Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 76

72 _lliePo£ular^Cultu^^ pair with persons of their gender preference. The music accomplished this effect by creating stock opportunities which called upon partiers to pursue various social exigences of their choosing, like meeting strangers, acting crazy, achieving some level of catharsis or pairing sexually. The music was treated as a rhetorical artifact (Holmberg "Rhetoric of Popular Song"; Holmberg "Toward the Rhetoric of Music") for enhancing social interaction. Partiers had a clear expectation of themselves and others that they must use their communication skills. Music strategically supplied by their hosts facilitated their conununication. In essence, the beer bash mood was an obvious dramatistic scene to the participants though their conscious recognition of it as such was no doubt in most cases inchoate. The music itself was an agency of their interaction. Both the scene and the agency encouraged partiers to be actors who might perform parts pursuing varying interests, even the invention of fictive biographies similar to those Cavan observed in bars. Fictive or genuine, the roles or their entertainment value to other partiers were seemingly invented on the spot with some actors more successful than others. Partiers also knew they would be expected to participate in all sorts of activities with ritual overtones. Some rituals were relatively similar to those found in daily life, like meeting friends and being introduced to strangers. However, some activities would reflect the party mood, like acting humorously (talking softly to someone's gender preference during a loud party so they would have to lean closer to the speaker), singing boldly along with lyrics, gesturing wildly to songs, touching people, drinking in time to the music and playing drinking games, much as various ethnographers have reported about bar behavior (Cavan; Spradley and Mann). While participation appeared to be spontaneous, the behavior was de rigeur and learned at previous party attendance. Most of all, partiers appreciated parties as occasions during which they could "be themselves" with the tacit support of others like themselves—not the inauthentic selves they felt they had to be during daily life. The