Preserving Popular Music Heritage

Do-it-Yourself, Do-it-Together

Sarah Baker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317670742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

There is a growing awareness around the world of the pressing need to archive the material remnants of popular music so as to safeguard the national and local histories of this cultural form. Current research suggests that in the past 20 or so years there has been an expansion of DIY heritage practice, with the founding of numerous DIY popular music institutions, archives and museums around the world.

This edited collection seeks to explore the role of DIY or Pro-Am (Professional-Amateur) practitioners of popular music archiving and preservation. It looks critically at ideas around "DIY preservationism, " "self-authorised" and "unauthorised" heritage practice and the "DIY institution, " while also unpacking the potentialities of bottom-up, community-based interventions into the archiving and preservation of popular music's material history. With an international scope and an interdisciplinary approach, this is an important reference for scholars of popular music, heritage studies and cultural studies.

1 Identifying Do-it-Yourself Places of Popular Music Preservation

Sarah Baker

DOI: 10.4324/9781315769882-1

There is increasing recognition across the globe of the pressing need to archive the remnants of popular music’s material past so as to safeguard the national and local histories of this important cultural form. Traditionally, popular music cultures were not regarded as heritage. As Bennett (2009, 477) argues, “Their mass-produced, commercial and global properties rendered them the antithesis of authentic cultural value as conceived in conventional heritage discourse.” There has been a gradual shift in the heritage sector that now balances the preservation and showcasing of formal evidence of statehood, modernity and other central aspects of regional or national life with a fiscal and administrative responsibility for the preservation of popular culture (Baker, Doyle and Homan 2015). National archives and museums have thus become key institutions for the preservation of the material aspects of popular music heritage. Many countries now have national institutions dedicated to the collection, preservation and display of popular music, and they often seek to provide a level of public access to these collections. In Australia, for example, the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) houses sound and visual recordings as well as some ephemera related to popular music’s material history. Comparable institutions include the British Library Sound Archive in the United Kingdom and the National Sound Archive at the National Library of Israel. As repositories for national heritage, institutions like the NFSA are accordingly supported by federal funding and an institutional structure designed to meet the aims of collection, preservation, promotion and access. But in the recognition that it is virtually impossible for institutions to collect everything and to function as comprehensive repositories of the nation, collecting strategies often lean towards the pursuit of selective narratives of particular national significance. As a result, the selection of materials and sounds of popular music in national institutions tends to follow established narratives in written and oral histories, reinforcing existing canons (Baker, Doyle and Homan 2015).

Brandellero and Janssen (2014, 225) note, “In recent years, spurred by the growing status and recognition of intangible heritage, bottom-up approaches to heritage identification have emerged, legitimating the role of communities as bestowers of heritage status.” As a result, alongside prestigious national institutions such as those mentioned above, there exist a range of community-led, grassroots, specialist archives, museums and halls of fame, manifested physically and/or online, which are equally important to the preservation of popular music’s material past. While some of these places have developed broad collection remits (e.g. Sarasota Music Archive, United States; Lippmann+Rau-Musikarchiv, Germany), others are dedicated to specific genres (e.g. SwissJazzOrama, Switzerland; Hector Country Music Heritage Museum, New Zealand), artists (e.g. Ramones Museum, Germany; Rokkheimur Rúnars Júlíussonar, Iceland) or locales (e.g. Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame, United States; Birmingham Music Archive, United Kingdom), which are marginalised, or at least not the focus of national collections, and which operate largely without any form of significant government support. Such institutions tend to have limited paid staff and rely for their operation sometimes entirely on the work of volunteers (e.g. National Jazz Archive, United Kingdom; Nederlands Jazz Archief, Netherlands) or interns (e.g. The ARChive of Contemporary Music, United States; SR-Archiv österreichischer Popularmusik, Austria). Indeed, many such institutions have no paid workforce whatsoever and no workers with training in the areas of archiving and curating (e.g. Sound Preservation Association of Tasmania, Australia; South Australian Jazz Archive, Australia). These archives, museums and halls of fame are therefore important in epistemological terms because the parameters of their heritage practices are determined by the volunteers and enthusiasts involved, enabling archival records and museal exhibitions to be created other than those that are governed by the policies and fiscal constraints of national institutions. The development of these grassroots archives and museums is “suggestive of broader trends in the ways in which communities and individuals within those communities show interest in asserting ownership over, and expertise in, the cultural history of popular music, which leads them to acts of preservation and display that contribute to our collective memory of these musics” (Baker and Huber 2013a, 514). Such places therefore have the potential to democratise popular music heritage, “contributing to a national archive that exists beyond the National Archives” (Flinn 2010, n.p.).

This book offers some insights into the ways in which these enthusiast-founded, volunteer-led, community-based archives and museums are contributing to the public record of popular music’s material past. The chapters contained within its pages confirm that the desire of individuals and communities to take on the role of custodians of popular music heritage is prevalent rather than isolated; they produce archives and museums that are distinct and specific, but reside on a continuum of popular music heritage practice at the community level; and “they have a history; and that they relate to an identifiable set of concerns, making themselves public through the practices of communities and individuals wishing to participate in the management of music heritage” (Baker and Huber 2013a, 526). This is a book about the ways in which popular music heritage is managed by ordinary people in extraordinary ways (Flinn 2007). As noted elsewhere, “If popular music culture is genuinely a culture of the people, then its preservation in the hands of the people seems appropriate” (Baker and Huber 2013a, 526).

The chapters in this book capture the extent to which popular music heritage, as a form of cultural heritage, is both practice and process, inasmuch as “its meanings and uses are socially, spatially and temporally enacted, and, as such, are constantly being remade and renegotiated” (Roberts, 2014, 267). Thus the question becomes not one of why it is important to amass the “junk” of pop culture in archives and museums (see Baker and Huber 2015) or revere canonic figures of the music industry in halls of fame (see Baker and Huber 2013b) but rather one concerning what this practice offers the enthusiasts involved and the networks and communities that form and are formed by these independent heritage enterprises. As Roberts puts it:

Rather than attempting to sketch the manifold heritages that attach themselves – with varying degrees of coherence – to forms of popular music culture, it is more instructive to pay critical attention to the discursive and performative structures of meaning and practice by which they are constituted. … By breaking down music heritage discourses into the spaces, practices and “acts of transfer” that play performative host to the cultures of popular music pasts, we can gain a better understanding of how these pasts, in all their colour, diversity and authenticity, are lived in the present (2014, 276–7).

The book demonstrates some of the ways in which popular music’s past becomes enacted in the present in the space of community-based archives and museums.

This introductory chapter sets the scene for what follows by providing an overview of the small body of existing literature that has been adopted as a critical framework by a number of the authors in Part I. In particular, the reader’s attention is drawn to the work of Roberts and Cohen (2014) on “self-authorized” and “unauthorized” popular music heritage practice, Bennett’s (2009) notion of a “DIY preservationist sensibility” and Flinn’s (2007) conception of the “community archive.” The work of Baker and Huber (2013a) on “DIY institutions” is also outlined in the context of the professional-amateur “revolution” (Leadbeater and Miller 2004) and with reference to “communities of practice” (Wenger 1998). Throughout the chapter, these conceptual frameworks are illustrated, where practical, with reference to the twenty-three enthusiast-founded, volunteer-led, community-based archives, museums and halls of fame the book’s editor visited between 2010 and 2014 as part of two consecutive projects funded by the Australian Research Council, Popular Music and Cultural Memory (DP1092910, 2010–12) and Do-It-Yourself Popular Music Archives (DP130100317, 2013–15). During this time, 125 workers were interviewed, most of whom were volunteers who gifted their time, and sometimes even their money, to these heritage enterprises. The sites of popular music heritage that are the focus of that research are located in ten countries: Australia, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Such a spread begins to show the breadth of this type of heritage activity, and this is confirmed further in the chapters that also draw attention to archiving being undertaken in Africa (Chapters 10, 14 and 15), South America (Chapter 16) and other European countries (Chapters 8 and 9). While the places of the editor’s research are primarily physical collections of popular music (see Chapter 4), this book also emphasises online community archives dedicated to preserving popular music’s material past (see Chapters 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13 and 16). Where possible, reference is also made in this chapter to other archives and museums that are not covered by the aforementioned research or the chapters contained in this collection so as to further demonstrate the extent of grassroots popular music heritage preservation practices around the world.

A Continuum of Popular Music Heritage Practice

This section considers at length the contribution of Roberts and Cohen (2014) to an understanding of popular music heritage as a continuum of practice. By focusing on commemorative plaque schemes in England, Roberts and Cohen draw on qualitative research to propose “a critical and analytical framework through which to explore popular music heritage” (2014, 242). This framework sets out to avoid a binarism that positions popular music heritage practice as either official (top down) or unofficial (bottom up). Rather, they put forward a more nuanced critical framework that highlights three types of interrelated discourse about popular music heritage: officially authorised, self-authorised and unauthorised. Such a typology, they argue, enables an exploration of the dynamics of popular music heritage “as a situated, relational practice involving various, often contested negotiations of the musical past” and the analysis of “the various ways in which popular music heritage is not simply practised but also authorised and ascribed with value, legitimacy and social and cultural capital” (2014, 243). In this typology, officially authorised popular music heritage – or “big H” Heritage – tends to be that which is sanctioned by and/or substantially sponsored by government bodies. However, the interest of contributors to this edited collection is primarily in Roberts and Cohen’s (2014, 244) development of the other two categories in their critical framework that situate “heritage-as-praxis.”

With self-authorised popular music heritage, there tends to be limited official government backing and an absence of the “gilt-edged symbolic capital” that is attached to prominent public institutions (Roberts and Cohen 2014, 248). Rather, self-authorised sites, organisations and activities are established alongside their more prestigious counterparts by way of the music and media industries and “by musicians, audiences, entrepreneurs and organisations who participate in particular musical cultures” (2014, 248). Roberts and Cohen refer to these as “DIY, localised or vernacular popular music heritage discourses,” which, though not officially authorised in the same way as prestigious public institutions, still make “claims to (or solicitations of) some form of official status” with regard to their “marketing and publicity, or ensuring the sustainability and development of the heritage initiative or resource in question” (2014, 248). Mechanisms through which self-authorised initiatives can build more influence and cultural clout include the endorsement or patronage of famous or influential people such as celebrities (as is the case with The ARChive of Contemporary Music, United States, which has the support of high-profile artists such as David Bowie, Keith Richards and Paul Simon); the capacity to secure grants and other forms of public funding, including local government or council funding such as that received by Tónlistarsafn Íslands, Iceland; and the ability to be granted charitable status such as the classical music-oriented organisation Music Preserved, all of which can assist in lending an air of professionalisation to the activities of the initiative and thus further blurring “the distinction between ideas of official and ‘unofficial’” popular music heritage (2014, 250).

In addition, while self-authorised institutions and practices may represent a more democratised form of popular music heritage, this type of activity memorialises “the personal musical heritage and history of individuals,” such as the founders of these initiatives, as much as “that which is claimed on behalf of a wider group or nation” (Roberts and Cohen 2014, 250). Take, for example, KD’s Elvis Presley Museum located in Hawera on Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island. While the museum is most definitely focused on Elvis – or, more accurately, Elvis memorabilia – it also uses this memorabilia to tell the story of KD’s engagement with rock ‘n’ roll throughout his life, with a particular emphasis on the 1950s and 1960s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Identifying Do-it-Yourself Places of Popular Music Preservation
• PART I Unpacking DIY Popular Music Heritage Practice
• 2 The Shaping of Heritage: Collaborations between Independent Popular Music Heritage Practitioners and the Museum Sector
• 3 Valuing Popular Music Heritage: Exploring Amateur and Fan-Based Preservation Practices in Museums and Archives in the Netherlands
• 4 Affective Archiving and Collective Collecting in Do-it-Yourself Popular Music Archives and Museums
• 5 “Really Saying Something?” What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Popular Music Heritage, Memory, Archives and the Digital?
• 6 Doing-it-Together: Public History-Making and Activist Archiving in Online Popular Music Community Archives
• 7 Alternative Histories and Counter-Memories: Feminist Music Archives in Europe
• 8 “When Folk Meets Pop”: DIY Archives in the Making of a Punk Rock DIY Community in Western France
• 9 Creating a Comprehensive Archive of Maltese Music on CD
• 10 “They’re Not Pirates, They’re Archivists”: The Role of Fans as Curators and Archivists of Popular Music Heritage
• 11 Coming Together: DIY Heritage and The Beatles
• 12 Trading Offstage Photos: Take That Fan Culture and the Collaborative Preservation of Popular Music Heritage
• PART II Case Studies
• 13 Pompey Pop: Documenting Portsmouth’s Popular Music Scenes
• 14 Ketebul Music: Retracing and Archiving Kenya’s Popular Music
• 15 Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation: Ghana’s Highlife Music Institute and the Need for Popular Music Archiving
• 16 Proyecto Caracas Memorabilia: Reconstructing Pop Music History in Venezuela
• 17 The Australian Jazz Museum: All That Aussie Jazz – A Potted History of the Victorian Jazz Archive, 1996–2014
• 18 The Australian Country Music Hall of Fame: A DIY Museum and Archive in Australia’s “Country Music Capital”
• 19 Re:Muse-icology: Defining a National Landscape for the Study and Preservation of Rock’n’roll’s Built Heritage in America
• 20 Editions of You: A DIY Archive of DIY Practice
• List of Contributors
• Index