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Paper Short Abstract:

Our paper shows how music matters in the spontaneous shaping of a socio-cultural configuration of a taste-based cosmopolitan community in Jerusalem, where DIY and indie music bring together Jews and Arabs, seculars and ultra-orthodox Jews, locals and tourists to enjoy shared musical aesthetics.

Paper Abstract:

This paper discusses the formation of a taste-based cosmopolitan community in Jerusalem. Based on their shared attraction to indie music as well as to the ethics of Do It Yourself (DIY) practices, residents of different ethno-national and religious backgrounds gather in the city of Jerusalem to create their shared cultural space despite powerful socio-political mechanisms that push for their separation in the city and elsewhere.

Our ethnographic fieldwork shows how music matters in the spontaneous shaping of a socio-cultural configuration. According to our findings, there are similarities between the conceptual characteristics of the indie music as an alternative to the commercial orientation of the major record companies that dominate the Western market and the conceptual characteristics of the cosmopolitan ideals as alternatives to the nation-state epistemology. Specifically, our fieldwork, interviews and media analysis show how Jerusalem's scene of indie music allows for the creation of an alternative social scene that brings together Jews and Arabs, seculars and ultra-orthodox Jews, locals and tourists to enjoy musical aesthetics that draws from the alternative rock tradition and which goes beyond popular musical configurations.

In the presentation we will share our analysis of a music videoclip filmed in Jerusalem. As we will argue, the production of the videoclip highlights DIY's practices of cultural experimentalism that realize a normative ideal of the city as a shared public space that enables the formation of a cosmopolitan community of taste.