Without Community, There Is No Art.
A personal account of the importance of community in music.
com·mu·ni·ty — a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
I grew up a single child in the south of France, raised by a single, working mother from Italy who’d been raised in Rhodesia. My home was small, but it was multicultural. Community has been important to me for as long as I can remember, it’s been my lifeline to other people. The first time I became involved in a musical community was during my teens. Like most people at that age I was looking for something to belong to, something I could identify with, some greater idea that could define me. That something turned out to be hip-hop.
Despite the inroads hip-hop had made as a genre in France’s mainstream since the 1980s, it was still a fairly niche music to be into growing up in the south of France in the 1990s. Hip-hop, especially of the more underground variety, wasn’t common and certainly wasn’t cool if my memories of being slightly bullied for my musical tastes at school are anything to go by. But it was something that the small group of friends I was a part of could bond over. That’s when I first found a sense of community: in the exchanging of tapes and radio broadcasts, in the reading of magazines, in long public transport journeys spent with my walkman, in hanging out and listening to music on long, lazy weekend afternoons.
The first music community I found was really about the shared enjoyment we got from it all. And it laid the ground for what would come next and the choices I made.
As I left home and went to university in England, community continued to be a central element in my relationship with music. Of all the friends I made back then, those I remain closest to today, beyond the emptiness of a Facebook friendship, I do because we bonded over music. More than simply shared enjoyment of common musical tastes, that bond was made up of shared discoveries of new musical communities during years of partying in the various corners of London’s vast playground. From squats to super clubs, house parties to DJ nights at the student bar, it was the sense of being part of a musical community that drove us forward, often times more so than the music itself. I may not have realised it back then, in the blur of the moment, but I understand it now.
The next dimension of community in music I encountered was online. In the early 2000s, forums felt just as thriving, and important, a communal place as clubs, squats or studios. Forums allowed me to find a sense of community that for the first time in my life was truly global. All of a sudden I could share my enthusiasm about music and the sense of community it gives us with people everywhere, not just those physically close to me. For a few years after I left home in the 1990s I would exchange letters and tapes with friends back home, keeping up to date with the happenings of the French rap scene. But the effort required to do so became too much once I’d plugged into the London music grid. The internet made that possible again, and made it possible to find new communities I knew nothing about but wanted to be a part of. From there it was down to me to try and bridge the virtual with the physical, which was made easier by living in a city that was at the centre of it all in Europe. Virtual communities are important, and they’ve only continued to grow in importance as the internet became faster and more available. Yet, they can be problematic too. Without a physical anchor digital communities can too easily lose focus of what they are about: forward movement.
Hip-hop was my first musical love, but I didn’t engage with it at a physical level much beyond the community of fans my friends and I built. Part of the reason was my remote location, and part of it was my young age. London solved that, giving me access to clubs and live shows and allowing me to see a real hip-hop community in effect and engage with it: tuning into Itch FM from my student flat while texting friends and the station about the music being played, going to Camden for Kung Fu or King’s Cross for Scratch, going record shopping at Mr. Bongo’s, collecting flyers.
At the same time I discovered dance music. I came to the UK too late to witness the glory days of acid house, breakbeat, or rave but I caught the end of the second wave and it left a deep impression on me. Beyond the music itself — the rumble of a sound system, the energy of sped up breaks, or the cacophony of standing between two rooms and trying to focus your brain on an imaginary sweet spot — it was the sense of community that made those years so memorable, and so defining to everything I’ve done since.
It was both the music — hip-hop and electronic dance music — and the sense of community that arose from it that made me believe there was value in writing, in involving myself, in justifying the time. I began writing about what I liked for magazines and websites as a way to share my passion and grow my community.
Sometime in the mid 2000s, as the high of encountering and engaging with the hip-hop and dance music communities began to wear off I was lucky enough to inadvertently find myself in the midst of a new musical movement coming out of London: dubstep. I’d met Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, in 2002 while at university. In the following years he played me proto-dubstep tracks, introduced me to grime, turned me onto Rinse FM, and took me to FWD>> at Plastic People back when the night was frequented by those making the music and their friends. I didn’t necessarily understand it at the time but a few years later in 2005, after seeing Steve and Mala play to ten people on the first floor of the Old Blue Last in Shoreditch, it all clicked into place. I went to DMZ at Third Base in Brixton, a venue I’d first frequented and come to love six years before for the short-lived Dekefex parties.
In dubstep I found a music community that was thriving and whose energy bolstered me. Most of all this felt like something I was genuinely a part of, coming from a city I now called home and at a time when it was still a local, underground movement. In the early 2010s, after dubstep had become a worldwide phenomenon, I came to realise that my discovery of the music in the previous decade had provided me a similar experience to that of my British friends who would always extol the amazement of first hearing rave music in their youth. I’d finally had my rave moment, and community had been just as integral to it as the sound system pressure and music itself.
There are various things that drive art forward and help us relate to it: struggle, pain, dedication, patience, curiosity, luck. In combination or on their own they are what makes creativity so addictive. When tapped into they are also what gives art a lasting quality, making it a potential doorway to immortality. Yet these are all intangible, they’re not easily defined and they’re always deeply personal. But within a community they come alive and become shared, even if just for a fleeting moment across a dark room, smoking a cigarette with a stranger, or huddling together in front of a rack of sub woofers. Without the community there is no art. Without the community there is no true sharing, no true creating, no true living.
Earlier this year I went on tour with a friend. The experience taught me much. It also gave me an insight into various local music communities linked globally in a way that was never possible before. Our understanding of communities and what they do is evolving every day. There are two quotes from that month I spent on the road that feel most appropriate to close this. The first is from a promoter in Slovenia who, when describing the struggles he faced trying to build a scene in his country, told me “it’s the people who don’t understand that progress is in giving not taking.” The night before, talking to a panel my friend had posited the following when asked about how he got to where he is today:
“All good things in this industry are built off relationships.”
Laurent Fintoni, New York City, 2014.
