review by Emily D. Ferrigno

Yale University (USA)

The study of virtual music communities is a fascinating and timely endeavor, given the widespread phenomenon of "bedroom production". Musical subcultures are often shaped by and mediated through online means, such as forums, chatrooms and listservs. Virtual environments provide vital space in which musical practitioners share creative methods of musical production, define genre, hold aesthetic debates and socialize. Virtual ethnographies are not yet numerous, and scholars interested in identity, gender and race as they exist in the virtual realm would do well to consult Andrew Whelan's study.

Whelan's book is an informative examination of virtual community from the chatrooms of Soulseek, a file-sharing application used by electronic dance music producers. Whelan focuses on users involved in breakcore, a breakbeat-centered genre influenced by jungle, industrial, and hardcore techno. Whelan draws upon the theories and practices of his discipline (sociology), and illustrates concepts with robust sections of ethnographically-culled data, working with a 2100-page transcription of conversational text from Soulseek chatrooms over a period of six months, as well as e-mail interviews with producers. Whelan's analytical focal point is chatroom dialogue. He uses textual analysis to illustrate how the individuals in his study define themselves, how chatroom dialogue creates and ascribes musical meaning, and how Soulseek users employ discursive cues to identify "insiders" and "outsiders."

In the introductory chapter, as well as in the concluding section of the book, Whelan engages with the "rationalization/ democratization" debate, a discourse central to his study. He confronts the hypothesis that technology serves to inhibit and ultimately dehumanize music, which stands in opposition to the utopian vision of technology as an agent of social change, allowing the voices of socially excluded groups to be heard (p.24). Whelan provides a useful introduction to the peer-to-peer environment and file sharing protocol, and examines the MP3 file (the medium of exchange) as a "sociocultural fetish". Whelan describes how "rip crews" encode new music into MP3 format, "tag" the files, and distribute/disseminate them to the larger community. Each MP3 is accompanied by an "nfo" file, which identifies the MP3 and its creator. These files are written in a source code that allows the creator to insert jokes, illustrations, and the like into the nfo. Several examples of nfo files are provided in the text.

Whelan focuses on three practices that he describes as "shibboleths," or "terms indicative of social location or origin, the use of which therefore serves to distinguish between groups" (p.14). These are the use of 1) nigga/nigger (Chapter 5); 2) gay/ghey (Chapter 7), and 3) the "Amen break" (Chapter 8), a widely sampled drum break from The Winstons' 1969 hit, "Amen Brother". Whelan provides lengthy analyses of textual exchanges in Soulseek chat rooms, in which social boundaries are defined and redefined, and multiple conversations occur at once.

The use of the terms "nigga/nigger" is presented in the context of "ritual insult exchange," as well as flatly racist discourse. As Whelan explains, "the term [nigga] is embedded within a matrix of ethnic and subcultural identity politics, and as such tells us much about the orientations of those who deploy it" (p.144). He bases his analysis on the use of "nigga" as a style-marker common among US youth, a characterization which is perhaps too superficial to provide the reader with sufficient context for virtual analysis. The verbal presence of "nigga/nigger" in American society is extremely complex, and quite different in its "real world" application, as opposed to the anonymous environment of virtual chatrooms. Anonymity presents significant difficulties for social analysis, in that age, race, nationality, and even (spoken) English language fluency of chatroom users may be unknown.

The second shibboleth "gay/ghey" is also examined within the context of chatroom discourse. Whelan bases his analysis on the concept of "gay" as not only homosexual, but also encompassing characteristics and ideals rejected by hegemonic masculinity (p.182). Noting that, "the 'joking' exploration of the semantics of gay is a popular trope among young men" (p.200), Whelan presents several examples of chatroom dialogue related to anal eroticism. He then explains the use of "ghey" in the chatrooms to describe something "lame" or "generic" (the homosexual connotation orthographically removed). The discussion concludes with an examination of masculinity, a frequent theme in Whelan's study, given the scarcity of participants identifying themselves as female in breakcore chatrooms.

In Chapter Eight, "Junglist," Whelan begins to focus on the music around which his study is centered. He discusses the aesthetics of breakcore via chatroom discourse, addressing polarities such as old school/new school and mainstream/underground. Whelan regards the "Amen break" as a third shibboleth, a time-honored (and well-worn) sample used in electronic dance music. However, he also highlights the debate within the breakcore community as to whether the use of the Amen is creative, progressive, or even interesting. This problematizes the classification of the Amen as a shibboleth; while the Amen is well known in the breakcore community, its utilization is not a given. Perhaps, then, the Amen is a shibboleth used to distinguish subgroups from one another, rather than distinguishing the entire breakcore community from outsiders. Whelan's book ends with a lengthy "journey through the media" (p.319), covering a range of topics from sampling ethics and branding, to utopian visions of peer-to-peer culture.

Whelan characterizes his book as a "collage," and, in fact, his theoretical discussions are dense, at times unfocused and difficult to follow. Whelan's own ideas are often obscured by his prose style and frequent quotation of others' work. This also limits the accessibility of the text to specialists, which can be a serious shortcoming when writing to an interdisciplinary audience. In addition, Whelan's engagement with musical analysis is not a strong point of the book. He describes the Amen break as embodying "polyrhythmic hesitancy", the snares "sketching an idiosyncratic, irregular pattern". Like many drum breaks, the Amen is characterized by syncopation, a basic feature of funk drumming-hardly idiosyncratic, and, in fact, very "regular". The reader is not given a particularly clear description of what breakcore and its related genres sound like (beyond the discography). Whelan does participate in the breakcore scene (as a chatroom member and perhaps a producer), but the reader is not privy to this information. The inclusion of reflexive ethnography would have added necessary transparency to his study, for when the reader is well acquainted with the author, ethnographic authority and agenda are made clear, and thus can become secondary to the voices of the observed.

Despite these shortcomings, Whelan makes a rigorous contribution to the study of musical culture in the digital age. He delves into an examination of the sometimes crude nature of chatroom discourse, thoughtfully employing textual analysis to unpack the complexities of race, gender and social interaction. Whelan's discussion of the Internet, society and identity is enlightening. He introduces the term "networked individualism" in which "identity is organised and expressed through consumption practices" (p.319), whereby participatory and collaborative consumption are encouraged, in opposition to the model of passive consumption set up by the music industry (p.305). This observation suggests that (somewhat problematically) Whelan embraces a utopian (and democratic) vision of peer-to-peer file sharing, in which recorded sound is free and open to all-collected, utilized, manipulated and most importantly, shared.