![Sample our Museum and Heritage Studies journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5945/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Museum-Heritage-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
Raymond Williams once remarked that ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (1983). He never said what the other ones were but had he been writing today, one of these might well have been ‘heritage’. Indeed, the imbrications of ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’, and the vexed nature of their relationship, particularly with regard to popular music, are such that each has come to serve as a synonym for the other in the wider sociocultural imaginary. This paper casts a critical spotlight on discourses of cultural heritage in the UK by questioning what makes popular music culture ‘heritage’ and considering the extent to which the UK popular music has become increasingly heritagised. Relating the specific example of popular music to wider debates on cultural heritage and heritagisation, the paper calls for greater problematising of discourses of popular music as cultural heritage, and considers, by way of conclusion, how a critical focus on the lived, performative and ‘hauntological’ dynamics of music heritage practices can illuminate understandings of the way cultures of music and memory are negotiated and transacted in the present.
Acknowledgements
This research has been supported as part of the Popular Music Heritage, Cultural Memory and Cultural Identity (POPID) project by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, DASTI, ETF, FNR, FWF, HAZU, IRCHSS, MHEST, NWO, RANNIS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme.
Notes
1. See http://musicmemoriesproject.blogspot.co.uk/p/our-project.html; www.eshcc.eur.nl/english/hera_popid/
2. Which is not to say that his work has not been discussed or valued as cultural heritage. For example, in his book Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema, Dave (Citation2006, p. 141) cites Jarman’s 1977 ‘punk film’ Jubilee as an example of ‘occult heritage’, which he describes thus: ‘At its simplest it represents valuable but neglected resources of the past. These resources represent an occult heritage in the sense that they are hidden or obscured by official heritage culture’.
3. His garden at prospect cottage on the bleak coastal landscape of Dungeness in Kent attracts visitors from around the world and represents another example of the artist’s cultural legacy as living or organic ‘heritage’ that has a social and aesthetic life rooted, nourished and enacted in the present.
4. The Icons of England project invited the public to nominate their favourite icons, ‘the things [they] cherished about England in the twenty-first century’: www.icons.org.uk (www.culture24.org.uk/art362437) [accessed 16 November 2011].
5. ‘England Really Rocks’, The Sun, 10 February 2007: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/travel/17461/England-really-rocks.html [accessed 16 November 2011].
6. http://www.miltonbayer.com/ [accessed 16 November 2011]
7. Robert Hewison, writing in 1987, remarks that Lord Charteris, Chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (and former private secretary to the Queen) is reported to have said that heritage can mean ‘anything you want’ (quoted in Hewison Citation1987, p. 32).
8. See http://birminghammusicarchive.co.uk/; www.birminghammusicheritage.org.uk/; www.homeofmetal.com/; www.sohoroadtothepunjab.org [accessed September 2012].
9. www.homeofmetal.com/events/events-list/birmingham-museum-art-gallery-home-of-metal/ [accessed September 2012].
10. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-15606017; www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2072798/Michael-Jacksons-hair-fished-shower-drain-bought-Gambling-website-11k.html; www.rockmusicmemorabilia.com/ [accessed September 2012].
11. http://spicegirlscollection.blogspot.co.uk/ [accessed September 2012].
12. The Heritage Foundation is a charity established in 1991 (as the Dead Comic’s Society, later to become Comic Heritage) and has mainly developed from the interests and background of its chairman and co-founder David Graham. Amongst its initiatives is a heritage plaque scheme designed to raise both greater awareness of the contribution and legacy of British entertainers as well as the profile of the charities which the organisation supports. The plaques commemorate figures from the world of show business and entertainment and include many popular musicians. See www.theheritagefoundation.info/aboutus (accessed 23 March 2011).
13. According to Reynolds hauntology ‘is all about memory’s power (to linger, pop up unbidden, prey on your mind) and memory’s fragility (destined to become distorted, to fade, then finally disappear) … [In the UK] hauntologists are self-consciously playing with a set of bygone cultural forms that lie outside the post Elvis/Beatles rock and pop mainstream … [and p]layfully parodying heritage culture’ (2011, p. 335, 337, 361). See also Davis (Citation2005).
14. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/hauntology [accessed 17 April 2012, emphasis added]. See also http://andrewgallix.com/2011/07/07/hauntology/, www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/07/musica-globalista-simon-reynolds-on-undead-hauntology/ [accessed 17 April 2012].
15. I have elsewhere discussed in detail the concept of the ‘archive city’, which similarly seeks to articulate a space of representation in which ‘the archive’ is a sociocultural index that is located both in material landscapes (e.g. the lived and performative spaces of urban habiting) as well as in the virtual spaces of archives, museums, galleries and different forms of media (see Roberts Citation2012).
16. Although it is the case that, to a certain extent, consumers and audiences have themselves embraced the idea of ‘heritage’ in relation to popular music pasts and that music heritage practises can without doubt positively inform collective narratives of memory and identity, the much wider question as of what music heritage is and does and the ways in which it has bearing on contemporary music cultures and creative practises is, I am suggesting, one that warrants a closer degree of critical attention than it has been afforded to date in discussions on popular music and memory.
