Negotiating underground status through hybrid visibilities: WeChat event promotion in Shanghai music and performance scenes

Abstract

While the widespread visibility on digital platforms and intensifying promotional cultures online have questioned ‘underground status’ in music and performance scenes, scene participants continue to construct underground identities online to increase their subcultural capital and manoeuvre politico-economic environments. In Shanghai, venues and event organisations negotiate their underground status through the dissemination of digital flyers on WeChat, targeting niche taste communities and navigating surveillance and censorship mechanisms of the digital platform and local authorities. Taking visibility as a lens to analyse underground status, this paper argues that multiple small but closely related music and performance scenes in Shanghai (including clubbing, drag, and BDSM) construct underground identities by negotiating their social, commercial, and political ethos within WeChat’s regime of visibility. Emphasising the interconnected nature of virtual and physical visibilities, it develops an understanding of ‘hybrid visibilities’ that consist of representational, coded, fractured, and offline visibilities. This paper contributes to debates in popular music studies by arguing that the notion of ‘underground’ still holds relevance within scenes through the negotiation of hybrid visibilities. It also engages with platform studies by suggesting a more nuanced conception of online visibility that includes (sub)cultural and social capital besides economic forms of capital.

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