Identity, community and postmodernity: The rock\u27n\u27roll scene in Austin, Texas

This dissertation studies the production and the consumption of rock\u27n\u27roll music among a group of fans and musicians currently living in Austin, Texas. An ideological link between cowboys, Texans and music, first established academically, by John A. Lomax in his 1910 publication of Cowboy Songs, forms a discursive consistency that continues to underlie aesthetic judgments and marketing decisions. This project begins by tracing the musical, commercial, and ideological development of the popular music scene in Austin, from its early roots in cowboy songs and honky-tonk culture through the progressive country and punk movements, to its current state as a commercialized site for what Julia Kristeva calls signifying practice. It then explores the identities, desires, and pleasures produced within this scene, using Kristeva\u27s concepts of the semiotic and the subject in process to explore the relations between individual experiences of pleasure and fandom, and the cultural, political, and material context of the scene. Next the dissertation moves to a discussion of the ways in which specific representations of the identities produced through this practice are disseminated beyond the immediate context of the scene through the commodifying mechanisms of the recording industry. I essay a theory of musicality in an attempt to explain the power of music to cross cultural boundaries and to blend the cultural practices of diverse groups into a postmodern community