Summary: Music, Culture and Society: Joseph Borlagdan <strong>The Paradox of “Do-It-Yourself” in Unpopular Music: Power, Capital, and Social Relations Within a Local Music Community</strong> Joseph Borlagdan This paper examines the construction of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) values in music-making. The importance of agency and participation as existing outside of the mainstream field of music is argued to be part of a process of music production, consumption and distribution that cannot be simplified according to a ‘mainstream versus alternative’ model. This dichotomy is a persistent one, but investigation into a small music making community revealed that social actors situating themselves in opposition to dominant norms will engage in complex and contradictory ways within the music field. It is more useful to talk of a continuum of music production rather than clearly bounded categorisations. To better conceptualise how this is negotiated within the milieu of social relationships, Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital as operating within a field of restricted cultural production will be used to explain how forms of sociality are organised around symbolic forms of music made for ‘art’s sake’. By applying this conceptual framework, struggles emerge in which music makers attempt to create their own self-determined autonomous space. Paradoxically, however, these moves towards independence are largely enabled and facilitated by the actor’s dependence on the social networks that constitute the field. The DIY ethic is therefore a misnomer of sorts that belies the inherently social and co-operative manner in which music is pursued against the grain of ‘the mainstream’.
