For everyone who takes part in this scene actively it is overt that his interpretations are so five or more years ago. His false insider knowledge blurs the results in a very disturbing way. Let me give you some examples. He uses straight edge hardcore as a term for a music genre that he affiliates with new york hardcore. Of course, in the late 1990s this could be argued to be correct but today it is just bullshit. Straight edge is no longer a musical subgenre. Today there is more non-straight edge bands than actual straight edge bands that sound like straight edge bands from back then and there is on the other hand straight edge bands in almost every subgenre from straight edge crust punk to straight edge screamo. The affiliation with new york hardcore however is a mistake even worse. Have you ever been to an Agnostic Front show in the past years? I can’t imagine a show where more beer is sold. New york hardcore is no longer an existing subgenre. There are still New York based bands but they are parts of different scenes. Some of which are straight edge. Most are absolutely not and their audience neither. But there is indeed two subgenres with a notable straight edge affiliation: Metalcore and youth crew. The fact that he doesn’t mention the latter at all while he combines the former with new york hardcore to one single item in his questionnaire completes the farce. The way Calmbach uses the term straight edge is counterproductive. I wonder if he ever tried to check if his new york hardcore subgroup and his straight edge subgroup are not completely different in how they answer his questions…

That he is also asking for genres called riot grrrls(sic!), art-core/art-punk and jazzcore shows that he is stuck in the terminology of 10 years ago. Nobody uses these terms any more. And calling Shai Hulud “Hal Shulud” is really, really, really embarrassing…

The whole book is full of factual errors and technical mistakes. At some points it also pretty yesterday in terms of gender issues. When asking for the respondent’s gender he offers only male and female as categories. In an emancipatory context I’d expect an idea of gender that is a little less old-fashioned. At another point he shows his lack of awareness by drawing the conclusion that women tend to leave the scene behind “when the real life begins” out of data that just doesn’t offer this conclusion, at least not the way he is presenting it. Doesn’t he realize that he is simply reproducing societal gender roles with what he is writing here? Maybe there is simply less working women in the scene because the female percentage in the scene has grown significantly in the past years which makes the average woman in the scene is younger in the average man? And by the way in mainstream society the percentage of working women is also lower than that of working men. Plus more than fifty percent of all students are women and students are no workers… This would be just as good an explanation for the data given. If not a better one…

At two points he refers to bands doing benefits for Peta without making any comment on how the scene has been discussing if Peta could still be supported because of their “holocaust on your plate” campaign. Why? Because he doesn’t know? Maybe… At another point he calls Earth Crisis the inventors of hardline. Not only was it Vegan Reich who invented this rubbish. Hardline is also absolutely irrelevant in today’s scene (apart from some weirdos…). That some hardline role models became muslim fundamentalists isn’t mentioned either…

One thing I really can’t understand no matter how hard I try is that despite 17% call it an important thing for them joining the scene he doesn’t mention the internet at all. The only point it turns up apart from the mentioned statistic is a quote from Punk Planet. I’d say that you can’t understand today’s d.i.y. hc/punk scene without the internet. Not at all. Of course if you don’t know how important message boards, onlinezines and web communities have become you will stress the importance of fanzines like he does. Fuck, it is sad as hell but printed zines are dead. They have been important in Marc Calmbach’s days but not anymore. Heartattack is dead, Punk Planet just published their last issue. 95% of all zines he quotes or mentions are dead by now. Doesn’t he see that?

The barcode discussion he stresses so much is also over since I don’t even remember when. It is a relict. By the way: this book got one ;) .

Some more things bother me heavily because I have had lectures on the methods of empiric social sciences: Neither of the club shows he attended with his questionnaires was at a squat or a house project. This totally blurs the data. It emphasises the more clean cut part of the scene while groups like crust punks, squatters and so on are under-represented.

And why is the questionnaire only printed in German in the book while it was handed out in English, French and Spanish as well? This way, no one can check if the translations don’t contain semantic differences. Bad style…

Another point about the questionnaire that is bad is the question on which groups the respondent belongs to. Not only does it give funny possibilities like raver, jesus freak, mod, hare krishna or skate punk that are either anachronistic or dorky or both, it does also distinguish between hardline straight edge, vegan straight edge and straight edge. These terms build up on one another. If you are vegan straight edge you are straight edge as well and if you are hardline you are in all three possibilities. So what do hardline and vegan sxe people answer? I’ll tell you. They’ll answer in different ways because they interpret the items differently. This blurs the data totally. It is also possible that vegan straight edge people won’t mark vegan in the dietary section because they think vegan straight edge says it already. If Calmbach hasn’t taken care a lot here he will have ended up with vegan straight edge people filed under omnivores. Personally, I’d take this as an insult. Scientifically it is simply another bias in the data.

I could go on like this for pages and pages. The whole book is a collection of factual errors, scientific mistakes and careless misunderstandings. It fails scientific standards and it offers nothing that everyone in the scene couldn’t tell anyway. I am sorry; I really wanted to write something positive about this book because I like the idea of it. The idea is great. But while reading it I grew more and more angry about all these mistakes and flaws and plain bullshit. I got even angrier when I realized that he is failing so badly because he is working unscientifically. He is working inductively where deduction would be right. I am very sorry but I cannot recommend reading this book to anyone. Stick to books like “all ages – reflections on straight edge” or “dance of days”. They might not pretend to be scientific like this book does but at least they are interesting to read and they are honest in their subjectivity where Calmbach hides behind a wall of false scientific objectivity.

[jan]

the book on transscript verlag