But in this pair of youtube clips, we see middle aged men at work, in their high-vis vests, still able to glide – subject to the constraints of those trainers and workboots, and the absence of talc-covered floor. It aint as pretty as in the old days at the Twisted Wheel or the Wigan Casino. But once you’ve got it, you don’t lose it. “Keep Going, Tommo”.

References

1. Paul Hodkinson (2011) ‘Ageing in a spectacular ‘youth culture’: continuity, change and community amongst older Goths’. The British Journal of Sociology. Volume 62 Issue 2, pp262-282.
2. Hodkinson, Paul (2002) Goth : identity, style, and subculture. Oxford : Berg.
3. Andrew Wilson, (2007) Northern soul : music, drugs and subcultural identity. Cullompton : Willan Pub.

More interesting though are the subtle manifestations of work within the lifeworlds of the people I studied, all British, all playing something loosely describable as ‘Americana’. The project became a photographic one, and in a minute I’ll write a few words about the daftness and delights of exploring the work of a musician using a silent medium. In the meantime, take a look at the clothes worn in the photos below. Style inspiration from Tom Joad: checked shirts aplenty, bought from Top Man or Urban Outfitters in imitation of a homespun Americana, this ‘plaid’ workwear was previously worn by a class of white agricultural workers who’ve since disappeared. The echoes are still seen and heard in the backrooms of pubs and on the small stages of provincial theatres, and have been for some years. Nowadays such check shirts, with their connotations of hard, masculine, manual labour can be seen on the backs of all sorts of folk, not just the musicians. But the Americana revival in Britain has played a role in this fashion, and is tied in with a notional claim to authenticity whereby the aesthetics of clothing suit the aesthetics of the sound.

But you can’t see the sound. Plaid shirts are one of the clues as to what you might imagine the sound is, assuming you have any sense of what Americana might sound like (and if not, there are plenty of recommendations on http://www.americana-uk.com).

(Click on image to see full photograph with analytic notes).

I started taking the photos in order to see differently the forms of work that made up performance: unloading, setting up, sound checking, and the transformation of the body needed to go from hefting amps to winning the attention of an audience. The first shots were in colour, the second and subsequent ones in black and white. Black and white seemed more fitting, given how in using photography (not video, not sound recording) I’d already removed enormous amounts of sense-data anyway. Reduction is the aim of most social research – take the complexity of the social world and make it manageable. Removing colour, movement and sound leaves the focus on the bodies at work, how they move, how they are held. So I built four sets of images of performances, all to focus attention on the body as it works on stage.

“Silence and immobility underpin the authority of the photography” suggests Lury (1998: 173). But I think she’s wrong. It’s impossible not to notice the silence here, and this is destabilising as it makes clear the utter partiality of what a photograph can ever claim to represent. Like all forms of social research, using photography as a way of gathering data and analysing the world produces only a small story of a sort of truth. Any reminder of the partiality of any representation is an important and useful form of humility. Noticing what is missing matters as much as remarking on what is there. And thinking about what might be there in addition to what can be seen is more than a parlour game, it is an act of imagination.

Reference

Lury, C. (1998) Prosthetic Culture: Photography, memory and identity. London: Routledge.

I have done some writing on the subject of ‘aesthetic labour’, the work of producing and presenting an acceptable working body, seen very clearly in Dawn’s post. In clothing retail in the UK, the cost of work clothing is usually borne by the employee and often has to come from current stock. Although employees may get a discount, the need to stay in fashion can be a burden to a worker on low wages; conceptually we can read this as showing how workers are implicated in consumption work as well as the labour market (Pettinger, 2008). Organisations’ demands for aesthetic labour reflects their presumptions about the importance of protecting and enhancing their ‘specific’ brand values (Pettinger, 2004), and marks a similarity between the postal worker and the sales assistant: both are configured as the embodiment of the corporation.

These postal workers will now be getting 5 euros a week for keeping themselves tidy; retail sales assistants are unlikely to start a similar campaign, tending instead celebrate the chance to “live it, love it, be the brand”, by buying themselves a nice new frock.

References

1. Pettinger, L. (2008) ‘Developing aesthetic labour: the importance of consumption’. International Journal of Work, Organisation and Emotions. 2 (4): 324–343.

2. Pettinger, L. (2004) ‘Branded stores, branded workers: service work and aesthetic labour in fashion retail.’ Consumption, Markets and Culture 7(2): 165–84.