What Would the Community Think: Communal Values in Independent Music

Abstract

An enthusiastic post on a website, a supportive audience in a smoky club, an animated conversation at a local music store—every interaction between fans of independent music binds them in a community. This paper presents my initial research into the ways in which the independent music community’s boundaries and values are expressed and shared in evolving social networks by means of interactions that authenticate participants into this community. While my observations here focus on Chicago’s independent music community in the early 2000’s, the following discussion broadens this context both historically and geographically. Like the cathartic narrator of Cat Power’s What Would the Community Think, I quote these voices here less to intimate a static, synchronic picture than to represent an ever-evolving community whose boundaries and values are constantly in flux.

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