What Is Underground

[coachjames]

So, we had the short-lived poll the other day (where did it go?) with most people claiming to prefer the "underground" sound. I don't buy it, but I am wondering, what do all of you consider underground? What is the difference between an underground sound and a mainstream sound? Is it genre? I don't think so. Is it popularity? Can you only be underground if you are unpopular or unknown? If so, that makes me the most underground DJ of all time!!!

So, how do *you* determine if something is underground?

[chrisaquilo]

Underground (culture)

What is Underground?

It is not easy to define the underground. Zappa's quote "The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground." gives us an idea. The definition of underground culture I use, is, culture that has not reached the mainstream but that has gained popularity amongst a small and loyal audience [a subculture]. Actually, that is the same definition I give to cult as in cult movies.

Definition

During the 1960s the term underground acquired a new meaning in that it referred to members of the so-called counterculture, i.e. those people who did not generally conform to the mainstream of human experience such as e.g. hippies.

Applied to the arts, the term "underground" typically means artists that are not corporately sponsored and don't generally want to be.

It can also mean that something is really groundbreaking and therefore is not mainstream.

An alternate usage of the term "underground" is in reference to something that is illegal or so controversial that it would be dangerous for it to be publicized. Or it's so controversial (as in, offensive to societal norms) that it will never be mainstream. Some authors/artists use this as a badge of pride. --http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_culture

Counter (culture) [...]

A culture, especially of young people, with values or lifestyles in opposition to those of the established culture. --American Heritage

Subculture [...]

Some subcultures achieve such a status that they acquire a name of their own.

Overground [...]

Grotesque [...]

Underground Cinema [...]

Underground House Music [...]

Underground Resistance

The underground is sometimes a nickname for a resistance movement: "the underground" is also a common name for World War II resistance movements. By extension, the term was also applied to counter-cultural movement(s) many of which sprang up during the 1960s. In a similar sense, the Underground Railroad was an United States anti-slavery movement which helped slaves escape. Underground Resistance is also the name of a techno formation from Detroit. --wikipedia.org + jahsonic.com, Jan 2004

Subculture [...]

Conventionally, any group sharing characteristics which are distinctive enough to differentiate them from other groups within a larger or "parent" culture. These characteristics may be economic, ethnic, political, or any matter of lifestyle. More particularly, "subculture" is used to designate those smaller groups which function in opposition to the larger culture, as in the punk subculture discussed in Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). Stuart Hall (et al., Resistance Through Rituals [1976]) distinguishes subculture, which he sees as informally and intuitively organized, from "counter-culture," which he sees as more formally arranged and more expressly political and consciously ideological. In this scheme, punks were subcultural and hippies were counter-cultural.--Robert Belton, http://www.arts.ouc.bc.ca/fiar/glossary/gloshome.html Sept 2003

Censorship[...]

Taboo [...]

Function

"Ideas enter our above-ground culture through the underground. I suppose that is the kind of function that the underground plays, such as it is. That it is where the dreams of our culture can ferment and strange notions can play themselves out unrestricted. And sooner or later those ideas will percolate through into the broad mass awareness of the broad mass of the populace. Occulture, you know, that seems to be perhaps the last revolutionary bastion." -- Alan Moore

Transgression

"If it's not transgressive, it's not underground. It has to be threatening the status quo by doing something surprising, not just imitating what's been done before." --Nick Zedd.

Outsiders as Innovators

Outsiders and marginalized minorities often drive artistic innovation. Much of the dynamic element in American culture, for instance, has been due to blacks, Jews, and gays, as Camille Paglia has noted. Outsiders have less stake in the status quo and are more willing to take chances. They face disadvantages when competing on mainstream turf, but a differentiated product gives them some chance of obtaining a market foothold. Individuals who will not otherwise break into the market are more inclined to take risks, since they have less to lose. Were an all-black orchestra or black conductor to record the umpteenth version of Mozart's Jupiter symphony, the racially prejudiced would have no reason to promote or purchase the product. (Few individuals know the name or the works of the most critically renowned black conductor of our century, Dean Dixon.) The cost of indulging discriminatory taste is low when the market offers the virtuostic von Karajan and Boehm, both former Nazi supporters. But when black performers played "Take the A Train" or "Maybellene," even many racists were impelled to support the outsider with their dollars.

The most influential African-American contributions have not come in the most established cultural forms, such as letters, landscape paintings, and theater. Instead, America's black minority has dominated new cultural areas - jazz, rhythm and blues, breakdancing, and rap [disco and house music]. Minority innovators bring novel insights to cultural productions. Their atypical background provides ideas and aesthetics that the mainstream does not have and, initially, cannot comprehend. Minorities also must rationalize their outsider status.

They deconstruct their detractors, reexamine fundamentals, and explore how things might otherwise be. They tend to bring the upstart, parvenu mentality necessary for innovation. Jazz musician Max Roach pointed out: "Innovation is in our blood. We [blacks] are not people who can sit back and say what happened a hundred years ago was great, because what was happening a hundred years ago was shit: slavery. Black people have to keep moving."

Capitalism has allowed minority groups to achieve market access, despite systematic discrimination and persecution. Black rhythm and blues musicians, when they were turned down by the major record companies, marketed their product through the independents, such as Chess, Sun, Stax and Motown. The radio stations that favored Tin Pan Alley over rhythm and blues found themselves circumvented by the jukebox and the phonograph. These decentralized means of product delivery allowed the consumer to choose what kind of music would be played. The French Impressionist painters, rejected by the government-sponsored academy, financed and ran their own exhibitions.

In the process modern art markets were born. Jews were kept out of many American businesses early in this century, but they developed the movie industry with their own capital, usually earned through commercial retail activity. Women cracked the fiction market in eighteenth century England once a wide public readership replaced the system of patronage. Innovators with a potentially appealing message usually can find profit-seeking distributors who are willing to place money above prejudice or grudges. -- In Praise of Commercial Culture - Tyler Cowen [Amazon US]

Underground Comics

The term "underground comics" is used to describe the industry of self-published or small press comic books that sprang up in the 1960s and has continued to the current day. Underground comics are noted for their lack of corporate control, which gives them the freedom to publish stories about literally anything, including subjects that many readers would consider shocking and offensive. These comics are often the produced by a single person, as opposed to mainstream comics, which are usually produced by a team including a writer, a penciler, an inker, a letterer, and an editor.

The initial wave of underground comics was written by and for the 1960s counter-culture and psychedelic movement, and a number of independent comics of this era were humorous (and unquestionably adult-oriented) stories about hippies and rebels who enjoyed the freedom of drugs, while putting up with persecution by evil police officers. As the genre grew and expanded, underground comics have ranged from small-press comics that grew to become mainstream (Elfquest and Cerebus the Aardvark), to comics created purely for artistic expression (Raw), to adult-oriented pornography and humor (Cherry Poptart and Xxxenophile). They have filled a creative niche left by the glut of superhero comic books published by mainstream companies such as DC and Marvel Comics.

The creators of underground comics have found various ways to publish their work without the backing of a major comic-book publisher. 'Mini-comics' are typically reproduced on a photocopier, hand-stapled and distributed by mail-order. More established creators can have their work published by one of the many small comics publishers (companies such as Fantagraphics Books, Rip-off Press, Slave Labor Graphics, Last Gasp and many others). The publishers also put together anthologies that collect short works from several different creators. More recently, there has been a surge of new creators posting their comics on the web, often for free or for a modest fee.

Some fans and artists use the term 'underground' comics to refer only to the first wave of independently produced comics, in the 1960s and 1970s. Later waves are sometimes referred to as 'independent', 'alternative', 'small press', or 'mini-' comics. --http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_comics

Subcultures: Maps of Meaning

The relationship between mainstream, "hegemonic" culture and the subcultures that split off from it mirrors the relationship of a linear, dominant narrative strain to the skein of other paths that could be pursued by the reader of hypertext. In other words, the way power is distributed in society relates to the way meaning is distributed in a hypertext narrative. In Subculture, The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige describes hegemony and the battle for subcultural meaning that resides beneath it:

"Maps of meaning [in society] are charged with a potentially explosive significance because they are traced and retraced along the lines laid down by the dominant discourses about reality, the dominant ideologies. Thus they tend to represent, in however obscure and contradictory a fashion, the interests of the dominant groups in society... [...]

courtesy of jahsonic.com

[missionary]

straight from Webster.com:

a : produced or published outside the establishment especially by the avant-garde <underground movies> <underground newspapers> b : of or relating to the avant-garde underground <an underground moviemaker> <an underground theater>

[digitalphoenix]

Underground to me is a sound unheard of before...

something new...fresh & un-catchy..

It is a sound that elevates your mind beyond any possible drug or feel.

It is sounds played by those dj's who truly want to be different from all.

That's my own definition.

[vynelmuzik]

I believe underground was originally used for dance music in the sense of the parties were considered underground because no real venues would hold house music nights. The parties were thrown in basements and holes in the wall places. Thus underground music was born. House music got its name from being made in peoples homes. It is all related.

[vynelmuzik]

True underground house music is very hard to come by nowadays but it is new and unchartered territory not globaly excepted.

[vynelmuzik]

hip hop has undergroud to

[kosmosimpson]

Anything but a night out in Miami.

[lyrik]

I believe underground was originally used for dance music in the sense of the parties were considered underground because no real venues would hold house music nights. The parties were thrown in basements and holes in the wall places. Thus underground music was born. House music got its name from being made in peoples homes. It is all related.

I can agree here, however House music derives its coined name from the ware[house] in Chicago.

[lyrik]

True underground house music is very hard to come by nowadays but it is new and unchartered territory not globaly excepted.

I don't even know if we can still say there is underground house music anymore....even the underground sound has gotten popular enough to be recognized globally....communication age and the web has seen to this. Its no longer the basements and warehouses in the ghettos where you can get this music...you no longer have to skim through select mix tapes spread out on fold out tables at parties...the digital age has taken this culture to a much broader audience than ever before. Underground has now become a situational feeling inspired by enivornment IMO.

[vynelmuzik]

There are still plenty of unerground events, but you are on point about the music somewhat. I think a small % of house music is considered underground just because it is pushing into unchartered territory or genre bending

[lyrik]

There are still plenty of unerground events, but you are on point about the music somewhat. I think a small % of house music is considered underground just because it is pushing into unchartered territory or genre bending

Its exciting to think what will come in the future of music...for all genres whether underground and/or mainstream...with technology advancing and making music more and more readily accessible to people that 20-30 years ago would have no clue...the possibilities are endless.

[philippio]

I understand the word "underground" as a descriptive of a culture...not strictly a music scene. It's a way of life. Going back to the roots of house, in Chicago, people who went to Frankie Knuckles' parties at The Warehouse were not only following an underground musical movement. You could walk down the street and tell if someone was "house" or "not house". Like digitalphoenix said, "underground" is like a state of mind. A feeling that does not need to be sustained or even mildly affected by mind altering substances.

[jeffy1]

yeah! to all the above

[eKiTeL]

I think there are two kinds of underground, stuff that's too good for the mainstream, and then stuff that's not good enough for the mainstream

[techlab]

Underground is prefering to play in of people dancing, rather than people sitting in $35 dollar ticketmaster seats.

[obby]

Productions (music) that exist outside the mainstream establishments. I also see it as a movement. One that is not saturated by "club politics" leaving the root of the sounds pure, intelligent and somewhat secretive.

I could go on but.......

[philippio]

Maybe an underground movement attempts to target a more focused audience, one that has a longer attention span and is willing to be involved with, and preserve a particular scene rather than just to partake in its festivities and milk it for all it's worth and then move on to the next fad...

[digitalphoenix]

The Subway in NY is UNDERGROUND!

[philippio]

[astenback]

Let me take you on a trip…

Just a simple journey…

A journey full of sound and beats.

One that will lead you down…

way down…

to the underground.

[lyrik]

Can you hear the sound...

...the sound of the underground.

[philippio]

Celeda - 'The Underground'

[3rdrealmsp]

i always thought of underground(urban or dance) as music that was not on the radio. most stations play commercial/mainstream music that has mass appeal. most clubs play music taylored to thier crowd, so in a way anything you hear at a club can and may very well be underground because the general public does not know about it, only the crowd that listens to that particular music will know about it. in the end i think its really a personal thing, a song may be underground to me but mainstream to someone else. here's a little example..... every clubber and hardcore EDM lover and loyal Space patron knows and is sick of hearing all the djs play the song "forget the world" we would consider it as a mainstream song cause after all the Space dj's played it a few times all the other club djs played it and it got played out...to us....but to someone that has never herd the song, or just does not club hop too much that song is underground....theres my 3 cents...