Becoming Phat: Youth, Music and Micro-Enterprise

Abstract

As we demonstrated earlier, so many young people are working hard on developing and perfecting their musical skills and networks in difficult, often seemingly uncompromising, circumstances. But some do seem to ‘make it’. They not only achieve recognition or are awarded some degree of celebrity status from and beyond their peers and local communities, but they also reach a level of ‘excellence’ or in the current youth vernacular become seriously ‘cool’ or ‘phat’. Possibly even more importantly, they have started to make some sort of viable living from their art and passion, gaining self-funding through sustainable entrepreneurial activity. This chapter focuses on the meaning of this form of micro-enterprise for some of the young participants in our study, their mentors and the community-based organisations that support them, not only as a manifestation of the new economy ‘on the ground’ but also for its vitally important function of enabling a stronger sense of social identity, social cohesion and self-making within the contemporary world of blended work and leisure. That is, we are looking at what it means to ‘become phat’, to ‘make it’ in the difficult world of the music and related industries. This does not mean that these young people necessarily desire to follow the conventional professional pathway such as a ‘sign up’ with a commercial rather than an independent record label, for this is not always perceived as the most sought-after pathway for many young musicians today. Rather it is the point when the music activity can start to become one’s ‘day job’ or, as Shep once told us, it has become the way ‘to make money from what we love’ without government assistance.

You move out of the bedroom and take your writing out in the public. Then you perform it. Then you freestyle, then you go on from there. (Saul, Palais, personal communication, June 2010)

The most politically relevant point is surely that music today is also a place of employment, livelihoods and labour markets. This fact is obscured because being creative remains in our collective imaginations as a sort of dream world or utopia, far apart from the real world of making a living. (McRobbie, 1999, p. 134)