Making music, re-making leisure in The Beat of Boyle Street

Abstract

This dissertation represents my doctoral research in The Beat of Boyle Street, a recreation project that taught young people (ages 14-20) attending an inner city charter school to make their own music using computers and audio production software. The five papers and my research proposal are written to stand alone, but are commonly connected across theoretical, methodological, and analytical issues related to “doing” popular culture in musical leisure contexts with young people. The first paper presents methodological considerations for conducting and constructing an ethnographic bricolage, mixing various theoretical perspectives and methods as necessary in relation to popular culture, music, and leisure. I describe these processes through the hip-hop musical metaphor of “remixology.” The second paper offers a “performance text” as an alternative form of authoring ethnographic research. The “album tracks” retold as performance text articulate my struggles to develop a satisfactory means of representing the research— simultaneously musical, poetic, narrative, and performative—and reporting on the processes of the study. These processes included producing and sharing music in order to build rapport and respectful relationships, valuing participants’ musical interests, and including young people’s perceptions in the research. The third paper considers narrative soundscape compositions that indicate how young people politically use and negotiate city spaces, popular culture, and identities, thus acting as cultural “border crossers” in their everyday lives. The fourth paper provides autoethnographic accounts (with Karen Fox) which question how we have listened to different voices of young people involved in the research and reflect on the presence of our own voices and listening practices in our engagements. While listening to the stories told through rap music is vital, we emphasize that research/practice dialogue is a co-production between performers and active listeners. Our narratives represent ways we have struggled with what is (dis)missed in leisure research/practice, particularly when leisure meanings seem different, dangerous, violent, or otherwise “deviant.” In the concluding paper, I (re)locate key relationships between leisure and popular culture, advocating movements toward a “cultural studies of leisure” in order to better understand relations between power, identity work, and cultural consumption and production in youth musical leisure contexts.