Introduction
Popular music made in the small southern city of Dunedin, New Zealand is celebrated locally and nationally as a central part of its unique cultural character. Despite a number of recent academic publications seeking to emphasise musical diversity in Dunedin (Gorman Reference Gorman2008; Saunders Reference Saunders2011; Bendrups and Downes Reference Bendrups and Downes2011), the prevailing discourse about Dunedin music in both mainstream media and academia focuses on the international success of a handful of bands that were active during the 1980s, and affiliated with the Flying Nun record label (McLeay Reference McLeay1994; McGonigle Reference McGonigle2005; Bendrups and Downes Reference Bendrups and Downes2011; Bannister Reference Bannister1999).Footnote 1 Their legacy is referred to as the ‘Dunedin sound’, and extends to the subversive DIY aesthetics and a mythologised sense of place and artistic community that narativises those groups’ successes. In recent years, the ‘sound’ and its associated values have also become mobilised in ways that serve to legitimise place-making agendas by the political establishment and associated institutions. For example, the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy forms a central part of the narrative surrounding the UNESCO ‘City of Literature’ accreditation that was bestowed to Dunedin in 2014: ‘for over three decades … [Dunedin bands] have inspired a cultural legacy through poetry and song that has indelibly marked Dunedin as an ongoing vibrant and creative musical community’ (Dunedin City of Literature n.d.). The perspectives of Dunedin musicians outside of this legacy, including young local musicians, have rarely featured in media, academic or institutional discourses about Dunedin music and local identity, and are largely absent from institutional narratives about music and the city. In early 2018 however, a number of mainstream media stories ignited debates about new music and cultural identity in the city and have helped to bring the centrality of the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy to local musical identity into wider contestation. The coverage relates to two separate incidents, both of which involve the depiction of musicians in public murals.
The first incident concerns a mural depicting the UK singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, which was commissioned by the Dunedin City Council (DCC) to celebrate the commercial success of three consecutive concerts at the local indoor stadium in early 2018. While some media coverage celebrated the mural for recognising the concerts’ financial contributions to the local economy, other commentators, as well as a prominent local politician, expressed outrage at the use of public funding to depict a UK artist with few obvious links to the city. Much of the outcry was situated online, yet cited in mainstream media-coverage, and argued that Dunedin's own musicians are more deserving of public acknowledgement and investment. Local city councillor, and former student-radio host Aaron Hawkins offered comment: ‘The [online] backlash received, and particularly from our creative community, was entirely predictable and avoidable’, and goes on to elaborate: ‘[a]t a time when we are starting to make progress around celebrating our own culture and identity, and taking our local artists seriously (in the broadest sense), something like this is a pretty big slap in the face for this community’ (McNeilly Reference McNeilly2018a).
The second incident took place two months later and leveraged the attention gained by the Ed Sheeran controversy. This involved another mural, this time advertising The Chills, a seminal ‘Dunedin sound’ band who continue to be cited internationally as formative and highly influential in the indie-rock canon.Footnote 2 The mural was commissioned by the telecommunications company Chorus, and painted by an art student from the Otago Polytechnic. The mural is located outside The Captain Cook Tavern, where The Chills regularly performed during the 1980s, prior to pursuing an international career. Before the mural had been completed, however, the name of local punk group ‘Coyote’ was painted over the work by masked individuals who claimed (via a Facebook video documenting their work), to be the famous guerrilla artist Banksy. In the video, ‘Banksy’ announces his work to be ‘a message for the fat cats in the government’ before decreeing that instead of The Chills, the mural ‘should say Coyote’, and painting over The Chills logo.
This incident also invoked mainstream and social media outcry. In this case, however, the causes for protest were more varied and nuanced than responses to the Ed Sheeran mural. On one hand, local newspaper The Otago Daily Times, presuming that the graffiti was instigated by the group Coyote, labelled the act ‘vandalism’, stating that: ‘A painting paying homage to legendary Kiwi band The Chills has been ruined during a filmed graffiti attack by another Dunedin band’ (McNeilly Reference McNeilly2018b). On the contrary, student media, along with several local musicians interviewed for this article, interpreted the masked assailants’ actions as a legitimate protest about the privileged space that some musicians – specifically those associated with the ‘Dunedin sound’ – occupy in the public discourse about Dunedin and its musical identity, and implied that this occupation is to the detriment of younger musicians. Coverage in the student magazine Critic summarised this sentiment in a satirical piece accepting that the video ‘showed the first ever glimpse of famous vandal Banksy in the flesh’. The article went on to summarise:
It seems that for The Chills, who are awaiting their own film and [museum] exhibition and already own all of the descriptive terms for music in Dunedin, having their own branded power supply might have been a step too far …. Will the DCC advertise for every artist in Dunedin? Will there be justice for the original but less famous artist? Some questions still remain unanswered, what we can confirm is that there are in fact musicians in Dunedin other than The Chills. (Broughton Reference Broughton2018)
While not specifically about public art (although music-related public art is a worthy topic that requires further research), this article unpacks the tensions that underpin responses to these incidents, and serves to highlight the changing role that local popular music has in influencing ‘how cities are perceived, experienced and made meaningful’ (Cohen Reference Cohen2007, p. 226). Our article explores the power structures that mediate representations of musical culture in the city, and provides a nuanced, youth-focused perspective. We build on the work of Andy Bennett, who observes the shift in perception among older music audiences who now consider popular music of their youth ‘not merely as something particular to their youth, but rather as a key element in their collective cultural awareness and a major contributor to their generational identity’ (Bennett Reference Bennett2009, p. 478). We also offer contemporary perspectives on Holly Kruse and Matthew Bannister's critical approaches to the political economies of local indie music scenes (Bennett Reference Bennett1999, Reference Bennett and Peterson2004; Hesmondhalgh Reference Hesmondhalgh1997, Reference Hesmondhalgh1999, Reference Hesmondhalgh2005; Kruse Reference Kruse2003; Bannister Reference Bannister2006) by focusing on the cultural politics surrounding place-centric authenticated musical legacies, and how these are perceived by young and emerging musicians. Although Alan Moore (Reference Moore2002) argues that scholars should eschew artists’ intentions in interpreting their work as authentic (or otherwise), we adapt Moore's model to explore what happens when artists are authenticated by others – in our case via a mediatised historical legacy – in ways that locate them within a tradition, and associated ideological tropes, from which they actively disassociate. In doing so, our analytical focus shifts from the musical and performance characteristics (the ‘sound’ of the sound), towards the tropes of authenticity associated with musicians that dominate the ‘Dunedin sound’ canon and its international and localised discourses. We argue, therefore, that young Dunedin musicians are not rejecting musical, production or performative conventions, but rather, are drawing on these conventions, and doing so in order to deconstruct the values that the historicised ‘Dunedin sound’ artists have come to represent as a process of space-reclamation and self-determination.
At the heart of this process are the public objections by some young Dunedin artists to being compared with the ‘Dunedin sound’. This is evident in their responses to mainstream media pieces, which almost always compare emerging Dunedin artists to the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy. For a succinct example, on receiving a favourable review of his latest album in Pitchfork magazine, (Berman Reference Berman2016), the then Dunedin based musician Kane Strang tweeted:
I honestly would have been fine with a 3 [star review] as long as they still didn't mention the ‘Dunedin sound’ lol. (KaneStrang 2016)
In order to understand how Dunedin musicians are attempting to reclaim Dunedin as a musical space for young people, we identify the conceptual paradigm through which some young local musicians associate the ‘Dunedin sound’ with privilege and power, specifically as it relates to class, race and gender. We also explore how the ‘Dunedin sound’ is being applied by some as an insult towards other young musicians, who are viewed as being complicit with both the problematised ‘Dunedin sound’ tropes, as well as their own media comparisons with the legacy.
The research draws on ethnographic perspectives in the form of interviews with local musicians, analysis of media and scholarly discourse, as well as our own positions as performers and practitioners who have worked with a range of Dunedin acts, including the aforementioned group The Chills. Owing to our emphasis on ethnographic perspectives and critical analysis of media, the article provides limited analysis on specific musical artefacts and texts (such as lyrical or iconographic analysis), and further research would be welcome in this area.Footnote 3 Our collaborators involve key members of the music community that feature in national (and sometimes international) media coverage of the scene. These include Stephen John Marr, who produces local guitar-based artists (including the aforementioned Kane Strang), as well as members of the groups Soaked Oats, The Shambles and Albion Place, who have received recent press proclaiming them to represent a new ‘Dunedin sound’ (Rowe Reference Rowe2018). We also draw on interviews with musician and author Millie Lovelock, who has been highly critical of issues within the Dunedin music community, specifically in relation to gender. Lovelock studied popular music for her Masters and contributed valuable critical perspectives to this research.
We begin our analysis by establishing the essentialised tropes associated with the mediatised ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy. We then argue that these tropes, when deployed uncritically by mainstream media coverage discussing young Dunedin musicians, obfuscate power imbalances as experienced by these musicians. By foregrounding local musicians’ readings of the ‘Dunedin sound’, we show it to represent privileges now associated with the legacy acts. Finally, we explore how the frequent superimposition of the ‘Dunedin sound’ label upon younger musicians homogenises perceptions of their practice, further disguising tensions between participants operating in various scenes, and the often-problematic structural issues that underlie local-scene divisions. We conclude by considering how the tropes that have helped to characterise the ‘sound’ as subversive and authentically indie now serve to position it as representative of current power structures. We argue that, while the indie guitar music making is still undertaken as a subversive practice, the ‘Dunedin sound’ is no longer so, and instead represents an institution worthy of critique and its own subversion.
The ‘Dunedin sound’ and the essentialised tropes of authenticity
In order to understand why young Dunedin musicians reject the associations with the ‘Dunedin sound’, we need to first unpack its connotations by viewing it as a series of historically constituted mediatised tropes. In a previous study, we extrapolated how specific tropes of authenticity, bounded in assumptions about the scene's isolation and DIY culture, underpin its narrativisation in various forms of media (Holland and Wilson Reference Holland, Wilson, Stahl and Brunt2018).Footnote 4 We found that the key tropes that define the mediatised ‘Dunedin sound’ are central to the ways in which the ‘sound’ – and the group of musicians affiliated with the sound – is attributed with authenticity, as understood by fans we interviewed while on tour, and are representative of an essentialised view of the ‘Dunedin sound’ portrayed in the global media coverage. As we explore below, this essentialisation is also reflected in academic publications eager to explain the international recognition the ‘sound’ has received.
The first trope concerns isolation, and the city's position as peripheral to the global music industry has now been observed by several scholars (Shuker and Pickering Reference Shuker and Pickering1994; see also McLeay Reference McLeay1994, p. 43). According to Tony Mitchell, the small southern city of Dunedin, which is home to around 100,000 people, is remote: it is located in the ‘bleakly isolated and uninhabited southern part of the South Island’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1994, p. 38). Similarly, the Verlaine's songwriter and front-person Graeme Downes, who is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Otago, states:
in Dunedin we were extremely isolated and it took a long time for musical trends to filter down this far. You have to appreciate the pre-globalisation technological environment that existed back then (at least for us) … Being something of a backwater meant there was something of a disincentive to follow trends (why bother when they were moribund at their source by the time we knew about them). (Downes, quoted in McGonigle Reference McGonigle2005)
Scholars link the city's historical isolation to a tendency to disregard fashion and trends. Mitchell (Reference Mitchell1996) succinctly summarises Robertson's delineation of the Dunedin ‘aesthetic of sorts’ (Reference Robertson1991, p. 44) suggesting that:
The musical aesthetic involved a total disregard for musical fashions and trends, as well as commercial recognition, expressed in the idea of authentic music, which legitimised the ignorance of contemporary musical trends. An adherence to authentic music involved stepping outside the confines of musical fashion and justified an ignorance of any boundaries of what was considered popular. (Robertson cited in Mitchell Reference Mitchell1996, p. 229)
Flying Nun label founder Roger Shepherd also suggests that this seclusion meant that Dunedin musicians ‘were a bit more inclined to write and perform the music they wanted to hear … like different dialects, a unique style definitely emerged’ (Shepherd, quoted in Mitchell Reference Mitchell1996, p. 225).Footnote 5
Another trope concerns the role of DIY production, and a sense of community among music makers in the creation of the ‘Dunedin sound’. The nostalgic and romanticised narratives surrounding recording and production reinforce this trope: for example, Flying Nun's first release, the Dunedin Double EP is celebrated as being recorded on a borrowed four-track tape machine in the bedroom of a student flat:
With the release of the Dunedin Double there was no longer any discussion in the NZ music press … there WAS a ‘Dunedin sound,’ it resided on Flying Nun, and it required records to be made in the most appalling of locales on the most primitive of equipment. And, somehow, the magic happened. (McGonigle Reference McGonigle2005)
Related to this narrative, the song's intrinsic musical qualities become elevated above the performer's abilities, which can be manipulated using technologies and recording processes. In essence, it is understood that the DIY culture and lo-fi recording technologies created the conceptual space where the authenticity of the song became paramount. As Robertson notes, production values and slick visual accompaniments were disregarded in favour of an emphasis on musical and lyrical materials: ‘The Clean's no-fuss, anti-presentation approach to performance highlighted for the younger bands what was important – the music’ (Robertson Reference Robertson1991, p. 58).
In the case of the ‘Dunedin sound’, the songwriter's virtuosity transcends production values, and therefore does not require the investment of major labels for recording budgets in order to be worthy of a global audience. This perspective is not dissimilar to tropes associated with punk of the 1970s, and indie rock more broadly, and when considering the ‘Dunedin sound’ in terms of historical tropes of authenticity, it is easy to position this cultural phenomenon as an ‘authenticated’ alternative to modern pop music. In this vein, the characteristics of the ‘sound’ discussed above can be crudely considered in opposition to 1980s pop. This perspective resonates with Alan Moore's discussion of tropes of authenticity (Reference Moore2002), which draws on the works of Walser (Reference Walser1993) and Taylor (Reference Taylor1997):
technological mediation … is equated with artifice, reinstating as authentic/inauthentic the distinction between ‘vernacular’ and ‘trained’ or ‘professional’. There is thus a relationship here with an alternative category developed by Taylor, which he terms authenticity of positionality. (Taylor Reference Taylor1997, pp. 22–3)
Through this, he identifies the authenticity acquired by performers who refuse to ‘sell out’ to commercial interest. (Moore Reference Moore2002, p. 213)
These tropes were clearly articulated in interviews with fans across the UK, Europe and the USA, as explored in a previous publication (Holland and Wilson Reference Holland, Wilson, Stahl and Brunt2018), and summarised in Table 1.
Comparison of essentialised tropes of ‘Dunedin sound’ and modern popular music
This schema implies a neat dichotomy of values, whereby the ‘Dunedin sound’ represents the ‘authentic’, and the pop music culture the ‘inauthentic’. These tropes, however, mostly refer to production contexts, and prioritise an implicit primacy of the recorded medium. It is therefore worth turning again to Moore's assertion that authentication is best understood not as a process applied to things, such as musical sounds and formats, but to the artists. Applying Moore's model, perceptions of authenticity pertaining to ‘Dunedin sound’ artists centre around the musicians that operate within these contexts and undertake these modes of production. By shifting the focus towards the who, not the what, we can better understand why local artists have become critical of their unwitting co-optation into a supposedly shared tradition, based upon tropes that define production, namely issues around class, gender and race. In short, young artists are not subverting stylistic characteristics, but rather, the values that the older artists seem to represent. Table 2 depicts, although somewhat simplistically, how issues surrounding race, gender and class may be positioned as being consistent with problematic power structures associated with the global music industry.
Comparing essentialised gender, race and class characteristics pertaining to the ‘Dunedin sound’, and modern popular music
By correlating essentialised tropes about ‘Dunedin sound’ musicians with those pertaining to the global popular music industry, the musicians associated with the ‘Dunedin sound’ can be read to embody race and class privilege, mirroring the power structures that define modern popular music as embodying global capitalist hegemonies.Footnote 6 Recently, these structures have become publicised via a range of global media reports, and indicate that the contestation we see in Dunedin is not unique to that city. In a report on gender inequality in film composition in Australia, Catherine Strong and Fabian Canizzo note that:
[women] are vastly outnumbered by males; where they feel the need to gain more qualifications than their male peers; where their careers can be severely curtailed or ended by having children; where they are less likely to be undertaking the type of composing work they would most like to; where they are less likely to be recognised with official awards for their work; where they experience frustration at being excluded from networks that they perceive as being ‘boys’ clubs’; and where, in some cases, they are actively harassed and abused. (Strong and Cannizzo Reference Strong and Cannizzo2017)
These themes are recurrent in scholarly and media discussions around equality in music industries, and serve to highlight the problematic power relationships embodied in seemingly subversive music scenes (see also Smith et al. Reference Smith, Choueiti and Pieper2018; Hanna-Osborne et al. Reference Hanna-Osborne, Cooper and Coles2017; Leonard Reference Leonard2017; Ashley Reference Ashley2011). In the below section we exemplify how ‘Dunedin sound’ tropes are problematised by young Dunedin musicians. In exploring these previously marginalised perspectives, we are able to interrogate how power relationships impose historical constructs upon current artists’ practice. This article now turns to a discussion of the above issues, from the perspective of the young musicians interviewed as part of this study.
Gender
When discussing gender in relation to the ‘Dunedin sound,’ it is important to recognise that woman played central roles in several ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy acts, as well as the broader music community. Despite this, scholarship and media coverage of these musicians tends to position their involvement in the scene as peripheral. For example, on the New Zealand state-funded music website audioculture.co.nz, the article on the all-female group Look Blue Go Purple introduces the group's members as accessories to the male artists of the scene: ‘Look Blue Go Purple rose, as many Dunedin groups of the time did, from the roil of post-punk activity in the early 1980's. They were friends with, and sometimes girlfriends of, prominent members of the rising new groups’ (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2013).
In 2018, Look Blue Go Purple re-released their debut and only album Bewitched (1983), which drew local and international reviews, and provided a contemporary platform for the broader consideration of gender within the ‘Dunedin sound’ discourse. Like the audioculture article, much of the press continued to situate the group as novel, owing to their gendered membership, as well as tangential to the more widely known acts:
[T]he Chills and the Verlaines, along with their Flying Nun Labelmates the Bats and the Clean, would come to define New Zealand's mid 1980's indie rock scene. Amid all these humbly named acts, Look Blue Go Purple – Francisca Griffin (formerly Kathy Bull), Norma O'Malley, Kath Webster, Denise Roughan, and Lesley Paris – were bound to stand out. (Moreland Reference Moreland2017)
Other interviews with members surrounding the release provided a platform for music media to engage more directly with gender:
The ‘feminist girl group’ tag has shadowed the band since their heyday – and although Paris says she kind of likes it, Griffin is tired of perpetually being asked about. ‘It's not that I don't like the question … of course we're feminists, we're women – why wouldn't we be? Why wouldn't we be sticking up for ourselves?’
The interview continued:
In an organic, subconscious way we probably were ‘feminist’, but it wasn't deliberate. It sort of annoyed us that our gender was considered special … It just made sense … we were women friends … it wasn't a big deal to us. It influenced our sound, and our way of doing things. (Mills Reference Mills2017)
This interview, and others like it, centre on gender as the group's definitive characteristic, an issue that continues to dominate media on all-girl groups in Dunedin. In a recent Critic article ‘The all-girl band making waves in the new Dunedin sound’, members of the group Lacuna raise similar issues:
So let's state the obvious: Lacuna is a band consisting of women in a genre dominated by lads. An ‘all girl band’ so to speak. But the artists have expressed their frustration with this title: ‘It should be irrelevant, but the fact that it's still relevant really says something …. When I was in Albion Place I had some really shitty experiences,’ Mackenzie said, ‘from people subconsciously treating me like I can't play the drums and don't know how to work with them. The band members were really supportive though’. (Thomson Reference Thomson2018)
More recently, the problematisation of gender as a structural problem in the music scene has become more visible in the local discourse. This is largely thanks to local activists, including Millie Lovelock, who assisted significantly with this research. In addition to her role as singer-writer and frontwoman of post-punk Dunedin band Astro Children, Lovelock is a scholar of popular music and a cultural critic (Lovelock Reference Lovelock2017; Oliver Reference Oliver2018). She is also known locally for her regular column in Dunedin's local newspaper, The Otago Daily Times, in which she ‘rallied against sexism, campaigned against the University of Otago's cuts to humanities and shared her fears about being a young woman in today's world’ (Elder Reference Elder2017). Lovelock's work reinforces the disconnect between Dunedin's mediatised musical history and her own work, but also highlights the ways in which journalists’ tendency towards particular historical comparisons suggests more about the journalists than the subjects of their writing:
I think that the older men writing about music, invested in that ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy often don't really consider that as a woman or as a person of colour you might look at that legacy and think, ‘that has nothing to do with me’ … I'm not thinking about that legacy when I'm writing music, or when I'm performing music, and it's kind of jarring to me to have those comparisons because I'm like, I don't know anything about that, it's not what I'm trying to do. (Interview with Lovelock Reference Lovelock2018)
Lovelock further explains that historical gender politics underpin her position:
it [the ‘Dunedin sound’ scene] was such a small and exclusive group of guys – dudes being dudes – in guitar bands, being a bit raucous, doing drugs, not really considering the people around them. It's this sort of romanticised image of being a punk, having a bit of a wild time, not really thinking, that there are probably a few people who were not having such a good time while that wild time was going on, or who were making valuable works of art but they haven't been remembered because they didn't fit in … it must have sucked to have been a women making really cool stuff in the 80s, but no-one remembers. (Interview with Lovelock Reference Lovelock2018)
Lovelock is not alone in her scepticism concerning gender and the historicisation of indie guitar music in New Zealand. Prominent indie songwriter Emily Edrosa recently publicly discussed her abusive experiences in the New Zealand indie scene, declaring: ‘I wanna make music for girls to feel comfortable to go to the shows and to feel like they want to dance to. Not for dudes in Flying Nun shirts to stroke their chins’ (Greive Reference Greive2016).Footnote 7
Race
Despite few participants in this study raising race as a factor, we argue that race is a determining factor in the way historicised ‘Dunedin sound’ ideologies are formed, in that it manifests through unconscious biases that inform the types of artists who get included in, and compared with, the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy. While not citing race directly, some media discussions have positioned the ‘sound’ as problematically mono-cultural. For example, one review of Roger Shepherd's 2016 autobiography In Love With These Times, is highly critical of the broader notion that Flying Nun's output dominates international perceptions of New Zealand music, and specifically addresses the underrepresentation of Māori and Pasifika artists in the national discourse of historical musical legacies broadly:
Wellington's Jayrem label was at least able to offer a home to some of the acts rejected by the taste-makers at Flying Nun, and its ‘throw shit at the wall and see what sticks’ approach made for a stylistically interesting mix that included … the first flush of local reggae and Te Reo releases. And by the end of the ‘80s, it was hard to ignore that Flying Nun had found itself in a pasty-faced, op-shop clothes-wearing ghetto oblivious to the development of local reggae, the ‘Polyfunk’ sound of bands like Ardijah or the conscious hip-hop of Upper Hutt Posse. (Steel Reference Steel2016)
In an example from the contemporary Dunedin context, the subversion of race within the ‘Dunedin sound’ narrative is especially relevant when considering the group Six60, who are arguably the most commercially successful group ever to originate from Dunedin.Footnote 8 For Six60, place forms a central aspect of their story, and the band's name refers to the address of the house that they shared on Castle St in 2008, which has for decades been the site of student parties, and occasional riots (Sutton Reference Sutton2009). The house at 660 Castle St has become something of a shrine to the group, and in 2016, the group performed a ‘house party’ there in which a balcony collapse, seriously injuring several fans, made national headline news (McKay et al. Reference McKay, McNeilly, Burns-Francis and Hume2016). This concert reinforced the group's core values regarding place and identity, as expressed in songs such as the multi-platinum selling ‘Don't Forget Your Roots’ (Six60 2011).
Six60 seem to exist outside of the ‘Dunedin sound’, and almost no media has compared their success with the Dunedin bands of the 1980s, nor their musical achievements with this legacy. In order to understand why the group has escaped comparison, it is worth considering its eclectic approach to genre – which includes reggae and dance music – and their associations with race and cultural identity. Their cultural otherness from the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy nuances Steel's above complaints, and is further evidenced through their racial associations: members have Māori heritage, including their front-person Matiu Walters, and the band has received awards recognising their indigeneity, such as the Waiata Māori Music Award in 2015.
In our survey of the coverage of Six60 in relation to the ‘Dunedin sound’, the only references we found were by other Dunedin artists who are highly critical of the group, and this further demonstrates how the group are positioned as outside the ‘Dunedin sound’. In an interview published in student magazine the Critic with local alternative/indie rock group A Distant City, Six60 are described as being ‘not representative of the Dunedin sound’. The interview is as follows:
How do you feel about the New Zealand music scene as a whole? Is it an easy place for a band to make it?
Z [band member] – I don't know that it's easy. I think you have to have a certain sound to do well. You have to sound like … Six60.
CJ [band member] – Oh my God, don't even mention them.
N [band member] – That didn't happen! We didn't just slag off Dunedin's favourite band.
CJ [band member] – Yes we did!
This is good. This is the kind of dirt Critic readers want to see. So, what do you honestly think about Six60? Why are they so popular?
N – Six60 is not representative of the Dunedin sound.
CJ – Yeah, that's a good quote.
N – Whatsoever!
But they're like the Dunedin success story!
N – Oh aren't they just … It's great … so great.
CJ – WHY! WHY!?!?!
So why do you think people are so into it?
Z – Because they sound the same, all the time …
N – Because most people don't like to think. (Clark-Memler Reference Clark-Memler2012)
Six60's unpopularity among acts such as A Distant City is not discursively centred around race, in that no one is citing race as a negative aspect of Six60's success. However, the negative attitudes toward Six60 by local acts, especially in relation to their position within Dunedin's musical legacy, can be interpreted as being drawn on ideological lines that also implicate race. This is particularly clear when one considers how ethnicity features broadly within the construction and characterisation of local scenes, and the musical styles, such as indie rock or reggae, that help to define them (see Mitchell's Reference Mitchell and Hayward1998 writings on the Otara Sound for example; see also Cattermole Reference Cattermole2004).
Class and generational inequality
In contemplating the hegemonic structures that underpin the broader emerging ‘Dunedin sound’ discourse, it is important to note the interlinked progression of age and wealth amongst fans of the original ‘Dunedin sound’ period's music and associated culture. Author Grant Smithies notes that, ‘It is, I imagine, no fun to have your creative endeavours endlessly defined in relation to everybody else's 80s nostalgia trip’ (Smithies Reference Smithies2014). As Lovelock more directly articulates, Flying Nun era fans and artists – who were mostly in their late teens during the 1980s – now occupy a position of privilege in both media and society: ‘Because there are so many older men, primarily older men talking about it in the media, they haven't reflected on the fact that people might not be interested in it’ (interview with Lovelock Reference Lovelock2018). This group are also members of a generation who have been associated with a level of economic privilege not accorded to subsequent generations. Recently, media reports have highlighted these inequalities, particularly with regard to housing. Economist Shamubeel Eaqub notes that at the time writing, a young couple in Auckland needed to spend nearly half their income on mortgage payments to buy a modest home. This situation is not as bad in Dunedin, but the narrative does translate, as property prices in the city had increased 51.5 per cent over the decade up to late 2019 (Theunissen Reference Theunissen2017), leading to a situation the Demographia International Housing Affordability survey described as ‘unaffordable’ (Demographia 2018). This shift in the market is suggested to have been driven by a steep increases in the value of housing in New Zealand's main centre, Auckland, as Dunedin has experienced limited population growth in over a century, and has received limited infrastructure improvements since the 1980s. Eaqub further describes the current generation of young people as ‘generation rent’: ‘if household incomes continue to rise at their historical rate of 3.5 per cent per year and house prices rise at the 8 per cent per year that investors expect [then] mortgage payments will be a staggering 80 per cent of a young couple's income by 2020 (Eaqub, quoted in Godfery Reference Godfery2015). The social and economic impact of the property market is described in a report produced by Oxfam in January 2019, as being the primary driver of the country's growing inequality’ (Alejo Vázquez Pimentel et al. Reference Alejo Vázquez Pimentel, Macías Aymar and Lawson2019).
This generational privilege and associated inequality are clearly reflected in the relationship between musicians of the historical and contemporary eras in Dunedin. As Lovelock argues, this intergenerational relationship does not involve a fair exchange of wealth and resources, but instead:
It's not so much about getting compared to these bands when it's not accurate, it's kind of this attitude that this legacy is somehow helping you … Talking about this legacy is not the same thing as providing opportunities for young bands and nurturing the creative community within the city. (Interview with Lovelock Reference Lovelock2018)
According to Lovelock, it was this literal scribing of the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy into the public space that garnered empathy for Coyote from young Dunedin musicians:
[when I first saw The Chills mural] I thought … why do The Chills get free advertising? and I was also thinking about the inherent issues with gentrification of street art, and this very middle to upper class assumption that you can just pay for a bit of outside space, paint on it, and no one's going to touch it. (Interview with Lovelock Reference Lovelock2018)
In relation to the class symbolism of Coyote's response to the mural, Marr too observed: ‘[I] could see a message in that. It was about a younger generation kind of being over the constant comparison … You are from Dunedin and so you are dubbed with the Flying Nun thing, the “Dunedin sound”’ (Interview with Marr Reference Marr2018).
The issue of class also underpins local politics in the music scene, which is loosely divided into two groups. The first of these was referred to by participants in this study as ‘university bands’, typically comprising students or recent graduates of the University of Otago, many of whom have moved from elsewhere to study. The second group, loosely categorised as ‘noise bands’, have less overt connections with student culture, and often feature musicians who were born in the city.
Divisions between these groups centre not upon differences in musical style, but rather around the varying degrees of critical awareness and political engagement expressed by their participants. As Lovelock, whose work tends to be associated with the ‘noise’ scene, notes:
I think that I am not really able to practice music, or do anything in the public sphere without it being some kind of political statement … I'm also very aware that I'm white, and I'm from a very middle-class background, and I've been able to kind of latch on and climb a little way up the ladder, so I'm duty bound to kind of pull people up behind me. (Interview with Lovelock Reference Lovelock2018)
This self-awareness contrasts strongly with the outlook of the ‘uni bands’, whose attitudes (canvassed below) reinforce their positions as members of a scene for whom political engagement is seen as removed from their musical practice. The term ‘uni bands’ is also loaded with connotations concerning Dunedin's mythologised student culture, referred to as scarfie culture. This culture is portrayed in low-budget films such as Scarfies (Sarkies Reference Sarkies1999), which mythologises students as middle or lower-middle class subjects, a notion now rejected my many non-university affiliated musicians. While both groups are often compared with their ‘Dunedin sound’ predecessors, their differing reactions to these comparisons further reinforce the complex relationship between scene politics, and forms of class, gender and race privilege that underpin musical practice in Dunedin.
Discussion: fragmentations in the contemporary Dunedin scene
Within Dunedin's indie music communities, comparisons with the ‘Dunedin sound’ are a key site for the contestation of contemporary scene values, as explicitly linked to intergenerational politics. None of the young musicians we interviewed identified their practice as being an extension of the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy. However, some contemporary indie artists, particularly those associated with a more underground subculture of ‘noisy’ guitar bands, brazenly point at some of their contemporaries as embodying some of the tropes of privilege associated with the older ‘Dunedin sound’ artists.
In our interviews, divisions within and between contemporary Dunedin music scenes were frequently framed in terms of scene culture, and participants’ relationships with the city of Dunedin and its institutions. Lovelock suggests that her role as the songwriter in Astro Children, a group that she describes as a ‘squally guitar band’, marks her as a participant in the noisy faction:
There's not a single scene in Dunedin, I think when I talk about scene, I'm talking about the kinds of bands that are played on [the student radios station] Radio One, essentially guitar bands … I'm talking about people who are working in the same spaces, working together, utilising the same outlets, and getting the same kind of media attention. (Interview with Lovelock Reference Lovelock2018)Footnote 9
Stephen Marr characterises the ‘noisy’ scene as also just one side of a divide within indie music practices in Dunedin, and discusses the nature of each group in broad terms:
The noisy scene is segregated and cliquey, and the other side of it … a lot more of the matey everyone gets on with everyone atmosphere … there's the uni-focused group, and kind of [bands] outside of that. There is real separation around scarfie culture … sometimes those people are like, musical jocks. They [the ‘uni bands’] are anti-jocks, but the [‘noisy’ bands] are anti musical-jocks, to put it into that framework. (Interview with Marr Reference Marr2018)
Another local musician, Micah Davis-Rae, who performs with the group Albion Place, describes the ‘uni scene’ – in which he identifies – as a kind of ‘surf rock scene if you want, and the people who are going to those shows are the same, they're interested in similar things, surfing, chilling, partying’ (Davis-Rae Reference Davis-Rae2018). Micah also discusses the ‘ethos’ of the ‘uni band’ scene, noting that it is based around a sense of shared optimism and a hedonistic celebration of youth culture: ‘it's like, realising how good we've got it, and celebrating it, that's what comes across at the gigs … It's sort of that lifestyle I was talking about, that's just sort of slightly, ironic, laid-back, celebration, rather than the emo stuff’ (Interview with Davis-Rae Reference Davis-Rae2018).
Lovelock offers a counter-narrative to this ‘ethos’, describing these artists as ‘visitors’ to the city, and not a part of their scene, which comprises people who were born and raised in Dunedin:
I don't think they're from Dunedin, they came here to study didn't they, so that's part of the divide as well, isn't it? If you're really established in the city you've been to high school here, and you've been playing in bands since you've been in high school, and you've been playing shows since you started school or whatever, you kind of feel this entitlement to the city, and you kind of feel like you should be driving the culture or whatever. (Interview with Lovelock Reference Lovelock2018)
Crucially, these positions rarely seem to revolve around ideas about musical genre or style. This is notable, as the term ‘Dunedin sound’ implies a sense of sonic distinctiveness. This ‘sound’ is described by Graeme Downes as comprising jangle-drone guitar techniques, and lo-fi recordings (Mills Reference Mills2016). All of the musicians engaged in this study are also guitar-based bands, and some reflect similar musical and sonic characteristics. However, all reject the notion that their musical style, instrumentation, and geographical affiliations automatically render them part of the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy. The guitar-based stylistic comparison is exemplified in the following review of Kane Strang's Blue Cheese:
At first listen, Blue Cheese fits neatly into the legacy of record label Flying Nun and his hometown's ‘Dunedin sound’ – indie guitar-pop popularised by The Chills and The Clean in the early 1980's that was largely jangly, but with a bit punk and a touch of the psychedelic. (Kerry Reference Kerry2016)
Stephen Marr, who recorded Kane's subsequent album, reiterates this frustration:
I have always been aware of the fed-up attitude. I really feel for those [like Kane Strang] who have lived in Dunedin their whole lives, it's just always been a thing … it's like living in the shadow of that thing, people just don't want to be tagged with that, but are inevitably labelled in that group, even though they might be trying to avoid it. (Interview with Marr Reference Marr2018)
While artists across both groups reject such comparisons, an analysis of their explanations reveals differing levels of awareness and critical reflection on their role in music making in Dunedin. As affiliates of the ‘noise’ scene, Lovelock and Strang base their rejections on ideological grounds, whereas musicians in the ‘uni band’ scene reject comparisons mostly owing to a lack of lineage. Davis-Rae notes that Dunedin's musical history has little to do with his song-writing or performance practice:
It's not like they're our grandfathers and we've got to retain their legacy, you know, that's not how we feel when we make music. I think the music industry's changed heaps since then for starters, so now you can listen to bands from all over the world … So the Dunedin thing I think is a little less relevant than in the past. (Interview with Davis-Rae Reference Davis-Rae2018).
This comment was in response to an article in online publication The Spinoff, entitled ‘The New Dunedin Sound’, which showcased a group of bands, including several of our interview participants. The article described the bands as ‘filling out venues in Auckland and Wellington in a way not seen since the era of the Dunedin Sound. And this time it's coming straight from the source’ (Rowe Reference Rowe2018). This comparison (and others like it) appears to be celebrating and promoting contemporary Dunedin artists, but does so by measuring their success against the historical legacy of the ‘Dunedin sound’.
One of the bands discussed in The Spinoff article, Soaked Oats, highlight a lack of tangible connection between their work and that of ‘Dunedin sound’ artists, suggesting that the comparison is more reductive than realistic:
Now it's just an easy cover-all label for everything that happens in Dunedin musically. I have no idea that what they did is linked to what we're doing in any way … I really don't care, they're going to label it whether we like it or not … people from Dunedin making music are the ‘Dunedin sound’, as far as most of the people who are writing articles, it's just an easy buzz-word for them or whatever. (Interview with Francis et al. Reference Francis, Mein and Holmes2018)
However, artists affiliated with the ‘uni scene’ are not overtly critical of ‘Dunedin sound’ itself, and some openly celebrate the sound's legacy. Davis-Rae wfor example, lauded the achievements of the 1980s ‘Dunedin sound’ artists in garnering international attention: ‘I really like the [‘Dunedin sound’] music, for starters … that it was just a powerhouse, that heaps of bands from outside of Dunedin took note – like actually ask the Rolling Stones about the DS, and they'd probably know what you're talking about!’ (interview with Davis-Rae Reference Davis-Rae2018). Furthermore, members of Soaked Oats discussed how listening to this music was a part of their upbringing, though largely a result of parental influence; noting, ‘my parents bought me The Clean and stuff. It's hard to take an interest in New Zealand music and not know what Flying Nun and the “Dunedin sound” are’ (interview with Francis et al. Reference Francis, Mein and Holmes2018).
Despite the presence of generally positive attitudes towards the ‘Dunedin sound’ among the ‘uni band’ affiliates, these artists do not perceive themselves as operating as extensions of that legacy. Nonetheless, their rejection of a place in the tradition is much less assertive than that of the ‘noise’ bands discussed above. For example, Davies-Ray suggests that, ‘If it's relevant then it's probably on the subconscious level’ (interview with Davis-Rae Reference Davis-Rae2018). These groups’ relatively indifferent reactions to the comparison with earlier Dunedin artists, combined with their unproblematic celebration of their predecessors’ achievements, position the ‘uni bands’ not only in opposition to their noisier contemporaries, but also as easy targets to satire in other forms of media. The most notable of these took the form of a parody of The Spinoff article, published in student magazine Critic (Figure 1).
Replication of ‘Editorial: which new Dunedin Sound band are you?’ Published by Critic, Issue 5, 8 April 2018, p. 8.
The uncritical and celebratory tone of The Spinoff piece, and the critical satire of the Critic parody, echo the divergent perspectives of participants in two distinct, contemporary indie guitar-based scenes. These divergences can be seen in terms of attitudes about music-making and scene participation. The Critic parody deploys the ‘Dunedin sound’ label as a means to satirise the supposedly uncritical ‘uni band’ musicians, neatly aligning their predominantly middle-class, privileged white participants with their hedonistic outlook, and the ‘Dunedin sound’ as emblematic of problematic and uncritical discourses on musical practice and ideology.
Conclusion
The various reactions of young Dunedin musicians to mediatised attempts to situate their work within the ‘Dunedin sound’ tradition are indicative of the contradictions within the historicisation of the ‘sound,’ particularly in terms of its supposed ideological subversion of commercial pop culture in the 1980s. The ‘sound's’ history is positioned via mainstream media, and scholarly research as reflecting widely understood tropes of indie rock authenticity: DIY music making, lo-fi recordings, a small community of musicians, and the primacy of song-writing over artifice in performance. This is positioned as oppositional to ‘mainstream’ pop, which is inherently assumed to carry hegemonic connotations.
In this way, the ‘Dunedin sound’ has been historically understood as a subversive form. However, as we have argued in this article, the tropes that have helped to characterise the ‘sound’ as authentically indie now also serve to position it as representative of current power structures in the eyes of young musicians. The ‘sound’ is no longer subversive, it instead represents an institution worthy of critique and subversion. Furthermore, the term is even deployed to mock young and emerging artists, who are perceived to reinforce the uncritical and hegemonic values associated with the historicisation of the ‘sound’ in mainstream media.
Somewhat ironically, participants in the ‘uni band’ scene are compared by other musicians with the ‘Dunedin sound’ in a form of satire that critiques them for their lack of criticality, a graduate attribute touted by universities worldwide as central to the value of tertiary education. However, many non-‘uni band’ artists, such as Lovelock, hold university and postgraduate degrees, suggesting that the division of music scenes is not so much about access to education as it is about the role of tertiary institutions in creating the pre-conditions for a music scene based on ‘laid back celebration’ (interview with Davis-Rae Reference Davis-Rae2018). This link between tertiary institutions, student culture, and the variously critical nature of music scene participation warrants further investigation, though nonetheless appears to speak against the viability of media characterisations of Dunedin's musical landscape as simply ‘isolated’.
The critique of the ‘Dunedin sound’ politic offered here owes much to both the term's institutionalisation within global indie music discourse and a shift in generational perspective. Our previous work in this area provided a range of international views on the ‘Dunedin sound’, reinforcing its global reach and institutionalisation, and suggesting that the sound may be viewed as a kind of canon. As Bannister notes, ‘Canonism in popular music has historically been identified with men, and indie was also overwhelmingly masculine’ (Reference Bannister2006, p. 84), and these tropes are the ideological aspects of the ‘Dunedin sound’ canon from which some local artists seek to dissociate their practice. This article has highlighted the increasingly critical outlook of some young local musicians, who demonstrate a willingness to engage with indie music not only through song-writing and performing, but with an increasingly critical awareness of their place within its institutions. This is reflected by our interview participants, who view the contemporary institutionalisation of the ‘Dunedin sound’ – for example via public art installations – as inherently hypocritical:
I've heard it a lot, coming from the old guard, coming up, saying, ‘new Dunedin bands, they're so safe, they're so tame, they don't do anything, they don't even do drugs any more or whatever,’ and then a Dunedin band tags something and it's ‘no, don't misbehave like that, that's not what we meant, have some respect for your elders’. (Interview with Lovelock Reference Lovelock2018)
Given the restrictive nature of this imperative to rebel in an acceptable manner, and contemporary artists’ rejection of attempts to correlate their work with that of their geographical predecessors in terms of scene culture, it is also worth considering why the association persists, especially when – in many cases – it is applied so haphazardly as to reveal its own inaccuracy. We suggest that the persistence of this comparison probably has more to do with journalists’ biases than young Dunedin musician's lived experience. The situation is exacerbated by the access these writers have to mainstream press platforms, whereby their voices are heard above the perspectives of local musicians. As Sara Cohen notes, musicians in Liverpool felt a similar frustration regarding the legacy of The Beatles: ‘Many local rock musicians also felt excluded by the dominance of the city's Beatles heritage, and were irritated by the way that they and their music were continually situated and judged in relation to it’ (Cohen Reference Cohen2007, p. 197). This frustration, however, is particularly interesting in the case of Dunedin, where a number of musicians are engaged in musical activities that both reinforce and contradict the ‘Dunedin sound’ ideals.
Our research indicates that in Dunedin, indie-rock participation remains a meaningful platform for subversion, but also that local experiences of subversion have changed, as social media and other online platforms have brought a geographically isolated city into closer contact with the global music industry, as well as global critical discourses. On reflecting upon our premise that the notion of a ‘Dunedin sound’ is not sonically or musically defined, this article has instead argued that it represents a collection of values. These values are contested by young musicians, who employ similar sonic and musical characteristics to the ‘Dunedin sound’, but are highly critical of the ideological associations the mediatised notion of the ‘sound’ represents. Young Dunedin musicians are not an extension of the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy by default of locale either, but rather, appear to reflect Jacques Derrida's notion of a discourse that ‘borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1978, p. 416).
This discussion has highlighted some of the ways in which essentialist notions of ‘indie rock’ authenticity are contested, owing to their institutionalisation and subsequent associations with privilege. In exploring previously marginalised perspectives on these emerging cultural institutions, we have been able to interrogate the problematic power relationships at play in imposition of historical constructs upon current artists’ practice. Our analytical approach has deployed Alan Moore's authenticity model, which enabled us to focus on the people – or at least the ideals attached to the ‘Dunedin sound’ as a group of human musicians – rather than the materials authenticated in contemporary and historically focussed discourses. In discussing attempts to authenticate artists who make music related to an historical group or culture, Moore quotes David Harvey, who highlights the long history of inventing traditions:
the ideological labour of inventing tradition became of great significance in the late nineteenth century precisely because this was an era when transformations in spatial and temporal practices implied a loss of identity with place and repeated radical breaks with any sense of historical continuity. (Harvey Reference Harvey1990, p. 272, also quoted in Moore Reference Moore2002, p. 216)
It is thus tempting to excuse the ongoing historicisation of young Dunedin musicians as a series of attempts to cling to familiar, geographically centred ideals about the relationship between music and place, in an ever more connected and complex global mediascape. However, through our analysis of authentication processes within and across Dunedin's contemporary and historical indie music scenes, we have highlighted the value of a more critical approach to the discursive relationship between music, place, and ideology. Through foregrounding the critical perspectives of young artists, we have demonstrated how the ‘Dunedin sound’ legacy can be viewed as embodying forms of race, gender, and class privilege, which mirror a set of hegemonic power-structures that define popular music as embedded global capitalism.
