Reflecting on reflexing, and the outsider/insider dichotomy

Fascinatingly, much of my “Introduction-to-the-field” class today focused on self-reflexivity in scholarly writing.  Apropo, anyone?  It’s like they were secretly already reading my blog.  Anyway, the discussion involved an interesting element concerning the advantages and disadvantages to perceived insider/outsider status.  A lot of the writing for this week involved a explication of the advantages and disadvantages of either status.  Predictably, a vocal identification as a music scholar usually places one as an “outsider” from the practicing music community.  (Gotta love a quote by Shostakovich – quite the insider – in one of the readings, which I’ll paraphrase: Imagine there is someone cooking eggs, and others eating the eggs.  Now imagine there is someone standing nearby talking about how the eggs were made and how they’re eaten.  This is a musicologist.)  While such an identification in the so-called field allows one to be honest about who they are and what they are doing, there may be a lot to be gained by falsely posing as an insider.

Enter me, fanboi-cum-manboi.  As one who’s usually participated on the far-flung fringes of the indie and techno blog communities (fringes in themselves to begin with), I can’t lay claim to any sort of insider status in the community.  I was hoping this blog could act as a sort of bridge to that gap, allowing me to be a visible outsider, yet at the same time participate in a virtual community.  Of course, I already figured that the writing-about-writing would be alienating to any non-scholars or writers in the community; what I failed to consider was the potential for privledged access that a perceived non-scholar status may achieve.

As an experiment, then, I’m going to separate out what was intended to be one blog into two: what’s been achieved here thus far (finding my way as a self-conscious writer and “outsider” to the music community), and a fanboi with no aspirations beyond good pop music criticism and cultural cachet (aspiring to “insider”-dom, however successful or not it turns out).  I don’t seek to preserve the dichotomy as such – obviously, the two terms are not in opposition – I hope that my chronicling of the process here will work to tease out the benefits and costs of trying my hand at music blogging, as well as the difficulties encountered in the process.

Voilà: Fanboyisms