Subcultural escapades via music consumption: Identity transformations and extraordinary experiences in Dionysian music subcultures

This study focuses on subcultures that are shaped by eclectic constellations of style, ideology, and discourse in the context of music perceived to be antithetical to mainstream music and mass culture — what this study refers to as ‘Dionysian music subcultures’. Prior studies recognize the significance of consumption in the construction of subcultural meanings, experiences, and discourses. Consumption of music as a symbolic product with socially constructed meanings that are perceived to be expressive and paradoxical, also through which cultural sources and meanings dynamically circulate, has been so recognized. Yet earlier studies largely overlook the music consumption micro discourses in which consumers ascribe meaning to multifaceted subcultural practices that elicit transformative and extraordinary experiences resulting in identity narratives, identity projects, and shared experiences and meanings based on subcultural practices. To redress this gap, this study introduces the concept of ‘subcultural escapades’ to explicate the nature of the experiences, meanings, and self-identities that are cultivated and transformed within Dionysian music subcultures. Findings of this ethnographic study reveal that subcultural escapades in music consumption are manifest in radical self-expression, therapeutic praxis, and controlled chaos that transform scripted roles, monotonic inertia, and controlled sterility into presentational becoming, cathartic escape, and reinvigorated passion, respectively. Through subcultural escapades, the extraordinary self is realized. Subcultural escapades improve consumer psychological and social well-being as modern illustrations of Nietzsche's Dionysian conception to transform beyond the self, to the extraordinary self.