ABSTRACT
The majority of studies on popular music production or music making have focused on public spaces of cultural activity and sociability: these include festivals (e.g., Dowd, Liddle, and Nelson 2004; McKay 2015) and urban, often nightlife spaces associated with subcultures and music scenes (e.g., Straw 1991; Stahl 2001), centered around venues, clubs, pubs, cultural centers, record shops, rehearsal rooms, studios, the streets, and the urban pathways linking these (Straw 2001). Works addressing the ways in which the domestic sphere and relationships associated with it—such as partnership, friendship, and family—help sustain and shape music making and production are relatively fewer in number. The distinction between public and private or domestic is a deeply significant one with regard to gender relations. Many of the mentioned public spaces associated with music making, especially rock culture, have been described as male-dominated and even exclusionary towards women. In their essay “Girls and Subcultures,” Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber ([1975] 2007) made this point by offering an early feminist critique of the masculine bias of subcultural studies associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). They shifted their focus from the public sphere of the street with its bars and venues to the domestic space, where girls’ bedrooms served as the locus of social activities similarly centered around music, fandom, and the consumption of youth cultural products to the male-dominated subcultures described in contemporary works associated with the CCCS. Sara Cohen similarly emphasized the contrast between rock culture’s association with the “street” or the “road,” posited against the domestic space and the bedroom, which are thus constructed as feminine spaces of “passive” consumption—as opposed to active production (Cohen 1997, 30). At the same time, Cohen also highlighted, albeit briefly, the essential role played by women, in particular as partners, and the domestic sphere in shaping the Liverpool indie rock music scene (Cohen 1991, 1997). This crucially takes place through the informal provision of various resources:
Involvement of men with the scene’s bands and business frequently depends upon financial and other support received from friends, relatives and partners, many of whom are women. Without such support a business like Liverpool Music House would not survive, but even a successful musician like the singer of the Lightning Seeds relies on his wife to help take care of the band’s financial accounts. (Cohen 1997, 21)
