‘It’s better to see yourself as a bohemian than poor’: Justifying precarious accommodation as bohemianism among independent musicians

Abstract

This article shows that independent musicians justify and endure precarious living and working conditions by discursively mobilizing the discourse of bohemianism. Drawing on an analytic ethnography combining long term participant observation and 60 interviews conducted in the United States, France, and Sweden, we explore how musicians reconcile poor housing, unstable income, and spatial insecurity with the perceived necessity of remaining in major urban centres. Our analysis reveals that bohemianism operates as a discursive resource that aestheticizes precarity, enabling musicians to cope, all the while obfuscating their situation as exploited workers. The bohemian myth thus has performative effects: it normalizes sacrifice, contributes to consenting to exploitation, and unwittingly facilitates gentrification by attaching symbolic value to artists' living spaces, thus contributing to reproducing the very precarity artists seek to mitigate. Crucially, the capacity to inhabit bohemianism is unevenly distributed, reflecting differences in social class background.