Getting By Together
I conclude by considering music’s situated power in cultural and social transformation. I argue that resistance concerns how one resists aesthetics and how this builds one’s immunity to those things that they perceive as unhealthy. As the Underground case suggests, an interdisciplinary approach to studying the social and the musical is essential. Indeed, how we come to define the social is called into question when we “reassemble” it to consider people, objects, and materials acting together. This chapter examines “togetherness,” that is not only about people being together; rather, it is about people, timbres, cassette tapes, backbeats, establishments, photographs, places, transmitters, long hair, legacies, regimes, police, poetry, histories that are ecologically assembled (or rejected) to (re)form a habitable, healthy space where one can live. The chapter reflects on the case of the Underground and how its lessons in building a counterculture via music are valuable for any situation of dis-ease.