Do it yourself music : its role as a subculture in Thai popular music

Abstract

This thesis will explore and analyze the workings of popular culture, its process of inception into a culture and its relevance and functions in a culture. In the chapters that follow I trace and bring to light the value of modem music in Bangkok by first describing the climate and overall context that modern pop music is being created and wallows in. From there an analysis how underground or unpopular music is influential to the development of popular music and also even see why and how today’s underground music sounds the way it does and what it all means. Theoretical concepts of subculture will mostly follow concepts from Dick Hebdige's book. Subculture: the Meaning of Style (1979) and David Muggleton’s Inside Subculture: the Postmodern Meaning of Style (2000), an updated rendition of Hebdige’s work on music subcultures with revised concepts relevant to a more modern and globalized world. Subcultures are derived as a direct response to society’s popular culture. Subcultures are created from the void left by what the popular culture fails to offer, and in terms of music it’s the honest expression and experimentation in styles and sounds motivated by perception and opinions as opposed to marketing strategies and the glory of fame. The people who make up this music subculture achieved in creating an infrastructure for networking and building outside the confines of the popular music industry, enabling free expression of ideas, sounds and styles relevant to the society and environment that surrounds them. As products of their environment, subcultures are especially important as it enables lesser heard voices of society to be acknowledged and heard. As subcultures expand and gain popularity, the popular music industry is most likely to take subcultures and use their expressive forms for profit. It is in this stage we see original subcultures reinterpreted and transformed for mass consumption. It is also in this stage where we see shifts of styles and sounds within the underground, as it reacts to the popular culture reinterpreting their ideals. This ongoing process is what moves culture forward making it worthy to document and examine. Society would be one-sided without subcultures as subcultures provide the space for experimental, radical, eccentric, subversive ideals and thoughts that popular culture is reluctant to explore. In other words, the underground is a space for development of new ideals and ideologies, a space to work things out, a space that could centually lend to changes, reforms and growth of a society.