of feeling like I’m losing my mind. Sick of doing the same things most nights after night. Sick of self-loathing and self-absorption, self-destructive narcissism. I’m sick to death of being constantly fucking sick of. I don’t know who I can trust. Thought there was us, but no, there is no one. The narrator doubts about himself: this happens because there is no coherence between his worldview and his actions. He has to abandon his “self”, and become a machine, or a clown, Mara Persello 296 act as someone else. The clown (comedian) is in the following song, and acts like a machine, repeating Standing here like a comedian, I repeat what I say, again and again and again until the meaning has become an imitation of itself The narrator knows, he’s losing touch with reality. (the next song bares the title “Don’t Lose Touch”). At the end, the consequences of “unprotected sex with multiple partners” (dealing with the entertainment industry) lead to diseases, and while ill, the narrator looks backwards to the days, as the world still made sense, and basically gives up. In the end, will you be all alone? As the disease spreads slowly through your body, pumped by your heart to the tips of your arms and your legs, your greatest fear was that your mind wouldn’t last, your coherency and alertness would be the first things to fade, as your hair thinned, as the weight fell off, as your teeth blackened, as the lesions spotted your skin, as you fell to your knees in the center of the stage, as you offered witness to mortality in exchange for the ticket price, as the lights blended into the continuing noise, as all hope was finally lost. Let this be the end. Let this be the last song. Let this be the end. Let all be forgiven. Selling out is compared to a sexual transmitted disease. Here, like in Ziggy Stardust, the last song is desperate. The moral of the two albums is the same, and it is quite obvious: selling out to the mainstream leads to illness, madness, and eventually death. It is not possible to deal with both social environments, the mainstream and the subculture, without jeopardizing the identity. The consequence, as the coherence of ideas and actions is granted by the social body, is the decay of the body itself. The last album I present is Ein kleines bisschen Horrorschau, released by the German punk band Die Toten Hosen as sixth full lenght in 1988, inspired by the movie Clockwork Orange 9 directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. The reference is also to be found in the album cover, where Beethoven (whose 9 th Symphony is the main theme of the movie) is depicted. Even if the band is well known in Europe, the choice of the German language for the lyrics restricts the audience. The lyrics in this album, other that in the other two of the sample, are not telling a personal story, but describing the events Alex (the main character of the movie and of the novel) goes through. The narrator shares the sadness of the story told, but he’s not involved. The album begins with “Hier kommt Alex”: in a narcotized world the only way to feel alive is through aggressiveness. Auf dem Kreuzzug gegen die Ordnung und die scheinbar heile Welt zelebrieren sie die Zerstörung, Gewalt und Brutalität. The Rise and Fall of the Subcultural Hero 297 But after “Ein Schritt zuviel” Alex gets caught because he went too far. In “Keine Ahnung”, Alex, confronted with the value system of the mainstream, is disoriented. Keine Ahnung, was ich dir sagen soll, keine Ahnung und keinen Plan. Frag mich nicht nach jedem Unterschied, ob es Gut und ob es Böse gibt. Was Erfolg und was Versagen ist, wer die Regeln für das Spiel bestimmt. […] Ich kann selber nur noch Nebel sehen, kann mein eigenes Wort nicht mehr verstehen, verliere Tag für Tag den Überblick, weiß nicht, auf welcher Seite ich stehe. […] keine Ahnung, vielleicht bin ich zu dumm. Alex can’t put his ideas in practice anymore, faces a set of values that doesn’t compare with his own, and begins to doubt, most of all about himself (“vielleicht bin ich zu dumm”). This is the moment when his authenticity dissolves. The same happened to the narrator of the lyrics of Against Me! , as he said, in “How Low”, he thought he could at least trust himself, but he can’t (“I don’t know who I can trust / Thought there was us, but no, there is no one”). The worldview he had constructed, after which he had been living so far, is now incoherent with the new situation he’s living in. He doesn’t know anymore what the truth is: is he true or are his perceptions of this new world real? He starts doubting about himself, because he can’t act and react following his usual pattern. Practices and texts are connected, and the change in one of the two creates a sort of disjunction between body and mind, with catastrophic consequences for the equilibrium of the individual. Everything loses its meaning, there are no definite objects, everything is undistinguished, the world makes no sense anymore. Gray is the color of the indefiniteness, the opposite of distinguishing, understanding: the opposite of meaning: Draußen dreht sich die Welt und sie fragt nicht mal nach dir […] Grau ist die Farbe, die dein Anzug hat. Grau ist die Farbe deiner Zellenwand. Grau ist die Farbe der ganzen Strafanstalt. In the following “180 Grad” begins the re-programming of the outsider. Schmidt defines in “Kalte Faszination” the culture as program for the social binding, communicative and collective interpretation of the model of reality. 10 Keiner entkommt unserem Intensiv-System, in jedem Supermarkt läuft unsere Weichspül-Melodie. An jeder Häuserwand ein Verhaltensbefehl, wir polen alles um, was in die falsche Richtung geht. In Mehr davon Alex is ready to leave behind every qualification of himself as person ich geb dir alles, was ich noch hab. Meinen Charakter, meinen Selbstrespekt, jedes letzte Gefühl von Moral. Mara Persello 298 Fig. 4 to join the object value of the new mandant, the mainstream: Mehr Sex! Mehr Geld! Mehr Speed! Mehr Hass! Mehr Ruhm! Mehr Macht! He has become a “menschmaschine” and spent his life as “free man” working in a factory for 35 years. He’s not the same person, he is actually not a person at all anymore, and the lyrics of “Bye bye Alex” say goodbye to what he used to be: Der große Rebell von gestern sagt nun für immer “JA! ” zum bürgerlichen Leben und den Dingen, gegen die er war. […] Hey, bye bye Alex! Nur noch ein Clown, traurig anzuschaun. This is the fall of the hero, who lost his interior coherence between what he thinks and what he does, and has therefore become a clown, a mask, whose appearance is everything we know about him, while his authenticity is hidden, or, in this case, lost: Alex is “only” a clown, a comedian, playing a part and not expressing his true self. In the subcultural interpretation, the image of Alex as a victim is a warning for those who think they can trust the mainstream. Alex is what the mainstream does to outsiders. Subculture means building an alternative program because the cultural program offered by the mainstream didn’t suit the reality as perceived by the subject. 4 Analysis Whatever a culture or subculture may be, we have no culture or subculture without actors getting involved, without someone doing something for some reason, without a story. To center my argumentation on the subcultural actor as embodied enunciation, I will refer to the actantial model of Greimas (1986) (fig. 4), who, after Propp, developed the roles played in a narrative process focusing on the actants and their reciprocal relations: The Actant-Sender and the Actant-Receiver of Information. The Actant-Subject and the Actant-Object of Action. The Actant-Supporter and the Actant-Oppositionist of Volition. The Rise and Fall of the Subcultural Hero 299 The Information level is the moment in which the value of the object is negotiated. To see this phase just as the origin of a story doesn’t do it justice. This is the level of the proper semiosis, where the object gets his meaning, and through the object the sender and the receiver are bound in a contract, an interaction. This is where the often quoted “web” Geertz talks about is spun. 11 Once the Actant-Receiver has accepted the mission and thereby the value system of the Sender, he moves forward to the Action level, where he has to get the object whose value is now acknowledged. As of the second pair, it describes the relation between subject and object. From a cultural and semiotic point of view, objects don’t exist without a subject giving them meaning. The action phase is where a meaningful practice takes place. By doing, “acting”, the contract with the sender goes from virtual to active. Objects exist only in the intersection of a network, and they disappear when the connecting routes are broken (Ponzio 1990: 17). The value of the object is always a relational one: […] value, fixed in this location called object and there to manifest that object, is in a relation with the subject. Indeed, to the extent that the elementary utterance can be defined as an oriented relation that engenders two end terms - the subject and the object - the value invested in the object in question in a way semanticizes the whole utterance, and thereby becomes a value of the subject that meets it upon seeking the object. The subject is, therefore, semantically determined through its relation with the value (Greimas 1987: 87). The third level is that of competences. In the fairy tales analyzed by Propp, the hero, at the beginning of the story, doesn’t possess the required competences (a sword to fight against the dragon, a horse to reach the castle …) to accomplish his mission, and the weaving of the fairytale expands through the apparition of helping figures and secondary trials meant to provide the hero of the key competences. This leads to an indefinite series of possible narrative sub-programs, in the model elaborated by Greimas. What is interesting for us, in the case of subcultures, is that the value system, the contract between sender and receiver, collapses because of the lack of competences of the hero. The mainstream, acting as actant-sender in our story, delivers a pattern of rules and values to the individual, whose task is to agree with these rules and act accordingly in order to receive recognition. The mainstream as actant-sender persuades the subject with the promise of social acknowledgment. 12 Accepting these conditions, the subject provides himself with a competence, an identity that will guide his actions. Inside the semiosphere the central ruling system is represented by the mainstream. Those unable to gain the required competences are pushed towards the periphery, where they will try to build an alternative cultural program through an original bricolage. The subcultural program arises when the system of values given by the mainstream is perceived as incoherent with that experienced by the subject, or the performance required is impracticable because the subject doesn’t own the suitable competence. We have, then, two possibilities when confronted with the value proposal of the mainstream. We can either accept this task, or we can break the pact, and look around for something that will fit us better. Subcultures don’t collaborate with the mainstream in the construction of a certain reality, because they see or feel that it’s wrongly depicted. They find a different reality in their environment, they build a different system, usually very loose and without stable rules, through a bricolage of objects and behaviors and ideas they find at the periphery of the semiosphere. This different system is much more coherent to their experience of life, and prevents them from frustration while giving new meanings. Subcultural actant-receivers start Mara Persello 300 mistrusting the actant-sender, that becomes an enemy, the one who wanted us to agree with false statements and a false reality. Subcultures, then, live between two worlds: they don’t accept the reality they are living in, and develop a virtual world where they can feel free to express themselves and their beliefs as they want; but on the other hand they are not a separated different world. They use those materials at hand within the semiosphere, renaming and deforming them. For this reason subcultures (like all cultures, in the communication between semiospheres) keep a constant connection with their enemy, with whom they share texts, and whose media they take advantage of to spread their message. 13 The maintenance of a constant authenticity, in opposition to the enemy, is the battle to the delimitation of the self. The myth of the subculture spreads through media and uses media. These myths set a system of rules and give directions for the practice. Because of their nature, not structured to an institutional level, practices are to be considered the most important aspect of the subcultural emergence, as subcultures can only be embodied. If subculture can only be presented through the body, it is now clear why, while losing their authenticity, the subcultural heroes of the concept albums here presented lose their lives. The lesson taught to the subcultural members is, then, to beware of the mainstream value proposal, whose acceptance can have mortal consequences, and to protect their authenticity, threatened by the enemy. 5 Conclusions The delimitation of the subcultural space, as in the lotmanian description of the semiosphere, is fuzzy; the relation with the mainstream/ enemy is under different aspects very tight, and this can become a threat for the very existence of the subculture. The mainstream as actant-sender offers an authenticity that is incoherent with the experience of the subcultural member, and whose application leads to social schizophrenia or frustration. The actant receiver needs, therefore, a new definition of himself, and constructs an alternative form of identity. His authenticity fits, as balances coherently his Weltanschauung and his actions. The three concept albums here presented show the consequences of losing this laboriously constructed authenticity, falling back in the frustrating mainstream system, under the illusion of having eventually gained the required competences. As the authenticity is incarnated in the bodies, when it dissolves, the consequence is not only a simple peaceful return to the mainstream, the consequence can be madness (losing the mind) or death (losing the body). Appendix I: Track listing David Bowie 1972: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Side A: Five Years, Soul Love, Moonage Daydream, Starman, It Ain’t Easy Side B: Lady Stardust, Star, Hang on to Yourself, Ziggy Stardust, Suffragette City, Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide Die Toten Hosen 1988: Ein kleines bisschen Horrorschau Hier kommt Alex, 1000 gute Gründe, Ein Schritt zuviel, Keine Ahnung, Die Farbe Grau, 180 Grad, Mehr davon, Zahltag, 35 Jahre, Musterbeispiel, Testbild, Bye, bye Alex Against Me! 2005: Searching for a former Clarity Miami, Mediocrity Gets You Pears (The Shaker), Justin, Unprotected Sex with Multiple Partners, From Her Lips to God’s Ears (The Energizer), Violence, Pretty Girls (The Mover), How Low, Joy, Holy Shit! , Even at Our Worst We’re Still Better Than Most (The Roller), Problems, Don’t Lose Touch, Searching for a Former Clarity The Rise and Fall of the Subcultural Hero 301 Appendix II: Figures Fig 1: Hitzler, Ronald, Thomas Bucher, Arne Niederbacher ²2005: 25 Fig 2: Hitzler, Ronald, Thomas Bucher, Arne Niederbacher ²2005: 27 Fig 3: Hitzler, Ronald, Thomas Bucher, Arne Niederbacher ²2005: 28 Fig 4: Greimas 1986: 180. 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Medienaneignung als kultureller und ästhetischer Prozeß, München: Quintessenz Notes 1 A fanzine is a non-professional magazine published by fans of a particular scene, whose circulation is usually circumscribed to the other members of the same scene. 2 Hebdige defines bricolage after Levi-Strauss as “placing [commodities] in a symbolic ensemble which served to erase or subvert their original straight meanings”. (2008: 592). For Lévi-Strauss, the bricolage is the practical aspect of the mythopoesis (1968). 3 “Semiosis begins in the body and in its perceptive and proprioceptive processes” Violi 2008: 56. 4 Respected artists, nonetheless, don’t need to be underground. In my opinion the conclusions of Daschuk (2011) are hurried. Against me! (see later on) are accused of selling out not because being underground is per se a quality all punks are supposed to share; more than that, Against me! , signing for a major, acted manifestly against what they themselves declared in their lyrics and interviews. 5 In the Seventies music was still mainly printed on vinyl. Therefore Side A and Side B were conceived as internally concluded already during the composition. 6 After this experience with a major, harshly criticized by the fans, the band recently started its own record label. 7 The critics to this that was perceived by the fans as a sudden change in the politics of the band is described in the work of Daschuk, 2011. 8 Octavius on 12-17-2006 http: / / www.songmeanings.net/ songs/ view/ 3530822107858555351/ [accessed 20.12.2011]. 9 This whole concept album is an intertextual translation of the well known movie, which has a huge importance in the construction of the subcultural imagery, at least of the punk scene. An example: an highly respected English punk band, the Adicts, shows up in Alex-costumes, and so do the fans at their concerts. Dressing like Alex before his re-programming expresses freedom and authenticity. In 2009 the Brazilian Heavy Metal band Sepultura also dedicated a concept album to Clockwork Orange, bearing the title “A-lex”, an homage to the main character of the movie but also a play on words meaning without law. 10 “Das Programm für diese sozial verbindliche kommunikative Gesamtinterpretation des Wirklichkeitsmodells einer Gesellschaft nenne ich Kultur Schmidt 2000: 35. 11 “The concept of culture I espouse […] is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning” Geertz 1973: 5. 12 ‘Sanzione’ in Greimas, Courtes 1979: 293. 13 Here comes at mind, once again, Lotman, as he reminds that we need to build a relation with our enemy, at least to declare war.