Popular Music and Materiality: Memorabilia and Memory Traces

Abstract

The material objects of popular music have featured significantly in studies of popular music. In particular, there are established literatures on physical playback media (including the re-emergence of vinyl albums) and playback devices, from the Walkman to the iPod. Recently, as popular music scholars have begun to explore the everyday use of music and music technologies by casual listeners, music has increasingly been described as sound and as an ambient presence in our lives. Yet woven through these increasingly digital cultures are concrete manifestations of music listening and fandom. Drawing on the findings of a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project on popular music and cultural memory, this article considers the implications of such manifestations of materiality for the way we understand the significance of popular music, and its linking of the past and the present, in contemporary everyday life. Using fieldwork data collected in cities across Australia, the article considers how various aspects of popular music-related material culture became palpable objects for the writing of personal histories. In some instances, these material objects of participation were less foregrounded but still present. In these cases, materiality was resigned more to the past, but material cultures were actively digitized and distributed. This process was always ongoing and incomplete. This article examines and develops a central theme emerging from our research findings, namely that popular music objects acquire meanings that raise them above their everyday status via cultural means strongly influenced by the contextualizing effects of online technology.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Notes

^[1] The broader project is called “Popular Music and Cultural Memory: Localised Popular Music Histories and Their Significance for National Music Industries” and was funded under the Australian Research Council's (ARC) Discovery Project scheme for three years (2010–12, DP1092910). Chief Investigators on the project were Andy Bennett (Griffith University), Shane Homan (Monash University), Sarah Baker (Griffith University), and Peter Doyle (Macquarie University), with Research Fellow Alison Huber (Griffith University) and Research Associate Ian Rogers (Griffith University).

^[2] The history of music's digitization reaches much further back than the mid-'90s. The compact disc was introduced to Western consumer markets in 1983 and was little more than a physical container of digital code. The concept of consumers having access to replicable master recordings of music begins with the CD and, culturally, the type of file sharing discussed here begins with the CD-ROM. This is a prehistory of online piracy debates seldom highlighted by the recording industry.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP1092910).

Notes on contributors

Andy Bennett

Andy Bennett is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He has authored and edited numerous books including Music, Style and Aging, Popular Music and Youth Culture, Cultures of Popular Music, Remembering Woodstock, and Music Scenes (with Richard A. Peterson). He was lead Chief Investigator on a three-year, five-country project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled “Popular Music and Cultural Memory” (DP1092910). He is a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University.

Ian Rogers

Ian Rogers obtained his PhD from the University of Queensland in 2012. Supervised by Graeme Turner, the thesis was entitled “Musicians and Aspiration: Exploring the Rock Dream in Independent Music.” Rogers is currently a lecturer in the Music Industry program at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of numerous articles on musician ideologies, music policy, and local music history, and his latest publication appears in Sounds and the City: Popular Music, Place and Globalization (Leisure Studies in a Global Era), an edited collection for Palgrave Macmillan.