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