ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the story of rapper Plan B as a focus around which to consider issues of democracy, social exclusion and music education through the lenses of classical sociological concepts of anomie (Durkheim 1997) and to a lesser extent alienation (Marx 2000). Additional, contemporary sociological lenses are then introduced: those of remix and life-hack (MacDonald 2016). These concepts are used to examine the ways in which music education might act to reproduce undemocratic, exclusionary practices or to counter them by enabling young people, or indeed people of all ages, to utilise their musical cultural resources to remix and life-hack their subjectivities – to make sense of themselves and their worlds in order to assist in experiences of exteriority and constraint necessary to counter anomie, to make life somewhat easier and therefore more bearable.
