In Football and Popular Culture: Singing Out from the Stands, edited by Stephen R. Millar, Martin J. Power, Paul Widdop, Daniel Parnell, and James Carr, 51–68. (Routledge, 2021).
This chapter presents an ethnographic study of the Stony Monday Riot (SMR), a football supporters’ group for the Ottawa Fury Football Club, conducted through participant observation during the 2014-2015 seasons. Drawing on phenomenological ethnomusicology and soundscape theory, the study examines how supporters create meaning through musical performance—singing, drumming, chanting, and gesturing—within the context of Ottawa’s political and cultural landscape.
The research examines the concept of “sonic sanctioning” and how supporters negotiate identity, belonging, and territorial claims through sound in TD Place Stadium. Analyzing the sonic environment as a site of political performance, the chapter investigates tensions between different supporters’ groups (the SMR and Bytown Boys Supporters Club), commercial entertainment interests (Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group), and broader questions of tradition, inclusivity, and place-making in Canada’s capital city.
Theoretically, the study employs concepts of stance, intentionality, and “cosmopolitan musical bonding” to understand how collective music-making creates what I call “platforming”—a shared support structure that simultaneously allows for meaningful difference. The analysis reveals how supporters navigate between conscious political reflection and pre-reflexive passion, producing an acoustic environment that resists North American sportscape conventions while engaging with complex histories of colonialism, displacement, and national identity.
The chapter contributes to scholarship on sport, sound studies, and expressive culture by demonstrating how football supporters’ musical practices constitute both intimate community-building and public political performance in contemporary Canada.
Keywords: ethnomusicology, football supporters, soundscape, phenomenology, Ottawa, sport and music, stance theory, political performance, place-making