The Hardcore Continuum: How does music change over time?
Simon Reynolds, a music commentator who blogs here, discusses the development and transformation of dance music in the UK in a series of articles written over many years for the magazine The Wire. In discussing his terminology, he explains
I call it a ‘continuum’ because that’s what it is: a musical tradition/subcultural tribe that’s managed to hold it together for nearly 20 years now, negotiating drastic stylistic shifts and significant changes in technology, drugs, and the social/racial composition of its own population. It’s been a bumpy but exhilarating ride, but let no one doubt that it’s the same rollercoaster at every stage of the journey (a ride which most likely has yet to reach its end).
Reynolds focuses on London, and dance music in particular, but the idea of the continuum raises interesting questions about the relationship between the social relations, the circulation of media and how music changes overtime. Scholars have noted that dance music has a particularly quick rate of generic transformation: every few months a new sub-genre emerges, every year a whole new universe of music genres. But we might think about this taking place with regard to genres as diverse as heavy metal or various forms of music (for example, the continual cycling of genres that defines the ‘hipster.’) In case of Reynold’s discussion, it’s not just about music but about the spaces (cities in the UK) that provide in infrastructure for this transformation.
In reading the articles, how might be translate or transform the ideas of the hardcore continuum into other genres and places. How do different musical scenes (see Straw) take shape in places like Toronto, New York or Montreal that have had comparably long processes of evolution and change. At a more simple level, how to we think about changes in musical genre as linked to material contexts (the cities, clubs, stores) in which they are generated?
In order to understand how music scenes take shape and evolve over time, one must look at how spaces work with the evolution of music. Straw claims that there are two distinct pressures inherent in music scenes. These pressures include “one towards the stabilization of local historical continuities, and another which works to disrupt such continuities, to cosmopolitanize and relativize them” (2006, p. 373). The latter pressure reveals that there is a pressure to break up a particular music scene. This may involve borrowing other social activities from other music scenes (such as the style of apparel), in order to form a heterogeneous scene. As social, political, and economic contexts change, it can be said that these heterogeneous scenes are always in processes of transformation, similar to the hardcore continuum, where everlasting changes to music scenes remain productive and unavoidable activities.