A Batcave in Via Redi: The Music Club Enactment of Dark

Abstract

This chapter describes how the music club enactment of dark took shape alongside the activist one retracing the history of Milanese alternative music clubs, and in particular of the Hysterika disco, the main dark club in Milan in the 1980s. The specificities of the disco club enactment are addressed and compared to those of the activist enactment: these differences do not relate only to the stance towards political activism, which music club darks dismissed in favour of an identity politics that had to be expressed through a shocking style flaunted in urban public places. It related also to patterns of socialisation, relationship with public space, style and finally criteria of subcultural authentication. In this enactment, in fact, subcultural capital was gained showing high competences in the subcultural canon, regarding both cultural consumption (music, but also literature, theatre, cinema and the arts) and style, and subcultural identities were validated showing a coherence in style throughout all the situations of subculturalists’ daily lives. The two enactments had also their own sub-scene, even if these sub-scenes overlapped, allowing the circulation of members. The chapter ends with the closure of Hysterika in 1991, sketching the main lines of transformation of the enactment in the following decade.