UC Berkeley

This dissertation is an ethnography of the Tokyo garage rock scene, a revival scene in the Tokyo underground comprised of fans and musicians who recycle and recreate Anglo-American rock and roll music from the mid-1960s. Seeped in retro-nostalgic style, garage assumes an orientation to the past premised on a playful, visceral engagement with the cultural objects of yesteryear (the sound recordings, the fashions, the ephemera) that is highly selective and fixated on certain modalities of pastness. In particular, garage rock represents a commitment to the obscure, the local, the noisy, the makeshift, and the trashy.

With the turn in the humanities and social sciences in recent years towards sound and sensory studies, new avenues have opened to reconsider the intersection of musical style, performance, and the sociocultural--to understand how the experiential domains of affect and performance intersect with wider sociocultural processes. Drawing on fieldwork from the Tokyo underground rock scene, this dissertation explore the aesthetics of excess, trash, and immediacy in the Tokyo garage rock revival. I ask, what tangible effects do these defining features of garage music perform socially? In what ways do they underscore a particular logic of cultural production in underground culture? This dissertation presents a framework to understand style and musicality as more than mere by-products of the social, but as foundational to musical life in all its dimensions.

By focusing on retro-nostalgic style, this dissertation fills a lacuna in popular music scholarship on the processes of cultural revivalism in contemporary pop culture. To date, the scholarship on music revivalism has been dominated by folk and heritage musics. Unlike heritage culture, which makes virtue of preservation and enshrinement, retro cultures such as garage rock fetishize the playful, sensuous materiality of the recovered objects themselves as the focus of revival rather than a mythologized past or narrativized identity. To this end, I present a unique framework through which to conceptualize music revivalism in pop culture revivals like garage by focusing on the forces of mediation and cultural production in ways that are attuned to the particulars of garage sound and style.