Abstract
In Club Cultures, Silvia Rief offers a detailed and, at times, thought-provoking account of young people’s nightclubbing activities. The study is situated mostly in the United Kingdom, and Rief explains the growing significance of clubbing not only to local and national economies but also to identities and lifestyles. Her analysis is concerned with aesthetics, the body, and gender and sexuality. She invokes a wide range of theories to shed light on these matters but ultimately fails to deliver anything new or concrete. This disappointment does not stem from Rief’s lack of expertise. She certainly cares about the subject and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the British leisure industry and clubbing scenes around Europe. In my viewpoint, the book suffers from the absence of a compelling thesis, overinterpretation of sparse evidence from faulty methodology, and too few conceptual and empirical takeaway points to elucidate its contribution.
Rief defines club cultures as “a cultural and social practice and a particular ambience that combines electronic, beat-centered music of various genres, dance, fashion, drugs, and sexuality in various temporal and spatial contexts of co-presence” (p. 4). While the term club cultures encompasses a wide range of youth-based music scenes and subcultures, Rief tends to equate rave and electronic dance music (EDM) cultures with “club cultures.” This British-centric view is less relevant to club cultures in the United States, for example, where clubbing centers more around hip-hop and pop music. Beginning in chapter one, Rief writes about raves as though they have the same presence and meaning today as they did in the 1990s. They do not. At the beginning of her fieldwork—late 1990s—rave culture was peaking in both the United States and United Kingdom. By the time of her follow-up work, nine years later, raves had altered and declined significantly. The hiatus in her fieldwork (something not sufficiently explained) as well as the privileging of raves and EDM cultures are problematic because she does not conceptualize change over time or confront shortcomings in her data collection.
Still, there is ample value in Club Cultures. Chapters two and three contain superb detail on the social, economic, and political history of the leisure industry in the United Kingdom, especially London. Anyone interested in the evolution of London’s clubbing economy and the policies governing it will find this a must-read. Rief’s analysis of the 2003 Licensing Act’s impact on local communities and culture is effective. Chapters two and three also present an impressive array of quantitative data, indicating the significance of clubbing to local and national economies. However, Rief’s failure to tie this information to an overarching thesis on clubbing and the economy or to her discussion of identity and lifestyle in later chapters undercuts its promise.
In chapters four, five, and six, Rief focuses on the body, hedonistic pursuits (i.e., drugs), and identity. This is where we meet her respondents, 23 clubbers mostly between 18 and 25 years of age. We also learn she has conducted some field observations, although we are given little detail on them. These chapters are laden with postmodern interpretations of the respondents’ experiences even though their voices are mostly silenced. There is a remarkable absence of data here, actual testimony from respondents or entries from field journals, leaving one to question Rief’s interpretations. For example, there is little information on how long she talked to her respondents and what they talked about (an exception is a 30- to 60-minute discussion of what clubbing meant to the respondents). Chapter five’s discussion of drug use and clubbing is the most effective in grounding the respondents’ voices, but Rief ends up at a familiar place: Rave and EDM cultures permit alternative identities and unique solidarity through drugs.
By chapters seven and eight, Rief confronts the topics most relevant to Gender & Society readers: the negotiation of gender and sexuality through clubbing activities. Drawing heavily from Butler, Skeggs, and McRobbie, Rief interprets her respondents’ stories and experiences into another familiar narrative about gender and sexuality. She finds that young people perceive clubbing as a way to resist heteronormative practices and expectations and to carve out novel, if not hybrid, masculinities, femininities, bisexualities, and homosexualities, only to reproduce them instead. This is not especially new. Various scholars such as Hunt, Laidler, Evans and Moloney (EDM), Leblanc (punk), Haenfler (straight edge), and Clay and Adams and Fuller (hip hop) have made similar observations, yet they are not mentioned here. Even though Rief offers, at times, some interesting nuance to these debates, she does not seriously consider the antithesis: that clubbers actively exploit conventional, sexist, and heterosexist norms, identities, and related behaviors for short-term gain.
To sum up, I found myself repeatedly asking the “so what” question on the topics Rief studied. My guess is that Rief believes clubbing offers the young a space for “otherness” and that negotiating it can best be understood by Lamont and Molnar’s work on symbolic boundaries. While linking a cultural studies topic to a “sociology of culture” theoretical debate is a commendable objective, Rief fails to provide a conceptual road map for scholars in this direction. The relative absence of a compelling and significant thesis and the paucity of reliable data throughout the book are what obstruct that progress.