Play It Again: Rock Music Reissues and the Production of the Past for the Present

Abstract

The reissue is a significant yet under-studied aspect of the music industries and popular music culture. The continual resurrection of recordings via reissues alters how the music and musicians of the past are understood in the present. This article develops a theory of rock music reissues, analyzing them as cultural artifacts that transform the originals' historical meaning and cultural status. The influential role of paratextual and extratextual materials is closely analyzed through case studies of reissues of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Gary Wilson's You Think You Really Know Me, and the various artists compilation Where the Action Is! L.A. Nuggets 1965–1968. It is argued that the reissue process necessarily decodes a text's past and recodes it for the present, fundamentally altering our understanding of our cultural history.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jonathan Gray and the participants in his “Textuality: Beyond the Screen” seminar at UW-Madison for their helpful feedback on an earlier version of this article. My thinking about the research in this article also benefited greatly from discussions with Ron Radano, Michele Hilmes, Kyle Barnett, Christopher Cwynar, and Diana Willis Bottomley. Additional thanks to the reviewers and editors of Popular Music and Society for their time and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^[1] To be clear, my argument here is that limiting reissues and the actions of reissue producers to economic motives and marketing logics alone risks overlooking the cultural meaning and value of popular music.

^[2] Special issues of the journals Popular Music (25.1) and Journal of Popular Music Studies (22.1) sit alongside Carys Wyn Jones' book The Rock Canon as three of the most notable efforts made so far toward addressing the question of canons in popular music.

^[3] I deliberately use the term “recording industry” over “music industry” in this article because I am defining musical texts as recordings rather than musical compositions more broadly. Though the recording industry is its largest component, the music industry (or industries, to be more exact) would also include sectors not directly related to the production of recordings, such as live performance, management, and retail sales.

^[4] This type of on-the-cheap re-purposing was especially common in the early years of the CD in the 1980s and 1990s. It has also been replicated in the Internet era, as record companies have simply made their already-digitized back catalogs available as digital audio files often without enhancing the content in any significant fashion.

^[5] In fact, Motel Records has since gone out of business, and You Think You Really Know Me is again out of print. Milan and Bates's “labor of love” narrative is propagated in the documentary film You Think You Really Know Me: The GaryWilsonStory.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew J. Bottomley

Andrew J. Bottomley is a PhD candidate in media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently writing his dissertation on the cultural history of radio's convergence with the internet.