As the title suggests, Wendy Fonarow's Empire of Dirt is an in-depth look at the aesthetics and rituals of British indie music, a genre that grew out of the British independent record label movement of the late 1970s–1980s. Based on an ethnographic study that spans thirteen years and over 1,000 concerts, the book complements and enhances a lively scholarly discussion of indie as both a commercial and aesthetic form (see Lee Reference Lee1995; Hesmondhalgh Reference Hesmondhalgh1997, Reference Hesmondhalgh1999; Kruse Reference Kruse2003; Bannister Reference Bannister2006).
Fonarow begins by addressing the problematic nature of the indie genre for both insiders and academics (Chapter 1). Grounding the study in a historical discussion of British indie, and treating the genre as a set of shifting discourses rather than a static entity, enables Fonarow to avoid some common pitfalls of generic classification. The remainder of the book is primarily devoted to making anthropological sense of the indie gig's ‘participant structure’ (Chapters 2–5). She observes that the youngest and most energetic indie concert-goers congregate nearest to the stage in an area she calls ‘zone one’. By contrast, zone two, located closer to the back of the venue, comprises older members who no longer dance, but opt instead for a more cerebral music experience. Finally, zone three, which is not differentiated from zone two ‘in terms of space, but in terms of orientation and comportment’ (p. 123), is made up of post-fanatic music industry professionals and others whose priorities lie outside the on-stage event.
While segmenting fluid concert spaces into a fixed number of (relatively) autonomous participant zones is a risky move, the decision proves useful for considering audience segmentation in new ways. For example, what Fonarow documents in her interviews with fans and professionals is not merely the existence of three zones and their attendant modes of spectatorship, but also the progression of individuals through these zones over the course of their ‘careers’ as indie fans. In this sense, the indie gig is a ‘ritual of transformation’ (p. 182 ff) where community members eventually shed the ‘youthful’ antics of zone one in favour of the ‘grown-up’ conduct of zones two and three. By parsing the gig into three zones, then, Fonarow is able to describe not only how bodies become organised within a venue, but what this organisation means with respect to issues of ageing and subjectivity.
Like many widely read anthropological analyses of music (e.g. Cohen Reference Cohen1991; Small Reference Small1998; Finnegan Reference Finnegan2007[1989]), Empire of Dirt deserves the attention of any specialist with an interest in questions of music and culture more broadly. This is because, in addition to being a study of indie music, Empire of Dirt is equally a dissection of the ritualistic and metaphysical bases of Western society. Certainly some of the most provocative arguments in the book – for example, that indie embodies latent conflicts ‘between Puritan asceticism and Romantic emotionalism, between Western and West African metaphysics’ (p. 23) – are also the most anthropological. In saying this, popular music scholars without anthropological training should fear not, because Fonarow outlines the theories and methods she uses clearly enough for even the most uninitiated popular music scholar to appreciate.
Aside from some possible stylistic objections (the way song lyrics are marshalled as textual evidence is often interesting and entertaining, but sometimes feels stilted and distracting) and an inaccurate description of guitar effects pedals (p. 46), the book is well researched and carefully executed. If there is a more substantial issue that warrants mention, it concerns the considerable timeline of the project itself.
For most academics and many fans the heyday of indie was in the mid-1980s. Considering that Fonarow's study began in 1991 (a low point in indie's history marked by the bankruptcy of leading UK independents Factory Records and Rough Trade), was carried out during the 1990s (a decade which saw the rise and fall of Britpop), and lasted well into the 2000s (a time of renewed interest in the indie genre), it is impossible not to wonder whether audience conventions and the role of the gig fluctuated accordingly. Maybe they did not (which is what has to be assumed from Fonarow's account), but this raises the question of why the meaning and structure of the concert gig remained stable while other aspects of the musical culture changed considerably.
These points should not take away from the fact that Empire of Dirt is a substantial and significant contribution to indie music scholarship. That said, the book's most valuable offering to popular music studies more generally may well lie in what we can learn from its distinctly anthropological agenda. In either case, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which an interested researcher wouldn't find this book both useful and thought provoking.
