Popular Music, Cultural Memory, and Heritage

Andy Bennett, Susanne Janssen, Andy Bennett, Susanne Janssen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351790017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Popular music is increasingly being represented and celebrated as an aspect of contemporary cultural history and heritage. In many places across the world, popular music heritage sites – including museums, archives, commemorative plaques adorning buildings, and what could be referred to as DIY music heritage initiatives – constitute some of the key ways in which popular music artists, scenes and events are being remembered. Bringing together a selection of wide-ranging contributions, the purpose of this book is to present a number of case studies from Europe and Australia that demonstrate the variety of ways in which popular music is being cast as cultural heritage and as a medium that invokes the collective memory of successive generations whose identity and sense of cultural belonging have often been indelibly inscribed by the musical soundscapes of their teen and early adult years. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Music and Society.

Historical Records, National Constructions: The Contemporary Popular Music Archive

Sarah Baker, Peter Doyle and Shane Homan

This article examines the contemporary role of archives in relation to the curation and preservation of popular music artifacts, drawing upon interviews with a range of archival institutions and popular music curators in several countries. It explores the current technological, financial, and aesthetic challenges facing curators and archivists in the era of digital abundance. Previous strategies of “collecting everything” are being revised, with more recent strategies of selective narratives of particular national significance. This in turn presents further challenges for institutions that wish to adopt more playful and innovative uses of their material, particularly as pressures mount from the state to increase user/visitor numbers. The article also explores how “the national” is configured in these forms and presentations of popular music and cultural memory, and where archives are situated between the music industries, the state, and popular music fan communities.

Until the 1990s, the role of public archives was largely settled, involving a range of seemingly objective tasks. They were “institutions [that] have a responsibility to preserve documents and objects that reflect individual and collective endeavors and that have had an impact on culture and society at national, regional, and local levels” (Lloyd 53). Yet this has been disturbed in several ways. Past archival practices that preserved and showcased formal evidence of statehood, modernity, and other central aspects of regional or national life are increasingly under review. At the same time, state archival institutions, aided by the significant turn to popular culture exhibitions in museums and libraries globally, have increasingly taken up the fiscal and administrative responsibilities in the housing of popular cultural knowledge. In relation to popular music, the number of state-funded sites for preservation and display has grown (Cohen et al.). A parallel development has been the growth in what Baker and Huber (“Notes”) call “Do-it-Yourself (DIY) institutions”, archives that emerge from communities of music consumption which aim to augment and build upon “national” heritage strategies at a community level and fill gaps that music enthusiasts-cum-amateur archivists have identified in the public records collected at “authorised” institutions (Roberts and Cohen).

This popular cultural turn has renewed focus upon not just how archives deal with popular music’s material history, but how they engage multiple publics with this material. The process of assigning significance through selection is not only contestable and socially constructed (Lloyd 55); these concerns have become more pressing as popular music researchers themselves become primary curators of city histories (Leonard). This has led to more practical re-evaluations of the extent of replicating canonic representations (the re-emphasis upon well-known historical music events and figures; see, for example, Baker and Huber, “Locating”), the extent to which popular music should drive social histories of the local, and whether to privilege the exceptional or the everyday (Leonard).

In addition, the construction of national popular music narratives remains a dominant discursive mechanism: “the national” remains the simplest device for “categorizing, controlling and finalizing” narratives and the most obvious means by which histories are constructed as “uniquely national,” which enables “specific national characteristics to be retained” (Weisethaunet 190, 188). Assigning significance, and in particular national significance, creates an illusory “fiction” of collective understanding, so that an item of documentary heritage, once designated significant, is deemed worthy of being remembered (Lloyd 54). This raises questions about the tensions between popular music’s “continuous modes of national expression” (Morra 54, emphasis added) and the wider, larger, international circuits in which certain recognized genres exist. As Regev (2) has pointed out, “Anglo-American pop-rock music became the major ingredient in the canon of popular music,” providing the foundational points of reference for localized adaptation. How canons of (primarily) Anglo-American performers, recording stars, and genres have come to be incorporated into national significance is further complicated by local constructions of canons derived from “individual, collective and institutional cultural memories” (Cohen 584). Cities have been more prominent in the production and validation of popular music heritage, emphasizing the various contributions of the local to national canons (ibid.).

Whether of local or national concern, “[o]nce established, canons exert cultural power by influencing memory and heritage … [they] influence the narration of the past, and they inspire the radius of creativity for the future” (Regev 2). Given the relatively late recognition of popular music by archives and museum sectors, the past is instead already “pre-formed,” particularly where the larger cultural memory signposts of Anglo-American tradition are concerned. For example, the Beatles’ 1964 tour of Australia is inserted into the larger known Beatles heritage much as the Beatles are inserted into Australian pop practices and memories. In this sense, localized instances and contact with canonic performers reinforce the gate-keeping modes involved in their maintenance. Subsequent organized memories of such events are both nationalistic and nation-building exercises.¹ The recent “The Beatles in Australia” exhibition constructed by the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is useful here for its reinvestment in a strange form of nationalistic pride:

The eruption of Beatlemania in Australia was more intense than anywhere in the world. For thirteen days in 1964 the nation was held in a kind of euphoria, captivated by the talent, the songs and the charm of the Fab Four on their concert tour. (Powerhouse Museum)

How Australians reacted perhaps more intensely than other nations to the band becomes part of a wider emerging mythology.

The exhibition also “looks at how Australians responded to The Beatles and the tour’s lasting impact on Australian music and culture” (ibid.). The tour has shaped understanding of subsequent events in Australia, in the local turn to groups who wrote their own songs (and the momentary demise of individual performers who sang others’ compositions), the flurry of Beatles-esque local hits in the charts, and so on. Such exhibitions remain interesting for the ways they participate in building consensus about national characteristics and as gatekeepers in the active creation, mediation, interpretation, and shaping of relationships between the historical global and national.

The challenges confronting national institutions are not simply ones of gate-keeping, but also of technology (Gilliland). The incredible rise in open source and other digital software information systems has created alternative archival practices of popular music (see Collins and Long). Karaganis, for example, argues that “the convergence of experiential critique, institutional conflict, and new intellectual entrepreneurship has fostered an explicit and often contentious public debate about the organization of culture and the nature of cultural authority in the digital era” (10).

In short, the music archive must confront internal questions about sourcing and retaining digital artifacts and external questions about the role of digital popular culture sites performing alternative roles as archivists. The primacy of the online search engine in contemporary cultures similarly challenges archives as central cultural heritage authorities. It also of course raises questions about what digitalization does in mediating the past. A recent Australian academic report on digital policy recognized a need to go “[b]eyond merely acknowledging user agency” and to “account for the shifts and modulations of user agency, and the way that platforms and policy can accentuate or delimit that potential” (Crawford and Lumby 10).

In this article we narrow our focus to three core issues that arise across the archival narratives: the acquisition of artifacts in the pursuit of completeness; the impact of financing on collection and preservation priorities; and the role of archives in the narration of national identity. As ours was a multinational project the article is necessarily comparative. However, there is also value in an in-depth case study approach in drawing out in more detail certain specific contexts in which popular music archiving occurs and the ways in which archivists navigate institutional policies and practices. Thus we begin the article with a case study of Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), where a large proportion of our data gathering took place. The article then looks to provide global comparison, taking the reader deeper into a consideration of how those three core issues play out in quite different cultural and national contexts. Though the authors do not intend to suggest generalizations can be made beyond the archives in our fieldwork, the international comparison does point to a number of similarities in how various archives address the development, collection, preservation, maintenance, and promotion of a nation’s popular music heritage. To begin, however, we provide some background to the research on which this article is based.

Methodology

The article draws on in-depth qualitative interviews undertaken with archivists and music librarians between 2010 and 2012 as part of a multinational Australian Research Council-funded project, “Popular Music and Cultural Memory: Localised Popular Music Histories and Their Significance for National Music Industries.”² The project sought to identify and critique the ways in which localized popular music histories are produced, and how these are placed within broader national and international histories. The project researchers were particularly interested in the role of formal and informal archives in the preservation and construction of national popular music histories. Interview questions largely focused on archival functions, processes, and practices as well as on the value of preserving popular music’s material culture. All interviews were undertaken on site at the archive in which the interviewee worked.

In addition to interviews with 15 staff from Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive, all of whom worked primarily with the music collection, interviews were conducted with an additional ten archivists and music librarians at the National Sound Archive at the National Library of Israel, the British Library Sound Archive (UK), Georgia State University Library Special Collections and Archives (USA), and the music and audio collection at the National and University Library of Iceland. Interviews were also conducted in broadcast and industry archives, including the EMI Archive Trust (UK), the British Broadcasting Corporation Sound Archive (UK), and the radio and television archives of the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, Ríkisútvarpið (Iceland). The international archives were selected for inclusion in the project based on their proximity to the project’s partner investigators in those countries. Combined, these archives are broadly representative of the types of popular music archiving that take place in “authorized” archives globally as well as those seeking “authorized” status (see, for example, Isabirye; Linehan; Mäkelä; Zevnik), authorized archives being those which tend to be sanctioned by and/or substantially sponsored by government bodies and which engage in “‘big H’ Heritage” (Roberts and Cohen 4).

We consider these popular music archives as authorized institutions at the intersection of personal, social, and industrial memory. Indeed, for many of our interviewees their responses to our questions reflected an overlapping of roles in which in addition to their position as archivist/librarian they could also situate themselves as fan, collector, musician, and/or broadcaster. These other positions enable them to reflect on their work as archivists and librarians but also feed into their archival practices and decision-making within the confines of the institution’s collecting remit. This has ramifications beyond the archive for cultural memory more broadly in that their practices have the power to frame the social, material, and cognitive remembering of popular music’s past (Erll and Nunning). As Strachan points out, “the very act of collection and protection serves to construct particular narratives which prioritize, valorise and exclude” (7). Yet these were not “personal” interviews, as such. At their heart was the desire to unpack the institutional agendas that are the focus of this article. The often frank responses of our interviewees enable us to explore here some of the challenges facing popular music archives across the globe, including the technological (shifts from analogue to digital), the social (the agendas and practices of collection), the regulatory (government agendas and funding), and the cultural (framing of the “national”) issues. It is important to understand these dimensions of popular music archiving in authorized institutions given that these archives will likely be central to “what can be said in the future about the present when it will have become the past” (Assmann, “Canon” 102).

Case Study: The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Established in 1984, the National Film and Sound Archive (the NFSA) is located in the Austra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Popular Music, Cultural Memory, and Heritage
• 1. Historical Records, National Constructions: The Contemporary Popular Music Archive
• 2. Popular Music and Materiality: Memorabilia and Memory Traces
• 3. Articulations of Identity and Distinction: The Meanings of Language in Dutch Popular Music
• 4. Not Singing in Tune: The Hor 29 Novembar Choir and the Invention of a Translocal Do-It-Yourself Popular Music Heritage in Austria
• 5. The Aesthetics of Slovene Popular Music for Different Generations of Slovene Listeners: The Contribution of Audience Research
• 6. Talk of Heritage: Critical Benchmarks and DIY Preservationism in Progressive Rock
• Index