Abstract
Within this chapter, we follow the ways in which the past enters into our experience and what that experience is like through an account of a very different northern soul experience—the premiere of the Northern Soul film in Blackburn—and three “history lessons” provided by older members of the scene. Building on these different engagements with the history of the scene, we examine how the past in different formats—through personal recollections, films, documentaries, and books—enters into the experience of young men and women, and what indeed this past is like. As a central thread to contemporary scene experience and a central element in individual claims to belong, it becomes clear that the northern soul past is tenuous and living, a history that is modified and debated, reshaped and remade.
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Notes
- 1.
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1973); Hayden White, The Practical Past (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2014).
- 2.
Gebhardt, “A Time for Jazz.”
- 3.
This storied understanding of the past was developed by Gebhardt (ibid) through the work of Paul Ricœur – Paul Ricœur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in On Paul Ricœur: Narrative and interpretation, ed. David Wood (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 20–33.
- 4.
Gebhardt, “A Time for Jazz,” 200.
- 5.
This chapter builds upon my previous publications with Tim Wall: Raine and Wall, “Participation and role in the northern soul scene.”; and Raine and Wall, “Myths On/Of the Northern Soul Scene.”
- 6.
Paul Ricœur, Memory, history, forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
- 7.
David. J. Leichter, “Collective Identity and Collective Memory in the Philosophy of Paul Ricœur,” Études Ricoeuriennes / Ricoeur Studies, 3 no. 1 (2012), 114.
- 8.
Constantine, Northern Soul.
- 9.
Soul Boy (Shimmy Marcus: 2010).
- 10.
This verbatim extract is edited from a two-hour interview with Mike in December 2016.
- 11.
Extracts from personal correspondence to author, February 1, 2015.
- 12.
An ethnography of an interview undertaken in September 2017.
- 13.
Sara Cohen, “Ethnography and popular music studies,” Popular Music, 12 no. 2 (1993), p.123; Dick Hebdige, Subculture, the meaning of style, (London: Methuen, 1979); Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How working class kids get working class jobs (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977).
- 14.
Steve Herbert, “For ethnography,” Progress in Human Geography, 24 no. 4 (2000), 556.
- 15.
This summary of the ethnographic approach builds upon an anthropological understanding of society and is taken from Herbert. Ibid.
- 16.
This term is used by older members of the hip-hop scene “as a standard phrase for addressing hip-hop in retrospect, discursively isolating its emergence within a non-mainstream ideal in a manner that may be historically accurate or emotionally fetishizing the past.” – Murray Forman, “Kill the Static: Temporality and change in the hip-hop mainstream (and its ‘other’),” in Redefining Mainstream Popular Music, ed. Sarah Baker, Andy Bennett and Jodie Taylor (London: Routledge, 2013), 68. This valuing of the hip hop past is also noted in – Kembrew McLeod, “Authenticity within hip-hop and other cultures threatened with assimilation,” Journal of Communication 49, no. 4 (1999) 134–150.
- 17.
McLeod, “Authenticity within hip-hop and other cultures threatened with assimilation,” 134.
- 18.
The use of northern soul music in the mainstream media, particularly adverts, is avidly critiqued on- and offline by scene members, but much is seen as a fad, a selling of “northern soul cool” in a temporary peak of popularity. These moments are placed by scene members in a longer history, with northern soul “exposed” on Top of the Pops in the form of Wigan’s Ovations in 1975 before the scene once again returned to “the underground.”
- 19.
Also noted by Lucy Gibson, “Nostalgia, symbolic knowledge and generational conflict,” in The Northern Soul Scene, ed. Sarah Raine, Tim Wall, and Nicola Watchman Smith (Sheffield: Equinox, 2019).
- 20.
Long and Collins, “Affective memories of music in online heritage practice.”
- 21.
David Nowell, Too Darn Soulful: The story of northern soul (London: Robson, 1999).
- 22.
This is also noted in an earlier publication, Raine and Wall, “Myths On/Of the Northern Soul Scene.”
- 23.
This research into published self-documented histories in northern soul is discussed in more detail in – Raine and Wall, “Myths On/Of the Northern Soul Scene.”
- 24.
The exception here was Constantine and Sweeney’s book accompaniment to the Northern Soul film, also directed by Constantine. While the book does indeed follow the same geography as the other scene histories, the women are here named individuals with quoted opinions and experiences, rather than the “wife”, “girlfriend”, or first-name only acquaintances of the male characters that dominate the other published scene histories – Elaine Constantine and Gareth Sweeney, Northern Soul: An Illustrated History (United Kingdom: Virgin Books, 2016).
- 25.
The most extreme being Barry Doyle’s complete removal of female experience from his history of competitive northern soul dancing in the 1970s – Barry Doyle, “More than a dance hall, more a way of life”.
- 26.
Smith, “Time Will Pass You By”, 190.
- 27.
Mercieca, Chapman, and O’Neill, To the Ends of the Earth, 18.
- 28.
This notion of the record as capturing the experience of those who produced it was developed in George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The hidden histories of popular music, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xii, xv.
- 29.
This framing is influenced by Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
- 30.
I also discuss this in Duffett, Raine and Wall, “The Voice of Participants on the Scene.”
- 31.
The “patching-together” of alternative but overlapping histories is explored in detail in Chap. 6.
- 32.
Historically situated stories are evident in a range of music scenes, providing justification for the social practices and cultural norms (e.g., Eileen M. Wu, “Memory and Nostalgia in Youth Music Cultures: Finding the Vibe in The San Francisco Bay Area Rave Scene, 2002–2004,” Dancecult 1, no. 2 (2010): 67), yet few studies explore the power and influence that these stories confer onto certain individuals and groups within music scenes.
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Raine, S. (2020). The History Lesson. In: Authenticity and Belonging in the Northern Soul Scene. Palgrave Studies in the History of Subcultures and Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41364-4_5
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