Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 78
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The Popular Culture Review
as in the background and apparently not in the fore of guests'
attention.
Guests at bashes often left without thanking the host. Even if
they knew the host well they were invested with anonymity by
virtue of the number of guests and the loudness of music, both of which
covered or masked their individuality. Guests at snuiller gatherings
almost always expressed personal thanks for the hospitality, some
even having supplied food and drink as a form of thanks upon arrival.
They arriv ^ expecting to be individuals and treated the host more
formally.
Hosts and guests at both kinds of parties realized that
parties are rites of reversal (Norbeck; Jewett and Laurence). Parties
are events which reverse the day-to-day, mundane norms to allow
escape from them. Bashes dramatically reverse norms, a fact for
which hosts must be prepared since purposefully getting guests
intoxicated invites possible community sanction (Holmberg and
MacDonald). Friendly gatherings also reverse norms. Daily life and
the workplace do not always allow for lingering, in-depth
conversation. The additional suspension of sexual innuendo is also a
kind of reversal which friends give to one another. Both kinds of
parties use music as a symbolic sound system which signifies the
reversals. The partiers and party planners thus experienced parties
as sound rituals of reversal which enabled escape from daily norms of
behavior and the recovery or purgation to face the norms after
leaving the party. Music nmkes parties sound rituals and is thus
perhaps the most important guest for promoting interaction at social
gatherings. At times its voice is the only voice heard. At times it
helps us speak.
Bowling Green State University
Carl B. Holmberg
Works Cited
Cavan, Sheri. Liquor License: An Ethnography of Bar Behavior.
Chicago: Aldine, 1966.
Douglas, Jack D.
Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the
Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. Chicago: Aldine,
1970.
Fomas, Johan. "Moving Rock: Youth and Pop in Late Modernity."
Popular Music 9 (1990): 291-306.