LazyMuthaFucka: Emotional Energy and Subcultural Politics 

Eric Ma  (photo by Ducky Tse)

Draft, Incomplete References, Photos not attached, Please Don’t Quote

This paper is a small part of an ethnographic study that tries to capture the moment of post-97 subcultural formation in Hong Kong. Local underground bands have recently been surfacing up as alternative lifestyle options for teenagers. Their oppositional noises can be heard in mini concerts, TV commercials and self-financed music albums. Critical to mainstream middle-class ideologies, these bands and their music serve as symbolic resources for cultural differentiation and discursive sites of popular resistance. Yet they have been quickly absorbed by consumerist discourses to a point in which their resistive postures seem to be on the edge of being vaporized into fashionable lifestyle commodities. The present paper will examine these discursive processes by a case study of a leading underground band and their affiliates.

LMF and Friends

LMF has been commercially the most successful among local underground bands since 1999. LMF started their first appearance in 1993 when a few groups come together to jam songs in a musical style that they would not usually do in their own bands. They called this ad-hoc group LMF, a name referring to one vocalist Ah Wah who is, in their words, a lazy mother fucker doing nothing except fooling around. Most of these bands were underground bands that did not engage in mainstream commercial operations. After this one-off performance, there had been no LMF for a few years since it was actually not a group in the first place. However, core members of the group had produced 4 CDs in the mid-1990s under the name Anodize. Among these underground bands, group boundaries are quite fluid and members from different groups join each other’s performances at different point of time. In 1998, Anodize and friends regrouped into LMF and produced their independent debut Album LazyMuthaFucka. The songs of this album are mostly about grassroots youth and their everyday life in public housing estates. They enthusiastically received among underground bands and music lovers but later picked up by the mainstream, especially zooming onto the issue of swearing, indecency and ‘bad’ effects on teenagers. 18,000 CDs were independently distributed and sold. Because of this initial success, LMF has been signed up under the wing of Warner Music and has produced two more albums after their debut in 1999.

In this case study, my primary informants are the 12 members of LMF. From LMF I have networked out and interviewed their friends [1] and five other independent bands. I have also befriended some concertgoers in mini concerts. In a later stage of the research, I was able to participate in their daily activities and attend recording sessions and stage performances. Thus my target community includes LMF members, fans, concertgoers, and a few independent band groups and their friends. I should emphasize that it is somewhat misleading to label this semi-open community as underground. The activities within the lifeworlds of the members of this community can fall into a spectrum, with one end relatively restrictive and the other end extended into ‘normal’ public life. Except some illegal activities (such as drawing graffiti and taking drug) which can be somehow considered as underground, most of their activities, music related or otherwise, are pretty ‘normal’. They are not doing something radically subversive. Yet, their lifestyles and aspirations are quite special, in the sense that they are usually discredited or condemned by mainstream institutions such as schools and the media. 

Emotional Energies

I am not particularly fond of rock and hip-hop music. As a ‘regular’ guy with rather mainstream musical taste and minimal musical knowledge, I experienced a series of surprises and uneasiness during my field study. These ethnographic adjustments are exploited to serve as the raw resources for this interpretative essay. My first encounter with these bands was in a concert where band groups screaming unintelligible lyrics on stage. As an academic with a strong desire to ‘collect data’, my attention in fieldworks has always been channeled towards the conceptual and the analyzable. At the very beginning, I inclined to look for cognitively analyzable data such as lyrics, visuals and conversations. However, as I become more involved, my encounters are more emotive, bodily and spatial. Band sound is more then lyrics. Indeed, screaming on stage was ‘unintelligible’, but a strong emotive power was clearly presented on stage through heavy musical rhythms, hysterical bodily movements and techno-electronic engineered noises.

Adapting Collins’ (1990) sociology of emotions, these band groups can be perceived as active producers of what he calls ‘emotion energies.’ They discursively mobilize oppressive energies of social stigmas thrown upon them, turn them around, and use these stigmas as their own identity resources for drawing boundary of inclusion and exclusion. These free flowing emotion energies are charged and re-charged in concerts, stored in CDs, pregnant in self-produced signs, and echoed in their own private underground spaces. Life history interviews of members indicate that most (nine out of ten) of them were ‘failures’ by elitist standards. They dropped out from schools, some had serious problems with their parents, and others had taken up free-lance jobs in CD shops, construction sites and delivery companies. Of course there are a few who obtained university degrees but they can hardly be considered as academic achievers. They do not integrate well into the mainstream. Durkheim asked a fundamental question of sociology: what holds society together? His answer is the mechanisms that produce moral solidarity. Collins suggests that these mechanisms do so by producing emotions. My informants exclude themselves from an imagined mainstream society. Antagonisms generate negative emotions, which build up barriers between these underground groups and the society at large. However, these negative emotional energies are used positively to mobilize in-group solidarity.

Social theories privilege rationality. For instances, in Marxian conflict theories, Weberiarn theory of bureaucratization and Durkheimian theory of solidarity, the role of emotionality in social formation is suggested but not explicitly discussed. These theoretical inclinations are quite compatible with the modernity project, which often calls for the taming of irrationality (or emotionality). In this paper, I try to use the case of underground bands to explore the emotionality of subcultural formation. With emotional energy, I refer to routine as well as dramatic emotions generated, maintained, dissipated and re-charged in interactional rituals within and between communities. It is somewhat similar to the psychological concept of drive, but emotional energy is more than personal and biographical, it is also collective, bodily, interactional and thus social and structural. I draw heavily on theories of ethnomethodology, which conceptualize and analyze the skills and methods deployed by ordinary people in daily interactions. My formulation combines Sacks’ Membership Categorization Device (MCD), Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, Bourdieu’s concept of habitat, and Giddens’ idea of ontological security. I will briefly outline each of these ingredients.

Sacks (1992) generalizes from conversation analysis a scheme he calls MCD analysis. He suggests that MCDs are ethno-devices socially installed and intuitively grasped. People within an imagined community interact by constantly making inference and categorizing ritual partners. They intuitively but reflexively accomplish appropriate exchanges by inferring from hints and cues of ‘category bounded activities’, putting partners into popular membership categorizations, and react accordingly. During interactional rituals, partners improvise and revise MCDs by mutual testing. Rituals are all locally accomplished by these culturally stable MCDs.

Garfinkel never uses the term MCD, but MCDs are what he would call ethnomethods that ordinary people deploy. Garfinkel adds an emotional dimension to MCD. He shows that humans have intrinsically limited cognitive capabilities, and that they construct mundane social interaction by avoiding recognizing their reflexivity in deploying these MCDs. In his ‘breaching’ experiments, he finds out that if people’s taken-for-granted ethnomethods are challenged, intense negative emotions would be triggered (Garfinkel, 1967). Ordinary people are ethno- methodologically skillful, but they exercise their skills without explicitly aware of their own reflexive navigation. This ethno-accomplishment maintained a routine level of emotional energy, which builds solidarity. People will display dramatic emotional energies when they are forced to acknowledge their ethno-activities.

Sacks’ MCD and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology are micro, inward looking and interpersonal, while Bourdieu’s (1984, 1977) concept of habitat is more outward looking. It is a concept that relates the personal and the social. Habitats are structurated by cultural and economic capitals. However, actor-in-habitat can have the limited flexibility to improvise with available capitals to accomplish social differentiations. Giddens, along similar line, extend the personal and social to the epochal structuration of modernity (1991). He situates self-identity within the project of modernity and explores how individuals scope with the existential anxiety of deskilling and reskilling under the discipline of capitalist modernity. Giddens’ ‘protective cocoon,’ which balances ontological security and existential anxiety, can be compared to Sack’ MCDs, Garfinkel’s enthmethodology and Bourdieus’ habitats, except it is more ambitious in bridging the micro and the macro. He theorizes the mechanism of reducing anxieties when MCDs, ethno-methods, habitats are destabilized by the trajectory of modernity. The reflexive activities of de-skilling and re-skilling maintain self-identity and stabilize emotional energies within a protective cocoon. In other words, people are skillfully re-construct ethno-methods to survive macro and epochal changes.

Adapting these formulations into the concept of emotional energy, I propose to study subcultural formation as on-going construction of alternative ethnomethods by subverting and reworking emotional energies of the larger society. When mainstream MCDs (Sacks) are challenged and inverted, intense emotional energies are generated (Garfinkel). These emotion energies are the glue and repellent for stabilizing mainstream and differentiating subcultural habitats (Bourdieu), producing numerous emotionally charged identity ‘cocoons’ in high modernity (Giddens). This emotive and ethnomethodological approach to subculture has the strength of bridging psychological drive with collective desire, connecting micro personal action with macro social interaction, and articulating the cultural with the structural. It can also bypass the binary of domination and resistance in subculture studies by seeing the connection between the wild and tamed emotion energies within the ethnomethods running though different dominant and subordinate social groups. Emotional energies are polymorphous. It can serve as resistive energy and at the same time absorbed by the market and the elite to re-energize economic and cultural formation.

This essay is thus an attempt to capture the working of these emotional energies in the case of post-97 underground music in Hong Kong. I try to present my ethnographic encounter by both analytic and visual means, so as to re-direct the emotive aspects of the experiences into the interpretive format of this paper. Images are produced by award winning photographer Ducky Tse, who has participated in most of the fieldworks of this study. It should be noted that the visuals and analyses are not presented here as representations or documentaries. They are expressive treatments of our ethnographic encounters. Ducky treats the images independently. Instead of giving me visual ‘records,’ he dramatizes and retouches the images to express his own visual interpretations.

1.       Fears and Spatial Frictions

During my two months of intensive fieldwork, casual conversations with outsiders (those initially not familiar with LMF and their music) indicated that their first impressions of LFM and other imagined underground bands ranged from curiosity to anxieties and sometimes fear. Outsiders’ perceptions are often clouded with the cultural imaginations of criminality, violence and aggressiveness. From an ethno methodological point of view, people ‘above ground’ are used to a set of ethno methods, which will facilitate effective everyday encounters by providing hints and cues concerning appropriateness, normality and dangers.

Underground band groups often use signs of danger to mark off boundary and territory. They inscribe onto their body and their life world conspicuous signs of trouble such as tattoos, metallic accessories, long hairs, and leather boots. Devilish posters, fierce looking figures, machine guns, and seemingly chaotic array of equipments and gears fill up their band rooms. These are not necessarily signs of danger; interpretations depend on the set of ethno-methods one is deploying. Perhaps some of these subcultural signs, like tattoos, have already been more or less appropriated by youth groups to be symbols of being hip and trendy. I will come back to this at a later stage. But the conspicuous display of dramatic signs inhibits easy psychological and interpersonal access. In their words, they like things that are ‘a bit evil.’ Although none of my informants are members of triad gangs, many of them have permanent tattoos that make them look like gangsters. One informant recalled: “In the past, when we went to concerts, we didn’t have to queue. Those poor people were scared and they stayed away from us. We just walked in.” Some of them told me that, ten years back, when they started to take on their conspicuous bad boy appearances, policemen always spot checked them at night. Members of band groups have always been easy target for police. When they go out in groups, police read it as sign of trouble and interrogate them in the streets.

An ethnographic episode is relevant here. I went out cycling with them one night. We formed a gang of about 12, including 5 LMF members, 5 of their friends, Ducky the photographer and me. We speeded through empty streets and parks from 2:00 AM till 7:00 AM. Sometimes we stopped for a while and let graffitian AhYan spray his paints on the walls. This is illegal. We had to look out for him. In one quite amusing episode, we spotted a foreigner with a heavy build jogging towards us. It was 6:00 AM in the early morning. Some suggested the approaching man might be a retired policeman, and we told Yan to hurry up. “100 meters, 90 meters…” we whispered as Yan was giving his final touch. The big man noticed that in front of him was a gang of ‘trouble-makers’ with heavy-duty bicycles idling on the street. He avoided us by slowing down quietly, pretending to take a rest, and facing away from us. We are not violent at all, but our appearances are setting up what Harvey (1989) calls ‘spatial friction’ that separates in-group and out-group space by physical, semiotic and emotional barrier. My experience is that once this spatial friction has been overcome, this group of people is friendly and quite straight forwards. To build up boundary and scare off outsiders, they deploy signs that are commonsensically considered to be evil and aberrant. These markers, as inverted MCDs, are effective because they are loaded with negative emotional energy. Those signs that are “a bit evil” are inverted to become sacred anchor of collective pride and sense of solidarity.

2.       Subverting Time

Besides inverting signs of good and evil, my informants also re-prioritize work and play and time and space. Most underground band groups prefer to jam at night. Some have routine daytime jobs, but most LMF members and their affiliates have long been practicing a lifestyle that subverts normal routine. They stay up very late and sleep during the day. They make a living by free-lance jobs serving as stage crews, musicians, technicians, and private music tutors. Besides music, most of them are indulged in different kinds of games. They like war game and cycling; some are frantic collectors of guns, tank models and plastic figures. One told me that for the past 10 years, he had been very lazy and would stop working if he earned enough for the day. Now he doesn’t work at all because he can get money from LMF.

If capitalistic modernity is about the precision management of time and turning it into effective and measurable units, then LMF members are somehow resisting this by privileging space over time. Time seems to be frozen within the closed space inside the band room. Band room activities are more spatial then temporal. Most band groups prefer to have their own band room instead of hiring commercial band rooms on an hourly basis. Inside a band room, time gives way to space. Band rooms are saturated with excessive spatial markers such as windowless walls, overcrowded musical instruments, dim lighting, DIY partitions, etc. These privileged spaces allow members to engage in activities that they cannot normally do at home and at the workplaces. Members bring to the band rooms things that they personally love but may not be acceptable to family members at home. Graffiti, unfamiliar decors and chaotic set-ups render these spaces emotionally charged and identity conferring.

These spaces are restricted to outsiders. Play comes before work. An episode of ethnographic adjustment is illustrative here. One night Jim told me to start cycling at mid-night. We gathered in a private den. I had 6 hours of lecture starting early morning in the next day. So I was quite eager to be sharp on time and finished it up by 2:00 am. However, we hadn’t started till 3:00 am. I was very anxious and constantly checking the time. Yet, they were hanging around in their base camp ‘doing nothing.’ The base camp is actually a rented apartment that resembles a private clubhouse, a few blocks away from the LMF band room. It is inside a worn-out building at the heart of an over-populated down town area. In that night, while I was waiting anxiously, they spent their time in front of their video play station, smoking marijuana and throwing drat. Gradually, as I adjusted myself and tried to enter into their time scheme, I started to realize how disciplined I am with time. I have an automatic clock of calculating cost-effectiveness and an installed program of time management. However, play is most essential to them. It doesn’t matter whether it is cycling or playing dart. It was me who wanted to ride on those big bicycles on time; I wanted to collect data and take exotic photos for my book. They have a different set of ethno-methods, which depart from the work value and ‘productive time’ of the mainstream, and they have been doing this for many years.

Young (1971) distinguishes between formal work values and subterranean values of play. In the adult workaday world, ‘normal’ people affirm the values of deferred gratification, future planning, predictability and hard productive work. However, some subculture groups, such as some LMF members and their friends, accentuate the values of short-term hedonism, spontaneity, and autonomy. In modernity, the socialization of a child involves a transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, from the world of play to the world of productivity. In this process, subterranean values are restricted and framed within the discourse of reward, recreation, relaxation, catharsis, and consumerist leisure. But in the lifeworld of my informants, subterranean values are prime values. I don’t want to dramatize this. Most of them are fairly OK in time-management when it comes to concert performance and studio recording sessions. Some of them have full time jobs, which required precise timing. Besides, they are engage in all sorts of normal social and economic activities that most people of the larger society do everyday. Nevertheless, while fulfilling routine duties is sometime necessary, they are inclined to transgress the disciplinary time machine of the workaday world. Playing is not a relaxation after which productivity can be increased. For some of them, play is an end in itself.

3.       DIY: in and out of control

If you look at these band groups from a mainstream middle-class ideology, generally defined, their disdain of work, their indulgences in different kinds of games, their ‘hysterical’ shaking and dancing on stage, and their ‘chaotic’ lifestyle all lead to the conclusion that their lives are pretty out of control. However, in their own world, they are experts in remodeling, re-assembling and re-mixing of all kinds of given resources available to them. Their band rooms were designed and refurnished by themselves and have been continuously renovated and upgraded. Ah Wah, the laziest among the LazyMuthaFucka, told me that he did most of the renovation when they first rented the bandroom in 1993. The wires, pipes and sockets were all installed on the spot. But everything was mixed up. A friend who was a technician visited the place and told him that he had done it all wrong. Anyhow, posters, wallpaper and sound absorbing materials have covered up all those technical mistakes. The band room is now saturated with DIY decorations.

They build toy models. They rebuild their bicycles. Another band group has built a hawker cart. That band sold meatballs on the street for a while. They re-assemble legal CO₂ guns, increasing muzzle energy to an illegal and lethal level. Another group publishes a music magazine on bands and skateboarding. The magazine, which is called ‘Start from Scratch’, now into its 7^th issue, is produced and distributed by the group itself, without the help of commercial publisher and distributors. Of course, the most prestigious attempt among band groups is the independent production of their own CD albums. There are many stories of how CDs are produced by borrowing money from friends and parents, of sharing studios and equipment, and exchanging drummers and guitarists to get recordings done.

Their flexible recreation of resources is empowered by technologies. Skilled in managing sound technologies, they get around unexpected malfunctions and technical limitations by skillful improvisation during performances. In concerts, a substantial portion of emotion energy is generated by electronic guitars, high power amplifiers, gigantic drum sets and sophisticated mixers. Emotions will be flattened if concerts are cut off from the power of modern techno-electronic sound system. Electronic is the technical core of band sound. On stage, you can see wires snaking everywhere. Drummers are submerged in their drum sets that make them look larger than life. Electronic guitars are amplifying their ability of producing heart throbbing rhythms. Guitarists shake and jump when they plug into the ‘electric energy’ of the systems. Performer and fans can both experience this techno-power when the sound waves are beating across the concert halls. Machines and men are one.

DIY improvisations are ‘energy consuming’ in a work-and-spend consumer culture. Ready-made products, user-friendly services and instant-consumerable goods can increase turnover, boost sales, save time, strengthen production, and enable precise marketing control. To rehabilitate assembly-line-monotony, post-Fordist mechanisms ensure an easy but exciting life for consumers by providing a constant flow of ready-made but individualized niche products. In fact, DIY products have been developed into another line of niche products. A little bit of DIY can satisfy customers who need more autonomy and flexibility.

Instant goods are time saving, so that consumers can have more time to work and more time to spend. It is energy consuming to improvise because we are not accustomed to re-creation. Consumerist ethnomethods have been McDonaldized, sliding into the ready-made track of niche marketing. However, DIY improvisations are the survival tactic of the underprivileged. With limited resources, they make do by the arts of breaking and mixing whatever is available to them. Ironically, this energy consuming ethnomethods can generate alternative emotional energies of self confidence, autonomy, freedom and a sense of active agency. DIY is emotionally satisfying. DIY rituals of underground bands are charging up energy for members to construct their own sense of confidence and self-worth.

4.       Translocality

Translocality refers to the exchange of very localized lifeworlds between far away sites. The alternative emotion energies of local underground bands are partly appropriated from transnational symbolic resources. Translocal underground music culture from afar has frequently been used as discursive linkage to energize the local music scene. Emotional energies travel across cultural boundaries through the mediation of translocal music subculture. In the ‘habitats’ of Hong Kong band groups, there are CDs, posters and images of foreign bands. In photo *, you can see guitarist Jimmy standing in front of a collage of westerns images. His hairstyles, eyeglasses, T-shirts are all compatible and comparable to those images behind him. Most of them recalled that when they started out, they acquired knowledge of band music mostly by reading music magazines and listening to western groups.

In recent years, American hip-hop styles such as graffiti, rapping (speaking over music), and disc scratching have been appropriated from aboard. LMF member Ah Yan told me that his music is acquired by reading western Hip Hop history. In fact, my own very limited knowledge about Hip Hop comes from books that I borrowed from him. Ah Yan has a very personal liking of American Indian crafts. He has a collection of Indians artifacts and inscribed onto his own private microphone a pattern resembles Indian Totems (photo *). He likes to tell the history of how Indian culture was ripped out by the Americans. This small piece of history of oppression, and many others bit and piece he learnt from aboard, have been used to energize and fuel his own desire of resisting what he is facing locally. They remind him of the need to defend marginalized groups like themselves in the oppressing and homogenizing culture in Hong Kong.

Disc scratching, a DIY musical element of Hip Hop culture, can serve as another example of translocal transfer. DJ Tommy, the disc scratcher of LMF, learnt this form of music in the early 1990s from black American hip-hop. He then introduced his craft to LMF and now disc-scratching has been incorporated into the band as an important musical element of the group. Disc scratching involves mixing and blending music from existing albums. Its originality and creativity are exhibited in ‘stealing’ and ‘copying,’ a postmodern favor of creating over creation. Hip Hop is now global, yet local scratchers like Tommy can always localize their particular brand of music scratching by injecting domestic musical elements. Tommy disc scratches into his music some very old-fashioned Cantonese songs, which he has collected from second hand shops in Temple Street.

As I am more involved with my informants, grand discourses of cultural imperialism, globalization, and homogenization turn pale in empirical cases. The irony is that the life world of my informants is saturated with foreign cultural elements and yet they are producing very localized spaces and styles with these ‘alien’ elements. In the midst of a Hong Kong style old building in Mongkok, LMF has built their own band room and peppered it with Japanese and American plastic figures, imported instruments, and piles of western albums. This underground den is definitely local. It is a big weird nest with global and local leaves and branches. This translocal space is craved out in very localized city space, from which very domestic life histories have been structurated in a DIY fashion. Those translocal elements are employed by local bands to empower themselves and their fans and to over-come very localized problem they are facing in Hong Kong.

5.       Dramatized Masculinity

There are more men then women in local band groups. Most bands are groups of all male. In the local community of bands, there are signs of dramatized masculinity everywhere, erecting penises and naked women are among the most obvious. In photo *, photographer Ducky associates a penis ashtray with rolls of toilet tissue. This photo reminds me of the conversation among band members saying that if they bring girlfriends to the band room, they should also bring toilet paper and condom with them. Penis, cigarettes, wastes and ashes are amusingly brought together. It is not uncommon that vocalists hold their penises while singing and dancing on stage. In the back stage during a concert, I overheard a story told by concert organizers saying that a group masturbated and ejaculated while they perform. How far this story is merely a story is not the point, what is interesting is that it was retold as if it had a legendary aura attached to it. All these somehow suggest the valorization of sexual power and transgression of sexual taboos.

Inside band rooms, there are images of sexy and naked women mixed with images of machine guns, weapons and military figures. They talked about how exciting it was to fire at rats, frogs, tin cans and used CDs. ‘Senior’ LMF members said they can’t write songs about love because most of them are fooling around: “We have 3 to 4 ‘pieces’ with us. How can we talk about (romantic) love?” I was quite surprised when one of them said he ought to have kids because he is the only child; he has the responsibility to marry a woman and have a son to bear his family name. Some others said that obedient is the most important criterion for those girls who want to ‘follow’ them. Photo * captures the cheerful moment when a group of 4 male members of a youngster band viewing a home video of themselves watching a pornographic comic book. This is a mediation of mediation of pornography. In my field study, I have seen girl friends waiting backstage, preparing examinations inside very noisy band room, or tenderly taking care of their boyfriends after performances. Although many male band members have been revising mainstream ideologies on various fronts, they seem to take for granted those mediated representations of obedient, sexy and exploitable women and dramatize their masculinity through explicit symbolic reproduction of sexist signs. 

I am not suggesting patriarchal ideology of a specific group or person. There are a few who take up a not so masculine posture. Yet it is quite easy to spot patriarchal values through inscribed signs and casual conversations. In the case of black American Hip Hop, the circulation of some woman hating songs suggests that part of the reason can be related to the emotional conflicts between downward mobile black males and upward mobile black females (Nelson, 1998). In the case of Hong Kong, dramatized masculinity among band groups has not been developed into a situation that breeds the production of women hating songs. However, among my informants, their deficiencies in socio-economic and educational terms can indeed be compensated by dramatizing their masculinity in physical and musical terms. Besides, the desire to express oneself through transgression, sensuality, sexuality, physicality and emotionality may have also contributed to the uninhibited subscription to patriarchal ideology.       

6.       Rage

Lam Ke is an upcoming band, which won the Asian Independent Band Contest in 2000. They believed that the reason why they stood out among hundreds of veteran bands from all over Asia was that, on stage, they had delivered something distinctively Hong Kong, and it was rage. “That (award winning) song is a song of extreme rage,” they said. Rage is complicated. It can be personal, subcultural and social. The life worlds and ideologies of underground bands intercut with other groups in the society at large. Underground bands differentiate themselves by dramatizing masculinity, subverting capitalized time and inverting symbolic emotions of fear and anxiety. They inflict upon themselves the stigmas forced upon them by the mainstream (again, mainstream here is more an discursive/imaginative then a descriptive term). They are very often stigmatized as academic losers, troublemakers and violent gangsters. In return, they self-stigmatize themselves by inflating and inscribing signs of troubles given to them. The irony is that they inflated these stigmas and at the same time attacking the stupidity of stigmatization. They absorb the emotional energy and turn it into hardboiled rage against the education system, the media, the adult world and the government.

LMF members said they are not good at talking about politics in their songs. They know little about it. What they really care about are those trivial things in their daily lives. The life histories of most informants have episodes of conflicts with the establishment. When they were in their teenage years, they found that upward mobile formulas offered to them by teachers, parents and mainstream media could not solve their own problems of growing up. Many of them have developed a critical stand towards the very restrictive lifestyle options offered by parents and approved by the elite. Their rage has a biographical base.

Thus rage generated by underground bands is polymorphic. First, it is partly fueled by the rebellious spirit of independent music incorporated translocally. Second, this rage can be charged by personal frustrations in schools, families and the workplaces. Third, rage can also be a tactic of differentiating a youth identity in contrast with the adult and the established world. Fourth, some teenage band groups are relatively well-off. For these privileged kids, they have a tendency to use the emotional energy of rage as fashionable signs and identity labels. I will come back to this the section on commodification. Fifth, in the particular juncture of the post-97 Hong Kong, underground rage can also be articulated and channeled into popular anti-establishment discourses. There are obvious thematic parallels between underground music and public sentiments on the widespread dissatisfaction with the tabloid media, the education system and the conservative polity. I will come back to this in the concluding section.

7. Transgression

Outsiders often associate underground bands with various forms of ‘deviant’ behaviors. These may be merely imaginative or induced by self-stigmatization (e.g., the association of tattoo with violence). Some other deviancies are cultural (e.g. swearing, smoking and casual sex). Whether these are deviant is arguable. Underground bands often transgress these arguable norms and stimulate dispute and disapproval. Here, I will discuss drug abuse and illegal graffiti, which render these groups unarguably underground.

There has recently been high-profile media coverage on drug abuse among teenagers at disco and rave parties in Hong Kong. [2] Drug taking teenagers are depicted as irrational victims and school failures. Government officials, social workers and the general public articulate a powerful consensus condemning drug abuse, which is causally associated with grave personal, family and social problems. Most of my informants are quite sensitive to the powerful discourse on drug. Since they have a public face and are not completely underground, they are conscious of the need to get around these public discourses and at the same time stick to their own impulse of transgressing social norms. In fact, LMF member Ah Sum is working on a film in which he tries to encourage teenagers not to take drugs. But most of them are very direct and frank in talking about their habit of smoking marijuana. During my first life history interviews with LMF members, Phat smoked marijuana with a glass pipe in front of my two female students and me. The leaders of the band told me frankly that they have been smoking it for more than ten years. Most of them try to differentiate different types of drug abuse and they are all against heroin, cocaine and other popular drugs, which they think are addictive and may cause permanent bodily damage. They smoke marijuana for relaxation, socializing, and boosting up sensitivity and creativity. There are also ‘straight edges’ among band groups. Straight edges are those who take no drug, no alcohol and no casual sex. Both drug users and straight edges are quite tolerant to each other.

Another illegal activity is drawing graffiti. Since it is rather new to Hong Kong, it is not widely considered as vandalism. Graffiti appears in T-shirt, band rooms and band shows, and on the walls in various parts of the city. Ah Yan started to draw graffiti in Hong Kong about two years ago, since then he has been drawing illegal graffiti, training ‘disciples’, and hired to paint legally in specific sites. The public and the police are ambivalent. Last year, when Yan painted with a foreign graffitian, both of them were spotted by a policeman. Yan just stopped right there because he knew Hong Kong policemen were not quite sure of what he was doing. However, the foreign graffitian, fully aware of the legal consequence, tried to run away. The police called for a chase not because he thought graffiting was vandalism, but because he sensed trouble when he saw a man running at mid-night. Several police cars rushed to the scene. The police later discovered that they were just ‘painting’ and thought it was not a serious crime, yet they could not call it off because police cars had been summoned and report had to be written. They were both caught and charged. Similar stories have been circulated among teenagers and amplified by the media. Illegality ‘charges up’ subculture by conferring the transgressors an aura of bravery and rebellion.

Drawing graffiti is a spatial subversion by reclaiming city space symbolically. Against macro spatial practices by property developers, advertisers and city planners, graffitians mark their presences by conspicuous display. They earn prestige among underground graffitians by putting on walls their name tags, throw-ups and masterpieces. [3] The more difficult the graffiti and the more dangerous the circumstances, the more emotional energy they will acquire by achieving it. The emotional energy they gained is derived from how far legal restrictions they have transgressed. For the general public, transgression generates negative emotions because it challenges moral consensus and legal power. However, for subculture groups, transgression generates positive emotions, which confer status to the transgressor. For the underground community, the extent of illegality articulates with the level of emotional energies. Yet subcultural energies will dissipate if transgressions become legal and fashionable. This brings us to the last section on the appropriation of subculture by the mainstream.

8.       Re-enchanting consumption

Underground bands share an ambivalent attitude towards mainstream media. Although the fame conferred by media exposure seems hard to resist, there is still a rough consensus that discourages close relation with the media. To them, going commercial and entering the mainstream is a sign of weakness and compromise. Recently, LMF members have appeared at commercials, interviews, and various promotional activities. They have attracted sporadic criticisms from other independent bands. To maintain a critical posture, LMF has been tactically utilizing the media to negotiate their own financial survival but at the same time continue to defy social norms and the rules of the media.

These seemingly contradictory processes are in fact complementary. Here I want to insert two relevant ethnographic episodes. In one promotional activity, a local Beer sponsored a rave party and hired LMF for a brief performance. The admission ticket was HK$ 250 per head. Instead of taking up an onlooker’s role, I joined the crowd on the dance floor, which was on a lower level. Those on the dance floor had to actually ‘look up’ to the surrounding stages. On these surrounding platforms, there were more then 30 photographers. They were all armed with king size professional cameras pointing at the dancing floor and the front stage where LMF was performing. It was quite an awesome scene watching from below: cameras above were pointing down at us, aggressively capturing frantic facial expressions and body movements of sexy girls ‘dancing out of their mind.’ The media was tapping into this energy producing ritual in order to re-charge their pages with the exotic images of stigmatized youths. In the near climax of the performance, a couple representing the sponsor jumped in for a lucky draw. Of course, LMF members were fully aware of their role as cultural intermediary in all these processes of stigmatization and commodification. ‘Fuck the media,’ LMF screamed on stage; ‘Fuck the media,’ the pretty well-off audience on the dance floor shouted back.

Another episode was in a band show organized by Polytechnic University. One of the sponsors was a new fashion magazine called ‘Cool’. The promoter asked the lighting technician to project their logo onto the background of the stage, thus mixing LMF’s very energetic performance with the logo of the magazine. The cover story of the magazine is about LMF: the Trendiest Group in Town, headlined the cover of the first issue. The in-story has portraits of all 12 LMF members in stylistic close-ups, with captions telling what kinds of fashion each of them wears. It is tapping onto LMF energetic stage performance, transferring LMF’s bad boy image into the magazine, reframing LMF members as trendsetter, and exploiting their emotional energies to become the aura embedded in the consumerist ideology of the magazine. Emotional energy is a wild card for many situations. It can serve as resistive energy and at the same time absorbed by the market and the elite to re-energize dominant economic and cultural formation.

Market developers constantly need to tap into all forms of emotional energies to re-charge cultural products and material goods. Market-driven dynamics have led to what Ritzer (1999) calls product disenchantment: fordist mode of production erases whatever fresh and special along the assembly line, while post-fordist mode seeks to re-enchant products by constantly adding in exotic elements. Underground bands, with their excessive signs and overflowing emotional energies, become ideal resources for re-enchanting the disenchanted world. Since subcultures have highly inflated markers of differences, they are easy targets for stigmatization by mainstream media. Ironically, the stronger the stigmatization, the more emotional energies are pumped into these subcultural forms. These emotional energies can be deployed by subculture groups to foster solidarity; they can also be absorbed and appropriated by the mainstream to recreate fashionable commodities.

Subcultural Formation

In this concluding section, I would like to connect the above ethnographic case to the socio-political context of post-97 Hong Kong. LMF exhibits many sub-cultural features. In the colonial years, similar subcultural features were quite difficult to surface up and incorporate into wider collective forms. When Hong Kong was still a colony without a nation, both the Chinese and British government refrained from imposing strong nationalistic imperatives. This meant, for many years, Hong Kong people did not have a strong historical or national narrative against which they could negotiate or situate their own subjectivity. Colonial politics was mysteriously disguised by administrative diversion (Law, 1998; Chiu, 1997). Besides, Hong Kong has been an immigrant society for many years. As an immigrant society, the cultural makeup of Hong Kong did not privilege an elite culture (Luk, 1995). Or put it in another way, elitist/traditional Chinese culture was recognized only as a remote cultural authority but did not have a dominant discursive power in the everyday life of Hong Kong people. Thus the painstaking valorization of popular culture against the hegemony of the State and high culture in some of the now classic Birmingham projects deem not readily relevant in the Hong Kong context. In Hong Kong, the mass culture debate had been less intense. In fact, popular culture cut across grass root and elite classes to became the cradle of a collective local identity in the 1970s and the1980s (Ma, 1999).

Thus in the colonial years, subculture energies had been absorbed by Hong Kong’s upward mobile economy and non-interventionist polity. Without the productive discipline of a dominant high culture, Hong Kong’s post-war cultural formation had arguably been a process of mainstreaming different subcultures to form a secular and energetic local culture. These contextual factors have been undergoing gradual changes since the sovereignty reversion in 1997. The discourses of re-nationalization, downward mobility, failed market economy, and weak local governance may have contributed to the post-97 subcultural formation in which the intertextual and socio-cultural web of band culture is one of the most conspicuous displays.

In the particular juncture of post-97 Hong Kong, excessive subcultural energies have been connecting to salient public sentiments. Hong Kong has experienced quite drastic re-construction in terms of its political, economic and cultural make-up. These changes have generated strong emotions, which over-spill to different walks of life. Workers are disappointed with structural unemployment, middle class families have been struck by the collapse of property markets, lawyers are protesting against the erosion of the rule of law, and doctors against the deteriorating working conditions in the medical field. At the same time, the SAR government was accusing the general public and the media of spilling out too much bitterness and acridity. These negative emotion energies dilute social solidarity and encourage dissolution and oppositions.

This is not the place to give a substantive structural analysis of post-97 Hong Kong, suffice here to generalize a few discursive formations, which tend to bridge underground emotional energies with the public sentiments of the larger society.  First, the economic crisis in 1997 and its after effects have triggered a series of chain reactions. The discourse of unfailing capitalism can no longer serve as a base from which local identity was built. Widening gap between the rich and poor breeds despair and unrest, but at the same time the myth of upward mobility has failed to absorb and dissipate the emotional energies of the underprivileged as in the past. Second, recent public acridity has something to do with the crash between progressive political desire and regressive political infrastructure. During the1990s, proposals of political reforms and the Sino-British dual political structure encouraged the development of high expectations on democratic politics. However, the Hong Kong SAR government has been quite conservative in political reform. As a result, unfulfilled public expectation has turn into frequent protest and oppositional discourses mediated by the populist media. Third, growing discourse of re-nationalization, strong central political imposition, and weak local governance have generated unrest and cultural maladjustments.

These discursive processes are compatible with the subcultural energies generated by underground bands. In the case of LFM, the biographical meets with the socio-cultural. The subcultural style of LMF are class based. Some members of the group are restricted to a lower social stratum, deprived by the education system, and categorized by elitist ideology as academic losers. However, their talents have been re-directed into music. Together they have fostered an alternative lifestyle, which is not necessarily subversive, but are different from those options offered by schools, the media and the established middle class. Unable or unwilling to follow the mainstream, they have been finding alterative ethnomethods of survival by challenging and inverting established ethnomethods of the larger society. They are reversing seemingly negative emotions of fear, rage, shame and inferiority into positive emotions of solidarity and rebellion. In the context of post-97 Hong Kong, the emotional energies they generated transpire through subcultural boundaries and articulate with public acridity and disappointment. These energies have been amplified and re-charged by media stigmatization and commercial absorption, and subsequently articulate into a messy web of antagonistic discourses, which has marked the subcultural politics of post-97 Hong Kong.

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