Dr Jess Blaise Ward

Online music communities are a vital method of genre formation in the 21st century. In a Web 2.0 (or 3.0) virtual space which transcends geographical boundaries, a multitude of artists, audiences, musicians, producers and performers come together to negotiate subcultural capital in a collective capacity. With new subcultural styles, rituals, practices, and cultural disseminations, how can we assess the activities of an online community and their role in the formation of a genre? This 5-year and 6-month (2017-2023) ethnographic study examined the ecosystem of the online synthwave community, a 21st century style of music which both privileges and reimagines 1980s musical and cultural aesthetics. It includes autoethnographic work, with music composition, production and performance being key tenets of the author’s positionality. Paired with an emic viewpoint, this thesis makes visible tacit knowledge of the synthwave creative process, as well as providing rich and experiential subcultural detail about the online community. The research concluded that the synthwave community is an active community of practice with a defined set of musical, stylistic, technological and subcultural rules. By examining the tensions observable within the outputs, interactions, and discourses of this community of practice, as well as through the author’s participation as a creator, the research addresses how online music communities (including creators and audiences) construct and negotiate parameters of an emergent musical style. The research is (to date) the first ethnographic account of the online synthwave community and provides a first-hand telling of its ecosystem as a community of practice. Ultimately, this research traces the genre formation of an ‘internet-based creative practice’ (Born, 2018, p.606) known as synthwave. Key implications of the research findings implore the potential for making connections between communities of practice and genre formation in other areas of popular music, particularly of genres which exist primarily (or were formed initially) online.

Making Synthwave: How an Online Music Community Invented a Genre documents the journey of an online community in their formation of the synthwave genre. Taking an emic perspective that delivers a behind-the-scenes, access-all-areas telling of synthwave's story from the very beginning to the mid 2020s, this ethnographic account offers a full history and development of the online synthwave community. Through an insightful longitudinal virtual ethnography by a composer, producer and performer, the book observes how artists, audiences, musicians, producers and performers have come together to negotiate the musical and cultural boundaries of 1980s 'throwback' style synthwave. The book makes visible tacit knowledge of the synthwave creative process, as well as providing rich and experiential subcultural detail that situates synthwave as an active community of practice which formulated its roots as a music genre exclusively online in the mid to late 2000s. This book is essential reading for music makers in a variety of genres and scholars of popular music, cultural theory and music production, as well as those interested in the nuances of music-making on the internet, creative processes with synthesizers and the mechanics of genre theory and community music in the digital age.

Who remembers post-punk? Its cultural and musical presence in the late 1970s and the early 1980s is often celebrated by many, despite the numerous hardships that British society faced. From industrial disputes and strikes to anti-Thatcherism and youth unemployment, it was a transitionary time in British history. How do we remember post-punk? Established since the 1940s, memory work and oral histories provide an opportunity for this, although they simultaneously raise a multitude of issues, not least from terminology. ‘Individual memory’ and ‘collective memory’ both allow for misrepresentations, although Sara Jones contends that the latter ‘requires actors, both individual and institutional, to construct, transmit, and support particular narratives of the past’. It is hence paramount to ask: who has been permitted to remember? When considering memory alongside gender identity and post-punk, one can observe some of the opportunities that it afforded women, and yet debate continues to contest their ‘empowerment’ and ‘increased’ representation in popular music. Historically much memory work has been conducted by women, whilst oral histories of punk and post-punk have predominantly been written by men. Ultimately, this article examines the memory and representation of women through semi-structured interviews, revealing anecdotal nostalgia of post-punk by members of what was termed Generation X (those born between 1955 and 1975).