The Paradoxes of Mainstream: Investigating Transition-Era Youth Cultures in Slovakia

Zuzana Kepplova – Central European University Budapest, Department of Gender Studies & Stony Brook University SUNY, Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory

This article aims to propose a perspective on the way subcultures have participated in constructing consumer cultures and middle-class sensibilities in a society transitioning from state socialism to market economy. I examine narratives and practices of young people congregated around the popular youth culture called “club cultures”. I argue that the widely used discursive trope of mainstream was important in its performative role to produce imagined others from which clubbers could differ themselves as more sophisticated and progressive. However, in order to differ, they employed traditional strategies widely used by socialist subjects in the nonofficial sphere, strategies known as ways of getting by. Just like the late socialist ‘hunt for commodities’, subcultural labor and strategies of distinction may be studied as a way of cultivating middle-class sensibilities and building middle class fractions during transition.

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Introduction

In this study I focus on a particular subculture – club cultures –, which, in the 1990s and around the millennium turn, was the most popular global subculture in terms of mass participation of youth and its influence on many areas of life1. Club cultures refer to the cultural practice of all-night-long dancing to electronic music played by DJs from records, sound machines or laptops usually in the space of a club. My research took place in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. On the basis of interviews, discourse analysis and ethnographic field research, I argue that the invocations of mainstream typically present in clubbers’ speech functioned to perform distinction (Bourdieu 1984), which equipped clubbers with a self-confidence of a nascent class fraction. This distinction from the mainstream had more of a rhetorical value, as there was little well developed cultural industry and consumer culture during transition. In subcultural discourses, but also in cultural critique and theory, consumer culture and cultural industries tend to be understood as a basis for the mainstream. The slippery nature of the term will be discussed in the course of the article. I draw a discrepancy between the way mainstream has been theorized and the way my interviewees have used it in order to signify superiority of their taste, style, knowledge and skills above the imaginary other. Eventually, I propose that clubbers employed the idea of subcultural difference from the mainstream to claim distinctions, which had not only class-formative implications but also a symbolic value in the discourse of becoming ‘Western’.

I examine how clubbers understood their identities in disconnection from previous sub- and countercultures and from the street crowd signifying uniform (non-)taste. At the same time, I observe how they imagined themselves as continuous with ‘Western’ clubbing youth. Investigation of these lines is embedded in a larger argument that club cultures stretch discursive branches to late socialist consumer cultures. I support this claim by discussing the way subcultural bricolage connects to practices in late socialist nonofficial cultures. Eventually, I position my claim in dialogue with the body of literature where practices of late socialist consumerism are connected to taste differentiation, social distinction, upward mobility and attempts to forge a middle class. This article provides preliminary insight into the broader argument that club

1 Arguably, club cultures had an immense impact on many areas of life. Clubbing shapes the nocturnal urban-scapes of leisure and has boosted the re-development of declining industrial areas of cities (Chatterton & Hollands 2003; Rief 2009). It has activated tourist routes and re-popularized alternative nomadic lifestyles (D’Andrea 2007), often problematically resurrecting old colonial habits and racism toward the locals (Saldanha 2004; Roberts 2005: 580-581). Moreover, club cultures can be seen as important laboratories of late post-industrial neoliberal forms of labor and social relations (McRobbie 2002; 2010). As such they directly provide a pool of skills and knowledge for new cultural industries, offering a schema for fashionable but precarious jobs (McRobbie 1999; 2002; 2010) and contributing to the emergence of the so-called creative classes (Florida 2004) or lifestyle entrepreneurs (Featherstone 1991: 84) or new ‘cultural intermediaries’ (Bourdieu 1984; McRobbie 2002).

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cultures offered a way for embourgeoisement – of upward status mobility related to a rising middle class during transition.

Even if my study is bounded by its location, my aim is not to contribute to subcultural research in terms of filling a geographical gap but rather to make a commentary on the way subcultural identities were sustained in the context of socio-economic transformation2. The implications are two-fold: the youth category has been neglected in the studies of transition as well as a post-socialist context in shaping views on subcultures. This article thus targets mainly the scholarly field of transitology, theories of subcultures, youth studies and post-socialist cultural studies.

Methodologically, the article draws on interviews with a sample of clubbers predominantly based in Bratislava, Slovakia but coming from other places around the country, too. Being between the age of 21 and 34 during the time when I conducted my interviews – from Fall 2008 to Spring 2009 – they were in their teens and twenties as active clubbers around the millennium time. It is significant that most of my interviewees were students at the time of their commitment to club cultures – mainly high school and university students. This particular information on their background corresponds to the previous findings of Jana Donovalová (2000). She investigated the economic background of Bratislava clubbers and their value orientation to find out that clubbers shared middle-class sensibilities3, unlike the popular presupposition that portrays them as hedonists and social dropouts due to nocturnal dancing marathons and drug consumption. The in-depth interviews conducted for this study elaborate on Donovalová’s findings by proposing that the middle-class status is not retained in spite of the pursuit of clubbing but it is rather reshaped and reinforced through the participation in club cultures.

In the interviews I conducted, I focused on the narratives through which my interviewees presented their involvement in club cultures not as a festive interruption of their everyday activities but as a part of their career path, as a force shaping their subjectivity in respect to work. Therefore, I was sensitive to the use of tropes, which relate to clubbers’ self-perception and identity presentation. This article is a part of a larger research project, therefore it deals with only some of the themes emerging from the interviews: I focus on

2 Transition can be understood as a period between the Velvet revolution in 1989 and accession to transatlantic and European structures in 2004; a switch from a form of a ‘socialist planned economy’ (with some fragments of the market) to a version of market economy; during this time, Czechoslovakia split into two republics and between 1993-98, Slovakia was governed by Vladimir Mečiar’s government who’s methods were seen as autocratic, populist, isolationist and unacceptable for further accession steps towards NATO and EU.

3 Donovalová (2000) argued that “U.club” regulars can be assessed as elite (‘elita’) in terms of education, material situation and professional orientation. Based on Peter Sak’s value grid, she proposes that clubbers are mostly oriented towards professional and personal development and towards materialist values (2000: 42-44). Apart from the value grid, this suggestion is based on the assessment of respondents’ economic background.

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the way clubbers stress acquiring niche products and assembling non-normative styles are supposed to reflect their more sophisticated taste; both verbally and through practices, they formulate a distinction from the crowd uniformity. Importantly, I notice the imaginary value of subcultural discourses and practices. The category of ‘imaginary consumption’ has been employed repeatedly in post-socialist ethnographies (i.e. Oushakine 2000; Rausig 2002) with reference to post-socialist subjects’ struggle to make sense of the changing order of things as well as their way of employing consumption as a means of self-construction and the positioning of others within a social grid in flux. Both researchers and their subjects tend to implicitly reference Western ‘normality’, the order of things ‘as they should be’, and so Shevchenko (2002) refers to the shifts in socio-cultural scapes of post-socialist Russia as ‘hybrid patterns of consumption’ which accompany ‘emerging identities’.

In these interviews, I observed that their ideas concerning clubbing are closely accompanied by images of a mainstream. They invoked mainstream with an easiness that seemingly lacked sensitivity to the socio-economic context of ‘90s Slovakia. How could they talk about challenging the mainstream when, during transition, the corporate/commercial infrastructure for mainstream taste was lacunose if existing at all? For example, shops filled with a variety of goods, commercial radio programming or shopping malls harboring chain brands were only gradually appearing. I noticed a disconnection of subcultural discourse from the actual socio-economic and cultural scapes. Further, I observed that although clubbers perceived club cultures as radically innovative and unrelated to previous sub- and countercultures, their strategies of forging subcultural identities drew on late socialist forms of access to (sub)cultural items in the absence of the market. Were clubbers’ typical subcultural practices, including travelling for shopping or modifying clothing design, not dissimilar to broader, late-socialist means of getting by? Was trading in tapes and information not in some way an extension of the previous black market simulation of consumer culture? On the basis of these two observations – on the use of mainstream and on the strategies of getting and trading in items, I suggest that both late socialist cultures of getting by as well as transition subcultural practices can be understood as a way of producing middle-class sensibilities in constricted market conditions. The socialist ‘hunt for commodities’ as well as clubbers’ ways of producing difference in the taste scapes of transition are attempts to diversify lifestyles and aim for middle-classness often merged with imaginary ‘Westerness’.

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Studies of youth cultures in the context of transitology

Concerning the post-Soviet space, in his study Gagarin and the Rave Kids, Alexei Yurchak writes:

The emergence of the nightlife subculture, from dance clubs to expensive casinos, has been one of the most noteworthy changes in Russian youth culture in the first post-Soviet decade. (1999: 76)

Further, Yurchak characterizes the types of nightscapes by the population groups which frequent them – the nightlife scene “organized around dance clubs and all-night dance parties and raves” in the largest Russian cities caters mostly to “the new young” who are also referred to as “trendy people” or “ravers” (Yurchak 1999: 77). At the same time in the region of post-socialist Central Europe, the ‘90s was when electronic dance music in clubs was bourgeoning in popularity. However, the way in which club cultures intervened in shaping taste cultures, work and leisure has not yet been acknowledged in the studies of transition, of post-socialist counter- and subcultures and more broadly in sociologies and anthropologies of the region (Bridger & Pine 1998; Burawoy & Verdery 1999; Berdahl et al. 2000; Mandel & Humphrey 2002; Hann 2002; Forrester et al. 2004; Ost 2005; Heintz 2006; Svašek 2008; Ghodsee 2011).

A considerable portion of literature on transition in post-socialist regions is concerned with the outcomes of spectacular changes: growing economic differences, unemployment, gender inequalities, decrease of life standards for large sections of population, trafficking in drugs and women, national and ethnic animosities crystallizing into severe conflicts. Transition became articulated as a period of in-between-ness and non-regulation (Forrester et al. 2004: 22) positing a threat that the region will become culturally homogenized, a legal ‘no man’s land’ quickly occupied by Western capital and over-ridden by pervasive ‘pop-culture’. As a result, the idea of a clash of popular culture within post-socialist conditions fed literary fiction across post-socialist contexts (Hvorecký 1998, 2001; Masłowska 2004[2002]; Denežkinová 2004[2002]). In both fiction and academic discourse, post-socialist subjects were seen as dealing with a tsunami of images, products, flashing advertisement, influx of drugs, rising criminality and corporate use of lacunose legality.

Transition in the region of post-socialist Central Europe was a time of deep structural changes on every level: political, economic, social and cultural. According to many commentators, processes of transformation were most palpable in the landscape of post-socialist cities with emerging billboards, striking colors of re-painted blocks of flats, baroquesque family houses of nouveau rich, glass towers of international corporations, mushrooming banks, inundation of new shops and refurbished city centers; all this happening in a relatively short time, a change of unseen rapidity and depth. These spatial

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observations are tellingly captured in the expression “the construction and contestation of new cultural landscapes” (Berdahl 2000: 1). Together with the alterations in the landscape, mindsets and subjectivities were molded and adjusted to new conditions. John Borneman frames a perspective that became a consensual view among scholars of transition:

The collapse of the Soviet Empire entailed not only the blitzkrieg dissolution of socialist economies and one-party states in Eastern Europe but also immediate accidental and incidental changes in the everyday life of its residents. (cited in Ghodsee 2011: back flap)

The perspective stressing rapidity and violence of these changes is made even more explicit in the words of Maria Todorova – also cited on the back flap of Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism (Ghodsee 2011) as she speaks about “the lives of people caught up in the painful transition from socialism to capitalism”.

However, this perspective reverberates mainly with the views and impressions of the generation of adults and older people as well as of the voices of Western researchers coming to witness history in the making. My sample of clubbers consists mainly of people who were teenagers or in their early twenties and who were actively club-going during the transition time. Their views on the era rarely resonate with such a dramatic tone, as the changes were perceived from the position of young people growing up and making sense of the world surrounding them. At the same time, transition was characterized not just by chaos but also by flexibility. Things were negotiable, modifiable and ‘in the making’ and young people could sense this tangible plasticity of conditions. Therefore, club cultures were a space filled with their agency, a space where they could experiment and learn and, as I argue elsewhere, they could accumulate skills and knowledge, which gave them a marketable advantage. In the scope of this article, I suggest that clubbers’ navigated in the taste scapes of transition to distance themselves from a concrete ‘crowd’ which could be understood through its class implications as ‘common people’. Symbolically, clubbing represented for their enthusiasts a possibility to connect to the idea of cosmopolitan youth. Rather than just uniting young people across differences, club cultures can be conceived of as a platform for the formation of a self-confident progressive middle-class fraction.

Disconnection from previous sub- and countercultures

In post-socialist contexts, sub- and countercultures had typically been deployed on the battlefield over the future orientation of the country and the codification of its past. Mainly rock music and artistic underground was seen as decisive in the process of democratization of societies leading to the political changes of 1989 (Ryback 1990; Ramet 1994; Cushman 1995; Szemere 2001;

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Vaněk 2002). However, electronic music and club cultures had no record from the past, no clear-cut connection to the underground music and art scenes or to official socialist cultures. As such, club cultures could be figured in as unburdened with the past, quasi-neutral, strictly cosmopolitan and progressive. Names of events suggested an idea of global connectedness of dancing communities – Cape Town clubbing in Nitra, L.A. clubbing in Považská Bystrica, Tokyo clubbing in Poprad – while other parties promoted an idea of a community gathered around a shared sensibility – The Vibes, Sunshine, Be Free. This imaginary was reinforced by projections of a dancing crowd from a distant place or shouts of DJ’s name or ‘Ibiza!’, which gave an idea of a connected community with space and time presenting no obstacle to the image of post-Wall youth.

Early Slovak clubbers shared with their Western peers distaste for rock music and together with it, contempt for the styles and values it represented. If once countercultures and underground offered a vision, a set of alternatives and moral legitimacy, the logic has been disturbed after 1989 (Szemere 2001). In the flux of the post-socialist cultural scapes, club cultures offered a self-conscious direction – fast forward leaving everything old behind in a cloud of dust. In the quotation below, one of my interviewees explains the way in which he navigated between different subcultural styles to eventually lean toward club cultures that were promising something else, indicating a shift away from the worn-out logic of countercultures:

Like we used to go to Propeler for punk concerts (laughter)… and to all different sorts of concerts: rock, punk and to Danglár [a notorious ‘90s pub in the centre of Bratislava, it endorsed mostly indie and grunge music] and such places… And after some time, we were looking for something… you know like adolescent people try hard to differ and this [meaning club cultures] seemed […] the most progressive, something that grabbed my attention, something absolutely new… On one occasion, we were invited to a private party in U.club and it was there that I actually for the first time experienced the underground electronic dance music scene. And for me it was a total shock, I was like speechless! […] Punk and rock concerts were like you wore ripped jeans and so [club cultures] was something cleaner and more modern and mainly more… futuro [sic]. And that really got me like I no longer wanted to be a part of some rock trash (laughter).

(P., male, 26, financial lawyer)4

The ripped jeans, once a powerful countercultural item on both sides of the Curtain, were in P.’s statement relegated beyond relevance. Jeans used to be a sign of affiliation to the working class, refusal to be an ‘organization man’, a part of the establishment and a shout against the bourgeois moral with its

4 To contextualize the quotes within a set of sociological vectors, I provide information on gender, age at the time of interviewing and occupation when being interviewed. As I agreed with my interviewees, I protect their identity using only first letter of the name or two letters in case of the same letter occurring more than once.

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competitive but conformist ethic (Frank 1997). At the same time, jeans were a prized symbol of American-ness, of the ‘Western’ loose lifestyle and thus freedom per se, affiliation to a set of values that stood in critical opposition to the expected neat conformism of socialist youth. Jeans were re-coded and re-loaded with symbolism with every subsequent subcultural style or countercultural movement that claimed them – like ‘70s punk or ‘90s grunge and even the bell-bottomed disco version with ultra tight upper part redressing gender norms and sexual codes.

In the taste scapes of transition, these messages did not make sense as they used to do; they did not connect to a promise of a more meaningful lifestyle. Moreover, in P.’s perspective, youth cultural ideologies symbolized by jeans were in contradiction to progress and modernity. In P.’s words, the navigation between subcultural styles was described, with a grain of ‘grown-up’ contempt, as an adolescent striving for difference, and as such, it could be universalized as a general experience of growing-up. However, I prefer taking into account the discursive positionality of the statement. Such approach problematizes the seeming vagueness of P.’s interpretation and directs us toward considering the specificity of the moment when club cultures were interpellating its subjects.

The narrative of disconnection from previous sub- and countercultures is decisive because it provided a discursive basis for a congregation of young people who wanted to break-away from previous cultural ties. Club cultures were rooted in new technologies and media, new ways of cultural production, and new forms of sociality. Party drugs energized people and secured a new type of experience. Internet and cell phones were used for the first time to coordinate events and uphold communities. Therefore, clubbing was also an opportunity to network and forge skills, which could have been, and arguably were, transferred beyond the walls of clubs into labor market. Clubbers cannot be seen as social dropouts with distinct cultural values and in opposition to ‘mainstream society’ but rather as members of an avant-garde group advantageously disposed for the new order.

Invocations of the mainstream divorced from the actual context

Even if clubbers typically distanced themselves from other sub- and countercultures, they shared with them the rhetoric of contempt for mainstream. For my interviewees, participating in club cultures used to be typically based on the idea of evading the mainstream. I look at the way this category emerges through the words of interviewed clubbers and interpret it with respect to the ways mainstream has been understood in cultural theory. One of my interviewees, L. proposes:

I used to be under the impression that [electronic dance music] parties are something very novel, like [signifying] the 3rd millennium already […], something that only a small

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group of people had access to, something these people created and others didn’t have the chance to experience… And it was like so freaky when you could wear anything and everybody turned around to check you out and in a taxi you got looks and in the MHD [public transport] everyone stared at you but you just didn’t care because it was them, the outsiders, who were not getting it… And that we were simply offered a very novel experience. Like something that neither our parents nor our peers could have had experienced.

(L., female, 27, marketing agent)

L.’s claim can be connected to at least two ways mainstream has been previously discussed. First, it can be read as an invocation of classic Bohemian, subcultural and countercultural animosity towards bourgeoisie. Since early Parisian Bohemians through modernists to Beats, the meaning of mainstream has been enriched and widely used. However, as David Brooks (2000) claims, the new ‘Western’ upper-middle class has appropriated traces of Bohemian discourse. According to Thomas Frank (1997), the ‘life on the edge’ philosophy has officially become the ideology of the new consumer who wants to perceive him/herself as a rebel rather than a conformist. It is in reference to this recognition that I read the quote as a claim that signals an avant-garde attitude of a new consumer, self-confident and owning the future.

L.’s invocation of mainstream is coded as ‘outsiders’, the non-distinct crowd outside of clubs. This crowd is portrayed as travelling in public transport or personified by the taxi driver throwing an investigative look on the clubber. The distinction is legitimized by the access to a very new experience or, by extension, the access to experiencing novelty. In opposition to it, mainstream is imagined through the idea of mundane life chores constricting individuality: the crowd staring in public transportation – an image of a mass of people on their daily route to and from work. Mainstream is perceived through uniformity of people’s taste – they stare when someone is dressed differently. Rather than implying the uptight morality or ethics of self-denial, suppression of individuality, conformity and respectability – referring to the classic characteristic of bourgeoisie – L.’s depiction of the mainstream can be read with reference to socialist uniformity. Due to the underdeveloped infrastructure of consumer choices during the first decade of post-socialism, such uniformity is partly retained. Rather than evading the prescript uniformity of ‘dominant society’ or bourgeois culture, clubbers like L. fostered new niche styles and forged the taste for consumer choices. In other words, there was no oppressive force of mainstream to break away from but rather an undernourished market, which did not yet allow for a diversification of lifestyles. Clubbers thus had to be creative enough, or have enough resources, to build an appropriate subcultural identity in the conditions of transition taste scapes.

Clubbers deployed subcultural labor to practice distinction – for example, by shopping ‘elsewhere’. In the discourse of Bratislavian clubbers, ‘elsewhere’ refers to the evasion of places like the main shopping street Obchodná or the

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open-air market place Miletičova. The so-called ‘bad taste crowd’, the ‘mass’ harboring indiscriminant taste, was thus mapped onto specific places – often literally crowded – with trams passing in between pedestrians and sweaty bodies pushing each other to closely observe food or examine fake-brand clothes. The taste category evaded and ridiculed by clubbers connotes ‘common people’ who come to these places to shop for cheap consumer items with no added value of cultural capital as in the case of subcultural goods. The demographic shopping in Obchodná and Miletičova is often of modest income, lacks the information of where to better shop or the resources to get there. In the case of the open-air market, it is a place of rural aesthetic where rough Western Slovak dialects mix with Southern Slovak Hungarian and basic Slovak-for-shoppers pronounced by Vietnamese sellers of clothes, shoes and electronics. The evasion and mockery of the ‘people’s’ places for shopping may be seen as a confirmation of the progressive middle-class status expressed through the refusal of the lowbrow shopping culture and a claim to expert taste. After a more institutionalized version of mainstream appeared, shopping malls were invoked as palaces of homogeneous taste, not bad taste in the sense above, but unified, predigested and lacking individuality and the skill of informed choice. Clubbers who were exposed to trends, meeting other trendy people, exchanging information and following news in technology, media and music, were in a good position to fill and create places where lifestyle has been actively produced.

A different line of the definition of mainstream has to do with a critique of mass culture (Kracauer 1995[1927]; Adorno & Horkheimer 1973[1944]; McLuhan 2002[1951]; Hoggart 1992[1957]). Frankfurt, as well as other schools of criticism of mass culture, was mainly rooted in the Marxist/leftist tradition of analysis and critique of capitalist societies. The mass culture critique communicates the idea that something we may refer to as mainstream taste cannot exist as an abstraction. It has to be performed through consumer acts (for example, going to the movies) and therefore an infrastructure is needed which allows for ‘sheep-minded’ consumerism to take place. In terms of its institutional incarnations, mainstream can be decomposed into sub-rubrics of the profit-oriented entertainment industry infrastructure – commercially formatted radios and TVs, well-established and influential music press, powerful recording companies and other institutions generating, defining and regulating taste for popular culture. Derived from the mass culture critique, the meaning of mainstream connotes 1) cultural industries, 2) mass society’s uniform taste based on prefabricated needs as well as 3) popular culture as such. The term connotes the whole circle of cultural economy from the production process, commodities, to the act of consumption, which is read as a legitimization of production in the first place.

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After the centralized economy system was dissolved, its taste infrastructure was also restructured5. As economy was switching from a centralized to a free market model, nodes of the infrastructure anchoring the (new) mainstream taste were not yet at place or only beginning to rise. For example, the first shopping center of mall format – Polus City Center – was opened in Bratislava in 20006. Its space harbored chain brands and allowed for the standardized shopping culture to emerge, ordering ‘popular taste’ within the confines of ‘Western’ consumer culture. As an illustration of mainstream-in-flux, here is a commentary on the situation in the radio milieu. Roman Juhás, who worked for several radio stations based in Bratislava, said:

Those were fantastic times [early ‘90s] but these particular radios did not last exactly because they were directed intuitively. No one ever did [market] research, there was no business plan, no target group [of listeners] was defined. People often used their own records to play. Nowadays, even if I am a music fan, I know this is a way leading to nowhere. It is impossible to make a financial profit by playing a music based on one’s own taste, it is impossible. (http://kultura.sme.sk/c/5599302/slovenske-radia-hrame-to-co-chcete.html [Accessed 25 September 2011])

Early clubbers thus functioned in a cultural landscape which was being profoundly re-arranged before it ‘settled down’ into a form underpinned by market rules and institutions of law and order recognized as close enough to the models of Western democracy. This process also concerned the gradual introduction of business culture and marketing ideas – as suggested in the quotation above – which can be seen as channeling taste into more governable formats; these formats tend to be legitimized as ‘following people’s will’7. But how did the discourse of being anti-mainstream make sense to clubbers before the actual solid infrastructure of mainstream was established? What did it mean to be non- or anti-mainstream before shopping malls, tabloids or reality TV but following ideas about subcultural difference? How did clubbers manage to assemble subcultural styles out of the limited choice but in line with their ‘Western’ peers or imagined L.A., Tokyo or Cape Town clubbers?

5 What could be understood as socialist mainstream is beyond the scope of this article – its pillars in state media, official events and festivities, party-led youth organizations, strong state-funded theater, film, visual arts and literature but also featuring non-official undercurrents and specificities which softened the systemic lines and made them more permeable to negotiations.

6 http://www.poluscitycenter.sk/sk/informacie/o-nas [Accessed 25 September 2011]

7 This paraphrases the title of the source article from which the quote above is taken: Slovak radios: We play following your wishes (http://kultura.sme.sk/c/5599302/slovenske-radia-hrame-to-co-chcete.html [Accessed 25 September 2011]).

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Improvising distinction

For the Bratislavian clubbing youth to be in step with trends, it meant having access to a car that would take them shopping to Parndorf outlet (close to the border with Austria, selling brand and designer clothes) or to places in Vienna. There were very few shops in Bratislava selling the ‘right’ clothing, as the choice was still limited in general. If the items seen as cool or trendy by clubbers were available, they were often expensive (P., Ro.). Many clubbers thus shopped when travelling, whether for parties or not (D., I.). D. remembers that her friend, who brought platform shoes from Germany, stood out in U.club – the main underground hub – and attracted attention. D. used to visit better equipped shops in Brno and Prague (Czech Republic) to purchase bags, shoes or hair dye.

Subcultural labor not only meant bringing items from abroad but also creatively adjusting the current market offer. Some of my interviewees assembled their style using emerging second-hand stores offering vintage pieces within range of student pocket money (Ke., D., L.). Some girls even pulled out their mom’s sewing machines (Ka.) or made their own designs and had clothes assembled by professionals (Ki, Ma).

Travelling in order to acquire goods may be related to the cultural pattern inherited from late socialism. This practice tends to be evoked by the parent generation of clubbers as shopping trips to goulash-communist Budapest, bringing records back home from holidays in Yugoslavia or occasional visits to Western countries. In the ‘90s, the hybrid market of late socialism was still fresh in memory. Early clubbers remembered buying their first records from illegal open-air markets (burza) or circulating and copying tapes. The generation of today’s 30-something-year-old clubbers remembers the manners in which ‘alternative’ music was imported and distributed in late socialist Slovakia. M2 gives an example of a Dead Can Dance CD that someone from his surroundings brought from Germany: “we carried it like a golden calf and everyone borrowed it and copied it on a cassette”.

In the course of transition, the taste scapes started to be anchored in an emerging subcultural infrastructure. S. recalls how he was introduced into electronic dance music together with his friends in the last year of elementary school in 1994:

We used to order CDs and tapes in a tiny music shop on the [main] square in Banská Bystrica [the capital of Central Slovakia]. I bought them using money I had been tactically stealing from my parents. This shop ordered CDs from Germany, I guess. I started with it [ordering and buying] accidentally when having heard about it from my friend and that was it. From that moment on, ordering at large started as well as the street circulation of tapes and CDs.

(S., male, 27, GIS administrator)

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Early DJs Tibor Holoda and Dalibor Kŕč – who ran a record store associated to the cult meeting place UW café (Bratislava) that was one of the first places to offer untraditional mixed drinks – used to go record shopping and trend checking in Vienna (Mi.). DJ Mayla remembers that she and her boyfriend DJ Skank used to stay over at friends’ place in Vienna; the Viennese friends were then guest-DJs at U.club where Skank worked. DJ and promoter Pico mentions he spent one summer washing windshields on Austrian borders to save money for buying necessary equipment8. There was no scene-specialized print media and the radio space was limited to Crystal House on Radio Ragtime and another early show on RMC radio. Therefore, music journals in German were a source of information for early DJs and clubbers9. The habit to go Vienna-clubbing and to concerts – mainly in the time when big names avoided Bratislava – remained (Rn., Mo., Mi.) while Vienna pensioners used to come for cheap opera and concerts of classical music – thus profiting from the legacy of socialist cultural politics of affordable high culture. The Bratislava – Vienna connection was crucial for the early scene in Bratislava; however, event promoter Pico also accentuates the impact of Italian house music to which he used to be exposed to during his holidays in Slovenia10.

As several interviewees agreed, the early scene was hungry for resources and less discriminative. Nowadays, Pico’s choice of music for events represents a stream of happy ecstatic tunes of house and trance suitable for large club spaces, city bars or beaches by the Danube river – a ‘mainstream line’ within the scene – while other DJs prefer to think of their selection of music as ‘less commercial’ – spanning from the minimal techno scene in U.club, through the Wilsonic festival oriented toward ‘reflecting future’ (as its slogan goes), to obscure parties where hardstyle is played. However, when Pico recounts the story, he speaks about ‘techno mainstream’ which made it difficult for the ‘trance community’ to emerge11. He presents the early trance scene around the Ibiza club – related to the first Bratislavian gay club Apolon – as a place where differences did not matter and music brought together “gays, common people, celebrities, models, miss girls, actors, singers, moderators” (Ibid.). Obviously, inside the subcultural discourse, the trope of mainstream became a

8 http://www.ilovemusic.sk/clanky/bt-rozhovor-s-picom-alebo-ako-to-vsetko-zacalo [Accessed 25 September 2011]

9 The generation of 30-somethings witnessed the abrupt switch from obligatory Russian language courses to the language offer of mostly English, German and French or Spanish. While German had its tradition in Bratislava (due to emission of radio and TV signal across Austrian border), English soon became the number one language disseminated widely but mostly in bits and pieces of ‘fashionable speak’. For leisure scapes – including club cultures – English was essential.

10 http://www.ilovemusic.sk/clanky/bt-rozhovor-s-picom-alebo-ako-to-vsetko-zacalo [Accessed 25 September 2011]

11 Ibid.

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tool for discrediting the concurrence in the scene when battling for audience, space in clubs and media as well as sponsoring.

In terms of its wider ideology, club cultures were formulated through travelling, moving and flows – of music, events, people and technology. The rise of electronic dance music cultures is coterminous with the world being connected by the Internet and covered by telecommunication footprints, which connect to the rise of the information-communication sector where many of clubbers found employment. The clubbing youth could therefore symbolize for itself the world as a network: a world-wide-scene where people migrate freely for parties. It is a world where boundaries are broken down. In other words, the world after the Wall. For the clubbers, the act of the opening of borders and further the accession of the country into European political (2004) and monetary union (2008) meant that they could massively join international leisure scapes. Clubbers’ subcultural labor of carving out distinction in the taste scape of transition is thus embedded in a larger ambition to join the imaginary of globalized alternative youth cultures.

DiY cultures as forging middle-class sensibilities?

During transition, the strategy of evading ‘mass taste’ by shopping along the lines of niche/exclusive tastes or improvising trendy clothes necessitated a considerable effort not completely dissimilar to crafting difference during late socialism. One cannot be discussed without the other and therefore, subcultural practices during transition cannot purely be seen as expressions of forces of homogenous globalization but rather they communicate with previous sub- and countercultural traditions and, by extension, with socialist practices of getting by. Through subcultural practices, both the global is adopted and the local is adapted. In their effort to avoid mainstream under conditions of lacunose market, clubbers revive cultural memory traces of popular and largely practiced late socialist Do-it-Yourself cultures. In the following section, I connect their subcultural practices to previous cultural scenarios. While the subcultural labor of bricolage has previously been read as a sign of resisting market uniformity, as a vitality of popular culture in the face of power, a creative appropriation of signs from different spheres or even a symbolic guerilla warfare (Hebdige 1987[1979]; Willis 1990; Yurchak 1999), I reflect on the possibility that Do-it-Yourself strategies inherited from late socialism can be seen as substituting market choice and thus making possible assemblage of different lifestyles through consumption practices.

The notion of bricolage is tightly connected to the ‘classic’ concept of subculture; the term, as used in cultural studies and theory, was introduced by Dick Hebdige (1987([1979]). He adapted Lévi-Strauss’s (1990[1966]: 16-36) anthropological meaning of the term for the purposes of the study of urban youth sign system. Bricolage refers to a creative use of objects for purposes for which they were not destined resulting in sheer practicality but also in surreal

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or ironic meanings. According to structuralist and post-structuralist readings, such distortion of meanings has a potential to challenge the habitual order of things and symbols and is thus relevant for the agenda of social change. The issue of theorizing bricolage with respect to socialist and post-socialist subcultures is a slippery endeavor. In his study of the late socialist and early post-socialist club scene in St. Petersburg, Alexei Yurchak proposed that nonofficial cultural practices – comprising bricolage, too – were varied and widespread under socialism and they should not be confined narrowly to counter-cultures or oppositional youth cultures (Yurchak 1999: 80).

Bricolage was widely present, a common ‘mode of operation’ in socialist everyday life, where not just the variety of products was highly constricted but likewise often basic needs were hardly covered and the service sector operated according to widespread non-official rules of nepotism and clientelism (Drakulić 1996). The existence of local terms returns the notion of bricolage to its ethnographic origin: for example, kutilství in Czech or buhera kultúra in Hungarian. These expressions may have different nuances – for example, kutilství has a gendered aspect as it mainly refers to masculine work around the house, cottage or car: from small improvements to instances of making one’s own boat or fiddling a totem for a garden house. The Hungarian term connotes less a widespread leisure culture but rather transfers a set of traditionally masculine skills of tinkering, getting things done non-professionally, onto the whole area of economy and social relations. The Slovak term podomácky vyrobené captures an intersection of private and public sphere when it comes to ‘getting something done’. This concerns both masculine and feminine labor in the non-official economy. For example, women in Czechoslovakia used to form networks around circulating Western German (DDR) magazine issues of Burda (with sewing templates inserted) and thus supplemented a narrow selection of clothing items in shops and simulated the fashion discourse under different market conditions. Moreover, pieces of clothing imported from the ‘West’ were being copied and reproduced at home. The widespread character of bricolage can be understood as a symptom of socialist non-official economy of symbols and signs constituting plurality of lifestyles.

Here, in the socialist non-official sphere, the logic of fetishization that turns objects into commodities charged with symbolic value took place. While the planned economy seemingly left no space for fetishization (and conditioned it at the same time), the non-official sphere became the aforementioned trading location of signs and symbols. Not only were records smuggled from the more liberal Yugoslavia12 or patches with names of bands bought at the booming burza black markets in the 80s13, but also rather the entire sphere of non-

12 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/arts/music/09punk.html [Accessed 25 September 2011]

13 http://hvorecky.sk/2006/06/06/depeche-mode-v-cssr/ [Accessed 25 September 2011]

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official economy functioned on the principles of exchange of precious information and rare goods charged with symbolic value and often imbued with Western mysticism. The exchange typically forged interpersonal dependencies through services; networks strengthened by clientelism and nepotism were formed14.

Therefore, subcultural practices under socialism can hardly be strictly delimited from the everyday practices of wider society. Subsequently, we need to re-read subcultural social relations in the light of their similarity to non-monetary economies of services which, for example, have implications for the way subcultural labor and the system of rewards distribution is gendered. Even more problematically, seeing subcultural practices through their redefinition with respect to wider socialist DiY practices exposes them to the possibility that they may be understood in the line of critique of the late socialist ‘hunt for commodities’ (Kiossev 2007: 6; Czeglédy 2002: 143). Alexander Kiossev writes: “there is the familiar accusation that the eastern European Velvet Revolutions were driven by consumerist motives [...]” (2007: 6). In Manufacturing the New Consumerism, André P. Czeglédy proposes:

Both scholarly [Gellner] and popular writing [Drakulić] attests to the ‘triumph of the West’ [Fukuyama] over state socialism as having had more to do with the heady attractions of consumerism than with the elusive promises of liberal democracy. (2002: 143)

In her essay Bathroom Tales, Slavenka Drakulić does not hesitate to make a conceptual chain that leads from the comfort of her fully stocked bathroom to the big concepts of democracy; she associates: “cosmetics, the market, advertising, capitalism, the West, democracy, human rights” (2007: 2).

Such perspective suggests that practices of bricolage in their late socialist version can be understood as a way of embourgeoisement: upward status mobility in the uniform society of planned economy, a gesture against mass society but often with unexpected ambition to assemble middle-class lifestyles as observed – and often crudely idealized (Drakulić 1996; 2007) – in the ‘West’. My proposition connects well to the debate over the quest for ‘normalization’ in late socialist and transitioning societies. In the essays of Drakulić (2007), Kiossev (2007) and Vasilescu (2007) – all contributions to the conference Changing Places: What’s Normal Anyway – the term ‘normalization’ refers to the problematic of reconciliation between the imagined ‘West’ and the socio-economic realities of transition. Late and post-socialist subjects imagined the ‘normal’ lifestyle as actually an upper middle-class standard and the process of transition was meant to make this standard accessible for everybody (Drakulić

14 On specificities of socialist and post-socialist social relations intersecting economy, see literature on Russian blat (Ledeneva 1998), Yugoslav stela or veze (Bougarel et al. 2006; Sorabji 2008).

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1996; 2007). One of the resolutions of the tension between imagined and actual process of transition, leading in many instances to a deep frustration of the 1989 aftermath (Svašek 2008), was ‘imaginary consumption’. Discussing ‘imaginary consumption’ in post-Soviet space, both Oushakine (2000) and Rausig (2002) notice the way their research subjects struggle to understand and access new conditions with the help of discursive categories which make consumption meaningful for their identity construction as well as for distinction from others in social scapes.

For the transition youth under discussion, the claim to approximating ‘normality’ meant having access to entertainment, styles and cultural items as their ‘Western’ peers. In the conditions of a lacunose market, they managed to put together and experience the cosmopolitan identity of a clubber, an identity based on distinction from the elusive category of mainstream. Apart from understanding their invocations of mainstream as classed (when mainstream is associated with a crowd in public transport or un-‘cool’ shopping areas), there is a symbolical layer that can be deciphered. Naming events according to cosmopolitan metropolises – like L.A., Cape Town or Tokyo – suggests that mainstream is locked to the past and to the domestic territory while clubbing communicates the idea of post-1989 world in which borders have disappeared and youth reconnect under the post-political agenda of club cultures. To paraphrase the names of some of the parties, they enjoy the vibes and shine of freedom. In club cultures, being non-mainstream is thus a multilayered gesture of moving beyond the outdated logic of countercultural protest, away from the classed taste of ‘crowd’ and into the imaginary connection with progressive ‘Western’ youth.

Conclusion

In this article, I investigated some of the paradoxes of being anti-mainstream in transition-era club cultures. Clubbing was arguably one of the most popular and influential youth cultures during the transition era (1993 – 2004) in Slovakia. I argued that the use of mainstream in clubbers’ speech betrays a process of distinction, which implies more than just the “typical youthful need for being different” as one of my interviewees put it. Rather, I examined the logic of the trope to propose that the idea of mainstream helped clubbers legitimize their experience and taste as superior and progressive.

I studied Bratislava-based clubbers who, by the way they classify and use distinctions (Bourdieu 1984: 6), emerged as a self-confident group asserting its advantage and privilege over ‘common people’ and aimed at becoming more ‘Western’. In other words, my concern was to argue that the discursive insistence on exclusivity of subcultural taste and its progressive nature shaped sensibilities of the new class fraction. I found that while clubbers perceived club cultures as radically disconnected from previous sub- and countercultures, at the same time in order to inhabit a desired subcultural identity, they

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employed strategies not dissimilar to late socialist everyday cultures of getting by. In the limited market offer and under-developed infrastructure of the ‘90s, their use of subcultural creativity was a strategy of distinction from the perceived mainstream. The performative effect of such a strategy can be understood in connection to attempts to diversify the market, and by extension lifestyles, during late socialism and transition. In the specific socio-economic and cultural context of post-socialist countries, subcultural creativity thus paradoxically connects to the forging of middle-class sensibilities in the way it diversifies taste cultures using the middle-class practice of distinction and othering, here formulated through the imaginary category of mainstream.

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