John Jacobs

John Jacobs is documented in this archive as a figure from the early Sydney free-party scene whose account of how "doof" shifted from an in-joke about bass to the name of a movement is one of the most useful oral history records the archive holds for that transitional period. He belongs in the same lineage as Non Bossy Posse and Peter Strong - the generation of Sydney participants who built the informal outdoor party culture of the early 1990s before it had a widely recognised name, let alone an archive.^[1]

This article is a stub. The archive holds limited biographical information about John Jacobs beyond his documented participation in the early scene and his oral history account of the word's transition. Submissions are sought, though currently closed.

The word becoming a scene

Jacobs's most significant documented contribution is his account of the moment - or rather, the period - in which "doof" stopped being a sound description and started being a scene identity. His account, preserved in community oral history, describes the shift as gradual and unplanned: a word that people started using seriously because it was already in use as a joke, and that accumulated weight through repetition and recognition until it described something real. The archive notes that this is how most important cultural words work, and that Jacobs's account of it is more precise than most.^[2]

The archive holds Jacobs's account as complementary to Peter Strong's written record: where Strong documented the scene as history, Jacobs documents the etymology as lived experience. Together they provide the most complete picture the archive has of how the early Sydney doof scene understood itself while it was forming.^[3]