“Surely people who go clubbing don’t read”: Dispatches from the Dancefloor and Clubland in Print

Authors

  • Simon Morrison University of Chester

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5429/ij.v4i2.735

Keywords:

music journalism, gonzo journalism, chemical generation literature, electronic dance music culture (EDMC)

Abstract

In the context of the UK dance club scene during the 1990s, this article redresses a presumption that “people who go clubbing don’t read”. It will thereby test a proposed lacuna in original journalist voices in related print media. The examination is based on key UK publications that focus on the musical tropes and modes of the dancefloor, and on responses from a selection of authors and editors involved in British club culture during this era The style of this article is itself a methodology that deploys ‘gonzo’ strategies typical of earlier New Journalism, in reaching for a new approach to academicism. In seeking to discover whether the idea that clubbers do not read is due to inauthentic media re/presentations of their experience on the dancefloor, or with specific subcultural discourses, the article concludes that the authenticity of club cultural re/presentation may well be found in fictional responses.

Author Biography

Simon Morrison, University of Chester

Simon A. Morrison is Senior Lecturer at University of Chester, where he is heads up its Music Journalism degree. He is currently researching a PhD within the School of Music at University of Leeds, interrogating Electronic Dance Music Culture and the way it is re/presented in literature. Simon contributed the chapter 'DJ-Driven Literature: A Linguistic Remix' on the role and function of DJs in literature the edited collection DJ Cultures in the Mix (2013, Bloomsbury Academic) and also contributed to the 2015 Bloomsbury title How To Write About Music. He has also been awarded a Santander bursary to visit New York, in order to further research a title he is currently co-authoring for publisher Reaktion Discotheque: The Revolutions of Dance Music Culture. Simon has also presented this work at various conferences in the UK and overseas, including the 2012 IASPM conference, and conferences in Portugal and Holland. Alongside this academic work, Simon has worked within the music industry for the last 20 years. Author of the book Discombobulated, a collection of columns for DJmag and published in the UK and US by Headpress - Simon has reported on the nightclub scene everywhere from Beijing to Kosovo. He has also produced and presented TV and radio and for two summers edited Ministry of Sound’s Ibiza magazine.

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Published

31-12-2014

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Section

Music Journalism: Articles