ABSTRACT
Music-making usually needs many different people to cooperate together (Becker 1982), and yet it displays very fluid forms of organisation. This paradox has led to a vast literature, improving our understanding of collective action in situations where people are not formally bound to each other through concepts such as field, world and scenes (Bottero and Crossley 2011). This chapter will show how social network analysis (SNA) may enhance the analysis of the two latter concepts. According to Will Straw who introduced it in 1991, the notion of a ‘local scene’ describes ‘a cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist’ in ‘a distinctive relationship to historical time and geographical location’ (Straw 1991, 373-5). The development of studies on specific musical scenes has helped to get over some of the difficulties raised by the subcultures approach. The subculture approach often reifies and homogenises cultural practices and aesthetics. It also favours the reception of music over its production (Guibert 2012, 97). By contrast, the notion of musical scene puts the stress on the close relations between musicians and audiences, and also on the manifoldness of commitment to musical practices ‘clustered around a specific geographic focus’ (Bennett and Peterson 2004, 6). As it develops, the music scenes perspective draws near to another tradition, which focuses on ‘social worlds’. Used in a loose sense for a long time, the notion of social world was first conceptualised by Tamotsu Shibutani. The development of a social world perspective is closely related to the assumption that through ‘the development of rapid transportation and the media of mass communication, people who are geographically dispersed can communicate effectively. . . . Culture areas [may] overlap and [may] have lost their territorial bases’ (Shibutani 1955, 566). Through this concept, Shibutani aimed to describe forms of grouping characterised by ‘a culture area, the boundaries of which are set neither by territory nor by formal group membership but by the limits of
effective communication’ (ibid.). Then, identifying common communication channels is crucial to understanding any precise social world. Anselm Strauss (1992) deepens and popularises this concept of ‘social world’. He especially underlines the role of actual institutions, sites and technologies in the making and continuity of any social world. Leisure studies offer several valuable examples of such loose yet effective sorts of grouping, and the role of the commodification processes in these organisations (Yoder 1997). To contrast a social world perspective and a local scene perspective, two issues may be kept in mind. First, these concepts suggest a different approach towards locality. The notion of social world has been especially designed to cope with a kind of social organisation with boundaries which are not set by geography. A second issue has been debated to a greater extent, as we shall see, and relates to mass production and the industry. At first glance, the social world perspective raises the question of asymmetry in social participation through restricted communication channels and commodification, while the local scene perspective puts the stress on appropriations and connoisseurship in face-to-face social circles. I do not wish to oppose theoretically these concepts. Both traditions look after the contradictory trend toward the one they highlight – dynamics of deterritorialisation in the case of musical scenes (Straw 1991, 374; Bennett 2004), processes of relocation in the case of social worlds (Strauss 1978; Clarke 1991). Moreover, Harris (2000) convincingly analyses the issue of commodification from a local scene perspective in the case of metal band Sepultura, through the concept of ‘translocal scene’. My aim is rather to suggest ways to evaluate degrees of ‘sceneness’ and ‘social worldness’, to paraphrase Bennett and Peterson (2004, 12), through the empirical case of French-speaking rap music. As Di Maggio (2011) underlines, SNA offers valuable tools to explore both the actual relationship between social groups or individuals, and also emic understanding of these relations. Thus, it provides empirical means to articulate culture and structure, two issues at the heart of the musical scene and social world perspectives. SNA especially offers two sets of tools. The first intends to cope with the cohesion of a group of actors and offers insight into its structural organisation. The second provides a sense of hierarchies and power relations among this group. Both sets of tools require that we are explicit about what kind of ‘nodes’ and ‘ties’ are under scrutiny. The first step in using SNA should consist of clarifying the empirical facts shaped with SNA, in these study collaborations between rap artists in various francophone countries.
