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Causing a Scene: Magazine Punk Rock Issue Bollocks as Genre Arbiter in Japan

Dahlberg-Sears, Robert Michael
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9157-8785
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1735772122205424

Abstract Details

2025, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Music.
This dissertation explores how the punk music-culture scene in Japan is imagined and represented through print media, specifically the magazine Punk Rock Issue Bollocks, and in what ways this mediated form contributes and delimits the function of such representations. Print materials and commentaries often serve as references within music studies literature, but are rarely implicated in supporting the creation of the genre which they address. Punk music-culture is well-known for auto-descriptive practices in the form of zine and magazine commentaries written by and for community consumption. Drawing on the current longest running present-day Japanese punk magazine, Punk Rock Issue Bollocks, this project explores the punk “scene” brought to life in Japan to demonstrate how print materials play a vital role in arbitrating the subjective definition of a scene. These materials can offer distinct processual viewpoints onto communities of practice as they develop even when distanced from a physical site of enactment such as the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to the material focus of this dissertation in the first place. In conversation with writing on music and community from ethnomusicological, musicological, folkloristic, and punk studies literature, this dissertation closely surveys the 16 volumes of Bollocks (20% of the total) released over a two-and-a-half-year period between January 2020 and July 2022. That data is emplaced alongside larger trends throughout. Chapter 2 deeply explores relevant literature relating from the standpoint of music studies of Japan, Japanese writing on punk, and punk studies writing on Japan. Chapter 3 presents a developmental trajectory of music magazine writing from which Bollocks derives. Chapter 4 offers a close reading of the formal features of Bollocks and theorizes how it acts to “enliven” a defined portion of the punk scene. Chapter 5 comprises four case studies, each addressing entanglements of Bollocks’ form with the ways in which it represents or feeds back into the punk scene it supports. This dissertation offers several useful interventions for current academic trends in music studies, Japan studies, and punk studies. Approaching serial print materials as representations of ongoing community self-constitution is novel and suggests that these materials can play a role beyond archival reference in ethnographic exploration. Studies of punk music in Japan of any sort are scant in Japanese and almost non-existent in English, making this project a useful source of literary information and developmental history. Punk studies research fruitfully raises the example of Japan as a location where punk lives, but few contributions exist documenting or otherwise exploring that life. This project contributes to new ways of examining representations of music-culture via print materials and adds to discussions of community creation and maintenance in Japan and punk scenes.
Ryan T. Skinner (Advisor)
Arved Ashby (Committee Member)
Danielle Fosler-Lussier (Committee Member)
233 p.
Asian Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Folklore; Music
Ethnomusicology; Musicology; Folklore; Japan studies; Popular music; Punk studies; Punk; Japanese punk; Punk zine; Popular music journalism; Cultural anthropology; Media studies

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dahlberg-Sears, R. M. (2025). Causing a Scene: Magazine Punk Rock Issue Bollocks as Genre Arbiter in Japan [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1735772122205424

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dahlberg-Sears, Robert. Causing a Scene: Magazine Punk Rock Issue Bollocks as Genre Arbiter in Japan. 2025. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1735772122205424.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dahlberg-Sears, Robert. "Causing a Scene: Magazine Punk Rock Issue Bollocks as Genre Arbiter in Japan." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2025. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1735772122205424

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.
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